Page:Shakespeare of Stratford (1926) Yale.djvu/171

152 and nothing more, an object equally of derision and distrust.

A single striking example may illustrate the point. There was one rough, roystering, and unique set of Londoners who must have come under constant observation of a man doing business on the Bankside. It was the tribe of watermen or scullers, a body numbering its hundreds, if not thousands, and possessed even of its laureate in Taylor the Water-Poet. Indisputably, Shakespeare must have sat téte à téte with dozens of them on the way to Southwark, and his fortune can hardly have been so bad that he met only the dull dogs in so hilarious a fraternity. Yet he never came nearer to a tribute than when in Othello he let drop his casual slur on

Are we not almost justified in thinking that the well-styled Bard of Avon (not Thames) was the converse of Peter Bell? A primrose by the water’s brim was to Shakespeare all that it was to Wordsworth, but the delectable Taylor was to him, I sadly fear, simply ‘a knave of common hire,’ and he was nothing more. We may find in this a reason why Shakespeare never chose to write a city comedy. Here again, then, there is in Shakespeare more of Stratford than of London, more of Plantagenet than of Tudor England.

In religion also Shakespeare evidently did not feel the attraction of the new ideas which so appealed to Spenser, Marlowe, and Ralegh. There is no good reason for believing that he was an actual recusant, a convinced disciple of the Roman faith; but the religious penumbra of his mind was certainly archaic. For poetic purposes at least religion still connoted for him