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head, and fool enough to provoke the armed fist of his betters." In Shakespeare's play none are too high nor too sacred to be free from the venom of his tongue. Achilles, Hector, Agamemnon himself, and even old Nestor, all come in for his abuse; he even abuses himself; he berates Trojans and Greeks, individually and collectively, the war, and the object of the war, with all the scurrilous invective of an analytic and inventive, but distorted and envious, mentality.

In personifying Chapman's repellent disposition and envious nature in this character, the subtlety and strength of the attack revealed against that poet exceed, in satirical point and force, anything of a like nature in our tongue.

If the personal touches in Chapman's original poems, from the earliest to the latest, be followed, a most abnormally envious, self-centered, and misanthropic individuality, accentuating in bitterness with the years, will be displayed. The character of Thersites, extravagant caricature as at first sight it may appear, pales into a resemblance very near to portraiture, when compared with the personality there to be found. Much of the force and sting of the satire lies in the fact that Shakespeare uses Chapman's own personality in this character, to cast in clear relief the moral obliquity and low ethical standards of the gods of that poet's own ardent worship and fulsome praise.

Chapman claims supremacy for Homer, not only as a poet, but as a moralist, and, as I have hitherto noticed, extends his claims for moral altitude to in

clude the heroes of his epics. Shakespeare divests the Greek heroes of the glowing, but misty, nimbus of legend and mythology, and presents them to us in the light of common day, and as men in a world of men. In a modern Elizabethan setting he pictures these Greeks and Trojans, almost exactly as they appear in the sources from which he works. He does not stretch the truth of what he finds, nor draw willfully distorted pictures, and yet, the Achilles, the Ulysses, the Ajax, etc., which we find in the play, have lost their demigodlike pose. How does he do it? The masterly realistic and satirical effect he produces comes wholly from a changed point of view. He displays pagan Greek and Trojan life in action-with its low ideals of religion, womanhood, and honor; with its bloodiness and sensuality-upon a background from which he has eliminated historical perspective. Thus, in the light of Christian civilization and chivalric ideals, Achilles becomes a disgruntled bully and coward; Ajax a frothy boaster; Patroclus a pimp; Nestor a dotard; Diomed a libertine; Agamemnon a mock king; Ulysses a Machiavellian opportunist; and Helen and Cressida wantons. The satirical effect is vastly

enhanced, and its intention revealed, by the introduction of the character of Thersites, which runs as a scornful and gibing commentary through the whole play.

While Shakespeare was, no doubt, moved in the first place to this satire by personal considerations incidental to his enmity to Chapman, I cannot but believe that, in Chapman's exorbitant claims for

"divine Homer," and in the incongruous religiosity with which he invested Homer's heroes, and the high moral plane upon which he placed them, Shakespeare's sane and judicial mind not only recognized the falsity and sham, but, to some extent, apprehended the evil effect which such an extravagant admiration and indiscriminate acceptance of oldworld and pagan ideals might have, not only upon our budding English literature, but even upon English life.

After the death of Shakespeare, and indeed for some time before it, the classicist movement inaugurated by the Renaissance gained by slow, but sure, stages upon our distinctively English literature and threatened for a long period to quite engulf it, but the healthy growth which it had already attained in Elizabethan days, and the established status which the dominant pen of Shakespeare, and the fine discrimination of the translators of the authorized version of the Bible had given our English tongue, enabled it in time to reassert itself, strengthened and beautified by the classicist purgation through which it had passed.

It is curious and interesting, then, to notice almost at the inception of the classicist movement the unavowed, but real champions of these divergent schools, moved apparently by a personal enmity, locking horns in combat, unconsciously, but none the less really, over an issue which it took two more centuries to decide.

CHAPTER XI.

CONCLUSION.

I DOUBT if any reader who has followed the arguments and proofs which I have adduced in the foregoing pages will fail to see that the patron, the rival, and the mistress of the Sonnets, were living actualities. The identity of the patron and rival, I believe, is definitely proved; I have not attempted to prove that of the "dark lady," but think that it may yet be done. In 1594, on September 3, a poem called "Willobie his Avisa" was licensed for publication. In the following prefatory verses to that poem we have one of the earliest extant mentions of Shakespeare's name.

"In Lavine land, though Livy boast

There hath been seen a constant dame;
Though Rome lament that she have lost
The garland of her rarest fame;
Yet now we see that here is found,
As great a faith in English ground.
Though Collatine have dearly bought
To high renown a lasting life

And found, that, most in vain have sought
To have a fair and constant wife

Yet Tarquin pluckt his glittering grape

And Shakespeare paints poor Lucrece' rape.”

Here we have Shakespeare mentioned by name. Two of the characters in the story of this poem have initials which coincide exactly with those of Shakespeare and Southampton: " Henry Willobie and W. S." The libelous nature and intention of the poem is revealed in the fact that, upon its second issue in 1596, it was condemned by the public censor and withdrawn from print.

I am strongly of the opinion, held by many critics, that this poem refers to Shakespeare and Southampton, and to their acquaintance with the "dark lady" of the Sonnets, who is here given the name of 'Avisa," but I do not agree with those same critics in the opinion that this poem refers to the period of the affair with the "dark lady" revealed in the Sonnets, but am inclined to believe that it alludes to an earlier period of Shakespeare's acquaintance with this woman, which antedates this affair by nearly two years.

Shakespeare's attack upon Chapman's "Amorous Zodiac," in the 20th and 21st Sonnets, and his references to the "Coronet for his Mistress Philosophy," in the 69th and 70th Sonnets, which I date shortly after the issue of these poems in 1595, were all anterior to Sonnets 30, 31, and 32, 40, 41, and 42, which reveal Southampton's culpability. The following lines from the 70th Sonnet are undoubtedly of an earlier time:

"And thou present'st a pure unstained prime. Thou hast passed by the ambush of young days, Either not assail'd, or victor being charged."

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