Queen Elizabeth and the "Merry Wives" [pp. 348-358]

348 QUEEX ELIZABETH AxND " THE MERRY WIzVES." [June,
QUEEN ELIZABETH AND "THE MERRY WIVES."
IN its issue of July, I877, THE CATHOLIC WORLD reviewed
a volume which in many ways was a notable and unique work.
Attention had often been called to the fact that in the plays and
poems of Shakspere all the lofty sentiments, honorable deeds,
and noble aspirations are credited to the nobility; that he is the
poet of the lofty and not of the lowly; that it is only royal and
titled personages he selects for his heroes-for embodiment of
the passions, impulses, tendencies, virtues of human nature; that
in them alone does he extol honor, courage, faith, charity, obedi ence to marriage vows, while the child of the people never ap pears in any exemplary roles save those of submission and of
service, and then only as a bounden duty to be performed with out reward. But Shakspere from an American Point of View, by
George Wilkes, * first elaborated the charge that Shakspere
cared nothing for the masses-for the people, their rights and
interests; devoted his pages entirely to the affairs of kings,
courts and noblemen, field-marshals and generals, passing the
people over always with slur, sneer, and lampoon, if, indeed,
they received any notice whatever. Mr. Wilkes backed up his
indictment with an array of quotations from the plays and poems
that left apparently nothing to be said on the other side. I will
endeavor to indicate (so far as I can discover, for the first time)
the real plea in abatement, if not answer to the charge. That
plea was that in Shakspere's day the right of the subject could
only come from the permanence of institutions. Shakspere was
no agitator screaming from a corner, or reformer circulating in
cipher philippics against whatever he found established. He was
the proprietor of two theatres, mounting what he wrote publicly
upon his boards, under the vigilant eye of a sovereign whose
definition of treason was notoriously elastic, and with the Tower
and the block unpleasantly close at hand to suggest prudence in
meddling with the recognized order of things. The dramatists
*It is, I think, to be regretted that Mr. Wilkes tampered with his book by committing itin the third edition (1882)-to J. Payne Collier's claim to the discovery of a new play of Shakspere's, A Warning to Fair Women (1599). The very fact that the characters are not patrician (their names are Master Drewry, Anne, Brown, Sanders, etc.), as contrasted with the personages of the Shaksperean drama-which involves, by the way, the exact point Mr. Wilkes
wrote his book to prove-ought to have put him on his guard. Mr. Collier was ninety years
old when he made the assertion, and it attracted no attention from Shaksperean critics.