its free choice, without a suspicion of supernatural coercion, although in both cases the presence of a real or apparent supernatural power suggests the mysterious and envelops the transactions with a poetic element. In both cases sin leads to a retributive justice. All of the action in Macbeth, except the rewards for valor conferred by Duncan, the creation of the Duke of Cumberland, and the king's visit to Macbeth's castle, is due directly or indirectly to Macbeth's belief in the witches. The action of Hamlet that is due solely and separably to the ghostly influence is comparatively much less.

Hamlet and Macbeth agree in this: that there is a strong poetic suggestion of the supernatural, so powerful that an actual supernatural force seems to pervade both. In both an artful use of only man's belief in the supernatural invests the work with a subtle poetic charmthat charm which makes the mysterious supernatural such a painful delight to all imaginative minds. Both exhibit a marked contrast with the uses made of the actual supernatural as dramatic agencies in A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest. Both are pervaded by the highest poetry of life and of nature, as well as by the mysterious supernatural poetic element. Both deal with, or rest upon, a profound philosophy, which suggests the greatest questions that touch man and human life-man as a social being with varied human relations, and man as a creature having close relations with laws higher than human laws, with a world transcending this world, and with a wise and beneficent rule higher than the human, above all secondary supernatural forces and supreme in power and wisdom. In both we are shown man, apparently dealing with supernatural forces, firmly believing in their existence and his relations with them, and acting upon their suggestions, and yet all working out in accordance with natural lawsincluding the superstitions of man as natural forces-but working out under the absolute dominion of a power all-wise and supreme, and in accordance with its law of retribution for crime. In both the man is a free agent, his judgment untrammelled, his responsibility recognized and his actions such as he may conceive and determine, except in so far as they may be modified by equal or controlled by superior natural forces, or by the universal law.

This genuine Calvinistic view of life, as distinguished from a blind fatalism on the one hand, and a licentious free-will upon the other, is the common law of the Shakespearian drama; but it is more clearly. apparent in Hamlet and Macbeth than in any of the rest. It is freedom within limits, and a coextensive moral responsibility. It is freedom of action under Hamlet's

"There's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow,"

or in his

"There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will,"

in which speaks, with cheerful acknowledgment, a man who is conscious of only righteous aims; and Macbeth's

"But in these cases we still have judgment here,

That we but teach bloody instructions, which being taught,
Return to plague the inventor,"

in which speaks, in grudging acknowledgment, a man whose every aim is evil, and for that which crime alone can procure. Between free-will and fixed fate, 'twixt which "life hovers like a star," both dramas wonderfully move and have their being. In accordance with the rule of the law of retribution and the manifestation of the moral power, and the rule of its law-giver, it is clear that it matters not whether Hamlet drive straight on to vengeance, or yield, as he does, to a mental hesitancy and a halting disposition, all must work out, as it does, in retributive justice. It matters not whether the otherwiseboth as a soldier before the murder and as a king after the murderprompt and decided Macbeth halt on his way to murder, as he does with a moral as Hamlet with a mental and emotional hesitancy, or whether he drive straight on to his purpose: whether he halt and stumble after the murder, as he did before; or whether he shall, as he does, drive straight toward new and bloodier ends, as prompt and decided as when he routed Norway, vanquished Sweno, and scattered the skipping kerns and gallowglasses of domestic rebellion, the same end must be reached under the rule of a higher and an overruling power.

In and for these two dramatic worlds, the law is the universal law of retributive justice. There is for them both a divinity that shapes our ends, such special providence as there is in the fall of a sparrow, and the end must be retributive justice, despite all listening, by the way, to supernatural agencies, despite all leaning with too credulous car to ghost or witch counsel, and despite all human effort. In Hamlet and Macbeth, profoundly philosophical and deeply poetical, but thoroughly practical dramas of human life, we have a rigid use of only man's belief in the supernatural; in A Midsummer Night's Dream and in The Tempest, pitched upon a lofty plane of pure poetry, as far above the ordinary dramatic plane as that is above the plane of real life, we have the actual supernatural working out results impossible to natural forces; and, in these two groups of two dramas each, lies all there is of the supernatural in the Shakespearian drama.

H. M. DOAK.

THE HOUSE KNOWN AS SHAKESPEARE'S BIRTHPLACE.

THE recent purchase by trustees created by act of Parliament for the preservation of Shakespeare relics of the Anne Hathaway cottage recalls the matters and things which had led previously to the purchase of the house in Henley Street, known, and very properly so, as the house in which William Shakespeare was born.

We say, "very properly so known," since, although there is the preliminary doubt-growing from the long state of truly British neglect in which all Stratford-on-Avon matters connected with the actual life of Shakespeare remained-the records in this case point to genuineness.

When Dr. Johnson said that the death of David Garrick "eclipsed the gayety of nations," he was only indulging in one of his sonorous hyperboles. Garrick was not known out of England, nor outside of that not very grand division which constituted its theatre-goers in the eighteenth century. What reputation Garrick may be said to have had, or to have to-day, among "nations" comes from the fact that, from whatever motive, he did first call attention to the Stratford vestiges of Shakespeare, and so first suggest their preservation.

In the year 1769 Garrick, who had found the stage still resonant of Shakespeare, and Hamlet and Richard III. its standards then as now, conceived the idea of going down to William Shakespeare's birth-town,

236 HOUSE KNOWN AS SHAKESPEARE'S BIRTHPLACE.

and there holding a series of pageants to constitute a jubilee in the great dramatist's honor. Dr. Halliwell-Phillipps is right in speaking very contemptuously of this jubilee, and is warranted, we think, in intimating that the jubilee was proposed more as an advertisement to the living David Garrick than to a glorification of the dead William Shakespeare. Indeed a résumé of the programme seems to suggest as much. "The opening of the celebration," says Dr. Halliwell-Phillipps, "having been announced in early morning by a cannonade, the lady visitors were serenaded in rotation by young men attired in fancy costume, and when everybody had thus been thoroughly aroused Garrick was presented by the corporation with a medal and a wand, both made from relics of the famous mulberry tree, bells and cannon announcing the actor's acceptance of the gifts. Then there were public feasts, more serenading, an oratorio at the church, elaborate processions, masquerade balls, illuminations, fireworks, horse-races and an unlimited supply of drummers. In the midst of this tomfoolery the presiding genius of the show recited an ode in praise of the great dramatist." But even this was more than had been done before.

This jubilee was in 1769. At that date there stood in Henley Street the tenement of which our frontispiece (from a picture made in 1708) is an accurate semblance. It had been mentioned in one Winter's plan of Stratford as "the house where Shakespeare was born." We know now, principally from Dr. Halliwell-Phillipps' exhaustive investigations, that this house and one other were purchased by John Shakespeare, the dramatist's father, in 1556. The fact of this purchase being established, the selection of this particular house as the actual birthplace of William Shakespeare seems to have been acquiesced in upon Garrick's arrival in Stratford with his jubilee. And the house. he saw is the one represented in the frontispiece of the present number of SHAKESPEARIANA. That Garrick's disinterestedness did not extend further than the glorification of the memory of the dramatist is apparent from the fact that he left the old house as it stood: remaining in private hands; so that, as appears by our view of the premises in 1806, it was on that date an inn. And it remained in private hands until the proposition of the late Mr. Barnum in 1849 to purchase the building and transport it intact to the United States roused up the British pride in their greatest poet, and proceedings were taken. by which the premises passed by auction into the hands of a committee of gentlemen, who in their turn in 1866 surrendered the legal estate, under a public trust, into the hands of the corporation of Stratford.