Page:On Shakespeare, or, What You Will, Furness, 1908.djvu/12

10 speare’s life? Can we not all fervently reëcho: “Good friend, for Jesus’ sake forbear, To touch the dust enclosed here!” If the mundane facts of his life were tenfold as numerous as they are, what conception from them would be gained of the Creator of that splendid procession of characters that crosses his stage, more august, more brilliant, more varied than any single page of history can show? Or of him at whose creative word a whole new race of elves and fairies started into life and will live as Shakespeare’s offspring as long as wild waves wash the yellow sands, or pearls hang in any cowslip’s ear? It has been believed that we may discover what manner of man he was by searching through his works. Ah, no,—we may, peradventure, detect a few little personal traits, such as that he was very fond of the name Kate; that he thoroughly admired his own imaginary Brutus, whom he mentions, directly or indirectly, I believe, in every play he wrote; and we can on broad lines discern that he was always grandly on the side of Justice, Humanity, and Morality. For, look you, at the very hour when the torture-chamber of the Tower reëchoed the shrieks of victims, we hear the solemn warning, “You speak upon the rack, Where men enforced do speak anything.” We can hardly appreciate the boldness, almost foolhardy, of such an utterance in the days of a Star Chamber. Or of the temerity of saying “It is an heretic that makes the fire, Not she which burns in it,” when the embers at Smithfield were still glowing.

Out from the heart of nature rolled these profound utterances, and so much, on large proportions, may we know and recognize of the man, Shakespeare; but when we seek to find in his dramas his lesser, distinctive, purely personal traits, we cannot find him, he is not there, and it is because he is not there, that his plays are so heaven-high above the plays of other dramatists. Lear is Lear; Shylock is Shylock. They are not William Shakespeare behind a mask. Can we at any instant detect a gleam of Shakespeare’s eye behind that mask, at that instant there is revealed a flaw. The character is not perfect, it is not true to itself. I must not speak in terms of exaggeration. There are unquestionably, here and there, such flaws as local, or temporary, or even personal allusions to be detected in his plays. But I do not deem it exaggeration to say that they are neither so numerous nor so pronounced that we can draw from them any conclusions as to Shakespeare’s personal