"Food for Powder"--"Food for Worms"

Abstract

N an age accustomed to and thunder on and off stage, Shakespeare's instinctive revulsion from senseless shedding of is striking and novel. The agonizing cry of Marlowe's Faustus at moment of his damnation, See, see where Christ's streams in firmament! impresses finally with its theatricality rather than with its sensitivity to blood-letting. But Shakespeare's Portia, in a similar vein of melodrama, sets countercurrent to age's insensibility in her warning against shedding of one drop of Christian blood (IV. i. 3I0). From very beginning of Shakespeare's career, this phrase, the effusion of Christian blood, runs like a thread through English history plays, in which, over a long period of time, he turned again and again to tragical cost of war. In Henry VI, his earliest history, good Duke of Gloucester proposes a peace between England and France as only means to stop effusion of our Christian blood (i Henry VI V. i. 8-9), and in Henry V, with which he completed series, French King echoes same sentiment (III. vi. I39-I40). Indeed, business of does not come to a climax until almost unendurable pageant of Macbeth's futile and bloody murders. In none of Shakespeare's historical plays is this humane temper more in evidence than in i Henry IV, where it is thrown into high light through deft use of a potent image. In last decade study of Shakespeare's imagery has been occasion for a good deal of speculation on Shakespeare's life, character, and environment, extending from his observation of direction of flow of water under Clopton bridge to his disgust of fawning spaniels at rich men's tables. As to dubiousness of these speculations, nothing more need be said here than has already been said in Rosemund Tuve's recently published Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery. It is rather to be remarked that, with all this new interest in subject, so little attention should have been paid to what on its face would seem to be a more pertinent field of inquiry, Shakespeare's use of imagery in conformity to special capacities of artistic medium in which he was writing. The prefaces of Granville-Barker have shown how sensitive Shakespeare was to dramatic effects possible on stage on which his plays were produced. It is inconceivable that poet should not have perceived possibilities of poetic imagery so projected. That Shakespeare did think of imagery functionally is a wholly reasonable hypothesis against which evidence in i Henry IV may be tested with profit. But first critics must be dealt with, who, while they will begrudgingly