Page:Shakespeare of Stratford (1926) Yale.djvu/172

Shakespeare of Stratford friars, masses, vigils, extreme unction, and purgatory. It came natural to him to invoke angels and ministers of grace, to swear by Our Lady and Saint Patrick.

Nor can we doubt, rare as are the authentic expressions of Shakespeare’s personal feeling in his works, that the poet was himself fully aware of the homely and conservative cast of all his thinking. Readers have always, and rightly, recognized the inner voice of the dramatist’s own conviction in the words with which Biron abjures

‘I do forswear them,’ says Biron, ‘and I here protest

The volatile Biron, it is probable, found the vow too hard to keep; but for Shakespeare, who here speaks through him, russet and kersey were to the end the only wear. In his seventy-sixth Sonnet he expresses, with a candid clarity impossible to discount, his realization of the intellectual gulf which separated him from the peacock race of the true Elizabethans: