You may know that man to be a knave, and that woman to be a courtesan; but if circumstances compel you to associate with one or both of them, policy closes your lips not only when they are present but when they are absent also. 'The world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players'; which shows that Shakespeare had made up his mind to play his part so as to shock as little as possible the susceptibilities of those about him. No man appears to have derived more satisfaction than he from the doctrine in the old song,

My mind to me a kingdom is.

If a man be determined to cage his thoughts, he is their absolute master; he can arrange them, discipline them, throw them into innumerable combinations and watch the results; he can make them play tricks for his amusement and lead them out into forbidden grounds, can set them at entire difference from the rest of the world, can condemn what he sees or hears, can believe or disbelieve, can overthrow cities, dethrone kings, extirpate religions, practise all kinds of virtues or indulge in every conceivable modification of vice, and yet walk with a smooth face among his neighbours. 'Fronti nulla fides,' observes the Roman historian who passed his life among deluding masks; and Shakespeare, surrounded by analogous circumstances, has given us an admirable translation of the phrase:

There's no art

To find the mind's construction in the face.

No, there is no such art, which, like all other men, he found highly advantageous to his fortunes. Bacon, when he wrote his Essay on Wisdom for a Man's Self,' regarded this closeness, as he terms it, as one of

the most valuable attributes of man. If you have it, you live in an impregnable fortress with all your intellectual wealth exclusively at your own disposal; neither cajolements nor menaces nor law nor despotism can compel you to yield up one jot of what you have within. The soul may safely take sanctuary there and bid defiance to the arts and power of everything finite. Our predecessors used to think, and Mr. Froude among late writers agreed with them, that pain or torture applied without mercy can wring truth from the boldest nature. Experience and history prove the contrary. Everybody remembers the Pythagorean woman whom a tyrant desired to betray her friends; when the extremities of torture appeared to be on the point of overcoming her firmness, she bit off her tongue and spat it in the monster's face. Her mind was her kingdom, and she defended it to death. Insanity can only shatter the defences of this fortress, it cannot destroy them: death only can achieve that work.

If, as I suppose, Shakespeare had in his mind many things which he found it convenient to conceal, he was wise enough to commune with his own heart in his chamber, and to put a padlock on his tongue when outside of it. With him, esoteric opinions were a necessity. Orthodox opinions, while they occasion no shock in society, are equally distant from affording much pleasure; they are regarded as matters of course, and the men who profess them often pass among the discerning for hypocrites, who, as a rule, are not worth being unmasked. It is only erratic forms of thought, which run counter to received doctrines, that excite astonishment or hostility. In religion the case is still worse than in morals or politics. Formerly any deviation from the crooked line which people call

straight put a man in danger of being grilled, fried, or roasted alive, in the presence of priests and potentates, to whom his groans sounded like music; and it can scarcely be doubted that, if this pleasure still suited the taste of the majority, grilling or roasting a neighbour would afford supreme satisfaction to many orthodox thinkers. No one can have observed much of what passes around him without discerning in mankind symptoms of a strong yearning in this direction. The deity probably in whose honour the torch would now be lighted is not God but gold; yet the devotion, instead of being weaker than for the object of solicitude in the Middle Ages, is much stronger. The omnipotence of property, however, has been so thoroughly established, and so widely accepted, that nothing new can be said upon the subject. One of our poets, who meant right though he expressed himself wrongly, says:

Let honours and preferments go for gold,
But glorious beauty is not to be sold.

If we attach the ordinary signification to his words, instead of subscribing to the truth of his dictum, we should say there is not a greater drug in the market than beauty, which, with however many reservations, is always to be purchased. He meant, however, that an ugly woman could not buy it, and might have added that though she could not do that, she might invest herself with a far superior beauty, though not quite so visible to the eyes of fools. Fortunately for Shakespeare or rather, perhaps, for us-he had no taste for being grilled, so he took refuge in the enigmatical style of writing, and when he said what he thought, was careful to put it in juxtaposition with

something he did not think, and so provided himself with a loophole to escape through in case of difficulty. How far he agreed on certain matters with Essex or Southampton, neither he nor either of those earls could possibly know, because each had his esoteric theory, to which none of them put the key out of his own hands. Essex could pray with a Protestant doctor openly in church or chapel, while he plotted or equivocated with a Jesuit in a back parlour; so likewise could Southampton; and if Shakespeare was not called upon to perform a similar feat, it was because he came less prominently forward in the world's eye. His audiences were made up of professors of the two rival religions, so he had devout and holy men of either church, who might be appealed to in proof of his secret orthodoxy as a Protestant or as a Catholic. Nay, if he wished to stand well in the estimation of philosophers, as Bacon, Raleigh, Northumberland, and his three magi, he could point to passages in his plays quite as heterodox as any of their positions. If he laughed and joked and talked nonsense at the Mermaid, as is popularly believed, and as, for aught I know, may be true, he doubtless took care that his heterodoxy, if he had any such ingredient in his composition, should not be made palpably evident to Master Benjamin Jonson, whose familiarity with the backstairs of ministers could hardly be unsuspected by him. It was probably as a hint to his Mermaid friends, who may each have desired to interpret him in his own way, that he wrote:

When my outward action doth demonstrate
The native act and figure of my heart
In compliment extern, 'tis not long after
But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve
For daws to peck at.

It is clear from this and many other passages that Shakespeare prided himself on not being easily read by those about him; he had to buy bedsteads and hangings and other household stuff for Anne Hathaway and her children; he had to look forward likewise, and take all the care he could, that when the winter of old age came on, he should not be left bare to weather, and therefore was not at all disposed to throw open the avenue to his inner system of thought, if by so doing he should run the risk of diminishing his chances of fortune. Like many other writers, he may meanwhile have desired to pass for a jovial companion, with nothing secret or designing in his nature, and his manners accordingly may have proclaimed as much. Pope, whose very soul had been disciplined by Jesuitism, had the effrontery to say

I love to pour out all my self as plain

As downright Shippen or as old Montaigne.

Whatever Shippen or Montaigne may have done, Pope's esoteric opinions were so carefully guarded that no one knew in his lifetime, or knows yet, what on many subjects they were. Indeed, he cleverly suggests that he did not know himself. Talking of controversial divinity, he says 'I am always of the opinion of the last book I read.' He was therefore orthodox and heterodox by turns, and so perhaps was Shakespeare, which may account for the difficulty we experience in trying to get at his secret opinions, which may on some points have been fixed, on others fluctuating. The world has seen a whole octavo volume written with the design of proving him to have been an atheist. Such demonstrations remind one of what Byron says:

When Bishop Berkeley said there was no matter
And proved it, 'twas no matter what he said.