Shakespeare felt no doubt. Clear before his eyes there was the old King, ill and weak and weary, and troubled by his conscience. He had taken the crown wrongly, he is afraid that others may take it; he wishes to keep it by him, to see and touch it even if he cannot wear it. Holinshed says that the courtiers thought the King dead, covered up his face, and went at once to his son with the news; the Prince then came and took away the crown. Shakespeare changes this very finely. If the King was in his last sickness, why was the Prince away? In the play the illness comes on suddenly, and the Prince-so one of his brothers thinks-is out hunting. He enters cheerfully after his sport, jests a little at the sight of his brother's tearful face, and is shocked to find his father dangerously ill. He takes his place at the bedside at once. Notice another point: the chronicler tells us that the King had reigned' in great perplexity and little pleasure'. How does the poet make us feel that this is true? The first thing which the Prince thinks about, as he watches the white, suffering face, is the 'trouble. some bedfellow', the 'golden care' lying on the pillow close by as if in mockery. We must see the face as he did if we are to feel that; so Shakespeare left out the linen cloth. And that was not his only reason. Why does the Prince think that the crown belongs to him? He notices suddenly a tiny feather resting on the King's lip; it does not stir-he must be dead! It is then that the Prince takes away the crown. When Warwick finds him later in the next room, he is on his knees in deep grief. There is a fine change too when the Prince returns to ask his father's forgiveness. Shakespeare has worked out the hints for their talk as he found them in Holinshed, but he has added an idea of his own. In the play the King does much more than ask the Prince 'what he meant so to misuse himself'. It is not only his son's unkindness that troubles him; he has a deeper grief when he thinks of England. The Prince's wild life has made him-so his father thinks-unfit to reign; and when he is king the country will fall back into the old bad ways and be shamed and ruined. But the Prince answers that he has already, while grieving at the thought of losing his father, vowed a 'noble change'. This is very different from the selfish way in which they both behave in the

chronicle-the King eyeing and fingering his crown like a miser, the Prince taking it without even a look at his dead father's face. The play makes us understand them and feel for them, for Shakespeare has put into them his own great love for England. It gives the sad King one moment of happiness before he dies; it is like a ray of sunshine on his deathbed.

Yes,' you will say, 'it is very fine; but if the Prince did not really see that feather, what right hadShakespeare to say that he did?' He had a poet's right; he imagined it. As he wrote that scene, he acted it over in his own mind; and it is just such touches as that little feather which make it real for us. A poet may invent as many of them as he likes so long as they fit the character. For the character is the main thing; he must fix on that first, and he must keep to it. If he takes a character from history, he must have a true idea about him and show us what sort of man he was; then he can do as he likes with the smaller points. If he interests us, we shall not mind. If it suits him, he can put into one scene what happened at more than one time and place. In Shakespeare's play of Richard II there is a sitting of Parliament, and it does in that one meeting what really happened at three different meetings. There is good reason for this: it is the scene in which Richard gives up his crown to his conqueror Henry. Seen only once in a stately procession and filling the stage as long as it remains there, the Parliament interests us; it is a fine background for the two great figures, and so it has something royal about it. But if it trooped in three times, that grand effect would be lost, and we should yawn and be glad to see the last of it. Shakespeare, who was an actor as well as a poet, knew this and took care to interest us.

Let us see how Shakespeare deals with character. We will take the case of Henry V after he became king and carried out the 'noble change' which he promised to his father. No other play of Shakespeare's makes us feel so finely his faith and pride in England. 'That battle of Agincourt', said a great writer, Thomas Carlyle, ' strikes me as one of the most perfect things in its sort we anywhere have of Shakespeare's. The description of the two hosts the worn-out, jaded English-the dread hour, big with destiny, when the battle shall begin-and

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then that deathless valour, "Ye good yeomen, whose bones were made in England!" There is a noble patriotism in it. . . . There is a sound in it like the ring of steel.' The reason is, not only that Shakespeare was one of the great poets of the world, but also that he lived at a great time in our history. England had faced a terrible danger, but the courage of her leaders and the loyal hearts of her people had saved her. So the king in the play is much more than the Henry whom we read of in history books: he is the highest and most heroic Englishman that the poet was able to draw, and he leads his people to victory because he puts his own great spirit into theirs. Shakespeare thought of his own time when he wrote the play, and there were men in England then whose lives and deeds would help the people in the theatre to understand it. When they heard King Henry say before the battle,

For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother,

they would understand how a king and a man in the ranks could be comrades if they thought of Philip Sidney dying on the field of Zutphen and passing on to a wounded soldier the cup of water which he needed himself. And for a band of brothers' they had only to look to the seamen of the time, men like Drake who sailed into the Pacific, which Spain thought closed to Englishmen ; Frobisher and Davis whose names are on the map where they pushed their way into the Arctic ice; Richard Grenville who fought the great fight of the one ship against the fifty-three; Lord Howard of Effingham who destroyed the proud fleet of Spain. Men like these stirred the nation with a belief that Englishmen could go any where and do anything, and they honoured the deeds of their fathers all the more because they had proud memories of their own. Henry V's famous victory specially touched them; perhaps that was because of Shakespeare's play. The greatest war-song of the time was written only a few years later; it was Michael Drayton's Ballad of Agincourt. And in 1599, the year when Henry V was acted, Thomas Heywood's play of Edward IV was published; and it shows us quite by accident what people thought on the subject. In a scene which is given in this book (XVI, scene 1), the King goes disguised to the house

of a tanner at Tamworth, who has asked him to supper, thinking that he is the King's butler. Kings like to do this-it is their idea of fun; and the jolly tanner, among other things which he does to entertain his guest, takes part in a song with his daughter and his servant. Agincourt, Agincourt!' the three voices ring out,' know ye not Agincourt?' and even more than the great verse of Shakespeare that homely scene helps us to feel the spirit of the time. You do not get fine writing in a comedy, especially when it is about simple people, and here is a comic writer who thought that song the most natural thing to hear in an English cottage. But Heywood, though he is interesting and amusing, is not a great poet. When Shakespeare tells us of Agincourt, it is as if England herself were speaking to us, and the words will stir the blood of Englishmen as long as our race endures. The famous Duke of Marlborough learned from Shakespeare's plays all the history he knew. We expect our generals to read more history than that; but the Duke had a great lesson-book and the noblest of all teachers.

II. SHAKESPEARE'S THEATRE

It is not enough to read Shakespeare; you must see him acted. Only in that way will you really understand how great he was. Plays are put on the stage now at great cost, and the scenery is very beautiful. If you go to The Merchant of Venice or Julius Caesar, you will have before you pictures, as true as the stage-painter can make them, of Venice with its seaways and Rome with its marble palaces and temples. In Shakespeare's day the theatre was simpler; the same scene would have done equally well, one day for Venice, and the next for Rome or London. The only difference would be that a board would be hung up to tell you what town it was. The great Sir Philip Sidney laughs at this, and asks 'What child is there that, coming to a play, and seeing" Thebes" written in great letters upon an old door, doth believe that it is Thebes?' The answer is that, as the piece went on, the power of a great poet, helped by the playing of a good actor, would make us believe anything: we should forget about the 'old door', keep a sharp eye upon

the actors, and think of the play itself, not of the way it was staged.

If we had been living in seventeenth-century London, and wished to see a play, we should first of all have looked in the morning at one of the posts on which managers set their bills. When Duke Theseus wants a play at court some papers, or bills, are put into his hands, and he reads one of them

A tedious brief scene of young Pyramus
And his love Thisbe; very tragical mirth.
(XVIII, iii. 17, 18.)

Shakespeare is here making fun of the way in which plays were advertised. Sometimes a title-page reads as if it were one of these bills. In the year 1600 a famous play of Shakespeare was published with this title "The excellent history of the Merchant of Venice. With the extreme cruelty of Shylock the Jew towards the said Merchant in cutting a just pound of his flesh. And the obtaining of Portia by the choice of three caskets.' With the date and the name of the theatre put in, that would make a very good bill.

There were not many theatres in London, and they were just outside the City or on the Surrey side of the Thames. A famous one for us was the Globe, built in 1599 on the Bankside in Southwark, where Barclay's brewery is now; many of Shakespeare's pieces were played there, and he acted there himself. Suppose we were going to the Globe. The performance began early in the afternoon. If we were poor, I expect we should have walked over old London Bridge. But it was the fashion to go by water, and then we should have gone down to some stairs' or landing-stage, and looked across the river to see if the silk flag was flying from the roof of the theatre; if so, it meant a performance, and we should have engaged a waterman'. A number of old sailors got their living by rowing people over to the places of amusement in what is now South London-not only to the theatres, but also to the Bear Garden in Southwark where bears were baited, and the archery ground of Newington Butts. Rich people took a pair of oars' (that is, two boatmen), others a sculler (or one man pulling sculls). We should land near the theatre.