Having walked in this sort from Saturday in
the evening, till Monday noon, it then stood still." It seems not
improbable that Birnam wood should come to Dunsinane.
It was for an age of faith, for a people whose credulity was fed on such
prodigies and whose imagination glowed at such wonderful portents, that
Shakespeare wrote, weaving into the realities of sense those awful
mysteries of the supernatural which hovered not far away from every
Englishman of his time.
Shakespeare was born in 1564, when Elizabeth had been six years on the
throne, and he died in 1616, nine years before James I., of the faulty
spleen, was carried to the royal chapel in Westminster, "with great
solemnity, but with greater lamentation." Old Baker, who says of himself
that he was the unworthiest of the knights made at Theobald's,
condescends to mention William Shakespeare at the tail end of the men of
note of Elizabeth's time. The ocean is not more boundless, he affirms,
than the number of men of note of her time; and after he has finished
with the statesmen ("an exquisite statesman for his own ends was Robert
Earl of Leicester, and for his Countries good, Sir William Cecill, Lord
Burleigh"), the seamen, the great commanders, the learned gentlemen and
writers (among them Roger Askam, who had sometime been schoolmaster to
Queen Elizabeth, but, taking too great delight in gaming and
cock-fighting, lived and died in mean estate), the learned divines and
preachers, he concludes: "After such men, it might be thought ridiculous
to speak of Stage-players; but seeing excellency in the meanest things
deserve remembring, and Roscius the Comedian is recorded in History with
such commendation, it may be allowed us to do the like with some of our
Nation.
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