Tucker Brooke

“ Shakespeare was in no way a literary critic. His taste in books does not seem to have been good, if we may judge by some of the poor works he chooses to dramatize and by the many great ones he ignores. Compared with his most worthy contemporaries, Shakespeare rather lacked the literary conscience. Compared, that is, with Lyly, Marlowe, or Jonson, he was not more, but less careful in choosing and developing his plot, in shaping his sentences, and in winding up his conclusions. ”

“ At the horse-foot fountain [1] thou hast drunk full deep:
Virtue’s or vice’s theme to thee all one is.
Who loves chaste life, there’s Lucrece for a teacher;
Who list read lust, there’s Venus and Adonis,
True model of a most lascivious lecher.
Besides in plays thy wit winds like Meander,
Whence needy new-composers borrow more
Than Terence doth from Plautus and Menander.
But to praise thee aright I want thy store.
Then let thine own works thine own worth upraise,
And help t’adorn thee with deserved bays. ”

“ A very important reason for Shakespeare’s superiority to his contemporaries is that he was not primarily a gentleman author like Lyly, Greene, Peele, Marlowe, but actually, as Greene called him, ‘an absolute Johannes factotum’ of the theatre, a man too absorbed in opening the world’s oyster—in holding the mirror up to life—to feel much the littlenesses and compunctions of the artist. ”

“ The greatest of modern poets passed a quarter century amid the tremendous intellectual currents—social, religious, and imperial—of Elizabethan London, and his soul through all this time remained a stranger to them. ‘Multum incola fuit anima sua.’ His most apparent efforts to reflect the spirit around him are the relative failures of Love’s Labour’s Lost and The Merry Wives of Windsor. He gave his audiences, to be sure, what they liked immensely, but he gave it with a strange and stubborn indirectness. The Armada comes and goes; Drake and Ralegh light the beacons of a new and potent patriotism ”

“ The date of Shakespeare’s death, April 23, is indicated by the inscription on his monument in the chancel of Holy Trinity Church, Stratford:
Judicio Pylium, genio Socratem, arte Maronem
Terra tegit, populus moeret, Olympus habet.
Stay, passenger, why goest thou by so fast?
Read, if thou canst, whom envious death hath placed
Within this monument: Shakespeare, with whom
Quick nature died; whose name doth deck his tomb
Far more than cost; sith all that he hath writ
Leaves living art but page to serve his wit. ”

“ In the controversy between classic and romantic theories of drama—between Jonson’s method and Marlowe’s—Shakespeare seems to take no stand and feel no interest. It happens that two particularly romantic plays, The Tempest and Othello, are in their structure nearly as classic (regular) as two of Jonson’s, while two plays of classic atmosphere and story, Julius Cæsar and Antony and Cleopatra, carry to the farthest extreme the romantic irregularities. For these things—for the whole formal side of poetry—Shakespeare doubtless cared as little as Homer. ”

“ A straight line, indeed, is seldom the shortest line between a romantic poet’s inspiration and his accomplishment; but in Shakespeare the usual Elizabethan carelessness about rules of poetry may often seem magnified into carelessness about poetry itself. ‘The works of Shakespeare,’ says Coleridge, ‘are romantic poetry revealing itself in the drama.’ But his romanticism requires to be distinguished from that of his great contemporaries. In the sense that the romanticist is one who ignores academic rules for writing, Shakespeare is a very type and pattern of the romantic dramatist ”

“ Shakespeare learned his patriotism and foreign policy from Holinshed and the other old chroniclers who followed in the train of that prince of sporting-writers, Froissart. They treated warfare as we treat football—as a spectacular, exciting, and fundamentally good-natured pastime, arising from no particular causes except the love of competition and productive of no consequences except the glory of the successful athlete. ”

“ Know ye that in all nations and kingdoms the record and remembrances of the valiant facts and virtuous dispositions of worthy men have been made known and divulged by certain shields of arms and tokens of chivalry, the grant and testimony whereof appertaineth unto us by virtue of our offices from the Queen’s most excellent majesty and her Highness’ most noble and victorious progenitors. ”

“ One is that Shakespeare is not, as he seems often to be thought, the summation of Elizabethan literary art. The student of Shakespeare will know much of human nature, but not a vast deal about the sixteenth-century mind. Shakespeare was indeed not of one age, and did not supersede Lyly and Spenser and Marlowe and Jonson as exponents of his era. ”

“ Proud lust-stung Tarquin seeking still to prove her:
Romeo, Richard, more whose names I know not,
Their sugar’d tongues and pure attractive beauty
Say they are Saints, although that Saints they show not,
For thousands vow to them subjective duty.
They burn in love thy children. ”

“ Shakespeare was as comparatively little interested in concrete incident as he was in abstract emotion. The overt act generally has no special significance for him. He was no pragmatist, as Bacon was, and would never have agreed with Bacon that ‘good thoughts (though God accept them) yet towards men are little better than good dreams, except they be put in act.’ [28]
The spectrum of life, running from dreams through thoughts into acts, was for the true Elizabethans brightest at the two ends. ”

“ We have but collected them, and done an office to the dead, to procure his orphans guardians: without ambition either of self-profit or fame, only to keep the memory of so worthy a friend and fellow alive as was our SHAKESPEARE by humble offer of his plays to your most noble patron age. Wherein, as we have justly observed no man to come near your Lordships but with a kind of religious address, it hath been the height of our care, who are the presenters, to make the present worthy of your Highnesses by the perfection. ”

“ The danger of spreading plague infection was continually argued by the opponents of drama in London, and there seems to have been worked out a sort of compromise principle that plays must cease when the reported plague deaths reached the number of thirty or forty a week. 1593, 1603, and 1609 were great plague years, in which there was very little acting in London, and consequently much traveling; but even after Shakespeare’s company attained its high and assured position under the special favor of James I, there were few years in which it did not travel for a period. ”

“ To the fourth interrogatory this deponent saith that the plaintiff did request him, this deponent, to go with his wife to Shakespeare, to understand the truth, how much and what the defendant did promise to bestow on his daughter in marriage with him the plaintiff; who did so, and asking Shakespeare thereof, he answered that he promised, if the plaintiff would marry with Mary, his the defendant’s only daughter, he the defendant would by his promise, as he remembered, give the plaintiff with her in marriage about the sum of fifty pounds in money and certain household stuff. ”

“ The other truth is that the problems of Shakespeare’s great plays are not to be settled triumphantly by frontal literary attack, by disquisitions upon his mind and art alone. The personality of Shakespeare has been so dismally disputed that students have sometimes been driven to wish the whole matter buried in Cimmerian gloom. ”

“ I have sent and been all this morning hunting for players, jugglers, and such kind of creatures, but find them hard to find; wherefore leaving notes for them to seek me, Burbage is come and says there is no new play that the Queen hath not seen, but they have revived an old one, called Love’s Labour Lost, which for wit and mirth he says will please her exceedingly. ”

“ The conditions of the day led to radical revision of plays, almost as often as they were revived, to suit the changing manners of the theatre and the playwright. Some of Shakespeare’s earlier works are therefore palimpsests, containing writing of several different periods, impossible to refer to a single point in the poet’s development. Love’s Labour’s Lost and All’s Well that Ends Well (probably originally presented under the title of Love’s Labour’s Won) are striking examples of this mixture of styles. ”

“ The author of the Shakespearean plays, we can say with perfect confidence, was not the advanced political thinker that Bacon was, or Ralegh, or Spenser, or even Marlowe. He was distinctly a traditionalist in politics and social theory. His attitude toward the state and sovereign was not Tudor, but Plantagenet; not renaissance, but feudal. It represents the feeling of Stratford much better than that of London.
The King in Shakespeare is nearly always the man on horseback. He who rides roan Barbary [7] gets the plaudits of the multitude ”

“ Right trusty and well beloved counselor, we greet you well, and will and command you that under our Privy Seal in your custody for the time being you cause our letters to be directed to the Keeper of our Great Seal of England, commanding him that under our said Great Seal he cause our letters to be made patents in form following:—James, by the grace of God King of England, Scotland, France and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, &c., to all justices, mayors, sheriffs, constables, headboroughs, and other our officers and loving subjects, greeting. ”

“ Censure will not drive a trade or make the jack go. And though you be a magistrate of wit, and sit on the stage at Blackfriars or the Cockpit to arraign plays daily, know, these plays have had their trial already and stood out all appeals, and do now come forth quitted rather by a decree of court than any purchased letters of commendation. ”

“ It is reasonably conjectured that the motive for John Shakespeare’s effort thus to establish his social position came from the poet, and that it reflects the latter’s ambition and worldly prosperity. Other wealthy actors—e.g. Augustine Phillips and Thomas Pope of Shakespeare’s company—assumed arms to which they appear to have had no hereditary right. A contemporary herald, Ralph Brooke, mentions Shakespeare as one of twenty-three persons charged with obtaining coats of arms to which they were not entitled. ”

“ As the Greek tongue is made famous and eloquent by Homer, Hesiod, Euripides, Æschylus, Sophocles, Pindarus, Phocylides, and Aristophanes; and the Latin tongue by Vergil, Ovid, Horace, Silius Italicus, Lucanus, Lucretius, Ausonius, and Claudianus: so the English tongue is mightily enriched and gorgeously invested in rare ornaments and resplendent habiliments by Sir Philip Sidney, Spenser, Daniel, Drayton, Warner, Shakespeare, Marlow, and Chapman. ”

“ One great strength of Shakespeare’s dramatic art lies in the fact that circumstances made him a great connoisseur of life and a very careless student of literature. He was first an actor, second a practical adapter of old plays, third a company manager. Only fourth and last was he a dramatist proper. ”

“ The ‘Globe,’ constructed in 1599, partly of timber taken from the dismantled ‘Theatre,’ stood near the ‘Rose,’ which it far surpassed in size and magnificence. It was the usual place for the performance of Shakespeare’s plays from the middle of 1599 till it was burned in 1618 in the course of the presentation of Henry VIII. [5] A large part of the poet’s wealth came from his interest in the ‘Globe.’ [6]
[Two other playhouses on the Bankside—the ‘Swan,’ built in 1595, and the ‘Hope,’ built in 1618—do not appear to have been used by Shakespeare’s company.] ”

“ John Shakespeare married (presumably in 1557) Mary Arden, youngest daughter of Robert Arden, a wealthy landowner of Wilmecote, a couple of miles north of Stratford. Robert Arden, who had died in 1556, was the son of Thomas Arden (the poet’s maternal great-grandfather) , who was living at Wilmecote in 1501 and who probably belonged to the aristocratic family of the Ardens of Park Hall. [1] Mary Shakespeare, the poet’s mother, was buried at Stratford, September 9, 1608. ”

“ And so every day at two o’clock in the afternoon in the city of London two, sometimes even three, comedies are performed at different places . . . then those who perform best, they have the most auditors. The places are built in such a way that they play on a raised platform, and every one can well see all. ”

“ William, Earl of Pembroke, &c., Lord Chamberlain to the King’s most excellent Majesty; and Philip, Earl of Montgomery, &c., Gentleman of his Majesty’s Bedchamber—both Knights of the most noble Order of the Garter, and our singular good lords.
Right Honorable:
Whilst we study to be thankful in our particular for the many favors we have received from your Lordships, we are fallen upon the ill fortune to mingle two the most diverse things that can be: fear and rashness—rashness in the enterprise, and fear of the success. ”