Elizabethan Demonology | Page 5

religious order was another. Here, then, we have
a full explanation of Camiola's conduct. She is in possession of
evidence of a contract of marriage between herself and Bertoldo, which,
whether in praesenti or _in futuro_, being confirmed by oath, she can
force upon him, and which will invalidate his proposed marriage with

the duchess. Having established her right, she takes the only step that
can with certainty free both herself and Bertoldo from the bond they
had created, by retiring into a nunnery.
[Footnote 1: Swinburne, p. 227.]
This explanation renders the action of the play clear, and at the same
time shows that Shakspere in his conduct with regard to his marriage
may have been behaving in the most honourable and praiseworthy
manner; as the bond, with the date of which the date of the birth of his
first child is compared, is for the purpose of exonerating the
ecclesiastics from any liability for performing the ecclesiastical
ceremony, which was not at all a necessary preliminary to a valid
marriage, so far as the husband and wife were concerned, although it
was essential to render issue of the marriage legitimate.
6. These are instances of the deceptions that are likely to arise from the
two fertile sources that have been specified. There can be no doubt that
the existence of errors arising from the former source--misapprehension
of the meaning of words--is very generally admitted, and effectual
remedies have been supplied by modern scholars for those who will
make use of them. Errors arising from the latter source are not so
entirely recognized, or so securely guarded against. But what has just
been said surely shows that it is of no use reading a writer of a past age
with merely modern conceptions; and, therefore, that if such a man's
works are worth study at all, they must be read with the help of the
light thrown upon them by contemporary history, literature, laws, and
morals. The student must endeavour to divest himself, as far as possible,
of all ideas that are the result of a development subsequent to the time
in which his author lived, and to place himself in harmony with the life
and thoughts of the people of that age: sit down with them in their
homes, and learn the sources of their loves, their hates, their fears, and
see wherein domestic happiness, or lack of it, made them strong or
weak; follow them to the market-place, and witness their dealings with
their fellows--the honesty or baseness of them, and trace the cause;
look into their very hearts, if it may be, as they kneel at the devotion
they feel or simulate, and become acquainted with the springs of their
dearest aspirations and most secret prayers.
7. A hard discipline, no doubt, but not more hard than salutary. Salutary
in two ways. First, as a test of the student's own earnestness of purpose.

For in these days of revival of interest in our elder literature, it has
become much the custom for flippant persons, who are covetous of
being thought "well-read" by their less-enterprising companions, to
skim over the surface of the pages of the wisest and noblest of our great
teachers, either not understanding, or misunderstanding them. "I have
read Chaucer, Shakspere, Milton," is the sublimely satirical expression
constantly heard from the mouths of those who, having read words set
down by the men they name, have no more capacity for reading the
hearts of the men themselves, through those words, than a blind man
has for discerning the colour of flowers. As a consequence of this
flippancy of reading, numberless writers, whose works have long been
consigned to a well-merited oblivion, have of late years been
disinterred and held up for public admiration, chiefly upon the ground
that they are ancient and unknown. The man who reads for the sake of
having done so, not for the sake of the knowledge gained by doing so,
finds as much charm in these petty writers as in the greater, and hence
their transient and undeserved popularity. It would be well, then, for
every earnest student, before beginning the study of any one having
pretensions to the position of a master, and who is not of our own
generation, to ask himself, "Am I prepared thoroughly to sift out and
ascertain the true import of every allusion contained in this volume?"
And if he cannot honestly answer "Yes," let him shut the book, assured
that he is not impelled to the study of it by a sincere thirst for
knowledge, but by impertinent curiosity, or a shallow desire to obtain
undeserved credit for learning.
8. The second way in which such a discipline will prove salutary is this:
it will prevent the student from straying too far afield in