Character Sketches of Romance Volume Iii Part 152

_Macbeth_, 1606. No early mention made of this play.

_Measure for Measure_, 1603. Acted at Whitehall[TN-171] 1604.

_Merry Wives of Windsor_, 1596. Printed 1602.

_Pericles Prince of Tyre._ Printed 1609.

_Taming of the Shrew._ (?) Acted at Henslow's Theatre, 1593.

Entered at Stationer's Hall, 1607.

_Tempest_, 1609. Acted at Whitehall, 1611.

_Timon of Athens_, 1609. No early mention made of this play.

_t.i.tus Andronicus_, 1593. Printed 1600.

_Twelfth Night._ Acted in the Middle Temple Hall, 1602.

_Two Gentlemen of Verona_, 1595. Mentioned by Meres[TN-172] 1598.

_Winter's Tale_, 1604. Acted at Whitehall, 1611.

First complete collection in folio; 1623, Isaac Jaggard and Ed. Blount; 1632, 1664, 1685. The second folio is of very little value.

_Shakespeare's Parents._ His father was John Shakespeare, a glover, who married Mary Arden, daughter of Robert Arden, Esq., of Bomich, a good country gentleman.

_Shakespeare's Wife_, Anne Hathaway, of Shottery, some eight years older than himself; daughter of a substantial yeoman.

_Shakespeare's Children._ One son, Hamnet, who died in his twelfth year (1585-1596). Two daughters, who survived him, Susanna and Judith, twin-born with Hamnet. Both his daughters married and had children, but the lines died out.

_Voltaire says of Shakespeare_: "Rimer had very good reason to say that Shakespeare _n'etait[TN-173] q'un vilain singe_." Voltaire, in 1765, said, "Shakespeare is a savage with some imagination, whose plays can please only in London and Canada." In 1735 he wrote to M. de Cideville, "Shakespeare is the Corneille of London, but everywhere else he is a great fool (_grand fou d'ailleur_)."

=Shakespeare of Divines= (_The_), Jeremy Taylor (1613-1667).

Taylor, the Shakespeare of divines.--Emerson.

=Shakespeare of Eloquence= (_The_). The comte de Mirabeau was so called by Barnave (1749-1791).

=Shakespeare of Germany= (_The_), Augustus Frederick Ferdinand von Kotzebue (1761-1819).

=Shakespeare of Prose Fiction= (_The_). Richardson, the novelist, is so called by D'Israeli (1689-1761).

=Shallow=, a weak-minded country justice, cousin to Slender. He is a great braggart, and especially fond of boasting of the mad pranks of his younger days. It is said that Justice Shallow is a satirical portrait of Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote, who prosecuted Shakespeare for deer-stealing.--Shakespeare, _The Merry Wives of Windsor_ (1596); and 2 _Henry IV._ (1598).

As wise as a justice of the quorum and custalorum in Shallow's time.--Macaulay.

=Shallum=, lord of a manor consisting of a long chain of rocks and mountains called Tirzah. Shallum was "of gentle disposition, and beloved both by G.o.d and man." He was the lover of Hilpa, a Chinese antediluvian princess, one of the 150 daughters of Zilpah, of the race of Cohu or Cain.--Addison, _Spectator_, viii. 584-5 (1712).

=Shalott= (_The lady of_), a poem by Tennyson, in four parts. Pt. i. tells us that the lady pa.s.sed her life in the island of Shalott in great seclusion, and was known only by the peasantry. Pt. ii. tells us that she was weaving a magic web, and that a curse would fall on her if she looked down the river. Pt. iii. describes how Sir Lancelot rode to Camelot in all his bravery; and the lady gazed at him as he rode along.

Pt. iv. tells us that the lady floated down the river in a boat called _The Lady of Shalott_, and died heart-broken on the way. Sir Lancelot came to gaze on the dead body, and exclaimed, "She has a lovely face, G.o.d in his mercy grant her grace!" This ballad was afterwards expanded into the _Idyll_ called "Elaine, the Lily Maid of Astolat" (_q.v._), the beautiful incident of Elaine and the barge being taken from the _History of Prince Arthur_, by Sir T. Malory.

"While my body is whole, let this letter be put into my right hand, and my hand bound fast with the letter until I be cold, and let me be put in a fair bed with all the richest clothes that I have about me, and so let my bed and all my rich clothes be laid with me in a chariot to the next place whereas the Thames is, and there let me be put in a barge, and but one man with me such as ye trust to steer me thither, and that my barge be covered with black samite over and over." ... So when she was dead, the corpse and the bed and all was led the next way unto to the Thames, and there a man and the corpse and all were put in a barge on the Thames, and so the man steered the barge to Westminster, and there he rowed a great while to and fro, or any man espied.--Pt. iii. 123.

King Arthur saw the body and had it buried, and Sir Lancelot made an offering, etc. (ch. 124); much the same as Tennyson has reproduced it in verse.

_Shalott_ (_The lady of_). "It is not generally known that the lady of Shalott lived, last summer, in an attic at the east end of South Street." Thus begins a story of an incurable invalid, whose only amus.e.m.e.nt is watching street scenes reflected in a small mirror hung opposite the one window of her garret-room. A stone flung by a boy shatters the mirror, and the fragile creature never recovers from the shock.--Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, _The Lady of Shalott_.

=Shamho'zai= (3 _syl._), the angel who debauched himself with women, repented, and hung himself up between earth and heaven.--Beres.h.i.+t rabbi (in _Gen._ vi. 2).

? Harut and Marut were two angels sent to be judges on earth. They judged righteously until Zohara appeared before them, when they fell in love with her, and were imprisoned in a cave near Babylon, where they are to abide till the day of judgment.

=Shandy= (_Tristram_), the nominal hero of Sterne's novel called _The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman_ (1759). He is the son of Walter and Elizabeth Shandy.

_Captain Shandy_, better known as "Uncle Toby," the real hero of Sterne's novel. Captain Shandy was wounded at Namur, and retired on half-pay. He was benevolent and generous, brave as a lion but simple as a child, most gallant and most modest. Hazlitt says that "the character of Uncle Toby is the finest compliment ever paid to human nature." His modest love-pa.s.sages with Widow Wadman, his kindly sympathy for Lieutenant Lefevre, and his military discussions, are wholly unrivalled.

_Aunt Dinah_ [_Shandy_], Walter Shandy's aunt. She bequeathed to him 1000, which Walter fancied would enable him to carry out all the wild schemes with which his head was crammed.

_Mrs. Elizabeth Shandy_, mother of Tristram Shandy. The ideal of nonent.i.ty, individual from its very absence of individuality.

_Walter Shandy_, Tristram's father, a metaphysical Don Quixote, who believes in long noses and propitious names; but his son's nose was crushed, and his name, which should have been Trismegistus ("the most propitious"), was changed in christening to Tristram ("the most unlucky"). If much learning can make man mad, Walter Shandy was certainly mad in all the affairs of ordinary life. His wife was a blank sheet, and he himself a sheet so written on and crossed and rewritten that no one could decipher the ma.n.u.script.--L. Sterne, _The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy_ (1759).

=Sharp=, the ordinary of Major Touchwood, who aids him in his transformation, but is himself puzzled to know which is the real and which the false colonel.--T. Dibdin, _What Next?_

_Sharp_ (_Rebecca_), the orphan daughter of an artist. "She was small and slight in person, pale, sandy-haired, and with green eyes, habitually cast down, but very large, odd, and attractive when they looked up." Becky had the "dismal precocity of poverty," and, being engaged as governess in the family of Sir Pitt Crawley, bart., contrived to marry, clandestinely, his son, Captain Rawdon Crawley, and taught him how to live in splendor "upon nothing a year." Becky was an excellent singer and dancer, a capital talker and wheedler, and a most attractive, but unprincipled, selfish, and unscrupulous woman. Lord Steyne introduced her to court; but her conduct with this peer gave rise to a terrible scandal, which caused a separation between her and Rawdon, and made England too hot to hold her. She retired to the Continent, was reduced to a Bohemian life, but ultimately attached herself to Joseph Sedley, whom she contrived to strip of all his money, and who lived in dire terror of her, dying in six months under very suspicious circ.u.mstances.--Thackeray, _Vanity Fair_ (1848).

_Sharp_ (_Timothy_), the "lying valet" of Charles Gayless. His object is to make his master, who has not a sixpence in the world, pa.s.s for a man of wealth in the eyes of Melissa, to whom he is engaged.--Garrick, _The Lying Valet_ (1741).

=Sharp-Beak=, the crow's wife, in the beast-epic called _Reynard the Fox_ (1498).

=Sharpe= (_The Right Rev. James_), archbishop of St. Andrew's, murdered by John Balfour (a leader in the covenanters' army) and his party.--Sir W.

Scott, _Old Mortality_ (time, Charles II.).

=Sharper= (_Master_), the cutler in the Strand.--Sir W. Scott, _Peveril of the Peak_ (time, Charles II.).