ile in the act of
awaiting her bridegroom conveys a furtive stroke of satire at the similar
vaunt of Elizabeth when likewise meditating marriage and preparing to
receive a suitor from the hostile house of Valois. It must be
unnecessary to point out the resemblance or rather the identity between
the character and fortune of Paris and the character and fortune of
Essex, whose fate had been foreseen and whose end prefigured by the poet
with almost prophetic sagacity. To the far-reaching eye of Shakespeare
it must have seemed natural and inevitable that Paris (Essex) should fall
by the hand of Romeo (Burghley) immediately before the monument of the
Capulets where their common mistress was interred alive--immediately,
that is, before the termination of the Tudor dynasty in the person of
Elizabeth, who towards the close of her reign may fitly have been
regarded as one already buried with her fathers, though yet living in a
state of suspended animation under the influence of a deadly narcotic
potion administered by the friends of Romeo--by the partisans, that is,
of the Cecilian policy. The Nurse was not less evidently designed to
represent the Established Church. Allusions to the marriage of the
clergy are profusely scattered through her speeches. Her deceased
husband was probably meant for Sir Thomas More--"a merry man" to the last
moment of his existence--who might well be supposed by a slight poetic
license to have foreseen in the infancy of Elizabeth her future
backsliding and fall from the straight path "when she came to age." The
passing expression of tenderness with which the Nurse refers to his
memory--"God be with his soul!"--implies at once the respect in which the
name of the martyr Chancellor was still generally held, and the lingering
remains of Catholic tradition which still made a prayer for the dead rise
naturally to Anglican lips. On the other hand, the strife between
Anglicans and Puritans, the struggle of episcopalian with Calvinistic
reformers, was quite as plainly typified in the quarrel between the Nurse
and Mercutio, in which the Martin Marprelate controversy was first
unmistakably represented on the stage. The "saucy merchant, that was so
full of his ropery," with his ridicule of the "stale" practice of Lenten
fasting and abstinence, his contempt for "a Lenten pie," and his
preference for a flesh diet as "very good meat in Lent," is clearly a
disciple of Calvin; and the impotence of the Nurse, ho