 CHAPTER XVI. The Supernatural. Hamlet. The time is out of joint. O cursed spite that ever I was born to set it right. Had all his hair has been lives, my great revenge had stomach for them all. Shakespeare in January 1600 was at the height of his dramatic renown, and at the age of 36 was the ripest philosopher in the world, knowing more about the secret impulses of the human heart than any other man. I could see a great change in his life and thought, for a shade of settled melancholy characterized his action since the death and burial of Spencer, and the downfall of Essex and Southampton through the vengeance of Cecil and Bacon, jealous courtiers, who poisoned Queen Elizabeth against the most noted lords of her court. Shakespeare's theatrical company became involved in the conspiracy of Essex, and an edict was issued against the Blackfriars and Globe playhouses performing their dramatic satires. Children players took their places. Through the particular vengeance of Lord Bacon, charges of treason were trumped up against Essex, the former benefactor of Bacon, and in due course the head of Essex went to the block in February 1601. Thus perished one of the brightest, bravest and loftiest peers of England, a victim to the spleen hate and tyranny of the ugly Elizabeth, a woman without conscience or morality when her personal interest was involved. She shines out as one of the greatest and most infamous queens of history, and so long as lofty crime is remembered, she will remain on the top pedestal of royal iniquity. In the course of our classical and historical readings, William had become very much interested in the tragic story of Amloth, or Hamlet, as told by the Danish writer Saxo, and Seneca, the great Roman, in his story of Cornelia gives the same tragic tale, while Gagnier, the French dramatist as well as Kidd, the friend of Shakespeare, made plays out of the tragic history of the Prince of Denmark. But it was left for my friend William to gather up the historical bones of the ancient story and articulate them into a breathing, living, passionate, divine being whose lofty words and phrases should go sounding down the centuries, thrilling and reverberating in the soul-lit memory of mankind. The supernatural or spiritual part of creation had ever a fascinating influence upon the part of Avon, and all the outward manifestations of nature were infallible hints to him of the inward sources of the divine, and an absolute belief in the immortality of the soul. His own mind was the best evidence of divinity. Night after night in the winter of 1600 William would read over and ponder upon scraps of thought that he had at various times put into the mouth of Hamlet, and in our new quarters near Temple Bar I assisted him in composing the dramatic story of the melancholy dame. That is, I blew the bellows, and when his thought was heeded to a red rose hue he hammered out the play on the anvil of his genius, and made the sparks fly in a shower of pristine glory. His literary blacksmith's shop was richly furnished with all the rough iron bars and crude ingots of vanished centuries, and all the best dramatic writers of London filled his thought factory with contributions of their inventions. He worked many of their rough pieces of thought into his dramatic plots, but when the phrase, scene, and act were finished and placed before the footlights for rendition, it sailed away a full-rigged ship of dramatic grandeur, showing nothing but the royal workmanship of a master builder, the Homer, Phidias, and Angelo of artistic perfection. Mankind cares but little for the various kinds of wheat that compose the loaf, the wool or cotton that's in the garment, the timber or stone in the house, or the kind of steel in the battleship or guns. All they look for is the perfect structure, as they may see today in Shakespeare's greatest play, Hamlet. While Hamlet is the central figure of the play, old Polonius, the diplomatic double-dealer, laertes his son, and Ophelia his daughter, act prominently, while Horatio and the ghost of Hamlet's father express words of lasting remembrance. Paul Claudius, the king who murdered Hamlet's father, stole his throne and seduced his wife, is shown up as a first-class criminal villain, while Gertrude, the mother of the young prince, is one of the most sneaking, mild, incestuous queens in history. Such she-devils with heaven in their eyes and face, honeyed words on their lips, and gall and hell in their hearts, are the real seducers of infatuated, willing, ambitious men, and each should dangle at the end of the same rope or hemlock together. Contrast Gertrude with Ophelia, and you have a fiend of chicanery and crime with a sweet angel of innocence. Too good, too fair to be cast among the briars of this working-day world, and fall and bleed upon the thorns of life, like a strain of sad, sweet music which comes floating by us on the wings of night and silence, like the exhalation of the violet dying even upon the sensate charms, like the snowflake dissolved in air before it has caught a stain of earth, like the light's surf severed from the billow which a breath disperses. Such is the character of the delicate and sanctified Ophelia. In December 1601 the ban of disgrace was taken from the Globe Theatre, and Burbage and William were permitted to continue their dramatic exhibitions. Hamlet was played the night before Christmas. The house was packed closer than grass on an English lawn, and the applause was almost continuous like the moan or roar of a distant sea. Shakespeare played the ghost, Burbage acted Hamlet, Joe Taylor played Horatio, Heminge played Ophelia, Peale played Polonius, Condole acted Claudius, Camped played Gertrude, Cook acted Laertes, and the other parts were taken by the best stock actors. The play opens up on a platform before the castle at Elsinore, Copenhagen, Denmark. Bernardo and Francisco are soldiers on night duty. Bernardo says, who's there? Francisco says, nay, answer me, stand and unfold yourself. The ghost of Hamlet's father appears to the night officers, and also to Horatio and Marcellus, but will not speak. They reveal the wonderful story to Hamlet, who makes ready to see and talk to the ghost the next night at twelve o'clock. In the meantime the king, queen and courtiers gather at the grand throne of the castle and talk of the late king. Hamlet is moody and sad and will not be comforted, although persuaded by King Claudius and his mother. Claudius addressing Hamlet says, but now my nephew Hamlet and my son, how is it that the clouds still hang on you? Hamlet says aside, a little more than kin and less than kind. Not so, my lord, I am too much in the sun. Hamlet's mother rebukes him about grieving for his father and says, do not forever with thy veiled lids seek for thy noble father in the dust. Thou knowest his common, all that live must die, passing through nature to eternity. Hamlet says, I, madam, it is common. Queen says, if it be, why seems it so particular with thee? And then, surcharge with suspicion of her secret villainy, Hamlet exclaims, seems, madam, nay, it is, I know not seems. Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother, nor customary suits of solemn black, nor windy suspiration of forced breath, no, nor the fruitful river in the eye, nor the dejected heavier of the visage, together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief that can denote me truly. These indeed seem, for they are actions that a man might play. But I have that within which passeth show these but the trappings and the suits of woe. Then, after the exit of the old murder-king and his particept's criminous queen, Hamlet ponders to himself on life and death in these lofty lines. Oh, that this too-too solid flesh would melt, thaw and resolve itself into a dew, or that the everlasting had not fixed his canon against self-slaughter. Oh, God, oh, God, how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world. Fie on it, oh, fie, to the unweeded garden that grows to seed. Things rank and gross in nature possess it merely. That it should come to this, but two months dead, nay, not so much, not two. So excellent a king that was, to this Hyperion to a Seder, so loving to my mother that he might not beteem the wind of heaven visit her face too roughly. Heaven and earth must I remember? Why, she would hang on him as if increase of appetite had grown by what it fed on. And yet, within a month, let me not think on it, frailty thy name is woman. A little month, or ere those shoes were old with which she followed my poor father's body, like Naiobi, all tears. Why, she, even she, oh, God, a beast that once discourse of reason would have mourned longer, married with my uncle, my father's brother, but no more like my father than I to Hercules. Within a month ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears had left the fleshing of her galled eyes, she married. Oh, most wicked speed to post with such dexterity to incestuous sheets. It is not, nor can it come to good, but break my heart, for I must hold my tongue. Layertes, before his departure for France, gives his sister Ophelia some advice, and warns her against the blandishments of Hamlet. He says, fear it, Ophelia, fear it, my dear sister, and keep you in the rear of your affection, out of the shot, and danger of desire. Be wary, then. Best safety lies in fear, youth to itself rebels, though none else near. The innocent, beautiful girl gave this wise reply to her brother. I shall the effect of this good lesson keep as watchmen to my heart. But good my brother, do not, as some ungracious pastures do, show me the steep and thorny way to heaven, whilst, like a puffed and reckless libertine, himself the primrose path of dalliance treads, and wrecks not his own reed. Then, Polonius, the wise old father, comes in to hasten Layertes off to France with this great advice. There, my blessing with thee, and these few precepts in thy memory look thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue, nor any unproportioned thought his act. Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar. Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel. But do not dull thy palm with entertainment of each new hatched, unfledged comrade. Beware of entrance to a quarrel. But being in, bear it, that the opposed may beware of thee. Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice. Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment. Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy, but not expressed in fancy, rich, not gaudy, for the apparel oft proclaims the man. And they in France of the best rank and station are of a most select and generous chief in that. Neither a borrower nor a lender be, for loan oft loses both itself and friend, and borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry. This, above all, to thine own self be true, and it must follow as the night the day. Thou canst not then be false to any man. Good advice is very fine from those who think and make it. Only one in ninety-nine will ever stop to take it. Hamlet and his friends Horatio and Marcellus go to the passing place of the ghost at midnight, and there to the amazement of Hamlet he sees the apparition of his father, and exclaims, Angels and ministers of grace defend us. Be thou a spirit of health or a goblin damned, bring with thee heirs from heaven or blasts from hell. Be thy intense wicked or charitable. Thou comst in such a questionable shape that I will speak to thee. I'll call thee Hamlet, King, Father, Royal Dane. O answer me! Let me not burst in ignorance, but tell, why thy canonized bones, hurst in death, have burst their sermons. Why thy sepulcher, wherein we saw thee quietly and earned, hath opened his ponderous and marble jaws to cast thee up again. What may this mean that thou, dead corpse, again in complete steel, revisit thus the glimpses of the moon, making night hideous? And we, fools of nature, so horridly to shake our disposition, with thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls. Say, why is this? Wherefore? What should we do? The ghost passes across the stage and beckons Hamlet to follow, who frantically rushes after the apparition, and says, Wither, wilt thou lead me? Speak, I'll go no farther. Ghost utters in sepulchral voice. Mark me! I am thy father's spirit, doomed for a certain term to walk the night, and for the day confined to fast in fires till the foul crimes done in my days of nature are burnt and purged away. But that I am forbid to tell the secrets of my prison house, I could a tale unfold whose lightest words would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres, thy knotted and confined locks to part, and each particular hair to stand on end like quills upon the fretful porcupine. But this eternal blazing must not be to ears of flesh and blood. List, list, o list! If thou didst ever, thy dear father, love, tis given out that sleeping in my orchard a serpent stung me. So the whole ear of Denmark is by a forged process of my death rankly abused. But know, thou noble youth, the serpent that did sting thy father's life now wears his crown. Hamlet exclaims, oh, my prophetic soul, my uncle! The ghost then makes this remarkable speech. I, that incestuous, that adulterate beast, with witchcraft of his wit, with traitorous gifts, o wicked wit and gifts that have the power so to seduce, one to his shameless lust the will of my most seeming virtuous queen. Oh, Hamlet, what a falling off was there! From me, whose love was of that dignity, that it went hand in hand even with the vow I made to her in marriage, and to decline upon a wretch whose natural gifts were poor to those of mine. But virtue, as it never will be moved, though lewdness courted in a shape of heaven, so lust, though to a radiant angel linked, will sate itself in a celestial bed and pray on garbage. But soft, me thinks I sent the morning air, brief, let me be. Sleeping within my orchard my custom always of the afternoon. Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole, with juice of cursed hebenin in a vial, and in the porches of my ears did pour the leprous distillment, whose effect holds such an enmity with blood of man that quick as quick silver, it courses through the natural gates and alleys of the body, and with a sudden vigor it doth posset and curd like eager droppings into milk, the thin and wholesome blood. So did it mine, and a most instant tether barked about, most lazar-like, with vial and loathsome crust, all my smooth body. Thus was I sleeping by a brother's hand of life, of crown, of queen at once dispatched, cut off even in the blossoms of my sin, unhoused, disappointed, unannalled, no reckoning made, but sent to my account with all my imperfections on my head. O horrible, most horrible, if thou hast nature in thee, bear it not, let not the royal bed of Denmark be a couch for luxury and damned incest, but howsoever thou pursuest this act, taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive against thy mother ought, leave her to heaven, and to those thorns that in her bosom lodge to prick and sting her. Fare thee well at once, the glowworm shows the matten to be near, and begins to pale his ineffectual fire. Adieu, adieu, adieu, remember me. As the ghosts ceased and passed off the stage, a peculiar shivering cheer passed over the great audience, and revealed for the first time in London dramatic art, a supernatural being seemingly clothed in the habiliments of flesh, blood, and bones resurrected from the tomb. Do spirits revisit this world again when they're released from this body of pain, and do they inhabit a realm afar beyond the bright sun and sparkling star? King Claudius, his queen, and Polonius were anxious to get at the real cause of Hamlet's lunacy, and send him away from the castle to prevent future trouble. The guilty conscience of the king daily feared detection. Hamlet brooded so intently upon the cruel murder of his father that he was constantly on the verge of insanity, devising plans to either slaughter himself or wreak a terrible vengeance upon his uncle and mother. Treading the halls of his ancestral palace, he uttered this transcendent soliloquy that has puzzled the ages. To be or not to be, that is the question. Whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them. To die, to sleep, no more. And by asleep to say we end the heartache, and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, to the consummation devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep. To sleep for chance to dream. Aye, there's the rub. For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause. There is the respect that makes calamity of so long life. For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, the oppressors wrong, the proud man's contumely, the pangs of despised love, the laws delay, the insolence of office, and the spurns? That patient merit of the unworthy takes, when he himself might his quietest make with a bare bodkin. Who would fardels bear to grunt and sweat under a weary life, but the dread of something after death, the undiscovered country from whose born no traveller returns, puzzles the will, and makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of? Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, and thus the native hue of resolution is sickly door with the pale cast of thought, and enterprises of great pitch and moment, with this regard their currents turn awry and lose the name of action. Ophelia, at the suggestion of her father and the other conspirators, comes in at this juncture, and sounds Hamlet as depleted love, and gives back the gifts he gave her. Hamlet, pretending to madness, still talks double, and asks Ophelia if she be honest, fair, and beautiful. She says, could beauty, my lord, have better commenced than with honesty? Hamlet replies, I truly, for the power of beauty will sooner transform honesty from what it is to abode, than the force of honesty can translate beauty into its likeness. This was some time a paradox, but now the time gives it proof. I did love you once. Ophelia says, indeed, my lord, you made me believe so. And then the fickle Hamlet says, I loved you not, and with supercilious advice exclaims, Get thee to a nunnery. Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners? I am myself indifferent honest, but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me. I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at my back than I have thoughts to put them in. Imagination to give them shape or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do, crawling between heaven and earth? We are errant knaves all, believe none of us, go thy ways to a nunnery. If thou dost marry, I'll give thee this plague for thy dowry. Be thou as chastised as ice, as pure as snow, thou shall not escape Calumny. If thou wilt needs marry, marry a fool, for wise men know well enough what monsters women make of them. Go, get thee to a nunnery. Hamlet thus plays the madman to the eye and mind of Ophelia that she may report his lunacy, and believing her former lover deranged after his exit utters this wail of grief. Oh, what a noble mind is here or thrown, the courteous soldier's scholar's eye, tongue, sword, the expectancy and rose of the fair state, the glass of fashion and the mold of form, the observed of all absorbers, quite, quite down. And I of ladies most dejected and wretched, that sucked the honey of his music vows, now see that noble and most sovereign reason, like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh, that unmatched form and feature of blown youth blasted with ecstasy. Oh, what was me, to have seen what I have seen, see what I see. The instruction of Hamlet to the players is the most conclusive evidence that William Shakespeare was not only the greatest dramatic author, but an actor and orator of matchless mold. There was no character that his soul conceived in any of his plays, fool or philosopher, that he could not act better than any man in his company. In the first rehearsal of his plays, he usually read the lines to his men, and gave them the cue and philosophy of the character to be enacted. A few days before the play of Hamlet, I heard him deliver this speech for the edification of the whole troop, that they might know how to render their lines in an effective and oratorical manner. Speak the speech I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue. But if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as leaf the tongue crier spoke my lines. Now do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently. For in the very torrent tempest and, as I may say, whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness. O, it offends me to the soul to hear a woe bustuous periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise. I would have such a fellow whipped for overdoing termigant. It outherds hered, pray you avoid it. Be not too tame, neither, but let your own discretion be your tutor. Suit the action to the word, the word to the action. With this special observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature, for anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as for the mirror, up to nature. To show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time, his form and pressure. Now this, overdone or come tardy off, though it make the unskilled laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve, the censure of the which one must in your allowance overweigh a whole theater of others. Oh, there be players that I have seen play, and heard others praise, and that highly, not to speak it profanely, that neither having the accent of Christians nor the gate of Christian pagan nor man, have so strutted and bellowed that I have thought some of nature's journeymen had made men, and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably. In all the troubles and vicissitudes of Hamlet's life, young Lord Horatio remained his unfaltering friend, and this tribute to friendship is one of the best in Shakespeare. Hamlet says, Horatio, thou art even as just a man as ere my conversation coped with all. Nay, do not think I flatter. For what advancement may I hope from thee, that no revenue has but thy good spirits to feed and clothe thee? Why should the poor be flattered? No, let the candied tongue lick absurd pomp and crook the pageant hinges of the knee, where thrift may follow fawning. Dost thou hear? Since my dear soul was mistress of its choice, and could of men distinguish, her election has sealed thee for herself, for thou has been as one in suffering all that suffers nothing. A man that fortunes, buffets, and rewards, has taken with equal composure, and blest are those whose blood and judgment are so well commingled that they are not a pipe for fortune's finger to sound what stop she pleases. Give me that man that is not passion's slave, and I will wear him in my heart's core, I, in my heart of heart, as I do thee. In the dumb show murder play, before the king and queen, Shakespeare puts these phrases in the mouths of the players and Hamlet. The great man down, you mark his savoured flies. The poor advance to mix friends of enemies, and hither too doth the love unfortunate end, for who not needs shall never lack a friend. But what's that, your majesty, and we that have free souls it touches us not? Let the gall'd jade wince our withers are unrung. King Claudius, frightened at the mock play, runs away, and Hamlet says to Horatio, why let the stricken dear go weep, the heart ungall'd play, for some must watch while some must sleep, thus runs the world away. Tis now the very witching time of night when churchyard's yawn and hell itself breathes out contagion to this world. Now could I drink hot blood and do such bitter business as the day would quake to look on. Soft, now to my mother, I will speak daggers to her, but use none. King Claudius the night before his death, after conspiring with Polonius for the exile of Hamlet, utters this self-accusing remorseful soliloquy. Oh, my offence is rank, it smells to heaven, it hath the primal eldest curse upon it, a brother's murder. Pray can I not, though inclination be as sharp as will, my stronger guilt defeats my strong intent. And like a man to double business bound, I stand in pause where I shall first begin, and both neglect. What if this cursed hand were thicker than itself with brother's blood? Is there not rain enough in the sweet heavens to wash it white as snow? Where to serve mercy but to confront the visage of offence? And what's in prayer but this twofold force to be forestalled ere we come to fall, or pardoned being down? Then I'll look up, my fault is past. But oh, what form of prayer can serve my turn? Forgive me, my foul murder? That cannot be, since I am still possessed of those effects for which I did the murder, my crown, my known ambition, and my queen. May one be pardoned and retain the offence? In the corrupted currents of this world offence's gilded hand may shove by a justice, and oft to seen the wicked prize itself buys out the law. But tis not so above, there is no shuffling there, the action lies in his true nature, and we ourselves compelled even to the teeth and forehead of our faults to give in evidence. In the midnight interview of Hamlet with his mother, Polonius hides behind a curtain to spy upon the words of the melancholy dain, and is killed by a sword thrust of Hamlet who exclaims, How now, a rat, dead for a ducket! Then Hamlet holds his mother to the talk, and pours these lines of liquid gall into her trembling ear and frightened heart. Look here upon this picture and on this, the counterfeit presentiment of two brothers. See what a grace was seated on this brow, Hyperion's curls the front of Jove himself, and I, like Mars, to threaten in command, a station, like the Herald Mercury, new lighted on a heaven-kissing hill. A combination and a form indeed, where every god did seem to set his seal, to give the world assurance of a man. This was your husband. Look you now, what follows. Here is your husband, like a mildewed ear blasting his wholesome brother. Have you eyes? Could you, on this fair mountain, leave to feed and batten on this foul moor? Your husband, a murderer and a villain, a slave that is not twentieth part the tithe of your precedent lord, a vice of kings, a cut purse of the empire and the rule that from a shelf the precious diadem stole and put in his pocket, a king of shreds and patches. King Claudius, alarmed at the death of Polonius and in his own guilty state, conspires with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to take Hamlet to England and get rid of him, saying, follow him at foot, tempt him with speed abroad, delay it not, I'll have him hence tonight, away, for everything is sealed and done that else leans on the affair, pray you make haste. Hamlet, before retiring, thus bemoans his slowness in wreaking a just vengeance upon his murderer uncle. How all occasions do inform against me and spur my dull revenge? What is a man if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more. Sure, he that made us with such large discourse looking before and after, gave us not that capability and godlike reason to rot in us unused. Rightly to be great is not to stir without great argument, but greatly to find quarrel in a straw when honors at the stake. How stand I, then, that have a father killed, a mother stained? Excitements of my reason and my blood, and let all sleep, while to my shame I see the imminent death of twenty thousand men, that for a fantasy and a trick of fame go to their graves like beds? Fight for a plot, whereon the numbers cannot try the cause, which is not too enough and continent to hide the slain? Oh, from this time forth my thoughts be bloody or nothing worth. The beautiful Ophelia becomes insane after her father's death and wanders about the castle singing disjointed love songs and uttering musings. Queen Gertrude says, How now, Ophelia? She sings. How should I your true love know from another one, by his cockle hat and staff and his sandal shun? The king asks, How do you, pretty lady? She replies, They say the owl was a banker's daughter. Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be. Laertes returns from France, and finds his sister insane from grief over the loss of her father, and viewing this innocent wreck parading palace halls exclaims, Dear maid, kind sister, sweet Ophelia, O heavens, is it possible a young maid's wit should be as mortal as an old man's life? Ophelia unconsciously sings. They bore him barefaced on the beer. Hey, no, nonny, nonny, hey, nonny. And in his grave rained many a tear. Fare you well, my dove. Holding a spray of flowers in her hands, she fitfully plucks them in murmurs. There's rosemary. That's for remembrance. Pray you love, remember. And there is pansies. That's for thoughts. There's fennel for you and columbines. There's roux for you, and here's some for me. We may call it herb of grace on Sunday. Oh, you must wear your roux with a difference. There's a daisy. I would give you some violence, but they withered all when my father died. Hamlet and his party in sailing for England encounter a war-like pirate ship, and in the fight in grapple Hamlet alone is taken prisoner, and his keepers go to destruction. He suddenly appears at Elsinore and goes to the churchyard, where a grave is being prepared for Ophelia, who was drowned in a garden stream in her mad ramblings. Hamlet converses philosophically with the gravediggers about the bones, skulls, and greatness of a politician, courtier, lady, lawyer, tanner. And when the skull of the old king's jester is thrown out of the grave after a sleep of twenty-three years, Hamlet, speaking to Horatio, says, Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him Horatio. A fellow of infinite jest of most excellent fancy, he hath borne me on his back a thousand times, and now how abhorred in my imagination it is. My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed. I know not how oft. Where be your jibes now, your gambles, your songs, your flashes of merriment, that were want to set the table in a roar? Not one now to mock your own grinning. Quite chopfallen. Now get you to my lady's chamber and tell her. Let her paint an inch thick, to this favor she must come. Make her laugh at that. The funeral procession with the corpse of Ophelia now appears, laertes, king, queen, train, and priest attending. The priests tell laertes that were it not for great command, his sister's body should, in ground unsanctified, have lodged till the last trumpet. Because of alleged suicide. Laertes preemptorily says, Lay her in the earth, and from her fair and unpolluted flesh may violet spring. I tell thee, churlish priest, A ministering angel shall my sister be when thou lies howling in perdition. Laertes and Hamlet, both overpowered with frantic grief, leap into the new-made grave, and struggle for precedence of affection. The former exclaiming, Now pile your dust upon the quick and dead, Tell of this flat a mountain you have made, To our top old peleon, or the skyish head of blue Olympus. Hamlet, replying to the king, queen, and laertes, says, I loved Ophelia. Forty thousand brothers could not with all their quantity of love make up my sum. And if thou prait of mountains, let them throw millions of acres on us, Till our ground, cinching his fate against the burning zone, Make assa like a wart. Hamlet tells his friend Horatio, How on his voyage to England he discovered that King Claudius gave commission to his enemies to send his head to the block. Hamlet says, Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well when our deep plots do pall, And that should teach us. There is a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough hue them how we will. King Claudius, seeing no other way to get rid of Hamlet, consults his secret courtiers and brews up the passion existing between laertes and himself, proposing that they fence with rapiers for a great prize, the king betting that in twelve passes of swords laertes makes not three hits on Hamlet. The grand contest for excellence in swordplay comes off in the main hall of the palace, while the king, queen, lords, and courtiers await the entrance of Hamlet. The rapier point handed by the king to laertes was dipped in deadly poison, so that it but touched the flesh of Hamlet's certain death prevailed, and even of the wine cup set on the table to quench the thirst of the artistic fencers, one was poisoned and intended for Hamlet's dissolution. Laertes was in the poison plot, and Hamlet felt in his soul that foul play was intended, but in the general scramble and conclusion he hoped to wipe off the score of his vengeance from the slate of royal iniquity and slaughter. Trumpet and cannon sound for beginning the sword contest. First passes favorite Hamlet, and the king grasping the poison wine cup says, Hamlet, this pearl is thine, here's to thy health, offering him the cup. Hamlet replies, give laertes the cup, I'll play this bout first, set it by a while. Hamlet makes another pass and touches laertes, and the queen grasps the poison cup in her excitement and drinks to her son. The king impulsively says, Gertrude, do not drink, it is the poison cup. The queen, as god and fate would have it, says stubbornly, I will, my lord, I pray you pardon me. In the third round laertes wounds Hamlet with the poison pointed rapier, and in the struggle Hamlet grasps laertes rapier, and in turn wounds his antagonist. At this moment the queen falls off her throne, and dying says to Hamlet, oh my dear Hamlet, the drink, the drink, I am poisoned. Laertes then falls, and Hamlet, seeing through the plot, exclaims, oh villainy, oh let the door be locked, treachery, seek it out. Laertes makes the dying confession of his treachery. It is here, Hamlet, Hamlet, thou art slain. No medicine in the world can do thee good. In thee there is not half an hour of life. The treacherous instrument is in thy hand, unbated and unvenomed. The foul practice has turned itself on me. Lo, here I lie, never to rise again. Thy mother's poisoned, I can no more. The king, the king is to blame. Then Hamlet, as a lion rushing on his prey, exclaims, the point in venom too, then venom to thy work, stabs the king. The king falls, and says, I am but hurt. While Hamlet grasps the poison cup of wine, and dashes it down the throat of the guilty monster, exclaiming, here, thou incestuous, murderous, damned dain, drink off this potion. Is thy union here? Follow my mother. King dies. Laertes last words. The king is justly served. Exchange forgiveness with me, noble Hamlet. Hamlet replies, Heaven make thee free of it. I follow thee. I am dead, Horatio. Wretched queen, Adieu, you that look pale and tremble at this chance, that are but mutes or audience to this act. Had I but time, as this fell sergeant death is strict in his arrest, oh, I could tell you. But let it be. Horatio, I am dead. Thou alivist, report me and my cause a right to the unsatisfied. Oh, I die, Horatio. The potent poison quite orcrows my spirit. I cannot live to hear the news from England, but I do prophesy the election lights on Fortenbrass. He has my dying voice. So tell him, with the occurrence more and less which have solicited, the rest is silence. Dies. And then, to close the scene of slaughter, the noble and faithful Horatio, bending over the body of his princely friend exclaims, Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest. Such tumultuous applause I never heard in a theatre, and shouts for the ghost and Hamlet prevailed, until William and Burbage came from behind the curtain, and made a triple bow to the audience, as the clock in the tower of St. Paul struck the midnight hour. The lesson in great Hamlet taught is that a throne is dearly bought, by lawless love and bloody deeds which fester like corrupted weeds, and smell to heaven with poison breath involving all in certain death. For fraud and murder can't be hid since even Cain did what they did, and left us naked through the world like meteors in midnight hurl to the darkle in this trackless sphere, not knowing what we're doing here. What have kings that privates have not do save ceremony? The new year of sixteen hundred and three brought no consolation or happiness to Queen Elizabeth. Her reign of forty-four years had been bloody, but patriotic, and while she had long since passed the noonday of her glory, her sunset of life hastened to its setting with a fevered brain and tortured heart, to think that she had not one real friend living, but surrounded by cunning courtiers, who were already manipulating for the favour and patronage of King James. Like a blasted pine on a mountain peak, she moaned and sighed every day and week, awaiting the deadly, stormy gusts that laid her low in the crumbling dust. To amuse her lingering hours of grief, Lord Cecil desired the Shakespeare Company to give its new version of Lovesaber's Lost, before the Queen in the Grand Reception Hall at Richmond. Burbage went to the castle and made all the preliminary preparations for the play, and on the night of the second of February, sixteen-oh-three, the fantastic love-play was given for the amusement of the Virgin Queen. She sat in regal solitude, and with mock laughter tried to enjoy the mimic's show. The royal audience was great in rank, beauty, wealth, and intellect, yet through the various scenes of the lighthearted drama, Elizabeth only swung her head, muttered, and sighed, while her courtiers evinced great amusement at the predicament of the various lovers in the play. Nothing can minister to a mind diseased. The Queen professed great disappointment at the absence of Shakespeare from the performance, on account of sickness, as Burbage told her royal highness. But William and myself remained at our rooms at Temple Bar that evening, working on the first drafts of Macbeth, to catch the praise and patronage of King James, the Scotch Englishman. Since the execution of Essex and imprisonment of Southampton, Shakespeare never said a word in praise of Elizabeth, and when he heard of her death on the twenty-sixth of March, sixteen-oh-three, he betrayed no feeling of grief, but on the contrary expressed delight that the way was now clear for the release of Southampton and other victims of Elizabeth from the Tower. Several weeks before her death Elizabeth was afflicted with a choking sensation, and ghosts of her murdered sister, Mary, Queen of Scots, and her former lover, the beheaded Earl of Essex, appeared nightly. Cecil asked her a few days before she died how she felt, when she muttered, My Lord, I am tied with a chain of iron about my neck. Thus a cruel, bloody conscience sat like a fiend over her dying sighs and groans, and though surrounded with the wealth and glory of the world, the Virgin Queen stepped into eternity with only the memory of a successful tyrant to light her to the Pluto realms of her father, King Henry VIII. Her funeral procession and burial in Westminster Abbey was the grandest exhibition of royal pomp and magnificence. The whole population seemed to fill all the alleys, streets, and parks of the great city, with the army and navy leading the funeral cortege, while the great bells from steeple, tower, and temple rang out their periodical wail of sonorous sounds for twenty-four hours. The body of Elizabeth had been scarcely cold in death when Lord Cecil and the Royal Council proclaimed James of Scotland, King of England, Ireland, Scotland, and France, tumbling over each other in a mad race to throw themselves prostrate before the rising sun, forgetting in a day the honours and benefactions showered upon them for forty years by their late mistress. And thus we see, from age to age, the greed of man on every page, no matter whether young or old, his strife in life is search for gold. King James left Edinburgh on the fifth of April with a royal escort for London, and by easy stage from town to town and castle to castle, made a triumphal march to London, where he arrived on the seventh of May, 1603, putting up at the Whitehall Palace. The lords of the realm and millions of faithful subjects gave James their loyal adhesion and support, lauding him to the skies as monarch of the realm and defender of the faith. Hope had no thorns in her crown. Protestants and Catholics alike on their first rush of spontaneous patriotism made a bid for the patronage of the new king, who, although reared a Protestant, was known to have sympathy for certain Catholic lords, who tried to save his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, from the fatal block. James never forgave Elizabeth for the murder of his mother, and in his inmost heart despised his predecessor. King James, after his coronation and triumphal entry into London on the fifteenth of March, 1604, ordered a partial jail delivery, releasing hundreds of prisoners in Scotland, Ireland and England, exempting only highway and house robbers, murderers, and those who had committed overt acts of treason against the crown. Many political prisoners had been immured in the tower and other state prisons, on trivial or trumped-up charges, preferred by jealous courtiers on personal or religious grounds. James was very friendly to the dramatic profession, and granted a charter to the Shakespeare Company to play at the Blackfriars, Globe, Prince, Fortune, and Curtin theatres. In the coronation procession, nine of the King's Company appeared dressed out in fantastic array, wearing four yards and a half each of silk scarlet cloth. The nine chief actors thus honoured by the King were William Shakespeare, Augustine Phillips, Lawrence Fletcher, John Hemmings, William Sly, Robert Arman, Henry Condole, Richard Cowley, and Richard Burbage. King James sent for Shakespeare and Burbage, and told them to be ever in readiness as the King's servants to perform at any of the palaces that he might entertain domestic or foreign guests, and assured them that the puritanical policy that had hounded them in the past should not prevail during his reign, believing that the stage, properly managed, was as great an educator for the people as the church. When William told me of his interview with the King, I expressed great delight, with the other literary bohemians that now sat on the throne of old Albion, a patron of poetry, painting, music, and sculpture. The Church of Rome and the Church of England had been battling for nearly a hundred years in Britain for the mastery, and although the devotees of Luther's Reformation had cracked the creed of popes and princes, there was a general demand for a new version and translation of the Bible, cutting out the Catholicism of the Old Book, and expurgating the vulgarity and superstition engrafted on the word of God by the apostles and bishops of the first, second, and third centuries, after Christ had been crucified for the sins of all mankind. Curious kind of celestial justice to kill any man for my sins and crimes, I prefer to suffer for my own sins and not fall back on a scapegoat to carry them off into the wilderness. On the first of September 1604 a great religious conclave was held at Hampton Court by the established church and the Puritans, and there it was determined to make a new revised and complete edition of the Bible by the Royal Authority of King James. On the first of May 1607, forty-seven of the most learned men of the British realm assembled in three parties at Oxford, Cambridge, and Westminster, to make a new Bible for the guidance of mankind. Hebrew, Greek, and Latin scholars made up the great conclave, and after four years of detailed labour the King James edition of the Bible was published to the world, cutting loose forever from the power of Rome. Although the word of God has been revised several times since by man, there are yet a large number of sentences and verses in the old and new testament that might be expurgated in the interest of decency, reason, and science. This electric age is too rapid and wise to gulp down the obsolete doctrine of ancient fanaticism, and the preachers of today are painfully alarmed at the decreasing number of pew-holders and patrons, who once listened to their rigmarole platitudes or eloquent dissertations on the power and locution of an unknown God. On Christmas Eve 1607 the King's players, with Shakespeare and Burbage in the respective roles of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, produced that great historical play at the grand reception room of Whitehall, in the presence of King James and the nobles of his court, surrounded by the ministers and diplomats from all the civilized nations of the world. I never saw a grander audience, interspersed with the most beautiful ladies of the world, who shone in their jewels and diamonds like a field of variegated wildflowers, besprinkled with the morning dew. The witches in the play seemed to startle the king, and more than ever convince him that these inhabitants of earth and air were all of a reality, and should be destroyed wherever found, believing that they held the destiny of man in the cauldron of their incantations. Come, come, you spirits, that tend on mortal thoughts, un-sex me here, and fill me from the crown to the toe, top-full of direst cruelty. Make thick my blood. Stop up the access and passage to remorse, that no compunctious visitings of nature shake my fell purpose, or keep peace between the effect and it. Come to my woman's breasts, and take my milk for gall you murdering ministers, wherever in your cyclist substances you wait on nature's mischief. Come, thick night, and pawl thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, that my keen knife see not the wound it makes, nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dog. This speech of the devilish Lady Macbeth made a deep impression on the audience, and caused the king to squirm in his throne-chair at the contemplation of the murder of Duncan. But when William entered as Macbeth, and rentered the following speech, James wished himself a million miles away, and yet applauded to the echo the murdering thoughts of the Scottish chieftain. If it were done went his done, then to her well it were done quickly. If the assassination could trample up the consequence, and catch with his surcease success, that but this blow might be the be-all and the end-all here, but here, upon this bank and shoal of time, we'd jump the life to come. But in these cases we still have judgment here, that we but teach bloody instructions, which being taught return to plague the inventor. This even-handed justice commends the ingredients of our poisoned chalice to our own lips. He's here in double trust. First as I am his kinsman and his subject, strong both against the deed. Then as his host, who should against his murderer shut the door, not bear the knife himself? Besides, this Duncan hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been so clear in his great office, that his virtues will plead like angels trumpet-tongued against the deep damnation of his taking off. And pity, like a naked newborn babe striding the blast, for heaven's terribim, hoist upon the sightless coarsers of the air, shall blow the horrid deed in every eye, that tears shall drown the wind. I have no spur to prick the sides of my intent, but only vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself and falls on the other. Still brooding on the murder of Duncan, Macbeth says, Is this a dagger which I see before me? The handle towards my hand. Come, let me clutch thee. I have thee not, and yet I see thee still. Art thou not fatal vision sensible to feeling as to sight? Or art thou but a dagger of the mind, a false creation proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain? I see thee yet in form as palpable as this which now I draw. Thou marshlessed me the way that I was going, and such an instrument I was to use. Mine eyes are made the fools of the other senses, or else worth all the rest. I see thee still, and on my blade and handle gout's of blood which was not so before. There's no such thing. It is the bloody business which informs thus to mine eyes. Now, o'er the one-half world nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse the curtain sleeper. Now witchcraft celebrates pale hecket's offerings, and withered murder alarmed by his sentinel the wolf whose howls his watch, thus with his stealthy pace, with Tarquin's ravishing strides towards his design moves like a ghost. Thou sure and firm set earth, hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear the very stone's prait of my whereabout, and take the present horror from the time which now suits with it. While I threat, he lives. Words to the heat of deed's too-cold breath gives. I go, and it is done. The bell invites me. Hear it not, Duncan, for it is a nail that summons thee to heaven or to hell. After the murder of Duncan, Lady Macbeth is constantly haunted with the ghost of her victim, and in midnight hours, sick at soul, walks in her sleep talking of her bloody deed. Out, damn spot! Out, I say! Here's the smell of the blood still. All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. And then retiring to her purple couch amidst the cries of her waiting-lomen, she dies with insane groans echoing through her castle halls. Macbeth, the pliant, cowardly, ambitious tool of his wicked wife, is at last surrounded by Macduff and his soldiers, and informed that his lady is dead. And then, soliloquizing on time and life, he utters these philosophic phrases. She should have died hereafter. There would have been a time for such a word. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time, and all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. And then, in the forest in front of the castle, Macbeth is at last brought to bay, and killed by Macduff. But the murderer of Duncan, brave to the last, exclaims, Yet I will try the last, before my body I throw my warlike shield. Lay on, Macduff, and damned be him that first cries, Hold enough! A whirlwind of applause echoed through the royal halls at the conclusion of the great Scotch historical drama, and Shakespeare was loudly called before the footlights, making a general bow to the audience, and paying deep, low courtesy to the king, who beckoned him to the throne-share, and placed about his neck a heavy golden chain, with a miniature of his majesty attached. William was glorified. Murder, though it have no tongue, will speak with most miraculous organ. The King Becoming Graces are Justice, Verity, Temperance, Stabilness, Bouty, Perseverance, Mercy, Lowliness, Devotion, Patience, Courage, Fortitude. He lives in fame that died in virtue's cause. The King Becoming Graces are Justice, Verity, Temperance, Stabilness, Bouty, Perseverance, Mercy, Lowliness, Devotion, Patience, Courage, Fortitude. Shakespeare became a prime favorite of King James, and occasionally he entertained the bard at Whitehall Palace, introducing him to the bishops, cardinals, and lords, who were interested in the revision of the Bible. They were astonished at the detailed knowledge of Shakespeare, touching the word of God, and when he entered into a dissertation of the Hebrew, Greek and Latin philosophers and divines who concocted the history of the ancients, they marveled at his native erudition. These modern preachers had been educated and imperpled in the classical ruts of ancient superstitious divinity, while William communed with immediate nature and taught lessons of virtue and vice on the dramatic stage that impresses the rushing world far more than dictatorial dogmas or pulpit platitudes. Shakespeare was a constant searcher of all religious Bibles, and particularly pondered on the Christian story of the creation, prophecies, crucifixion, and revelation. Paganism was the advanced guard of Christianity. Monks, priests, preachers, bishops, cardinals, popes, princes, kings, emperors, and czars had exercised their minds and hands as commentators on the old philosophy of an unknown God, and William saw no reason why he should not extract from or paraphrase the best logical phrases and sentences of the Bible. His sonnets and plays are filled with the hidden meaning of the scriptures, and those who read closely and delve deeply into the works of the Bard of Avon will need no better moral teacher. His axioms and epigrams are used today as the proverbial philosophy of practical life, and the whole world is indebted to the sons of a carpenter and a butcher for the greatest pleasure and philosophy that has ever been enunciated on the globe. The years 1611, 1612, and 1613 found William at the pinnacle of his dramatic glory, and like a ripe philosopher he finished his most thoughtful plays, Timon of Athens, A Winter's Tale, Antony and Cleopatra, Pericles, Symbolene, Henry VIII, and his Cap Sheaf in the Greenfield of Thought, the Tempest. The constant intellectual labor of Shakespeare began to tell on his body, but his mind like a slumbering volcano emitted flashes of heat and light, irradiating the midnight of literary mediocrity and gilding his declining days with golden flashes of fame and fortune. He sold his interest in the black priors and globe theaters, and purchased property in London and Stratford, making every preparation as a wise and thrifty man for himself and his children and family. William ever kept an eye on the glint and glory of gold, and while his bohemian theatrical companions were squandering their shillings at midnight taverns with bells and bows, he put money in his purse and kept it there. Gold is power everywhere, best ends in toil and care, and it surely will outwear royal purple here or there. King James, in searching for an alliance to strengthen his throne by a marriage with his beautiful and brainy daughter, Elizabeth, finally hit upon the elector Frederick Count Palantine of Germany, and in the spring of 1613 all the royal nobility of England were delighted that a matrimonial alliance had been made with a Protestant prince. While King James lent his official power to the Protestant religion and aided the Reformation in its rapid encroachments upon the papal power of Rome, he socially and clandestinely gave ear to the priests, bishops, and cardinals of the Catholic Church. The ceremonials incident to the marriage of Frederick and Elizabeth were splendid in the songs, dances, masks, parades, fireworks, and dramatic entertainments at Whitehall. A dozen of the most appropriate plays of Shakespeare were enacted before the nobility of the realm, and the diplomatic corps from foreign lands were greatly charmed by the magnificence of the theatrical displays. The king spent $100,000 in the palace and London festivities of the marriage of his beautiful daughter, and he secretly pawned his word and jewels to secure the ready cash. As an intellectual climax to the splendid royal nuptials, King James invited to the wedding banquet three thousand of the most noted men and women of the world and informed his guests that at the conclusion of the feast the most wonderful dramatic artist of the age, William Shakespeare, would recite in monologue from his own plays rare bits of philosophic eloquence. The benevolent reader will be glad to know and see that I have carefully preserved the following autographic note of his Majesty King James inviting William to the wedding banquet. Whitehall, February 14th, 1613, to William Shakespeare, our royal dramatic poet. Great sir, you will appear this evening at seven o'clock at Whitehall to entertain by monologue at nuptial banquet three thousand guests. James Rex. The Archbishop of Canterbury tied the nuptial knot. The bride and groom, arrayed in white satin and German purple respectively, looked magnificent as they knelt at the palace altar to receive the final blessing of the Episcopal Church amid the glorious greetings of wealth and power. Fourteen salutes from the royal artillery in honour of Frederick and Elizabeth and St. Valentine's Day echoed from the heights of Whitehall and carrier pigeons with love notes were sent flying over the temples, churches and towers of London to notify all royal subjects that the throne of old Albion had been strengthened by an infusion of Germanic blood. Promptly at seven o'clock St. Valentine's evening, Richard Burbage, Ben Johnson, Shakespeare and myself drove up in our festooned carriage to the palace portals of Whitehall and were ushered into the presence of the Great Assembly doing honour to the royal bride and groom, Frederick and Elizabeth. The king sat on a throne chair at the head of the banquet board with his daughter and son-in-law on his left while the queen sat on his right. The other royal guests were seated according to their ancestral rank while our dramatic quartet occupied a special table William at the head on the right of the king and queen elevated as an improvised stage with Shakespeare, the most intellectual man of the world, the observed of all observers. The play of knife and fork, laugh and jest, toast and talk lasted for two hours and then as the foam on the brim of the beakers began to sparkle the king in his royal robes arose and said, My loyal subjects, health and prosperity to Great Britain and Germany and love and truth for Frederick and Elizabeth. The three thousand guests standing responded with a storm of cheers and then the king remarked, We are honoured tonight by the presence of William Shakespeare, our most loyal and intellectual subject, who will now address you in logic and philosophy from his own matchless plays. Lord Bacon looked as if he wanted to crawl under the table at the king's compliment to the bard of Avon. Shakespeare arose, dressed in a dark purple suit, knee breeches and short sword by his side, bowed majestically and for two hours entranced the royal assembly with these eloquent pen pictures of humanity. My good friends, I'll skip across the fields of thought and pluck for you the sweetest flowers that I have from dame nature caught to cheer the lingering leaden hours. While vice and virtue side by side go hand in hand down the years, virtue alone remains the bride to banish all our falling tears. And here tonight, like stars above, these flowers of beauty blush and bloom, commanding honest human love, immortal or the voiceless tomb. Let the fellow thus defends himself against the charge of bewitching Desdemona. Most potent grave and reverent seniors, my very noble and approved good masters, that I have taken away this old man's daughter, it is most true, true I have married her. The very head and front of my offending hath this extent no more, rude am I in speech and little blessed with the set phrase of peace. For since these arms of mine had seven years' pith, till now some nine moons wasted, they have used their dearest action in the tented field. And little of this great world can I speak more than pertains to feats of broil and battle, and therefore little shall I grace my cause in speaking for myself. Yet by your gracious patience I will around unvarnished tale deliverer of my whole course of love. What drugs, what charms, what conjuration, and what mighty magic, for such proceeding I am charged with all, I have won this daughter with. Her father loved me, often invited me, still questioned me the story of my life from year to year, the battles, sieges, fortunes that I have passed. I ran it through, even from my boyish days, to the very moment that he bade me tell it, wherein I spoke of most disastrous chances of moving accidents by food and field, of hair-breath scapes, the imminent deadly breach, of being taken by the insolent foe and sold to slavery, of my redemption thence and demeanor in my travels history. Wherein of caverns vast and deserts idle, rough quarries, rocks and hills whose heads touch heaven, it was my hint to speak such was the process, and of the cannibals that each other eat, the anthropophagy and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders. These things to hear would does Demona seriously incline, but still the house affairs would draw her thence, whichever as she could with haste dispatch she'd come again, and with a greedy ear devour up my discourse, which I observing took once a pliant hour, and found good means to draw from her a prayer of earnest heart, that I would all my pilgrimage dilate, of by parcel she had something heard, but not intently. I did consent, and often did beguile her of her tears, when I did speak of some distressful stroke that my youth suffered. My story being done, she gave me for my pains a world of size. She swore, in faith, twas strange, twas passing strange, twas pitiful, twas wondrous pitiful. She wished she had not heard it, yet she wished that heaven had made her such a man. She thanked me, and bade me, if I had a friend that loved her, I should but teach him how to tell my story, and that would woo her. Upon this hint I spake. She loved me for the dangers I had passed, and I loved her that she did pity them. This only is the witchcraft I have used. Here comes the lady, let her witness it. Timon of Athens, a wealthy spendthrift lord, becomes bankrupt by his generous entertainment of friends, but maddened by their ingratitude, retires to a forest cave by the sea, giving this parting curse to the people of Athens, and later scattering gold among a band of thieves. Here the self-ruined epicure. Let me look back upon thee, O thou wild, that girdlest in those wolves. Dive in the earth, and fence not Athens. Matrons turn incontinent. Obedients fail in children. Slaves and fools pluck the grave-wrinkled senate from the bench, and minister in their steds. To general Filth's convert of the instant green virginity. Do it in your parents' eyes. Bankrupts hold fast, rather than render back out with your knives, and cut your trustor's throats. Bound servants steal. Large-handed robbers your grave-masters are, and kill by law. Made to thy master's bed, thy mistress is of the brothel. Son of sixteen, pluck the lined crutch from the old limping sire. With it beat out his brains. Piety and fear, religion to the gods, peace, justice, truth, domestic awe, nightrest, and neighborhood, instruction, manners, mysteries, and trades, decrees, observances, customs, and laws, decline to your confounding contraries, and yet confusion live. Plagues incident to men, your potent and infectious fevers heap on Athens right for stroke. Thou cold siotica, cripple our senators, that their limbs may halt as lamely as their manners. Lust and liberty creep in the minds and marrows of your youth that against the stream of virtue they may strive and drown themselves in riot. Itches, blanes, so all the Athenian blossoms, and their crop be general leprosy. Breath infect breath, that their society as their friendship may be merely poison. Nothing I'll bear from thee but nakedness thou detestable town. You must eat men, yet thanks I must you con, that you are thieves professed, that you work not in holier shapes, for there is boundless theft in legal professions. Rascal thieves, here's gold, go, suck the subtle blood of the grape, till the high fever cede your blood to froth, and so escape hanging. Trust not the physician, his antidotes are poison, and he slays more than you rob. Take wealth and lives together. Do villainy, do, since you profess to do it, like workmen. I'll example you with thievery. The sun's a thief, and with his great attraction robs the vast sea. The moon's an errant thief, and her pale fire she snatches from the sun. The sea's a thief, whose liquid surges resolves the moon into salt tears. The earth's a thief, that breeds and feeds by a composter stolen from general excrement. Each thing's a thief. The laws, your curb and whip, in their rough power have unchecked theft. Love not yourselves. Away, rob one another. There's more gold cutthroats. All that you meet are thieves. To Athens go, break open shops. Nothing can you steal, but thieves do lose it. Jacques, in the Forest of Arden, discourses to the exiled Duke of the Fools of Fortune and the Nature of Man. A fool, a fool, I met a fool in the forest, a motley fool, a miserable world. As I do live by food, I met a fool, who laid him down and basked him in the sun, and railed on Lady Fortune in good terms, in good-set terms, and yet a motley fool. Good-morrow fool, quoth I, no sir, quoth he, call me not a fool, till heaven hath sent me fortune. And then he drew a dial from his poke, and looking on it with lackluster eye, says very wisely, it is ten o'clock. Thus may we see, quoth he, how the world wags, tis but an hour ago, since it was nine, and after an hour more, twill be eleven. And so from hour to hour, we writhe and writhe, and then from hour to hour, we writhe and writhe, and thereby hangs a tale. When I did hear the motley fool thus moral on the time, my lungs began to crow like a shanticleer, that fools should be so deep contemplative, and I did laugh sans intermission, an hour by his dial. O noble fool, a worthy fool, motley is the only where. All the worlds of stage, and all the men and women merely players, they have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages. At first the infant, mulling and puking in the nurse's arms, and then the whining schoolboy with his satchel, and shining morning face, creeping like a snail unwilling to school. And then the lover, sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad made to his mistress's eyebrow. Then a soldier, full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard, jealous in honor, and quarrel, seeking the bubble reputation even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice, in fair round belly, with good capon lined, with eyes severe and beard of formal cut, full of wise saws and modern instances, and so he plays his part. The sixth stage shifts into the lean and slippered pantaloon, with spectacles on nose and pouch on side, his youthful hose well saved, a world too wide for his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice turning again toward childish trouble, pipes and whistles in his sound. Last scene of all that ends this strange eventful history in second childishness and mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. In measure for measure the brave Duke, the pure Isabella, and cowardly Claudio discourse thus on death. Be absolute for death, either death or life shall thereby be sweeter. Reason thus with life, if I lose thee, I do lose a thing but none but fools would keep. A breath thou art, servile to all the sky-y influences, that dust this habitation where thou keepest hourly afflict, merely thou art death's fool. For him thou laborest by thy flight to shun, and yet runst toward him still, thou art not noble. For all the accommodations that thou bearest are nursed by baseness. Thou art by no means valiant, for thou dost fear the soft and tender fork of a poor worm. Thy best of rest is sleep, and that thou oft provokes'dt, yet grossly fierced thy death which is no more. Thou art not thyself, for thou exists upon many thousand grains that issue out of dust. Happy thou art not, for what thou hast not still thou strivest to get, and what thou hast forgettest. Thou art not certain for thy complexion shifts to strange effects after the moon. If thou art rich, thou art poor, for like an ass whose back with inguts bows, thou bearst thy heavy riches but a journey, and death unloads thee. Friend hast thou none, for thine own bowels which do call thee the mere effusion of thy proper loins do curse the gout, leprosy, and the room for ending thee no sooner. Thou hast nor youth nor age, but as it were in after-dinners sleep dreaming on both. For all thy blessed youth comes as aged, and doth beg the alms of palsied elders. And when thou art old and rich, thou hast neither heat, affection, limb nor beauty to make thy riches pleasant. Oh, I do fear thy courage, Claudio, and I quake lest thou a feverish life shouldst entertain, and six or seven winters more respect than a perpetual honor. Darest thou die, the sense of death is most in apprehension, and the poor beetle that we tread upon in corporal sufferance finds a pang as great as when a giant dies. I, Isabella, but to die, and go we know not where, to lie in cold obstruction and to rot, this sensible warm motion to become a needed Claude, and the delighted spirit to bathe in fiery floods, or to reside in thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice, to be imprisoned in the viewless winds and blown with restless violence round about the pendant world, or to be worse than worst of those that lawless and uncertain thoughts imagine howling. Tis too horrible, the weariest and most loath worldly life that age, ache, penury, and imprisonment can lay on nature is a paradise to what we fear of death. King Henry IV on his deathbed thus bitterly rebukes Prince Hal for his heartless haste in taking the crown before the last breath leaves his father. Thy wish was father, Harry, to that thought, I stay too long by thee, I weary thee. Dost thou so hunger for my empty chair, that thou wilt needs invest thee with mine honors before thy hour be ripe? O foolish youth, thou seekest the greatness that will overwhelm thee. Stay but a little, for my cloud of dignity is held from falling with so weak a mind that it will quickly drop. My day is dim. Thou hast stolen that, after which some few hours were thine without offense, and at my death thou hast sealed up my expectation. Thou life did manifest, thou lovest me not, and wilt have me die assured of it. Thou hittest a thousand daggers in my thoughts, which thou hast wedded on thy stony heart, to stab at half an hour of my life. What, canst thou not forbear me half an hour? Then get thee gone, and dig my grave thyself, and bid the merry bells ring to thine ear, that thou art crowned, not that I am dead, let all the tears that should be due my hearse be drops of balm to sanctify thy dead. Only compound me with begotten dust, give that which gave thee life unto the worms. Pluck down my officers, break my decrees, for now a time is come to mock at form. Harry the Fifth is crowned, up vanity, down royal state. I'll use sage-counselors hence, and to the English court assemble now from every region apes a vitalness. Now, neighbor confines, purge you of your scum, have you a ruffian that will swear, drink, dance, revel the night, rob, murder, and commit the oldest sins the newest kinds of ways. Be happy, he will trouble you no more. England shall double-guild his trouble-guilt. For the Fifth Harry from curbed license plucks the muzzle of restraint, and the wild dog shall flesh his tooth in every innocent, oh poor kingdom, sick with civil blows. When that my care could not withhold thy wealth, what wilt thou do when riot is thy care? Oh, thou wilt be a wilderness again, peopled with wolves thy old inhabitants. King Lear, the generous old monarch of Britain, in a spasm of parental love, bequeaths his dominion to his two daughters, Gunnaril and Regan, and gave nothing to the beautiful Cordelia. Hear the old man rave at his ungrateful daughters in the corrupt world. In gratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend, more hideous, when thou shouest in a child than the sea-monster. Hear nature, hear. Dear goddess, hear, suspend thy purpose if thou didst intend to make this creature fruitful. Into her womb convey sterility. Dry up in her the organs of increase, and from her degraded body never spring a babe to honor her. If she must team, create her a child of spleen, that it may live and be a thwart natured torment to her. Let it stamp wrinkles on her brow of youth, with falling tears fret channels in her cheeks, turn all her mother's pains and benefits to laughter and contempt, that she may feel how sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child. Blow wind and crack your cheeks, rage, blow. You cataracts and hurricanes, spout till you have drenched our steeples, drown to the cocks. You sulfurous and executing fires, vaunt couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts, singe my white head. And thou, all shaking thunder, strike flat the thick rotundetry of the world. Crack nature'sbolts, all germans spill at once that make ungrateful men. Rumble thy bellyful, spit fire, spout rain. Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire are my daughters. I tax not you, you elements, with kindness. I never gave you kingdom, called you children. You owe me no obedience. Why then let fall your horrible pleasure? Here I stand your slave, a poor, infirm, weak and despised old man. But yet I call you servile ministers that have with two pernicious daughters joined your high endangered battles against a head so old as this. I am a man more sinned against than sinning. I, every inch a king, when I do stare, see how the subject quakes. I pardon that man's life. What was thy cause, adultery? Thou shalt not die, die for adultery, no. The wren goes to it, and the small gilded fly does letcher in my sight. Let copulation thrive, for Gloster's bastard son was kinder to his father than my daughters got between the lawful sheets. To it luxury, pal mel, for I lack soldiers. Behold Yon's simpering dame, whose face between her forks presages snow. That minceth virtue, and does shake the head to hear of pleasure's name, the fit you, nor the soiled horse, goes to it with more riotous appetite. Down from the waist they are senators, though women all above, but to the girdle do the gods inherit, beneath is all the fiends. Through tattered clothes, small vices do appear, robes and furrowed gowns hide all, plate sin with gold, and the strong lance of justice breaks, arm it in rags, a pygmy straw doth pierce it. Prospero, the dupe philosopher and magician of the Tempest, is my greatest conception, where I command invisible spirits to work out the fate of man, and show that love and forgiveness are the greatest attributes. Prospero is blessed with a pure and faithful daughter, Miranda, and an honorable son-in-law, Ferdinand. If I have to austerely punish you, your compensation makes amends, for I have given you here a thread of mine own life, or that for which I live, whom once again I tender to thy hand. All thy vexations were but my trials of thy love, and thou hast strangely stood the test. Here, afore heaven, I ratify this my rich gift. O Ferdinand, do not smile at me that I boost her off. For thou shalt find she will outstrip all praise, and make it halt behind her. Then, as my gift and thine own acquisition worthily purchased, take my daughter. But if thou dost break her virgin knot, before all sanctimonious ceremonies, may with full and holy rites be ministered, no sweet sprinkling shall the heavens let fall to make this contract grow. But bear in hate, sour-eyed disdain, and discord shall be shrew the union of your bed with weeds so loathely that you shall hate it both. Therefore take heed, as Hyman's lamps shall light you. You do look, my son, in a moved sort, as if you were dismayed. Be cheerful, sir. Our revels now are ended. These are actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits, and are melted into air, into thin air. And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, the clod-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself, yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve. And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rock behind. We are such stuff as dreams are made of, and our little life is rounded with asleep. Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves, and ye that on the sands with fruitless feet do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him when he comes back, ye demmy puppets that by moonshine do the green-sour ringlets make, whereof the ye not bites, and ye whose pastime is to make midnight mushrooms, that rejoice to hear the solemn curfew, by whose aid, weak masters though ye be, I have bedimmed the noontide sun, called forth the mutinous winds, and twixed the green sea and the azured vault set roaring war. To the dread-rattling thunder have I given fire, and rifted Joves stout oak with his own vault. The strong-based promontory have I made shake, and by the spurs plucked up the pine and cedar. Graves at my command have waked their sleepers, gaped and let them forth by my so potent art. But this rough magic I hear abjure, and when I have required some heavenly music, which even now I do, to work mine end upon their senses, that this airy charm is for, I'll break my staff, bury it certain fathoms in the earth, and deeper than did ever plummet sound, I'll drown my books. The fall of Cardinal Wolsey from the pinnacle of earthly power was the work of his own duplicity, greed and fraud, and all ministers of state may take warning from this great wreck of unholy ambition. King Henry VIII sacrificed everything for his physical and religious ambition. Listen and profit by the last words of the old, ruined Cardinal. O Father Abbott, an old man, broken with the storms of state, is come to lay his weary bones among ye. Give him a little earth for charity. I have touched the highest point of all my greatness, and from that full meridian of my glory I haste now to my setting. I shall fall like a bright exhalation in the evening, and no man see me more. Farewell, along farewell to all my greatness. This is the state of man. Today he puts forth the tender leaves of hope, tomorrow blossoms, and bears his blushing honors thick upon him. The third day comes a frost, a killing frost, and when he thinks, good easy man, full surely his greatness is a ripening, nips his root, and then he falls as I do. I have ventured like little wanton boys that swim on bladders this many summers in a sea of glory. But far beyond my depth, my high blown pride at length broke under me, and now has left me weary and old with service to the mercy of a rude stream that must forever hide me. Vain pomp and glory of this world I hate ye. I feel my heart new opened. O how wretched is that poor man that hangs on Prince's favors. There is betwixt that smile he would aspire to, that sweet aspect of princes and their ruin more pangs and fears than wars or women have, and when he falls he falls like Lucifer, never to hope again. The king has gone beyond me all my glories in that one woman, and I have lost forever. No sun shall ever usher forth, mine honors, or guild again the noble troops that waited upon my smiles. Go get thee from me, Cromwell. I am a poor fallen man, unworthy now to be thy lord and master. Seek the king. That son, I pray, may never set. I have told him what and how true thou art. He will advance thee. Some little memory of me will stir him, I know his noble nature, not to let thy hopeful service perish too. Good Cromwell, neglect him not, make use now, and provide for thine own future safety. Cromwell, I did not think to shed a tear in all my miseries, but thou hast forced me out of thy honest truth to play the woman. Let's dry our eyes, and thus we shall hear thee, Cromwell. And when I am forgotten, as I shall be, and sleep in dull cold marble, where no mention of me more must be heard of, say I taught thee. Say, Woolsey, that once trod the ways of glory, and sounded all the depths and shoals of honor, found thee away out of his wreck to rise in. Assure and save one, though my master missed it. Mark but my fall, and that that ruined me, Cromwell, I charged thee fling away with ambition, by that sin fell the angels. How can man, then, the image of his own maker hope to win by it? Love thyself least, cherish those hearts that hate thee, corruption wins not more than honesty. Still in thy right hand carry gentle place to silence envious tongues. Be just and fear not. Let all the aims thou aimest at be thy countries, thy gods and truths. Then if thou fallest, O Cromwell, thou fallest in acid martyr, serve the king, and pray thee, lead me in. There take an inventory of all I have to the last penny, tis the king's. My robe and my integrity in heaven is all I dare now call my own. O Cromwell, Cromwell, had I but served my God with half the zeal I served my king, he would not in my age have left me naked to my enemies. At the conclusion of this greatest of monologues, King James arose at the heart of the royal banquet board, and lifting a glass of sparkling champagne proposed three cheers for Shakespeare, which were given with intense feeling, echoed and re-echoed through those royal halls like thunder music from the realms of Jupiter. The king beckoned William to approach the throne-chair, and there in the presence of the nobility of the realm placed upon his lofty brow a wreath of oak leaves with a monogram crown ring to decorate the digit finger of the brilliant bard. It was worth the gold and glory of all the ages to have heard the divine William scatter his nuggets of eloquence, and until my pilgrimage of a thousand years reincarnates me again to the island of immortality, I shall cherish that banquet night as the greatest milestone in the memory of my ruminating rambles. Glory, like the sun on rushing river, shines down the years forever and forever.