SHAKESPEARE AND SLEEP.

Dominion, Volume 3, Issue 815, 12 May 1910, Page 6

SHAKESPEARE AND SLEEP.

Mr. BVanHin Head, who is a banker in Chicago, is also a man of letters, and especially a student of Shakespeare. Ho lias produced a monograph on "Shakespeare's Insomnia and tie Causes Thereof"—ono of these titles that "rush" the reader in a spirit of admirable assurance, like Mr. Edward Carpenter's "Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure." Shakespeare. Mr. Head assumes in his title, suffered from insomnia ; there is no . question about it in his mind. He founds his conviction upon the several passages in praise of sleep that occur in "the plays at a certain period. Sleep is. a subject., on which "no author has written so feelingly." The eulogies of sleep are "transcripts from his own mournful experience."

This principle, generally applied, would bring a good many poets and others into the melancholy army of insomnia. Sancho Panza, as most of us remember, blessed the man who invented sleep. So did the Ancient Mariner. So did Julian the Apostate, in Swinburne's glorious lines. Anyone, in fact, considering sleep at all is inclined to admit that it is a good thing. Must it bo assumed that we .can only prize it when we are liable to the loss of it? The suggestion seems absurd enough in Shakespeare's country, however it may seem in Chicago. Mr. Head's book, in fact, is an unconscious burlesque upon the modern tendency to gather personal facts about Shakespeare from the. internal evidence of the plays. Mr. Frank Harris showed us last year, in a 'remarkable work, how much there is that may reasonably/ , be derived' from that method; but' ho showed us, too, how very easy it is to pass from legitimate inferences to fanciful conjecture. We should place the Chicago scholar's argument for insomnia in the last-named class.—"Daily News."