perceived and absorbed its form and pressure at the lightning pace which his intuitive faculty alone could master. We may apply to him his own words in his description of the training of his hero Posthumus, in Cymbeline. He had at command The geo point of view. The world was Shakespeare's oyster which he with pen could open. The mere geographical aspect of his dramas proves his width of outlook beyond English boundaries. In no less than twenty-six plays of the graphical whole thirty-seven are we transported for a space to foreign towns. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, in Timon of Athens, Athens is our home, and so occasionally in Antony and Cleopatra. Ephesus was the scene of The Comedy of Errors and part of the play of Pericles. Messina, in Sicily, is presented in Much Ado About Nothing, as well as in Antony and Cleopatra, which also takes us to Alexandria, to a plain in Syria, and to Actium. Pericles introduces us to Antioch, Tarsus, Pentapolis, Mytilene, together with Ephesus; Troilus and Cressida to Troy; and Othello to Cyprus. In no less than five plays the action passes in Rome. Not only is the ancient capital of the world the scene of the Roman plays Titus Andronicus, Coriolanus, Julius Cæsar, and Antony and Cleopatra, but in Cymbeline much that is important to the plot is developed in the same surroundings. Of all the historic towns of northern Italy can the like story be told. Hardly any European country is entirely omitted from Shakespeare's map of the world. The Winter's Tale takes us to Sicily and Bohemia; Twelfth Night to an unnamed city in Illyria; Hamlet to Elsinore in Denmark; Measure for Measure to Vienna, and Love's Labour's Lost to Navarre. Shakespeare's plays teach much of the geography of Europe. Geo graphical But none must place unchecked reliance on the geographical details which Shakespeare supplies. The want of exact scholarship which is character blunders. istic of Shakespeare's attitude to literary study, is especially noticeable in his geographical assertions. He places a scene in The Winter's Tale in Bohemia 'in a desert country near the sea.' Unluckily Bohemia has no seaboard. Shakespeare's looseness of statement is common to him and at least one contemporary. In this description of his Bohemian scene, Shakespeare followed the English novelist, Robert Greene, from whom he borrowed the plot of A Winter's Tale. A fantastic endeavour has been made to justify the error by showing that Apulia, a province on the seacoast of Italy, was sometimes called Bohemia. The only just deduction to be drawn from Shakespeare's bestowal of a seacoast on Bohemia, is that he declined with unscholarly indifference to submit himself to bonds of mere literal fact. Shakespeare's dramatic purpose was equally well served, whether his geographical information was correct or incorrect, and it was rarely that he attempted independent verification. In his Roman plays he literally depended on North's popular translation of Plutarch's Lives. He was content to take North as his final authority, and wherever North erred Shakespeare erred with him. In matters of classical geography and topography he consequently stumbled with great frequency, and quite impenitently. In Antony and Cleopatra Shakespeare includes Lydia among the Queen of Egypt's provinces or possessions. Lydia is a district in Asia Minor with which Cleopatra never had relation. Plutarch wrote quite correctly that the district of Libya in North Africa was for a time under the Queen of Egypt's sway. Shakespeare fell blindly into the error, caused by a misprint or misreading, of which no scholar acquainted with classical geography was likely to be guilty. Again, in Julius Cæsar, there are many errors of like kind due to like causes-to casual acts of carelessness on the part of the English translator, which Shakespeare adopted without scruple. Mark Antony in Shakespeare describes the gardens which Cæsar bequeathed to the people of Rome as on this side of the Tiber-on the same side as the Forumwhere the crowded streets and population left no room for gardens. Plutarch had correctly described the Tiber gardens as lying across the Tiber, on the opposite side to that where the Forum lay. A very simple mistake had been committed by North or his printers: on that side of the Tiber' had been misread on this side.' But Shakespeare was oblivious of a confusion, which would be readily perceived by one personally acquainted with Rome, or one who had studied Roman topography. IX foreign But more interesting than the mere enumeration of details of Shakespeare's scenes or of the literature that he absorbed is it to consider in broad outline how his knowl- The edge of foreign literature worked on his imagina- spirit in tion, how far it affected his outlook on life. How Shakespeare. far did Shakespeare catch the distinctive characteristics of the inhabitants of foreign lands and cities who fill his stage? How much genuine foreign spirit did he breathe into the foreign names? Various answers have been given to this inquiry. There are schools of critics which deny to Shakespeare's foreign creations-to the Roman characters of Julius Cæsar, or to the Italian characters of Romeo and Juliet and Othello-any national or individual traits. All, we are told by some, are to the backbone Elizabethan Englishmen and Englishwomen. Others insist that they are universal types of human nature in which national idiosyncrasies have no definite place. Neither verdict is satisfactory. No one disputes that Shakespeare handled the universal features of humanity, the traits common to all mankind. On the surface the highest manifestations of the great passions-ambition, jealousy, unrequited love-are the same throughout the world and have no peculiarly national colour. But, to the seeing eye, men and women, when yielding to emotions that are universal, take something from the bent of their education, from the tone of the climate and scenery that environs them. The temperament of the untutored savage differs from that of the civilised man; the predominating mood of northern peoples differs from that of southern peoples. Shakespeare was far too enlightened a student of human nature, whether he met men and women in life or literature, to ignore such facts as these. His study of foreign literature especially brought them home to him, and gave him opportunities of realising the distinctions in human character that are due to race or climate. Of this knowledge he took full advantage. Lovemaking is universal, but Shakespeare recognised the diversities of amorous emotion and expression which race and climate engender. What contrast can be greater than the boisterous bluntness in which the English king, Henry v., gives expression to his love, and the pathetic ardour in which Historic the young Italians Romeo and Ferdinand urge sensibility. their suits? Intuitively, perhaps involuntarily, Shakespeare with his unrivalled sureness of insight impregnated his characters with such salient features of their national idiosyncrasies as made them true to the environment that was appointed for them in the work of fiction or history on which he founded his drama. As the poet read old novels and old chronicles, his dramatic genius stirred in him a rare force of historic imagination and sensibility. Study developed in Shakespeare an historic sense of a surer quality than that with which any professed historian has yet been gifted. Cæsar and Brutus, of whom Shakespeare learned all he knew in the pages of Plutarch, are more alive in the drama of Julius Cæsar than in the pages of the historian Mommsen. Cleopatra is the historic queen of Egypt, and no living portrait of her is known outside Shakespeare. No minor errors in detail destroy the historic vraisemblance of any of Shakespeare's dramatic pictures. Shakespeare Fidelity phere.' The word 'atmosphere' is hackneyed in the critical jargon of the day. Yet the term has graphic value. apprehended the true environment of the heroes and heroines to whom his reading of history or romance introduced him, because no writer had a keener, quicker sense of atmosphere than he. The comedies and tragedies, of which the scene is laid in Southern Europe, in Italy or Greece or Egypt, are all instinct with the hot passion, the gaiety, the lightness of heart, the quick jest, the crafty intrigue, which breathe the warm air, the brilliant sunshine, the deep shadows, the long days of southern skies. The great series of the English history plays, with the bourgeois supplement of The Merry Wives, is, like the dramas of British legend, Macbeth and King Lear and Cymbeline, mainly confined to English or British scenery. Apart from them, only one Shakespearian play carries the reader to a northern clime, or touches northern history. The rest take him to the south and introduce him to southern lands. The one northern play is Hamlet. The introspective melancholy |