Chivalry in English literature
Chaucer, Malory, Spenser and Shakespeare

William Henry Schofield. 1912

SHAKESPEARE

IN England, before Spenser died, feudalism had lost its force; more and more the monarchy was to be limited and the commoner to become distinguished in the realm. Catholicism, as an institution, had then succumbed before violent attack; hence forth Protestants alone were to occupy the throne and rule the Established Church. Scholasticism had reluctantly recoiled before the onslaught of human ists; collegiate discipline was to be increasingly broad ened by new science. Parochialism, after long wait ing, had ceased to characterize English speech; few Englishmen in the future were to write Latin or French; fate promised universality to the mother-tongue. Nationalism had at last stirred the hearts of men of every rank, and writers had appeared in whom all English-speaking peoples will forever rejoice. One had come who far surpasses every other of his countrymen in wide renown.

Shakespeare was born eleven years after Spenser, and survived him by seventeen. For thirty-five years both lived under the same sovereign, with their eyes on the same court. Yet there was a social gulf be tween them. The one was an ambitious suitor to Elizabeth for offices of note; the other gained hum ble success acting at her command. The one wrote for the applause of refined circles, and associated on intimate terms with distinguished nobles; the other, though he had a great patron and close acquaintances among the aristocracy, made a business of purveying plays to the general public, and appearing in them for pecuniary gain, "a motley to the view." If it be Shakespeare to whom Spenser refers as Action in Colin Clout, he praised him merely as a writer of elaborate lyric verse.

And there, though last not least, is Action;
A gentler shepherd may nowhere be found,
Whose muse, full of high thoughts invention,
Doth like himself heroically sound.

Shakespeare had just begun his poetic career when the following words appeared in the Faery Queen:

Gold all is not that doth golden seem;
Ne all good knights that shake well speare and shield.
The worth of all men by their end esteem,
And then due praise or due reproach him yield.

It would perhaps be fanciful to find here another reference to Spenser's coming rival; but we may accept the thought of the passage, and, having the whole wonderful Folio whereby to judge, unhesitatingly declare Shakespeare's worth, as he did that of the hero of his sonnets, "a limit past [our] praise."

Shakespeare is a far greater marvel than Spenser, not only on account of the gift of a loftier genius, but also because his attainments more fully belied the circumstances of his early environment and education. It passes understanding how he should have had the wise "skill in discourse" which he himself conceived in his beloved Henry V, and been able to frame such "sweet and honey 'd sentences" as distinguish his many works,

Since his addiction was to courses vain;
His companies unlettered, rude, and shallow;
His hours Jiird up with riots, banquets, sports;
And never rooted in him any study,
Any retirement, any sequestration
From open haunts and popularity.

Still "the strawberry grows underneath the nettle," and Shakespeare's human greatness may have been partly due to his necessary acquaintance with unveiled nature, with artless life. Had he been brought up to privilege, he might not have had the same spur to achievement^ had he been university-bred, he might not have so widely shunned pedantry and pose; had he lived secluded, he might have failed to touch the chords of all humanity.

Shakespeare's character and tastes we must in the main divine from the evidence of his work, and no one can be infallible in such divination. Still, this at least is clear: meditation upon his own place in so ciety and personal distinction dominates some of his most poignant sonnets, and, if these are in any way autobiographical, the author regretted the misfortune of his stars. He would fain have boasted a "proud title," experienced "public honour," and been "with friends possess'd." All alone he bewept his "outcast state;" he sighed the lack of many a thing he sought. He was of the purest blood royal of poets, and endowed with riches of the imagination surpassing all the high-born whom he admired, yet with what he "most possessed" he was "contented least." Fortune "did not better for [his] life provide than public means, which public manners breeds." "In sleep a king, but waking no such matter"! The outer facts of Shakespeare's life show steady desire on his part to improve his social position. He cultivated a noble patron, and became his affectionate friend. He strove for wealth, and secured a landed estate. Though a poor tradesman's son, he made himself a leading citizen of his native town, and was legally granted admittance to the gentry "non sanz droict"

Shakespeare seems to have been endowed by nature with personal grace. His comrades spoke of his "civil demeanour;" they noted his sweetness, uprightness, and honesty, his "open and free nature;" they called his expressions, his verse, and him himself, by his own favourite term of commendation, "gentle." What though he had no great old "household coat," he had still, like exiled Bolingbroke, the sign of "men's opinions and [his] living blood to show the world [he was] a gentleman." He was, in truth, still more. We may confidently say of him, as Antony did of noble Brutus:

His life was gentle, and the elements
So mix'd in him that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world: " This was a man"!

"I loved the man," said Ben Jonson, "and do honour his memory on this side idolatry, as much as any."

My Shakespeare, rise! I will not lodge thee by
Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie
A little farther off to make thee room:
Thou art a monument without a tomb,
And art alive still, while thy book doth live,
And we have wits to read and praise to give.

I

SHAKESPEARE'S first published works were Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. Evidently, it was by what he calls "gentle verse," not by plays, that he expected to win recognition in the world of the great.

Though the rape of Lucrece was a classical theme, Chaucer's version of the story was accessible to the poet, and it is important to observe how he allowed mediaeval sentiments to adhere to his own. We have seen, from a passage earlier quoted, that Chaucer indignantly apostrophized Tarquin for having done a villain's deed, "despite to chivalry," which was much the worse because of his royal birth. In similar fashion, Shakespeare's Lucrece importunes him to believe that since he is a king, a lustful act would bring him peculiar shame. She conjures him by "knighthood and gentry," as well as by other oaths. Later, when telling her story, she requires each of the fair lords before her to plight his honourable faith to revenge her on the traitor, since "knights by their oaths should right poor ladies' harms." Each of them at once promises her his aid, "as bound in knighthood." Still more striking is the passage where Tarquin, premeditating his deed, breaks out as follows:

O shame to knighthood and to shining arms!
Yea, though I die, the scandal will survive,
And be an eyesore in my golden coat;
Some loathsome dash the herald will contrive,
To cipher me how fondly I did dote;
That my posterity ', sham'd with the note,
Shall curse my bones, and hold it for no sin
To wish that I their father had not been.

Chaucer lived before the Herald's College had been founded; but Shakespeare knew all about it, even to its "dashes," or abatements, for dishonour. He himself was then seeking a golden coat to dignify his posterity. He makes Tarquin of Rome echo his personal preoccupation with the advantage it would procure. He even analyzes the "heraldry" in his heroine's face.

For Troilus and Cressida, as for Lucrece, Shakespeare had the example of Chaucer, and for Pericles that of Gower, so that he was naturally disposed to fill these plays with feudal anachronisms, as his predecessors had filled their poems on the same themes. King Lear and Cymbeline dealt ostensibly with events in ancient Britain, and, since it had been the regular custom throughout the Middle Ages for those who rehandled Celtic tales to reflect in so doing the circumstances of their own time, it is not surprising to find in Shakespeare's treatment a large infusion of mediaeval as well as modern thought. But, in truth, we find nearly everywhere in the poet's productions knightly conceptions influencing his standards of right, and frequently old images of romance suggesting his turns of phrase.

Shakespeare, it should not be forgotten, was obliged to make a close study of the age of chivalry before being able to write his historical works. Of these King John, Richard II, the two parts of Henry IV, Henry F, the three parts of Henry VI, and Richard III nine plays, all written before he had reached middle life concern themselves with a period when chivalry was a living force, and it would have been impossible for anyone to picture properly the courtly events of that time and not hold the mirror up to knightly practice and sentiment. The facts, first, that Shakespeare chose to write these plays, and then, that he described the scenes of mediaeval life therein contained with glad zest, sufficiently attest his sympathy for that lofty manner of envisaging duty which illumines the epoch with a splendid light. Edward Kirke, when defending Spenser's use of archaic words, pointed out that it was natural for him, being "much travelled and thoroughly read" in the ancient English poets, to have their sounds "still ringing in his ears," so that he "must needs in singing hit out some of their tunes." It was, he declares, as Cicero said: "Walking in the sun, although for other cause he walked, yet needs he must be sunburnt." This is exactly Shakespeare's situation. He walked cheerfully and long in the open air of the Middle Ages, and his whole face was tanned by the sun of chivalry.

II

MANY outer features of chivalric life naturally appear in the poet's plays. Often, for example, he refers to the dubbing of knights, laying particular emphasis on this honour when done before, during, or after a battle, as a stimulant to courage. Robert Faulconbridge was knighted "by the honour-giving hand of Cceur-de-lion ... in the field." His bastard son, Philip, was dubbed by King John while preparing for a war in France. Henry V promised before Agincourt that that day would "gentle the condition" of those who shed their blood with him; they should be his brothers. When a herald gave him the numbers of the French who were slain in this conflict, he remarked: "Five hundred were but yesterday dubbed knights." The stalwart esquire, Alexander Iden, who slew the rebel Cade, was knighted by his sovereign for" good service;" and Henry VI, at the queen's request, dubbed his own son:

Edward Plantagenet, arise a knight;
And learn this lesson, draw thy sword in right.

Once dubbed, the knight had above all to defend his honour, which sometimes led him to demand a trial by combat to settle a dispute with another person of similar rank. Richard II begins with an ap peal to the king for such a contest of strength. Henry Bolingbroke, afterwards Henry IV, accuses Thomas Mowbray of high treason, and begs to be allowed to prove by his sword that what he says is true. Finally he throws down his "gage," his "honour's pawn," to show thereby "and all the rites of knighthood else," that he will make good his words. Mowbray replies:

I take it up; and by that sword I swear,
Which gently laid my knighthood on my shoulder,
I'll answer thee in any fair degree
Or chivalrous design of knightly trial.

He denounces Bolingbroke as a "foul liar," while he undertakes "to prove [himself] a loyal gentleman." The king and John of Gaunt endeavour to make peace between the two, but in vain; both refuse to let anyone command their "shame." Naught availing otherwise, they are bidden to appear at Coventry on St. Lambert's Day, when the "victor's chivalry" will reveal the right. On the day appointed, the lists are arranged, and all proceeds in due order. The marshal demands public statement of his cause on the part of each champion, and makes him swear to its justice on the sacred oath of knighthood, "which God defend a knight should violate." They bid their friends a solemn farewell. Heralds proclaim that each is ready, "on pain to be found false and recreant," to prove his adversary traitorous or disloyal. The combatants are on the point of setting forward. But "Stay! the king has thrown his warder down." He forbids the combat; he proclaims the banishment of both. Of other scenes of the same sort, the most notable is that near the end of King Lear, where we have a trial by combat executed in the manner of the fourteenth century. Openly before the court, the heroic Edgar proclaims his half-brother Edmund "a most toad-spotted traitor."

Say thou, No,
This sword, this arm, and my best spirits, are bent
To prove upon thy heart, whereto I speak,
Thou liest.

Edmund, scorning to take advantage of the rule of knighthood which excused him from fighting "an unknown opposite," repudiates the accusation of treason, and tosses back to his enemy "the hell-hated lie." Edgar wins, strong in a righteous cause.

A less serious, but equally characteristic, chivalric situation occurs in Pericles, where the poet describes a great assembly whither knights have come from all parts of the world, "for honour's cause," to joust for the love of King Simonides' daughter. Though in appearance a "mean knight," Pericles of Tyre wins the prize handsomely, whereupon the princess gives him the wreath of victory, and crowns him "king of this day's happiness." It is not without significance that this tournament was substituted by Shakespeare for a ball-game in his source.

In Cymbeline the plot hinges on the readiness of a valiant hero to fight for his lady's name. Posthumus, when abroad in youth, had been prepared to prove by his sword that his lady was "more fair, virtuous, wise, chaste, constant-qualified,' and less attemptable" than the rarest in France; and he is will ing to accept lachimo's challenge to test Imogen's honour, on the covenant that, if the plan fail, the Italian shall answer for his ill-opinion in a duel. To judge from the autobiography of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, such an occurrence was not infrequent in Shakespeare's own day among men who clung to knightly practices. On one occasion, Lord Herbert relates: "Being among the French, I remembered myself of the bravado of Monsieur Balagny, and coming to him told him, I knew how brave a man he was, and that as he had put me to one trial of daring, when I was last with him in the trenches, I would put him to another; saying, I heard he had a fair mistress, and that the scarf he wore was her gift, and that I would maintain I had a worthier mistress than he, and that I would do as much for her sake as he or anyone else durst do for his." To this Balagny made a coarse reply, and the earnest Englishman, "looking hereupon somewhat disdainfully on him, said he spoke more like apaillard than a cavalier." Lord Herbert tells us that he took seriously the vows he made when initiated a Knight of the Bath, ob serving that certain of these for example, "never to sit in place where injustice should be done, but they shall right it to the uttermost of their power; and particularly ladies and gentlemen that shall be wronged in their honour, if they demand assistance" were "not unlike the romances of knight-errantry." He loved to regard himself in a chivalric light, and laid particular stress on his many duels fought (rather too self-consciously) in the name of honour. Some of these duels were so famous in England that Shakespeare must have heard them discussed, particularly since Lord Herbert belonged to the circle of the Earl of Southampton, and was intimate with Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote, near Stratford-on-Avon.

One of Lord Herbert's most spectacular perform ances occurred in the Netherlands when he was serving the Prince of Orange. He was then bold enough to send a trumpeter to the camp of the opposing army of Spain, to challenge any Spanish soldier to meet him before the hosts and to "fight a single combat for the sake of his mistress." This incident is curiously parallel to that in Troilus and Cressida, when Aeneas comes as herald to the Greeks and challenges some one of them to meet Hector alone in arms.

If there be one amongst the fairist of Greece
That holds his honour higher than his ease.
That seeks his praise more than he fears his peril,
That knows his valour, and knows not his fear.
That loves his mistress more than in confession

. . . to him this challenge.
Hector, in view of Troyans and of Greeks,
Shall make it good, or do his best to do it.
He hath a lady, wiser, fairer, truer,
Than ever Greek did compass in his arms.

It is odd to hear Agamemnon, when he promises to bear Hector's message to the Greek "lovers," voice this mediaeval sentiment: "May that soldier a mere recreant prove, that means not, hath not, or is not in love." It is equally odd for old Nestor (who was a man "when Hector's grandsire suck'd") to be stirred by the challenge, and to undertake to hide his silver beard in a gold beaver and put his withered brawn in his vantbrace to prove that his "lady "is fair and chaste. Nestor in mediaeval armour righting in the lists for his lady! In the ensuing conflict Diomed wears on his helmet Cressida's "sleeve," which once had belonged to Troilus, and when he sends the latter's horse to her, commends his "service;" he has "chastis'd the amorous Troyan,"and is "her knight by proof."

With such anachronisms in Troilus, it is not strange to find there also a discussion of fair play. Troilus, though a "prince of chivalry," becomes so wild when he learns of Cressida's infidelity, that he begins this unworthy conversation with Hector, and meets a merited rebuke:

TROILUS. Brother, you have a vice of mercy in you,
Which better Jits a lion than a man.

HECTOR. What vice is that, good Troilus? Chide me for it.
TROILUS. When many times the captive Grecian falls,
Even in the fan and wind of your fair sword,
You bid them rise and live.

HECTOR. O, 't is fair play.

TROILUS. Fools play, by heaven, Hector! ....p

HECTOR. Fie, savage, he.

Hector, however, is shown the opposite of fair play by Achilles. After the last great battle, believing himself alone on the field, the hero takes off his helmet and hangs his shield behind him. Then Achilles approaches suddenly, and, even though Hector makes appeal: "I am unarm'd: forego this vantage, Greek," bids his myrmidons strike. Still more ! The murderer ties Hector's body to his horse's tail "in beastly sort," and trails it "through the shameful field." This conduct was so vile that even Ajax broke out when he heard the news:

If it be so, yet bragless let it be;

Great Hector was a man as good as he.

Hector was "worthy," and it was wholly "in the vein of chivalry" that he avowed:

Mine honour Jceeps the weather of my fate. Life every man holds dear; but the dear man Holds honour far more precious-dear than life.

III

"THERE are," wrote Hallam, "if I may so say, three powerful spirits which have from time to time moved over the face of the waters, and given a predominant impulse to the moral sentiments and energies of man kind. These are the spirits of liberty, of religion, and of honour. It was the principal business of chivalry to animate and cherish the last of these three. And what ever high magnanimous energy the love of liberty or religious zeal has ever imparted was equalled by the exquisite sense of honour which this institution preserved."

Nothing attests more convincingly the power that chivalric ideals had over Shakespeare than his constant insistence on honour. The word occurs throughout his plays. He seems hardly to have been able to conceive a great man of action save in a chivalric light. While we are not surprised to have a mediaeval English king like Henry V declare that he is not "covetous for gold" or fine garments, but that "if it be a sin to covet honour," he is "the most offending soul alive," we do not look for such sentiments from warriors of Rome. Shakespeare, nevertheless, represents Antony as brooding on his honour, which called him from Cleopatra, who had caught him " in her strong toil of grace," and puts into the mouth of Enobarbus memorable words on loyalty:

The loyalty well held to fools does make
Our faith mere folly: yet he that can endure
To follow with allegiance a fallen lord,
Does conquer him that did his master conquer
And earns a place i' the story.

Still more remarkable is the way in which the poet pictures Brutus as "a very perfect gentle knight." Brutus, indeed, measures up, as much as any of Shakespeare's characters, to the standard of Chaucer's pattern of worthiness. When Cassius comes to incite him to oppose Caesar, the hero declares:

If it be aught toward the general good,
Set honour in one eye, and death the other,
And I will look on both indifferently;
For, let the gods so speed me as I love
The name of honour more than I fear death.

"Well," replies Cassius, "honour is the subject of my story;" and, after they have parted, he exclaims: "Brutus, thou art noble!" Casca, too, remarks on his leader's nobility and its effect:

O, he sits high in all the people's hearts;
And that which would appear offence in us,
His countenance, like richest alchemy,
Will change to virtue and to worthiness.

Brutus will not demand oaths of his fellow conspirators; he thinks they need no other bond than to have "spoke the word," no other oath than "honesty to honesty engaged." Headmonishes his "gentle friends" to kill Caesar boldly, but not wrathfully; he desires that they shall be called "purgers, not murder ers;" for theirs was an "exploit worthy the name of honour." In his address to the people, Brutus pleads: "Believe me for mine honour; and have respect to mine honour that ye may believe." Antony, in his famous speech of mourning, plays on this, his friend's sensitive point:

Brutus is an honourable man;
So are they all, all honourable men.

And he puts the case so craftily (dwelling on the "gracious drops" of pity) that the citizens, previously ready to accept the situation because of their confidence in Brutus, break out scornfully, in words that evince an old-time knightly contrast:

They were traitors; honourable men! . . .
They were villains, murderers.

Brutus was "noble, wise, valiant and honest." He accepted the grievous blow of his wife's death with patience, not of art, but nature; "even so great men great losses should endure!"

There was probably self-deception in Brutus' persuasion that pure honour guided his conduct toward Caesar, and this may explain why, when meditating on the plot, the hero cast "ungentle looks" at Portia, and exhibited impatient anger in her presence. Portia observed that he was not then himself, "gentle Brutus." She was "true and honourable," and it was perhaps more than fear of feminine indiscretion that made her husband refrain from taking her at once into his confidence. His noble mind had been seduced, and he was apparently too well aware of the purity of Portia's sense of honour to be will ing to submit his dubious scheme to her scrutiny. "There are no tricks," he knew, "in'plain and simple faith."

In the Merchant of Venice Shakespeare described another Portia, "nothing undervalued to Cato's daughter," who also cherished honour. Into this Portia's mouth the poet put his magnificent exaltation of mercy, "mighty in the mightiest," which quality, along with that other chivalric one, pity, the Jew Shylock so glaringly lacked. Unlike "stubborn Turks and Tartars, never train 'd to offices of tender courtesy," Antonio and Bassanio were genuine patterns of "ancient Roman honour," differing in no respect from that of Christian England and France. Antonio, at the beginning of the play, shows himself will ing to serve his friend to the extreme of his means, "if it stand . . . within the eye of honour," and at the end he dares be bound upon his soul's forfeit that the same friend will never in the future "break faith advisedly." Bassanio's honour would not let ingratitude "besmear" it; he was willing to sacrifice all that he held as dear as life, even life itself, to show Antonio becoming loyalty.

Who shall go about
To cozen fortune, and be honourable
Without the stamp of merit? Let none presume
To wear an undeserved dignity.
0, that estates, degrees and offices
Were not derived corruptly ! And that clear honour
Were purchased by the merit of the wearer!
How many then should cover that stand bare!
How many be commanded that command!
How much low peasantry would then be glean'd
From the true seed of honour! and how much honour
Picked from the chaff and ruin of the times
To be new-varnish'd!

When writing these lines, Shakespeare's thought was centred on conditions in England rather than in Arragon or Italy, and in exalting clear honour purchased by the merit of the wearer, he showed kinship in attitude with the greatest earlier poets of his land. Even so it was with his glorification of mercy.

Wilt thou draw near the nature of the gods?
Draw near them then in being merciful.
Sweet mercy is nobility's true badge.

In 2 Henry VI the poet proclaims, as Sidney felt, that a knight's heart should accord with his tongue, and adds:

What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted;
Thrice is he arm'd that hath his quarrel just.
And he but naked, though locked up in steel,
Whose conscience with injustice is corrupted.

Apart from the chivalric thought in this passage, one is struck by the figures of its expression, drawn as they are from knightly accoutrement. Such figures are frequent in Shakespeare. We read, for example, of "grey locks, the poursuivants of death." Hotspur does not desire, when war is brewing, to "tilt with lips." Macbeth exclaims:

Come fate into the list,
And champion me to the utterance!

The Earl of Salisbury observes of King John:

The colour of the Icing doth come and go
Between his purpose and his conscience,
Like heralds 'twixt two dreadful battles set.

Shakespeare shows his absorption in chivalry by many such metaphors and similes, as well as by his constant, open exaltation of honour. He would have a youth wed honour, not simply woo it. "Perseverance," he says, "keeps honour bright." "Who hates honour hates the gods above."

Honour and policy, like unsever'd friends,
F the war do grow together. Grant that, and tell me
In peace what each of them by the other lose,
That they combine not there.

IV

SHAKESPEARE portrays numerous knightly characters in his historical plays. Of these none is more valorous than "English John Talbot," "renowned noble gentleman," chief hero of the fifteenth- century wars with France. "Above human thought [Talbot] enacted wonders with his sword and lance; " his opponents declared that he was "the devil in arms;" yet he was "the life, the joy," of his friends, and he did his duty to his sovereign with "submissive loyalty of heart." Once, fiercely indignant against a coward captain who had deserted him in danger, he tore the insignia of the Garter from the recreant's knee, declaring that "this ornament of knighthood" was not fit for the infamous. Shakespeare knew various persons to whom he might have pointedly addressed the following pregnant words:

When first this order was ordain'd, my lords,
Knights of the Garter were of noble birth,
Valiant and virtuous, full of haughty courage,
Such as were grown to credit by the wars;
Not fearing death, nor shrinking from distress,
But always resolute in most extremes.
He then that is not furnish' 'd in this sort
Doth but usurp the sacred name of knight,
Profaning" this most honourable order;
And should, if I were worthy to be judge,
Be quite degraded, like a hedge-born swain
That doth presume to boast of gentle blood.

The scenes between Talbot and his son in their last hours are unforgetable by any one whose heart leaps up at bravery. The old general sends for the young man to give him his final instructions, and to bid him make his escape while there is still time; but he stoutly refuses to go.

Is my name Talbot? and am I your son?
And shall I fly?

Again the father pleads; still again the son denies. There is but one possible issue; they go into the battle together, shouting "St. George and Victory "Afterwards, when his brave boy has shown by his valour that he is "sealed the son of chivalry," the old warrior once more urges him to flee. He pleads a mother's hopes, their household's name, "my death's revenge, thy youth, and England's fame," but all to no avail. Young John refuses to "save a paltry life and slay bright fame." He will not be "shame's scorn." The two continue the fight by each other's side. Young John defends his father with o'ermounting spirit, and while so doing meets his death. Yet, like Launcelot (like Elaine and Imogen also), as he lay he smiled.

The father dies soon after, with his boy in his arms. Friend and foe pay them deep reverence. They are given burial "as beseemed their worth." "How would it have joyed brave Talbot," wrote Nash in 1592, "to think that after he had lain two hundred years in his tomb, he should triumph again on the stage, and have his bones new embalmed with the tears of ten thou sand spectators at least (at several times), who, in the tragedian who represents his person, imagine they behold him fresh bleeding."

Associated with the Talbots was another most notable hero, the Duke of Bedford. His companions spoke of him much as Hector did of Launcelot after death:

A braver soldier never couched lance,
A gentler heart did never sway in court.

Shakespeare likewise admired Duke Humphrey of Gloucester. He did always "bear him like a noble gentleman," good Duke Humphrey, whom the com mon people loved. When repudiating the accusations of his enemies, he explained:

Pity was all the fault that was in me;
For I should melt at an offender's tears,
And lowly words were ransom for his fault.

He had a "gentle heart" of Chaucer's kind. The king defended him as "virtuous, mild, and too well given to dream on evil;" in his face he saw "the map of honour, truth and loyalty."

King Lear exhibits characters of similar nobility, especially "true-hearted Kent," who could not flatter, and pure Edgar, "whose nature is so far from doing harm that he suspects none." Albany, too, was finely sensitive to honour, and revolted at his wife's cru elty. "Where I could not be honest," he asserted, "I never yet was valiant." It was the tiger Goneril who talked of "milky gentleness" and "harmful mildness;" it was the monster Edmund who declared: "To be tender-minded does not become a sword."
Albany remarked with truth:

Wisdom and goodness to the vile seem vile;
Filths savour but themselves.

Chaucer's knight, as we have seen, fought in many places "for our faith." Malory, in almost the closing paragraph of his book, relates that the four warlike knights of King Arthur who remained after the great catastrophe which overwhelmed their fellowship, "went into the Holy Land, there as Jesu Christ was quick and dead. . . . And did many battles upon the miscreants or Turks. And there they died upon a Good Friday for God's sake." But neither Chaucer nor Malory, not to mention Spenser, brings the Crusades so often or so vividly before us as Shakespeare. The poet was enthusiastic for Richard I, whom, despite his arrogance and ferocity, because of his surpassing courage and brilliant personality, men much admire still:

Richard, that robbed the lion of his heart
And fought the holy wars in Palestine.

John of Gaunt, in his famous praise of England, "this dear, dear land," "this precious stone set in the silver sea," glories in it as the "teeming womb of royal kings,"

Renowned for their deeds as far from home,
For Christian service and true chivalry,
As is the sepulchre in stubborn Jewry,
Of the world's ransom, blessed Mary's Son.

"Many a time," said the Bishop of Carlisle, with emotion:

Many a time hath banished Norfolk fought
For Jesu Christ in glorious Christian field,
Streaming the ensign of the Christian cross
Against Hack pagans, Turks and Saracens;
And, toiVd with works of war, retired himself
To Italy; and there at Venice gave
His body to that pleasant country's earth,
And his pure soul unto his captain Christ,
Under whose colours he had fought so long.

Constantinople fell almost a century before Shakespeare's birth, and crusading enterprise had wholly ceased; but the spirit of the old encounters the poet sympathetically revived. He showed no contempt for any ideals of the past that led to heroic acts.

V

THE plays of Henry IV deserve separate discussion, particularly because of the contrast which Shakespeare there draws between two youths of noble lineage, one of whom was "the theme of honour's I tongue," an "all-praised knight," nevertheless a prey to grievous faults, and the other, though stained at first by "riot and dishonour," at the end the paragon's conqueror and the nation's pride Henry Percy Northumberland, surnamed Hotspur, and Prince Hal, afterwards King Henry V.

Hotspur is pictured by Shakespeare (varying from authority) as a gallant young knight, who by his high deeds had won " never-dying honour" in all Christen dom. The great Douglas addressed him as the "king of honour," and his wife looked on him as a "miracle of men."

[His honour] stuck upon him as the sun
In the grey vault of heaven, and by his light
Did all the chivalry of England move
To do brave acts. He was indeed the glass
Wherein the noble youth did dress themselves.

But Shakespeare conceived Hotspur also as madheaded, harebrained, altogether governed by humours, tossed with spleen, easily made drunk with choler, ever ready to "plume himself and bristle up the crest of youth " against supposed indignities, given to flat denials, good mouth-filling oaths, boast, and scorn. "Hot Lord Percy" was prone to call those who angered him contemptuous names shallow, cowardly, frosty-spirited, lack-brain, dish of skimmilk and he drew rebuke to himself from many, besides his wife, whose counsel he would not heed. "What think you," asked the irritated king, "of this young Percy's pride?" His father admitted that "imagination of some great exploit [drove] him be yond the bounds of patience." "Fie, Cousin Percy," exclaimed Mortimer, because of the youth's disdainful treatment of Glendower, when he did "cross his humour;"and he is "school'd"by theEarl of Worcester in the following impressive words:

In faith) my lord, you are too wilful-blame;
And since your coming hither have done enough
To put him quite beside his patience.
You must needs learn, lord, to amend this fault.
Though sometimes it shows greatness, courage, blood,
And that's the dearest grace it renders you,
Yet oftentimes it doth present harsh rage,
Defect of manners, want of government,
Pride, haughtiness, opinion and disdain;
The least of which haunting a nobleman
Loseth men's hearts and leaves behind a stain
Upon the beauty of all parts besides,
Beguiling them of commendation.

The prominent but strange combination, "wilful-blame," in this extract, has much puzzled the grammarians. One wonders if it may not have been suggested to Shakespeare by the passage in the Faery Queen where Sir Artegall is said to have been left to the will of Radigund "by his own wilful blame." The last books of Spenser's poem appeared a year earlier than Henry IV, and the parts concerning Radigund, "a miracle of nature's goodly grace," and false Duessa, both of whom were identified with Mary, Queen of Scots, had caused a national sensation, King James having openly protested against them. It is especially interesting to see that Duessa's mate, bold Blandamour, whom Spenser describes as a "hotspur youth, scorning to be crossed," has features curiously like Shakespeare's northern youth.

Blandamour was

a jolly youthful knight
That bore great sway in arms and chivalry,
And was indeed a man of mickle might.

He had, however, a "countenance stern and full of wrath;" he was "too boastful," and used terms of "foul despight;" he accused his companions of being dumpish and sluggish; he was marked by haughty disdain; counsel was lost on him. Once Paridell, his comrade, said:

Sir, him wise I never hold
That, having once escaped peril near,
Woidd afterwards afresh the sleeping evil rear.

But Blandamour scornfully rejected his advice, and "forth he fiercely pricked that one him scarce could see," only to lose an example of folly! "Young Hotspur's case at Shrewsbury" is thus explained:

[He] liv'd himself with hope,
Eating" the air on promise of supply,
Flattering himself in project of a power
Much smaller than the smallest of his thoughts;
And so, with great imagination
Proper to madmen, led his powers to death,
And winking leaped into destruction.

Blandamour's motto was: "Fortune friends the bold;" Hotspur's: Esperance "Die all, die merrily." "I will ease my heart," he said, "although it be with hazard of my head." Hotspur Blandamour and Percy Hotspur have so great likeness that it is difficult to believe it wholly accidental. But be that as it may, we should not fail to observe that both poets strongly deprecate the same faults in knights, while they ea gerly applaud in them the same virtues. We recall in this connection Spenser's admirable Sir Calidore, whose "gracious speech did steal men's hearts away," together with his opponent Crudor, a warrior marked by "high disdain, and proud despight of his self-pleasing mind." Calidore, though provoked mightily by the taunts of Crudor's haughty mistress, "did himself from frail impatience refrain," and, when he had overcome his foe, gave him this advice:

Put away proud look and usage stern,
The which shall not to you but foul dishonour yearn.
For nothing is more blameful to a knight,
That courtsy doth as well as arms profess,
However strong and fortunate injight,
Than the reproach of pride and cruelness.

Meliboe told Calidore that "great ones"

oft through pride do their own peril weave,
And through ambition down themselves do drive.
Hotspur had "ill-weav'd ambition."

Hotspur is to us an exceedingly attractive char acter because of his idealistic devotion to honour. Prince Hal said the best of him (and it is much) in these words:

I do not think a braver gentleman,
More active-valiant or more valiant-young,
More daring or more bold, is now alive
To grace this latter age with noble deeds.

We all applaud his last appeal to his companions:

O gentlemen! the time of life is short;
To spend that shortness basely were too long.

But to picture Hotspur as a pattern was not Shakespeare's intent. The hero had too many "blameful" attributes like pride, haughtiness, quick wrath, and self-pleasure; he was ever disposed to folly.

Hotspur's temper, it is explained, had "the excuse of youth and heat of blood." The same excuse may be offered in general for the excesses of chivalry, which, being planned as an ideal for warriors with youth and heat of blood, was bound to be disturbed in manifestation by the defects which usually accompany the qualities of the active-valiant and valiant-young. Because it was peculiarly needed in days of deeds, to counterbalance courage, mediaeval poets laid great stress on "measure." Treatises on chivalry persistently rebuke impatience and disdain, boast and hasty speech, as inconsistent with the pure ideal they held aloft. Chaucer said of his perfect Knight: "Though that he was worthy, he was wise;" and Shakespeare made Lord Bardolph counsel Hotspur's father: "Sweet Earl, divorce not wisdom from your honour."

Hotspur seems characteristically English when he betrays contempt for an effeminate, popinjay lord, "neat and trimly dressed, ""perfumed like a milliner," who questioned him with many "holiday and lady terms" when a battle had hardly ceased.

He made me mad
To see him shine so brisk and smell so sweet
And talk so like a waiting" gentlewoman
Of guns and drums and wounds, God save the mark!

Hotspur cared not for "candy courtesy," or "mincing poetry." "I profess not talking," he declared; "I have not well the gift of tongue." In these respects he resembles that other blunt Englishman, the bastard Philip Faulconbridge, natural son of Richard Cceur de Lyon, who, though a "babbler" himself, felt "bethump'd with words" when Hubert de Burgh opened his "large mouth." This "lusty gentleman" was proud of "our lusty English," and had plenty of their independent vigour and strong fidelity to king and land; but he too was blotted with intolerance and self-love.

Prince Hal, in contrast to Hotspur, began his career most ill. His father accused him of " inordinate and low desires," of indulgence in "barren pleasures, rude society," which should not have accompanied the greatness of his blood; he was " almost an alien to the hearts of all at court," a "libertine." Yet, after he had come to recognize that he had been a " truant to chivalry," he turned from his reckless comrades, and proved himself a just and dignified leader, strong in self-control. Prince Hal had always charm. Like Chaucer's Squire, he was " as full of spirit as is the month of May," and able to " witch the world with noble horsemanship." He had " a tear for pity, and a hand open as day for melting charity." When he slew Hotspur in combat, he showed his body courtesy, and revealed his own worthiness in his adieu: " Fare thee well, great heart ! " It was not thus that Achilles treated Hector! Prince Hal's last act in the encounter at Shrewsbury was also one of "high courtesy;" he delivered up the great Douglas ransomless and free, saying nobly:

His valour shown upon our crests to-day
Hath taught us how to cherish such high deeds,
Even in the bosom of our adversaries.

Here seems born again the Black Prince, as courteous as brave, whom the poet was soon after to picture in glory at Crecy, with "his most mighty father" standing smiling by, leaving him alone to win!

When Shakespeare was writing Henry IV, he absorbed all he could of the spirit of chivalry as revealed in books on the theme. One of those (not hitherto noted) which he appears to have read is the famous Law of Arms, by Chaucer's contemporary, Honore Bonet. This work, readily accessible to him in English as well as French, concludes with a short section on "What good properties and conditions should be in a king," several features of which the poet emphasizes in promi nent passages of Henry IV and the Merchant of Venice. Here we shall examine only a few statements concerning such qualities as Hotspur lacked: "A prince or a lord that cannot put measure in his largess . . . and in all his other deeds of virtue, he is counted not wise." "He should be temperate in his word, that no unfitting word part from his mouth, and be measured that he think always before he speak, with good deliberation A king's word should be firm." "A prince should be well-measured in his breath, and not be soon moved to ire." Shakespeare makes Troilus illustrate these very precepts. This "true knight," he tells us, was "firm of word," "not soon provok'd"

Speaking in deeds, and deedless in his tongue. . . .
Yet gives he not till judgement guide his bounty,
Nor dignifies an impure thought with breath.

Spenser represents Sir Calidore as loth to break "the law of arms," and he exhibits the same good qual ities. Bonet's remark, " It is not to presume that a king should well govern others that cannot govern his own person," reminds one of what Sir Calidore says in the Faery Queen:

In vain he seeketh others to suppress,
Who hath not learned himself first to subdue.

It almost seems like the text of Shakespeare's teach ing in Henry IV.

VI

THE Order of Chivalry, already mentioned more than once, was regularly associated, even bound up, with the Law of Arms. It was the most obvious book from which Shakespeare might derive knowledge of the principles which should appropriately inspire his plays on mediaeval heroes. According to the Order, "virtue and measure abide in the middle of two extremities, pride and vice." Even as Shake speare embodied the former of these extremities in Hotspur, so he did the latter in Falstaff. Sir John is perennially fascinating because of his brilliant wit and unquenchable jollity; but we should not fail to note that the poet makes him nearly everything which chivalric moralists reprimanded in a knight. In Caxton's rough rendering of the Order is written: "Because a knight being without harness, and that hath no riches for to make his dispences, if he be made knight, him should peradventure hap for need to be a robber, a thief, traitor, liar or beguiler, or have some other vices which be contrary to chivalry a man lame, or over great, or over fat, or that hath any other evil disposition in his body, is not sufficient to be a knight." "The fat knight" Falstaff alone illustrated nearly every vice set forth here, as well as elsewhere, in the Order. His over-fatness was, of course, his most prominent characteristic. "An I had but a belly of any indifferency," he lamented, "I were simply the most active fellow in Europe." But thereto he was "heinously unprovided;" he had "an incurable dis ease of the purse." Prince Hal finally gave him a competency, "that lack of means enforce [him] not to evil."

Falstaff comes on the scene as a robber and thief, and he speedily reveals himself a liar, swaggerer, roisterer, glutton, and "misleader of youth." He is slothful, dishonest, perjured, foul-mouthed, gross unscrupulous in his relations with the poor Hostess, mean to Shallow, deserving imprisonment (so the Chief Justice thought) as a knave and a rogue "Wherein worthy, but in nothing?" It shows a strange misunderstanding of Shakespeare's purpose in picturing FalstafF in this light, to have critics worry because Prince Hal, when he became king, banished from court this "tutor and feeder of [his] riots," until such time as he should reform. The Order expressly directs: "When any noble prince or high baron hath in his court or in his company, wicked knights, false and traitors, that never finish to admonish him that he do wickedness, . . much great strength of courage and great noblesse hath such a lord in himself, and greatly is he the friend of chivalry, when he taketh vengeance of such enemies that would take from him and pluck away the weal and honour of chivalry, and corrupt his noble courage." Henry IV feared that his son was degenerate; but Prince Hal (like the poet himself) early redeemed his youthful mistakes. Falstaff, however, having been persistent in evil-doing until old age, was quite be yond cure, and came to a lamentable end. "Every officer, spiritual and temporal," we find in the fifteenth-century Book of Noblesse, "should put him in his devoir to the advancing of the common profit;" "voluptuous delights led by sensuality be contrary to the exercising and haunting of arms." The "authority" of this work was an actual Sir John Fastolf. Shakespeare's Sir John was certainly not this man, any more than Oldcastle, the martyr.

Externally FalstafF has the same character as Parolles in All's Well, "a very tainted fellow and full of wickedness," who corrupted by his inducement the "well-derived nature" of Bertram, Count of Rousillon. Parolles was "more saucy with lords and honourable personages that the commission of [his] birth and virtue [gave him] heraldry" "a most not able coward, an infinite and endless liar, an hourly promise-breaker, the owner of no one good quality worthy [Bertram's] entertainment." Like Thersites, he was a loud braggart, yet given to "base fear;" his tongue alone was too foolhardy; he went backward when he fought; he was a fox. Parolles and Falstaff (in a measure) are of the same breed as Malory's King Mark, also a fox, and a "destroyer of good knights." When cowardly Mark encountered Launcelot he "made no defence, but tumbled down out of his saddle to the earth as a sack, and there he lay and cried Sir Launcelot mercy." But O that but! how glad a passage 'tis! Shakespeare endowed Falstaff with an instinct for good fellowship, so that we are "bewitched with the rogue's company; "his escapades are "laughter for a month and a good jest forever." Falstaff's associate, Master Shallow, took the part of "Sir Dagonet in Arthur's show," a company of citizen-archers. This Sir Dagonet, the king's fool, is described in the Morte d Arthur as "the best fellow and the merriest in the world; " he made all his fellows laugh like mad when he chased Mark (on whom the other knights had played a trick) "through thick and thin" in a forest. "Arthur loved him pass ing well, and made him knight with his own hands. And at every tournament he began to make King Arthur to laugh." Shakespeare, who exalted fools to such prominence in his plays, must have been strongly drawn to this fun-evoking personage, but probably still more to Sir Dagonet's comrade, Sir Dinadan, another mocker of Mark, the only devel oped comic character in Malory, whom the poet per haps remembered in fashioning his own single merry knight. "Send ye for him, my lady Isoud," said Tris tram, after telling the queen of Dinadan's exploits, "and I will not be seen, and ye shall hear the mer riest knight that ever ye spake withal and the mad dest talker, and I pray you heartily that ye make him good cheer." As soon as Dinadan arrived, he began to rail against love. "Madam," said Dinadan, "I marvel of Sir Tristram and more other lovers, what aileth them to be so mad and so sotted upon women. Why, said La Belle Isoud, an ye be a knight and be no lover? It is a shame to you. Wherefore ye may not be called a good knight but if ye make quarrel for a lady. Nay, said Sir Dinadan, for the joy of love is too short, and the sorrow thereof, and what cometh thereof, dureth over long Now, I pray you, said La Belle Isoud, tell me, will ye fight for my love with three knights that have done me great wrong? And in so much as ye be a knight of King Arthur's I require you to do battle for me. Then Sir Dinadan said, I shall say you be as fair a lady as ever I saw any, and much fairer than is my Queen Guinevere, but wit ye well at one word: I will not fight for you with three knights, Heaven defend me. Then Isoud laughed and had good game at him." On another occasion Dinadan boasted of his wisdom in refus ing to joust with a knight whom he could not beat; he did not see any point in fighting every errant warrior he met, just for fun.

Falstaff, though not in the least noble like Dina dan, shares his peculiar attitude of common-sense with regard to chivalric hazards; he too thought that the better part of valour was discretion. Falstaff's famous soliloquy on honour before the conflict at Shrewsbury is in Dinadan's humorous vein. "Honour pricks me on. Yea, but how if honour prick me off when I come on? How then? Can honour set to a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honour hath no skill in surgery, then? No. What is honour? A word. What is that word honour? Air; a trim reckoning! ... I'll none of it. Honour is a mere scutcheon." Falstaff liked not "such grinning honour" as Sir Walter Blunt had, lying dead on the field, slain for his monarch's sake.

Queen Elizabeth seems to have got as much amuse ment out of merry Falstaff as Guinevere and Ysolt out of merry Dinadan; and at her request, we are told, Shakespeare wrote the Merry Wives of Windsor, to show FalstafF in love. It is perhaps not out of place to remark here that in Shakespeare's first play, Love's Labour's Lost, the witty Biron declaims against "Dan Cupid, regent of love-rhymes, the anointed sovereign of sighs and groans," with the cheerful cynicism of Dinadan:

What! I love! I sue! I seek a wife!
A woman, that is like a German clock,
Still a-repairing, ever out of frame,
And never going right. . . .
And I to sigh for her! to watch for her!
To pray for her! Go to!

Rosaline explains to the princess:

Biron they call him; but a merrier man,
Within the limit of becoming mirth,
I never spent an hour's talk withal.
His eye begets occasion for his wit,
For every object that the one doth catch
The other turns to a mirth-moving jest.

Various critics have detected in Biron something of Shakespeare himself. However that may be, we are profoundly indebted to the poet for his creation of Falstaff, who is mirth-moving as no other knight. Humour did not often find a place in the romances of chivalry, doubtless not often enough to suit a man of Shakespeare's type. Like Chaucer, he felt the need of an occasional laugh in the presence of too perfect paragons. Still, Sir John's jests should not blind us, any more than Sir Thopas' absurdities, to either poet's serious object in presenting his comic figure. Cervantes died in the same year as Shakespeare; but Don Quixote, the finest of all burlesques of chivalry, is as appealing now as ever. Though we are highly amused by the hero's fantastic acts, we never fail to recognize the purity of the ideal which guided him. Cervantes may unconsciously have given a death-blow to chivalry by his satire of its weakness in this practical world, but he knew that the same world would be far more materialistic and philistine if the ideal which he ridiculed when carried to excess had never arisen. "I am a knight," said Don Quixote; " as such I shall live; as such, please God, I shall die. I walk in the strait and narrow path of errant chiv alry, despising riches but not honour. I have avenged injuries; I have redressed wrongs; I have rebuked in solence; I have no thought which is not upright; I desire to do only good to men. Does one who thinks and acts in this spirit deserve to be treated as a fool? I ask this of Your Excellencies." We cannot imagine Falstaff even comprehending Don Quixote's ideal, let alone acting by it. Yet we wonder what he would have been like had he not been able to subscribe him self "John Falstaff, Knight;" Sir John with all Europe: he felt that he belonged to a class as catholic and cosmopolitan as Christendom. When he swore "o mine honour," "as I am a true knight," "as I am a gentleman," he acknowledged what should have been a force in his case, not only for achievement, but also for restraint.

"Lying, vainness, babbling, drunkenness," Viola points out in Twelfth Night , are signs of "corruption" in man. The last of these, drunkenness, seems to have been a besetting sin of English gentlemen in Shakespeare's days. Sir John Falstaff, Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Aguecheek Shakespeare's degenerate knights are all drunkards. And yet, strangely enough, the scenes in which they revel are even now the most popular parts of the plays where they appear. This reveals a noteworthy fact. Falstaff lies, to be sure, but he lies so palpably that we do not lay it up against him; if he lied meanly, he would be hissed off the stage. Anyone among us who shows vanity, or babbles effeminately, is despised; but, while we do not approve, we tolerate drunkenness, even in gentlemen. To this day an Englishman may get "drunk as a lord," and be forgiven. On the contrary, if a French or Spanish gentleman were to drink similarly to coarse excess, he would commit an offence that his countrymen would hardly condone. "All Europe," save residents of Teutonic lands, believe with St. Louis: "It is passing foul for a preuc homme to get drunk." When gentle Rosalind asserts that certain abominable fellows "betray them selves to every modern censure, worse than drunk ards," we may feel sure that we hear Shakespeare's own condemnation of a common vice opposed to chivalry.

Rosalind deprecated "those that are in the extremity of either" melancholy or laughing. The Order of Chivalry, we have seen, applauded "virtue and measure," which "abide in the middle of two extremities, pride and vice." Shakespeare portrays Prince Hal in the end ("Let the end try the man"! ) without the excesses of either Hotspur or Falstaff,and makes him consciously aspire to virtue and measure. Prince Hal wished to be a worthy king, and as such, following the Order, he had to make himself "chivalry incorporate." Shakespeare loved this royal hero; he gave him the highest hopes of knighthood.

VII

IN Hamlet we find another interesting contrast be tween two aspirants to honour. Laertes is preeminently a man of action, who, when enraged by his father's murder, immediately stirs up the people to revolt against the king, and demands revenge. He indignantly refuses to act calmly, as the queen suggests. It was not in his nature to stop to reason, and he goes to the extreme of defiance.

I dare damnation. To this point I stand,
That both the worlds I give to negligence,
Let come what comes; only Pll be revenged
Most throughly for my father.

When the king acquaints him with the manner of Polonius' death, his first question is why the slayer has not been proceeded against before. He is eager to show himself his father's son "in deeds more than in words." Hamlet praised Laertes as "a very noble youth," and was very sorry he so forgot himself as to address him rudely. He asked Laertes to pardon this wrong "as a gentleman;" but the latter explained that, while his nature was thereby satisfied, his hon our could not be so readily appeased. When wounded to death, Laertes avowed shame for having yielded to Claudius' subtle deceptions, declaring that he him self was "justly killed by [his] own treachery."

Hamlet recognized the likeness of his grievance to that of Laertes; "by the image of my cause," he said, "I see the portraiture of his." Nevertheless, he conducted himself in a manner very different from that of his friend; he was afflicted by indecision under circumstances demanding clear purpose and quick action. The ghost of his father must needs appear a second time "to whet [his] almost blunted purpose;" and he thus argues:

Sure, He that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and godlike reason
To fust in us unused. Now, whether it be
Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple
Of thinking too precisely on the event
A thought which, quartered, hath but one part wisdom,
And ever three parts coward, I do not know
Why yet I live to say, " This thing's to do"
Sith I have cause, and will, and strength and means,
To do't.

Hamlet here reveals one source of conflict between the spirit of the Middle Ages and that of the Renaissance: the former inclined men to act without meditation, the latter to meditate without action. Even as Shakespeare said to the mediaeval knight: "Divorce not wisdom from your honour," he said to the Renaissance prince:

Rightly to be great,
Is not to stir without great argument.
But, greatly tojind quarrel in a straw,
When honour '$ at the stake.

He makes Hamlet rejoice in the rashness which, contrary to habit, he exhibited on his way to England.

Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well,
When our deep plots do pall; and that should teach us,
There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will.

Hamlet was endowed with chivalric qualities. The king pronounced him so above being suspicious "most generous and free from all contrivings" that he would not examine the foils in the match; Fortinbras had praise for him as a royal soldier; Horatio bade him farewell as a sweet prince with a noble heart; and "the general gender" bore him great love. But Hamlet, as portrayed by Shakespeare, was unlike any mediaeval hero; he was swayed by his mind. Ophelia, dwelling upon her lover's "noble and most sovereign reason," pictured him first as a courtier and afterwards as a scholar.

O, what a noble mind is here overthrown!
The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's, eye, tongue, sword;
The expectancy and rose of the fair state.
The glass of fashion and the mould of form,
The observed of all observers!

Ophelia found Hamlet keen, and he reveals intellectual subtlety in his every remark. It is he who exclaims: "What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason ! How infinite in faculty; " and into his mouth the poet put the great philosophical inquiry:

To be, or not to be: that is the question.
Whether it is nobler in the mind to stiffer
The sling's and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them.

A Spenserian courtier might easily, but a Chaucerian knight would never, have questioned himself as Hamlet does. Too much meditation, Shakespeare saw, "puzzles the will," and hampers exploits.

Conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment,
With this regard, their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.

The poet's chief heroes are men of action rather than of thought, of deeds rather than of words.

Nay, if we talk of reason,

Let's shut our gates, and sleep. Manhood and honour
Should have hare-hearts, would they but fat their thoughts
With this crammed reason. Reason and respect
Make livers pale, and lustihood deject.

Hamlet was the "chiefest courtier" of Claudius; but he treats the other courtiers with measured contempt. He pierces the deceits of Rosencrantz and Guild enstern, terms Polonius a "wretched fool," and ridicules the "golden words" of Osric the waterfly: " Sir, here is newly come to court, Laertes; believe me, an absolute gentleman, full of most excellent differences, of very soft society and great showing: indeed, to speak feelingly of him, he is the card or calendar of gentry, for you shall find in him the continent of what part a gentleman would see." The "absolute gentleman," Laertes, was expert in courtly exercises, and widely travelled. He had won the praise of the gem of French horsemen ("and they can well on horseback"), but he was ready to use a poisoned rapier and a poisoned potion to achieve revenge. The practice of poisoning, Shakespeare believed, flourished in crafty, "drug-damn'd" Italy, and was not censured by the Italianate at the English court. Some of his countrymen actually imitated the "false Italian, as poisonous-tongu'd as handed." They admired Machiavel, whom he called "murd'rous." Most of them, however, merely learned foolish attitudes from far travel. "Farewell, monsieur traveller," said Rosalind to the mannered Jaques. "Look you lisp and wear strange suits; disable all the benefits of your own country; be out of love with your nativity, and almost chide God for making you that counte nance you are; or I will scarce think you have swam in a gondola." Shakespeare here shows open sym pathy with the prejudices of men of the Ascham type. He had no desire to see a condition in England when "manhood is melted into courtesies, and men only turned into tongue, and trim ones too," when a man is "as valiant as Hercules that only tells a lie and swears it" Yet he thought one could not be a perfect man, "not being try'd and tutor 'd in the world," and he approved anyone who was really

complete in feature and In mind
With all good grace to grace a gentleman.

Armado was thought a "complete" man; but his was a different sort of completeness; he was "most dainty," "fashion's own knight," a gamester.

"Truly," says the clown in Alls Well, "if God have lent a man any manners, he may easily put it off at court." Shakespeare found particular objection to court manners in the flattery which was apt to mark them. Therefore he makes Hamlet protest to loyal Horatio:

Nay, do not think I flatter;
For what advancement may I hope from thee.
That no revenue hast but thy good spirits
To feed and clothe thee? Why should the poor be flatter'd?
No, let the candied tongue lick absurd pomp.
And crook the pregnant hinges of the knee.
Where thrift may follow fawning.

Other taints of court conduct are emphasized in Cymbeline, where Belarius contrasts his free life with that which men of his class led in nearness to the king:

O, this life
Is nobler than attending for a check,
Richer than doing nothing for a bribe,
Prouder than rustling in unpaid-for silk.
Such gains the cap of him that makes him fine.
Yet keeps his book uncrossed. No life to ours.

When the young princes whom he is fostering in the mountains protest that they are only like the beasts they chased, having no experience, that they are im prisoned and in bondage for lack of opportunity and ignorance, and still show themselves unpersuaded, their guardian resumes:

Did you but know the city's usuries.
And felt them knowingly; the art o 1 the court,
As hard to leave as keep; whose top to climb
Is certain falling, or so slippery that
The fear's as bad as falling; the toil o' the war,
A pain that only seems to seek out danger
P the name of fame and honour; which dies V the search,
And hath as oft a slanderous epitaph
As record of fair act; nay, many times,
Doth ill deserve by doing well; what's worse,
Must curtsy at the censure.

Belarius thereupon illustrates the situation by his own experience, explaining how he was richly rewarded when victorious as a soldier, but, having suffered from the machinations of two villains who swore he was a traitor and "whose false oaths prevail'd before [his] perfect honour," he was unjustly banished. "Uncertain favour". Yet the event brought him joy; he had lived some twenty years in "honest freedom. "Shakespeare might have read similar words in the Curial of Alain Chartier, translated by Caxton in 1484, "at the instance and request of a noble and virtuous earl," in which work the author pointed out with emphasis to his rustic brother the miseries of court life, urging him to stay in peace and honesty at home. It is clear, however, that Shakespeare's condemna tion of ordinary courtiers was not merely an echo, or a convention; he knew what was happening about him to friends and foes of Elizabeth.

Perhaps he also found in actual life the models of his ideal courtiers. We read of Posthumus that he

liv'd in court
Which rare it is to do most praised, most lov'd, A sample to the youngest, to the more mature
A glass that feat ed them, and to the graver
A child that guided dotards.

This "true knight" seems almost to image Sir Philip Sidney:

He is one
The truest mannered, such a holy witch
That he enchants societies into him;
Half all men's hearts are his . . .
He sits Amongst men like a descended god:
He hath a kind of honour sets him off,
More than a mortal seeming.

Posthumus, like Sidney, was avid of learning, and "did incline to sadness, not knowing why;" no other man was endowed with "so fair an outward and such stuff within." He is strongly contrasted to miserable Cloten, a wrathy, profane, boastful, contemptuous "ass," a mean gambler and lustful wooer, together with various other "that- way-accomplished cour tiers" of Britain and Italy who appear in the play. We think also of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, well-reputed "both for learning and courage," who in youth avoided courtly companions because he observed in them "much ill-example and debauchery." "Public duty," he wrote, "did not hinder me yet to follow my beloved studies in a country life for the most part; although sometimes also I resorted to court, without yet that I had any ambition there and much less was tainted with those corrupt delights incident to the times."

As had often been done by writers before him, Shakespeare portrayed a noble courtier of the past as a model for his own day. The King of France describes Bertram's father as possessed of wit with out scorn, as a man of honour without levity.

Contempt nor bitterness
Were in his pride or sharpness; if they were,
His equal had awaked them, and his honour,
Clock to itself, knew the true minute when
Exception bid him speak, and at this time
His tongue obeyed his hand. Who were below him,
He us'd as creatures of another place,
And bow'd his eminent top to their low ranks,
Making them proud of his humility,
In their poor praise he humbled. Such a man
Might be a copy to these younger times;
Which, followed well, would demonstrate them now
But goers backward.

The corollary of dissatisfaction with the court was enthusiasm for the country. " Gods, what lies I have heard," exclaimed Imogen at Belarius' retreat:

Our courtiers say all's savage but at court.
Experience, O, thou disprov'st report!

Be it because of his own experience or not, Shakespeare betrays a most living sense of that joy in rural life which English gentlemen have so conspicuously shown. Nowhere does this appear more than in As You Like It, a delightful comedy, interpenetrated with thoughts of gentleness. There we read of the gentle duke, father of Rosalind, who dwelt in the for est of Arden, "like the old Robin Hood of England," and "a many merry men with him," fleeting the time carelessly "as they did in the golden world." For this play Shakespeare utilized Thomas Lodge's version of the fourteenth-century outlaw tale of Gamelyn, which seems to have appealed long before to Chaucer, for it is preserved in manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, and is thought to have been one which he intended to rewrite. Chaucer had a veritable genius for discovering what his countrymen were later to admire, and his taste and Shakespeare's singularly agree. In his Former Age (adapted from Boethius), Chaucer also exalted " a blissful life, a peaceable, and a sweet," such as men were imagined to have lived in the happy time when no palace-chambers existed, and everyone kept faith to other. Spenser developed the idea finely in the Faery Queen. Old Meliboe, who guarded Pastorella, did not long for "the world's gay shows," but rejoiced in "the simple sort of life that shepherds lead," quiet, free, and fortunate, spend ing all his nights in "silver sleep," the fields his food, the flock his raiment, envying no one, envied by none.

[He] set his rest among the rustic sort,
Rather than hunt still after shadows vain
Of courtly favour., fed with light report
Of every blast, and sailing always in the port. . . .
For who had tasted once (as oft did he)
The happy peace which there doth overflow . . .
Would never more delight in painted show.

Shakespeare, we have sufficient evidence, was acquainted with this passage. It is in the same mood as Meliboe that the gentle duke speaks to his followers:

Now, my co-mates, and brothers in exile,
Hath not old custom made this life more sweet
Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods
More free from peril than the envious court?

In the woods, "exempt from public haunt," was no flattery; there men lived sweetly in quiet. Celia declared, when she accompanied Rosalind from the court, that she went "to liberty and not to banishment."

Who doth ambition shun
And loves to live the sun,
Seeking- the food he eats,
And pleased with what he gets,
Come hither, come hither, come hither.

The shepherd Corin sums up wisely the whole matter of court versus country, when he replies to Touchstone's assertion that if he was never at court, he never saw good manners: "Those that are good manners at the court are as ridiculous in the country as the behaviour in the country is most mockable at court." Unlike Spenser, Shakespeare placed the enlightened country gentleman above the courtier, especially if the latter was Italianate. He gave haughtiness no countenance and accomplishments no superior mien. At the very opening of As You Like It, the poet indicates views regarding the education of noble youth in accord with those of English schoolmasters. Good Sir Rowland de Bois, whom all the world esteemed honourable, and whom the gentle duke loved as his soul, carefully arranged for Orlando's education. Oliver, however, neglected his younger brother, kept him "rustically at home," and bred his horses better, for they were "taught their manage and to that end riders dearly hir'd." Finally Orlando protested: " My father charg'd you in his will to give me good education. You have trained me like a peasant, obscuring and hiding from me all gentleman like qualities. The spirit of my father grows strong in me, and I will no longer endure it; therefore allow me such exercises as become a gentleman." If Orlando had no such education as humanists demanded, he had the blood in his veins and the example of his father, as guides to excellence; he exhibits a character of chivalric beauty. Even Oliver, in secret, acknowledged Orlando's distinction: "He's gentle, never school'd and yet learned, full of noble device, of all sorts enchantingly beloved, and, indeed, so much in the heart of the world, and especially of my own people, who best know him, that I am altogether misprised." Nothing is more striking as a witness to the hero's knightliness than his treatment of the family servant, Adam, whom Oliver spurned as an "old dog." Adam's heart went out to Orlando:

My young master! O, my gentle master!
O, my sweet master! O, you memory
Of old Sir Rowland! . . .
Why are you virtuous ? Why do people love you?
And wherefore are you gentle, strong and valiant?

When he offers the youth all his life's savings, to help him in need, the latter exclaims:

O good old man, how well in ihee appears
The constant service of the antique world,
When service sweat for duty, not for meed!
Thou art not for the fashion of these times,
Where none will sweat but for promotion,
And having that do choke their service up
Even with the having.

Adam replies, with the devotion of "pure love:"

Master, go on, and I will follow thee
To the last gasp, with truth and loyalty.

To obtain relief for this faithful friend, Orlando, with drawn sword, breaks into the company of the gentle duke, and defiantly demands food. Whereupon the latter speaks:

Art thou thus bolden'd, man, by thy distress:
Or else a rude despiser of good manners,
That in civility thou seem'st so empty? . . .
What would you have? Your gentleness shall force
More than your force move us to gentleness.

Orlando at once changes his tone:

Speak you so gently? Pardon me, I pray you:
I thought that all things had been savage here;
And therefore put I on the countenance
Of stern commandment. But whatever you are . . .
If ever you have look'd on better days;
If ever been where bells have 'knoll'd to church;
If ever sat at any good man's feast;
If ever from your eyelids wiped a tear,
And know what 'tis to pity and be pitied;
Let gentleness my strong enforcement be,
In the which hope, I blush, and hide my sword.

The duke acknowledges himself moved; he has assuredly been knoll 'd to church with holy bell, and wiped his eyes of "drops that sacred pity hath engender'd;" he begs Orlando to sit down "in gentleness," and command anything that may minister to his want. A special interest attaches to these scenes, because tradition asserts that Shakespeare himself acted the part of Adam. Shakespeare, as much as Chaucer, would have us understand that gentleness begets gentleness, even perhaps as "the sight of lovers feedeth those in love." He wrote with all his heart in praise of the constant service of the antique world, glorifying truth and loyalty. "Kindness," he makes Oliver say after his conversion, is "nobler ever than revenge."

As You Like It is all surrounded by an atmosphere of graciousness; but it is not only here that "the air nimbly and sweetly recommends itself unto our gentle senses;" similar charm is noticeable in A Midsummer Nighfs Dream. It may be that the poet saw royal revels at Kenilworth and elsewhere, in youth and later, and was therefore the better able to write of the open joys of "gentles," of the abridgements of fair pastime, of the "musical confusion of hounds and echo in conjunction," of feasts held in great solemnity, all touched upon in that brilliant play. But to be able, also, to make his readers feel the sweet courtliness of Theseus and Hippolyta, to voice without any discordant note the moods of gentle lovers in palace-halls, was more than a trick of "strong imagination;" it required knowledge of antique fables, large sympathy with the life of chivalry that they revealed, and, above all, a personal wish for gentleness.

Mediaeval chivalric writers occupied themselves chiefly with the relations of individuals to one another in cosmopolitan fellowship. They exalted wise self-government, but scarcely mentioned patriotism or politics. On the other hand, courtiers of the Renaissance strongly urged young men to contribute to the public weal of their various lands. They promoted wise civic government as a prime need of civilization. With chivalric temper, Shakespeare shows himself incomparably more interested in problems of personal conduct 4han in questions of state.

VIII

IN one of his finest sonnets, the poet thus ruminates on the love-writings of former days:

When in the chronicle of wasted time
I see descriptions of the fairest wights,
And beauty making beautiful old rhyme
In praise of ladies dead, and lovely knights;
Then, in the blazon of sweet beauty's best
Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow,
I see their antique pen would have expressed
Ev'n such a beauty as you master now.
So all their praises are but prophecies
Of this our time, all you prefiguring.

Chivalric love manifestly prefigured that which Shakespeare exalted. There is no very important difference between his views and Chaucer's on this theme: both of them laughed genially at the excesses of courtly "service," but both were sweetly sensitive to honourable true love, and illustrated its effects on idealistic hearts.

When Valentine exclaims in The Two Gentlemen of Verona: "O, gentle Proteus, love's a mighty lord!" he is merely quoting from the Knight's Tale:

The god of love, a benedicite,
How mighty and how greet a lord is he!

Valentine himself has striking similarity to Chaucer's Troilus. He is introduced to us as a noble youth, zealous for honour, but disdainful of love, who takes pleasure in chiding Proteus, a " love-wounded " friend, because of his unhappy plight. We remember how Troilus, if he saw a companion sigh for a lady, "would smile and hold it folly," and speak thus:

"I have herd told, pardieux, of your livinge,
Ye lovers, and your lewede observaunces,
And which a labour folk han in winninge
Of love, and, in the keping, which doutances;
And whan yourpreye is lost, wo and penaunces;
O verreyfoles! nyce and blinde be ye;
Ther nis not oon can war by other be"

But this scorner of "love's pains" was altered with a look from Cressida and "waxed suddenly most subject unto love." He caught a "malady" from which he felt that he was sure to die.

And fro this forth tho refte him love his sleep
And made his mete his foo; and eek his sorwe
Gan multiplye, that who-so toke keep,
It shewed in his hewe, both eve and morwe.

In like manner, Valentine was suddenly " metamorphosed with a mistress," and showed all the "special marks" of love. Speed, who humorously enumerated these, declared that not an eye that saw him but was "a physician to comment on [his] malady." The hero was humbled and confessed his fault:

I have done penance for contemning love;
Whose high imperious thoughts have punished me
With bitter fasts ', with penitential groans,
With nightly tears, and daily heart-sore sighs;
For in revenge of my contempt of love,
Love hath chased sleep from my enthralled eyes,
And made them watchers of mine own heart's sorrow.

In Love's Labour's Lost, which also turns on how the proud in love may be abased, Biron appears as another scoffer reproved. After witnessing how the king, Dumain, and Longaville (who had all vowed to disregard ladies) privately vented their mournful longings, he exclaims:

O, what a scene of foolery have I seen,
Of sighs, of groans, of sorrow, and of teen!

Yet he himself could not resist the "almighty dread ful little might" of Dan Cupid, and languished for Rosaline, who steadily mocked him for his pains. Biron was born again in witty Benedick, who simi larly flouted love. " I do much wonder," he says early in Much Ado, "that one man seeing how much an other man is a fool when he dedicates his behaviours to love, will, after he hath laughed at such shallow follies in others, become the argument of his own scorn by falling in love." Notwithstanding, he ends by marrying Beatrice, through a trick. "Cupid kills some with arrows, some with traps."

Shakespeare had the sixth book of the Faery Queen fresh in memory when he wrote his early plays, and may have recalled then how Sir Calidore " was unawares surpris'd in subtile bands of the blind boy," caught like a bird, and brought suddenly to adore fairest Pastorella. Of this charming maiden (whom the poet was later to revive in Perdita) we read:

Many a one
Burned in her love, and with sweet pleasing pain
Full many a night for her did sigh and groan.

She had not cared a whit for previous suitors, but she quickly yielded herself to the courteous stranger, as Silvia did to Valentyne. One wonders if Spenser's words regarding her, " Ne was there shepherd's swain but her did honour," did not find an echo in the following song:

Who is Silvia? What is she,
That all our swains commend her?
Holy, fair, and wise is she;
The heaven such grace did lend her,
That she might admired be.
Is she kind as she is fair?
For beauty lives with kindness;
Love doth to her eyes repair
To help him of his blindness,
And, being helped, inhabits there.

Troilus felt the "plesaunce of love" which is "in gentle hearts aye ready to repair." He discovered that "love had his dwelling within the subtle streams of Cressida's eyes," and he addressed the god "with piteous voice:"

Ye stonden in hire eyen mightily,
As in a place unto your vertu digne.

Shakespeare often emphasizes the wonder in a mortal eye, but nowhere more strongly than in Biron's brilliant speech, where he affirms that love is "first learned in a lady's eyes "and "lives not alone im mured in the brain."

From women's eyes this doctrine I derive:
They sparkle still the right Promethean Jire;
They are the books, the arts, the academes,
That show, contain, and nourish all the world,
Else none at all in aught proves excellent.

Fancy, the poet elsewhere says, is bred not in the head but in the heart.

It is engendered in the eyes,
With gazing fed.

Love's Labour's Lost has various Chaucerian touches. Dumain, for example, sings of "love, whose month is ever May;" and Longaville tries to justify breaking his oath by representing his lady as a goddess, not a woman, his love not of earth but of heaven. Most noteworthy, however, is the fact that, like Chaucer, the poet here reveals a disposition to smile at conventional love, as well as at the "painted rhet oric" which was used to proclaim it. Chaucer tells us of the crying and the woe of Palamon after he has been "hurt through [his] eye into [his] heart" by a glance at Emelye, and of his "youling and clamour" after Arcite has been let out of prison; he describes repeatedly the affliction of devotees of Cupid, and makes Theseus ask mockingly (in the passage where the god of love is spoken of as a mighty lord):

Who may been a fool, but if he love? . , .
And yet they wenenfor to beenful wyse
That serven love, for aught that may bifalle!

Shakespeare speaks likewise in his own Troilus:

For to be wise and love
Exceeds man's might; that dwells with gods above,

which strongly resembles Spenser's form of the old idea:

To be wise and eke to love
Is granted scarce to gods above.

Lord Bacon made a similar remark in his essay on Love: "It was well said that it is impossible to love and be wise;" but he quoted the adage from the Latin. Bacon, one may say in passing, could no more have written Shakespeare's poems of love than Lord Chesterfield could have written the songs of Burns. In striking contrast to Shakespeare, Bacon shows little feeling for chivalry anywhere in his works.

The vows of the lovers who lost their labour, Biron called "flat treason 'gainst the kingly state of youth." As by Chaucer, so by Shakespeare, love is pictured as the chief idealistic impulse of the noble young. The countess says in All's Well (which was probably earlier called Loves Labour's Won}:

It is the show and seal of natures truth.
Where lovers strong passion is impressed in youth.
The clown sings in Twelfth Night:
What is love? is not hereafter.
Present mirth hath present laughter;
What is to come is still unsure.
In delay there lies no plenty;
Then come kiss me, Sweet-and-twenty,

Youth's a stuff will not endure.

Valentine, a mirror of chivalry, has his foil in Proteus, who protests all truth and faith, but turns out to be a "subtle, perjured, false, disloyal man," of the light o' love sort that Chaucer particularly abhorred. "Thou hast deceived so many with thy vows," Silvia says to him, indicating how often he was forsworn. Proteus asks: "In love, who respects friend?" and Silvia answers: "All men but Proteus." She advises him to devote himself whole-heartedly to his "first best love," and not have "plural faith." If he were really a true lover, he would sepulchre his love in his lady's grave. Proteus was as vile as Jason (who acted "with feigning and every subtle deed") and all the other villains of the Legend of Good Women, which poem Shakespeare knew well. He was even ready to take Silvia at a disadvantage, and love her "'gainst the nature of love," that is "force" her. Valentine denounced his treachery, but generously (too generously for probability!) accepted his repentance; whereupon Proteus bewailed his vice in words that Chaucer might have used:

heaven! were man
But constant, he were perfect. That one error
Fills him with faults; makes him run through all the sins.

How often the earlier poet had emphasized this thought:

We men may say more, swear more; but, indeed,
Our shows are move than will; for still we prove
Mitch in our vows, but little in our love!

In Thurio, moreover, we see a despicable lover, of Chaucer's "dung-hill" kind. The duke rightly (from the point of view of chivalry) calls him "degenerate and base" when he abandons Silvia with the words:

I hold him but a fool that will endanger
His body for a girl that loves him not.

Shakespeare's own view was this:

Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
0, no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love "is not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come.
Love alters not with the brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

Other chivalric sentiments occur in The Two Gentlemen of Verona: "they love least that let men know their love;" "truth hath better deeds than words to grace it;" "hope is a lover's staff;" "lovers break not hours;" and "scorn at first makes after-love the more." "We are betroth'd," said Valentine. "I am betroth'd," said Silvia. As genuine lovers of the mediaeval type, they were prepared to die rather than violate their plighted word.

Cressida "loved Troilus right for the first sight," and Chaucer approved her "sudden love." Marlowe shared his feelings, and Shakespeare too. In As You Like It the latter wrote:

Dead shepherd! Now IJind thy saw of night
Who ever loved, that loved not atjirst sight.
It was a lover and his lass,
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
That o'er the green cornfield did pass
In the spring time, the only pretty ring time,
When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding;
Sweet lovers love the spring.

"The poor world," said Rosalind humorously, "is almost six thousand years old, and in all this time there was not any man died in his own person, videlicet, in a love cause. Troilus had his brains dashed out with a Grecian club; yet he did what he could to die before; and he is one of the patterns of love." The faithful shepherd Silvius told her "what 'tis to love," after the pattern of such a knight:

It is to be all made of sighs and tears . . .
It is to be all made of faith and service . . .
It is to be all made of fantasy ,
All made of passion, and all made of wishes;
All adoration, duty, and observance,
All humbleness, all patience, and impatience,
All purity, all trial, all observance.

Rosalind had heard "many lectures" against love from "an old religious uncle," who had taxed her whole sex with " many giddy offences." Had she been willing to disclose them, we should have found that they resembled those which Chaucer learned from mediaeval clerks, and which Cressida might have acquired from her old irreligious uncle, Pandar. Rosalind, all the while deeply enamoured of Orlando, is merely playful in her mockery. She voices the sentiments of both Chaucer and Shakespeare in her counsel to Phebe: "Foul is most foul, being foul to be a scoffer." If one really scorns love, one must be, like Beatrice, "self-endeared;" one must have self-love, "which is the most inhibited sin in the canon." True love and self-love have ever been yoked together unequally.

In A Midsummer-Nights Dream we find Cupid again supreme, with a plenty of love's vows, entreaties, and languishings, among gentles "love-in-idleness." The play illustrates Lysander's view:

Ah me! for aught that ever I could read,
Could ever hear by tale or history,
The course of true love never did run smooth.

Hermia's soul consented not to give sovereignty to Demetrius, but she idolized Lysander, lord of "true gentleness." Under delusion, the latter strove " to honour Helen, and to be her knight," but when himself, he was a faithful follower of his betrothed lady. "Thy love n'er alter, till thy sweet life end!" she said to him. And he replied:

Amen, Amen, to that fair prayer say I;
And then end life, when I end loyalty.

Her companion, Helena, with a "gentle tongue" and a heart "as true as steel," was drawn as irresistibly to Demetrius as the Nut Brown Maid to her lover, and was ready to suffer any spurns or strokes to follow him. Gentle Puck called him a churl when he seemed to be a "lack-love." Shakespeare put as much contempt as Chaucer into the word "churl."

Another Helena, in All's Well, reminds one of Malory's Elaine. The countess dwelt on her "pure love," and her one desire was to "wish chastely and love dearly."

I know I love in vain, strive against hope;
Yet in this captious and intenible sieve
I still pour in the waters of my love,
And lack not to lose still.

Helena was ready to live as the "servant" of her dear lord and master, Bertram, and to die his "vassal." This chivalric attitude of willing service on the part of one who, having won sovereignty, was delighted to give it back, is found frequently in Shakespeare's heroines, as, for example, in Portia, who speaks thus of herself to Bassanio:

Happiest of all is that her gentle spirit
Commits itself to yours to be directed,
As from her lord, her governor, her king.

Miranda says to Ferdinand: " I'll be your servant whether you will or no;" but he replies: "My mistress, dearest, and I thus humble ever." Ferdinand was a true lover, who loved at first sight. "Love sought is good, but, given unsought, is better."

We have already seen that Shakespeare's earliest published poems concerned love. There is a strong Ovidian atmosphere about Venus and Adonis, which is paralleled in some of Chaucer's works: but Shakespeare felt as keenly as Chaucer, or even Malory, the difference between love and lust.

Lone comforteth like sunshine after rain,
But lust's effect is tempest after sun;
Love's gentle spring doth always fresh remain,
Loves winter comes ere summer half be done;
Love surfeits not, lust like a glutton dies;
Love is all truth, lust full of forged lies.

For some reason best known to himself, Shakespeare, shortly after he had written As You Like It, chose to represent Cressida as a sheer wanton. Rosalind resembles Chaucer's heroine more at the start.

The people praise her for her virtues.
Her very silence and her patience
Speak to the people, and they pity her.

She, too, awakes instant love in a valiant chivalric youth; she, too, has both physical charm and quick intelligence; she is feminine as well as shrewd. Rosalind, however, cannot understand any one being " not true in love." In her affection for Orlando was "mat ter from the heart," not as in the new Cressida's "words, words, mere words." The mediaeval Cleopatra is no more like Shakespeare's than the first Cressida resembles the second. Chaucer emphasized the ruth of his woeful heroine when her knight was slain. She had sworn to be all freely his, and made a covenant with herself, so far as it was " unreprovable" with her womanhood, to feel as he felt, come life or death. She sought her own end "with good cheer" "Was never unto her love a truer queen." Here is nothing of Shakespeare's " amorous surfeiter," "the serpent of old Nile," who compassed the shame of Antony.

According to Shakespeare, Antony's honour died because of his lady's charms. He was " beguil'd to the very heart of loss." This situation is frequently paralleled in mediaeval romance. Chretien de Troies, for example, represents Yvain, Knight of the Lion, one of the most valiant heroes of the Round Table, as succumbing to the witchery of a fee, Lunette, who kept him long from prowess; and Guinglain, the Fair Unknown, had to be lured from his fairy mistress of the Golden Isle by special appeals to his honour. At Arthur's request, he married the devoted Esmeree, but he continued to long for his dame d amour , no angel of heaven, but a "most sovereign creature" of the Otherworld.

Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety.

In an interesting scene of King John, two ladies present honour from different points of view. Blanche of Castile, who has just married the Dauphin, tries to keep him from taking up arms against the English, saying:

Now shall I see thy love. What motive may
Be stronger with thee than the name of wife?

To which Constance, Prince Arthur's mother, makes direct reply:

That which upholdeth him that thee upholds,
His honour. O thine honour, Lewis, thine honour!

Honour versus love ! We remember what Lovelace wrote:

I could not love thee, Dear, so much,
Loved I not Honour more.

Celia says to Rosalind: "by mine honour I will; and when I break that oath let me turn monster."

We have lingered over Shakespeare's female characters who most clearly exhibit the sentiments or illustrate the problems of chivalric love; but there are others in whom we observe the same sweet gravity and dignified charm that Chaucer portrays in the Duchess Blanche. When, for example, we read of that gentle lady's "goodly soft speech," we recall Shakespeare's memorable lines concerning Cordelia:

Her voice was ever soft,
Gentle and low, an excellent thing in woman.

Chaucer says of Blanche:

Trouthe himself, over al and al
If ad chose his maner principal
In hir, that was his resting-place.

Truth was the "dower" of Cordelia. Shakespeare also sets the same note as Chaucer regarding love in marriage. Henry VIII praises Queen Katherine as a wife than whom there was no better in the world, "obey ing in commanding; " and Brutus speaks of Portia as Arviragus did of Dorigen: " Render me worthy of this noble wife." Wedlock unforced, the poet states,

bringeth bliss,
And is a pattern of celestial peace.

Half-jestingly Biron declared:

Never durst poet touch a pen to write
Until his ink were tempered with lovers sighs.

Shakespeare, like Chaucer, recognized that a large part of love-service was mere feigning "lovers are given to poetry; and what they swear in poetry, may be said, as lovers, they do feign." But, like Chaucer, he was always pleased to exalt simple, unaffected true love, and it is that which we find embodied in his latest creations serene Imogen, winsome Perdita, and artless Miranda.

In only one of Shakespeare's plays is pure love not given something of a chivalric cast; yet that is the greatest of all his poems dealing with such emotion, Romeo and Juliet. To be sure, we read there of the "true love's passion "of a "gentle knight" and a " true and faithful " lady; but the atmosphere that surrounds them is not mediaeval. The poet associates love and beauty in Platonic style; but he is not Italian in spirit. The love of Romeo and Juliet is of no particular age or land; it is instinctive, universal. When Shakespeare emancipates himself from the Middle Ages, he does not become a slave of the Renaissance. Wholly free, his mind fills "the world's large spaces," and in apperception he approaches the divine. Shakespeare was "myriad-minded "and could evoke any mood. Nevertheless, his constant predilection was for that love, "quick and fresh," which had "made beautiful old rhyme;" and he used "the flourish of all gentle tongues" to show it forth.

IX

SHAKESPEARE was mid-stream in the current of English literary tradition and willingly rehandled earlier chivalric themes. Among these was one of how good blood may show itself in youths obscurely reared. Guiderius and Arviragus, the sons of Cymbeline, brought up by Belarius in the forest, ignorant of their parentage, are close parallels to Sir Tor, Sir Gareth, and Sir Calidore. As early as the twelfth century,

Chretien de Troies told the adventures of Sir Perceval with similar intent, to indicate the impulse of high lineage, and illustrate laws of chivalric life.

How hard it is to hide the sparks of nature!
These boys know little they are sons to the King; . . .
They think they are mine; and, though trained up
thus meanly,
IF the case wherein they bow, their thoughts do hit
The roofs of palaces, and Nature prompts them,
In simple and low things, to prince it much
Beyond the trick of others.

This passage, in which Belarius comments on his foster-sons, recalls that by Spenser, beginning: " O, what an easy thing is to descry the gentle blood;" but we miss the emphasis there on "mind." It is interesting to observe that when Shakespeare writes: "'T is the mind that makes the body rich," he is very near to Spenser, who makes Meliboe address Sir Calidore:

It is the mind that maketh good or ill,
That maketh wretch or happy, rich or poor.

Shakespeare's own key-word is "nature."

O thou goddess,
Thou divine Nature, how thyself thou blazon'st
In these two princely boys! . . .
. . .'T'is wonder
That an invisible instinct should frame them
To royalty unlearned, honour untaught,
Civility not seen from other, valour
That wildly grows in them, but yields a crop
As if it had been sow'd.

The waif Perdita, who, like Spenser's Pastorella, being reared among shepherds, "had ever learn'd to love the lowly things," also shows herself gracious and sweet, worthy of the love of courteous Florizel, whose desires ran not before his honour. The King of Bohemia, the latter's father, remarks concerning her:

This is the prettiest low-born lass that ever
Ran on the green-sward. Nothing she does or seems
But smacks of something greater than herself.
Too noble for this place.

When Perdita speaks of the art which shares with "great creating Nature," she calls forth from Polixenes the following profound words:

Nature is made better by no mean
But Nature makes that mean; so, over that art
Which you say adds to Nature, is an art
That Nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry
A gentle scion to the wildest stock,
And make conceive a bark of baser kind
By bud of nobler race. This is an art
Which does mend Nature, change it rather, but
The art itself is Nature.

Nature was also the "goddess" of Edmund in King Lear, but that traitor had only bastard virtue. Edmund remarked to unknown Edgar: "Thy tongue some say of breeding breathes;" and Albany: "Me thought thy very gait did prophesy a royal nobleness." He and Kent, in disguise, like Posthumus and Imogen, showed noble natures, tested by adversity. Blood and virtue contended for empire in them; their goodness shared with their birthright. "Nature hath meal and bran, contempt and grace."

Shakespeare believed in established degree, and set forth his views convincingly in a long passage of Troilus:

The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre,
Observe degree, priority, and place,
Insisture, course, proportion, season, form,
Offwe and custom, in all line of order.
. . . O, when degree is shale 1 d,
Which is the ladder to all high designs,
The enterprise is sick! How could communities,
Degrees in schools, and brotherhoods in cities,
Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,
The primogenitive and due of birth,
Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels,
But by degree, stand in authentic place?
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And, hark, what discord follows! Each thing meets
In mere oppugnancy.

The poet had no drawing towards "the fool multi tude that choose by show;" he had no confidence in the judgement of the "slippery people." True, it is blunt Casca who talks roughly of the "tag-rag people" and the "common herd" with their "stink ing breath;" but the rabble in Shakespeare's plays are always variable and prone to hasty acts, always disposed to worship the Giant Demagogue, whom Spenser so powerfully describes. "O thou fond many!" we read in 2 Henry IV:

An habitation giddy and unsure
Hath he that buildeth on the vulgar heart.

Disgust with the mob seems to have moved him, like Chaucer, and it was, no doubt, with personal conviction that he made Henry VI speak:

Look, as I blow this feather from my face,
And as the air blows it to me again,
Obeying with my wind when I do blow,
And yielding to another when it blows,
Commanded always by the greater gust;
Such is the lightness of you common men.

Furthermore, Shakespeare's standards of art were consciously above those of "the million;" it was not by accident that his plays concerned themselves so largely with high-born personages, and treated notably the problems of greatness.

On the other hand, Shakespeare had strong sympathy with true aspirants to distinction, no matter from what rank they came, and believed that

As the sun breaks through the darkest clouds,
So honour peereth in the meanest habit.

He was aware that virtue may highly ennoble a peasant, as vice may deeply degrade a lord.

From lowest place when virtuous things proceed,
The place is dignified by the doer's deed:
Where great additions swell and virtue none,
It is a dropsied honour. Good alone
Is good without a name. Vileness is so;
The property by what it is should go.
Not by the title. . . .
. . That is honour's scorn
Which challenges itself as honour's bom
And is not like the sire. Honours thrive
When rather from our acts we them derive
Than our foregoers.

Here we rise to the same height that Chaucer reached, the height of true democracy. Such democracy bears no more relation to demagoguery than true to free love.

"We are gentlemen," says a knight of the court, in Pericles:

That neither in our hearts nor outward eyes
Envy the great nor do the low despise.

"You are right courteous knights!" is the only answer that the prince makes. According to Shakespeare, the low may be "too virtuous for the contempt of empire." In his view, blood was not opposed to virtue, fortune to merit, art to nature, nor honour to goodness; on the contrary, in each case, the one supported and confirmed the other. If we would be gentlemen, he makes clear, we must be gentle. To be gentle, however, does not necessarily mean to be intellectual. When Viola declares herself a "gentleman," Olivia remarks:

I'll be sworn thou art;

Thy tongue, thy face, thy limbs, action and spirit, Do give thee five-fold blazon.

There is here no mention of mind.

When we reflect upon the four great writers whose works we have here studied, we find that their attitudes towards chivalry are amazingly alike, and yet characteristically different.

Chaucer's chivalry appears innate, an instinctive, ever-present check on growing worldliness, like the religious idealism implanted in a youth by a pious mother, which never ceases to control his life, even after he may have abandoned the beliefs of boyhood. It is not single-eyed, but steadily prevails in mature judgement, and is always tender and real.

Malory's chivalry reveals more emphasis on outer things. It delights in ritual; it demands adherence to a creed; it is sacerdotal, Anglican. Though it may be rigid and narrow, it stimulates earnest aspiration.

Spenser's chivalry is directed mostly towards the learned and polite. It is combined with book education, intellectual and complex. Albeit too subtle for the common run of men, it appeals persistently to the poetic, imaginative few.

Shakespeare's chivalry is retrospective; but in his works we find the ideals of the Middle Ages reproduced with full comprehension and glorified as guiding stars to human excellence. Shakespeare, with unique genius, widens their sphere, and makes them universal in application, meet for highest or lowest, for keenest or dullest, in this majestic world.

Chaucer presents a standard of conduct for the knight, Malory for the noble, Spenser for the court ier, and Shakespeare for the man. Their pattern figures are contrasted respectively with the coarse churl, the vulgar parvenu, the rude rustic, the common brute. Chaucer exalts worthiness, determining acts; Malory, nobility, accepting obligations; Spenser, worth, procured by self-discipline; Shakespeare, high nature, transforming character. Chaucer says "do;" Malory, "avoid;" Spenser, "study;" Shakespeare, "be."

CONCLUSION

IN the Middle Ages England borrowed chivalry from France; but English chivalry and French chivalry developed differently. In France it was chiefly restricted to a class; in England, almost from the first, it was democratized. In France, up to the Revolution, the etiquette of institutional chivalry grew increasingly important, until in the end it be came largely a matter of formal politeness; in England the spirit of the ideal was so continuously insisted upon that it is now hardly separable from moral uprightness. In the one case, courtliness, refinement, elegance, careful consideration of conduct in the light of social authority, dominated its manifestation in daily life; in the other, frankness, sweetness, kindliness, subordination of self in deference to religious principle, occasioned its sway. From without inward, from inward without, these seem the contrasting methods of the two developments, both arriving, in accord with diverse national characteristics, at the same general end distinction.

There are now those in England who insist on the benefits of class, who, if a choice were necessary, might prefer to belong to the nobility rather than to be noble, and would find greater advantage in the gentry than in gentleness ; but such are few and speak in undertones. To-day even our most candid men of the world are loth to applaud Lord Chesterfield's social precepts without reserve. As a whole, English men have always exalted substance more than appearance, respect more than respects, reverence more than rites. Since, as was said of them long ago, they instinctively "set their hearts' delight upon action," they have been strongly drawn to chivalry, an ideal for men of deeds. Since, however, as Burke saw, "a spirit of piety is deeply engrained in the English nation," they have persistently emphasized its moral rather than its ceremonial side.

The English ideal of the "gentleman" is an out come of English chivalry. The word conveys to us a very different idea from the French gentilhomme, on which it is etymologically based. It embodies a conception more like that of the mediaeval preud'omme, indicating the aspiration, irrespective of class, which moved crusading warriors like St. Louis and Joinville. It combines the best in the attitudes of the galant homme and the honnete homme, implying courteous demeanour, but subordinating this to vir tuous character. English men of rank agree that "he who is gentle should do gentle deeds;" "he is gentle who doth gentle deeds" is the creed of the majority; both groups emphasize gentle deeds as the final witness of a gentleman. If the high-born now desire to be thought worthy, they accept the best moral standards of the people; if the low in station desire to be termed gentle, they accept the best social standards of the aristocracy.

Emerson says that "English history is aristocracy with the doors open." The English aristocracy, which sets the standard of the gentleman, is composed of elements as different as the House of Lords; it is a class that is not confined to the bearers of titles, any more than titles are confined to those of good birth; it is a class in constant change. Thomas Fuller put the matter clearly for his time (1642): "The good yeoman is a gentleman in ore, whom the next age may see refined; and is the wax capable of a genteel impression, when the prince shall stamp it. Wise Solon (who accounted Tellus the Athenian the most happy man, for living privately on his own lands) would surely have pronounced the English yeomanry 'a fortunate condition,' living in the temperate zone between greatness and want, an estate of people al most peculiar to England. France and Italy are like a die, which hath no points between cinque and ace - nobility and peasantry. Their walls though high, must needs be hollow, wanting filling stones. Indeed, Germany hath her boors, like our yeomen; but, by a tyrannical appropriation of nobility to some few ancient families, their yeomen are excluded from ever rising higher, to clarify their bloods. In England the temple of honour is bolted against none who have passed through the temple of virtue; nor is a capacity to be genteel denied to our yeoman, who thus be haves himself."

Thackeray wrote as follows in The Four Georges: "Which was the most splendid spectacle ever witnessed the opening feast of Prince George in London, or the resignation of Washington? Which is the noble character for after ages to admire yon fribble dancing in lace and spangles, or yonder hero who sheathes his sword after a life of spotless honour, a purity unreproached, a courage indomitable, and a consummate victory? Which of these is the true gentleman? What is it to be a gentleman? Is it to have lofty aims, to lead a pure life, to keep your honour virgin; to have the esteem of your fellow citizens, and the love of your fireside; to bear good fortune meekly; to suffer evil with constancy; and through evil or good to maintain truth always? Show me the happy man whose life exhibits these qualities, and him we will salute as gentleman, what ever his rank may be; show me the prince who possesses them, and he may be sure of our love and loyalty." .

Washington said of himself: "I am sensible to everything that affects the honour of a gentleman." And happily to-day in the land where he fought for independence, a land where no distinctions of class are supposed to exist, where in any case all that do exist can be transcended by individual merit or removed by individual disgrace, the word "gentleman" still flourishes with all its English atmosphere of superiority of Christian character. Here, as else where, there attaches to good birth the presumption of gentleness. One whose father was gentle is assumed free of churlish offence until he shows it in his demeanour, whereas one who rises from obscurity has to prove his title before his nobility is acknowledged. But a sin against gentleness by one born favoured is counted doubly foul, and a victory over disadvantage by one born without expectation meets with peculiar acclaim. It has been agreed by final consensus of opinion in this long-established democracy that only through personal worthiness may a family preserve, even as only so might its founder gain, the noble name of gentle. " Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds!"

The whole world is kin, and something like chivalric principles can be found in every clime ; but it is wrong to state, as has recently been done by the author of Christian, Greek or Goth? that chivalry and honour are "essentially Northern," and the product of Christianity only in so far as they are "an undefined and instinctive protest against it." Germanic sentiment, particularly in respect to the attitude of men towards women, has undoubtedly influenced these conceptions in Germanic lands; but history shows plainly that they developed into what they are under the leading of Romance peoples, were fashioned first by devout Christians, and fused with the teachings of Our Lord. In Northern heathendom, warriors were sturdy, but they believed in brag; they were straightforward, but given to ferocity; to them revenge was a duty, and sweet. It was Christianity that taught Northern warriors to consecrate their strength to an impersonal ideal, to be courteous to the vanquished and avoid boast, to be meek and mild, simply because "Dieu le veut." Christian chivalry made, not for mere fulfilment of duty, but for superabundant generosity ; not for simple fidelity, but for glorifying deference to women; not for rigour and harsh display of force, but for tolerance and ten derness. The finest ideal of the Christian knight, wholly unlike that of the Northern earl, was to make himself beloved. In the eighteenth century men often wrote about "Gothic chivalry," but by that they meant the institution, or ideal, which arose synchronously with the "Gothic" cathedrals; they had no thought of making it, any more than the splendid architectural monuments of mediaeval Christian aspiration, a fruit of the barbaric spirit.

In times of national perplexity, when the morale of the people has seemed weak, Englishmen have often turned for new stimulus to old-time ideals of honour. It is not surprising, then, that now, when so many deplore the materialistic tendencies of the age, chivalry is being revived as a practical religion for laymen. Boy scouts are spreading some of its prin ciples abroad in the world, and, under the inspiration of fair play, idealistic young men are beginning a new crusade against inequalities of opportunity, trying to lower the handicaps of position and power that the privileged possess. That way, perhaps, more than any other, modern chivalry tends, the chivalry

That dares the right, and disregards alike
The yea and nay of the world.

It is as true now as in the days of Pope :

Honour and shame from no condition rise;
Act well your part, there all the honour lies.

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