VII. SHAKSPEARE'S HISTORICAL PLAYS - PROSPERO - ORLANDO - ΑΝΤΟΝΙΟ THOUGH the gentleman be an æsthetic per sonage, fragrant, like poetry, with the aroma of life, he needs, as we have said, a sound moral pith for his full florescence; and hence the Homeric Gods and Heroes come not up to the highest standard of gentlemanly manhood. Nor in Shakspeare should we look in the historical plays for exemplifications of the gentlemanly; for, through the long dynastic contests, which for several generations kept the soil of England wet with successive showers of native blood, the persistent combatants, kings and princes and nobles, were assuredly as perfidious, conscienceless, ruthless, remorseless, sanguinary a file of practically heathen villains and ruffians as a poet 1 could anywhere find to work with. The times were coarse and cruel, black with plots, assassinations, and executions. Men had not time or opportunity to be gentlemen. A Sidney or a Bayard would hardly have made himself scope. Hotspur, and his rival Prince Hal, though not darkly stained, as so many others, are rude, - gentlemen in posse rather than in esse; and Hotspur is wilful, - though Heaven forbid that we should wish him other than he is by a tittle; and the great Faulconbridge is coarse, as becomes him to be; nor would we exchange his rough tongue for a score of smoother ones, for such catching vigor is there in his vaulting speech, that the reading of him aloud before breakfast were, to a poetical dyspeptic, an appetizing tonic. Albeit the tragedy of Lear is not historical, being wrought into its thrilling grandeur out of fable and tradition, we may - knowing what England has since become-invest Kent with historic reality, and behold in him a prevenient representative of all fidelity, loyalty, self-devotion; exhibiting superb proportions, benignant capabilities; carrying within his lordly heart the germs which, beneath the future Sun of Culture, were to be warmed into a breed of bountiful gentlemen. And the same sublime tragedy has a mate to Kent in "France," who eagerly takes for his Queen Lear's disowned and dowerless daughter, with a gush of generous warmth that prefigures Bayard, addressing her, "Fairest Cordelia, that art most rich, being poor; Most choice, forsaken; and most loved, despised!" Prospero, the wrongfully deposed Duke of Milan, is a magnificent gentleman. His Duchy was the first through all the Seignories, "And Prospero the prime Duke, being so reputed His gentleness and sweet parental tenderness, his cordial joy in forgiving his wrongers, his long-nurtured gratitude to Gonzalo, his superregal graciousness, all crowned by a subtle, majestic intellect, make Prospero a peer of the supreme creations of poetry, a master to teach and exalt manhood, a figure whose amplitude and beauty "cannot be measured or confined." Orlando, in As You Like It, whose unnatural brother, - to quote Orlando's own words, "Keeps me rustically at home, or, to speak more properly, stays me here at home unkept," and "mines my gentility with my education," has in him "a something that Nature gave him," which keeps him fine in spite of coarse nurture, and buoys him up through the beatings of adverse fortune to the high place which was his even more by nobility of disposition than by birth. That Adam, an old family-servant, "In whom so well appears The constant service of the antique world who says of himself, "Though I look old, yet am I strong and lusty; Hot and rebellious liquors in my blood; that he should be fervently willing to devote to his young master himself and the hoard he had saved to be the "foster-nurse" of his age, is testimony more absolute for Orlando than even the love of Rosalind; for maidens princess or shepherdess - will sometimes bestow the whole treasure of a virgin heart upon one whose fairness is chiefly of the outside. But how fully is the inward beauty of Orlando proclaimed by the churlish tribute of his bad brother, and by the spontaneous ejaculations of Adam, prompted by his fears, when he meets Orlando before the house of Oliver; and how distinctly do his words portray the leading features of a gentleman : "What! my young master? O, my gentle master, Your praise has come too swiftly home before you. |