noble Knight, Sir John Salisburie. virum Musa vetat mori. MDCI.' Dignum laude The significance of this slight piece, which, as indicated, is signed in Shakespeare's full name, remains an unsolved problem; but its authenticity is generally accepted. It has the air of a trifle, thrown off perhaps at the urgency of a resolute Album-maker, whose hackneyed emblematics, allegorical mystifications, and Arthurian legend-lore can have had few attractions for the Shakespeare of 1600. Critics of repute have read high romance in these cloudy symbols; and Chester himself doubtless intended to convey a very serious meaning, whether it concerned the love-affairs of Elizabeth with Essex or another, or some private history to which we have no clue;1 but the team of distinguished poets whom he persuaded to be yoked to his allegorical chariot regarded their enterprise, one surmises, as a pleasant jest, though they carried their parts through with appropriate decorum to the end. 1 Dr. Grosart, in his valuable edition (New Shaks. Soc. 1878), ardently defends the Essextheory. Mr. Lee has pointed out the resemblance between the symbolism of this poem and 'the parts figuratively played in Sidney's obsequies by turtledove, swan, phoenix, and eagle,' as described in Matthew Roydon's elegy on Sidney appended to Spenser's Colin Clout's Come Home again, 1595 (W. Shakespeare, p. 184). THE PHOENIX AND THE TURTLE LET the bird of loudest lay, But thou shrieking harbinger, To this troop come thou not near! From this session interdict Let the priest in surplice white, And thou treble-dated crow, That thy sable gender makest With the breath thou givest and takest, 14. can, is accomplished in. 17. treble-dated, thrice as long lived as man. 18. gender, race, ΙΟ 20 Here the anthem doth commence: So they loved, as love in twain Hearts remote, yet not asunder; So between them love did shine, Property was thus appalled, Reason, in itself confounded, That it cried, How true a twain 25. as, as if. 37, Property, individual nature, personal identity. 40 |