Emerson's Essays Part 10

[Footnote 517: Luther. (See note 188.)]

[Footnote 518: Jacob Behmen. A German mystic of the sixteenth century; his name is usually written Boehme.]

[Footnote 519: George Fox. (See note 202.)]

[Footnote 520: James Naylor. An English religious enthusiast of the seventeenth century; he was first a Puritan and later a Quaker.]

[Footnote 521: Operose. Laborious.]

[Footnote 522: Outskirt and far-off reflection, etc. Compare with this pa.s.sage Emerson's poem, The Forerunners.]

[Footnote 523: Oedipus. In Greek mythology, the King of Thebes who solved the riddle of the Sphinx, a fabled monster.]

[Footnote 524: Prunella. A widely scattered plant, called self-heal, because a decoction of its leaves and stems was, and to some extent is, valued as an application to wounds. An editor comments on the fact that during the last years of Emerson's life "the little blue self-heal crept into the gra.s.s before his study window."]

SHAKESPEARE; OR, THE POET.

[Footnote 525: Shakespeare; or the Poet is one of seven essays on great men in various walks of life, published in 1850 under the t.i.tle of Representative Men. These essays were first delivered as lectures in Boston in the winter of 1845, and were repeated two years later before English audiences. They must have been especially interesting to those Englishmen who had, seven years before, heard Emerson's friend, Carlyle, deliver his six lectures on great men whom he selected as representative ones. These lectures were published under the t.i.tle of Heroes and Hero-Wors.h.i.+p. You should read the latter part of Carlyle's lecture on The Hero as Poet and compare what he says about Shakespeare with Emerson's words. Both Emerson and Carlyle reverenced the great English poet as "the master of mankind." Even in serious New England, the plays of Shakespeare were found upon the bookshelf beside religious tracts and doctrinal treatises. There the boy Emerson found them and learned to love them, and the man Emerson loved them but the more. It was as a record of personal experiences that he wrote in his journal: "Shakespeare fills us with wonder the first time we approach him. We go away, and work and think, for years, and come again,--he astonishes us anew. Then, having drank deeply and saturated us with his genius, we lose sight of him for another period of years. By and by we return, and there he stands immeasurable as at first. We have grown wiser, but only that we should see him wiser than ever. He resembles a high mountain which the traveler sees in the morning and thinks he shall quickly near it and pa.s.s it and leave it behind. But he journeys all day till noon, till night. There still is the dim mountain close by him, having scarce altered its bearings since the morning light."]

[Footnote 526: Genius. Here instead of speaking as in Friends.h.i.+p, see note 286, of the genius or spirit supposed to preside over each man's life, Emerson mentions the guardian spirit of human kind.]

[Footnote 527: Shakespeare's youth, etc. It is impossible to appreciate or enjoy this essay without having some clear general information about the condition of the English people and English literature in the glorious Elizabethan age in which Shakespeare lived. Consult, for this information, some brief history of England and a comprehensive English literature.]

[Footnote 528: Puritans. Strict Protestants who became so powerful in England that in the time of the Commonwealth they controlled the political and religious affairs of the country.]

[Footnote 529: Anglican Church. The Established Church of England; the Episcopal church.]

[Footnote 530: Punch. The chief character in a puppet show, hence the puppet show itself.]

[Footnote 531: Kyd, Marlowe, Greene, etc. For an account of these dramatists consult a text book on English literature. The English drama seems to have begun in the Middle Ages with what were called Miracle plays, which were scenes from Bible history; about the same time were performed the Mystery plays, which dramatized the lives of saints. These were followed by the Moralities, plays in which were personified abstract virtues and vices. The first step in the creation of the regular drama was taken by Heywood, who composed some farcical plays called Interludes. The people of the sixteenth century were fond of pageants, shows in which cla.s.sical personages were introduced, and Masques, which gradually developed from pageants into dramas accompanied with music. About the middle of the sixteenth century, rose the English drama,--comedy, tragedy, and historical plays. The chief among the group of dramatists who attained fame before Shakespeare began to write were Kyd, Marlowe, Greene, and Peele. Ben Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher rank next to Shakespeare among his contemporaries, and among the other dramatists of the period were Chapman, Dekker, Webster, Heywood, Middleton, Ford, and Ma.s.singer.]

[Footnote 532: At the time when, etc. Probably about 1585.]

[Footnote 533: Tale of Troy. Drama founded on the Trojan war. The subject of famous poems by Latin and Greek poets.]

[Footnote 534: Death of Julius Caesar. An account of the plots which ended in the a.s.sa.s.sination of the great Roman general.]

[Footnote 535: Plutarch. See note on Heroism(264). Shakespeare, like the earlier dramatists, drew freely on Plutarch's Lives for material.]

[Footnote 536: Brut. A poetical version of the legendary history of Britain, by Layamon. Its hero is Brutus, a mythical King of Britain.]

[Footnote 537: Arthur. A British King of the sixth century, around whose life and deeds so many legends have grown up that some historians say he, too, was a myth. He is the center of the great cycle of romances told in prose in Mallory's Morte d'Arthur and in poetry in Tennyson's Idylls of the King.]

[Footnote 538: The royal Henries. Among the dramas popular in Shakespeare's day which he retouched or rewrote are the historical plays. Henry IV., First and Second Parts; Henry V; Henry VI., First, Second, and Third Parts; and Henry VIII.]

[Footnote 539: Italian tales. Italian literature was very popular in Shakespeare's day, and authors drew freely from it for material, especially from the Decameron, a famous collection of a hundred tales, by Boccaccio, a poet of the fourteenth century.]

[Footnote 540: Spanish voyages. In the sixteenth century, Spain was still a power upon the high seas, and the tales of her conquests and treasures in the New World were like tales of romance.]

[Footnote 541: Prestige. Can you give an English equivalent for this French word?]

[Footnote 542: Which no single genius, etc. In the same way, some critics a.s.sure us, the poems credited to the Greek poet, Homer, were built up by a number of poets.]

[Footnote 543: Malone. An Irish critic and scholar of the eighteenth century, best known by his edition of Shakespeare's plays.]

[Footnote 544: Wolsey's Soliloquy. See Shakespeare's Henry VIII. III, 2. Cardinal Wolsey was prime minister of England in the reign of Henry VIII.]

[Footnote 545: Scene with Cromwell. See Henry VIII. III, 2. Thomas Cromwell was the son of an English blacksmith; he rose to be lord high chamberlain of England in the reign of Henry VIII., but, incurring the King's displeasure, was executed on a charge of treason.]

[Footnote 546: Account of the coronation. See Henry VIII. IV, 1.]

[Footnote 547: Compliment to Queen Elizabeth. See Henry VIII. V, 5.]

[Footnote 548: Bad rhythm. Too much importance must not be attached to these matters in deciding authors.h.i.+p, as critics disagree about them.]

[Footnote 549: Value his memory, etc. The Greeks, in appreciation of the value of memory to the poet, represented the Muses as the daughters of Mnemosyne, the G.o.ddess of memory.]

[Footnote 550: Homer. A Greek poet to whom is a.s.signed the authors.h.i.+p of the two greatest Greek poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey; he is said to have lived about a thousand years before Christ.]

[Footnote 551: Chaucer. (See note 33.)]

[Footnote 552: Saadi. A Persian poet, supposed to have lived in the thirteenth century. His best known poems are his odes.]

[Footnote 553: Presenting Thebes, etc. This quotation is from Milton's poem, Il Penseroso. Milton here names the three most popular subjects of Greek tragedy,--the story of Oedipus, the ill-fated King of Thebes who slew his father; the tale of the descendants of Pelops, King of Pisa, who seemed born to woe--Agamemnon was one of his grandsons; the third subject was the tale of Troy and the heroes of the Trojan war,--called "divine" because the Greeks represented even the G.o.ds as taking part in the contest.]

[Footnote 554: Pope. (See note 88.)]

[Footnote 555: Dryden. (See note 35.)]

[Footnote 556: Chaucer is a huge borrower. Taine, the French critic, says on this subject: "Chaucer was capable of seeking out in the old common forest of the Middle Ages, stories and legends, to replant them in his own soil and make them send out new shoots.... He has the right and power of copying and translating because by dint of retouching he impresses ... his original work. He recreates what he imitates."]

[Footnote 557: Lydgate. John Lydgate was an English poet who lived a generation later than Chaucer; in his Troy Book and other poems he probably borrowed from the sources used by Chaucer; he called himself "Chaucer's disciple."]

[Footnote 558: Caxton. William Caxton, the English author, more famous as the first English printer, was not born until after Chaucer's death. The work from which Emerson supposes the poet to have borrowed Caxton's translation of Recueil des Histoires de Troye, the first printed English book, appeared about 1474.]

[Footnote 559: Guido di Colonna. A Sicilian poet and historian of the thirteenth century. Chaucer in his House of Fame placed in his vision "on a pillar higher than the rest, Homer and Livy, Dares the Phrygian, Guido Colonna, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and the other historians of the war of Troy."]

[Footnote 560: Dares Phrygius. A Latin account of the fall of Troy, written about the fifth century, which pretends to be a translation of a lost work on the fall of Troy by Dares, a Trojan priest mentioned in Homer's Iliad.]

[Footnote 561: Ovid. A Roman poet who lived about the time of Christ, whose best-known work is the Metamorphoses, founded on cla.s.sical legends.]

[Footnote 562: Statius. A Roman poet of the first century after Christ.]

[Footnote 563: Petrarch. An Italian poet of the fourteenth century.]

[Footnote 564: Boccaccio. An Italian novelist and poet of the fourteenth century. See note on "Italian tales," 539. It is supposed that the plan of the Decameron suggested the similar but far superior plan of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.]

[Footnote 565: Provencal poets. The poets of Provence, a province of the southeastern part of France. In the Middle Ages it was celebrated for its lyric poets, called troubadours.]

[Footnote 566: Romaunt of the Rose, etc. Chaucer's _Romaunt of the Rose_, written during the period of French influence, is an incomplete and abbreviated translation of a French poem of the thirteenth century, Roman de la Rose, the first part of which was written by William of Loris and the latter by John of Meung, or Jean de Meung.]

[Footnote 567: Troilus and Creseide, etc. Chaucer ascribes the Italian poem which he followed in his Troilus and Creseide to an unknown "Lollius of Urbino"; the source of the poem, however, is _Il Filostrato_, by Boccaccio, the Italian poet already mentioned. Chaucer's poem is far more than a translation; more than half is entirely original, and it is a powerful poem, showing profound knowledge of the Italian poets, whose influence with him superseded the French poets.]

[Footnote 568: The c.o.c.k and the Fox. The Nun's Priest's Tale in the Canterbury Tales was an original treatment of the Roman de Renart, of Marie of France, a French poet of the twelfth century.]

[Footnote 569: House of Fame, etc. The plan of the House of Fame, written during the period of Chaucer's Italian influence, shows the influence of Dante; the general idea of the poem is from Ovid, the Roman poet.]

[Footnote 570: Gower. John Gower was an English poet, Chaucer's contemporary and friend; the two poets went to the same sources for poetic materials, but Chaucer made no such use of Gower's works as we would infer from this pa.s.sage. Emerson relied on his memory for facts, and hence made mistakes, as here in the instances of Lydgate, Caxton, and Gower.]

[Footnote 571: Westminster, Was.h.i.+ngton. What legislative body a.s.sembles at Westminster Palace, London? What at Was.h.i.+ngton?]

[Footnote 572: Sir Robert Peel. An English statesman who died in 1850, not long after Representative Men was published.]

[Footnote 573: Webster. Daniel Webster, an American statesman and orator who was living when this essay was written.]

[Footnote 574: Locke. John Locke. (See note 18.)]

[Footnote 575: Rousseau. Jean Jacques Rousseau, a French philosopher of the eighteenth century.]

[Footnote 576: Homer. (See note 550.)]

[Footnote 577: Menn. Menn, or Mann, was in Sanscrit one of fourteen legendary beings; the one referred to by Emerson, Mann Vaivasvata was supposed to be the author of the laws of Mann, a collection made about the second century.]

[Footnote 578: Saadi or Sadi. (See note 552.)]

[Footnote 579: Milton. Of this great English poet and prose writer of the seventeenth century, Emerson says: "No man can be named whose mind still acts on the cultivated intellect of England and America with an energy comparable to that of Milton. As a poet Shakespeare undoubtedly transcends and far surpa.s.ses him in his popularity with foreign nations: but Shakespeare is a voice merely: who and what he was that sang, that sings, we know not."]

[Footnote 580: Delphi. Here, source of prophecy. Delphi was a city in Greece, where was the oracle of Apollo, the most famous of the oracles of antiquity.]

[Footnote 581: Our English Bible. The version made in the reign of King James I. by forty-seven learned divines is a monument of n.o.ble English.]

[Footnote 582: Liturgy. An appointed form of wors.h.i.+p used in a Christian church,--here, specifically, the service of the Episcopal church. Emerson's mother had been brought up in that church, and though she attended her husband's church, she always loved and read her Episcopal prayer book.]

[Footnote 583: Grotius. Hugo Grotius was a Dutch jurist, statesman, theologian, and poet of the seventeenth century.]

[Footnote 584: Rabbinical forms. The forms used by the rabbis, Jewish doctors or expounders of the law.]

[Footnote 585: Common law. In a general sense, the system of law derived from England, in general use among English-speaking people.]

[Footnote 586: Vedas. The sacred books of the Brahmins.]

[Footnote 587: aesop's Fables. Fables ascribed to aesop, a Greek slave who lived in the sixth century before Christ.]

[Footnote 588: Pilpay, or Bidpai. Indian sage to whom were ascribed some fables. From an Arabic translation, these pa.s.sed into European languages and were used by La Fontaine, the French fabulist.]

[Footnote 589: Arabian Nights. _The Arabian Nights' Entertainment or A Thousand and One Nights_ is a collection of Oriental tales, the plan and name of which are very ancient.]

[Footnote 590: Cid. The Romances of the Cid, the story of the Spanish national hero, mentioned in note on Heroism139:5, was written about the thirteenth century by an unknown author; it supplied much of the material for two Spanish chronicles and Spanish and French tragedies written later on the same subject.]

[Footnote 591: Iliad. The poem in which the Greek, poet, Homer, describes the siege and fall of Troy. Emerson here expresses the view adopted by many scholars that it was the work, not of one, but of many men.]

[Footnote 592: Robin Hood. The ballads about Robin Hood, an English outlaw and popular hero of the twelfth century.]

[Footnote 593: Scottish Minstrelsy. _The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border_, a collection of original and collected poems, published by Sir Walter Scott in 1802.]

[Footnote 594: Shakespeare Society. The Shakespeare Society, founded in 1841, was dissolved in 1853. In 1874 The New Shakespeare Society was founded.]

[Footnote 595: Mysteries. See "Kyd, Marlowe, etc." 531.]

[Footnote 596: Ferrex and Porrex, or Gorboduc. The first regular English tragedy, by Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville, printed in 1565.]

[Footnote 597: Gammer Gurtor's Needle. One of the first English comedies, written by Bishop Still and printed in 1575.]

[Footnote 598: Whether the boy Shakespeare poached, etc. For a fuller account of the facts of Shakespeare's life, of which some traditions and facts are mentioned here, consult some good biography of the poet.]

[Footnote 599: Queen Elizabeth. Dining her reign, 1558-1603, the English drama rose and attained its height, and there was produced a prose literature hardly inferior to the poetic.]

[Footnote 600: King James. King James VI. of Scotland and I. of England who was Elizabeth's kinsman and successor; he reigned in England from 1603 to 1625.]

[Footnote 601: Ess.e.xes. Walter Devereux was a brave English gentleman whom Elizabeth made Earl of Ess.e.x in 1572. His son Robert, the second Earl of Ess.e.x, was a favorite of Queen Elizabeth's.]

[Footnote 602: Leicester. The Earl of Leicester, famous in Shakespeare's time, was Robert Dudley, an English courtier, politician, and general, the favorite of Queen Elizabeth.]

[Footnote 603: Burleighs or Burghleys: William Cecil, baron of Burghley, was an English statesman, who, for forty years, was Elizabeth's chief minister.]

[Footnote 604: Buckinghams. George Villiers, the first duke of Buckingham, was an English courtier and politician, a favorite of James I. and Charles I.]

[Footnote 605: Tudor dynasty. The English dynasty of sovereigns descended on the male side from Owen Tudor. It began with Henry VII. and ended with Elizabeth.]

[Footnote 606: Bacon. Consult English literature and history for an account of the great statesman and author, Francis Bacon, "the wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind."]

[Footnote 607: Ben Jonson, etc. In his Timber or Discoveries, Ben Jonson, a famous cla.s.sical dramatist contemporary with Shakespeare, says: "I loved the man and do honor his memory on this side idolatry as much as any. He was indeed honest and of an open and free nature: had an excellent fancy; brave notions and gentle expressions: wherein he flowed with that facility that sometimes it was necessary he should be stopped.... His wit was in his own power; would the rule of it had been so, too. Many times he fell into those things could not escape laughter.... But he redeemed his vices with his virtues. There was ever more in him to be praised than to be pardoned."]

[Footnote 608: Sir Henry Wotton. An English diplomatist and author of wide culture.]

[Footnote 609: The following persons, etc. The persons enumerated were all people of note of the seventeenth century. Sir Philip Sidney, Earl of Ess.e.x, Lord Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh, John Milton, Sir Henry Vane, Isaac Walton, Dr. John Donne, Abraham Cowley, Charles Cotton, John Pym, and John Hales were Englishmen, scholars, statesmen, and authors. Theodore Beza was a French theologian; Isaac Casaubon was a French-Swiss scholar; Roberto Berlarmine was an Italian cardinal; Johann Kepler was a German astronomer; Francis Vieta was a French mathematician; Albericus Gentilis was an Italian jurist; Paul Sarpi was an Italian historian; Arminius was a Dutch theologian.]

[Footnote 610: Many others whom doubtless, etc. Emerson here enumerates some famous English authors of the same period, not mentioned in the preceeding list.]

[Footnote 611: Pericles. See note on Heroism, 352.]

[Footnote 612: Lessing. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, a German critic and poet of the eighteenth century.]

[Footnote 613: Wieland. Christopher Martin Wieland was a German contemporary of Lessing's, who made a prose translation into German of Shakespeare's plays.]

[Footnote 614: Schlegel. August Wilhelm von Schlegel, a German critic and poet, who about the first of the nineteenth century translated some of Shakespeare's plays into cla.s.sical German.]

[Footnote 615: Hamlet. The hero of Shakespeare's play of the same name.]