Turn we then to the more bustling field of war. If anyone expects to find a general moral judgment about war in Shakespeare he will be disappointed. Shakespeare, like Justinian—a person to whom it would be hard to find any other resemblance in him—accepts war among the inevitable facts of life. Princes and nations fight, and arms are the natural profession of a gentleman. One of man’s seven ages, according to Jaques, is to be a soldier, ‘full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard’; and we are told that Bassanio was a soldier, seemingly because otherwise something would be lacking to him, for nothing turns on it. The reasons for making war, be they better or worse, are as a rule not too plainly bad to be plausible to the common understanding; a fair mark, it may be, for satirical quips, but that is not the main business. What really matters is that war must needs come in the dramatist’s way if he presents histories ancient or modern, and offers not only stirring incidents but precious occasions for developing every kind of character. Without the field of Shrewsbury we should not know Falstaff as we do know him; it gives us the exact measure of his braggadocio and the full wealth of the measureless ironical humour which he turns freely on himself, being resolved, since he may be no better than he is, to make himself out rather worse. He is the very contrary of that actual braggart who, having no humour, bragged sincerely and was a valiant man notwithstanding, Benvenuto Cellini.—One might fall to wondering what Shakespeare would have made of Benvenuto, had he ever heard of him; but the perpetual trouble with Shakespeare, as with the Oxford English Dictionary, is that at every turn one is tempted to stray and browse in by-ways.—Accordingly it was very well for a solemn Byzantine emperor, and his learned assessors who added the precepts of the Church to the Roman lawyers’ humane Stoic tradition, to deprecate war in set terms, along with slavery, as a lamentable departure from the ideal rule of natural reason, though in fact inveterate by the common custom of mankind: but a Renaissance playwright, who would be no dramatist without his share of unreasonable human nature, could hardly wish himself deprived of the material that war furnished him both for action and rhetoric. Such lines as ‘The royal banner and all quality, Pride, pomp and circumstance of glorious war’ explain better than any commentary why the military pageant of history had a warm place in an Elizabethan actor-manager’s professional affections. Shakespeare would have liked to display it better. The Chorus in ‘Henry V.’ apologises for the ‘four or five most vile and ragged’—_i.e._ battered—‘foils’ which were the best the Globe Theatre’s armoury could produce for the campaign of Agincourt. Of that play there will be a word more to say anon.