SCHELLING— THE COMMON FOLK OF SHAKESPEARE. 473 



is slanderously wronged, and it is his prudent advice, which, fol- 

 lowed implicitly by the lady and her friends, rights that wrong in 

 the end. The likeness of this function of Friar Lawrence is patent 

 to the most superficial reader ; but unhappily for his prudence and 

 his ingenuity, the accident to his messenger, the precipitancy of 

 Romeo, the influence of the very stars is against him and he fails 

 where his brother friar had succeeded. Nowhere in Shakespeare 

 does the clergy function with more dignity than in " Measure for 

 Measure " whether in the role of the chaste and devoted novitiate, 

 Isabella, or in the grave and searching wisdom of the Duke. What 

 Shakespeare's attitude toward formal religion may have been we 

 have little that is definite to go by. Who can doubt that it was he, 

 however, and none other, who paid for the tolling of the great bell 

 of St. Saviours when his brother's body was laid there to rest? 

 And who can question with all his scenes of religious pomp and 

 dignity that Shakespeare recognized, with Wolsey, that all these 

 forms of earthly vanity are 



a burden 

 Too heavy for a man that hopes for heaven ? 



We may regret that Shakespeare has nowhere exhibited to us, like 

 Chaucer in his " poure Persoun of a toun," his ideal of the cloth. 

 It has been wittily said that it is a credit to human nature that no 

 critic has as yet called Shakespeare a Puritan. It is somewhat less 

 creditable that some have gone about to show him the satirist of 

 Puritanism, especially in Malvolio. It was Jonson, the moralist, 

 who satirized Puritanism, not Shakespeare, whose business was with 

 qualities that differentiate men in the essentials of their natures and 

 in the conduct which these differences entail. 



Let us glance next at the physicians of Shakespeare. In Dr. 

 Caius of " The Merry Wives," albeit he is boastful of his intelligence 

 from the court, the doctor is lost in the gross wit of the Frenchman's 

 ignorance of English satirized. The apothecary who sells Romeo 

 his death potion, in his " tattered weeds," could assuredly not have 

 been of a profession in which there are no beggars. The father of 

 Helena in " All's Well," although he left to his daughter the mirac- 

 ulous cure of the King of France by means of his medical secrets. 



