The Mammoth Book of Conspiracies

glorification of Prince Hal, “Shakespeare’s” historic hero. Henry VI is the victim of misfortunes and machinations, and is handled with great tenderness and respect. The play of Richard III lays bare the internal discord of the Yorkist faction, the downfall and destruction of the Yorkist arch-villain, and the triumph of Henry of Richmond, the representative of the House of Lancaster, who had received the nomination and benediction of Henry VI. We might naturally expect, therefore, to find Shakespeare a member of some family with distinct Lancastrian leanings.

Having turned our attention to the different classes we are again faced with the question of his Italianism. Not only are we impressed by the large number of plays with an Italian setting or derived from Italian sources, but we feel that these plays carry us to Italy in a way that Hamlet never succeeds in carrying us to Denmark, nor his French plays in carrying us to France. Even in Hamlet he seems almost to go out of his way to drag in a reference to Italy. Those who know Italy and are familiar with The Merchant of Venice tell us that there are clear indications that Shakespeare knew Venice and Milan personally. However that may be, it is impossible for those who have had, at any time, an interest in nothing more than the language and literature of Italy, to resist the feeling that there is thrown about these plays an Italian atmosphere suggestive of one who knew and felt attracted towards the country. Everything bespeaks an Italian enthusiast.

Going still more closely into detail, it has often been observed that Shakespeare’s interest in animals is seldom that of the naturalist, almost invariably that of the sportsman; and some of the supporters of the Stratfordian tradition have sought to establish a connection between this fact and the poaching of William Shakspere. When, however, we look closely into the references we are struck with his easy familiarity with all the terms relating to the chase. Take Shakespeare’s entire sportsman’s vocabulary, find out the precise significance of each unusual term, and the reader will probably get a more distinct vision of the sporting pastimes of the aristocracy of that day than he would get in any other way. Add to this all the varied vocabulary relating to hawks and falconry, observe the insistence with which similes, metaphors and illustrations drawn from the chase and hawking appear throughout his work, and it becomes impossible to resist the belief that he was a man who had at one time found his recreation and delight in these aristocratic pastimes.

His keen susceptibility to the influence of music is another characteristic that frequently meets us; and most people will agree that the whole range of English literature may be searched in vain for passages that more accurately or more fittingly describe the charm and power of music than do certain lines in the pages of Shakespeare. The entire passage on music in the final act of The Merchant of Venice, beginning “Look how the floor of heaven,” right on to the closing words “Let no such man be trusted,” is itself music, and is probably as grand a paeon in honour of music as can be found in any language.

Nothing could well be clearer in itself, nor more at Money variance with what is known of the man than the dramatist’s attitude towards money. It is the man who lends money gratis, and so “pulls down the rate of usuance” in Venice, that is the hero of the play just mentioned. His friend is the incorrigible spendthrift and borrower Bassanio, who has “disabled his estate by showing a more swelling port than his faint means would grant continuance,” and who at last repairs his broken fortunes by marriage. Almost every reference to money and purses is of the loosest description, and, by implication, teach an improvidence that would soon involve any man’s financial affairs in complete chaos. It is the arch-villain, Iago, who urges “put money in thy purse,” and the contemptible politician, Polonius, who gives the careful advice “neither a borrower nor a lender be”; whilst the money-grabbing Shylock, hoist with his own petard, is the villain whose circumvention seems to fill the writer with an absolute joy.

It ought not to surprise us if the author himself turned out to be one who had felt the grip of the money- lender, rather than a man like the Stratford Shakspere, who, after he had himself become prosperous, prosecuted others for the recovery of petty sums.

Of the Stratford man, Pope asserts that “Gain not glory winged his roving flight.” And Sir Sidney Lee amplifies this by saying that “his literary attainments and successes were chiefly valued as serving the prosaic end of providing permanently for himself and his daughters”. Yet in one of his early plays (Henry IV, Part II) “Shakespeare” expresses himself thus:

How quickly nature falls into revolt
When gold becomes her object.
For this the foolish over-careful fathers
Have broke their sleep with thoughts, their brains with care,
Their bones with industry;
For this they have engrossed and piled up
The canker’d heaps of strange achieved gold.

From its setting the passage is evidently the expression of the writer’s own thought rather than an element of the dramatization.

Finally we have, again in an early play, his great hero of tragic love, Romeo, exclaiming:

There is thy gold, worse poison to men’s souls,
Doing more murders in this loathsome world
Than these poor compounds.

In a word, the Stratfordian view requires us to write our great dramatist down as a hypocrite. The attitude of William Shakspere to money matters may have had about it all the “sobriety of personal aims and sanity of mental attitude” claimed for it. In which case, the more clearly he had represented his own attitude in his works the greater would have been their fidelity to objective fact. Money is a social institution, created by the genius of the human race to facilitate the conduct of life; and, under normal conditions, it is entitled to proper attention and respect. Under given conditions, however, it may so imperil the highest human interests, as to justify an intense reaction against it, and even to call for repudiation and contempt from those moral guides, amongst whom we include the great poets, who are concerned with the higher creations of man’s intellectual and moral nature. Such, we judge, was the dramatist’s attitude to money.

The points treated so far have been somewhat on the surface; and most, if not all, might be found adequately supported by other writers. There are, however, two other matters on which it would be well to have Shakespeare’s attitude defined, if such were possible, before proceeding to the next stage of the enquiry. These are his mental attitude towards Woman, and his relation to Catholicism.

Ruskin’s treatment of the former point in Sesame and Lilies is well known, but not altogether convincing. He, and others who adopt the same line of thought, seem not sufficiently to discriminate between what comes as a kind of aura from the medieval chivalries and what is distinctly personal. Moreover, the business of a dramatist being to represent every variety of human character, it must be doubtful whether any characterization represents his views as a whole, or whether, indeed, it may not only represent a kind of Utopian idealism. Some deference, too, must be paid by a playwriter to the mind and requirements of his contemporary public; and the literature of the days of Queen Elizabeth does certainly attest a respectful treatment of Woman at that period. In quotations from Shakespeare on this theme, however, one is more frequently met with suggestions of Woman’s frailty and changeableness. In his greatest play, Hamlet, there are but two women; one weak in character, the other weak in intellect, and Hamlet trusts neither.

Shakespeare, however, is a writer of other things besides dramas. He has left us a large number of sonnets, and the sonnet, possibly more than any other form of composition, has been the vehicle for the expression of the most intimate thoughts and feelings of poets. Almost infallibly, one might say, do a man’s sonnets directly reveal his soul. The sonnets of “Shakespeare”, especially, have a ring of reality about them quite inconsistent with the fanciful non-biographical interpretation which Stratfordianism would attach to them. Examining, then, these sonnets we find that there are, in fact, two sets of them. By far the larger and more important set embracing no less than one