Culture And Values At The Heart Of Policy Making An Insiders Guide Stephen Muers

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5. CULTURE
& VALUES
AT THE HEART OF POLICY MAKING
AN INSIDER’S GUIDE
STEPHEN MUERS

6. CULTURE AND VALUES AT
THE HEART OF POLICY MAKING
An Insider’s Guide
Stephen Muers

7. First published in Great Britain in 2020 by
Policy Press
University of Bristol
1-9 Old Park Hill
Bristol
BS2 8BB
UK
t: [phone]
[email protected]
www.policypress.co.uk
© Policy Press 2020
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-4473-5615-8 paperback
ISBN 978-1-4473-5617-2 ePub
ISBN 978-1-4473-5616-5 ePdf
The right of Stephen Muers to be identifi ed as author of this work has been asserted
by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved: no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of Policy Press.
The statements and opinions contained within this publication are solely those of the
author and not of the University of Bristol or Policy Press. The University of Bristol
and Policy Press disclaim responsibility for any injury to persons or property resulting
from any material published in this publication.
Policy Press works to counter discrimination on grounds of gender, race, disability,
age and sexuality.
Cover design by Robin Hawes
Front cover image: iStock/Galore777
Printed and bound in Great Britain by CMP, Poole
Policy Press uses environmentally responsible print partners

8. To Jane and Robin, who taught me about
culture and values in all their forms

10. v
Contents
About the author vi
A
cknowledgements
vii
Introduction 1
1 What are culture and values? 7
P
art One: Why culture and values matter for public policy
19
2 Culture determines whether policies work 21
3 Culture and values determine whether policies 33
are legitimate
4 Arguments about values and the purpose of democracy 43
5 Governments can’t help affecting culture 57
P
art Two: How culture and values shape the political system
65
6 Values voters 67
7 Accountability in a values-driven system 85
P
art Three: How policy makers can take culture seriously
101
8 Taking symbols seriously 103
9 Doing more locally 113
10 Building organisations 129
11 Being smart about evidence 139
C
onclusion
151
Notes 155
References 159
Index 171

11. vi
About the author
Stephen Muers has held a range of senior policy-making and
strategy roles in the public and non-profit sectors. These have
included positions in the Cabinet Office, the Ministry of Justice,
the Department of Energy and Climate Change and the Prime
Minister’s Strategy Unit, and as non-executive director of an
NHS Trust. He is currently Head of Strategy and Market
Development at Big Society Capital, a trustee of the Friends
Provident Foundation and a Policy Fellow at the Institute for
Policy Research, University of Bath.

12. vii
Acknowledgements
The ideas that formed this book began to come together during
two days I spent at the University of Bath in April 2016 as a
Policy Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research. Professor
Nick Pearce, Director of the Institute, has been an invaluable
source of advice and support throughout the long subsequent
journey towards creating this book. I would never have reached
this point without his input.
I have drawn on many different experiences from my time
as a policy maker, and owe debts of insight to too many
colleagues to mention. However, my two periods in the Prime
Minister’s Strategy Unit (PMSU) were particularly important
both in shaping my thinking and in providing an extraordinary
network of talented people who care about public policy. So I
am especially grateful to the PMSU alumni, especially Gavin
Kelly (with whom I worked on the public value paper discussed
in Chapter 3) and David Knott (my co-author on the paper
I mention in the Introduction). Owain Service and David
Halpern were both fantastic colleagues during that period and
also kind enough to invite me to present my emerging ideas to
the Behavioural Insights Team.
Will Paxton at Kivu International is another ex-colleague
from the PMSU and provided me with some invaluable insights
into the international development literature as well as the
example from the recent Sri Lankan election mentioned in
Chapter 11. I am also grateful for the opportunity he arranged
for me to discuss my ideas with the wider Kivu team.
Some of the ideas in this book were trailed in my essay in
the collection Radical Visions for a Future Government, published
by Nesta in 2019. I’m grateful to Tom Symons and the rest of
the Nesta team for the opportunity to test some thinking in
that format.

13. Culture and Values at the Heart of Policy Making viii
The team at Policy Press – Laura Vickers-Rendall, Amelia
Watts-Jones and Millie Prekop – have been everything that a
first-time author could wish for: professional, encouraging, clear
and easy to work with.
I have been lucky to have close friends who have always been
prepared to indulge me in debating politics and policy issues, in
the process sharpening my thinking as well as having fun. In this
group I would particularly like to thank Steve Siddals, Thomas
Carter, Simon James, Sarah Donaldson and Mike Goldby.
Finally, I owe the greatest thanks of all to Olivia and Marcus,
without whose love and companionship writing a book would
feel neither worthwhile nor possible.

14. 1
Introduction
In 2007 I was working for the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit,
part of the Cabinet Office in London. The Labour Party had
been in a strong position in government for ten years, with
large majorities in Parliament and weak opposition. As he came
towards the end of his time as Prime Minister, Tony Blair initiated
a ‘policy review’, a process that aimed to look at the achievements
of his government and suggest directions for the future.
I was in charge of the section of this review looking at
public services – health, education, criminal justice and so on.
Improving these services had been a top priority for the Blair
government. It had implemented major reform programmes,
backed by increasing expenditure on health care in particular.
It had set up the Delivery Unit, headed by Michael Barber, to
bring to bear new ways of tracking and improving performance.
Every year the Queen’s Speech at the opening of the new
Parliamentary year had heralded new legislation to reform
the National Health Service, or schools, or childcare or other
public services.
However, when government ministers gathered together as
part of the policy review process to reflect on what they had
achieved, my fellow officials and I heard an overwhelming sense
of frustration. Minister after minister felt that nothing much had
changed. While resource pressures in some areas had been eased,
the fundamental dynamics of many services were very familiar
from before they came to power. In particular, they were
frustrated that large inequalities in health outcomes, educational
attainment and vulnerability to crime had proved very hard
to shift. For a progressive government like this one, that felt
like failure. And as ministers talked about these frustrations,
the concept that came up time and time again was ‘culture’.
The culture of the public service agencies, and the culture of
the communities they served, were so strong and deep-seated

15. Culture and Values at the Heart of Policy Making 2
that the best reform programmes, backed up by money and
expertise, couldn’t compete.
As a result of this strong message from our political masters,
my colleague David Knott and I wrote a paper about culture
change and how government could think about it. In retrospect
this was a rather peculiar and abstract piece for two civil servants
to write and publish on a government website, but the Strategy
Unit in that period was given an unusual degree of latitude.
We concluded that while thinking about culture and how
to change it was hard, and didn’t easily fit into many of the
frameworks employed by policy makers, some of the challenges
that government faced would be insoluble without it.
Fast-forward nearly a decade, and everyone with an interest
in politics, policy and social change was desperately looking for
explanations for the unexpected (by most) votes in the United
Kingdom to leave the European Union and in the United
States to elect Donald Trump as President. Many commentators
focused on the stagnant real incomes experienced by middle-
income workers since the 2008 financial crash (and indeed
before, in some cases), and on the increase in wealth held by the
most well-off. However, another school of argument, much of
which I found compelling, identified cultural factors and deep-
seated values as crucial drivers of support for Trump and Brexit.
I will discuss some of this work in more detail in Chapter 6.
In between these two periods, as I continued to work in a
range of roles around the public sector, I became increasingly
focused on a third phenomenon that pushed me to place culture
and values at the centre of my understanding. This was repeated
failures of accountability. On a macro level, like everyone else I
saw the leaders of huge financial institutions make catastrophic
misjudgements, with supposedly independent advisors in the
accountancy and legal professions, as well as non-executive
directors representing shareholders, doing nothing to check
them. Virtually none of the individuals involved faced any
meaningful sanctions. At a micro level, I saw senior civil servants
and ministers responsible for failed projects and misguided
policies that wasted money and harmed citizens facing no
damage to their careers. There appeared to be a disjunction
between what was needed for personal advancement and what

16. Introduction
3
was needed to make policy that actually worked. And yet this
was happening in an advanced democracy with, on paper, all the
tools of accountability: a credible independent court system, a
fully independent National Audit Office (NAO), Parliamentary
scrutiny committees, a well-resourced, reasonably diverse and
institutionally sceptical media. I concluded that culture once
again had a major part to play. This was through both the
culture and values of the institutions in which accountability
was meant to work, but perhaps more importantly the way in
which cultural norms and values-based actions play out in the
political system act to undermine much of the machinery of
accountability that we have built.
This book is an attempt to weave these experiences and
observations about the importance of culture and values into
a coherent whole, and to draw some conclusions for how to
do public policy better as a result. I have broken the argument
into three sections.
Chapter 1 introduces the concepts of culture and values as I
will use them in the book. Part One, Chapters 2 to 5, sets out
why culture and values matter when making decisions about
public policy. They matter for four main reasons. First, culture
affects outcomes. This is probably the least surprising claim I
make in the book, as it is both intuitive and well evidenced
in literature from all sorts of settings. However, the way in
which it does so, in particular by focusing our attention on the
culture and values of those implementing policy at the front
line rather than decision makers in Whitehall or Washington,
is vital for understanding the rest of the argument and some of
the proposed solutions. Second, a policy needs to be legitimate,
both for it to succeed on its own terms and because legitimacy
is a good thing in itself, and what is legitimate in a given society
is dependent on the values that its members hold. Third, many
of the questions that we ask the political and policy process to
resolve are values-based, and it is only through engaging with
the value judgements that people make that we can hope to
come to a satisfactory solution. In fact, confusion about when
something is an argument about values and when it isn’t creates
a lot of commonly seen problems in conversations about politics.
Finally in this part, governments affect culture and values by

17. Culture and Values at the Heart of Policy Making 4
their actions, intentionally or not. Given that this effect exists,
it seems to me wilfully short-sighted not to consider it explicitly
when making decisions.
Part Two, Chapters 6 and 7, looks at how the importance of
culture and values affect our political system and the way that
policy is made overall. It sets out that it is rational in principle
for voters to act on the basis of values, and that there is strong
evidence that they do so in practice. At this point I come back
to the implications for accountability, showing how this model
of voter choice means that many of the ways we expect decision
makers in a democracy to be held to account are doomed to
failure. Rather than looking at whether a decision has good or
bad consequences and then deciding their view of the decision
maker accordingly, most of the time people decide whether
they like the decision maker and interpret a range of partial and
messy facts to fit with that prior judgement. This part concludes
by suggesting some different approaches to accountability to
deal with the problem described above, by focusing more on
real-time front-line feedback on services and on interrogating
the values-base of political decisions.
Part Three, Chapters 8 to 11, looks at ways I think we should
adapt policy making to better reflect the centrality of culture.
One is to take the power of symbolic action in policy making
seriously, and to apply the same rigour and professionalism
around it that we do to other disciplines like cost-benefit
analysis. Secondly, I discuss how decentralising power over
policy making and delivery can help respond to some of the
challenges raised earlier in the argument. Thirdly, I look at
how organisations can embody values, and when building new
organisations is the best tool to bring about a desired shift. In the
final chapter I discuss how evidence and the movement towards
‘evidence-based policy making’ should be seen in the light of a
focus on culture, and where and how evidence can be useful.
As I set out at the start of this introduction, the inspiration
for the arguments in this book comes mainly from my own
experience as a practitioner and rather obsessive observer of the
policy process. However, I have also drawn on some significant
areas of academic research. I use elements of a longstanding
tradition of work on why implementation of policy is a messy

18. Introduction
5
and non-linear process (sometimes called complexity theory,
or implementation theory). The section on how culture and
values affect the political system in particular is influenced by
the emerging ‘realist’ school of democratic theory, as well as
extensive empirical work on the drivers of political choice. I
would encourage readers to delve more deeply into those fields,
where they will find levels of nuance and sophistication well
beyond a short book like this one. The section on practical ways
to adapt policy making is less grounded in academic work and
more in practical experience. Partly for that reason, and also in
the spirit of the recommendations themselves, it is necessarily
somewhat tentative. It is only by trying some of the directions
I suggest, getting them wrong, learning and trying again, that
any progress will occur. That is what I will be trying to do, and
I encourage you to join me on that journey.

20. 7
1
What are culture and values?
The experiences that I set out in the Introduction do not have
immediately obvious connections. Why are the same concepts
– culture and values – useful for analysing such different
phenomena as the difficulty of reforming the National Health
Service under Tony Blair’s government and the election victory
of Donald Trump? There is a risk that ‘culture’ and ‘values’ are
both abstract and potentially woolly terms, which don’t have
enough bite to them to drive real understanding. Therefore this
first chapter sets out what I mean by culture and values. There
are several different concepts in play here, and understanding
how they differ will be important to the arguments in the
following chapters. It is also vital to see how they are connected.
In reality the ways policy makers, organisations that interact
with policy, and individual citizens act stem from a mixture of
cultural and value-driven factors, as well as other elements. That
mixture depends on the specific situation and the wider context,
and disentangling its separate elements is not always practically
possible or useful.
There are three elements to the concepts of culture and values
as used in this book. They are:
•
the set of written and (especially) unwritten rules that define
the institutions within which people operate and which
enable them to work together with each other and with
wider society;
•
the set of beliefs about how the world works and about
ethical principles like fairness and justice that affect how policy is made and implemented; and

21. Culture and Values at the Heart of Policy Making 8
• the set of practical and psychological shortcuts that everyone
uses to navigate complexity and incomplete information.
Each of these elements operates at two levels: the level of policy
makers themselves and the level of society as a whole (see
Table 1.1).
1
It is the interaction of all the elements at both levels
that creates the environment of culture and values that I discuss
in the rest of the book.
Unwritten rules in institutions and society
The first of these elements will be familiar to anyone who has
worked in a large organisation. There is a set of rules about
how things can and can’t be done: which group makes which
decisions, who signs off expenditure, how new employees are
recruited. There is then a set of unwritten rules that are often
more powerful in deciding what an organisation can achieve.
These unwritten rules cover things like style in speaking and
writing, what approaches that are technically allowed under
the rules but are in fact unacceptable (or vice versa), and what
people trust one another to do without formal approvals or
scrutiny. Institutions that make and deliver public policy carry
these unwritten rules just like any others. The important point
to recognise is that those unwritten rules, which are a type of
culture, affect policy outcomes.
Some of the most powerful evidence for this assertion
comes from the work of Elinor Ostrom (2000, 2009). She
Table 1.1: Examples of culture and values
Unwritten rules
of conduct Ethical beliefs
Dealing with complexity
Policy makers
Example: acceptable language in political debate
Example: priority given to reducing inequality
Example: assumptions about human motivation
Society as a
 whole
Example: expectations of mutual support in times of hardship
Example: acceptable forms of family relationships
Example: stories and myths used to explain history

22. What are culture and values?
9
took on the classic public policy challenge of the collective
action problem and the risk of the ‘tragedy of the commons’:
how do communities manage common resources when the
economic incentive for individuals is to deplete the resource as
far as possible? At the risk of greatly simplifying her extremely
sophisticated body of work, one important conclusion is
that institutional culture, and particularly levels of trust, are
extremely important. High levels of trust enable societies to
achieve an equilibrium where common resources are not
depleted and everyone benefits. Such an equilibrium requires
trust and strong norms of behaviour operating within both
policy institutions and wider society, and also between them.
Take the example of managing fish stocks, a classic collective
action problem. Each fish that one boat catches is one less for
all the others to pursue. If everyone catches as much as they
can, there will soon be no fish left and everyone suffers. To
achieve a more positive outcome, fishermen need to trust one
another to report their catches honestly and stick to agreed
quotas. Fisheries regulators need to trust one another not to
take bribes to turn a blind eye to excess catches or to set quotas
in a way that favours particular localities or industry groups.
The boat operators in turn need to trust the regulators to
treat everyone fairly and listen to legitimate concerns that they
raise, while the regulators need to trust the operators to tell
the truth about what they catch and what they see happening
to the development of fish stocks. A strong culture of trust,
honesty and following accepted norms enables an effective
policy outcome.
Ostrom (2000) also argues that trust alone will not be enough
to sustain a culture of constructive cooperation. She says that
it will also be important to have a system whereby those
monitoring the relevant social norms (the fishing regulators
in this example) are accountable to the wider society. If they
are not accountable, the particular policy system can evolve an
equilibrium that works for those involved but not for anyone
else. To extend the fishing example, imagine a case where the
regulator and the boat operators have agreed (informally) a
schedule of bribes that the operators will pay the regulator to
turn a blind eye to infringements of the rules. This could lead

23. Culture and Values at the Heart of Policy Making 10
to a sustainable system, if the bribes required for egregious over-
fishing are high enough. However, the rest of society suffers, as
new entrants to the industry are excluded by the arrangements
and more broadly bribe-taking becomes normalised, with wider
negative consequences.
Of course, the opposite to a high-trust high-accountability
equilibrium is possible. Different cultural environments with
lower levels of trust can lead to very different outcomes. A
good example to illustrate this is the experience of Southern
Italy. Calabria (roughly the toes and instep of the Italian boot)
is stunningly beautiful. From towns like Pizzo and Tropea, the
views across the Tyrrhenian Sea to Stromboli and the other
small islands off the Sicilian coast are sensational. However,
there is another side to those towns, and even more to the larger
cities like Reggio Calabria. This other side is the ubiquitous
rubbish, poorly maintained or indeed half-finished buildings,
and the terrible state of many public spaces. Those ‘commons’
that Ostrom talks about are certainly suffering. Many scholars
have argued that a lack of social trust lies behind the set of
cultural norms that lead to this situation. Fukuyama (2014)
pulls together a series of studies that point to low levels of
trust in public institutions and civil society and a culture of
cynicism towards any initiative that claims to promote a form
of common good. Putnam (1993) provides strong empirical
evidence of low levels of civic engagement in Southern Italy
and what Fukuyama (2014: 110) calls ‘long-standing inherited
cultural values’ in the region that explain many of the struggles
it continues to have with managing common resources. He
argues that the weak trust in institutions which undermines
the management of common resources has its roots in feudal
rule in Southern Italy, which persisted much later than in many
other parts of Europe.
Trust is one very important part of institutional and social
culture, and an excellent example for showing why it matters.
It is not the only component and is used here simply as an
illustration. As we consider different elements of the political
and policy-making system in the following chapters, different
unwritten organisational rules will emerge as playing a
significant role.

24. Random documents with unrelated
content Scribd suggests to you:

25. order to revenge that ill-usage he made a ballad upon him.... It is
said to have been so very bitter that it redoubled the prosecution
against him to that degree that he was obliged to leave his business
and family in Warwickshire for some time and shelter himself in
London." Rowe believed this ballad to be lost, but what purports to
be the first verse of it has been preserved by Oldys, on the authority
of a very old man who lived in the neighbourhood of Stratford. It
may possibly be genuine. The coincidence between it and an
unquestionable gibe at Sir Thomas Lucy in The Merry Wives of
Windsor renders it probable that it has been more or less correctly
remembered.
[1]
Although poaching was at that time regarded as a
comparatively innocent and pardonable misdemeanour of youth, to
which the Oxford students, for example, were for many generations
greatly addicted, yet Sir Thomas Lucy, who seems to have newly and
not over-plentifully stocked his park, deeply resented the
depredations of young Stratford. He was, it would appear, no
favourite in the town. He never, like the other landowners of the
district, requited with a present of game the offerings of salt and
sugar which, as we learn from the town accounts, the burgesses
were in the habit of sending him. Shakespeare's misdeeds were not
at that time punishable by law; but, as a great landowner and justice
of the peace, Sir Thomas had the young fellow in his power, and
there is every probability in favour of the tradition, preserved by the
Rev. Richard Davies, who died in 1708, that he "had him oft whipt
and sometimes imprisoned." It is confirmed by the substantial
correctness of Davies' further statement: "His revenge was so great,
that he is his Justice Clodpate [Shallow],... that in allusion to his
name bore three louses rampant for his arms." We find, in fact, that
in the opening scene of The Merry Wives, Justice Shallow, who
accuses Falstaff of having shot his deer, has, according to Slender's
account, a dozen white luces (pikes) in his coat-of-arms, which, in
the mouth of the Welshman, Sir Hugh Evans, become a dozen white
louses—the word-play being exactly the same as that in the ballad.
Three luces argent were the cognisance of the Lucy family.

26. The attempt to cast doubt upon this old tradition of Shakespeare's
poaching exploits becomes doubly unreasonable in face of the fact
that precisely in 1585 Sir Thomas Lucy spoke in Parliament in favour
of more stringent game-laws.
The essential point, however, is simply this, that at about the age of
twenty-one Shakespeare leaves his native, town, not to return to it
permanently until his life's course is nearly run. Even if he had not
been forced to bid it farewell, the impulse to develop his talents and
energies must ere long have driven him forth. Young and
inexperienced as he was, at all events, he had now to betake himself
to the capital to seek his fortune.
Whether he left any great happiness behind him we cannot tell; but
it is scarcely probable. There is nothing to show that in the peasant
girl, almost eight years older than himself, whom he married at the
age of eighteen, Shakespeare found the woman who, even for a few
years, could fill his life. Everything, indeed, points in the opposite
direction. She and the children remained behind in Stratford, and he
saw her only when he revisited his native place, as he did at long
intervals, probably, at first, but afterwards annually. Tradition and
the internal evidence of his writings prove that he lived, in London,
the free Bohemian life of an actor and playwright. We know, too,
that he was soon plunged in the business cares of a theatrical
manager and part-proprietor. The woman's part in this life was not
played by Anne Hathaway. On the other hand, there can be no
doubt that Shakespeare never for a moment lost sight of Stratford,
and that he had no sooner made a footing for himself in London
than he set to work with the definite aim of acquiring land and
property in the town from which he had gone forth penniless and
humiliated. His father should hold up his head again, and the family
honour be re-established.
[1]
It runs:—

27. "A parliament member, a justice of peace,
At home a poor scare-crow, at London an asse;
If lowsie is Lucy, as some volke miscalle it,
Then Lucy is lowsie, whatever befall it;
He thinkes himself greate
Yet an asse in his state
We allowe by his eares but with asses to mate.
If Lucy is lowsie, as some volke miscalle it,
Sing lowsie Lucy, whatever befalle it."
IV
LONDON—BUILDINGS, COSTUMES, MANNERS
So the young man rode from Stratford to London. He probably,
according to the custom of the poorer travellers of that time, sold his
horse on his arrival at Smithfield; and, as Halliwell-Phillips
ingeniously suggests, he may have sold it to James Burbage, who
kept a livery stable in the neighbourhood. It may have been this
man, the father of Richard Burbage, afterwards Shakespeare's most
famous fellow-actor, who employed Shakespeare to take charge of
the horses which his customers of the Smithfield district hired to ride
to the play. James Burbage had built, and now owned, the first
playhouse erected in London (1576), known as The Theatre; and a
well-known tradition, which can be traced to Sir William Davenant,
relates that Shakespeare was driven by dire necessity to hang about
the doors of the theatre and hold the horses of those who had
ridden to the play. The district was a remote and disreputable one,
and swarmed with horse-thieves. Shakespeare won such favour as a
horse-holder, and was in such general demand, that he had to
engage boys as assistants, who announced themselves as
"Shakespeare's boys," a style and title, it is said, which long clung to
them. A fact which speaks in favour of this much-ridiculed legend is
that, at the time to which it can be traced back, well on in the

28. seventeenth century, the practice of riding to the theatres had
entirely fallen into disuse. People then went to the play by water.
A Stratford tradition represents that Shakespeare first entered the
theatre in the character of "servitor" to the actors, and Malone
reports "a stage tradition that his first office in the theatre was that
of prompter's attendant," whose business was to give the players
notice of the time for their entrance. It is evident, however, that he
soon rose above these menial stations.
The London to which Shakespeare came was a town of about
300,000 inhabitants. Its main streets had quite recently been paved,
but were not yet lighted; it was surrounded with trenches, walls, and
gates; it had high-gabled, red-roofed, two-story wooden houses,
distinguished by means of projecting signs, from which they took
their names—houses in which benches did duty for chairs, and the
floors were carpeted with rushes. The streets were usually thronged,
not with wheel-traffic, for the first carriage was imported into
England in this very reign, but with people on foot, on horseback, or
in litters; while the Thames, still blue and clear, in spite of the
already large consumption of coal, was alive with thousands of boats
threading their way, amid the watermen's shrill cries of "Eastward
hoe!" or "Westward hoe!" through bevies of swans which put forth
from, and returned to, the green meadows and beautiful gardens
bordering the stream.
There was as yet only one bridge over the Thames, the mighty
London Bridge, situated not far from that which now bears the
name. It was broad, and lined with buildings; while on the tall gate-
towers heads which had fallen on the block were almost always
displayed. In its neighbourhood lay Eastcheap, the street in which
stood Falstaffs tavern.
The central points of London were at that time the newly erected
Exchange and St. Paul's Church, which was regarded not only as the
Cathedral of the city, but as a meeting-place and promenade for
idlers, a sort of club where the news of the day was to be heard, a
hiring-fair for servants, and a sanctuary for debtors, who were there

29. secure from arrest. The streets, still full of the many-coloured life of
the Renaissance, rang with the cries of 'prentices inviting custom
and hawkers proclaiming their wares; while through them passed
many a procession, civil, ecclesiastical, or military, bridal companies,
pageants, and troops of crossbow-men and men-at-arms.
Elizabeth might be met in the streets, driving in her huge State
carriage, when she did not prefer to sail on the Thames in her
magnificent gondola, followed by a crowd of gaily decorated boats.
In the City itself no theatres were tolerated. The civic authorities
regarded them with an unfriendly eye, and had banished them to
the outskirts and across the Thames, together with the rough
amusements with which they had to compete: cock-fighting and
bear-baiting with dogs.
The handsome, parti-coloured, extravagant costumes of the period
are well known. The puffed sleeves of the men, the women's stiff
ruffs, and the fantastic shapes of their hooped skirts, are still to be
seen in stage presentations of plays of the time. The Queen and her
Court set the example of great and unreasonable luxury with respect
to the number and material of costumes. The ladies rouged their
faces, and often dyed their hair. Auburn, as the Queen's colour, was
the most fashionable. The conveniences of daily life were very
meagre. Only of late had fireplaces begun to be substituted for the
open hearths. Only of late had proper bedsteads come into general
use; when Shakespeare's well-to-do grandfather, Richard Arden,
made his will, in the year 1556, there was only one bedstead in the
house where he lived with his seven daughters. People slept on
straw mattresses, with a billet of wood under their heads and a fur
rug over them. The only decoration of the rooms of the wealthier
classes was the tapestry on the walls, behind which people so often
conceal themselves in Shakespeare's plays.
The dinner-hour was at that time eleven in the morning, and it was
reckoned fashionable to dine early. Those who could afford it ate
rich and heavy dishes; the repasts would often last an inordinate
time, and no regard whatever was paid to the minor decencies of

30. life. Domestic utensils were very mean. So late as 1592, wooden
trenchers, wooden platters, and wooden spoons were in common
use. It was just about this time that tin and silver began to supplant
wood. Table-knives had been in general use since about 1563; but
forks were still unknown in Shakespeare's time—fingers supplied
their place. In a description of five months' travels on the Continent,
published by Coryat in 1611, he tells how surprised he was to find
the use of forks quite common in Italy:—
"I obserued a custome in all those Italian Cities and Townes
through which I passed, that is not vsed in any other country
that I saw in my trauels, neither doe I thinke that any other
nation of Christendome doth vse it, but only Italy. The Italian
and also most strangers that are commorant in Italy doe alwaies
at their meales vse a little forke when they cut their meate. For
while with their knife which they hold in one hand they cut the
meate out of the dish, they fasten their forke which they hold in
their other hand vpon the same dish, so that whatsoeuer he be
that sitting in the company of any others at meale, should
vnaduisedly touch the dish of meate with his fingers from which
all at the table doe cut, he will giue occasion of offence vnto the
company, as hauing transgressed the lawes of good manners, in
so much that for his error he shall be at the least brow-beaten,
if not reprehended in wordes.... The reason of this their
curiosity is, because the Italian cannot by any means indure to
haue his dish touched with fingers, seing all men's fingers are
not alike cleane."
[1]
We see, too, that Coryat was the first to introduce the new appliance
into his native land. He tells us that he thought it best to imitate the
Italian fashion not only in Italy and Germany, but "often in England"
after his return; and he relates how a learned and jocular gentleman
of his acquaintance rallied him on that account and called him
"Furcifer." In one of Ben Jonson's plays, The Devil is an Ass, dating
from 1614, the use of forks is mentioned as lately imported from
Italy, in order to save napkins. We must conceive, then, that

31. Shakespeare was as unfamiliar with the use of the fork as a Bedouin
Arab of to-day.
He does not seem to have smoked. Tobacco is never mentioned in
his works, although the people of his day gathered in tobacco-shops
where instruction was given in the new art of smoking, and although
the gallants actually smoked as they sat on the stage of the theatre.
[1] Coryat's Crudities, ed. 1776, vol. i. p. 106.
V
POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS CONDITIONS—ENGLAND'S
GROWING GREATNESS
The period of Shakespeare's arrival in London was momentous both
in politics and religion. It is the period of England's development into
a great Protestant power. Under Bloody Mary, the wife of Philip II. of
Spain, the government had been Spanish-Catholic; the persecutions
directed against heresy brought many victims, and among them
some of the most distinguished men in England, to the scaffold, and
even to the stake. Spain made a cat's-paw of England in her contest
with France, and reaped all the benefit of the alliance, while England
paid the penalty. Calais, her last foothold on the Continent, was lost.
With Elizabeth, Protestantism ascended the throne and became a
power in the world. She rejected Philip's courtship; she knew how
unpopular the Spanish marriage had made her sister. In the struggle
with the Papal power she had the Parliament on her side. Parliament
had at once recognised her as Queen by the law of God and the
country, whilst the Pope, on her accession, denied her right to the
throne. The Catholic world took his part against her; first France,
then Spain. England supported Protestant Scotland against its

32. Catholic Queen and her Scottish-French army, and the Reformation
triumphed in Scotland. Afterwards, when Mary Stuart had ceased to
rule over Scotland and taken refuge in England, in the hope of there
finding help, it was no longer France but Philip of Spain who stood
by her. He saw his despotism in the Netherlands threatened by the
victory of Protestantism in England.
Political interest led Elizabeth's Government to throw Mary into
prison. The Pope excommunicated Elizabeth, absolved her subjects
from their oath of allegiance, and declared her a usurper in her own
kingdom. Whoever should obey her commands was excommunicated
along with her, and for twenty years on end one Catholic conspiracy
against Elizabeth treads on another's heels, Mary Stuart being
involved in almost all of them.
In 1585 Elizabeth opened the war with Spain by sending her fleet to
the Netherlands, with her favourite, Leicester, in command of the
troops. In the beginning of the following year, Francis Drake, who in
1577-80 had for the first time circumnavigated the world, surprised
and took San Domingo and Carthagena. The ship in which he had
achieved his great voyage lay at anchor in the Thames as a
memorial of the feat; it was often visited by Londoners, and no
doubt by Shakespeare among them.
In the years immediately following, the springtide of the national
spirit burst into full bloom. Let us try to picture to ourselves the
impression it must have made upon Shakespeare in the year 1587.
On the 8th of February 1587 Mary Stuart was executed at
Fotheringay, and the breach between England and the Catholic world
was thus made irreparable. On the 16th of February, England's
noblest knight and the flower of her chivalry, Sir Philip Sidney, the
hero of Zutphen, and the chief of the Anglo-Italian school of poets,
was buried in St. Paul's Cathedral, with a pomp which gave to the
event the character of a national solemnity. Sidney was an ideal
representative of the aristocracy of the day. He possessed the widest
humanistic culture, had studied Aristotle and Plato no less than
geometry and astronomy, had travelled and seen the world, had

33. read and thought and written, and was not only a scholar but a
soldier to boot. As a cavalry officer he had saved the English army at
Gravelines, and he had been the friend and patron of Giordano
Bruno, the freest thinker of his time. The Queen herself was present
at his funeral, and so, no doubt, was Shakespeare.
In the following year Spain fitted out her great Armada and
despatched it against England. As regards the size of the ships and
the number of the troops they carried, it was the largest fleet that
had ever been seen in European waters. And in the Netherlands, at
Antwerp and Dunkerque, transports were in readiness for the
conveyance of a second vast army to complete the destruction of
England. But England was equal to the occasion. Elizabeth's
Government demanded fifteen ships of the city of London; it fitted
out thirty, besides raising a land force of 30,000 men and lending the
Government £52,000 in ready money.
The Spanish fleet numbered one hundred and thirty huge galleons,
the English only sixty sail, of lighter and less cumbrous build. The
young English noblemen competed for the privilege of serving in it.
The great Armada was ill designed for defying wind and weather in
the English Channel. It manœuvred awkwardly, and, in the first
encounters, proved itself powerless against the lighter ships of the
English. A couple of fire-ships were sufficient to throw it into
disorder; a season of storms set in, and the greater number of its
galleons were swept to destruction.
The greatest Power in the world of that day had broken down in its
attempt to crush the growing might of England, and the whole
nation revelled in the exultant sense of victory.
VI
SHAKESPEARE AS ACTOR AND RETOUCHER OF OLD PLAYS—
GREENE'S ATTACK

34. Between 1586 and 1592 we lose all trace of Shakespeare. We know
only that he must have been an active member of a company of
players. It is not proved that he ever belonged to any other company
than the Earl of Leicester's, which owned the Blackfriars, and
afterwards the Globe, theatre. It is proved by several passages in
contemporary writings that, partly as actor, partly as adapter of older
plays for the use of the theatre, he had, at the age of twenty-eight,
made a certain name for himself, and had therefore become the
object of envy and hatred.
A passage in Spenser's Colin Clouts Come Home Again, referring to a
poet whose Muse "doth like himself heroically sound," may with
some probability, though not with certainty, be applied to
Shakespeare. The theory is supported by the fact that the word
"gentle" is here, as so often in after-life, attached to his personality.
Against it we must place the circumstance that the poem, although
not published till 1594, seems to have been composed as early as
1591, when Shakespeare's muse was as yet scarcely heroic, and that
Drayton, who had written under the pseudonym of Rowland, may
have been the poet alluded to.
The first indubitable allusion to Shakespeare is of a quite different
nature. It occurs in a pamphlet written on his deathbed by the
dramatist Robert Greene, entitled A Groat's Worth of Wit bought
with a Million of Repentance (August 1592). In it the utterly
degraded and penniless poet calls upon his friends, Marlowe, Lodge
or Nash, and Peele (without mentioning their names), to give up
their vicious life, their blasphemy, and their "getting many enemies
by bitter words," holding himself up as a deterrent example; for he
died, after a reckless life, of an illness said to have been induced by
immoderate eating, and in such misery that he had to borrow money
of his landlord, a poor shoemaker, while his landlord's wife was the
sole attendant of his dying hours. He was so poor that his clothes
had to be sold to procure him food. He sent his wife these lines:—
"Doll, I charge thee, by the loue of our youth and by my soules
rest, that thou wilte see this man paide; for if hee and his wife

35. had not succoured me, I had died in the streetes.
"ROBERT GREENE."
The passage in which he warns his friends and fellow-poets against
the ingratitude of the players runs as follows:—
"Yes, trust them not: for there is an upstart crow, beautified
with our feathers, that with his Tygers heart wrapt in a Players
hide, supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blanke verse
as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes fac totum,
is in his owne conceit the only Shake-scene in a countrie."
The allusion to Shakespeare's name is unequivocal, and the words
about the tiger's heart point to the outburst, "Oh Tyger's hart wrapt
in a serpents hide!" which is found in two places: first in the play
called The True Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke, and the Death of
the good King Henrie the Sixt, and then (with "womans" substituted
for "serpents"), in the third part of King Henry VI., founded on the
True Tragedie, and attributed to Shakespeare. It is preposterous to
interpret this passage as an attack upon Shakespeare in his quality
as an actor; Greene's words, beyond all doubt, convey an accusation
of literary dishonesty. Everything points to the belief that Greene and
Marlowe had collaborated in the older play, and that the former saw
with disgust the success achieved by Shakespeare's adaptation of
their text.
But that Shakespeare was already highly respected, and that the
attack aroused general indignation, is proved by the apology put
forth in December 1592 by Henry Chettle, who had published
Greene's pamphlet. In the preface to his Kind-harts Dreame he
expressly deplores his indiscretion with regard to Shakespeare:—
"I am as sory as if the originall fault had beene my fault,
because my selfe haue seene his demeanor no lesse ciuill than
he exelent in the qualitie he professes. Besides, diuers of
worship haue reported his vprightnes of dealing, which argues

36. his honesty, and his facetious grace in writing, that aprooues his
Art."
We see, then, that the company to which Shakespeare had attached
himself, and in which he had already attracted notice as a promising
poet, employed him to revise and furbish up the older pieces of their
repertory. The theatrical announcements of the period would show
us, even if we had no other evidence, that it was a constant practice
to recast old plays, in order to heighten their powers of attraction. It
is announced, for instance, that such-and-such a play will be acted
as it was last presented before her Majesty, or before this or that
nobleman. Poets sold their works outright to the theatre for such
sums as five or ten pounds, or for a share in the receipts. As the
interests of the theatre demanded that plays should not be printed,
in order that rival companies might not obtain possession of them,
they remained in manuscript (unless pirated), and the players could
accordingly do what they pleased with the text.
None the less, of course, was the older poet apt to resent the re-
touches made by the younger, as we see from this outburst of
Greene's, and probably, too, from Ben Jonson's epigram, On Poet-
Ape, even though this cannot, with any show of reason, be applied
to Shakespeare.
In the view of the time, theatrical productions as a whole were not
classed as literature. It was regarded as dishonourable for a man to
sell his work first to a theatre and then to a book-seller, and Thomas
Hey wood declares, as late as 1630 (in the preface to his Lucretia),
that he has never been guilty of this misdemeanour. We know, too,
how much ridicule Ben Jonson incurred when, first among English
poets, he in 1616 published his plays in a folio volume.
On the other hand, we see that not only Shakespeare's genius, but
his personal amiability, the loftiness and charm of his nature,
disarmed even those who, for one reason or another, had spoken
disparagingly of his activity. As Chettle, after printing Greene's
attack, hastened to make public apology, so also Ben Jonson, to

37. whose ill-will and cutting allusions Shakespeare made no retort,
[1]
became, in spite of an unconquerable jealousy, his true friend and
admirer, and after his death spoke of him warmly in prose, and with
enthusiasm in verse, in the noble eulogy prefixed to the First Folio.
His prose remarks upon Shakespeare's character are introduced by a
critical observation:—
"I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honour
to Shakespeare, that in his writing (whatsoever he penned) he
never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, Would he had
blotted a thousand. Which they thought a malevolent speech. I
had not told posterity this but for their ignorance, who chose
that circumstance to commend their friend by, wherein he most
faulted; and to justify mine own candour: for I loved the man,
and do honour his memory, on this side idolatry, as much as
any. He was (indeed) honest, and of an open and full nature;
had an excellent phantasy, brave notions, and gentle
expressions; wherein he flowed with that facility, that
sometimes it was necessary he should be stopped:
Sufflaminandus erat, as Augustus said of Haterius."
[1] He is said to have procured the production of Jonson's first play.
VII
THE "HENRY VI." TRILOGY
One might expect that it would be with the early plays in which
Shakespeare only collaborated as with those Italian pictures of the
best period of the Renaissance, in which the connoisseur identifies
(for example) an angel's head by Leonardo in a Crucifixion of Andrea
del Verrocchio's. The work of the pupil stands out sharp and clear,

38. with pure contours, a picture within the picture, quite at odds with
its style and spirit, but impressing us as a promise for the future. As
a matter of fact, however, there is no analogy between the two
cases.
A mystery hangs over the Henry VI. trilogy which neither Greene's
venomous attack nor Chettle's apology enables us to clear up.
Of all the works attributed to Shakespeare, this is certainly the one
whose origin affords most food for speculation. The inclusion of the
three plays in the First Folio shows clearly that his comrades, who
had full knowledge of the facts, regarded them as his literary
property. That the two earlier plays which are preserved, the First
Part of the Contention and the True Tragedie (answering to the
second and third parts of Henry VI.), cannot be entirely
Shakespeare's work is evidenced both by the imprint of the
anonymous quartos and by the company which is stated to have
produced them; for none of Shakespeare's genuine plays was
published by this publisher or played by this company. It is proved
quite clearly, too, by internal evidence, by the free and unrhymed
versification of these plays. At the period from which they date,
Shakespeare was still extremely addicted to the use of rhyme in his
dramatic writing.
Nevertheless, the great majority of German Shakespeare students,
and some English as well, are of opinion that the older plays are
entirely Shakespeare's, either his first drafts or, as is more commonly
maintained, stolen texts carelessly noted down.
Some English scholars, such as Malone and Dyce, go to the opposite
extreme, and regard the second and third parts of Henry VI. as the
work of another poet. The majority of English students look upon
these plays as the result of Shakespeare's retouching of another
man's, or rather other men's, work.
The affair is so complicated that none of these hypotheses is quite
satisfactory.

39. Though there are doubtless in the older plays portions unworthy of
Shakespeare, and more like the handiwork of Greene, while others
strongly suggest Marlowe, both in matter, style, and versification,
there are also passages in them which cannot be by any one else
than Shakespeare. And while most of the alterations and additions
which are found in the second and third parts of Henry VI. bear the
mark of unmistakable superiority, and are Shakespearian in spirit no
less than in style and versification, there are at the same time others
which are decidedly un-Shakespearian and can almost certainly be
attributed to Marlowe. He must, then, have collaborated with
Shakespeare in the adaptation, unless we suppose that his original
text was carelessly printed in the earlier quartos, and that it here
reappears, in the Shakespearian Henry VI, corrected and completed
in accordance with his manuscript.
I agree with Miss Lee, the writer of the leading treatise
[1]
on these
plays, and with the commentator in the Irving Edition, in holding
that Shakespeare was not responsible for all the alterations in the
definitive text. There are several which I cannot possibly believe to
be his.
In the old quartos there appears not a line in any foreign language.
But in the Shakespearian plays we find lines and exclamations in
Latin scattered here and there, along with one in French.
[2]
If the
early quartos are founded on a text taken down by ear, we can
readily understand that the foreign expressions, not being
understood, should be omitted. Such foreign sentences are
extremely frequent in Marlowe, as in Kyd and the other older
dramatists; they appear in season and out of season, but always in
irreconcilable conflict with the sounder taste of our time. Marlowe
would even suffer a dying man to break out in a French or Latin
phrase as he gave up the ghost, and this occurs here in two places
(at Clifford's death and Rutland's). Shakespeare, who never bedizens
his work with un-English phrases, would certainly not place them in
the mouths of dying men, and least of all foist them upon an earlier
purely English text.

40. Other additions also seem only to have restored the older form of
the plays—those, to wit, which really add nothing new, but only
elaborate, sometimes more copiously than is necessary or tasteful, a
thought already clearly indicated. The original omission in such
instances appears almost certainly to have been dictated by
considerations of convenience in acting. One example is Queen
Margaret's long speech in Part II., Act iii. 2, which is new with the
exception of the first fourteen lines.
But there is another class of additions and alterations which
surprises us by being unmistakably in Marlowe's style. If these
additions are really by Shakespeare, he must have been under the
influence of Marlowe to a quite extraordinary degree. Swinburne has
pointed out how entirely the verses which open the fourth act of the
Second Part are Marlowesque in rhythm, imagination, and choice of
words; but characteristic as are these lines—
"And now loud howling wolves arouse the jades
That drag the tragic melancholy night,"
they are by no means the only additions which seem to point to
Marlowe. We feel his presence particularly in the additions to Iden's
speeches at the end of the fourth act, in such lines as—
"Set limb to limb, and thou art far the lesser;
Thy hand is but a finger to my fist;
Thy leg a stick, compared with this truncheon;"
and especially in the concluding speech:—
"Die, damned wretch, the curse of her that bare thee!
And as I thrust thy body in with my sword,
So wish I, I might thrust thy soul to hell.
Hence will I drag thee headlong by the heels
Unto a dunghill, which shall be thy grave,
And there cut off thy most ungracious head."
There is Marlowesque emphasis in this wildness and ferocity, which
reappears, in conjunction with Marlowesque learning, in Young
Clifford's lines in the last act:—

41. "Meet I an infant of the house of York,.
Into as many gobbets will I cut it,
As wild Medea young Absyrtus did:
In cruelty will I seek out my fame"—
and in those which, in Part III., Act iv. 2, are placed in the mouth of
Warwick:—
"Our scouts have found the adventure very easy:
That as Ulysses, and stout Diomede,
With sleight and manhood stole to Rhesus' tents,
And brought from thence the Thracian fatal steeds;
So we, well cover'd with the night's black mantle,
At unawares may beat down Edward's guard,
And seize himself."
And as in the additions there are passages the whole style of which
belongs to Marlowe, or bears the strongest traces of his influence, so
also there are passages in the earlier text which in every respect
recall the manner of Shakespeare. For example, in Part II., Act iii. 2,
Warwick's speech:—
"Who finds the heifer dead, and bleeding fresh,
And sees fast by a butcher with an axe,
But will suspect 'twas he that made the slaughter?"
or Suffolk's to Margaret:—
"If I depart from thee, I cannot live;
And in thy sight to die, what were it else,
But like a pleasant slumber in thy lap?
Here could I breathe my soul into the air,
As mild and gentle as the cradle-babe,
Dying with mother's dug between its lips."
Most Shakespearian, too, is the manner in which, in Part III., Act ii.
I, York's two sons are made to draw their characters, each in a
single line, when they receive the tidings of their father's death:—

42. "Edward. O, speak no more! for I have heard too
much.
Richard. Say, how he died, for I will hear it all."
Again, we seem to hear the voice of Shakespeare when Margaret,
after they have murdered her son before her eyes, bursts forth (Part
III., Act v. 5):—
"You have no children, butchers! if you had
The thought of them would have stirred up remorse."
This passage anticipates, as it were, a celebrated speech in Macbeth.
Most remarkable of all, however, are the Cade scenes in the Second
Part. I cannot persuade myself that these were not from the very
first the work of Shakespeare. It is evident that they cannot proceed
from the pen of Marlowe. An attempt has been made to attribute
them to Greene, on the ground that there are other folk-scenes in
his works which display a similar strain of humour. But the difference
is enormous. It is true that the text here follows the chronicle with
extraordinary fidelity; but it was precisely in this ingenious
adaptation of material that Shakespeare always showed his strength.
And these scenes answer so completely to all the other folk-scenes
in Shakespeare, and are so obviously the outcome of the habit of
political thought which runs through his whole life, becoming ever
more and more pronounced, that we cannot possibly accept them as
showing only the trivial alterations and retouches which elsewhere
distinguish his text from the older version.
These admissions made, however, there is on the whole no difficulty
in distinguishing the work of other hands in the old texts. We can
enjoy, point by point, not only Shakespeare's superiority, but his
peculiar style, as we here find it in the very process of development;
and we can study his whole method of work in the text which he
ultimately produces.
We have here an almost unique opportunity of observing him in the
character of a critical artist. We see what improvements he makes by

43. a trivial retouch, or a mere rearrangement of words. Thus, when
Gloucester says of his wife (Part. II., Act ii. 4)—
"Uneath may she endure the flinty streets,
To tread them with her tender-feeling feet,"
all his sympathy speaks in these words. In the old text it is she who
says this of herself. In York's great soliloquy in the first act,
beginning "Anjou and Maine are given to the French," the first
twenty-four lines are Shakespeare's; the rest belong to the old text.
From the second "Anjou and Maine" onwards, the verse is
conventional and monotonous; the meaning ends with the end of
each line, and a pause, as it were, ensues; whereas the verse of the
opening passage is full of dramatic movement, life, and fire.
Again, if we turn to York's soliloquy in the third act (sc. I)—
"Now, York, or never, steel thy fearful thoughts,"
and compare it in the two texts, we find their metrical differences so
marked that, as Miss Lee has happily put it, the critic can no more
doubt that the first version belongs to an earlier stage in the
development of dramatic poetry, than the geologist can doubt that a
stratum which contains simpler organisms indicates an earlier stage
of the earth's development than one containing higher forms of
organic life. There are portions of the Second Part which no one can
believe that Shakespeare wrote, such as the old-fashioned fooling
with Simpcox, which is quite in the manner of Greene. There are
others which, without being unworthy of Shakespeare, not only
indicate Marlowe in their general style, but are now and then mere
variations of verses known to be his. Such, for example, is
Margaret's line in Part III., Act i.:—
"Stern Faulconbridge commands the narrow seas,"
which clearly echoes the line in Marlowe's Edward II.:—
"The haughty Dane commands the narrow street."
What interests us most, perhaps, is the relation between
Shakespeare and his predecessor with respect to the character of

44. Gloucester. It cannot be denied or doubted that this character, the
Richard III. of after-days, is completely outlined in the earlier text;
so that in reality Shakespeare's own tragedy of Richard III., written
so much later, is still quite Marlowesque in the fundamental
conception of its protagonist. Gloucester's two great soliloquies in
the third part of Henry VI. are especially instructive to study. In the
first (iii. 2) the keynote of the passion is indeed struck by Marlowe,
but all the finest passages are Shakespeare's. Take, for example, the
following:—
"Why then, I do but dream on sovereignty;
Like one that stands upon a promontory,
And spies a far-off shore where he would tread,
Wishing his foot were equal with his eye;
And chides the sea that sunders him from thence,
Saying—he'll lade it dry to have his way:
So do I wish the crown, being so far off,
And so I chide the means that keep me from it;
And so I say—I'll cut the causes off,
Flattering me with impossibilities."
The last soliloquy (v. 6), on the other hand, belongs entirely to the
old play. A thoroughly Marlowesque turn of phrase meets us at the
very beginning:—
"See, how my sword weeps for the poor king's death."
Shakespeare has here left the powerful and admirable text
untouched, except for the deletion of a single superfluous and
weakening verse, "I had no father, I am like no father," which is
followed by the profoundest and most remarkable lines in the play:—
"I have no brother, I am like no brother;
And this word love, which greybeards call divine,
Be resident in men like one another,
And not in me: I am myself alone."
[1] New Shakspere Society's Transactions, 1875-76, pp. 219-303.

45. [2] "Tantæne animis cœlestibus iræ!—Medice, te ipsum!—Gelidus timor occupat
artus—La fin couronne les œuvres—Di faciant! laudis summa sit ista tuæ."
VIII
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE AND HIS LIFE-WORK—TITUS
ANDRONICUS
The man who was to be Shakespeare's first master in the drama—a
master whose genius he did not at the outset fully understand—was
born two months before him. Christopher (Kit) Marlowe, the son of a
shoemaker at Canterbury, was a foundation scholar at the King's
School of his native town; matriculated at Cambridge in 1580; took
the degree of B.A. in 1583, and of M.A. at the age of twenty-three,
after he had left the University; appeared in London (so we gather
from an old ballad) as an actor at the Curtain Theatre; had the
misfortune to break his leg upon the stage; was no doubt on that
account compelled to give up acting; and seems to have written his
first dramatic work, Tamburlaine the Great, at latest in 1587. His
development was much quicker than Shakespeare's, he attained to
comparative maturity much earlier, and his culture was more
systematic. Not for nothing had he gone through the classical
curriculum; the influence of Seneca, the poet and rhetorician
through whom English tragedy comes into relation with the antique,
is clearly recognisable in him, no less than in his predecessors, the
authors of Gorboduc and Tancred and Gismunda (the former
composed by two, the latter by five poets in collaboration); only that
the construction of these plays, with their monologues and their
chorus, is directly imitated from Seneca, while the more independent
Marlowe is influenced only in his diction and choice of material.
In him the two streams begin to unite which have their sources in
the Biblical dramas of the Middle Ages and the later allegorical folk-
plays on the one hand, and, on the other hand, in the Latin plays of

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