Shakespeare and the Makers of Virginia. By Sir A. W.
Ward. (H. Milford. 4s. net.)—This year's Shakespeare Lecture to the British Academy is singularly interesting. It discusses, first, Shakespeare's personal connexions with the wealthy noblemen and City merchants who were interested in the Virginia Company, and who were also, in some respects, a kind of Opposition in James I.'s reign. Sir A. W. Ward thinks that Shakespeare, in describing the shipwreck in The Tempest, drew on a letter in which William Strachey, secretary to the Virginia Company at Jamestown, narrated the wreck of Sir George Somers's ship in the Bermudas in 1609. The letter was not published till long after Shakespeare's death ; presumably, then, some leading member of the Company allowed him to read it. Secondly, Sir A. W. Ward examines the political teaching of the plays, and concludes, we think rightly, that Shakespeare showed no bias in favour of the Opposition. " He was—could he help it 1—an aristocrat by nature ; but he was no follower of party, faction, or sect." "He stood, one and whole, in Church and State, steadfastly on the side of degree or Order, the dispensation of God to man, and therefore on the side of Ordered Freedom, as against that of the inevitable sequence of faction, tyranny, and mob-rule."
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