wever scandalised
at the nakedness of his ribald profanity, to protect herself against it
by appeal to reason or tradition, is dwelt upon with an emphasis
sufficient to indicate the secret tendency of the poet's own sympathies
and convictions. In Romeo's attempt at conciliation, and his poor excuse
for Mercutio (which yet the Nurse, an emblem of the temporising and
accommodating pliancy of episcopalian Protestantism, shows herself only
too ready to accept as valid) as "one that God hath made, for himself to
mar,"--the allusion here is evidently to the democratic and revolutionary
tendencies of the doctrine of Knox and Calvin, with its ultimate
developments of individualism and private judgment--we recognise the note
of Burghley's lifelong policy and its endeavour to fuse the Protestant or
Puritan party with the state Church of the Tudors as by law established.
The distaste of Elizabeth's bishops for such advances, their flutter of
apprehension at the daring and their burst of indignation at the
insolence of the Calvinists, are significantly expressed in terms which
seem to hint at a possible return for help and protection to the shelter
of the older faith and the support of its partisans. "An 'a speak
anything against me, I'll take him down an 'a were lustier than he is,
and twenty such Jacks;" (the allusion here is again obvious, to the
baptismal name of John Calvin and John Knox, if not also to the popular
byword of Jack Presbyter;) "and if I cannot," (here the sense of
insecurity and dependence on foreign help or secular power becomes
transparent) "I'll find those that shall." She disclaims communion with
the Protestant Churches of the continent, with Amsterdam or Geneva: "I am
none of his flirt-gills; I am none of his skains-mates." Peter, who
carries her fan ("to hide her face: for her fan's the fairer face"; we
may take this to be a symbol of the form of episcopal consecration still
retained in the Anglican Church as a cover for its separation from
Catholicism), is undoubtedly meant for Whitgift, Archbishop of
Canterbury; the name Peter, as applied to a menial who will stand by and
suffer every knave to use the Church at his pleasure, but is ready to
draw as soon as another man if only he may be sure of having the secular
arm of the law on his side, implies a bitter sarcasm on the intruding
official of state then established by law as occupant of a see divorced
from its connection with that of the apostle. The