urch under the
eighth Henry. As Shakespeare wrote, it was preparing for a new and
conspicuous outburst. When he died, Oliver Cromwell was already
seventeen years of age and John Hampden twenty-two. The spirit of
Hampden was preeminently the English spirit--the spirit which has given
distinction to the Anglo-Saxon race--and he and Shakespeare were
contemporaries, and yet of this spirit not a vestige is to be found in
the English historical plays and no opportunities lost to obliterate or
distort its manifestations. Only in Brutus and his
fellow-conspirators--of all Shakespearian characters--do we find the
least consideration for liberty, and even then he makes the common, and
perhaps in his time the unavoidable, mistake of overlooking the
genuinely democratic leanings of Julius Caesar and the anti-popular
character of the successful plot against him.

It has in all ages been a pastime of noble minds to try to depict a
perfect state of society. Forty years before Shakespeare's birth, Sir
Thomas More published his "Utopia" to the world. Bacon intended to do
the same thing in the "New Atlantis," but never completed the work,
while Sir Philip Sidney gives us his dream in his "Arcadia." Montaigne
makes a similar essay, and we quote from Florio's translation, published
in 1603, the following passage (Montaigne's "Essays," Book I, Chapter
30):

"It is a nation, would I answer Plato, that hath no kind of traffic, no
knowledge of letters, no intelligence of numbers, no name of magistrate
nor of political superiority; no use of service, of riches, or of
poverty; no contracts, no succession, no dividences; no occupation, but
idle; no respect of kindred, but common; no apparel, but natural; no
manuring of lands; no use of wine, corn, or metal. The very words that
import lying, falsehood, treason, dissimulation, covetousness, envy,
detraction, and pardon were never heard among them."

We may readily infer that Shakespeare found little to sympathize with in
this somewhat extravagant outline of a happy nation, but he goes out of
his way to travesty it. In "The Tempest" he makes Gonzalo, the noblest
character in the play, hold the following language to the inevitable
king (Shakespeare can not imagine even a desert island without a king!):

"Had I plantation of this isle, my lord,
I' th' commonwealth I would by contraries
Execute all things; for no kind of traffic
Would I admit; no name of magistrate;
Letter