Now, assuming that Horatio meant by "stars with trains of fire" to allude to meteors, and by "disasters in the sun" to allude to an eclipse of the sun, these astronomical records confirm him by actually enumerating these meteors and eclipses of the sun in this very year 1601. By again consulting the Monthly Notes of the Royal Astronomical Society, vol. xl., page 436, one finds that on December 24th, New Style, 1601, there was an annular eclipse of the sun, about a fortnight after the lunar eclipse just described, which "was annular right across England," and was in its midst at about one hour after midday. The meteoric shower required is somewhat better known. The well-known showers of "falling stars" which occur at periods of thirty-two and a quarter years (or a multiple of that number) in or about the fifteenth of November and therefore are called "November showers" (also called "Leonids," because always appearing to diverge from a point in the constellation Leo), came in the vicinity of London on October 27th, Old Style, 1601. one: Now here is the résumé, and we must agree that it is a startling (1) Hamlet, entered in the Stationer's Register December 29, 1601, and printed in 1602. (2) A meteoric shower in October, 1601. (3) An eclipse of the sun December 25, 1601. Now this "gentleman of Normandy named Lamond" is found to have been Charles de Contault, duc de Biron, Marshal of France, born in or about 1563, executed in the Bastille by order of Henry IV., July 31, 1602. He had been sent by Henry on an embassy to the English Court in 1601. Here again note the date 1601, which we saw prevail in our astronomical data. In the passage from which we quoted above, the King says of this gentleman of Normandy who was "here, two months since," that he had "witchcraft in his horsemanship." He grew unto his seat And to such wondrous doing brought his horse As he had been incorpsed and demi-natured With the brave beast, so far he topped my thought That I, in forgery of shapes and tricks Gane short of what he did! Now that this Duke of Biron was, indeed, a wonderful horseman, we have Chapman's testimony also. George Chapman wrote two dramas, The Conspiracy of Biron and The Tragedy of Biron. In the former, Act I., Scene II., we have: The Duke Byron, on his heavy beast Pastrana The Duc de Biron was well known to the English. Many Englishmen sent to Navarre served under him. The prologue to Chapman's Conspiracy says, "The all-admired Biron, all France exempted from comparison" (perhaps Biron in Love's Labour's Lost was drawn from this historical character). Stow's "Abridgment" gives the date of the arrival of this Biron in London as "about the fifth of September, 1601." And in Pierre Matthieu's Histoire de France, Geneva, 1620, page 115, the date of Biron's return to France was given as "at the beginning of the month of October, 1601, Old Style." 66 And, again, in the first scene of Act V. of Hamlet are the most wonderful of all these abstracts and brief chronicles. When Prince Hamlet says, 'Alas! poor Yorick," he seems to have been alluding to John Heywood, who was Jester to Henry VIII. and Queen Mary. Dr. Doran's History of the Stage (London, 1853, p. 132) says: "We now come to a person of some celebrity, who seems to have been a court-jester without being exactly a court-fool. I allude to John Heywood of North Mimms in Hertfordshire, whom Sir Thomas More introduced to the King as Sir William Nevil de Scogan, and whose introduction was followed by his appointment as jester to the sovereign." Of this Heywood, Wharton says that "he was beloved and rewarded by Henry VIII. for his buffooneries, and Henry was satisfied with the quips of his daughter's favorite." The title, "King's Jester," clung to him through the reign of Edward VI. and Mary. But as Mary was succeeded by Elizabeth there would naturally have been no other 'King's" Jester appointed. Now according to the Dictionary of National Biography, this "John the King's Jester" (see Doran id., p. 185) was born in 1497; being mentioned in a return of Catholic fugitives in January 29, 1517, when he had become tenant of lands in Kent. In 1599 he is said to be "dead and gone" (Newron's Epilogue or Conclusion to John Heywood's Works). His death, therefore, occurred somewhere between 1577 and 1578. Now the gravedigger says: "Here's a skull hath lain i' the earth three and twenty years." Twenty-three years from the year 1578 would again give us this year, 1601, the date we run against everywhere in the astronomical and the historical data. I pass reference to the wonderful graveyard scene where two gravediggers in discussing whether Ophelia is entitled to Christian burial, follow exactly the reasoning of the lawyers in the case of Hales against Petit, where Lady Hales fought an escheat on the ground that her husband, Sir James Hales, did not commit suicide; but, since he only threw himself into the water (since the throwing oneself into the water was no crime, and since he was not responsible for the water having drowned him after he had thrown himself in), because that famous case, reported in blackletter (almost as obsolete for a type for law reports in Shakespeare's day as it is now), was fifty years old when Shakespeare turned it to his purpose, and so was hardly a localism. Let us pass to an inquiry whether there was anything that Shakespeare was not; whether he was not only the father of English drama, but of English stage-craft as well? Nothing is perhaps oftener met with in these fields than the statement that Shakespeare's plays were presented on barren boards without stage effect or mise-en-scene, without practicable scenery, trusting to speech alone. Surely the authorities making this statement cannot have been very cautious students of the stage-direction in the quartos, or in the first folio. These stage directions the Bankside Editors of 1885 first maintained to be as truly Shakespeare's as the texts of the plays. Those who argue for barren boards have surely forgotten the very first scene of the very first act of the very first play printed, as modern editions usually run, in our collections. Surely the first act of The Tempest portraying a sinking ship toiling in the breakers, could not have been presented without "practical" scenery. Nor again that witches' chaldron scene in Macbeth, nor the incantation scene in Gloucester's garden in the second Henry VI. Surely Shakespeare's plays called for the most opulent stage effects and stage machinery known to his date. And surely their representation to-day calls, nay their perspective demands, the most opulent settings we can give them. And it is possibly speaking one word for the manager and one word for Shakespeare, when we are invited to see a Shakespeare play given to-day without scenery on the plea that there was no stage scenery in Shakespeare's times. That signs were hung out on Shakespeare's stage to indicate the place—Athens or Rome or Padua is doubtless the fact. But these signs were rather for the benefit of the audience which had no bill of the play on their knees than for the actors (there are no such signs called for in the stage directions of any Shakespearean play, by the way). And so even if this superman's head was among the beams of heaven, he was not oblivious to what his fellowmen were occupying themselves about, nor of human nature's daily food. Who were the greatest of the great? Those who, according to Goethe, are of no race and no nation, but of all races and nations. Victor Hugo says Moses, Homer and Shakespeare; others say Shakespeare, Dante and Cervantes; still others say Shakespeare, Dante and Goethe. Charles the First, whom the Puritans accused of reading Shakespeare more than he read his Bible, told Falkland that Shakespeare was the greatest of authors, for he had actually created a new order of being in Caliban. Such are a very few of the bewilderments which make me, for one, sincerely glad that we cannot localize and minimize Shakespeare down to any last analysis of a human being; why he must still remain to us "an immense figure of a man seated on a rocky summit with his head among the beams of heaven," why we nor time nor space can contain him, because as Dr. Johnson said in his immortal eulogy, "panting Time toils after him in vain.” GEORGE BERNARD SHAW. BY DANIEL A. LORD, S.J. II. HE function of comedy, Mr. Shaw declares, is nothing less than the destruction of old-established morals. Shakespeare was unprogressive enough to accept standard morality as the basis of his plays, and hence in Mr. Shaw's estimation he is quite inferior to Ibsen, the iconoclast. In consequence, Mr. Shaw makes his plays a frank and unfair attack on conventional morality, that is, the morality of the Decalogue and of the natural law. With Ibsen, he maintains that as far as morals go, there is no law; with Nietzsche, he rejects positively all morality based on Christian principles. So he counts off on his fingers the seven deadly sins of his moral code: respectability, conventional virtue, filial affection, modesty, sentiment, devotion to women, romance.1 And amidst shouts of laughter, the onslaught begins. Respectability. In the literal sense, respectability means worthy of respect; respectability in the Shavian sense means worthy of sovereign contempt. He despises it; he showers ridicule upon it; he tramps it in the mud, and throws its fragments to the gales of his own laughter. Dare to disagree with him, and he hurls at you that most galling of all modern epithets, Philistine! That is a terrible word! You may think me too radical, boisterous, foolishly progressive, even slightly demented, cries the modern intellectual; but don't, ah, don't think me a Philistine! Yet if anything would make me cling madly to respectability, it is Mr. Shaw's attack upon it. To begin with, his attack is obviously so unfair. To his respectable characters he does not give even the privilege of military execution. In argument with his unconventional characters, they appear unmitigated asses or silly hypocrites, fully conscious of their cant and ready to call quits at any sophistical argument that is fitted to a neat epigram. From Col. Craven and Doctor Paramore2 to Mr. and Mrs. Knox,2 his respectable characters are bores, or fools, or furtive sinners. While for the men and women who use their respectability as a cloak for 1 G. B. S., 77. 'The Philanderer. |