Or, again, where Lady Constance, in King John, says to Cardinal Pandulph, Act iii. Sc. 4: He talks to me that never had a son. In his writings, too, we seem to read that our author had learnt, and practised, and desired in his own truth to teach, the duty of children towards their parents. How pathetically, for instance, is this lesson read to Coriolanus by his mother Volumnia! Say my request's unjust, And spurn me back; but if it be not so, Thou art not honest; and the gods will plague thee, That thou restrain'st from me the duty, which To a mother's part belongs. Coriolanus, Act v. Sc. 3. And how forcibly is Goneril admonished by the Duke of Albany, that no good can be expected either from or by an undutiful child : O Goneril! You are not worth the dust which the rude wind i.e., cannot be restrained within any certain bounds, and will eventually shrink from no excess of sin : She that herself will sliver or disbranch From her material sap, perforce must wither, And come to deadly use. King Lear, Act iv. Sc. 2. In these last words Warburton suggests that there is a reference to the use that witches and * Tear off. enchanters are said to make of withered branches in their charms. But it is Lear himself who is employed, as we might expect, to place the deformity and misery of filial ingratitude in the strongest light: Ingratitude! thou marble-hearted fiend, More hideous when thou shew'st thee in a child How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is To have a thankless child. King Lear, Act i. Sc. 4. There is good reason to believe that, in using this strong language, Shakspeare wrote not only as he felt, but as he was justified in speaking by his own dutiful behaviour towards his parents.* On the other hand, no less forcibly and pathetically does our poet teach us, we may suppose also from his own feelings, the affection which parents cherish, or ought to cherish, towards their offspring, in the complaint of Lady Macduff before referred to, and in the rebuke which Clifford administers to King Henry VI. : My gracious liege, this too much lenity Whose hand is that the forest bear does lick? *See below, Tercent. Sermon preached at Stratford, p. 399. Yet, in protection of their tender ones, Who hath not seen them (even with those wings K. Henry VI., 3rd Part, Act ii. Sc. 2. a rebuke which, whether just or no, elicited from the king in reply the noble sentiment about which there can be no question, viz., that the good deeds of parents are the best inheritance which they can bequeath to their children : I'll leave my son my virtuous deeds behind. Shakspeare's only son, Hamnet, who died in his twelfth year, was still alive when this play was written. Had he survived his father, his would indeed have been a glorious inheritance. The two daughters of our poet, however, did both survive him; and to them-besides the immortal works which he left behind-he bequeathed also, I doubt not, the effectual blessing of a good Christian. This I venture to say, because it may be presumed that the pious practice of children receiving benedictions from their parents-a practice common in our poet's time-was observed in his own family. That such must have been the case we may not unreasonably infer from his frequent mention of it, and from the easy natural manner in which it is * See below, Sect. 16, p. 299. introduced. We find it in the Two Gentlemen, &c., in 1st K. Henry VI., in Coriolanus, in Cymbeline, in Titus Andronicus, in King Lear, in Hamlet, in King Richard III., in the Winter's Tale. But before we turn to the passages, let me produce a few examples in illustration of the custom from other sources. In the Life of Sir Thomas More, published in Dr. Chr. Wordsworth's Ecclesiastical Biography, we read : Towards his father he gave many proofs of his natural affection and lowly mind. Whensoever he passed through Westminster to his place in the Chancery, by the Court of King's Bench, if his father, who sat there as judge, had been set down ere he came, he would go to him, and reverently kneeling down in sight of all, ask him blessing. This virtuous custom be always solemnly observed; tho' then men after their marriages thought themselves not bound to these duties of younger folks. Such was the humility and filial reverence of the then Lord High Chancellor of England! Stapleton, in his Tres Thomæ, bears witness to the same fact, and in recording it speaks of the practice as peculiar to the English people. His words are worth quoting at the present day : : Solent apud nos liberi quotidie, mane ac vesperi, benedictionem flexo poplite ab utroque parente petere. Qui mos si apud alias quasdam gentes obtineret, haberent Parentes filios magis morigeros, haberit Respublica subditos magis obsequentes, haberet Ecclesia fideles magis obedientes.* * Eccl. Biog. ii. 73. Compare the testimony of Meric Casaubon, quoted in Christian Institutes, iv. 565; Walton's Life of George Herbert; and Scott's Woodstock, c. ii., xiii., and Pev. of Peak, c. ix. Nicholas Ferrar was born when Shakspeare began to write, viz., in 1592; and we are told of him, when he was 27 years old, and his mother came to visit him at Little Gidding, that though he was of that age, and had been engaged in many public concerns of great importance, had been a distinguished member of Parliament, and had conducted with effect the prosecution of the Prime Minister of the day, at first approaching his mother he knelt upon the ground to ask and receive her blessing;' and he kept up the same practice in his own family; as did also, we read,* Mr. Philip Henry, who died in 1696: so that we have evidence of the existence of the custom during two centuries. Bishop Sanderson, in 1657, mentions it as one of the observances which, in that disordered and distempered time, were cried down as 'rags of Popery.' And there can be no doubt that during the Cromwellian usurpation our old English manners suffered not a little, and many practices which were themselves part and instruments of piety, were exploded and lost by being branded under that odious name.' + But to return to Shakspeare. There could not be a more striking illustration of the custom of which I have been speaking than that Caius Marcius, on his return from the capture of Corioli, and victory over * See Ibid. iv. 173, 181. + Works, vol. ii. p. 35. Eccl. Biog. iv. 180. Christian Institutes, iv. 561. |
