Page:On Shakespeare, or, What You Will, Furness, 1908.djvu/17

1908.] cried aloud, “I am Shakespeare’s!” Oxen and wainropes cannot induce me to read it again. Life is too short.

But ah, with what delighted eyes we turn to Shakespeare’s earliest comedy, where he shook off the foul damps of Cerberus and blackest Midnight born, and yielded himself in unconfined delight to the jocund sunshine of Love’s Labour’s (whether Lost or Won,—who cares?) endured by high-born cavaliers for the sake of laughing girls of France. With the lavish prodigality of youth, on every hand he scatters jewels, sparkling with wit and wisdom, and, while untwisting all the chains that tie the hidden soul of harmony, in youthful frolic he dashes nectar full in our faces.

But Shakespeare was, however, always thus lavish. Do you remember those lines which bear with them a perennial charm: “Come sit by my side and let the world slip; we shall ne’er be younger”? How exquisite they are! Breathing love and tenderness, tinged with the faintest shade of sadness over the vanishing fleetness of human life, as sad as sunt lacrymae rerum. A prudent poet, one would suppose, thrifty in the disposition of his treasures, would have reserved his choice pearl for some occasion of state,—but not so Shakespeare; he knew that he had, like the good little girl in the Fairy Tale, but to open his mouth and flowers and jewels would always fall from his lips, so he threw this one away on—a drunken tinker, in The Taming of the Shrew.

Of course, as a technical drama, it is plain enough that Love’s Labour’s Lost is far from perfect. But I hope our intercourse with Shakespeare is not restricted to those occasional hours passed in a theatre, where we fleet the time in transient emotions. When, however, in the privacy of our homes our ears drink in the melody of his verse and our souls expand with his wisdom, then dramatic instruction becomes to us impertinent and a trifle light as air.

Kyd’s influence on Shakespeare did not persist long, yet he is one of the three whom Ben Jonson calls Shakespeare’s peers. It was Lyly, I think, although some of my betters differ from me, who helped Shakespeare most in his early years. In Lyly’s solitary comedy he found humor, in which Marlowe appears to have been deficient, and the humor is there put into the mouths of servants, as it is so often in Plautus, where Shakespeare also might have found it, but I think it is more likely that he took it second-hand from Lyly.