These lines are a significant arraignment of the drink habit and traffic. Shakespeare never lost sight of the train of evils arising from general revelry. He not only gauged the physical and mental ravages of intemperance, but weighed their calamitous effect from an economic standpoint, showing the drain upon the nation's resources to the advantage of other countries, whose people laughed at its suicidal policy and derided the customers who consumed their vinous wares.

While the scenes of his marvelous dramas are frequently laid abroad, it is now agreed that Shakespeare was invariably painting the manners and customs of his native land on a foreign background. This was the convention of the Elizabethan stage. The playgoers found delight in penetrating the thin disguise of the characters presented, and heartily enjoyed the local hits and allusions.

"With them," says T. Fairman Ordish in "Shakespeare's London," "the device was taken for grantedit was the mode of the time. It constituted a part of the 'play' with the audience to detect the reality beneath the mask, the actual beneath the fictitious."

In "Court and Society from Elizabeth to Anne," the Duke of Manchester suggests that the Earl of Essex, whose melancholy and irresolution were as marked as his personal beauty, was the original of Hamlet, that Leicester was Claudius, and that the relations of Lettice with Robert Devereaux resembled those of the Queen of Denmark to her moody and erratic son.

Aside from these considerations, however, there can be little doubt but that the "heavy-headed revelry east. and west" applied to England. It is an apt characterization of the social condition of the country; and, under the veil of attacking Denmark, Shakespeare was putting the stamp of disapproval on the national vice at home. Horatio's questions and Hamlet's answers seem to have been

devised for no other end, except, it may be, to stimulate sentiment to work for its extinction.

Even the loud and sulphurous pledge that accompanied the rouse of Claudius was an English custom. Royalty held itself little lower than divinity in Shakespeare's day, and kings and princes demanded as much sound and fury with their "wakes" as though nature herself was carousing, and the heavens and the earth were joyfully re-echoing the pompous celebration of their drink.

With all her good sense and prudence, Queen Elizabeth maintained this clamorous practice. In describing a royal dinner in 1598, when she was in her sixty-fifth year, Hentzer records that, while the yeomen of the guard were serving the courses, "12 trumpets and two kettle-drums made the hall ring for half-an-hour together."

In the last act of "Hamlet" drink is made to play another horrible part. Lest the envenomed foil of Laertes should prove laggard, the king has a cup of drugged wine prepared for Hamlet. Trumpets blare and cannons roar as the king pretends to drink during a breathing spell in the fencing match and offers the cup to Hamlet. The prince waves it aside until the bout is finished. Gertrude is not in the king's confidence, however. Disregarding a hurried warning from Claudius, she lifts the fatal chalice and drinks to the fortune of her son. The potent poison takes quick effect, and the queen-mother dies crying, "The drink, Hamlet, the drink."

Hamlet stabs the king with the envenomed foil, and forces the remainder of the deadly draught down his throat. Then the curtain falls on four victims of drink, treachery and murder, and the rest is silence.

In "Timon of Athens" drunkenness is pronounced an unpardonable offense in a soldier. It is in vain that Alcibiades pleads to the senate in behalf of a valorous comrade who had killed a man in private quarrel. The grave

and reverend seigniors close their ears to every citation of the culprit's good qualities. One fault he has, which, in their estimation, out-tongues them all:

He's a sworn rioter; he has a sin that often
Drowns him and takes his valor prisoner;
If there were no foes, that were enough
To overcome him; in that beastly fury
He has been known to commit outrages
And cherish factions; 'tis inferr'd to us
His days are foul and his drink dangerous.

This presentment is conclusive with the senate. Drink destroyed the man's courage, impelled him to frantic and disloyal acts; and because of that sin-note the word; it is Shakespeare's designation of drunkenness because of that sin the law must take its course. The senate might

have condoned the actual crime, but it refused to extend mercy to a sworn rioter, whose days were foul and his drink dangerous.

MACBETH'S MONSTROUS MALADY

Are thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight, or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?

-MACBETH.

To render easy the murder of Duncan and avert suspicion from herself and husband, Lady Macbeth stupefies the guards of the royal chamber with liquor. She explains the scheme to her wavering consort:

-His two chamberlains
Will I with wine and wassail so convince,
That memory, the warder of the brain,
Small be a fume, and the receipt of reason
A limbeck only; when in swinish sleep
Their drenched natures lie as in a death,
What cannot you and I perform upon
The unguarded Duncan? What not put upon
His spongy officers, who shall bear the guilt

Of our great quell?

The king was to be slain with the daggers of the unconscious guards, who, smeared with blood, would naturally be held guilty of the crime. But observe the variable course of liquor. The chamberlains found oblivion in the cup; it had been craftily administered to that end. Macbeth and his wife drank to fortify their courage and steady their treacherous hands.

At the outset of that famous scene, where the gory dagger floats before his startled gaze, Macbeth tells the servant:

Go bid thy mistress when my drink is ready,

She strike upon the bell.

There was nothing strange about this order; it was not likely to arouse suspicion, since it was the general habit to drink at bed-time. But Duncan's fate was trem

bling in the balance at that moment, and Lady Macbeth was undoubtedly anxious that her husband should not neglect this particular nightcap. His timidity in an earlier scene showed that he needed what our topers call a bracer. She was perturbed by his instability, and took care that the cup was specially qualified to prop his inconstant purpose.

As Macbeth awaits the signal for drink and murder, the blood-stained dagger confronts him. He is unnerved and unstrung again by this fatal vision. He calls upon the sure and firm-set earth to hear not his footsteps, lest the very stones cry aloud in horror. But when the bell sounds, his morbid fancies take flight, and he goes bravely to his drink and bloody task:

I go, and it is done; the bell invites me.
Hear it not, Duncan, for it is a knell,
That summons thee to heaven or to hell.

And while Macbeth, emboldened by liquor, is killing the sleeping king, his wife, referring to the guards, those slaves of drink and thralls of sleep, confesses:

That which hath made them drunk hath made me bold,
What hath quenched them hath given me fire.

This passage has convinced most students that Lady Macbeth was a drinking woman in the common acceptance of the term; but, addressing the Harvard chapter of Phi Beta Kappa several years ago, Dr. Horace Howard Furness objected to such an interpretation of the text as "inartistic and revolting." "I know of no published explanation of these words," said the learned doctor, "other than that given 130 years ago by Mrs. Griffith, who remarks that Shakespeare 'seems to think that a woman could not be rendered completely wicked without some degree of intoxication.' All subsequent commentators have either quoted Mrs. Griffith or omitted any reference to the passage; her interpretation remains,