A SLEEPLESS SHAKESPEARE.

WE shall never come to an end of fruitless speculations about Shakespeare. The wonder is that his tomb is yet inviolate. No curious fanatic has disturbed his dust in the hope of literally unearthing some secret. The latest im- probable theory touches his identity, The Baconian notion is no longer new, and a book which we notice elsewhere seeks to prove him the seventeenth Earl of Oxford ! Could an Elizabethan actor know the heart of an Englishman from the King to the peasant ? That he should have done so is not more wonderful than that a Judge or an Earl should do so. Genius would not be the miracle that it is if it were accountable. That he should have known every class from within is a mystery, and out of that mystery spring the two others which never cease to agitate the less balanced of his worshippers, that of his identity and his personality. Even for the latter it is useless to search in his work. The universality of his sympathies forbids us to discover its outline. Yet now and again most of his readers imagine that they have discovered some idiosyncrasy or other which brings them a little nearer to their literary divinity. This is true, we think, even among those devotees who relinquish in despair any attempt to discover such outstanding characteristics as must have been known to his least clear-sighted fellow- actors.

It has sometimes occurred to the present writer to wonder whether this supremely groat poet and man of the world suffered from sleeplessness. The volume of his thoughts must have been so enormous, and it is the thinkers who lie awake. No great writer has made so much of sleep, has so exalted its solace, and so perfectly comprehended the torture of its withholding. Ho is constantly alluding to sleep in its relation to death, to care, to guilt, and to ecstasy. He declares the power to sleep to be the joy of the simple and the envy of the responsible. He dwells upon the fact that when youth is past sleep is less pleasant and less long, and he counts this among the tragedies of age. It is as impossible to convizt Shakespeare of a single super- stition as it is to pin him to a particular creed. But dreams fill a larger part in his picture of life than in the pictures that. we paint now or than in those which other men painted in his own day. Was he right to give this prominence to sleep ? He was always right. Modem literature may have cast sleep a little into the shade, but the thought and experience of it are and remain one of the preoccupations of the human mind. We do not talk very much about it now. We fear to weary each other with our complaints of its absence, our pleasure in it, our wonder at the fancies which it brings. We know that we cannot give adequate expression to what we feel about sleep, but Shakespeare knew that he could. He was not constrained like ordinary men to be silent for want of means to convey his thoughts.

In nearly all his plays we find an exhaustive knowledge of what Lady Macbeth's doctor called " slumbery agitation" and of "the fierce vexation of a dream." It is at night that his murderers feel their punishment to be greater than they can bear, and envy even those whom their malice has sent to eternal rest. They eat in fear "and sleep

In the affliction of these terrible dreams That shake us nightly ; better be with the dead,

Whom we, to gain our peace, have sent to peace."

The doctor who suspects his patient's guilt pities as a thousand doctors do the guilty dreamer. "God, God, forgive us all," he cries. "Timorous dreams" turn all men to cowards, and Shakespeare not once but many times makes us sorry for the dreamer who deserves far worse than sleep can give him. These awful qualms of conscience Shakespeare by sheer force of sym- pathy could realize. He cannot have felt like a criminal, and the bulk of his readers can only follow him in imagination, convinced though they may be that every form of human feeling was known to him. Apart from such terrible emotions, the longing for sleep, the envy of sleep, the slight sense of grudging which bad sleepers feel towards those who are enjoying it while they cannot, Shakespeare perhaps felt in his own proper person. We are not Kings, but have we not in our degree compared our worldly condition with that of those less favoured by fortune and yet envied them because they slept while we tossed sleepless ? Henry V. remembers "the thrice gorgeous ceremony of a king" and despises it because he cannot "sleep so soundly as the wretched slave

Who with a body ffll'd and vacant mind Gets him to rest, cramm'd with distressful bread; Never sees horrid night, the child of Hell.

But, like a lackey, from the rise to set Sweats in the eyes of Phcebus and all night Sleeps in Elysium."

A like passage in which a King rebels against his inability to rest may occur to the reader's mind :— " Canst thou, 0 partial sleep! give thy repose To the wet sea boy in an hour so rude; And, in the calmest and most stillest night, With all appliances and means to boot, Deny it to a king ? "

It would seem Shakespeare was no stranger to appliances:—

" Not poppy, nor mandragora,

Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world, Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep Which thou owedst yesterday."

It is not only envy which the sleepless man feels for the one who sleeps at will. It is envy touched with contempt. It is the "youth with un stuffed brain" who snores so contentedly.

The self-centredness which comes of weary wakefulness does not escape Shakespeare even when it is love which forbids repose. It is love and the anxieties it brings which Romeo said "Chased sleep from my enthralled eyes,

And made them watchers of my own heart's sorrow."

Is what we call sweet sleep really unconscious oven if it is dreamless ? Its "golden dew" is surely too positive a delight for unconsciousness to hold. Who has not looked forward to the really good night (after anxiety or pain is over) which he

knows in store for him as we look forward to our most vividly conscious pleasures ? Moreover, it is a fact that many people

keep during their very " best " nights a faculty for judging time. They know within a little how long they have been in Elysium. Perhaps the very soundest sleeper, the man who, wakened only by reiterated noise,

"Thus frighted swears a prayer or two And sleeps again,"

has not this consciousness. If so, the bad sleepers have the

best of it, at least in one sense. To have experienced "the golden dew " is worth a good many hours of fuming wakefulness. "Nature's soft nurse" is kindest to those who most often cry for her. Did Shakespeare call to her again and again for aid himself, or did he only hear with the ears of genius the voices of others ? It is impossible to say. Perhaps men of supreme genius do not themselves know where experience ends and sympathy begins.