Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/251

 "printing kisses" and the print of hoofs. In "Love's Labor Lost" is the clause, "I will do it, sir, in print;" and in the "Winter's Tale," "I love a ballad in print." Blades even apprentices him to the printer Vantrollier, who at the time enjoyed the monopoly of printing a certain class of books. Up to the present date, the number of professions and employments to which Shakspeare was trained amounts to twenty-four. No doubt some one is preparing to show that he must have been a fishmonger, and the lines which invite his attempt are quite as apposite as any of the above: "A fish: he smells like a fish;" "The luce is a fresh fish, the salt-*fish is an old coat;" "They are both as whole as a fish;" and, more decisive than all, "The fish lives in the sea." By all means, let us have the sixty-eight allusions to fish and fishing in Shakspeare elaborated into one final theory, that he spent four years on a herring-smack; for how otherwise could the Clown in "Twelfth Night" have told Viola that a pilchard was a big herring?

There is another kind of criticism to which the plays have been subjected that imputes to them all the afterthoughts of later times. Ulrici derives from them an evangelical scheme of Christian ethics; a Roman Catholic claims the poet as an ardent adherent of the Pope; another commentator attributes to Shakspeare a deliberate purpose to write up the Protestant Reformation and write down the Pope, and finds a trace of Shakspeare's contempt for Romanism in "1 Henry IV.," iv. 1, where the troops of the Prince of Wales are described as—