Chapter 4

Shakespeare’s life was greatly imbittered. He lived perpetually slighted; he states it himself. Posterity may read this to-day in his own verses:—

“Thence comes it that my name receives a brand,
And almost thence my nature is subdu’d.
Pity me, then,
Whilst, like a willing patient, I will drink
Potions of eysel.”[1]

“Your love and pity doth th’ impression fill
Which vulgar scandal stamp’d upon my brow.”[2]

“Nor thou with public kindness honour me,
Unless thou take that honour from thy name.”[3]

“Or on my frailty why are frailer spies.”[4]
Shakespeare had permanently near him one envious person, Ben Jonson, —an indifferent comic poet, whose début he assisted. Shakespeare was thirty-nine when Elizabeth died. This queen had not paid attention to him; she managed to reign forty-four years without seeing that Shakespeare was there. She is not the least qualified, historically, to be called the “protectress of arts and letters,” etc. The historians of the old school gave these certificates to all princes, whether they knew how to read or not.

Shakespeare, persecuted like Molière at a later date, sought, as Molière, to lean on the master. Shakespeare and Molière would in our days have had a loftier spirit. The master, it was Elizabeth, —”King Elizabeth,” as the English called her. Shakespeare glorified Elizabeth: he called her the “Virgin Star,” “Star of the West,” and “Diana,”—a name of a goddess which pleased the queen, —but in vain. The queen took no notice of it; less sensitive to the praises in which Shakespeare called her Diana than to the insults of Scipio Gentilis, who, taking the pretensions of Elizabeth on the bad side, called her “Hecate,” and applied to her the ancient triple curse, “Mormo! Bombo! Gorgo!” As for James I., whom Henry IV. called Master James, he gave, as we have seen, the lease of the Globe to Shakespeare, but he willingly forbade the publication of his pieces. Some contemporaries, Dr. Symon Forman among others, so far took notice of Shakespeare as to make a note of the occupation of an evening passed at the performance of the “Merchant of Venice!” That was all which he knew of glory. Shakespeare, once dead, entered into oblivion.