"threatening twigs," the lime-tree once. Among others, he never mentions at all the walnut-tree, the larch, the fir, the chestnut, the alder, the poplar or-the beech. So that the play of "Titus Andronicus" remains without even the superficial evidence of any distinguishing peculiarities in its natural history. For the rest, the natural history throughout the play is so absolutely identical with that of all the other plays attributed to Shakespeare that if any one else wrote "Titus Andronicus" he must have been so soaked with Shakes peare that it oozed out of him at every point without his knowing it; he fairly dripped Shakespeare as he went, larding the earth with him. Or else, if any such man there was, he was Shakespeare's master. He wrote "Titus Andronicus," and then Shakespeare, with an industrious and humble fidelity to his classic that one would hardly have expected from his imperious genius, closely imitated the natural history of that play in every one of the rest. 66 To begin with his quadrupeds. Titus Andronicus calls the Empress Tamora "a heinous tiger;" and Lavinia, talking to the Empress in the presence of her sons, calls them the tiger's" young ones. Why did not they call Tamora a tigress? Because Shakespeare never uses that word throughout his works. He calls the female beast "tiger," and its mate, when he wishes to specify it particularly, "a male tiger" (Coriolanus). So the Duke of York says that Queen Margaret (who is elsewhere a "bitch" and a she wolf") has a "tiger's" heart, and Lear calls his daughters"tigers." 66 66 66 Again, we have the expression, Rome is but a wilderness of tigers. (Elsewhere he has a wilderness of sea, " and "a wilderness of monkeys.") In "Timon of Athens" we have: we have "Athens has become a forest of beasts."' Which is Shakespeare? deniable. In the same play, for instance, Tamora warns her sons not to let "the wasp" live after they have robbed it of "its honey ;" and Marcus, addressing a mob, says most absurdly : "You sad faced men, people and sons of Rome, By uproar severed, like a flight of fowl O, let me teach you how to knit again 66 From other plays many, and equally curious, examples of a fine plurality of metaphors" may be quoted. For instance, in "All's Well that Ends Well" (Act iii. Scene 6), fox, sprat, and bird are mixed: "2d LORD: We'll make you some sport with the fox, ere we case him. He was first smoked by the old Lord Lafeu. When his disguise and he is parted, tell me what a sprat you shall find him; which you will see this very night. shall be caught." Again, from "Much Ado About Noth- "DON JOHN: I am trusted with a muzzle, enfranchised with a clog; therefore I have decreed not to sing in my cage." Is it easy to believe that any one imitating Shakespeare would, like a Chinese tailor, reproduce on the new garment the patches and rents on the old one given him for a pattern? or that any one would, with deliberate industry, mimic the faults of the other's carelessness? 66 In "Titus Andronicus" there are three other references to lions, all of which are noteworthy. One is "the mountain lioness," a phrase used by Aaron to express his own intense ferocity when roused, and illustrates Shakespeare's partiality for the use of mountain as an aggravating adjective. His mountain" snow is the coldest, his "mountain" pines the hardiest, his "mountain" cedars the loftiest, his I wonder if any critic ever thought this "mountain" winds the fiercest, and his passage unworthy' of Shakespeare?" mountain" goats the wildest. Al! Here we have a "tiger" (Tamora) who poets after him (and before him for has a bear for her first husband and a the matter of that) similarly suggested lion for her second. But it is Shakes- an extra intensity by the prefix mounpeare none the less, authentic and un- tain." "The bear-whelp's dam is with the lion deeply still in league." 64 Another occurs in the following: "Yet have I heard-oh, could I find it nowThe lion moved with pity," etc. 66 have "boar chafed with sweat," and in Henry VI." will be found "chafed bull" (Warwick rages like a chafed Now Lucius (in the same play) speak- bull"), and in " Henry VIII.," "chafed ing, says: "Brother, you have a vice of mercy in you, Which better fits a lion than a man.' As a matter of fact, Shakespeare never made up his mind to his own satisfaction whether beasts had any pity or not, and, accordingly, as it suited his present purpose, he made them either su. perior to man by the possession of an instinct of mercy, or inferior by its nonpossession. Scattered up and down the plays will be found plenty of expressions to support either fancy, and in some, as in "Titus Andronicus," both sides are taken. Would so curious an ambiguity have suggested itself to a second person? Nor should it be overlooked that the lion which Lavinia especially instances as being, traditionally, credited with generosity he "did endure to have his princely paws pared all away" (ii. 3) -is almost invariably in the other plays of Shakespeare treated in sympathy with that tradition of "the royal disposition of that beast" ("As You Like It"). The boar occurs as "the chafed boar." In "Taming of the Shrew" we lion." The king has just gone by, and Wolsey, prescient of coming doom, says: "He parted frowning from me as if ruin leap'd from his eyes: so looks the chafed lion upon the daring huntsman that has galled him." The references to "domesticated" animals are all Shakespearean. The dog of the proverb is there and the dog of bear-baiting, and the "hell-hound" that we meet again in "Macbeth" and "Richard III.," and the "fell cur" (also in "Henry VI.") "of bloody kind" ("Richard III."), and the "inhuman dog," a term of abuse that recurs in "Othello." This reminds me to say that the student will find the comparison of the two Moors, Aaron and Othello, a very interesting study. The lamb is mentioned in a passage that is a paraphrase of another in "Richard II." : "In war was never lion raged more fierce, In peace was never gentle lamb more mild." It runs : "When we all join in league, I am a lamb but if you brave the Moor, This antithesis is a very favorite one of the poet's and is worth another word here for its reference to the ocean, for Shakespeare repeatedly uses the sea as exceeding the lion in its rage, as the superlative superlative of furiousness. There is only one allusion to the ass. "Now what a thing it is to be an ass!" says Aaron, aside of Chiron, an exclamation, I need hardly say, common in Shakespeare. Cattle meet with mention: "Where the bull and cow are both milk. white, They never do beget a coal-black calf. ' The cat : "What a caterwauling dost thou keep !" says Aaron the Moor to the nurse with the black-a-moor baby. In "Twelfth Night" we have Maria saying to Sir Toby and Sir Andrew, who are making the night hideous with a catch : "What a caterwauling do you keep !” the three previous occasions of its use. On the contrary. Is it possible to conceive Shakespeare, when piling up the horrors of the scene, adding, as an element of peril and wicked enchantment, ten thousand hedgehogs? Can you imagine it-ten thousand hedgehogs! Swarms of snakes and toads, myriads of them, are horrible in contemplation; the number alone makes them horrible. But hedgehogs. Think of the Empress, bound to a dismal yew with an acre of hedgehogs round her! No. Shakespeare intended the word urchin here to mean, as it does on the other three occasions in his plays, "goblins." The picture is then complete," ten thousand goblins." It might be objected that, having "fiends" already, "goblins" would be redundant, but Shakespeare does not think so. To quote one example (Comedy of Errors"): "We lurk with goblins, owls,* and elvish sprites. If we obey them not, this will ensue, They'll suck our breath, or pinch us black and blue." This age. Happy thought! urchin. To turn now to the hunting scene. Let me quote from this, and from another, play : 1. "Uncouple here, and let us make a bay. hounds. Uncouple in the western valley; go And mark the musical confusion The skies, the fountains, every region near Seem'd all one mutual cry: I never heard Now the use of this ambiguous word 2. "My love shall hear the musick of my here is distinctly interesting. For the hedgehog is one of the special animals of Shakespeare's fauna of witchcraft and abomination, which comprises also toads, "snakes" of all kinds, owls and ravens; and the writer, flashing through his mind his repertory of "damnèd" things, and needing a dissyllable to make the line and its horror complete thought of hedgehogs. When the three witches are making "hell-broth" when Titania's bodyguard are exorcising all evil things: when Prospero tells Ariel to "charge his goblins" to torment his would-be murderers-the hedgehog recurs punctually to Shakespeare's mind every time and is added accordingly. So on the fourth and only other occasion on which the black art is directly and seriously employed, Shakespeare, having already introduced "snakes" and "toads," "owl" and "raven," thought naturally of hedgehog. But ten thousand hedgehogs! One can almost imagine that one hears Shakespeare laugh at the im One of these passages is admitted by all authors and critics, and Dr. Johnson, to be indubitably Shakespeare's; the other is just as unanimously rejected. Which is which? By searching the other plays, hunting-passages will be found which so amplify, illustrate, repeat, and blend with, both of the above that one can no more pick out a single thread from the tissue and say it is genuine Shakespeare than you can " pluck birdlime out of frieze." Again, the Emperor, addressing Tamora, says, "Madam, now shall ye see our Roman hunting," whereupon their hounds, that Marcus and Titus begin to brag about will rouse the proudest panther in the chase, and climb the highest promontory top," and their horses that "will follow where the game makes way, and run like swallows o'er the plain." In "Midsummer Night's Dream," Theseus, addressing Hippolyta, says, "My love shall hear the musick of my hounds," whereupon the Queen proudly speaks of when she "with Hercules and Cadmus once,' and they "bayed the bear in Sparta," and vaunts the music of the Spartan pack; upon which Theseus at once begins to brag about his own pack, and says they are Spartan-bred : was رو "Straying in the park. Seeking to hide herself, as doth the deer That hath received some unrecuring wound." The incident of Lavinia's outrage has occurred during "a solemn hunting, and she herself, by her ravishers, was called "the dainty doe." Her uncle, returning from the chase, finds her wandering in the wood, and Shakespeare appropriately continues the hunting metaphor, using a simile he uses several times elsewhere, not only of deer, as in the following, from "As You Like It": "To the which place a poor sequestered stag That from the hunter's aim had ta'en a hurt, Did come to languish ;" but also of other game, as in " Much Ado About Nothing": Alas, poor hurt fowl! Now will he creep into sedges.' Here, too, should be noted a touch as to illicit sport, which Shakespeare so constantly introduces when speaking of illicit passion. Demetrius asks: What, hast not thou full often struck a doe, And borne her cleanly by the keeper's nose?" Elsewhere, it is "groping for trouts in a peculiar river" ("Measure for Measure"), "fishing another's pond" in his absence ("Winter's Tale"), with other variations drawn from hunting, fowl ing, angling, snaring and ferreting. This is surely Shakespeare. Again, the ever-present idea of sport suggests the phrase" if she" (the bearwhelp's dam)" wind you once." Both as hunter and falconer the importance of the wind in any undertaking is remembered. In the same play, Aaron, seating himself with his "black-a-moor baby" safely out of reach of the rapier that Chiron wishes to "spit the tadpole" on, says: 66 66 We will have the wind of you." Why do you go about," says Hamlet testily to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern whom he suspects of treachery, "to recover the wind of me ?" In "Henry VI.," Clarence of the cunning Gloster says: "He knows the game: how true he keeps the wind!" Further examples of these these "Shakespearean" touches could be easily, but it seems to me unnecessarily, multiplied. Flying high suggests to him, as it so often does elsewhere, hawking; and Aaron, speaking of his mistress who has climbed aloft says he too will "mount aloft with his imperial mistress and mount her pitch." Compare this with the passage in Henry VI." where Suffolk, talking of Gloster's hawks, says: "My lord, 'tis but a base, ignoble mind That mounts no higher than a bird can soar." But the two passages, apart from such exact similarity of phrase, are instinct with identical sentiment, and each is in Shakespeare's most authentic vein. The birds of the play are altogether Shakespearean. Citizens in tumult and scared by sudden danger suggest "a flight of severed fowl." So in Midsummer Night's Dream," the wild geese "who the creeping fowler eye,' sever themselves, and madly sweep the sky." 66 The eagle occurs in an admirable passage, the ring of which is distinctly Shakespeare: "The eagle suffers little birds to sing, And is not careful what they mean thereby Knowing that with the shadow of his wing He can at pleasure stint their melody." |