Shakspere, Personal Recollections | Page 4

his immortal productions.
Shakspere's chirography was almost as variable as his mind, and when
he sat down to compose plays for the Globe and Blackfriars theatres, in
his room adjacent to the Miter Tavern, he dashed off chunks of thought
for pressing and waiting actors and managers, piecing them together
like a cabinet joiner or machinist.
In all his compositions he used, designedly, a pale blue ink that
evaporated in the course of a year, and the cunning actors and
publishers, who knew his secret, copied and memorized and printed his

immortal thoughts. He kept a small bottle of indelible ink for ideals on
parchment for posterity.
I have often found his room littered and covered with numbered sheets
of scenes and acts, ready for delivery to actors for recital, and many
times the sunset over London would run its round to sunrise and find
William at his desk in the rookery, hammering away on the anvil of
thought, fusing into shape his divine masterpieces.
Shakspere's bohemian life was but an enlarged edition of his rural
vagabond career through the fields and alehouses of Warwickshire. He
only needed about four hours' sleep in twenty-four, but when
composition on occasion demanded rapidity, he could work two days
and rise from his labor as fresh as a lark from the flowery bank of
Avon.
Most of the great writers of antiquity patterned after greater than
themselves, but Shakspere evolved from the illuminated palace of his
soul the songs and sentiments that move the ages and make him the
colossal champion of beauty, mercy, charity, purity, courage, love and
truth.
There are more numerous nuggets of thought in the works of Shakspere
than in all the combined mass of ancient and modern literature.
The various bibles, composed and manufactured by man, cannot
compare in variety, common sense and eloquence, with the productions
of the Immortal Bard.
All the preachers, bishops, popes, kings, and emperors that have ever
conjured up texts and creeds for dupes, devotees and designers to
swallow without question, have never yet sunk the plummet of reason
so deep in the human heart as the butcher boy of Stratford!
Shakspere was the most industrious literary prospector and miner of
any land or time, throwing his searchlight of reason into the crude mass
of Indian, Assyrian, Persian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Frank, German,
Russian and Briton lore, and forthwith appropriated the golden beauties

of each nation, leaving behind the dross of vice and vulgarity.
Marlowe, Burbage, Peele, Chapman, Greene and Jonson composed
many fine physical and licentious dramas, pandering to the London
groundlings, bloated wealth and accidental power; but Shakspere threw
a spiritual radiance over their brutal, sordid phrases and elevated stage
characters into the realm of romantic thought, pinioned with hope, love
and truth. His sublime imagination soared away into the flowery
uplands of Divinity, and plucked from the azure wings of angels
brilliant feathers of fancy that shall shine and flutter down the ages.
He flung his javelin of wit through the buckler of ignorance, bigotry
and tyranny, exposing their rotten bodies to the ridicule and hate of
mankind.
In lordly language he swept over the harp strings of the heart with
infinite expression and comprehension of words, leaving in his
intellectual wake a multifarious heritage of brain jewels. He flew over
the world like a swarm of bees, robbing all the fields of literature of
their secret sweets, storing the rich booty of Nature in the honeycomb
of his philosophic hive.
Through his brain the variegated paraphernalia of Nature, in field,
forest, vale, mount, river, sea and sky were illuminated with a divine
radiance that shall shine forever and grow greater as mankind grows
wiser.
Shakspere has paid the greatest tribute of respect of any writer to
women. While he gives us a few scolding, licentious, cruel, criminal
women, like Dame Quickly, Katharina, Tamora, Gertrude and Lady
Macbeth, he gives us the beautiful, faithful, loving characters of
Isabella, Juliet, Desdemona, Perdita, Helena, Miranda, Imogen, Ophelia
and Cordelia, whose love-lit words and phrases shine out in the
firmament of purity and devotion like morning stars in tropic skies.
Shakspere studied all trades and professions he encountered in daily
contact with mankind. He thought what he was and was what he
thought! To him a sermon was a preacher, a writ a lawyer, a pill a

doctor, a sail a sailor, a sword a soldier, a button a tailor, a nail a
carpenter, a hammer a blacksmith, a trowel a stone mason, a pebble a
geologist, a flower a botanist, a ray of light an astronomer, and even a
word gave him ample suggestion to build up an empire of thought.
He sailed upon the tides and currents of the human heart, and steered
through the cliffs and caverns of the brain with greater glory