204 XX. SHAKESPEARE, THE MARRIED MAN. WE could wish imagination to carry us back to the first lowly home of Shakespeare and his bride. Scant was the furniture, and of the plainest description, yet we cannot believe that this penury had not something bright-something that marked his presence. It might be but the cast of the light, a little taste in arrangement, or even a few flowers; for a mind generative of beauty imparts it by a touch. One way or another, the humble dwelling wore a cheerful look; for Shakespeare loved to image that the light of the body is the eye. There was no blank in his perceptions. In his profoundest reverie, in the sublimest flight of his Muse he kept in view the real and practical. He did not require to be dragged by force to his dinner, like Archimedes,—though, more successful than the Syracusan, he found a stand-point from which to move the world. And now his gaiety was in its zenith, and could not be obscured by his worst necessities: rather, like the glow-worm's light, the darker the hour the clearer it appears. It is proverbial to say that Poverty at the door drives Love out of the window, but, after all, this is shallow doctrine, and must have come from one who knew not the constancy of the human heart. It is the notion of a sordid mind, hardened by prosperity and contact with the world, and which can tell nothing of what it has not experiencedthe softening influence which, in the midst of its trials, poverty exercises on the affections. The effect was understood by Shakespeare; for it was his own aspiration-" let me but bear your love, I'll bear your cares.” 1 If this were not an impulse of nature—if fellowship in suffering did not beget communion of feeling, from how many breasts must love be excluded! What the adage makes the death of sympathy is, in truth, its life; drawing us out of ourselves, and making us a part of others, alive to their misery, and strengthened by their participation of ours. The sorrow or privation shared with another is lightened in the same degree as a material burden, and inspires the same mutual reliance. There are moments when the temper yields to the burden equally with the back, but the affections are unbent, and derive new vigour from the trial. Such is the testimony of Shakespeare; and it is by this that we must judge his married life; for it clearly expresses what he felt. It proves that his wife retained the love which he gave to Anne Hathaway, and that what he was to her she was to him, under all vicissitudes and adversities abidingly and unchangeably faithful— "Kind is my love to-day, to-morrow kind; Still constant in a wondrous excellence." "2 Three centuries, indeed, were content to regard this marriage as a true love-match, when modern criticism suddenly discovered that it was out of joint. Mr. De Quincy describes the married life of Shakespeare in different terms from those used by himself. He represents it as passed in incessant bickerings, till the maddened poet flies for relief to London, leaving wife and children at home-like the truant ladybird in the nursery rhyme. We are perplexed to 1 'King Henry IV., Part II.,' act v. 2. 2 Sonnet cv. 3 Encyclopædia Britannica.' conceive what can have led to such a theory; for, beyond the muttered conjectures of other commentators, it has not a shadow of ground. All the facts point to an opposite conclusion. Within three years of her marriage Anne Shakespeare presented her husband with three childrenSusannah, baptized at Stratford on the 26th of May, 1583, and a twin son and daughter, baptized as Hamlet1 and Judith, on the 2nd of February, 1584-5. At the very time when he is said to have been worn out by their "conjugal discord," she is attaching herself to him by new ties, the dearest in nature's gift; and it is at the same moment that he addresses to her one of the most beautiful of his sonnets, which, read by the light of its obvious meaning, affords, indeed, a noble revelation of his feelings. The wife of thirty, and mother of three children, might now recall the disparity of their ages, as she looked on her husband of three-and-twenty, and saw him adding to his attractions, while her own were on the wane. But how must she be reassured, when her fears call forth such tender words as these: "To me, fair friend, you never can be old, For as you were, when first your eye I eyed, He reviews the three years they have spent together, commencing with winter, which, as they were married in November, pointedly marks his wife :- "Three winters' cold Have from the forests shook three summers' pride, Three Aprils' perfumes in three hot Junes burned, 1 This name was sometimes given as Hamlet, and sometimes as Hamnet; Shakespeare, in his will, spells it with 7. 2 Sonnet civ. The change made in her appearance by maternity is imaged with surpassing delicacy It may "Ah! yet doth beauty, like a dial-hand, Steal from the figure, and no pace perceived: So your sweet hue, which methinks still doth stand, be an illusion, but he sees the same maiden bloom on her cheek, and the same grace in her form, so that her charms, though they may be declining, seem to his watching eye, unchanged and stationary. His love for her not only survived their marriage and lit up their home, but was still the inspiration of his Muse. Thus it seems to open the door of his little dwelling, where we see his poetic instincts rising, as if they were a fountain, and hither he comes with his wife, in their pain and weariness, to drink and rest. One of his biographers has said that a good poet may be a bad man, and unhappily it would not be difficult to prove the fact; but we deny that it could be true of Shakespeare. The poet who is the interpreter of the noblest susceptibilities of the human heart must himself feel and respond to them. To believe he could be their oracle to all ages without this participation, were, indeed, to reduce them to leather and prunella. Virtue alone can image virtue. Libertines may give us a Parisina, but it requires a pure and refined mind, as well as the highest genius, to conceive a Miranda, and a Perdita, an Imogen, a Desdemona, and an Ophelia. So these sonnets of Shakespeare's now remove the cloud both from his married life and his good name. Instead of appearing as a thrall or a reprobate, he stands forward in his natural character, as the tenderest of husbands and the fondest of parents. Poetry is nurtured in his breast by affection, unites with it, and takes its hue and likeness, so that they seem two lovely berries moulded on one stem. Now he entwines them in the tresses of his wife; now they form the plume for his little son:1 "What's in the brain that ink may character, Finding the first conceit of love there bred, Where time and outward form would show it dead.” That it is indeed his son he thus addresses as "sweet boy," the whole tenour of the sonnet declares. In whom else could he find "the first conceit of love there bred;" that is, its first hope and fruit embodied? Who else could be a reproduction of his own childhood, when the lapse of time and his matured form witnessed that it had fled for ever? The love pledged eternally to his wife was here re-cast "in love's fresh case," in which there was no sign of the defacing wear of years, the "dearth and injury of age," or "necessary wrinkles," perceptible in himself. Thus love ever makes antiquity "its page," shows a man his youth renewed in his children, presents him again as a young boy. The poet saw "figured" in his prattling infant his own inmost nature" his true spirit," even to the last thought in his brain; and he could find nothing to say or write that would newly express either his own affection or the child's "dear merit." Yet he continually remembered them, dwelt upon them, and went through the unvarying reflections they suggested, as he repeated daily the same prayers,— Like prayers divine, I must each day say o'er the very same." 1 Sonnet cviii. |