My Shakespeare, rise! He rose. The bard rose throughout the length and breadth of his brave new world. He was not for an age, but for all time. Then, too, his tercentenary happened only once— at the end of three hundred years. It was observed piously from Maryland to Oregon. Eighty-one members of the House of Representatives, when asked by literate journalists for their favorite lines, replied instantly with a quotation from Polonius: “This above all: to thine own self be true.” The Swan was played, and pageanted, and essayed in every schoolhouse in the land.
Eugene tore the Chandos portrait from the pages of the Independent and nailed it to the calcimined wall of the backroom. Then, still full of the great echoing paean of Ben Jonson’s, he scrawled below it in large trembling letters: “My Shakespeare, rise!” The large plump face—“as damned silly a head as ever I looked at”—stared baldly at him with goggle eyes, the goatee pointed ripe with hayseed vanity. But, lit by the presence, Eugene plunged back into the essay littered across his table.
He was discovered. In an unwise absence, he left the Bard upon the wall. When he returned, Ben and Helen had read his scrawl. Thereafter, he was called poetically to table, to the telephone, to go an errand.
“My Shakespeare, rise!”
With red resentful face, he rose.
“Will My Shakespeare pass the biscuit?” or, “Could I trouble My Shakespeare for the butter?” said Ben, scowling at him.
“My Shakespeare! My Shakespeare! Do you want another piece of pie?” said Helen. Then, full of penitent laughter, she added: “That’s a shame! We oughtn’t to treat the poor kid like that.” Laughing, she plucked at her large straight chin, gazing out the window, and laughing absently—penitently, laughing.
But—“his art was universal. He saw life clearly and he saw it
