is sufficient for the thinker, who has thus shown what "our seemers be."
It is no less characteristic of Shakespeare that Duke Vincentio, his
alter ego, should order another to punish loose livers--a task
which his kindly nature found too disagreeable. But, leaving these
general considerations, let us come to the first scene of the first act:
the second long speech of the Duke should have awakened the suspicion
that Vincentio is but another mask for Shakespeare. The whole speech
proclaims the poet; the Duke begins:
"Angelo
There is a kind of character in thy life,"
Hamlet says to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in what is supposed to be
prose:
"There is a kind of confession in your looks."
A little later the line:
"Spirits are not finely touched
But to fine issues,"
is so characteristic of Hamlet-Shakespeare that it should have put every
reader on the track.
The speeches of the Duke in the fourth scene of the first act are also
characteristic of Shakespeare. But the four lines,
"My holy sir, none better knows than you
How I have ever loved the life removed,
And held in idle price to haunt assemblies,
Where youth and cost and witless bravery keep,"
are to me an intimate, personal confession; a fuller rendering indeed of
Hamlet's "Man delights not me; no, nor woman neither." In any case it
will be admitted that a dislike of assemblies and cost and witless
bravery is peculiar in a reigning monarch, so peculiar indeed that it
reminds me of the exiled Duke in "As You Like It," or of Duke Prospero
in "The Tempest" (two other incarnations of Shakespeare), rather than of
any one in real life. A love of solitude; a keen contempt for shows and
the "witless bravery" of court-life were, as we shall see,
characteristics of Shakespeare from youth to old age.
In the first scene of the third act the Duke as a friar speaks to the
condemned Claudio. He argues as Hamlet would argue, but with, I think, a
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