quiet, full of fear and sorrow, thinking what would be the issue and end of this war, it is said that suddenly they heard a marvellous sweet harmony of sundry sorts of instruments of music, with the cry of a multitude of people as they had been dancing, and had sung as they used in Bacchus' feasts, with movings and turnings after the manner of the satyrs, and it seemed that this dance went through the city unto the gate that opened to the enemy's camp, and that all the troop that made this noise they heard went out of the city there. Now such as in reason sought the depth of the interpretation of this wonder thought that it was the god unto whom Antonius bare singular devotion to counterfeit and resemble, that did forsake him.'

In two other well-known passages Shakespeare again makes use of supernatural machinery—in the death scene of Queen Katherine, and in Posthumus's vision in prison; but these two passages, especially the latter, have so little merit that they need not be more particularly referred to.

ESSAY XV

ESOTERIC OPINIONS OF SHAKESPEARE

I HAVE already observed that indications are discoverable in the plays, of the existence in the writer's mind of opinions and beliefs in some respects different from those of his contemporaries. On many occasions he says one thing but apparently means another, not merely different, but subversive of it altogether; so that we appear, while reading, to be engaged in the interpretation of hieroglyphics, scarcely less perplexing, perhaps, than those which torture our curiosity on the monuments of Thebes or Philæa. In this respect, however, he differs from other men only in degree, since every individual that lives, be his intellectual domain great or small, contrives to keep some portions of it involved in Eleusinian darkness, so as to be to that extent an enigma to his friends.

In Shakespeare's case, owing to the greatness of his mental powers, to the clearness and depth of his understanding, to the subtlety of his thoughts, to the boldness of his philosophy, to the immense variety of his acquisitions, to the beauty and soaring nature of his genius, we are stimulated by a more than usually strong desire to lift the thick drapery which he has let fall between his spirit and ours, and extort from him a key to his most hidden convictions. The inscription on the statue of Neith at Sais: 'I am all that has been, is,

or shall be, and no mortal hath ever drawn aside my veil,' scarcely awakened a more earnest search among the philosophers of Egypt, than the desire to ascertain the conclusions he had arrived at, among the students of Shakespeare.

The investigation may be idle, since Truth is as willing to be communicative to us as she was to him, but as by his numerous artistic creations he has enthroned himself in our love, our desire to be satisfied. as to what he thought on several momentous subjects is necessarily commensurate with our partiality.

Shakespeare was too familiar with the history of humanity not to be fully alive to the danger of disclosing his secret thoughts, if they happened to be at variance with those which are commonly entertained. John Huss, Jerome of Prague, Urbain Grandier, Servetus, and many others who paid the penalty of plain speaking, warned him to be on his guard, and he was otherwise rather inclined to live on good terms with his neighbours than to provoke them to make a martyr of him. It could have done no one any good to behold him on a pile of faggots in Smithfield, or languishing like Raleigh in the Bloody Tower; so he studied the art of reserve, of expressing himself by equivocal symbols, of investing startling ideas with the mantle of orthodoxy, of agreeing with his contemporaries in show, while in substance he and they may have been wide as the poles asunder.

Seeing how easily he might be crushed by the collision of the two Churches, he was careful not to place himself between them, that no one among his contemporaries could say towards which he leaned, or whether or not he leaned to either. There existed at that time in England a sect of thinkers, not perhaps so

small as might appear at first sight, which included Bacon, Raleigh, Henry Percy, Harriot, Hues, Warner, and others, and the question often suggests itself, Did Shakespeare belong to the sect? A tolerably thick volume has been written to prove that he went in many respects beyond most of its members, though the notions of the writer are so little exact that he confounds theism with its opposite.

If we carefully consider the ideas which meet us constantly in the plays, we shall probably discover reasons for thinking that Shakespeare did not secretly pride himself on his strict orthodoxy, though such was the refinement and subtlety of his policy that no class of thinkers could positively claim or disclaim him. From the Shepherd of the Ocean' down to the humblest sectary there were believers and unbelievers of all shades among his audiences at the Blackfriars and the Globe, and it was for his interest to dismiss them all in good humour with themselves and with him.

From the analogy between the ceremonies of the Catholic Church and those of the drama, a marked fondness for the stage has always been observable among the professors of that form of Christianity, and Shakespeare, consequently, was peculiarly solicitous to avoid giving utterance to sentiments which might have alienated from him so large a portion of his hearers. Indeed the extreme tenderness noticeable in his treatment of nuns, monks, and friars has led many to infer that he was himself one of those recusants who, in the times of Elizabeth and James, constituted so large a portion of the population. The only case in which his impartiality failed him was in the matter of the Puritans, whom in obedience to the prejudices of the

Court and the nobility he imprudently assailed, and thus aided to some extent in estranging from the theatre that great party of stern and haughty Englishmen who were so soon to be in the ascendant in the State.

Yet I would by no means be certain that Shakespeare held opinions different from those of the Puritans. His position as a stage player or a manager seems to have justified in his eyes the habit, not unknown in any rank or condition of men, of putting on for convenience the thickest possible veil of hypocrisy. Leicester, till he succumbed to what Fra Paolo calls Italian physic at Cornbury, had been, notwithstanding the incidents of his life, leader of the Puritan party; Essex was at the same time a Protestant and a Catholic, which may have been the case also with Southampton; Elizabeth prayed with the Protestant doctors, but hanged them when they went too far; and James, born of a mother whom history alternately presents as a martyr and a murderess, never throughout his life discovered exactly what he was, but hung, like Mohammed's coffin, between earth and heaven, so thoroughly devoted to the one that he scarcely dared look up at the other. Among such contemporaries what could Shakespeare do? His secret feeling is well expressed in the words of the old song,

My mind to me a kingdom is,

and this realm so far differs from other kingdoms that it cannot be invaded without the consent of its sovereign.

Though we know not what ideas are, whether they be spiritual or material, eternal or fleeting, we do know that they are often possessed of a ravishing and divine