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Shakspere: Personal Recollections

<h2>CHAPTER XVII.</h2> <h4>DEATH OF QUEEN ELIZABETH. CORONATION OF KING JAMES.</h4> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> "All that lives must die, Passing through nature to eternity." </div> <div class="stanza"> "Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown." </div> <div class="stanza"> "What have kings that privates have not too, Save ceremony?" </div> </div> The New Year of sixteen hundred and three brought no consolation or happiness to Queen Elizabeth. Her reign of forty-four years had been bloody, but patriotic; and while she had long since passed the noonday of her glory, her sunset of life hastened to its setting with a fevered brain and tortured heart, to think that she had not one real friend living, but surrounded by cunning courtiers, who were already manipulating for the favor and patronage of King James. <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> Like a blasted pine on a mountain peak, She moaned and sighed every day and week; Awaiting the deadly, stormy gust That laid her low in the crumbling dust. </div> </div> To amuse her lingering hours of grief Lord Cecil desired the Shakspere Company to give its new version of "Love's Labor's Lost" before the Queen in the grand reception hall at Richmond. Burbage went to the castle and made all the preliminary preparations for the play, and on the night of the second of February, 1603, the fantastic love play was given for the amusement of the Virgin Queen. She sat in regal solitude, and with mock laughter tried to enjoy the mimic show. The royal audience was great in rank, beauty, wealth and intellect, yet through the various scenes of the light-hearted drama, Elizabeth only swung her head, muttered and sighed, while her courtiers evinced great amusement at the predicament of the various lovers in the play. Nothing can minister to a mind diseased. The Queen professed great disappointment at the absence of Shakspere from the performance—"on account of sickness," as Burbage told her Royal Highness. But William and myself remained at our rooms at Temple Bar that evening working on the first draughts of "Macbeth" to catch the praise and patronage of King James, the Scotch-Englishman. Since the execution of Essex and imprisonment of Southampton Shakspere never said a word in praise of Elizabeth, and when he heard of her death on the 26th of March, 1603, he betrayed no feeling of grief, but on the contrary, expressed delight that the way was now clear for the release of Southampton and other victims of Elizabeth from the Tower. Several weeks before her death Elizabeth was afflicted with a choking sensation, and the ghosts of her murdered sister—Mary, Queen of Scots, and her former lover, the beheaded Earl of Essex, appeared nightly. Cecil asked her a few days before she died how she felt, when she muttered, "My lord, I am tied with a chain of iron about my neck." Thus a cruel, bloody conscience sat like a fiend over her dying sighs and groans, and though surrounded with the wealth and glory of the world, the Virgin Queen stepped into eternity with only the memory of a successful tyrant to light her to the Pluto realms of her father, King Henry the Eighth! Her funeral procession and burial in Westminster Abbey was the grandest exhibition of royal pomp and magnificence. The whole population seemed to fill all the alleys, streets and parks of the great city, with the army and navy leading the funeral cortege, while the great bells from steeple, tower and temple rang out their periodical wail of sonorous sounds for twenty-four hours. The body of Elizabeth had been scarcely cold in death when Lord Cecil and the Royal Council proclaimed James of Scotland, King of England, Ireland, Scotland and France, tumbling over each other in a mad race to throw themselves prostrate before the rising sun, forgetting in a day the honors and benefactions showered upon them for forty years by their late mistress. <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> And thus we see from age to age, The greed of man on every page; No matter whether young or old, His strife in life is search for gold! </div> </div> King James left Edinburgh on the 5th of April with a royal escort for London, and by easy stage from town to town and castle to castle, made a triumphal march to London, where he arrived on the 7th of May, 1603, putting up at the Whitehall Palace. The lords of the realm and millions of faithful subjects gave James their loyal adhesion and support, lauding him to the skies as monarch of the realm and defender of the Faith. Hope had no thorns in her crown. Protestants and Catholics alike, on their first rush of spontaneous patriotism, made a bid for the patronage of the new king, who, although reared a Protestant, was known to have sympathy for certain Catholic lords, who tried to save his mother—Mary, Queen of Scots, from the fatal block. James never forgave Elizabeth for the murder of his mother, and in his inmost heart despised his predecessor. King James after his coronation and triumphal entry into London on the 15th of March, 1604, ordered a partial jail delivery, releasing hundreds of prisoners in Scotland, Ireland and England, exempting only highway and house robbers, murderers, and those who had committed overt acts of treason against the crown. Many political prisoners had been immured in the Tower and other state prisons on trivial or trumped up charges, preferred by jealous courtiers on personal or religious grounds. James was very friendly to the dramatic profession, and granted a charter to the Shakspere Company to play at the Blackfriars, Globe, Prince, Fortune and Curtain theatres. In the coronation procession nine of the "Kings Company" appeared dressed out in fantastic array, wearing four yards and a half each of silk-scarlet cloth. The nine chief actors thus honored by the King were William Shakspere, Augustine Phillips, Laurence Fletcher, John Hemmings, William Sley, Robert <ins class="correction" title="Transcriber's note: original reads 'Armyn'">Armin</ins>, Henry Condell, Richard Cowley and Richard Burbage. King James sent for Shakspere and Burbage and told them to be ever in readiness as the King's servants to perform at any of the palaces that he might entertain domestic or foreign guests, and assured them that the puritanical policy that had hounded them in the past should not prevail during his reign, believing that the stage, properly managed, was as great an educator for the people as the church. When William told me of this interview with the King I expressed great delight, with the other literary bohemians that now there sat on the throne of old Albion, a patron of poetry, painting, music and sculpture. The Church of Rome and the Church of England had been battling for nearly a hundred years in Britain for the mastery; and although the devotees of Luther's Reformation had cracked the creed of popes and princes, there was a general demand for a new version and translation of the Bible, cutting out the Catholicism of the old book and expurgating the vulgarity and superstition engrafted on the "Word of God" by the apostles and bishops of the first, second and third centuries, after Christ had been crucified for the sins of all mankind. Curious kind of celestial justice, to kill any man for my sins and crimes? I prefer to suffer for my own sins and not fall back on a "scapegoat" to carry them off into the wilderness. On the first of September, 1604, a great religious conclave was held at Hampton Court by the established church and the Puritans, and there it was determined to make a new, revised and complete edition of the Bible, by the royal authority of King James. On the first of May, 1607, forty-seven of the most learned men of the British realm assembled in three parties at Oxford, Cambridge and Westminster to make a new Bible for the guidance of mankind. Hebrew, Greek and Latin scholars made up the great conclave; and after four years of detailed labor the King James edition of the Bible was published to the world, cutting loose forever from the power of Rome. Although the "Word of God" has been revised several times since by man there are yet a large number of sentences and verses in the Old and New Testament that might be expurgated in the interest of decency, reason and science. This electric age is too rapid and wise to gulp down the obsolete doctrine of ancient fanaticism, and the preachers of to-day are painfully alarmed at the decreasing number of pewholders and patrons, who once listened to their rigmarole platitudes or eloquent dissertations on the power and locution of an unknown God. On Christmas Eve, 1607, the "King's Players," with Shakspere and Burbage in the respective rôles of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, produced that great historical play at the grand reception room of Whitehall, in the presence of King James and the nobles of his court, surrounded by the ministers and diplomats from all the civilized nations of the world. I never saw a grander audience, interspersed with the most beautiful ladies of the world, who shone in their jewels and diamonds like a field of variegated wild flowers, besprinkled with the morning dew. The witches in the play seemed to startle the King, and more than ever convince him that these inhabitants of earth and air were all of a reality, and should be destroyed wherever found, believing that they held the destiny of man in the caldron of their incantations. <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> "Come, come, you spirits That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here; And fill me from the crown to the toe, top full Of direst cruelty! Make thick my blood, Stop up the access and passage to remorse; That no compunctious visitings of nature Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between The effect and it! Come to my woman's breasts, And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers, Wherever in your sightless substances You wait on nature's mischief; come, thick night, And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell! That my keen knife see not the wound it makes; Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark!" </div> </div> This speech of the devilish Lady Macbeth made a deep impression on the audience, and caused the King to squirm in his throne chair at the contemplation of the murder of Duncan, but when William entered as Macbeth and rendered the following speech James wished himself a million miles away, and yet applauded to the echo the murdering thoughts of the Scottish chieftain: <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> "If it were done, when 'tis done, then 'twere well It were done quickly. If the assassination Could trammel up the consequence, and catch, With his surcease, success; that but this blow Might be the be-all and the end-all here, But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,— We'd jump the life to come; but, in these cases We still have judgment here; that we but teach Bloody instructions, which being taught, return To plague the inventor. This evenhanded justice Commends the ingredients of our poisoned chalice, To our own lips. He's here in double trust; First as I am his kinsman and his subject, Strong both against the deed; then, as his host, Who should against his murderer shut the door, Not bear the knife himself. Besides, this Duncan Hath born his faculties so meek, hath been So clear in his great office, that his virtues Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against The deep damnation of his taking off; And pity, like a naked new-born babe, Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubim, horsed Upon the sightless coursers of the air, Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye, That tears shall drown the wind; I have no spur To prick the sides of my intent, but only Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself, And falls on the other!" </div> </div> Still brooding on the murder of Duncan, Macbeth says: <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> "Is this a dagger which I see before me, The handle towards my hand? Come, let me clutch thee; I have thee not, and yet I see thee still, Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible To feeling as to sight? Or art thou but A dagger of the mind; a false creation, Proceeding from the heat oppressed brain? I see thee yet in form as palpable As this which now I draw. Thou marshal'st me the way that I was going; And such an instrument I was to use. Mine eyes are made the fools of the other senses, Or else worth all the rest; I see thee still; And on thy blade and handle, gouts of blood, Which was not so before, there's no such thing; It is the bloody business, which informs Thus to mine eyes, now o'er the one-half world Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse The curtained sleeper; now witchcraft celebrates Pale Hecate's offerings, and withered murder Alarmed by his sentinel, the wolf, Whose howl's his watch, thus with his stealthy pace With Tarquin's ravishing strides, towards his design Moves like a ghost. Thou sure and firm-set earth Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear The very stones prate of my whereabout, And take the present horror from the time, Which now suits with it. While I threat, he lives, Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives; I go and it is done; the bell invites me. Hear it not, Duncan; for it is a knell That summons thee to heaven or to hell!" </div> </div> After the murder of Duncan, Lady Macbeth is constantly haunted with the ghost of her victim, and in midnight hours, sick at soul, walks in her sleep, talking of her bloody deed: <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> "Out damned spot! out I say! Here's the smell of the blood still; All the perfumes of Arabia Will not sweeten this little hand!" </div> </div> And then retiring to her purple couch, amidst the cries of her waiting woman, she dies with insane groans echoing through her castle halls. Macbeth, the pliant, cowardly, ambitious tool of his wicked wife, is at last surrounded by Macduff and his soldiers, and informed that his lady is dead. And then soliloquizing on time and life, he utters these philosophic phrases: <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> "She should have died hereafter; There would have been a time for such a word; To-morrow; and to-morrow, and to-morrow Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale, Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury— Signifying nothing!" </div> </div> And then, in the forest in front of the castle Macbeth is at last brought to bay and killed by Macduff; but the murderer of Duncan, brave to the last, exclaims: <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> "Yet I will try the last; before my body I throw my warlike shield; lay on Macduff, And damned be him that first cries, Hold, enough!" </div> </div> A whirlwind of applause echoed through the royal halls at the conclusion of the great Scotch historical drama, and Shakspere was loudly called before the footlights, making a general bow to the audience, and paying deep, low courtesy to the King, who beckoned him to the throne chair, and placed about his neck a heavy golden chain with a miniature of His Majesty attached. William was glorified. <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> "Murder, though it have no tongue, will speak With most miraculous organ!" </div> </div> <hr /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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