CHAPTER I. SHAKESPEARE'S EARLY ATTEMPTS TO PORTRAY HIMSELF

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THE MAN SHAKESPEARE

AND

HIS TRAGIC LIFE STORY

By Frank Harris

I DEDICATE THIS BOOK TO MY FRIEND, ERNEST BECKETT (NOW LORD GRIMTHORPE),

A MAN OF MOST EXCELLENT DIFFERENCES, WHO UNITES TO A GENIUS FOR

PRACTICAL THINGS A PASSIONATE SYMPATHY FOR ALL HIGH ENDEAVOUR IN

LITERATURE AND ART

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

BOOK I

SHAKESPEARE PAINTED BY HIMSELF

CHAPTER

I. Hamlet: Romeo-Jaques

II. Hamlet-Macbeth

III. Duke Vincentio-Posthumus

IV. Shakespeare's Men of Action: the Bastard,

Arthur, and King Richard II

V. Shakespeare's Men of Action (_continued_): Hotspur,

Prince Henry, and Henry V

VI. Shakespeare's Men of Action (_concluded_): King

Henry VI. and Richard III

VII. Shakespeare as Lyric Poet: “Twelfth Night”

VIII. Shakespeare's Humour: “Falstaff”

BOOK II

I. Shakespeare's early attempts to portray himself

and his wife: Biron, Adriana, Valentine

II. Shakespeare as Antonio the Merchant

III. Shakespeare's Love-story: the Sonnets: Part I

IV. Shakespeare's Love-story: the Sonnets: Part II

V. Shakespeare's Love-story: the Sonnets: Part III

VI. The First-fruit of the Tree of Knowledge: Brutus

VII. Dramas of Revenge and Jealousy: Hamlet

VIII. Dramas of Revenge and Jealousy: Othello

IX. Dramas of Lust: Part I: Troilus and Cressida

X. Dramas of Lust: Part II: Antony and Cleopatra

XI. The drama of Madness: Lear

XII. The Drama of Despair: Timon of Athens

XIII. The Latest Works: All Copies: “Winter's Tale”; “Cymbeline”; “The

Tempest”

XIV. Shakespeare's Life: Part I

XV. Shakespeare's Life: Part II

INDEX

INTRODUCTION

This book has grown out of a series of articles contributed to “The

Saturday Review” some ten or twelve years ago. As they appeared they

were talked of and criticized in the usual way; a minority of readers

thought “the stuff” interesting; many held that my view of Shakespeare

was purely arbitrary; others said I had used a concordance to such

purpose that out of the mass of words I had managed, by virtue of some

unknown formula, to re-create the character of the man.

The truth is much simpler: I read Shakespeare's plays in boyhood,

chiefly for the stories; every few years later I was fain to re-read

them; for as I grew I always found new beauties in them which I had

formerly missed, and again and again I was lured back by tantalizing

hints and suggestions of a certain unity underlying the diversity of

characters. These suggestions gradually became more definite till at

length, out of the myriad voices in the plays, I began to hear more and

more insistent the accents of one voice, and out of the crowd of faces,

began to distinguish more and more clearly the features of the writer;

for all the world like some lovelorn girl, who, gazing with her soul in

her eyes, finds in the witch's cauldron the face of the belovèd.

I have tried in this book to trace the way I followed, step by step; for

I found it effective to rough in the chief features of the man first,

and afterwards, taking the plays in succession, to show how Shakespeare

painted himself at full-length not once, but twenty times, at as many

different periods of his life. This is one reason why he is more

interesting to us than the greatest men of the past, than Dante even, or

Homer; for Dante and Homer worked only at their best in the flower of

manhood. Shakespeare, on the other hand, has painted himself for us in

his green youth with hardly any knowledge of life or art, and then in

his eventful maturity, with growing experience and new powers, in

masterpiece after masterpiece; and at length in his decline with

weakened grasp and fading colours, so that in him we can study the

growth and fruiting and decay of the finest spirit that has yet been

born among men. This tragedy of tragedies, in which “Lear” is only one

scene--this rise to intensest life and widest vision and fall through

abysms of despair and madness to exhaustion and death--can be followed

experience by experience, from Stratford to London and its thirty years

of passionate living, and then from London to village Stratford again,

and the eternal shrouding silence.

As soon as this astonishing drama discovered itself to me in its tragic

completeness I jumped to the conclusion that it must have been set forth

long ago in detail by Shakespeare's commentators, and so, for the first

time, I turned to their works. I do not wish to rail at my forerunners

as Carlyle railed at the historians of Cromwell, or I should talk, as he

talked, about “libraries of inanities...conceited dilettantism and

pedantry...prurient stupidity,” and so forth. The fact is, I found all

this, and worse; I waded through tons of talk to no result. Without a

single exception the commentators have all missed the man and the story;

they have turned the poet into a tradesman, and the unimaginable tragedy

of his life into the commonplace record of a successful tradesman's

career. Even to explain this astounding misadventure of the host of

critics is a little difficult. The mistake, of course, arose from the

fact that his contemporaries told very little about Shakespeare; they

left his appearance and even the incidents of his life rather vague.

Being without a guide, and having no clear idea of Shakespeare's

character, the critics created him in their own image, and, whenever

they were in doubt, idealized him according to the national type.

Still, there was at least one exception. Some Frenchman, I think it is

Joubert, says that no great man is born into the world without another

man being born about the same time, who understands and can interpret

him, and Shakespeare was of necessity singularly fortunate in his

interpreter. Ben Jonson was big enough to see him fairly, and to give

excellent-true testimony concerning him. Jonson's view of Shakespeare is

astonishingly accurate and trustworthy so far as it goes; even his

attitude of superiority to Shakespeare is fraught with meaning. Two

hundred years later, the rising tide of international criticism produced

two men, Goethe and Coleridge, who also saw Shakespeare, if only by

glimpses, or rather by divination of kindred genius, recognizing certain

indubitable traits. Goethe's criticism of “Hamlet” has been vastly

over-praised; but now and then he used words about Shakespeare which, in

due course, we shall see were illuminating words, the words of one who

guessed something of the truth. Coleridge, too, with his curious,

complex endowment of philosopher and poet, resembled Shakespeare, saw

him, therefore, by flashes, and might have written greatly about him;

but, alas, Coleridge, a Puritan born, was brought up in epicene

hypocrisies, and determined to see Shakespeare--that child of the

Renascence--as a Puritan, too, and consequently mis-saw him far oftener

than he saw him; misjudged him hideously, and had no inkling of his

tragic history.

There is a famous passage in Coleridge's “Essays on Shakespeare” which

illustrates what I mean. It begins: “In Shakespeare all the elements of

womanhood are holy”; and goes on to eulogize the instinct of chastity

which all his women possess, and this in spite of Doll Tearsheet,

Tamora, Cressida, Goneril, Regan, Cleopatra, the Dark Lady of the

Sonnets, and many other frail and fascinating figures. Yet whatever

gleam of light has fallen on Shakespeare since Coleridge's day has come

chiefly from that dark lantern which he now and then flashed upon the

master.

In one solitary respect, our latter-day criticism has been successful;

it has established with very considerable accuracy the chronology of the

plays, and so the life-story of the poet is set forth in due order for

those to read who can.

This then is what I found--a host of commentators who saw men as trees

walking, and mistook plain facts, and among them one authentic witness,

Jonson, and two interesting though not trustworthy witnesses, Goethe and

Coleridge--and nothing more in three centuries. The mere fact may well

give us pause, pointing as it does to a truth which is still

insufficiently understood. It is the puzzle of criticism, at once the

despair and wonder of readers, that the greatest men of letters usually

pass through life without being remarked or understood by their

contemporaries. The men of Elizabeth's time were more interested in

Jonson than in Shakespeare, and have told us much more about the younger

than the greater master; just as Spaniards of the same age were more

interested in Lope de Vega than in Cervantes, and have left a better

picture of the second-rate playwright than of the world-poet. Attempting

to solve this problem Emerson coolly assumed that the men of the

Elizabethan age were so great that Shakespeare himself walked about

among them unnoticed as a giant among giants. This reading of the riddle

is purely transcendental. We know that Shakespeare's worst plays were

far oftener acted than his best; that “Titus Andronicus” by popular

favour was more esteemed than “Hamlet.” The majority of contemporary

poets and critics regarded Shakespeare rather as a singer of “sugred”

verses than as a dramatist. The truth is that Shakespeare passed through

life unnoticed because he was so much greater than his contemporaries

that they could not see him at all in his true proportions. It was

Jonson, the nearest to him in greatness, who alone saw him at all fairly

and appreciated his astonishing genius.

Nothing illustrates more perfectly the unconscious wisdom of the English

race than the old saying that “a man must be judged by his peers.” One's

peers, in fact, are the only persons capable of judging one, and the

truth seems to be that three centuries have only produced three men at

all capable of judging Shakespeare. The jury is still being collected.

But from the quality of the first three, and of their praise, it is

already plain that his place will be among the highest. From various

indications, too, it looks as if the time for judging him had come:

“Hamlet” is perhaps his most characteristic creation, and Hamlet, in his

intellectual unrest, morbid brooding, cynical self-analysis and dislike

of bloodshed, is much more typical of the nineteenth or twentieth

century than of the sixteenth. Evidently the time for classifying the

creator of Hamlet is at hand.

And this work of description and classification should be done as a

scientist would do it: for criticism itself has at length bent to the

Time-spirit and become scientific. And just as in science, analysis for

the moment has yielded pride of place to synthesis, so the critical

movement in literature has in our time become creative. The chemist, who

resolves any substance into its elements, is not satisfied till by

synthesis he can re-create the substance out of its elements: this is

the final proof that his knowledge is complete. And so we care little or

nothing to-day for critical analyses or appreciations which are not

creative presentments of the person. “Paint him for us,” we say, “in his

habit as he lived, and we will take it that you know something about

him.”

One of the chief attempts at creative criticism in English literature,

or, perhaps it would be fairer to say, the only memorable attempt, is

Carlyle's Cromwell. He has managed to build up the man for us quite

credibly out of Cromwell's letters and speeches, showing us the

underlying sincerity and passionate resolution of the great Puritan once

for all. But unfortunately Carlyle was too romantic an artist, too

persuaded in his hero-worship to discover for us Cromwell's faults and

failings. In his book we find nothing of the fanatic who ordered the

Irish massacres, nothing of the neuropath who lived in hourly dread of

assassination. Carlyle has painted his subject all in lights, so to

speak; the shadows are not even indicated, and yet he ought to have

known that in proportion to the brilliancy of the light the shadows must

of necessity be dark. It is not for me to point out that this romantic

painting of great men, like all other make-believes and hypocrisies, has

its drawbacks and shortcomings: it is enough that it has had its day and

produced its pictures of giant-heroes and their worshippers for those

who love such childish toys.

The wonderful age in which we live--this twentieth century with its

X-rays that enable us to see through the skin and flesh of men, and to

study the working of their organs and muscles and nerves--has brought a

new spirit into the world, a spirit of fidelity to fact, and with it a

new and higher ideal of life and of art, which must of necessity change

and transform all the conditions of existence, and in time modify the

almost immutable nature of man. For this new spirit, this love of the

fact and of truth, this passion for reality will do away with the

foolish fears and futile hopes which have fretted the childhood of our

race, and will slowly but surely establish on broad foundations the

Kingdom of Man upon Earth. For that is the meaning and purpose of the

change which is now coming over the world. The faiths and convictions of

twenty centuries are passing away and the forms and institutions of a

hundred generations of men are dissolving before us like the baseless

fabric of a dream. A new morality is already shaping itself in the

spirit; a morality based not on guess-work and on fancies; but on

ascertained laws of moral health; a scientific morality belonging not to

statics, like the morality of the Jews, but to dynamics, and so fitting

the nature of each individual person. Even now conscience with its

prohibitions is fading out of life, evolving into a more profound

consciousness of ourselves and others, with multiplied incitements to

wise giving. The old religious asceticism with its hatred of the body is

dead; the servile acceptance of conditions of life and even of natural

laws is seen to be vicious; it is of the nobility of man to be insatiate

in desire and to rebel against limiting conditions; it is the property

of his intelligence to constrain even the laws of nature to the

attainment of his ideal.

Already we are proud of being students, investigators, servants of

truth, and we leave the great names of demi-gods and heroes a little

contemptuously to the men of bygone times. As student-artists we are no

longer content with the outward presentment and form of men: we want to

discover the protean vanities, greeds and aspirations of men, and to lay

bare, as with a scalpel, the hidden motives and springs of action. We

dream of an art that shall take into account the natural daily decay and

up-building of cell-life; the wars that go on in the blood; the fevers

of the brain; the creeping paralysis of nerve-exhaustion; above all, we

must be able even now from a few bare facts, to re-create a man and make

him live and love again for the reader, just as the biologist from a few

scattered bones can reconstruct some prehistoric bird or fish or mammal.

And we student-artists have no desire to paint our subject as better or

nobler or smaller or meaner than he was in reality; we study his

limitations as we study his gifts, his virtues with as keen an interest

as his vices; for it is in some excess of desire, or in some

extravagance of mentality, that we look for the secret of his

achievement, just as we begin to wonder when we see hands constantly

outstretched in pious supplication, whether a foot is not thrust out

behind in some secret shame, for the biped, man, must keep a balance.

I intend first of all to prove from Shakespeare's works that he has

painted himself twenty times from youth till age at full length: I shall

consider and compare these portraits till the outlines of his character

are clear and certain; afterwards I shall show how his little vanities

and shames idealized the picture, and so present him as he really was,

with his imperial intellect and small snobberies; his giant vices and

paltry self-deceptions; his sweet gentleness and long martyrdom. I

cannot but think that his portrait will thus gain more in truth than it

can lose in ideal beauty. Or let me come nearer to my purpose by means

of a simile. Talking with Sir David Gill one evening on shipboard about

the fixed stars, he pointed one out which is so distant that we cannot

measure how far it is away from us and can form no idea of its

magnitude. “But surely,” I exclaimed, “the great modern telescopes must

bring the star nearer and magnify it?” “No,” he replied, “no; the best

instruments make the star clearer to us, but certainly not larger.” This

is what I wish to do in regard to Shakespeare; make him clearer to men,

even if I do not make him larger.

And if I were asked why I do this, why I take the trouble to re-create a

man now three centuries dead, it is first of all, of course, because he

is worth it--the most complex and passionate personality in the world,

whether of life or letters--because, too, there are certain lessons

which the English will learn from Shakespeare more quickly and easily

than from any living man, and a little because I want to get rid of

Shakespeare by assimilating all that was fine in him, while giving all

that was common and vicious in him as spoil to oblivion. He is like the

Old-Man-of-the-Sea on the shoulders of our youth; he has become an

obsession to the critic, a weapon to the pedant, a nuisance to the man

of genius. True, he has painted great pictures in a superb, romantic

fashion; he is the Titian of dramatic art: but is there to be no

Rembrandt, no Balzac, no greater Tolstoi in English letters? I want to

liberate Englishmen so far as I can from the tyranny of Shakespeare's

greatness. For the new time is upon us, with its new knowledge and new

claims, and we English are all too willing to live in the past, and so

lose our inherited place as leader of the nations.

The French have profited by their glorious Revolution: they trusted

reason and have had their reward; no such leap forward has ever been

made as France made in that one decade, and the effects are still

potent. In the last hundred years the language of Molière has grown

fourfold; the slang of the studios and the gutter and the laboratory, of

the engineering school and the dissecting table, has been ransacked for

special terms to enrich and strengthen the language in order that it may

deal easily with the new thoughts. French is now a superb instrument,

while English is positively poorer than it was in the time of

Shakespeare, thanks to the prudery of our illiterate middle class.

Divorced from reality, with its activities all fettered in baby-linen,

our literature has atrophied and dwindled into a babble of nursery

rhymes, tragedies of Little Marys, tales of Babes in a Wood. The example

of Shakespeare may yet teach us the value of free speech; he could say

what he liked as he liked: he was not afraid of the naked truth and the

naked word, and through his greatness a Low Dutch dialect has become the

chiefest instrument of civilization, the world-speech of humanity at

large.

FRANK HARRIS.

LONDON, 1909.

BOOK I. SHAKESPEARE PAINTED BY HIMSELF

CHAPTER I. HAMLET: ROMEO--JAQUES

“As I passed by ... I found an altar with this inscription, TO THE

UNKNOWN GOD. Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto

you.” This work of Paul--the discovery and proclaiming of an unknown

god--is in every age the main function of the critic.

An unknown god this Shakespeare of ours, whom all are agreed it would be

well to know, if in any way possible. As to the possibility, however,

the authorities are at loggerheads. Hallam, “the judicious,” declared

that it was impossible to learn anything certain about “the man,

Shakespeare.” Wordsworth, on the other hand (without a nickname to show

a close connection with the common), held that Shakespeare unlocked his

heart with the sonnets for key. Browning jeered at this belief, to be in

turn contradicted by Swinburne. Matthew Arnold gave us in a sonnet “the

best opinion of his time”:

“Others abide our question. Thou art free.

We ask and ask--Thou smilest and art still,

Out-topping knowledge.”

But alas! the best opinion of one generation is in these matters often

flat unreason to the next, and it may be that in this instance neither

the opinion of Hallam nor Browning nor Arnold will be allowed to count.

As it is the object of a general to win battles so it is the life-work

of the artist to show himself to us, and the completeness with which he

reveals his own individuality is perhaps the best measure of his genius.

One does this like Montaigne, simply, garrulously, telling us his height

and make, his tastes and distastes, his loves and fears and habits, till

gradually the seeming-artless talk brings the man before us, a

sun-warmed fruit of humanity, with uncouth rind of stiff manners and

sweet kindly juices, not perfect in any way, shrivelled on this side by

early frost-bite, and on that softened to corruption through too much

heat, marred here by the bitter-black cicatrice of an ancient injury and

there fortune-spotted, but on the whole healthy, grateful, of a most

pleasant ripeness. Another, like Shakespeare, with passionate

conflicting sympathies and curious impartial intellect cannot discover

himself so simply; needs, like the diamond, many facets to show all the

light in him, and so proceeds to cut them one after the other as

Falstaff or Hamlet, to the dazzling of the purblind.

Yet Shakespeare's purpose is surely the same as Montaigne's, to reveal

himself to us, and it would be hasty to decide that his skill is

inferior. For while Montaigne had nothing but prose at his command, and

not too rich a prose, as he himself complains, Shakespeare in magic of

expression has had no equal in recorded time, and he used the lyric as

well as the dramatic form, poetry as well as prose, to give his soul

utterance.

We are doing Shakespeare wrong by trying to believe that he hides

himself behind his work; the suspicion is as unworthy as the old

suspicion dissipated by Carlyle that Cromwell was an ambitious

hypocrite. Sincerity is the birthmark of genius, and we can be sure that

Shakespeare has depicted himself for us with singular fidelity; we can

see him in his works, if we will take the trouble, “in his habit as he

lived.”

We are doing ourselves wrong, too, by pretending that Shakespeare

“out-tops knowledge.” He did not fill the world even in his own time:

there was room beside him in the days of Elizabeth for Marlowe and

Spenser, Ben Jonson and Bacon, and since then the spiritual outlook,

like the material outlook, has widened to infinity. There is space in

life now for a dozen ideals undreamed-of in the sixteenth century. Let

us have done with this pretence of doglike humility; we, too, are men,

and there is on earth no higher title, and in the universe nothing

beyond our comprehending. It will be well for us to know Shakespeare and

all his high qualities and do him reverence; it will be well for us,

too, to see his limitations and his faults, for after all it is the

human frailties in a man that call forth our sympathy and endear him to

us, and without love there is no virtue in worship, no attraction in

example.

The doubt as to the personality of Shakespeare, and the subsequent

confusion and contradictions are in the main, I think, due to Coleridge.

He was the first modern critic to have glimpses of the real Shakespeare,

and the vision lent his words a singular authority. But Coleridge was a

hero-worshipper by nature and carried reverence to lyric heights. He

used all his powers to persuade men that Shakespeare was [Greek:

_myrionous anaer_]--“the myriad-minded man”; a sort of demi-god who

was every one and no one, a Proteus without individuality of his own.

The theory has held the field for nearly a century, probably because it

flatters our national vanity; for in itself it is fantastically absurd

and leads to most ridiculous conclusions. For instance, when Coleridge

had to deal with the fact that Shakespeare never drew a miser, instead

of accepting the omission as characteristic, for it is confirmed by Ben

Jonson's testimony that he was “of an open and free nature,” Coleridge

proceeded to argue that avarice is not a permanent passion in humanity,

and that Shakespeare probably for that reason chose to leave it

undescribed. This is an example of the ecstasy of hero-worship; it is

begging the question to assume that whatever Shakespeare did was

perfect; humanity cannot be penned up even in Shakespeare's brain. Like

every other man of genius Shakespeare must have shown himself in his

qualities and defects, in his preferences and prejudices; “a fallible

being,” as stout old Dr. Johnson knew, “will fail somewhere.”

Even had Shakespeare tried to hide himself in his work, he could not

have succeeded. Now that the print of a man's hand or foot or ear is

enough to distinguish him from all other men, it is impossible to

believe that the mask of his mind, the very imprint, form and pressure

of his soul should be less distinctive. Just as Monsieur Bertillon's

whorl-pictures of a thumb afford overwhelming proofs of a man's

identity, so it is possible from Shakespeare's writings to establish

beyond doubt the main features of his character and the chief incidents

of his life. The time for random assertion about Shakespeare and

unlimited eulogy of him has passed away for ever: the object of this

inquiry is to show him as he lived and loved and suffered, and the

proofs of this and of that trait shall be so heaped up as to stifle

doubt and reach absolute conviction. For not only is the circumstantial

evidence overwhelming and conclusive, but we have also the testimony of

eye-witnesses with which to confirm it, and one of these witnesses, Ben

Jonson, is of rare credibility and singularly well equipped.

Let us begin, then, by treating Shakespeare as we would treat any other

writer, and ask simply how a dramatic author is most apt to reveal

himself. A great dramatist may not paint himself for us at any time in

his career with all his faults and vices; but when he goes deepest into

human nature, we may be sure that self-knowledge is his guide; as Hamlet

said, “To know a man well, were to know himself” (oneself), so far

justifying the paradox that dramatic writing is merely a form of

autobiography. We may take then as a guide this first criterion that, in

his masterpiece of psychology, the dramatist will reveal most of his own

nature.

If a dozen lovers of Shakespeare were asked to name the most profound

and most complex character in all his dramas it is probable that every

one without hesitation would answer Hamlet. The current of cultivated

opinion has long set in this direction. With the intuition of a kindred

genius, Goethe was the first to put Hamlet on a pedestal: “the

incomparable,” he called him, and devoted pages to an analysis of the

character. Coleridge followed with the confession whose truth we

shall see later: “I have a smack of Hamlet myself, if I may say so.” But

even if it be admitted that Hamlet is the most complex and profound of

Shakespeare's creations, and therefore probably the character in which

Shakespeare revealed most of himself, the question of degree still

remains to be determined. Is it possible to show certainly that even the

broad outlines of Hamlet's character are those of the master-poet?

There are various ways in which this might be proved. For instance, if

one could show that whenever Shakespeare fell out of a character he was

drawing, he unconsciously dropped into the Hamlet vein, one's suspicion

as to the identity of Hamlet and the poet would be enormously

strengthened. There is another piece of evidence still more convincing.

Suppose that Shakespeare in painting another character did nothing but

paint Hamlet over again trait by trait--virtue by virtue, fault by

fault--our assurance would be almost complete; for a dramatist only

makes this mistake when he is speaking unconsciously in his proper

person. But if both these kinds of proof were forthcoming, and not once

but a dozen times, then surely our conviction as to the essential

identity of Hamlet and Shakespeare would amount to practical certitude.

Of course it would be foolish, even in this event, to pretend that

Hamlet exhausts Shakespeare; art does little more than embroider the

fringe of the garment of life, and the most complex character in drama

or even in fiction is simple indeed when compared with even the simplest

of living men or women. Shakespeare included in himself Falstaff and

Cleopatra, beside the author of the sonnets, and knowledge drawn from

all these must be used to fill out and perhaps to modify the outlines

given in Hamlet before one can feel sure that the portrait is a

re-presentment of reality. But when this study is completed, it will be

seen that with many necessary limitations, Hamlet is indeed a revelation

of some of the most characteristic traits of Shakespeare.

To come to the point quickly, I will take Hamlet's character as analyzed

by Coleridge and Professor Dowden.

Coleridge says: “Hamlet's character is the prevalence of the abstracting

and generalizing habit over the practical. He does not want courage,

skill, will or opportunity; but every incident sets him thinking: and it

is curious, and at the same time strictly natural, that Hamlet, who all

the play seems reason itself, should be impelled at last by mere

accident to effect his object.” Again he says: “in Hamlet we see a

great, an almost enormous intellectual activity and a proportionate

aversion to real action consequent upon it.”

Professor Dowden's analysis is more careful but hardly as complete. He

calls Hamlet “the meditative son” of a strong-willed father, and adds,

“he has slipped on into years of full manhood still a haunter of the

university, a student of philosophies, an amateur in art, a ponderer on

the things of life and death who has never formed a resolution or

executed a deed. This long course of thinking apart from action has

destroyed Hamlet's very capacity for belief.... In presence of the

spirit he is himself 'a spirit,' and believes in the immortality of the

soul. When left to his private thoughts he wavers uncertainly to and

fro; death is a sleep; a sleep, it may be, troubled with dreams.... He

is incapable of certitude.... After his fashion (that of one who

relieves himself by speech rather than by deeds) he unpacks his heart in

words.”

Now what other personage is there in Shakespeare who shows these traits

or some of them? He should be bookish and irresolute, a lover of thought

and not of action, of melancholy temper too, and prone to unpack his

heart with words. Almost every one who has followed the argument thus

far will be inclined to think of Romeo. Hazlitt declared that “Romeo is

Hamlet in love. There is the same rich exuberance of passion and

sentiment in the one, that there is of thought and sentiment in the

other. Both are absent and self-involved; both live out of themselves in

a world of imagination.” Much of this is true and affords a noteworthy

example of Hazlitt's occasional insight into character, yet for reasons

that will appear later it is not possible to insist, as Hazlitt does,

upon the identity of Romeo and Hamlet. The most that can be said is that

Romeo is a younger brother of Hamlet, whose character is much less

mature and less complex than that of the student-prince. Moreover, the

characterization in Romeo--the mere drawing and painting--is very

inferior to that put to use in Hamlet. Romeo is half hidden from us in

the rose-mist of passion, and after he is banished from Juliet's arms we

only see him for a moment as he rushes madly by into never-ending night,

and all the while Shakespeare is thinking more of the poetry of the

theme than of his hero's character. Romeo is crude and immature when

compared with a profound psychological study like Hamlet. In “Hamlet”

the action often stands still while incidents are invented for the

mere purpose of displaying the peculiarities of the protagonist. “Hamlet,”

too, is the longest of Shakespeare's plays with the exception of “Antony

and Cleopatra,” and “the total length of Hamlet's speeches,” says

Dryasdust, “far exceeds that of those allotted by Shakespeare to any

other of his characters.” The important point, however, is that Romeo

has a more than family likeness to Hamlet. Even in the heat and heyday

of his passion Romeo plays thinker; Juliet says, “Good-night” and

disappears, but he finds time to give us the abstract truth:

“Love goes towards love, as schoolboys from their books,

But love from love, toward school with heavy looks.”

Juliet appears again unexpectedly, and again Hamlet's generalizing habit

asserts itself in Romeo:

“How silver-sweet sound lovers' tongues by night,

Like softest music to attending ears.”

We may be certain that Juliet would have preferred more pointed praise.

He is indeed so lost in his ill-timed reverie that Juliet has to call

him again and again by name before he attends to her.

Romeo has Hamlet's peculiar habit of talking to himself. He falls into a

soliloquy on his way to Juliet in Capulet's orchard, when his heart must

have been beating so loudly that it would have prevented him from

hearing himself talk, and into another when hurrying to the apothecary.

In this latter monologue, too, when all his thoughts must have been of

Juliet and their star-crossed fates, and love-devouring Death, he is

able to picture for us the apothecary and his shop with a wealth of

detail that says more for Shakespeare's painstaking and memory than for

his insight into character. The fault, however, is not so grave as it

would be if Romeo were a different kind of man; but like Hamlet he is

always ready to unpack his heart with words, and if they are not the

best words sometimes, sometimes even very inappropriate words, it only

shows that in his first tragedy Shakespeare was not the master of his

art that he afterwards became.

In the churchyard scene of the fifth act Romeo's likeness to Hamlet

comes into clearest light.

Hamlet says to Laertes:

“I pr'ythee, take thy fingers from my throat;

For though I am not splenitive and rash

Yet have I something in me dangerous

Which let thy wisdom fear.”

In precisely the same temper, Romeo says to Paris:

“Good, gentle youth, tempt not a desperate man;

Fly hence and leave me; think upon these gone,

Let them affright thee.”

This magnanimity is so rare that its existence would almost of itself be

sufficient to establish a close relationship between Romeo and Hamlet.

Romeo's last speech, too, is characteristic of Hamlet: on the very

threshold of death he generalizes:

“How oft when men are at the point of death,

Have they been merry? which their keepers call

A lightening before death.”

There is in Romeo, too, that peculiar mixture of pensive sadness and

loving sympathy which is the very vesture of Hamlet's soul; he says to

“Noble County Paris”:

“O, give me thy hand,

One writ with me in sour misfortune's book.”

And finally Shakespeare's supreme lyrical gift is used by Romeo as

unconstrainedly as by Hamlet himself. The beauty in the last soliloquy

is of passion rather than of intellect, but in sheer triumphant beauty

some lines of it have never been surpassed:

“Here, here will I remain

With worms that are thy chambermaids; O, here

Will I set up my everlasting rest

And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars

From this world-wearied flesh.”

The whole soliloquy and especially the superb epithet “world-wearied”

are at least as suitable to Hamlet as to Romeo. Passion, it is true, is

more accentuated in Romeo, just as there is greater irresolution

combined with intenser self-consciousness in Hamlet, yet all the

qualities of the youthful lover are to be found in the student-prince.

Hamlet is evidently the later finished picture of which Romeo was merely

the charming sketch. Hamlet says he is revengeful and ambitious,

although he is nothing of the kind, and in much the same way Romeo says:

“I'll be a candle-holder and look on,”

whereas he plays the chief part and a very active part in the drama. If

he were more of a “candle-holder” and onlooker, he would more resemble

Hamlet. Then too, though he generalizes, he does not search the darkness

with aching eyeballs as Hamlet does; the problems of life do not as yet

lie heavy on his soul; he is too young to have felt their mystery and

terror; he is only just within the shadow of that melancholy which to

Hamlet discolours the world.

Seven or eight years after writing “Romeo and Juliet,” Shakespeare

growing conscious of these changes in his own temperament embodied them

in another character, the melancholy “Jaques” in “As You Like It.” Every

one knows that Jaques is Shakespeare's creation; he is not to be found

in Lodge's “Rosalynde,” whence Shakespeare took the story and most of

the characters of his play. Jaques is only sketched in with light

strokes, but all his traits are peculiarly Hamlet's traits. For Jaques

is a melancholy student of life as Hamlet is, with lightning-quick

intelligence and heavy heart, and these are the Hamlet qualities which

were not brought into prominence in the youthful Romeo. Passages taken

at haphazard will suffice to establish my contention. “Motley's the only

wear,” says Jaques, as if longing to assume the cap and bells, and

Hamlet plays the fool's part with little better reason. Jaques exclaims:

“Give me leave

To speak my mind, and I will through and through

Cleanse the foul body of the infected world,

If they will patiently receive my medicine.”

And Hamlet cries:

“The Time is out of joint; O cursèd spite

That ever I was born to set it right.”

The famous speech of Jaques, “All the world's a stage,” might have been

said by Hamlet, indeed belongs of right to the person who gave the

exquisite counsel to the players. Jaques' confession of melancholy, too,

both in manner and matter is characteristic of Hamlet. How often

Shakespeare must have thought it over before he was able to bring the

peculiar nature of his own malady into such relief:

“I have neither the scholar's melancholy, which is emulation; nor the

musician's, which is fantastical; nor the courtier's, which is proud;

nor the soldier's, which is ambitious; nor the lawyer's, which is

politic; nor the lady's, which is nice; nor the lover's, which is all

these; but it is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples,

extracted from many objects, and, indeed, the sundry contemplation of my

travels; which, by often rumination, wraps me in, a most humourous

sadness.”

This “humourous sadness,” the child of contemplation, was indeed

Shakespeare's most constant mood. Jaques, too, loves solitude and the

country as Hamlet loved them--and above all the last trait recorded of

Jaques, his eagerness to see the reformed Duke and learn from the

convert, is a perfect example of that intellectual curiosity which is

one of Hamlet's most attaching characteristics. Yet another trait is

attributed to Jaques, which we must on no account forget. The Duke

accuses him of lewdness though lewdness seems out of place in Jaques's

character, and is certainly not shown in the course of the action. If we

combine the characters of Romeo, the poet-lover, and Jaques, the

pensive-sad philosopher, we have almost the complete Hamlet.

It is conceivable that even a fair-minded reader of the plays will admit

all I have urged about the likeness of Romeo and Jaques to Hamlet

without concluding that these preliminary studies, so to speak, for the

great portrait render it at all certain that the masterpiece of

portraiture is a likeness of Shakespeare himself. The impartial critic

will probably say, “You have raised a suspicion in my mind; a strong

suspicion it may be, but still a suspicion that is far from certitude.”

Fortunately the evidence still to be offered is a thousand times more

convincing than any inferences that can properly be drawn from Romeo or

from Jaques, or even from both together.

CHAPTER II. HAMLET--MACBETH

There is a later drama of Shakespeare's, a drama which comes between

“Othello” and “Lear,” and belongs, therefore, to the topmost height of

the poet's achievement, whose principal character is Hamlet, Hamlet over

again, with every peculiarity and every fault; a Hamlet, too, entangled

in an action which is utterly unsuited to his nature. Surely if this

statement can be proved, it will be admitted by all competent judges

that the identity of Hamlet and his creator has been established. For

Shakespeare must have painted this second Hamlet unconsciously. Think of

it. In totally new circumstances the poet speaks with Hamlet's voice in

Hamlet's words. The only possible explanation is that he is speaking

from his own heart, and for that reason is unaware of the mistake. The

drama I refer to is “Macbeth.” No one, so far as I know, has yet thought

of showing that there is any likeness between the character of Hamlet

and that of Macbeth, much less identity; nevertheless, it seems to me

easy to prove that Macbeth, “the rugged Macbeth,” as Hazlitt and Brandes

call him, is merely our gentle irresolute, humanist, philosopher Hamlet

masquerading in galligaskins as a Scottish thane.

Let us take the first appearance of Macbeth, and we are forced to remark

at once that he acts and speaks exactly as Hamlet in like circumstances

would act and speak. The honest but slow Banquo is amazed when Macbeth

starts and seems to fear the fair promises of the witches; he does not

see what the nimble Hamlet-intellect has seen in a flash--the dread

means by which alone the promises can be brought to fulfilment. As soon

as Macbeth is hailed “Thane of Cawdor” Banquo warns him, but Macbeth, in

spite of the presence of others, falls at once, as Hamlet surely would

have fallen, into a soliloquy: a thing, considering the circumstances,

most false to general human nature, for what he says must excite

Banquo's suspicion, and is only true to the Hamlet-mind, that in and out

of season loses itself in meditation. The soliloquy, too, is startlingly

characteristic of Hamlet. After giving expression to the merely natural

uplifting of his hope, Macbeth begins to weigh the for and against like

a student-thinker:

“This supernatural soliciting

Cannot be ill; cannot be good; if ill,

Why hath it given me earnest of success,

Commencing in a truth? I am thane of Cawdor:

If good, why do I yield to that suggestion

Whose horrid image ...

... function

Is smothered in surmise and nothing is

But what is not,----”

When Banquo draws attention to him as “rapt,” Macbeth still goes on

talking to himself, for at length he has found arguments against action:

“If chance will have me King, why chance may crown me,

Without my stir,”--

all in the true Hamlet vein. At the end of the act, Macbeth when

excusing himself to his companions becomes the student of Wittenberg in

proper person. The courteous kindliness of the words is almost as

characteristic as the bookish illustration:

“Kind gentlemen, your pains

Are registered where every day I turn

The leaf to read them.”

If this is not Hamlet's very tone, manner and phrase, then individuality

of nature has no peculiar voice.

I have laid such stress upon this, the first scene in which Macbeth

appears, because the first appearance is by far the most important for

the purpose of establishing the main outlines of a character; first

impressions in a drama being exceedingly difficult to modify and almost

impossible to change.

Macbeth, however, acts Hamlet from one end of the play to the other; and

Lady Macbeth's first appearance (a personage almost as important to the

drama as Macbeth himself) is used by Shakespeare to confirm this view of

Macbeth's character. After reading her husband's letter almost her first

words are:

“Yet do I fear thy nature.

It is too full o' the milk of human kindness

To catch the nearest way.”

What is this but a more perfect expression of Hamlet's nature than

Hamlet himself gives? Hamlet declares bitterly that he is “pigeon

livered,” and lacks “gall to make oppression bitter”; he says to

Laertes, “I loved you ever,” and to his mother:

“I must be cruel only to be kind,”

and she tells the King that he wept for Polonius' death. But the best

phrase for his gentle-heartedness is what Lady Macbeth gives here: he is

“too full o' the milk of human kindness.” The words are as true of the

Scottish chieftain as of the Wittenberg student; in heart they are one

and the same person.

Though excited to action by his wife, Macbeth's last words in this scene

are to postpone decision. “We will speak further,” he says, whereupon

the woman takes the lead, warns him to dissemble, and adds, “leave all

the rest to me.” Macbeth's doubting, irresolution, and dislike of action

could hardly be more forcibly portrayed.

The seventh scene of the first act begins with another long soliloquy by

Macbeth, and this soliloquy shows us not only Hamlet's irresolution and

untimely love of meditation, but also the peculiar pendulum-swing of

Hamlet's thought:

“If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well

It were done quickly: if the assassination

Could trammel up the consequence, and catch

With his surcease success: that but this blow

Might be the be-all and the end-all; here,

But here upon this bank and shoal of time

We'd jump the life to come. . . . .”

Is not this the same soul which also in a soliloquy questions

fate?--“Whether 'tis better in the mind....”

Macbeth, too, has Hamlet's peculiar and exquisite intellectual

fairness--a quality, be it remarked in passing, seldom found in a

ruthless murderer. He sees even the King's good points:

...... “this Duncan

Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been

So clear in his great office, that his virtues

Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against

The deep damnation of his taking off.”

Is it not like Hamlet to be able to condemn himself in this way

beforehand? Macbeth ends this soliloquy with words which come from the

inmost of Hamlet's heart:

“I have no spur

To prick the sides of my intent, but only

Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself,

And falls on the other.”

Hamlet, too, has no spur to prick the sides of his intent, and Hamlet,

too, would be sure to see how apt ambition is to overleap itself, and so

would blunt the sting of the desire. This monologue alone should have

been sufficient to reveal to all critics the essential identity of

Hamlet and Macbeth. Lady Macbeth, too, tells us that Macbeth left the

supper table where he was entertaining the King, in order to indulge

himself in this long monologue, and when he hears that his absence has

excited comment, that he has been asked for even by the King, he does

not attempt to excuse his strange conduct, he merely says, “We will

proceed no further in this business,” showing in true Hamlet fashion how

resolution has been “sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought.” In

fact, as his wife says to him, he lets “'I dare not' wait upon 'I would'

like the poor cat i' the adage.” Even when whipped to action by Lady

Macbeth's preternatural eagerness, he asks:

“If we should fail?”

whereupon she tells him to screw his courage to the sticking place, and

describes the deed itself. Infected by her masculine resolution, Macbeth

at length consents to what he calls the “terrible feat.” The word

“terrible” here is surely more characteristic of the humane

poet-thinker than of the chieftain-murderer. Even at this crisis, too,

of his fate Macbeth cannot cheat himself; like Hamlet he is compelled to

see himself as he is:

“False face must hide what the false heart doth know.”

I have now considered nearly every word used by Macbeth in this first

act: I have neither picked passages nor omitted anything that might make

against my argument; yet every impartial reader must acknowledge that

Hamlet is far more clearly sketched in this first act of “Macbeth” than

in the first act of “Hamlet.” Macbeth appears in it as an irresolute

dreamer, courteous, and gentle-hearted, of perfect intellectual fairness

and bookish phrase; and in especial his love of thought and dislike of

action are insisted upon again and again.

In spite of the fact that the second act is one chiefly of incident,

filled indeed with the murder and its discovery, Shakespeare uses

Macbeth as the mouthpiece of his marvellous lyrical faculty as freely as

he uses Hamlet. A greater singer even than Romeo, Hamlet is a poet by

nature, and turns every possible occasion to account, charming the ear

with subtle harmonies. With a father's murder to avenge, he postpones

action and sings to himself of life and death and the undiscovered

country in words of such magical spirit-beauty that they can be compared

to nothing in the world's literature save perhaps to the last chapter of

Ecclesiastes. From the beginning to the end of the drama Hamlet is a

great lyric poet, and this supreme personal gift is so natural to him

that it is hardly mentioned by the critics. This gift, however, is

possessed by Macbeth in at least equal degree and excites just as little

notice. It is credible that Shakespeare used the drama sometimes as a

means of reaching the highest lyrical utterance.

Without pressing this point further let us now take up the second act of

the play. Banquo and Fleance enter; Macbeth has a few words with them;

they depart, and after giving a servant an order, Macbeth begins another

long soliloquy. He thinks he sees a dagger before him, and immediately

falls to philosophizing:

“Come let me clutch thee:--

I have thee not and yet I see thee still.

Art 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?

I see thee yet in form as palpable

As that which now I draw....

- - - - - - - - - -

Mine eyes are made the fools o' the other senses.

Or else worth all the rest: I see thee still;

And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood

Which was not so before.--There's no such thing.”

What is all this but an illustration of Hamlet's assertion:

“There is nothing either good or bad

But thinking makes it so.”

Just too as Hamlet swings on his mental balance, so that it is still a

debated question among academic critics whether his madness was feigned

or real, so here Shakespeare shows us how Macbeth loses his foothold on

reality and falls into the void.

The lyrical effusion that follows is not very successful, and probably

on that account Macbeth breaks off abruptly:

“Whiles I threat he lives,

Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives,”

which is, of course, precisely Hamlet's complaint:

“This is most brave;

That I, the son of a dear father murdered,

Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,

Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words.”

After this Lady Macbeth enters, and the murder is committed, and now

wrought to the highest tension Macbeth must speak from the depths of his

nature with perfect sincerity. Will he exult, as the ambitious man

would, at having taken successfully the longest step towards his goal?

Or will he, like a prudent man, do his utmost to hide the traces of his

crime, and hatch plans to cast suspicion on others? It is Lady Macbeth

who plays this part; she tells Macbeth to “get some water,”

“And wash this filthy witness from your hand,”

while he, brainsick, rehearses past fears and shows himself the

sensitive poet-dreamer inclined to piety: here is the incredible scene:

“_Lady M._ There are two lodged together.

_Macb_. One cried, 'God bless us!' and 'Amen' the other,

As they had seen me with these hangman's hands.

Listening their fear, I could not say 'Amen,'

When they did say 'God bless us.'

_Lady M_. Consider it not so deeply.

_Macb_. But wherefore could not I pronounce 'Amen'?

I had most need of blessing, and 'Amen'

Stuck in my throat.”

This religious tinge colouring the weakness of self-pity is to be found

again and again in “Hamlet”; Hamlet, too, is religious-minded; he begs

Ophelia to remember his sins in her orisons. When he first sees his

father's ghost he cries:

“Angels and ministers of grace defend us,”

and when the ghost leaves him his word is, “I'll go pray.” This new

trait, most intimate and distinctive, is therefore the most conclusive

proof of the identity of the two characters. The whole passage in the

mouth of a murderer is utterly unexpected and out of place; no wonder

Lady Macbeth exclaims:

“These deeds must not be thought

After these ways: so, it will make us mad.”

But nothing can restrain Macbeth; he gives rein to his poetic

imagination, and breaks out in an exquisite lyric, a lyric which has

hardly any closer relation to the circumstances than its truth to

Shakespeare's nature:

“Methought I heard a voice cry, 'Sleep no more!

Macbeth does murder sleep,'--the innocent sleep:

Sleep, that knits up the ravelled sleave of care,”

and so forth--the poet in love with his own imaginings.

Again Lady Macbeth tries to bring him back to a sense of reality; tells

him his thinking unbends his strength, and finally urges him to take the

daggers back and

“smear

The sleepy grooms with the blood.”

But Macbeth's nerve is gone; he is physically broken now as well as

mentally o'erwrought; he cries:

“I'll go no more;

I am afraid to think what I have done.

Look on't again I dare not.”

All this is exquisitely characteristic of the nervous student who has

been screwed up to a feat beyond his strength, “a terrible feat,” and

who has broken down over it, but the words are altogether absurd in the

mouth of an ambitious, half-barbarous chieftain.

His wife chides him as fanciful, childish--“infirm of purpose,”--she'll

put the daggers back herself; but nothing can hearten Macbeth; every

household noise sets his heart thumping:

“Whence is that knocking?

How is't with me when every noise appals me?”

His mind rocks; he even imagines he is being tortured:

“What hands are here? Ha!

They pluck out my eyes.”

And then he swings into another incomparable lyric:

“Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood

Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather

The multitudinous seas incarnadine,

Making the green one red.”

There is a great deal of the poet-neuropath and very little of the

murderer for ambition's sake in this lyrical hysteria. No wonder Lady

Macbeth declares she would be ashamed “to wear a heart so white.” It is

all Hamlet over again, Hamlet wrought up to a higher pitch of intensity.

And here it should be remembered that “Macbeth” was written three years

after “Hamlet” and probably just before “Lear”; one would therefore

expect a greater intensity and a deeper pessimism in Macbeth than in

Hamlet.

The character-drawing in the next scene is necessarily slight. The

discovery of the murder impels every one save the protagonist to action,

but Macbeth finds time even at the climax of excitement to coin

Hamlet-words that can never be forgotten:

“There's nothing serious in mortality;”

and the description of Duncan:

“His silver skin laced with his golden blood”

--as sugar'd sweet as any line in the sonnets, and here completely out

of place.

In these first two acts the character of Macbeth is outlined so firmly

that no after-touches can efface the impression.

Now comes a period in the drama in which deed follows so fast upon deed,

that there is scarcely any opportunity for characterization. To the

casual view Macbeth seems almost to change his nature, passing from

murder to murder quickly if not easily. He not only arranges for

Banquo's assassination, but leaves Lady Macbeth innocent of the

knowledge. The explanation of this seeming change of character is at

hand. Shakespeare took the history of Macbeth from Holinshed's

Chronicle, and there it is recorded that Macbeth murdered Banquo and

many others, as well as Macduff's wife and children. Holinshed makes

Duncan have “too much of clemencie,” and Macbeth “too much of crueltie.”

Macbeth's actions correspond with his nature in Holinshed; but

Shakespeare first made Macbeth in his own image--gentle, bookish and

irresolute--and then found himself fettered by the historical fact that

Macbeth murdered Banquo and the rest. He was therefore forced to explain

in some way or other why his Macbeth strode from crime to crime. It must

be noted as most characteristic of gentle Shakespeare that even when

confronted with this difficulty he did not think of lending Macbeth any

tinge of cruelty, harshness, or ambition. His Macbeth commits murder for

the same reason that the timorous deer fights--out of fear.

“To be thus is nothing;

But to be safely thus. Our fears in Banquo

Stick deep, and in his royalty of nature

Reigns that which would be feared”:

And again:

“There is none but he

Whose being I do fear”:...

This proves, as nothing else could prove, the all-pervading, attaching

kindness of Shakespeare's nature. Again and again Lady Macbeth saves the

situation and tries to shame her husband into stern resolve, but in

vain; he's “quite unmann'd in folly.”

Had Macbeth been made ambitious, as the commentators assume, there would

have been a sufficient motive for his later actions. But ambition is

foreign to the Shakespeare-Hamlet nature, so the poet does not employ

it. Again and again he returns to the explanation that the timid grow

dangerous when “frighted out of fear.” Macbeth says:

“But let the frame of things disjoint, both the worlds suffer

Ere we will eat our meal in fear, and sleep

In the affliction of these terrible dreams

That shake us nightly.”

In passing I may remark that Hamlet, too, complains of “bad dreams.”

In deep Hamlet melancholy, Macbeth now begins to contrast his state with

Duncan's:

“After life's fitful fever he sleeps well.

Treason has done his worst: nor steel nor poison,

Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing,

Can touch him further.”

Lady Macbeth begs him to sleek o'er his rugged looks, be bright and

jovial. He promises obedience; but soon falls into the dark mood again

and predicts “a deed of dreadful note.” Naturally his wife questions

him, and he replies:

“Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck,

Till thou applaud the deed. Come, seeling night,

Scarf up the tender eye of pityful day,

And with thy bloody and invisible hand

Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond

Which keeps me pale.”

No other motive for murder is possible to Shakespeare-Macbeth but fear.

Banquo is murdered, but still Macbeth cries:

“I am cabined, cribbed, confined, bound in

To saucy doubts and fears.”

The scene with the ghost of Banquo follows, where-in Macbeth again shows

the nervous imaginative Hamlet nature. His next speech is mere

reflection, and again Hamlet might have framed it:

“the time has been

That when the brains were out the man would die

And there an end”: ...

But while fear may be an adequate motive for Banquo's murder, it can

hardly explain the murder of Macduff's wife and children. Shakespeare

feels this, too, and therefore finds other reasons natural enough; but

the first of these reasons, “his own good,” is not especially

characteristic of Macbeth, and the second, while perhaps characteristic,

is absurdly inadequate: men don't murder out of tediousness:

“For mine own good

All causes shall give way: I am in blood[1]

Stepped in so far, that, should I wade no more,

Returning were as tedious as go o'er.”

[Footnote 1: It seems to me probable that Shakespeare, unable to find an

adequate motive for murder, borrowed this one from “Richard III.” Richard

says:

“But I am in

So far in blood that sin will pluck on sin”--

This is an explanation following the fact rather than a cause producing

it--an explanation, moreover, which may be true in the case of a

fiendlike Richard, but is not true of a Macbeth.]

Take it all in all, this latter reason is as poor a motive for

cold-blooded murder as was ever given, and Shakespeare again feels this,

for he brings in the witches once more to predict safety to Macbeth and

adjure him to be “bloody, bold and resolute.” When they have thus

screwed his courage to the sticking place as his wife did before,

Macbeth resolves on Macduff's murder, but he immediately recurs to the

old explanation; he does not do it for his “own good” nor because

“returning is tedious “; he does it

“That I may tell pale-hearted fear it lies,

And sleep in spite of thunder.”

It is fair to say that Shakespeare's Macbeth is so gentle-kind, that he

can find no motive in himself for murder, save fear. The words

Shakespeare puts into Hubert's mouth in “King John” are really his own

confession:

“Within this bosom never enter'd yet

The dreadful motion of a murderous thought.”

The murders take place and the silly scenes in England between Malcolm

and Macduff follow, and then come Lady Macbeth's illness, and the

characteristic end. The servant tells Macbeth of the approach of the

English force, and he begins the wonderful monologue:

“my May of life

Is fall'n into the sear, the yellow leaf;

And that which should accompany old age,

As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,

I must not look to have; but in their stead

Curses, not loud, but deep, mouth-honour, breath

Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not.”

Truly this is a strange murderer who longs for “troops of friends,” and

who at the last push of fate can find in himself kindness enough towards

others to sympathize with the “poor heart.” All this is pure Hamlet; one

might better say, pure Shakespeare.

We are next led into the field with Malcolm and Macduff, and immediately

back to the castle again. While the women break into cries, Macbeth

soliloquizes in the very spirit of bookish Hamlet:

“I have almost forgot the taste of fears.

The time has been, my senses would have cooled

To hear a night-shriek; and my fell of hair

Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir

As life were in 't.”

The whole passage, and especially the “dismal treatise,” recalls the

Wittenberg student with a magic of representment.

The death of the Queen is announced, and wrings from Macbeth a speech

full of despairing pessimism, a bitterer mood than ever Hamlet knew; a

speech, moreover, that shows the student as well as the incomparable

lyric poet:

“She should have died hereafter:

There would have been a time for such a word.--

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more: it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.”

Macbeth's philosophy, like Hamlet's, ends in utter doubt, in a passion

of contempt for life, deeper than anything in Dante. The word “syllable”

in this lyric outburst is as characteristic as the “dismal treatise” in

the previous one, and more characteristic still of Hamlet is the

likening of life to “a poor player.”

The messenger tells Macbeth that Birnam Wood has begun to move, and he

sees that the witches have cheated him. He can only say, as Hamlet might

have said:

“I 'gin to be aweary of the sun,

And wish the estate o' the world were now undone.--

Ring the alarum bell! Blow wind! Come, wrack!

At least we'll die with harness on our back.”

And later he cries:

“They have tied me to a stake; I cannot fly,

But bear-like I must fight the course.”

This seems to me intensely characteristic of Hamlet; the brutal side of

action was never more contemptuously described, and Macbeth's next

soliloquy makes the identity apparent to every one; it is in the true

thinker-sceptic vein:

“Why should I play the Roman[1] fool and die

On mine own sword?”

[Footnote 1: About the year 1600 Shakespeare seems to have steeped

himself in Plutarch. For the next five or six years, whenever he thinks

of suicide, the Roman way of looking at it occurs to him. Having made up

his mind to kill himself, Laertes cries:

“I am more an antique Roman than a Dane,”

and, in like case, Cleopatra talks of dying “after the high Roman

fashion.”]

Macbeth then meets Macduff, and there follows the confession of pity and

remorse, which must be compared to the gentle-kindness with which Hamlet

treats Laertes and Romeo treats Paris. Macbeth says to Macduff:

“Of all men else I have avoided thee:

But get thee back, my soul is too much charged

With blood of thine already.”

Then comes the “something desperate” in him that Hamlet boasted of--and

the end.

Here we have every characteristic of Hamlet without exception, The

crying difference of situation only brings out the essential identity of

the two characters. The two portraits are of the same person and

finished to the finger-tips. The slight shades of difference between

Macbeth and Hamlet only strengthen our contention that both are

portraits of the poet; for the differences are manifestly changes in the

same character, and changes due merely to age. Just as Romeo is younger

than Hamlet, showing passion where Hamlet shows thought, so Macbeth is

older than Hamlet; in Macbeth the melancholy has grown deeper, the tone

more pessimistic, and the heart gentler. [Footnote: Immediately after

the publication of these first two essays, Sir Henry Irving seized the

opportunity and lectured before a distinguished audience on the

character of Macbeth. He gave it as his opinion that “Shakespeare has

presented Macbeth as one of the most blood-thirsty, most hypocritical

villains in his long gallery of men, instinct with the virtues and vices

of their kind (_sic_).” Sir Henry Irving also took the occasion to

praise the simile of pity:

“And pity, like a naked new-born babe,

Striding the blast.”

This ridiculous fustian seemed to him “very beautiful.” All this was

perfectly gratuitous: no one needed to be informed that a man might have

merit as an actor and yet be without any understanding of psychology or

any taste in letters.] I venture, therefore, to assert that the portrait

we find in Romeo and Jaques first, and then in Hamlet, and afterwards in

Macbeth, is the portrait of Shakespeare himself, and we can trace his

personal development through these three stages.

CHAPTER III. DUKE VINCENTIO--POSTHUMUS

It may be well to add here a couple of portraits of Shakespeare in later

life in order to establish beyond question the chief features of his

character. With this purpose in mind I shall take a portrait that is a

mere sketch of him, Duke Vincentio in “Measure for Measure,” and a

portrait that is minutely finished and perfect, though consciously

idealized, Posthumus, in “Cymbeline.” And the reason I take this

careless, wavering sketch, and contrast it with a highly-finished

portrait, is that, though the sketch is here and there hardly

recognizable, the outline being all too thin and hesitating, yet now and

then a characteristic trait is over-emphasized, as we should expect in

careless work. And this sketch in lines now faint, now all too heavy, is

curiously convincing when put side by side with a careful and elaborate

portrait in which the same traits are reproduced, but harmoniously, and

with a perfect sense of the relative value of each feature. No critic,

so far as I am aware, not Hazlitt, not Brandes, not even Coleridge, has

yet thought of identifying either Duke Vincentio or Posthumus with

Hamlet, much less with Shakespeare himself. The two plays are very

unlike each other in tone and temper; “Measure for Measure” being a sort

of tract for the times, while “Cymbeline” is a purely romantic drama.

Moreover, “Measure for Measure” was probably written a couple of years

after “Hamlet,” towards the end of 1603, while “Cymbeline” belongs to

the last period of the poet's activity, and could hardly have been

completed before 1610 or 1611. The dissimilarity of the plays only

accentuates the likeness of the two protagonists.

“Measure for Measure” is one of the best examples of Shakespeare's

contempt for stagecraft. Not only is the mechanism of the play, as we

shall see later, astonishingly slipshod, but the ostensible purpose of

the play, which is to make the laws respected in Vienna, is not only not

attained, but seems at the end to be rather despised than forgotten.

This indifference to logical consistency is characteristic of

Shakespeare; Hamlet speaks of “the undiscovered country from whose

bourne no traveller returns” just after he has been talking with his

dead father. The poetic dreamer cannot take the trouble to tie up the

loose ends of a story: the real purpose of “Measure for Measure,” which

is the confusion of the pretended ascetic Angelo, is fulfilled, and that

is sufficient for the thinker, who has thus shown what “our seemers be.”

It is no less characteristic of Shakespeare that Duke Vincentio, his

_alter ego_, should order another to punish loose livers--a task

which his kindly nature found too disagreeable. But, leaving these

general considerations, let us come to the first scene of the first act:

the second long speech of the Duke should have awakened the suspicion

that Vincentio is but another mask for Shakespeare. The whole speech

proclaims the poet; the Duke begins:

“Angelo

There is a kind of character in thy life,”

Hamlet says to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in what is supposed to be

prose:

“There is a kind of confession in your looks.”

A little later the line:

“Spirits are not finely touched

But to fine issues,”

is so characteristic of Hamlet-Shakespeare that it should have put every

reader on the track.

The speeches of the Duke in the fourth scene of the first act are also

characteristic of Shakespeare. But the four lines,

“My holy sir, none better knows than you

How I have ever loved the life removed,

And held in idle price to haunt assemblies,

Where youth and cost and witless bravery keep,”

are to me an intimate, personal confession; a fuller rendering indeed of

Hamlet's “Man delights not me; no, nor woman neither.” In any case it

will be admitted that a dislike of assemblies and cost and witless

bravery is peculiar in a reigning monarch, so peculiar indeed that it

reminds me of the exiled Duke in “As You Like It,” or of Duke Prospero

in “The Tempest” (two other incarnations of Shakespeare), rather than of

any one in real life. A love of solitude; a keen contempt for shows and

the “witless bravery” of court-life were, as we shall see,

characteristics of Shakespeare from youth to old age.

In the first scene of the third act the Duke as a friar speaks to the

condemned Claudio. He argues as Hamlet would argue, but with, I think, a

more convinced hopelessness. The deepening scepticism would of itself

force us to place “Measure for Measure” a little later than “Hamlet”:

“Reason thus with life:--

If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing

That none but fools would keep; a breath thou art,

- - - - - - - - - -

The best of rest is sleep,

And that thou oft provok'st, yet grossly fear'st

Thy death, which is no more. Thou'rt not thyself;

For thou exist'st on many a thousand grains

That issue out of dust. Happy thou art not;

For what thou hast not, still thou striv'st to get,

And what thou hast, forgett'st.

- - - - - - - - - -

What's in this,

That bears the name of life? Yet in this life

Lie hid more thousand deaths; yet death we fear,

That makes these odds all even.”

That this scepticism of Vincentio is Shakespeare's scepticism appears

from the fact that the whole speech is worse than out of place when

addressed to a person under sentence of death. Were we to take it

seriously, it would show the Duke to be curiously callous to the

sufferings of the condemned Claudio; but callous the Duke is not, he is

merely a pensive poet-philosopher talking in order to lighten his own

heart. Claudio makes unconscious fun of the Duke's argument:

“To sue to live, I find I seek to die,

And seeking death, find life: let it come on.”

This scepticism of Shakespeare which shows itself out of place in Angelo

and again most naturally in Claudio's famous speech, is one of the

salient traits of his character which is altogether over-emphasized in

this play. It is a trait, moreover, which finds expression in almost

everything he wrote. Like nearly all the great spirits of the

Renaissance, Shakespeare was perpetually occupied with the heavy

problems of man's life and man's destiny. Was there any meaning or

purpose in life, any result of the striving? was Death to be feared or a

Hereafter to be desired?--incessantly he beat straining wings in the

void. But even in early manhood he never sought to deceive himself. His

Richard II. had sounded the shallow vanity of man's desires, the

futility of man's hopes; he knew that man

“With nothing shall be pleased, till he be eased

With being nothing.”

And this sad knowledge darkened all Shakespeare's later thinking.

Naturally, when youth passed from him and disillusionment put an end to

dreaming, his melancholy deepened, his sadness became despairing; we can

see the shadows thickening round him into night. Brutus takes an

“everlasting farewell” of his friend, and goes willingly to his rest.

Hamlet dreads “the undiscovered country”; but unsentient death is to him

“a consummation devoutly to be wished.” Vincentio's mood is

half-contemptuous, but the melancholy persists; death is no “more than

sleep,” he says, and life a series of deceptions; while Claudio in this

same play shudders away from death as from annihilation, or worse, in

words which one cannot help regarding as Shakespeare's:

“_Claud_. Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;

To lie in cold obstruction and to rot....”

A little later and Macbeth's soul cries to us from the outer darkness:

“there's nothing serious in mortality”; life's

“a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.”

And from this despairing gloom come Lear's shrieks of pain and pitiful

ravings, and in the heavy intervals the gibberings of the fool. Even

when the calmer mood of age came upon Shakespeare and took away the

bitterness, he never recanted; Posthumus speaks of life and death in

almost the words used by Vincentio, and Prospero has nothing to add save

that “our little life is rounded with a sleep.”

It is noteworthy that Shakespeare always gives these philosophic

questionings to those characters whom I regard as his impersonations,[1]

and when he breaks this rule, he breaks it in favour of some Claudio who

is not a character at all, but the mere mouthpiece of one of his moods.

[Footnote 1: One of my correspondents, Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton, has

been kind enough to send me an article contributed to “Colbourn's

Magazine” in 1873, in which he declares that “Shakespeare seems to have

kept a sort of Hamlet notebook, full of Hamlet thoughts, of which 'To be

or not to be' may be taken as the type. These he was burdened with.

These did he cram into Hamlet as far as he could, and then he tossed the

others indiscriminately into other plays, tragedies and histories,

perfectly regardless of the character who uttered them.” Though Mr.

Watts-Dunton sees that some of these “Hamlet thoughts” are to be found

in Macbeth and Prospero and Claudio, he evidently lacks the key to

Shakespeare's personality, or he would never have said that Shakespeare

tossed these reflections “indiscriminately into other plays.”

Nevertheless the statement itself is interesting, and deserves more

notice than has been accorded to it.]

I now come to a point in the drama which at once demands and defies

explanation. In the first scene of the third act the Duke, after

listening to the terrible discussion between Isabella and Claudio, first

of all tells Claudio that “Angelo had never the purpose to corrupt”

Isabella, and then assures Claudio that to-morrow he must die. The

explanation of these two falsehoods would be far to seek, unless we take

it that they were invented simply in order to prolong our interest in

the drama. But this assumption, though probable, does not increase our

sympathy with the protagonist--the lies seem to be too carelessly

uttered to be even characteristic--nor yet our admiration of the

structure of a play that needs to be supported by such flimsy

buttresses. Still this very carelessness of fact, as I have said, is

Shakespearean; the philosophic dreamer paid little attention to the mere

incidents of the story.

The talk between the Duke and Isabella follows. The form of the Duke's

speech, with its touch of euphuistic conceit, is one which

Hamlet-Shakespeare affects:

“The hand that hath made you fair hath made you

good: the goodness that is cheap in beauty makes

beauty brief in goodness; but grace, being the soul of

your complexion, shall keep the body of it ever fair.”

This Duke plays philosopher, too, in and out of season as Hamlet did: he

says to Isabella:

“Virtue is bold, and goodness never fearful,”

generalizing his praise even to a woman.

Again, when Pompey is arrested, he passes from the individual to the

general, exclaiming:

“That we were all as some would seem to be,

Free from our faults, as from faults seeming free.”

Then follows the interesting talk with Lucio, who awakens the slightly

pompous Duke to natural life with his contempt. When Lucio tells the

Duke, who is disguised as a friar, that he (the Duke) was a notorious

loose-liver--“he had some feeling of the sport; he knew the

service”--the Duke merely denies the soft impeachment; but when Lucio

tells him that the Duke is not wise, but “a very superficial, ignorant,

unweighing fellow,” the Duke bursts out, “either this is envy in you,

folly, or mistaking: ... Let him but be testimonied in his own

bringings-forth, and he shall appear to the envious a scholar, a

statesman, and a soldier,” which recalls Hamlet's “Friends, scholars,

and soldiers,” and Ophelia's praise of Hamlet as “courtier, soldier,

scholar.” Lucio goes off, and the Duke “moralizes” the incident in

Hamlet's very accent:

“No might nor greatness in mortality

Can censure 'scape; backwounding calumny

The whitest virtue strikes. What king so strong

Can tie the gall up in the slanderous tongue?”

Hamlet says to Ophelia:

“Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shall

not escape calumny.”

And Laertes says that “virtue itself” cannot escape calumny.

The reflection is manifestly Shakespeare's own, and here the form, too,

is characteristic. It may be as well to recall now that Shakespeare

himself was calumniated in his lifetime; the fact is admitted in Sonnet

36, where he fears his “guilt” will “shame” his friend.

In his talk with Escalus the Duke's speech becomes almost obscure from

excessive condensation of thought--a habit which grew upon Shakespeare.

Escalus asks:

“What news abroad in the world?”

The Duke answers:

“None, but that there is so great a fever on goodness,

that the dissolution of it must cure it: novelty is only in

request. ... There is scarce truth enough alive to make

societies secure, but security enough to make fellowships

accursed.”

Escalus then tells us of the Duke's temperament in words which would fit

Hamlet perfectly; for, curiously enough, they furnish us with the best

description of Shakespeare's melancholy:

“Rather rejoicing to see another merry, than merry at

anything which professed to make him rejoice.”

And, lastly, the curious rhymed soliloquy of Vincentio which closes this

third act, must be compared with the epilogue to “The Tempest”:

“He who the sword of Heaven will bear

Should be as holy as severe;

Pattern in himself to know,

Grace to stand and virtue go;”

- - - - - - - - - -

“Shame to him whose cruel striking

Kills for faults of his own liking!

Twice treble shame on Angelo,

To weed my vice and let his grow!”

- - - - - - - - - -

In the fifth act the Duke, freed from making plots and plans, speaks

without constraint and reveals his nature ingenuously. He uses words to

Angelo that recall the sonnets:

“O, your desert speaks loud; and I should wrong it,

To lock it in the wards of covered bosom,

When it deserves, with characters of brass,

A forted residence 'gainst the tooth of time

And razure of oblivion.”[1]

[Footnote 1: Cf. Sonnet 122 with its “full character'd” and “razed

oblivion.”]

Again, the Duke argues in gentle Shakespeare's fashion for Angelo and

against Isabella:

“If he had so offended,

He would have weighed thy brother by himself

And not have cut him off.”

It seems impossible for Shakespeare to believe that the sinner can

punish sin. It reminds one of the sacred “he that is without sin among

you let him first cast a stone.” The detections and forgivings of the

last act follow.

It will be admitted, I think, on all hands that Duke Vincentio speaks

throughout the play with Shakespeare's voice. From the point of view of

literary art his character is very far from being as complex or as

deeply realized as that of Hamlet or Macbeth, or even as that of Romeo

or of Jaques, and yet one other trait besides that of sceptical brooding

is so over-accentuated that it can never be forgotten. In the last scene

the Duke orders Barnardine to the block and the next moment respites

him; he condemns

“An Angelo for Claudio; death for death,”

then pardons Angelo, and at once begins to chat with him in kindly

intimacy; he asserts that he cannot forgive Lucio, Lucio who has

traduced him, shall be whipped and hanged, and in the same breath he

remits the heavy penalty. Truly he is “an unhurtful opposite” [Footnote:

The critics are at variance over this ending, and, indeed, over the

whole play. Coleridge says that “our feelings of justice are grossly

wounded in Angelo's escape”; for “cruelty with lust and damnable

baseness cannot be forgiven.” Mr. Swinburne, too, regrets the

miscarriage of justice; the play to him is a tragedy, and should end

tragically with the punishment of the “autotype of the huge national

vice of England.” Perhaps, however, Puritan hypocrisy was not so

widespread or so powerful in the time of Shakespeare as it is nowadays;

perhaps, too, Shakespeare was not so good a hater as Mr. Swinburne, nor

so strenuous a moralist as Coleridge was, at least in theory. In any

case it is evident that Shakespeare found it harder to forgive Lucio,

who had hurt his vanity, than Angelo, who pushed lust to outrage and

murder, which strange, yet characteristic, fact I leave to the mercy of

future commentators. Mr. Sidney Lee regards “Measure for Measure” as

“one of Shakespeare's greatest plays.” Coleridge, however, thought it “a

hateful work”; it is also a poor work, badly constructed, and for the

most part carelessly written. In essence it is a mere tract against

Puritanism, and in form a sort of Arabian Nights' Entertainment in which

the hero plays the part of Haroun-al-Raschid.] whose anger has no

stead-fastness; but the gentle forgivingness of disposition that is so

marked in Vincentio is a trait we found emphasized in Romeo, and again

in Hamlet and again in Macbeth. It is, indeed, one of the most permanent

characteristics of Shakespeare. From the beginning to the end of the

play, Duke Vincentio is weakly-kind in act and swayed by fitful

impulses; his assumed austerity of conduct is the thin varnish of vanity

that will not take on such soft material. The Hamlet weakness is so

exaggerated in him, and so unmotived, that I am inclined to think

Shakespeare was even more irresolute and indisposed to action than

Hamlet himself.

In the character of Posthumus, the hero of “Cymbeline,” Shakespeare has

painted himself with extraordinary care; has, in fact, given us as

deliberate and almost as complete a picture of himself as he did in

Hamlet. Unluckily his hand had grown weaker in the ten years' interval,

and he gave such loose rein to his idealizing habit that the portrait is

neither so veracious nor so lifelike. The explanation of all this will

be given later; it is enough for the moment to state that as Posthumus

is perhaps the completest portrait of him that we have after his mental

shipwreck, we must note the traits of it carefully, and see what manner

of man Shakespeare took himself to be towards the end of his career.

It is difficult to understand how the commentators have been able to

read “Cymbeline” without seeing the likeness between Posthumus and

Hamlet. The wager which is the theme of the play may have hindered them

a little, but as they found it easy to excuse its coarseness by

attributing lewdness to the time, there seems to have been no reason for

not recognizing Posthumus. Posthumus is simply a staider Hamlet

considerably idealized. I am not at all sure that the subject of the

play was void of offence in the time of Elizabeth; all finer spirits

must even then have found it puerile and coarse. What would Spenser have

said about it? Shakespeare used the wager because of the opportunities

it gave him of painting himself and an ideal woman. His view of it is

just indicated; Iachimo says:

“I make my wager rather against your confidence than her reputation:

and, to bar your offence herein too, I durst attempt it against any lady

in the world.” But in spite of the fact that Iachimo makes his insult

general, Posthumus warns him that:

“If she remain unseduced ... for your ill opinion,

and the assault you have made to her chastity, you shall

answer me with your sword.”

From this it appears that the bet was distasteful to Posthumus; it is

not so offenceful to him as it should have been according to our modern

temper; but this shortcoming, an unconscious shortcoming, is the only

fault which Shakespeare will allow in his hero. In the first scene of

the first act Posthumus is praised as men never praise the absent

without a personal motive; the First Gentleman says of him:

“I do not think

So fair an outward and such stuff within

Endows a man but he.”

The Second Gentleman replies:

“You speak him far;”

and the First Gentleman continues:

“I do extend him, sir, within himself;

Crush him together, rather than unfold

His measure duly.”

And as if this were not enough, this gentleman-eulogist goes on to tell

us that Posthumus has sucked in “all the learnings” of his time “as we

do air,” and further:

“He lived in court--

Which rare it is to do--most praised, most loved;

A sample to the young'st, to the more mature

A glass that feated them; and to the graver

A child that guided dotards.”

This gross praise is ridiculously unnatural, and outrages our knowledge

of life; men are much more apt to criticize than to praise the absent;

but it shows a prepossession on Shakespeare's part in favour of

Posthumus which can only be explained by the fact that in Posthumus he

was depicting himself. Every word is significant to us, for Shakespeare

evidently tells us here what he thought about himself, or rather what he

wished to think, towards the end of his life. It is impossible to

believe that he was “most praised, most loved”; men do not love or

praise their superiors in looks, or intellect.

The first words which Posthumus in this same scene addresses to Imogen,

show the gentle Shakespeare nature:

“O lady, weep no more, lest I give cause

To be suspected of more tenderness

Than doth become a man.”

And when Imogen gives him the ring and tells him to wear it till he woos

another wife, he talks to her exactly as Romeo would have talked:

“How! how! another?--

You gentle gods, give me but this I have,

And sear up my embracements from a next

With bonds of death! [_Putting on the ring_.]

Remain, remain thou here

While sense can keep it on.”

And he concludes as self-depreciating Hamlet would have concluded:

“And sweetest, fairest,

As I my poor self did exchange for you,

To your so infinite loss, so in our trifles

I still win of you; for my sake wear this:

It is a manacle of love; I'll place it

Upon this fairest prisoner.

[Putting a bracelet on her arm.]”

In his fight with Cloten he is depicted as a rare swordsman of wonderful

magnanimity. Pisanio says:

“My master rather played than fought,

And had no help of anger.”

I call this gentle kindness which Posthumus displays, the birthmark of

Shakespeare; he had “no help of anger.” As the play goes on we find

Shakespeare's other peculiarities, or Hamlet's. Iachimo represents

Posthumus as “merry,” “gamesome,” “the Briton reveller”; but curiously

enough Imogen answers as Ophelia might have answered about Hamlet:

“When he was here,

He did incline to sadness; and ofttimes

Not knowing why.”

This uncaused melancholy that distinguishes Romeo, Jaques, Hamlet,

Macbeth, and Vincentio is not more characteristic of the

Hamlet-Shakespeare nature than the way Posthumus behaves when Iachimo

tries to make him believe that he has won the wager. Posthumus is

convinced almost at once; jumps to the conclusion, indeed, with the

heedless rapidity of the naïve, sensitive, quick-thinking man who has

cultivated his emotions and thoughts by writing in solitude, and not the

suspicions and distrust of others which are developed in the

market-place. One is reminded of Goethe's famous couplet:

“Es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille,

Sich ein Charakter in dem Strom der Welt.”

Posthumus is all in fitful extremes; not satisfied with believing the

lie, he gives Iachimo Imogen's ring as well, and bursts into a diatribe:

“Let there be no honour

Where there's beauty; truth, where semblance; love,

Where there's another man,”

and so forth. Even Philario, who has no stake in the matter, is

infinitely harder to convince:

“Have patience, sir,

And take your ring again; 'tis not yet won:

It may be probable she lost it.”

Then this “unstable opposite,” Posthumus, demands his ring back again,

but as soon as Iachimo swears that he had the bracelet from her arm,

Posthumus swings round again to belief from sheer rapidity of thought.

Again Philario will not be convinced. He says:

“Sir, be patient,

This is not strong enough to be believed

Of one persuaded well of--”

But Posthumus will not await the proof for which he has asked. He is

convinced upon suspicion, as Othello was, and the very nimbleness of his

Hamlet-intellect, seeing that probabilities are against him, entangles

him in the snare. Even his servant Pisanio will not believe in Imogen's

guilt though his master assures him of it. Shakespeare does not notice

this peculiar imprudent haste of his hero, as he notices, for example,

the hasty speech of Hotspur by letting Harry of England imitate it,

simply because the quick-thinking was his own; while the hurried

stuttering speech was foreign to him. Posthumus goes on to rave against

women as Hamlet did; as all men do who do not understand them:

“For even to vice

They are not constant, but are changing still.”

And Posthumus betrays as clearly as ever Hamlet did that he is merely

Shakespeare masquerading:

“I'll write against them,

Detest them, curse them--yet 'tis greater skill

In a true hate, to pray they have their will:

The very devils cannot plague them better.”

“Write against them” indeed! This is the same threat which Shakespeare

uses against his dark mistress in Sonnet 140, and every one will admit

that it is more in the character of the poet and man of letters than in

that of the warrior son-in-law of a half-barbarous king. The last line

here, because it is a little superfluous, a little emphatic, seems to me

likely to have a personal application. When Shakespeare's mistress had

her will, did she fall to misery, I wonder?

I may be allowed to notice here how intensely characteristic all this

play is of Shakespeare. In the third scene of the third act, life in the

country is contrasted to its advantage with life at Court; and then gold

is treated as dirt by the princely brothers--both these, the love of

country life, and the contempt of gold, are, as we shall see later,

abiding peculiarities of Shakespeare.

When we come to Posthumus again almost at the end of the play we find

that his anger with Imogen has burned itself out. He is angry now with

Pisanio for having executed his order and murdered her; he should have

“saved the noble Imogen to repent.” Surely the poet Shakespeare and not

the outraged lover speaks in this epithet, “noble.”

Posthumus describes the battle in which he took so gallant a part in

Shakespeare's usual manner. He falls into rhyme; he shows the cheap

modesty of the conventional hero; he tells of what others did, and

nothing of his own feats; Belarius and the two striplings, he says:

“With their own nobleness ... gilded pale looks.”

Unfortunately one is reminded of the exquisite sonnet line:

“Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy.”

“Gild” is one of Shakespeare's favourite words; he uses it very often,

sometimes indeed as in this case, ineffectively.

But the scene which reveals the character of Posthumus beyond all doubt

is the prison scene in the fifth act. His soliloquy which begins:

“Most welcome, bondage, for thou art a way,

I think, to liberty “--

is all pure Shakespeare. When he determines to give up life, he says:

“O Imogen!

I'll speak to thee in silence,”

and Hamlet at his death comes to the self-same word:

“The rest is silence.”

The scene with the gaoler is from Hamlet's soul; Posthumus jests with

his keeper as Hamlet with the gravedigger:

“So, if I prove a good repast to the spectators, the

ship pays the shot;”

and the Hamlet melancholy:

“I am merrier to die than them art to live;”

and the Hamlet riddle still unsolved:

“I tell thee, fellow, there are none want eyes to direct

them the way I am going; but such as wink, and will

not use them.”

When the messenger comes to bring him to the king, Posthumus cries:

“Thou bringest good news, I am called to be made

free,”

for there are “no bolts for the dead.”

Those who wish to see how Shakespeare's mind worked will compare

Posthumus' speech to Iachimo, when he has learned the truth, with

Othello's words when he is convinced of his own fatal error and of

Desdemona's chastity. The two speeches are twins; though the persons

uttering them should be of totally different characters. The explanation

of this astounding similarity will be given when we come to “Othello.”

It is characteristic of Posthumus that he should strike Imogen in her

page's dress, not recognizing her; he is ever too quick--a mere creature

of impulse. More characteristic still is the way he forgives Iachimo,

just as Vincentio forgave Angelo:

“Kneel not to me:

The power that I have on you, is to spare you,

The malice towards you, to forgive you. Live,

And deal with others better.”

In judging his fellow-men this is Shakespeare's harshest word.

Posthumus, then, is presented to us in the beginning of the play as

perfect, a model to young and old, of irreproachable virtue and of all

wonderful qualities. In the course of the play, however, he shows

himself very nimble-witted, credulous, and impulsive, quick to anger and

quicker still to forgive; with thoughts all turned to sadness and to

musing; a poet--ever in extremes; now hating his own rash errors to the

point of demanding the heaviest punishment for them; now swearing that

he will revenge himself on women by writing against them; a

philosopher--he jests with his gaoler and consoles himself with

despairing speculation in the very presence of the Arch-Fear. All these

are manifestly characteristics of Hamlet, and Posthumus possesses no

others.

So far, then, from finding that Shakespeare never revealed himself in

his dramas, I have shown that he pictured himself as the hero [Footnote:

A hypercritic might contend that Jaques was not the hero of “As You Like

It”; but the objection really strengthens my argument. Shakespeare makes

of Jaques, who is merely a secondary character without influence on the

action, the principal person in the play simply because in Jaques he

satisfied his own need of self-revealing.] of six plays written at

widely different times; in fact that, like Rembrandt, he painted his own

portrait in all the critical periods of life: as a sensuous youth given

over to love and poetry in Romeo; a few years later as a melancholy

onlooker at life's pageant in Jaques; in middle age as the passionate,

melancholy, aesthete-philosopher of kindliest nature in Hamlet and

Macbeth; as the fitful Duke incapable of severity in “Measure for

Measure,” and finally, when standing within the shadow, as Posthumus, an

idealized yet feebler _replica_ of Hamlet.

CHAPTER IV. SHAKESPEARE'S MEN OF ACTION: THE BASTARD, ARTHUR, AND

KING RICHARD II.

It is time now, I think, to test my theory by considering the converse

of it. In any case, the attempt to see the other side, is pretty sure to

make for enlightenment, and may thus justify itself. In the mirror which

Shakespeare held up to human nature, we not only see Romeo, and Jaques,

Hamlet, Macbeth and Posthumus; but also the leonine, frank face of the

Bastard, the fiery, lean, impatient mask of Hotspur, and the cynical,

bold eyes of Richard III. Even if it were admitted that Shakespeare

preferred the type of the poet-philosopher, he was certainly able, one

would say, to depict the man of action with extraordinary vigour and

success. He himself then must have possessed a certain strength of

character, certain qualities of decision and courage; he must have had,

at least, “a good stroke in him,” as Carlyle phrased it. This is the

universal belief, a belief sanctioned by Coleridge and Goethe, and

founded apparently on plain facts, and yet, I think, it is mistaken,

demonstrably untrue. It might even be put more plausibly than any of its

defenders has put it. One might point out that Shakespeare's men of

action are nearly all to be found in the historical plays which he wrote

in early manhood, while the portrait of the philosopher-poet is the

favourite study of his riper years. It would then be possible to suggest

that Shakespeare grew from a bold roistering youth into a melancholy,

thoughtful old age, touching both extremes of manhood in his own

development. But even this comforting explanation will not stand: his

earliest impersonations are all thinkers.

Let us consider, again, how preference in a writer is established.

Everyone feels that Sophocles prefers Antigone to Ismene; Ismene is a

mere sketch of gentle feminine weakness; while Antigone is a great

portrait of the _revoltée_, the first appearance indeed in

literature of the “new woman,” and the place she fills in the drama, and

the ideal qualities attributed to her girlhood--alike betray the

personal admiration of the poet. In the same way Shakespeare's men of

action are mere sketches in comparison with the intimate detailed

portrait of the aesthete-philosopher-poet with his sensuous, gentle,

melancholy temperament. Moreover, and this should be decisive,

Shakespeare's men of action are all taken from history, or tradition, or

story, and not from imagination, and their characteristics were supplied

by the chroniclers and not invented by the dramatist. To see how far

this is true I must examine Shakespeare's historical plays at some

length Such an examination did not form a part of my original purpose.

It is very difficult, not to say impossible, to ascertain exactly how

far history and verbal tradition helped Shakespeare in his historical

portraits of English worthies. Jaques, for instance, is his own creation

from top to toe; every word given to him therefore deserves careful

study; but how much of Hotspur is Shakespeare's, and how much of the

Bastard? Without pretending, however, to define exactly the sources or

the limits of the master's inspiration, there are certain indications in

the historical plays which throw a flood of light on the poet's nature,

and certain plain inferences from his methods which it would be folly

not to draw.

Let us begin with “King John,” as one of the easiest and most helpful to

us at this stage, and remembering that Shakespeare's drama was evidently

founded on the old play entitled “The Troublesome Raigne of King John,”

let us from our knowledge of Shakespeare's character forecast what his

part in the work must have been. A believer in the theory I have set

forth would guess at once that the strong, manly character of the

Bastard was vigorously sketched even in the old play, and just as surely

one would attribute the gentle, feminine, pathetic character of Arthur

to Shakespeare. And this is precisely what we find: Philip Fauconbridge

is excellently depicted in the old play; he is called:

“A hardy wildehead, tough and venturous,”

and he talks and acts the character to the life. In “The Troublesome

Raigne,” as in “King John,” he is proud of his true father, the

lion-hearted Richard, and careless of the stain of his illegitimate

birth; he cries:

“The world 's in my debt,

There's something owing to Plantaginet.

I, marrie Sir, let me alone for game

He act some wonders now I know my name;

By blessed Marie He not sell that pride

For England's wealth and all the world beside.”

Who does not feel the leaping courage and hardihood of the Bastard in

these lines? Shakespeare seizes the spirit of the character and renders

it, but his emendations are all by way of emphasis: he does not add a

new quality; his Bastard is the Bastard of “The Troublesome Raigne.” But

the gentle, pathetic character of Arthur is all Shakespeare's. In the

old play Arthur is presented as a prematurely wise youth who now urges

the claims of his descent and speaks boldly for his rights, and now begs

his vixenish mother to

“Wisely winke at all

Least further harmes ensue our hasty speech.”

Again, he consoles her with the same prudence:

“Seasons will change and so our present griefe

May change with them and all to our reliefe.”

This Arthur is certainly nothing like Shakespeare's Arthur. Shakespeare,

who had just lost his only son Hamnet, [Footnote: Some months before

writing “King John” Shakespeare had visited Stratford for the first time

after ten years absence and had then perhaps learned to know and love

young Hamnet.] in his twelfth year, turns Arthur from a young man into a

child, and draws all the pathos possible from his weakness and

suffering; Arthur's first words are of “his powerless hand,” and his

advice to his mother reaches the very fount of tears:

“Good my mother, peace!

I would that I were low laid in my grave;

I am not worth this coil that's made for me.”

When taken prisoner his thought is not of himself:

“O, this will make my mother die with grief.”

He is a woman-child in unselfish sympathy.

The whole of the exquisitely pathetic scene between Hubert and Arthur

belongs, as one might have guessed, to Shakespeare, that is, the whole

pathos of it belongs to him.

In the old play Arthur thanks Hubert for his care, calls him “curteous

keeper,” and, in fact, behaves as the conventional prince. He has no

words of such affecting appeal as Shakespeare puts into Arthur's mouth:

“I would to heaven

I were your son, so you would love me, Hubert.”

This love and longing for love is the characteristic of Shakespeare's

Arthur; he goes on:

“Are you sick, Hubert? You look pale to-day.

In sooth, I would you were a little sick,

That I might sit all night and watch with you:

I warrant, I love you more than you do me.”

A girl could not be more tender, more anxious for love's assurance. In

“The Troublesome Raigne,” when Hubert tells Arthur that he has bad news

for him, tidings of “more hate than death,” Arthur faces the unknown

with a man's courage; he asks:

“What is it, man? if needes be don,

Act it, and end it, that the paine were gon.”

It might be the Bastard speaking, so hardy-reckless are the words. When

this Arthur pleads for his eyesight, he does it in this way:

“I speake not only for eyes priviledge,

The chiefe exterior that I would enjoy:

But for thy perill, farre beyond my paine,

Thy sweete soules losse more than my eyes vaine lack.”

Again at the end he says:

“Delay not, Hubert, my orisons are ended,

Begin I pray thee, reave me of my sight.”

And when Hubert relents because his “conscience bids him desist,” Arthur

says:

“Hubert, if ever Arthur be in state

Looke for amends of this received gift.”

In all this there is neither realization of character nor even sincere

emotion. But Shakespeare's Arthur is a masterpiece of soul-revealing,

and moves us to pity at every word:

“Will you put out mine eyes?

These eyes that never did, nor never shall,

So much as frown on you?”

And then the child's imaginative horror of being bound:

“For heaven's sake, Hubert, let me not be bound.

Nay, hear me, Hubert: drive these men away,

And I will sit as quiet as a lamb;

I will not stir, nor wince, nor speak a word.”

When Hubert relents, Shakespeare's Arthur does not promise reward, he

simply breathes a sigh of exquisite affection:

“O, now you look like Hubert: all this while

You were disguised.”

And finally, when Hubert promises never to hurt him, his words are:

“O heaven! I thank you, Hubert.”

Arthur's character we owe entirely to Shakespeare, there is no hint of

his weakness and tenderness in the original, no hint either of the

pathos of his appeal--these are the inventions of gentle Shakespeare,

who has manifestly revealed his own exceeding tenderness and sweetness

of heart in the person of the child Prince. Of course, there are faults

in the work; faults of affectation and word-conceit hardly to be

endured. When Hubert says he will burn out his eyes with hot irons,

Arthur replies:

“Ah, none, but in this iron age, would do it! The iron of itself, though

heat red-hot,”

and so forth. ... Nor does this passage of tinsel stand alone. When the

iron cools and Hubert says he can revive it, Arthur replies with

pinchbeck conceits:

“An if you do you will but make it blush, And glow with shame at your

proceedings,”

and so forth. The faults are bad enough; but the heavenly virtues carry

them all off triumphantly. There is no creation like Arthur in the whole

realm of poetry; he is all angelic love and gentleness, and yet neither

mawkish nor unnatural; his fears make him real to us, and the horror of

his situation allows us to accept his exquisite pleading as possible. We

need only think of Tennyson's May Queen, or of his unspeakable Arthur,

or of Thackeray's prig Esmond, in order to understand how difficult it

is in literature to make goodness attractive or even credible. Yet

Shakespeare's art triumphs where no one else save Balzac and Tourgenief

has achieved even a half-success.

I cannot leave this play without noticing that Shakespeare has shown in

it a hatred of murder just as emphatically as he has revealed his love

of gentleness and pity in the creation of Arthur. In spite of the

loyalty which the English nobles avow in the second scene of the fourth

act, which is a quality that always commends itself to Shakespeare,

Pembroke is merely their mouthpiece in requesting the King to

“enfranchise Arthur.” As soon as John tells them that Arthur is dead

they throw off their allegiance and insult the monarch to his face. Even

John is startled by their indignation, and brought as near remorse as is

possible for him:

“I repent;

There is no sure foundation set on blood;

No certain life achieved by others' death--”

--which reads like a reflection of Shakespeare himself. When the Bastard

asks the nobles to return to their allegiance, Salisbury finds an

astonishing phrase to express their loathing of the crime:

“The King hath dispossess'd himself of us;

We will not line his thin bestained cloak

With our pure honours, _nor attend the foot

That leaves the print of blood where'er it walks_.”

In all literature there is no more terrible image: Shakespeare's horror

of bloodshed has more than Aeschylean intensity. When the dead body of

Arthur is found each of the nobles in turn expresses his abhorrence of

the deed, and all join in vowing instant revenge. Even the Bastard calls

it

“A damned and bloody work,

The graceless action of a heavy hand,”

and a little later the thought of the crime brings even this tough

adventurer to weakness:

“I am amazed, methinks, and lose my way

Among the thorns and dangers of this world.”

--a phrase that suits the weakness of Richard II. or Henry VI. or

Shakespeare himself better than it suits the hardy Bastard. Even as a

young man Shakespeare hated the cruelty of ambition and the savagery of

war as much as he loved all the ceremonies of chivalry and observances

of gentle courtesy.

Very similar inferences are to be drawn from a study of Shakespeare's

“King Richard II.,” which in some respects is his most important

historical creation. Coleridge says: “I know of no character drawn by

our great poet with such unequalled skill as that of Richard II.” Such

praise is extravagant; but it would have been true to say that up to

1593 or 1594, when Shakespeare wrote “King Richard II.,” he had given us

no character so complex and so interesting as this Richard. Coleridge

overpraised the character-drawing probably because the study of

Richard's weakness and irresolution, and the pathos resulting from such

helplessness, must have seemed very like an analysis of his own nature.

Let us now examine “Richard II.,” and see what light it casts on

Shakespeare's qualities. There was an old play of the same title, a play

which is now lost, but we can form some idea of what it was like from

the description in Forman's Diary. Like most of the old history-plays it

ranged over twenty years of Richard's reign, whereas Shakespeare's

tragedy is confined to the last year of Richard's life. It is probable

that the old play presented King Richard as more wicked and more

deceitful than Shakespeare imagines him. We know that in the “Confessio

Amantis,” Gower, the poet, cast off his allegiance to Richard: for he

cancelled the dedication of the poem to Richard, and dedicated it

instead to Henry. William Langland, too, the author of the “Vision of

Piers Plowman,” turned from Richard at the last, and used his deposition

as a warning to ill-advised youth. It may be assumed, then, that

tradition pictured Richard as a vile creature in whom weakness nourished

crime. Shakespeare took his story partly from Holinshed's narrative, and

partly either from the old play or from the traditional view of

Richard's character. When he began to write the play he evidently

intended to portray Richard as even more detestable than history and

tradition had presented him. In Holinshed Richard is not accused of the

murder of Gloster, whereas Shakespeare directly charges him with it, or

rather makes Gaunt do so, and the accusation is not denied, much less

disproved. At the close of the first act we are astonished by the

revelation of Richard's devilish heartlessness. The King hearing that

his uncle, John of Gaunt, is “grievous sick,” cries out:

“Now put it, God, in his physician's mind,

To help him to his grave immediately!

The lining of his coffers shall make coats

To deck our soldiers for these Irish wars.

Come, gentlemen, let's all go visit him:

Pray God we may make haste and come too late.”

This mixture of greed and cold cruelty decked out with blasphemous

phrase is viler, I think, than anything attributed by Shakespeare to the

worst of his villains. But surely some hint of Richard's incredible

vileness should have come earlier in the play, should have preceded at

least his banishment of Bolingbroke, if Shakespeare had really meant to

present him to us in this light.

In the first scene of the second act, when Gaunt reproves him, Richard

turns on him in a rage, threatening. In the very same scene York

reproves Richard for seizing Gaunt's money and land, and Richard

retorts:

“Think what you will: we seize into our hands

His plate, his goods, his money, and his lands.”

But when York blames him to his face and predicts that evil will befall

him and leaves him, Richard in spite of this at once creates:

“Our uncle York, Lord Governor of England;

For he is just, and always loved us well.”

This Richard of Shakespeare is so far, I submit, almost

incomprehensible. When reproved by Gaunt and warned, Richard rages and

threatens; when blamed by York much more severely, Richard rewards York:

the two scenes contradict each other. Moreover, though his callous

selfishness, greed and cruelty are apparently established, in the very

next scene of this act our sympathy with Richard is called forth by the

praise his queen gives him. She says:

“I know no cause

Why I should welcome such a guest as grief,

Save bidding farewell to so sweet a guest

As my sweet Richard.”

And from this scene to the end of the play Shakespeare enlists all our

sympathy for Richard. Now, what is the reason of this right-about-face

on the part of the poet?

It appears to me that Shakespeare began the play intending to present

the vile and cruel Richard of tradition. But midway in the play he saw

that there was no emotion, no pathos, to be got out of the traditional

view. If Richard were a vile, scheming, heartless murderer, the loss of

his crown and life would merely satisfy our sense of justice, but this

outcome did not satisfy Shakespeare's desire for emotion, and

particularly his desire for pathos, [Footnote: In the last scene of the

last act of “Lear,” Albany says:

“This judgement of the heavens, that makes us tremble

Touches us not with pity.”]

and accordingly he veers round, says nothing more of Richard's

vileness, lays stress upon his weakness and sufferings, discovers, too,

all manner of amiable qualities in him, and so draws pity from us for

his dethronement and murder.

The curious thing is that while Shakespeare is depicting Richard's

heartlessness, he does his work badly; the traits, as I have shown, are

crudely extravagant and even contradictory; but when he paints Richard's

gentleness and amiability, he works like a master, every touch is

infallible: he is painting himself.

It was natural for Shakespeare to sympathize deeply with Richard; he was

still young when he wrote the play, young enough to remember vividly how

he himself had been led astray by loose companions, and this formed a

bond between them. At this time of his life this was Shakespeare's

favourite subject: he treated it again in “Henry IV.,” which is at once

the epilogue to “Richard II.” and a companion picture to it; for the

theme of both plays is the same--youth yielding to unworthy

companions--though the treatment in the earlier play is incomparably

feebler than it became in “King Henry IV.” Bushy, Bagot, and Green, the

favourites of Richard, are not painted as Shakespeare afterwards painted

Falstaff and his followers. But partly because he had not yet attained

to such objective treatment of character, Shakespeare identified himself

peculiarly with Richard; and his painting of Richard is more intimate,

more subtle, more self-revealing and pathetic than anything in “Henry

IV.”

As I have already said, from the time when Richard appoints York as

Regent, and leaves England, Shakespeare begins to think of himself as

Richard, and from this moment to the end no one can help sympathizing

with the unhappy King. At this point, too, the character-drawing

becomes, of a sudden, excellent. When Richard lands in England, he is

given speech after speech, and all he says and does afterwards throws

light, it seems to me, on Shakespeare's own nature. Let us mark each

trait First of all Richard is intensely, frankly emotional: he “weeps

for joy” to be in England again; “weeping, smiling,” he greets the earth

of England, and is full of hope. “The thief, the traitor,” Bolingbroke,

will not dare to face the light of the sun; for “every man that

Bolingbroke has in his pay,” he cries exultantly, God hath given Richard

a “glorious angel; ... Heaven still guards the right.” A moment later he

hears from Salisbury that the Welshmen whom he had relied upon as allies

are dispersed and fled. At once he becomes “pale and dead.” From the

height of pride and confidence he falls to utter hopelessness.

“All souls that will be safe fly from my side;

For time hath set a blot upon my pride.”

Aumerle asks him to remember who he is, and at once he springs from

dejection to confidence again. He cries:

“Awake, thou sluggard majesty! thou sleepest.

Is not the king's name forty thousand names?”

The next moment Scroop speaks of cares, and forthwith fitful Richard is

in the dumps once more. But this time his weakness is turned to

resignation and sadness, and the pathos of this is brought out by the

poet:

“Strives Bolingbroke to be as great as we?

Greater he shall not be; if he serve God

We'll serve him, too, and be his fellow so.

Revolt our subjects? that we cannot mend;

They break their faith to God, as well as us.

Cry woe, destruction, ruin, loss, decay;

The worst is death, and death will have his day.”

Who does not hear Hamlet speaking in this memorable last line? Like

Hamlet, too, this Richard is quick to suspect even his friends' loyalty.

He guesses that Bagot, Bushy, and Green have made peace with

Bolingbroke, and when Scroop seems to admit this, Richard is as quick as

Hamlet to unpack his heart with words:

“O villains, vipers, damned without redemption!

Dogs, easily won to fawn on any man!

Snakes,”

and so forth.

But as soon as he learns that his friends are dead he breaks out in a

long lament for them which ranges over everything from worms to kings,

and in its melancholy pessimism is the prototype of those meditations

which Shakespeare has put in the mouth of nearly all his favourite

characters. Who is not reminded of Hamlet's great monologue when he

reads:

“For within the hollow crown,

That rounds the mortal temples of a king,

Keeps Death his court: and there the antic sits

Scoffing his state, and grinning at his pomp;

Allowing him a breath, a little scene

To monarchize, be fear'd and kill with looks;

Infusing him with self and vain conceit,

As if this flesh, which walls about our life,

Were brass impregnable; and, humour'd thus,

Comes at the last, and with a little pin[1]

Bores through his castle wall, and--farewell, King!”

[Footnote 1: In Hamlet's famous soliloquy the pin is a “bodkin.”]

Let us take another two lines of this soliloquy:

“For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground

And tell sad stories of the death of kings.”

In the second scene of the third act of “Titus Andronicus” we find Titus

saying to his daughter:

“I'll to thy closet; and go read with thee

Sad stories chancèd in the times of old.”

Again, in the “Comedy of Errors,” Ægeon tells us that his life was

prolonged:

“To tell sad stories of my own mishaps.”

The similarity of these passages shows that in the very spring of life

and heyday of the blood Shakespeare had in him a certain romantic

melancholy which was developed later by the disappointments of life into

the despairing of Macbeth and Lear.

When the Bishop calls upon Richard to act, the King's weathercock mind

veers round again, and he cries:

“This ague fit of fear is over-blown,

An easy task it is to win our own.”

But when Scroop tells him that York has joined with Bolingbroke, he

believes him at once, gives up hope finally, and turns as if for comfort

to his own melancholy fate:

“Beshrew thee, cousin, which didst lead me forth

Of that sweet way I was in to despair!”

That “sweet way” of despair is Romeo's way, Hamlet's, Macbeth's and

Shakespeare's way.

In the next scene Richard meets his foes, and at first plays the king.

Shakespeare tells us that he looks like a king, that his eyes are as

“bright as an eagle's”; and this poetic admiration of state and place

seems to have got into Richard's blood, for at first he declares that

Bolingbroke is guilty of treason, and asserts that:

“My master, God omnipotent,

Is mustering in his clouds, on our behalf,

Armies of pestilence.”

Of course, he gives in with fair words the next moment, and the next

rages against Bolingbroke; and then comes the great speech in which the

poet reveals himself so ingenuously that at the end of it the King he

pretends to be, has to admit that he has talked but idly. I cannot help

transcribing the whole of the passage, for it shows how easily

Shakespeare falls out of this King's character into his own:

“What must the King do now? Must he submit?

The King shall do it. Must he be depos'd?

The King shall be contented: must he lose

The name of king? O! God's name, let it go:

I'll give my jewels for a set of beads;

My gorgeous palace for a hermitage;

My gay apparel for an alms-man's gown;

My figur'd goblets for a dish of wood;

My sceptre for a palmer's walking staff;

My subjects for a pair of carved saints;

And my large kingdom for a little grave,

A little, little grave, an obscure grave:--

Or I'll be buried in the King's highway,

Some way of common trade, where subjects' feet

May hourly trample on their sovereign's head:

For on my heart they tread, now whilst I live;

And, buried once, why not upon my head?--

Aumerle, thou weep'st; my tender-hearted cousin!--

We'll make foul weather with despised tears;

Our sighs, and they, shall lodge the summer corn,

And make a dearth in this revolting land.

Or shall we play the wantons with our woes,

And make some pretty match with shedding tears?

As thus:--To drop them still upon one place,

Till they have fretted us a pair of graves

Within the earth; and, therein laid,--There lies

Two kinsmen digg'd their graves with weeping eyes.

Would not this ill do well?--Well, well, I see

I talk but idly, and you mock at me.--

Most mighty prince, my lord Northumberland,

What says King Bolingbroke? will his majesty

Give Richard leave to live till Richard die?

You make a leg, and Bolingbroke says ay.”

Every one will admit that the poet himself speaks here, at least, from

the words “I'll give my jewels” to the words “Would not this ill do

well?” But the melancholy mood, the pathetic acceptance of the

inevitable, the tender poetic embroidery now suit the King who is

fashioned in the poet's likeness.

The next moment Richard revolts once more against his fate:

“Base court, where kings grow base,

To come at traitors' calls, and do them grace.”

And when Bolingbroke kneels to him he plays upon words, as Gaunt did a

little earlier in the play misery making sport to mock itself. He says:

“Up, cousin, up; your heart is up, I know,

Thus high at least, although your knee be low”--

and then he abandons himself to do “what force will have us do.”

The Queen's wretchedness is next used to heighten our sympathy with

Richard, and immediately afterwards we have that curious scene between

the gardener and his servant which is merely youthful Shakespeare, for

such a gardener and such a servant never yet existed. The scene

[Footnote: Coleridge gives this scene as an instance of Shakespeare's

“wonderful judgement”; the introduction of the gardener, he says,

“realizes the thing,” and, indeed, the introduction of a gardener would

have this tendency, but not the introduction of this pompous, priggish

philosopher togged out in old Adam's likeness. Here is the way this

gardener criticises the King:

“All superfluous branches

We lop away, that bearing boughs may live;

Had he done so, himself had borne the crown,

Which waste of idle hours hath quite thrown down.”]

shows the extravagance of Shakespeare's love of hierarchy, and shows

also that his power of realizing character is as yet but slight. The

abdication follows, when Richard in exquisite speech after speech

unpacks his heavy heart. To the very last his irresolution comes to show

as often as his melancholy. Bolingbroke is sharply practical:

“Are you contented to resign the crown?”

Richard answers:

“Ay, no; no, ay;--for I must nothing be;

Therefore, no, no, for I resign to thee.”

When he is asked to confess his sins in public, he moves us all to pity:

“Must I do so? and must I ravel out

My weaved up follies? Gentle Northumberland,

If thy offences were upon record,

Would it not shame thee, in so fair a troop,

To read a lecture of them?”

His eyes are too full of tears to read his own faults, and sympathy

brings tears to our eyes also. Richard calls for a glass wherein to see

his sins, and we are reminded of Hamlet, who advises the players to hold

the mirror up to nature. He jests with his grief, too, in quick-witted

retort, as Hamlet jests:

“Rich. Say that again.

The shadow of my sorrow? Ha! let's see:--

'Tis very true, my grief lies all within;

And these external manners of lament

Are merely shadows to the unseen grief,

That swells with silence in the tortur'd soul.”

Hamlet touches the self-same note:

“'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,

Nor customary suits of solemn black,

- - - - - - - - - -

But I have that within which passeth show;

These but the trappings and the suits of woe.”

In the fifth act, the scene between the Queen and Richard is used simply

to move our pity. She says he is “most beauteous,” but all too mild, and

he answers her:

“I am sworn brother, sweet,

To grim necessity; and he and I

Will keep a league till death.”

He bids her take,

“As from my death-bed, my last living leave,”

and for her consolation he turns again to the telling of romantic

melancholy stories:

“In winter's tedious nights, sit by the fire

With good old folks; and let them tell thee tales

Of woeful ages long ago betid:

And, ere thou bid good night, to quit their grief,

Tell thou the lamentable fall of me,

And send the hearers weeping to their beds,

For why; the senseless brands will sympathize

The heavy accent of thy moving tongue.”

I cannot copy this passage without drawing attention to the haunting

music of the third line.

The scene in which York betrays his son to Bolingbroke and prays the

king not to pardon but “cut off” the offending member, is merely a

proof, if proof were wanted, of Shakespeare's admiration of kingship and

loyalty, which in youth, at least, often led him to silliest

extravagance.

The dungeon scene and Richard's monologue in it are as characteristic of

Shakespeare as the similar scene in “Cymbeline” and the soliloquy of

Posthumus:

“_K. Rich_., I have been studying how I may compare

This prison where I live unto the world:

And for because the world is populous,

And here is not a creature but myself,

I cannot do it; yet I'll hammer it out,

My brain I'll prove the female to my soul

My soul the father; and these two beget

A generation of still breeding thoughts,

And these same thoughts people this little world,

In humours like the people of this world,

For no thought is contented....”

Here we have the philosopher playing with his own thoughts; but soon the

Hamlet-melancholy comes to tune the meditation to sadness, and

Shakespeare speaks to us directly:

“Thus play I in one person many people,

And none contented: sometimes am I king;

Then treasons make me wish myself a beggar,

And so I am: then crushing penury

Persuades me I was better when a king;

Then am I king'd again; and by and by

Think, that I am unking'd by Bolingbroke,

And straight am nothing; but whate'er I be,

Nor I nor any man that but man is

With nothing shall be pleased, till he be eased

With being nothing.”

Later, one hears Kent's lament for Lear in Richard's words:

“How these vain weak nails

May tear a passage through the flinty ribs

Of this hard world, my ragged prison walls.”

To Richard music is “sweet music,” as it is to all the characters that

are _merely_ Shakespeare's masks, and the scene in which Hamlet

asks Guildenstern to “play upon the pipe” is prefigured for us in

Richard's self-reproach:

“And here have I the daintiness of ear,

To check time broke in a disordered string;

But for the concord of my state and time,

Had not an ear to hear my true time broke.”

In the last three lines of this monologue which I am now about to quote,

I can hear Shakespeare speaking as plainly as he spoke in Arthur's

appeals; the feminine longing for love is the unmistakable note:

“Yet blessing on his heart that gives it me!

For 'tis a sign of love; and love to Richard

Is a strange brooch in this all-hating world.”

And at the last, by killing the servant who assaults him, this Richard

shows that he has the “something desperate” in him of which Hamlet

boasted.

The murderer's praise that this irresolute-weak and loving Richard is

“as full of valour as of royal blood” is nothing more than an excellent

instance of Shakespeare's self-illusion. He comes nearer the fact in

“Measure for Measure,” where the Duke, his other self, is shown to be

“an unhurtful opposite” too gentle-kind to remember an injury or punish

the offender, and he rings the bell at truth's centre when, in “Julius

Caesar,” his mask Brutus admits that he

“... carries anger as the flint bears fire

Who much enforcèd shows a hasty spark

And straight is cold again.”

If a hasty blow were proof of valour then Walter Scott's Eachin in “The

Fair Maid of Perth” would be called brave. But courage to be worth the

name must be founded on stubborn resolution, and all Shakespeare's

incarnations, and in especial this Richard, are as unstable as water.

The whole play is summed up in York's pathetic description of Richard's

entrance into London:

“No man cried, God save him;

No joyful tongue gave him his welcome home:

But dust was thrown upon his sacred head;

Which with such gentle sorrow he shook off--

His face still combating with tears and smiles,

The badges of his grief and patience--

That had not God, for some strong purpose, steel'd

The hearts of men, they must perforce have melted,

And barbarism itself have pitied him.”

This passage it seems to me both in manner and matter is as truly

characteristic of Shakespeare as any that can be found in all his works:

his loving pity for the fallen, his passionate sympathy with “gentle

sorrow” were never more perfectly expressed.

Pity, indeed, is the note of the tragedy, as it was in the Arthur-scenes

in “King John,” but the knowledge of Shakespeare derived from “King

John” is greatly widened by the study of “King Richard II.” In the

Arthur of “King John” we found Shakespeare's exquisite pity for

weakness, his sympathy with suffering, and, more than all, his

girlish-tender love and desire of love. In “Richard II.,” the weakness

Shakespeare pities is not physical weakness, but mental irresolution and

incapacity for action, and these Hamlet-weaknesses are accompanied by a

habit of philosophic thought, and are enlivened by a nimble wit and

great lyrical power. In Arthur Shakespeare is bent on revealing his

qualities of heart, and in “Richard II.” his qualities of mind, and that

these two are but parts of the same nature is proved by the fact that

Arthur shows great quickness of apprehension and felicity of speech,

while Richard once or twice at least displays a tenderness of heart and

longing for love worthy of Arthur.

It appears then that Shakespeare's nature even in hot, reckless youth

was most feminine and affectionate, and that even when dealing with

histories and men of action he preferred to picture irresolution and

weakness rather than strength, and felt more sympathy with failure

than with success.

CHAPTER V. SHAKESPEARE'S MEN OF ACTION (_continued_).

HOT-SPUR, HENRY V., RICHARD III.

The conclusions we have already reached, will be borne out and

strengthened in unexpected ways by the study of Hotspur--Shakespeare's

master picture of the man of action. The setting sun of chivalry falling

on certain figures threw gigantic shadows across Shakespeare's path, and

of these figures no one deserved immortality better than Harry Percy.

Though he is not introduced in “The Famous Victories of Henry V.,” the

old play which gave Shakespeare his roistering Prince and the first

faint hint of Falstaff, Harry Percy lived in story and in oral

tradition. His nickname itself is sufficient evidence of the impression

he had made on the popular fancy. And both Prince Henry when mocking

him, and his wife when praising him, bear witness to what were, no

doubt, the accepted peculiarities of his character. Hotspur lived in the

memory of men, we may be sure, with thick, hasty speech, and hot,

impatient temper, and it is easy, I think, even at this late date, to

distinguish Shakespeare's touches on the traditional portrait. It is for

the reader to say whether Shakespeare blurred the picture, or bettered

it.

Hotspur's first words to the King in the first act are admirable; they

bring the brusque, passionate soldier vividly before us; but I am sure

Shakespeare had the fact from history or tradition.

“My liege, I did deny no prisoners.

But, I remember, when the fight was done,

When I was dry with rage and extreme toil,

Breathless and faint, leaning upon my sword,

Came there a certain lord, neat, trimly dressed,

Fresh as a bridegroom.”

Hotspur's picture of this “popinjay” with pouncet-box in hand, and

“perfumed like a milliner,” is splendid self-revelation:

“he made me mad,

To see him shine so brisk and smell so sweet,

And talk so like a waiting gentlewoman.”

But immediately afterwards Hotspur's defence of Mortimer shows the poet

Shakespeare rather than the rude soldier who hates nothing more than

“mincing poetry.” The beginning is fairly good:

“_Hot_. Revolted Mortimer!

He never did fall off, my sovereign liege,

But by the chance of war: to prove that true,

Needs no more but one tongue for all those wounds,

Those mouthed wounds which valiantly he took,

When on the gentle Severn's sedgy bank.”

This “gentle Severn's sedgy bank” is too poetical for Hotspur; but what

shall be said of his description of the river?

“Who then, affrighted with their bloody looks,

Ran fearfully among the trembling reeds,

And hid his crisp head in the hollow bank

Blood-stained with these valiant combatants.”

Shakespeare was still too young, too much in love with poetry to confine

himself within the nature of Hotspur. But the character of Hotspur was

so well known that Shakespeare could not long remain outside it. When

the King cuts short the audience with the command to send back the

prisoners, we find the passionate Hotspur again:

“And if the devil come and roar for them,

I will not send them.--I will after straight,

And tell him so: for I will ease my heart,

Although it be with hazard of my head.”

The last line strikes a false note; such a reflection throws cold water

on the heat of passion, and that is not intended, for though reproved by

his father Hotspur storms on:

“Speak of Mortimer!

'Zounds! I will speak of him; and let my soul

Want mercy, if I do not join with him....”

The next long speech of Hotspur is mere poetic slush; he begins:

“Nay, then, I cannot blame his cousin king,

That wish'd him on the barren mountains starve....”

and goes on for thirty lines to reprove the conspirators for having put

down “Richard, that sweet lovely rose,” and planted “this thorn,

Bolingbroke.” This long speech retards the action, obscures the

character of Hotspur, and only shows Shakespeare poetising without a

flash of inspiration. Then comes Hotspur's famous speech about honour:

“By heaven, methinks it were an easy leap,

To pluck bright honour from the pale-faced moon;

Or dive into the bottom of the deep ...”

And immediately afterwards a speech in which his uncontrollable

impatience and the childishness which always lurks in anger, find

perfect expression. To soothe him, Worcester says he shall keep his

prisoners; Hotspur bursts out:

“Nay, I will: that's flat.

He said, he would not ransom Mortimer;

Forbad my tongue to speak of Mortimer;

But I will find him when he lies asleep,

And in his ear I'll holla--'Mortimer!' Nay,

I'll have a starling shall be taught to speak

Nothing but 'Mortimer,' and give it him,

To keep his anger still in motion.”

No wonder Lord Worcester reproves him, and his father chides him as “a

wasp-stung and impatient fool,” who will only talk and not listen. But

again Hotspur breaks forth, and again his anger paints him to the life:

“Why, look you, I am whipped and scourged with rods,

Nettled and stung with pismires, when I hear

Of this vile politician, Bolingbroke.

In Richard's time,--what do you call the place?--

A plague upon 't--it is in Glostershire;--

'Twas where the madcap duke his uncle kept,--...”

The very ecstasy of impatience and of puerile passionate temper has

never been better rendered.

His soliloquy, too, in the beginning of scene iii, when he reads the

letter which throws the cold light of reason on his enterprise, is

excellent, though it repeats qualities we already knew in Hotspur, and

does not reveal new ones:

'“The purpose you undertake is dangerous';--why,

that's certain: 'tis dangerous to take a cold, to sleep, to

drink; but I tell you, my lord fool, out of this nettle

danger, we pluck this flower safety.... What a frosty-spirited

rogue is this!... O, I could divide myself and

go to buffets, for moving such a dish of skimmed milk

with so honourable an action! Hang him! Let him tell

the King: we are prepared. I will set forward to-night.”

But the topmost height of self-revealing is reached in the scene with

his wife which immediately follows this. Lady Percy enters, and Hotspur

greets her:

“How now, Kate? I must leave you within these two hours.”

The lady's reply is too long and too poetical. Hotspur interrupts her by

calling the servant and giving him orders. Then Lady Percy questions,

and Hotspur avoids a direct answer, and little by little Shakespeare

works himself into the characters till even Lady Percy lives for us:

“_Lady_. Come, come, you paraquito, answer me

Directly unto this question that I ask.

In faith, I'll break thy little finger, Harry,

An if thou wilt not tell me true.

_Hot_. Away,

Away, you trifler!--Love?--I love thee not,

I care not for thee, Kate; this is no world

To play with mammets and to tilt with lips....”

It shows a certain immaturity of art that Hotspur should introduce the

theme of “love,” and not Lady Percy; but, of course, Lady Percy seizes

on the word:

“_Lady_. Do you not love me? do you not, indeed,

Well, do not then; for since you love me not,

I will not love myself. Do you not love me?

Nay, tell me, if you speak in jest or no?

_Hot_. Come, wilt thou see me ride?

And when I am o' horseback, I will swear

I love thee infinitely....”

All this is superb; Hotspur's coarse contempt of love deepens our sense

of his soldier-like nature and eagerness for action; but though the

qualities are rendered magically the qualities themselves are few:

Shakespeare still harps upon Hotspur's impatience; but even a soldier is

something more than hasty temper, and disdain of love's dalliance. But

the portrait is not finished yet. The first scene in the third act

between Hotspur and Glendower is on this same highest level; Hotspur's

impatience of Glendower's bragging at length finds an unforgetable

phrase:

“_Glend_. I can call spirits from the vasty deep.

_Hot_. Why, so can I, or so can any man;

But will they come when you do call for them?”

Then Hotspur disputes over the division of England; he wants a larger

share than that allotted to him; the trait is typical, excellent; but

the next moment Shakespeare effaces it. As soon as Glendower yields,

Hotspur cries:

“I do not care; I'll give thrice so much land

Away to any well-deserving friend;

But in the way of bargain, mark ye me,

I'll cavil on the ninth part of a hair....”

This large generosity is a trait of Shakespeare and not of Hotspur; the

poet cannot bear to lend his hero a tinge of meanness, or of avarice,

and yet the character needs a heavy shadow or two, and no shadow could

be more appropriate than this, for greed of land has always been a

characteristic of the soldier-aristocrat.

Shakespeare is perfectly willing to depict Hotspur as scorning the arts.

When Glendower praises poetry, Hotspur vows he'd “rather be a kitten and

cry mew ... than a metre ballad-monger. ...” Nothing sets his teeth on

edge “so much as mincing poetry”: and a little later he prefers the

howling of a dog to music. When he is reproved by Lord Worcester for

“defect of manners, want of government, ... pride, haughtiness,

disdain,” his reply is most characteristic:

“Well, I am schooled: good manners be your speed,

Here come our wives, and let us take our leave.”

He is too old to learn, and his self-assurance is not to be shaken; but

though he hates schooling he will school his wife:

“Swear me, Kate, like a lady as thou art,

A good mouth-filling oath; and leave, 'in sooth,'

And such protest of pepper-gingerbread

To velvet guards and Sunday citizens.”

This is merely a repetition of the trait shown in his first speech when

he sneered at the popinjay-lord for talking in “holiday and lady terms.”

But not only does Shakespeare repeat well-known traits in Hotspur, he

also uses him as a mere mouthpiece again and again, as he used him at

the beginning in the poetic description of the Severn. The fourth act

opens with a speech of Hotspur to Douglas, which is curiously

illustrative of this fault:

“_Hot._. Well said, my noble Scot, if speaking truth

In this fine age were not thought flattery,

Such attribution should the Douglas have,

As not a soldier of this season's stamp

Should go so general current through the world.

By God, I cannot flatter; I defy

The tongues of soothers; but a braver place

In my heart's love hath no man than yourself.

Nay, task me to my word; approve me, lord.”

In the first five lines of this skimble-skamble stuff I hear Shakespeare

speaking in his cheapest way; with the oath, however, he tries to get

into the character again, and succeeds indifferently.

Immediately afterwards Hotspur is shocked by the news that his father is

sick and has not even sent the promised assistance; struck to the heart

by the betrayal, the hot soldier should now reveal his true character;

one expects him to curse his father, and rising to the danger, to cry

that he is stronger without traitors and faint-heart friends. But

Shakespeare the philosopher is chiefly concerned with the effect of such

news upon a rebel camp, and again he speaks through Hotspur:

“Sick now! droop now! this sickness doth infect

The very life-blood of our enterprise;

'Tis catching hither, even to our camp.”

Then Shakespeare pulls himself up and tries to get into Hotspur's

character again by representing to himself the circumstance:

“He writes me here, that inward sickness--

And that his friends by deputation could not

So soon be drawn; nor did he think it meet--”

and so forth to the question: “...What say you to it?”

“_Wor_. Your father's sickness is a maim to us.

_Hot_. A perilous gash, a very limb lopped off:--”

Shakespeare sees that he cannot go on exaggerating the injury--that is

not Hotspur's line, is indeed utterly false to Hotspur's nature; and so

he tries to stop himself and think of Hotspur:

“And yet, in faith, it's not; his present want

Seems more than we shall find it: were it good

To set the exact wealth of all our states

All at one cast? to set so rich a main

On the nice hazard of one doubtful hour?

It were not good; for therein should we read

The very bottom and the soul of hope,

The very list, the very utmost bound

Of all our fortunes.”

After the first two lines, which Hotspur might have spoken, we have the

sophistry of the thinker poetically expressed, and not one word from the

hot, high-couraged soldier. Indeed, in the last four lines from the

bookish “we read” to the end, we have the gentle poet in love with

desperate extremities. The passage must be compared with Othello's--

“Here is my journey's end, here is my butt,

And very sea-mark of my utmost sail.”

But at length when Worcester adds fear to danger Hotspur half finds

himself:

“_Hot_, You strain too far.

I rather of his absence make this use:--

It lends a lustre, and more great opinion,

A larger dare to our great enterprise,

Than if the earl were here; for men must think,

If we, without his help can make a head

To push against the kingdom; with his help

We shall o'erturn it topsy-turvy down.--

Yet all goes well, yet all our joints are whole.”

And this is all. The scene is designed, the situation constructed to

show us Hotspur's courage: here, if anywhere, the hot blood should

surprise us and make of danger the springboard of leaping hardihood. But

this is the best Shakespeare can reach--this fainting, palefaced “Yet

all goes well, yet all our joints are whole.” The inadequacy, the

feebleness of the whole thing is astounding. Milton had not the courage

of the soldier, but he had more than this: he found better words for his

Satan after defeat than Shakespeare found for Hotspur before the battle:

“What though the field be lost?

All is not lost; the unconquerable will,

And study of revenge, immortal hate,

And courage never to submit or yield,

And what is else not to be overcome;

That glory never shall his wrath or might

Extort from me.”

When Shakespeare has to render Hotspur's impatience he does it superbly,

when he has to render Hotspur's courage he fails lamentably.

In the third scene of this fourth act we have another striking instance

of Shakespeare's shortcoming. Sir Walter Blount meets the rebels “with

gracious offers from the King,” whereupon Hotspur abuses the King

through forty lines; this is the kind of stuff:

“My father and my uncle and myself

Did give him that same royalty he wears;

And when he was not six and twenty strong,

Sick in the world's regard, wretched and low,

A poor unminded outlaw sneaking home,

My father gave him welcome to the shore; ...”

and so on and on, like Hamlet, he unpacks his heart with words, till

Blount cries:

“Tut, I came not to hear this.”

Hotspur admits the reproof, but immediately starts off again:

“_Hot_. Then to the point.

In short time after he deposed the king;

Soon after that, deprived him of his life,”

and so forth for twenty lines more, till Blount pulls him up again with

the shrewd question:

“Shall I return this answer to the king?”

Hotspur replies:

“Not so, Sir Walter; we'll withdraw awhile.

Go to the king.....

And in the morning early shall mine uncle

Bring him our purposes; and so farewell.”

And yet this Hotspur who talks interminably when he would do much better

to keep quiet, assures us a little later that he has not well “the gift

of tongue,” and again declares he's glad a messenger has cut him short,

for “I profess not talking.”

The truth is the real Hotspur did not talk much, but Shakespeare had the

gift of the gab, if ever a man had, and Hotspur was a mouthpiece. It is

worth noting that though the dramatist usually works himself into a

character gradually, Hotspur is best presented in the earlier scenes:

Shakespeare began the work with the Hotspur of history and tradition

clear in his mind; but as he wrote he grew interested in Hotspur and

identified himself too much with his hero, and so almost spoiled the

portrait. This is well seen in Hotspur's end; Prince Henry has said he'd

crop his budding honours and make a garland for himself out of them, and

this is how the dying Hotspur answers him:

“O Harry, thou hast robbed me of my youth!

I better brook the loss of brittle life

Than those proud titles thou hast won of me;

They wound my thoughts worse than thy sword my flesh:--

But thought's the slave of life, and life time's fool,

And time, that takes survey of all the world,

Must have a stop. O, I could prophesy,

But that the earthy and cold hand of death

Lies on my tongue:--no, Percy, thou art dust,

And food for ----”

Of course, Prince Henry concludes the phrase, and continues the

Hamlet-like philosophic soliloquy:

“_P. Henry_. For worms, brave Percy: fare thee well,

great heart!--

Ill-weaved ambition, how much art thou shrunk!

When that this body did contain a spirit,

A kingdom for it was too small a bound;

But now two paces of the vilest earth

Is room enough: ...”

I have tried to do justice to this portrait of Hotspur, for Shakespeare

never did a better picture of a man of action, indeed, as we shall soon

see, he never did as well again. But take away from Hotspur the

qualities given to him by history and tradition, the hasty temper, and

thick stuttering speech, and contempt of women, and it will be seen how

little Shakespeare added. He makes Hotspur hate “mincing poetry,” and

then puts long poetic descriptions in his mouth; he paints the soldier

despising “the gift of tongue” and forces him to talk historic and

poetic slush in and out of season; he makes the aristocrat greedy and

sets him quarrelling with his associates for more land, and the next

moment, when the land is given him, Hotspur abandons it without further

thought; he frames an occasion calculated to show off Hotspur's courage,

and then allows him to talk faint-heartedly, and finally, when Hotspur

should die mutely, or with a bitter curse, biting to the last,

Shakespeare's Hotspur loses himself in mistimed philosophic reflection

and poetic prediction. Yet such is Shakespeare's magic of expression

that when he is revealing the qualities which Hotspur really did

possess, he makes him live for us with such intensity of life that no

number of false strokes can obliterate the impression. It is only the

critic working _sine ira et studio_ who will find this portrait

blurred by the intrusion of the poet's personality.

It is the companion picture of Prince Henry that shows as in a glass

Shakespeare's poverty of conception when he is dealing with the

distinctively manly qualities. In order to judge the matter fairly we

must remember that Shakespeare did not create Prince Henry any more than

he created Hotspur. In the old play entitled “The Famous Victories of

Henry V.,” and in the popular mouth, Shakespeare found roistering Prince

Hal. The madcap Prince, like Harry Percy, was a creature of popular

sympathy; his high spirits and extravagances, the vigorous way in which

he had sown his wild oats, had taken the English fancy, the historic

personage had been warmed to vivid life by the popular emotion.

Shakespeare was personally interested in this princely hero. As we have

seen, he dims Hotspur's portrait by intrusion of his own peculiarities;

and in the case of Harry Percy, this temptation will be stronger.

The subject of the play, a young man of noble gifts led astray by loose

companions, was a favourite subject with Shakespeare at this time; he

had treated it already in “Richard II.”; and he handled it here again

with such zest that we are almost forced to believe in the tradition

that Shakespeare himself in early youth had sown wild oats in unworthy

company. Helped by a superb model, and in full sympathy with his theme,

Shakespeare might be expected to paint a magnificent picture. But Prince

Henry is anything but a great portrait; he is at first hardly more than

a prig, and later a feeble and colourless replica of Hotspur. It is very

curious that even in the comedy scenes with Falstaff Shakespeare has

never taken the trouble to realize the Prince: he often lends him his

own word-wit, and now and then his own high intelligence, but he never

for a moment discovers to us the soul of his hero. He does not even tell

us what pleasure Henry finds in living and carousing with Falstaff. Did

the Prince choose his companions out of vanity, seeking in the Eastcheap

tavern a court where he might throne it? Or was it the infinite humour

of Falstaff which attracted him? Or did he break bounds merely out of

high spirits, when bored by the foolish formalities of the palace?

Shakespeare, one would have thought, would have given us the key to the

mystery in the very first scene. But this scene, which paints Falstaff

to the soul, tells us nothing of the Prince; but rather blurs a figure

which everyone imagines he knows at least in outline. Prince Henry's

first speech is excellent as description; Falstaff asks him the time

of day; he replies:

“Thou art so fat-witted, with drinking of old sack, and

unbuttoning thee after supper, and sleeping upon benches

after noon, that thou hast forgotten to demand that truly

which thou wouldst truly know....”

This helps to depict Falstaff, but does not show us the Prince, for

good-humoured contempt of Falstaff is universal; it has nothing

individual and peculiar in it.

Then comes the speech in which the Prince talks of himself in Falstaff's

strain as one of “the moon's men” who “resolutely snatch a purse of gold

on Monday night,” and “most dissolutely spend it on Tuesday morning.” A

little later he plays with Falstaff by asking: “Where shall we take a

purse to-morrow, Jack?” It looks as if the Prince were ripe for worse

than mischief. But when Falstaff wants to know if he will make one of

the band to rob on Gadshill, he cries out, as if indignant and

surprised:

_P. Hen_. Who, I rob? la thief? Not I, by my faith.

_Fal_. There's neither honesty, manhood, nor good fellowship

in thee, nor thou earnest not of the blood royal,

if thou darest not stand for ten shillings.

_P. Hen_. Well then, once in my days I'll be a madcap.

_Fal_. Why, that's well said.

_P. Hen_. Well, come what will, I'll tarry at home.

He is only persuaded at length by Poins's proposal to rob the robbers.

It may be said that these changes of the Prince are natural in the

situation: but they are too sudden and unmotived; they are like the

nodding of the mandarin's head--they have no meaning; and surely, after

the Prince talks of himself as one of “the moon's men,” it would be more

natural of him, when the direct proposal to rob is made, not to show

indignant surprise, which seems forced or feigned; but to talk as if

repenting a previous folly. The scene, in so far as the Prince is

concerned, is badly conducted. When he yields to Poins and agrees to rob

Falstaff, his words are: “Yea, but I doubt they will be too hard for

us,”--a phrase which hardly shows wild spirits or high courage, or even

the faculty of judging men, and the soliloquy which ends the scene

lamely enough is not the Prince's, but Shakespeare's, and unfortunately

Shakespeare the poet, and not Shakespeare the dramatist:

“_P. Hen_. I know you all and will awhile uphold

The unyoked humour of your idleness.

Yet herein will I imitate the sun,

Who doth permit the base contagious clouds

To smother up his beauty from the world,

That, when he please again to be himself,

Being wanted, he may be more wondered at,

By breaking through the foul and ugly mists

Of vapours, that did seem to strangle him. ...”

If we could accept this stuff we should take Prince Henry for the prince

of prigs; but it is impossible to accept it, and so we shrug our

shoulders with the regret that the madcap Prince of history is not

illuminated for us by Shakespeare's genius. In this “First Part of Henry

IV.,” when the Prince is not calling names with Falstaff, or playing

prig, he either shows us a quality of Harry Percy or of Shakespeare

himself. Everyone remembers the scene when Falstaff, carrying Percy's

corpse, meets the Princes, and tells them he has killed Percy:

_P. John_. This is the strangest tale that e'er I heard.

_P. Hen_. This is the strangest fellow, brother John.--

Come, bring your luggage nobly on your back:

For my part, if a lie may do thee grace,

I'll gild it with the happiest terms I have.”

Both in manner and in matter these last two lines are pure Shakespeare,

and Shakespeare speaks to us, too, when Prince Henry gives up Douglas to

his pleasure “ransomless and free.” But not only does the poet lend the

soldier his own sentiments and lilt of phrase, he also presents him to

us as a shadowy replica of Hotspur, even during Hotspur's lifetime. We

have already noticed Hotspur's admirable answer when Glendower brags

that he can call spirits from the vasty deep:

“_Hot_. Why, so can I, or so can any man;

But will they come, when you do call for them?”

The same love of truth is given to Prince Henry in the previous act:

“_Fal_. Owen, Owen,--the same;--and his son-in-law,

Mortimer; and old Northumberland; and that sprightly

Scot of Scots, Douglas, that runs o' horseback up a hill

perpendicular,--

_P. Hen_. He that rides at high speed, and with his

pistol kills a sparrow flying.

_Fal_. You have hit it.

_P. Hen_. So did he never the sparrow.”

But this frank contempt of lying is not the only or the chief

characteristic possessed by Hotspur and Harry Percy in common. Hotspur

disdains the Prince:

“_Hot_. Where is his son,

The nimble-footed mad-cap Prince of Wales,

And his comrádes that daffed the world aside

And bid it pass?”

and the Prince mimics and makes fun of Hotspur:

“_P. Hen._ He that kills me some six or seven dozen

of Scots at a breakfast, washes his hands and says to his

wife, 'Fie upon this quiet life! I want work.'”

Then Hotspur brags of what he will do when he meets his rival:

“_Hot._ Once ere night

I will embrace him with a soldier's arm,

That he shall shrink under my courtesy.”

And in precisely the same strain Prince Henry talks to his father:

“_P. Hen._ The time will come

That I shall make this northern youth exchange

His glorious deeds for my indignities.”

It is true that Prince Henry on more than one occasion praises Hotspur,

while Hotspur is content to praise himself, but the differentiation is

too slight to be significant: such as it is, it is well seen when the

two heroes meet.

“_Hot._ My name is Harry Percy.

_P. Hen._ Why, then I see

A very valiant rebel of that name.”

but Prince Henry immediately doffs this kingly mood to imitate Hotspur.

He goes on:

“I am the Prince of Wales, and think not, Percy,

To share with me in glory any more;

Two stars keep not their motion in one sphere,

Nor can our England brook a double reign

Of Harry Percy and the Prince of Wales ...”

And so the bombast rolls, and one brags against the other like systole

and diastole which balance each other in the same heart. But the worst

of the matter is, that Prince Henry and Hotspur, as we have already

noticed, have both the same soul and the same inspiring motive in love

of honour. They both avow this again and again, though Hotspur finds the

finer expression for it when he cries that he will “pluck bright honour

from the pale-faced moon.”

To the student of the play it really looks as if Shakespeare could not

imagine any other incentive to noble or heroic deeds but this love of

glory: for nearly all the other serious characters in the play sing of

honour in the same key. King Henry IV. envies Northumberland

“A son who is the theme of honour's tongue,”

and declares that Percy hath got “never-dying honour against renownéd

Douglas.” The Douglas, too, can find no other word with which to praise

Hotspur--“thou art the king of honour”: even Vernon, a mere secondary

character, has the same mainspring: he says to Douglas:

“If well-respected honour bid me on,

I hold as little counsel with weak fear

As you or any Scot that this day lives.”

Falstaff himself declares that nothing “pricks him on but honour,” and

bragging Pistol admits that “honour is cudgelled” from his weary limbs.

The French, too, when they are beaten by Henry V. all bemoan their shame

and loss of honour, and have no word of sorrow for their ruined

homesteads and outraged women and children. The Dauphin cries:

“Reproach and everlasting shame

Sits mocking in our plumes.”

And Bourbon echoes him:

“Shame and eternal shame, nothing but shame.”

It is curious that Bourbon falls upon the same thought which animated

Hotspur. Just before the decisive battle Hotspur cries:

“O, gentlemen! the time of life is short;

To spend that shortness basely were too long.”

And when the battle turns against the French, Bourbon exclaims:

“The devil take order now! I'll to the throng:

Let life be short; else shame will be too long.”

As Jaques in “As You Like It” says of the soldier: they are “jealous in

honour” and all seek “the bubble reputation, even in the cannon's

mouth.”

It is only in Shakespeare that men have no other motive for brave deeds

but love of honour, no other fear but that of shame with which to

overcome the dread of death. We shall see later that the desire of fame

was the inspiring motive of his own youth.

In the “Second Part of King Henry IV.” there is very little told us of

Prince Henry; he only appears in the second act, and in the fourth and

fifth; and in all he is the mouthpiece of Shakespeare and not the

roistering Prince: yet on his first appearance there are traces of

characterization, as when he declares that his “appetite is not

princely,” for he remembers “the poor creature, small beer,” whereas in

the last act he is merely the poetic prig. Let us give the best scene

first:

“_P. Hen_. Shall I tell thee one thing, Poins?

- - - - - - - - - -

_P. Hen_. Marry, I tell thee,--it is not meet that I should

be sad, now my father is sick: albeit I could tell to thee--as

to one it pleases me, for fault of a better, to call my

friend--I could be sad, and sad, indeed, too.

_Poins_. Very hardly upon such a subject.

_P. Hen._ By this hand, thou think'st me as far in the

devil's book as thou and Falstaff for obduracy and persistency:

let the end try the man. But I tell thee, my

heart bleeds inwardly that my father is so sick; and keeping

such vile company as thou art hath in reason taken

from me all ostentation of sorrow.

_Poins_. The reason?

_P. Hen_. What would'st thou think of me if I should

weep?

_Poins_. I would think thee a most princely hypocrite.

_P. Hen_. It would be every man's thought; and thou

art a blessed fellow to think as every man thinks; never

a man's thought in the world keeps the roadway better

than thine: every man would think me an hypocrite indeed.

And what accites your most worshipful thought to

think so?

_Poins_. Why, because you have been so lewd, and so

much engraffed to Falstaff.”

By far the best thing in this page--the contempt for every man's thought

as certain to be mistaken--is, I need hardly say, pure Shakespeare.

Exactly the same reflection finds a place in “Hamlet”; the

student-thinker tells us of a play which in his opinion, and in the

opinion of the best judges, was excellent, but which was only acted

once, for it “pleased not the million; 'twas caviare to the general.”

Very early in life Shakespeare made the discovery, which all men of

brains make sooner or later, that the thoughts of the million are

worthless, and the judgment and taste of the million are execrable.

There is nothing worthy to be called character-drawing in this scene;

but there's just a hint of it in the last remark of Poins. According to

his favourite companion the Prince was very “lewd,” and yet Shakespeare

never shows us his lewdness in action; does not “moralize” it as Jaques

or Hamlet would have been tempted to do. It is just mentioned and passed

over lightly. It is curious, too, that Shakespeare's _alter ego_,

Jaques, was also accused of lewdness by the exiled Duke; Vincentio, too,

another incarnation of Shakespeare, was charged with lechery by Lucio;

but in none of these cases does Shakespeare dwell on the failing.

Shakespeare seems to have thought reticence the better part in regard to

certain sins of the flesh. But it must be remarked that it is only when

his heroes come into question that he practises this restraint: he is

content to tell us casually that Prince Henry was a sensualist; but he

shows us Falstaff and Doll Tearsheet engaged at lips' length. To put it

briefly, Shakespeare attributes lewdness to his impersonations, but will

not emphasize the fault by instances. Nor will Shakespeare allow his

“madcap Prince” even to play “drawer” with hearty goodwill. While

consenting to spy on Falstaff in the tavern, the Prince tells Poins that

“from a Prince to a prentice” is “a low transformation,” and scarcely

has the fun commenced when he is called to the wars and takes his leave

in these terms:

“_P. Hen._ By Heaven, Poins, I feel me much to blame,

So idly to profane the precious time

When tempest of commotion, like the south

Borne with black vapour, doth begin to melt

And drop upon our bare, unarmed heads.”

The first two lines are priggish, and the last three mere poetic

balderdash. But it is in the fourth act, when Prince Henry is watching

by the bedside of his dying father, that Shakespeare speaks through him

without disguise:

“Why doth the crown lie there upon his pillow

Being so troublesome a bedfellow?

O polished perturbation! golden care!

That keep'st the ports of slumber open wide

To many a watchful night!--Sleep with it now,

Yet not so sound and half so deeply sweet

As he whose brow with homely biggin bound

Snores out the watch of night.”

In the third act we have King Henry talking in precisely the same way:

“O sleep, O gentle sleep,

Nature's soft nurse, how have I frighted thee?...

- - - - - - - - - -

Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast

Seal up the ship-boy's eyes, and rock his brains

In cradle of the rude imperious surge.”...

The truth is that in both these passages, as in a hundred similar ones,

we find Shakespeare himself praising sleep as only those tormented by

insomnia can praise it.

When his father reproaches him with “hunger for his empty chair,” this

is how Prince Henry answers:

“O pardon me, my liege, but for my tears,

The moist impediments unto my speech,

I had forestalled this dear and deep rebuke.

Ere you with grief had spoke and I had heard

The course of it so far.”...

It might be Alfred Austin writing to Lord Salisbury--“the moist

impediments,” forsooth--and the daredevil young soldier goes on like

this for forty lines.

The only memorable thing in the fifth act is the new king's contemptuous

dismissal of Falstaff: I think it appalling at least in matter:

“I know thee not, old man: fall to thy prayers;

How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!

I have long dreamed of such a kind of man,

So surfeit-swelled, so old and so profane;

But being awake I do despise my dream.

- - - - - - - - - -

Reply not to me with a fool-born jest,

Presume not that I am the thing I was;

- - - - - - - - - -

Till then, I banish thee on pain of death,

As I have done the rest of my misleaders,

Not to come near our person by ten mile.”

In the old play, “The Famous Victories,” the sentence of banishment is

pronounced; but this bitter contempt for the surfeit-swelled, profane

old man is Shakespeare's. It is true that he mitigates the severity of

the sentence in characteristic generous fashion: the King says:

“For competence of life I will allow you

That lack of means enforce you not to evil:

And as we hear you do reform yourselves,

We will, according to your strength and qualities,

Give you advancement.”

There is no mention in the old play of this “competence of life.” But in

spite of this generous forethought the sentence is painfully severe, and

Shakespeare meant every word of it, for immediately afterwards the Chief

Justice orders Falstaff and his company to the Fleet prison; and in

“King Henry V.” we are told that the King's condemnation broke

Falstaff's heart and made the old jester's banishment eternal. To find

Shakespeare more severe in judgement than the majority of spectators and

readers is so astonishing, so singular a fact, that it cries for

explanation. I think there can be no doubt that the tradition which

tells us that Shakespeare in his youth played pranks in low company

finds further corroboration here. He seems to have resented his own

ignominy and the contemptuous estimate put upon him by others somewhat

extravagantly.

“Presume not that I am the thing I was;”

--is a sentiment put again and again in Prince Henry's mouth; he is

perpetually assuring us of the change in himself, and the great results

which must ensue from it. It is this distaste for his own loose past and

“his misleaders,” which makes Shakespeare so singularly severe towards

Falstaff. As we have seen, he was the reverse of severe with Angelo in

“Measure for Measure,” though in that case there was better ground for

harshness. “Measure for Measure,” it is true, was written six or seven

years later than “Henry IV.,” and the tragedy of Shakespeare's life

separates the two plays. Shakespeare's ethical judgement was more

inclined to severity in youth and early manhood than it was later when

his own sufferings had deepened his sympathies, and he had been made

“pregnant to good pity,” to use his own words, “by the art of knowing

and feeling sorrows.” But he would never have treated old Jack Falstaff

as harshly as he did had he not regretted the results, at least, of his

own youthful errors. It looks as if Shakespeare, like other weak men,

were filled with a desire to throw the blame on his “misleaders.” He

certainly exulted in their punishment.

It is difficult for me to write at length about the character of the

King in “Henry V.,” and fortunately it is not necessary. I have already

pointed out the faults in the painting of Prince Henry with such

fullness that I may be absolved from again dwelling on similar weakness

where it is even more obvious than it was in the two parts of “Henry

IV.” But something I must say, for the critics in both Germany and

England are agreed that “'Henry V.' must certainly be regarded as

Shakespeare's ideal of manhood in the sphere of practical achievement.”

Without an exception they have all buttered this drama with extravagant

praise as one of Shakespeare's masterpieces, though in reality it is one

of the worst pieces of work he ever did, almost as bad as “Titus

Andronicus” or “Timon” or “The Taming of the Shrew.” Unfortunately for

the would-be judges, Coleridge did not guide their opinions of “Henry

V.”; he hardly mentioned the play, and so they all write the absurdest

nonsense about it, praising because praise of Shakespeare has come to be

the fashion, and also no doubt because his bad work is more on the level

of their intelligence than his good work.

It can hardly be denied that Shakespeare identified himself as far as he

could with Henry V. Before the King appears he is praised extravagantly,

as Posthumus was praised, but the eulogy befits the poet better than the

soldier. The Archbishop of Canterbury says:

... “When he speaks,

The air, a charter'd libertine, is still,

And the mute wonder lurketh in men's ears

To steal his sweet and honey'd sentences.”

the Bishop of Ely goes even further in excuse:

...“The prince obscured his contemplation

Under the veil of wildness.”

And this is how the soldier-king himself talks:

“My learned lord, we pray you to proceed

And justly and religiously unfold

Why the law Salique that they have in France

Or should, or should not bar us in our claim;

And God forbid, my dear and faithful lord,

That you should fashion, wrest, or bow your reading ...”

All this is plainly Shakespeare and Shakespeare at his very worst; and

there are hundreds of lines like these, jewelled here and there by an

unforgetable phrase, as when the Archbishop calls the bees: “The singing

masons building roofs of gold.” The reply made by the King when the

Dauphin sends him the tennis balls has been greatly praised for

manliness and modesty; it begins:

“We are glad the Dauphin is so pleasant with us;

His present and your pains we thank you for:

When we have match'd our rackets to these balls,

We will, in France, by God's grace, play a set

Shall strike his father's crown into the hazard.”

The first line is most excellent, but Shakespeare found it in the old

play, and the bragging which follows is hardly bettered by the pious

imprecation.

Nor does the scene with the conspirators seem to me any better. The

soldier-king would not have preached at them for sixty lines before

condemning them. Nor would he have sentenced them with this

extraordinary mixture of priggishness and pious pity:

“_K. Hen_. God quit you in his mercy. Hear your

sentence.

- - - - - - - - - -

Touching our person seek we no revenge;

But we our kingdom's safety must so tender,

Whose ruin you have sought, that to her laws

We do deliver you. Get you therefore hence,

Poor miserable wretches, to your death,

The task whereof, God of His mercy give

You patience to endure, and true repentance

Of all your dear offences!”

This “poor miserable wretches” would go better with a generous pardon,

and such forgiving would be more in Shakespeare's nature. Throughout

this play the necessity of speaking through the soldier-king embarrasses

the poet, and the infusion of the poet's sympathy and emotion makes the

puppet ridiculous. Henry's speech before Harfleur has been praised on

all hands; not by the professors and critics merely, but by those who

deserve attention. Carlyle finds deathless valour in the saying: “Ye,

good yeomen, whose limbs were made in England,” and not deathless valour

merely, but “noble patriotism” as well; “a true English heart breathes,

calm and strong through the whole business ... this man (Shakespeare)

too had a right stroke in him, had it come to that.” I find no valour in

it, deathless or otherwise; but the make-believe of valour, the

completest proof that valour was absent. Here are the words:

“_K. Hen_. Once more unto the breach, dear friends,

once more;

Or close the wall up with our English dead.

In peace there's nothing so becomes a man

As modest stillness and humility:

But when the blast of war blows in our ears,

Then imitate the action of the tiger;

Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,

Disguise fair nature with hard-favour'd rage;

Then lend the eye a terrible aspect,

Let it pry through the portage of the head

Like the brass cannon; let the brow o'erwhelm it

As fearfully as doth a galled rock

O'erhang and jutty his confounded base....”

And so on for another twenty lines. Now consider this stuff: first comes

the reflection, more suitable to the philosopher than the man of action,

“in peace there's nothing so becomes a man...”; then the soldier-king

wishes his men to “imitate” the tiger's looks, to “disguise fair

nature,” and “lend the eye a terrible aspect.” But the man who feels the

tiger's rage tries to control the aspect of it: he does not put on the

frown--that's Pistol's way. The whole thing is mere poetic description

of how an angry man looks and not of how a brave man feels, and that it

should have deceived Carlyle, surprises me. The truth is that as soon as

Shakespeare has to find, I will not say a magical expression for

courage, but even an adequate and worthy expression, he fails

absolutely. And is the patriotism in “Ye, good yeomen, whose limbs were

made in England” a “noble patriotism”? or is it the simplest, the

crudest, the least justifiable form of patriotism? There is a noble

patriotism founded on the high and generous things done by men of one's

own blood, just as there is the vain and empty self-glorification of

“limbs made in England,” as if English limbs were better than those made

in Timbuctoo.

In the third scene of the fourth act, just before the battle, Henry

talks at his best, or rather Shakespeare's best: and we catch the true

accent of courage. Westmoreland wishes

...“That we now had here

But one ten thousand of those men in England

That do no work to-day!”

but Henry lives on a higher plane:

“No, my fair cousin:

If we are marked to die, we are enow

To do our country loss; and if to live,

The fewer men the greater share of honour.”

But this high-couraged sentiment is taken almost word for word from

Holinshed. The rest of the speech shows us Shakespeare, as a splendid

rhetorician, glorifying glory; now and then the rhetoric is sublimated

into poetry:

“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers,

For he to-day that sheds his blood with me

Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,

This day shall gentle his condition.”

Shakespeare's chief ambition about this time was to get a coat of arms

for his father, and so gentle his condition. In all the play not one

word of praise for the common archers, who won the battle; no mention

save of the gentle.

Again and again in Henry V. the dissonance of character between the poet

and his soldier-puppet jars upon the ears, and this dissonance is

generally characteristic. For example, in the third act Shakespeare,

through King Henry, expressly charges his soldiers that “there be

nothing compelled from the villages, nothing taken but paid for, none of

the French upbraided or abused in disdainful language; for when lenity

and cruelty play for a kingdom, the gentler gamester is the soonest

winner.” Wise words, not yet learned even by statesmen; drops of

wisdom's life-blood from the heart of gentle Shakespeare. But an act

later, when the battle is over, on the mere news that the French have

reinforced their scattered men, Henry V., with tears in his eyes for the

Duke of York's death, gives orders to kill the prisoners:

“Then every soldier kill his prisoners;

Give the word through.”

The puppet is not even human: mere wood!

In the fifth act King Henry takes on the voice and nature of buried

Hotspur. He woos Katherine exactly as Hotspur talked to his wife: he

cannot “mince” it in love, he tells her, in Hotspur's very words; but is

forthright plain; like Hotspur he despises verses and dancing; like

Hotspur he can brag, too; finds it as “easy” to conquer kingdoms as to

speak French; can “vault into his saddle with his armour on his back”;

he is no carpet-soldier; he never “looks in his glass for love of

anything he sees there,” and to make the likeness complete he disdains

those “fellows of infinite tongue, that can rhyme themselves into

ladies' favours ... a speaker is but a prater; a rhyme is but a ballad.”

But if Shakespeare had had any vital sympathy for soldiers and men of

action he would not have degraded Henry V. in this fashion, into a

feeble replica of the traditional Hotspur. In those narrow London

streets by the river he must have rubbed shoulders with great

adventurers; he knew Essex; had bowed to Raleigh at the Court; must have

heard of Drake: inclination was lacking, not models. He might even have

differentiated between Prince Henry and Hotspur without going outside

his history-books; but a most curious point is that he preferred to

smooth away their differences and accentuate the likeness. As a mere

matter of fact Hotspur was very much older than Prince Henry, for he

fought at Otterbourne in 1388, the year of the prince's birth; but

Shakespeare purposely and explicitly makes them both youths. The King,

speaking of Percy to Prince Henry, says:

“And being no more in debt to years than thou.”...

It would have been wiser, I cannot but think, and more dramatic for

Shakespeare to have left the hot-headed Percy as the older man who, in

spite of years, is too impatient-quick to look before he leaps, while

giving the youthful Prince the calm reflection and impersonal outlook

which necessarily belong to a great winner of kingdoms. The dramatist

could have further differentiated the rivals by making Percy greedy; he

should not only have quarrelled with his associates over the division of

the land, but insisted on obtaining the larger share, and even then have

grumbled as if aggrieved; the soldier aristocrat has always regarded

broad acres as his especial reward. On the other hand, Prince Henry

should have been open-handed and carelessly-generous, as the patron of

Falstaff was likely to be. Further, Hotspur might have been depicted as

inordinately proud of his name and birth; the provincial aristocrat

usually is, whereas Henry, the Prince, would surely have been too

certain of his own qualities to need adventitious aids to pride. Percy

might have been shown to us raging over imaginary slights; Worcester

says he was “governed by a spleen”; while the Prince should have been

given that high sense of honour and insatiate love of fame which were

the poles of chivalry. Finally, the dramatist might have painted

Hotspur, the soldier, as disdainful of women and the arts of music

and poetry, while gracing Prince Henry with a wider culture and sympathy.

If I draw attention to such obvious points it is only to show how

incredibly careless Shakespeare was in making the conqueror a poor copy

of the conquered. He was drawn to Hotspur a little by his quickness and

impatience; but he was utterly out of sympathy with the fighter, and

never took the trouble even to think of the qualities which a leader of

men must possess.

CHAPTER VI. SHAKESPEARE'S MEN OF ACTION (_concluded_): KING HENRY VI. AND RICHARD III.

I think it hardly necessary to extend this review of Shakespeare's

historical plays by subjecting the Three Parts of “King Henry VI.” and

“Richard III.” to a detailed and minute criticism. Yet if I passed them

over without mention it would probably be assumed that they made against

my theory, or at least that I had some more pertinent reason for not

considering them than their relative unimportance. In fact, however,

they help to buttress my argument, and so at the risk of being tedious I

shall deal with them, though as briefly as possible. Coleridge doubted

whether Shakespeare had had anything to do with the “First Part of Henry

VI.,” but his fellow-actors, Heminge and Condell, placed the Three Parts

of “King Henry VI.” in the first collected edition of Shakespeare's

plays, and our latest criticism finds good reasons to justify this

contemporary judgement. Mr. Swinburne writes: “The last battle of Talbot

seems to me as undeniably the master's work as the scene in the Temple

Gardens, or the courtship of Margaret by Suffolk”; and it would be easy

to prove that much of what the dying Mortimer says is just as certainly

Shakespeare's work as any of the passages referred to by Mr. Swinburne.

Like most of those who are destined to reach the heights, Shakespeare

seems to have grown slowly, and even at twenty-eight or thirty years of

age his grasp of character was so uncertain, his style so little formed,

so apt to waver from blank verse to rhyme, that it is difficult to

determine exactly what he did write. We may take it, I think, as certain

that he wrote more than we who have his mature work in mind are inclined

to ascribe to him.

The “Second Part of King Henry VI.” is a poetic revision of the old play

entitled “The First Part of the Contention betwixt the Two Famous Houses

of Yorke and Lancaster,” and so forth. It is now generally agreed that

Shakespeare's hand can be traced in the old drama, and with especial

certainty in the comic scenes wherein Cade and his followers play the

chief parts. Notwithstanding this, the revision was most thorough. Half

the lines in the “Second Part of Henry VI.” are new, and by far the

greater number of these are now ascribed to Shakespeare on good grounds.

But some of the changes are for the worse, and as my argument does not

stand in need of corroboration, I prefer to assume nothing, and shall

therefore confine myself to pointing out that whoever revised “The

Contention” did it, in the main, as we should have expected our youthful

Shakespeare to do it. For example, when Humphrey of Gloster is accused

of devising “strange torments for offenders,” he answers in the old

play:

“Why, 'tis well known that whilst I was Protector,

Pitie was all the fault that was in me,”

and the gentle reviser adds to this:

“For I should melt at an offender's tears,

And lowly words were ransom for their fault.”

Besides, the reviser adds a great deal to the part of the weak King with

the evident object of making his helplessness pathetic. He gives Henry,

too, his sweetest phrases, and when he makes him talk of bewailing

Gloster's case “with sad unhelpful tears” we catch the very cadence of

Shakespeare's voice. But he does not confine his emendations to

the speeches of one personage: the sorrows of the lovers interest him as

their affection interested him in the “First Part of Henry VI.,” and the

farewell words of Queen Margaret to Suffolk are especially

characteristic of our gentle poet:

“Oh, go not yet; even thus two friends condemned

Embrace and kiss and take ten thousand leaves,

Leather a hundred times to part than die.

Yet now farewell; and farewell life with thee.”

This reminds me almost irresistibly of Juliet's words when parting with

Romeo, and of Imogen's words when Posthumus leaves her. Throughout the

play Henry is the poet's favourite, and in the gentle King's lament for

Gloster's death we find a peculiarity of Shakespeare's art. It was a

part of the cunning of his exquisite sensibility to invent a new word

whenever he was deeply moved, the intensity of feeling clothing itself

aptly in a novel epithet or image. A hundred examples of this might be

given, such as “The multitudinous seas incarnadine”; and so we find here

“paly lips.” The passage is:

“Fain would I go to chafe his paly lips

With twenty thousand kisses and to drain

Upon his face an ocean of salt tears,

To tell my love unto his dumb deaf trunk

And with my finger feel his hand unfeeling.”

It must be noticed, too, that in this “Second Part” the reviser begins

to show himself as something more than the sweet lyric poet. He

transposes scenes in order to intensify the interest, and where enemies

meet, like Clifford and York, instead of making them rant in mere blind

hatred, he allows them to show a generous admiration of each other's

qualities; in sum, we find here the germs of that dramatic talent which

was so soon to bear such marvellous fruit. No better example of

Shakespeare's growth in dramatic power and humour could be found than

the way he revises the scenes with Cade. It is very probable, as I have

said, that the first sketch was his; when one of Cade's followers

declares that Cade's “breath stinks,” we are reminded that Coriolanus

spoke in the same terms of the Roman rabble. But though it is his own

work, Shakespeare evidently takes it up again with the keenest interest,

for he adds inimitable touches. For instance, in the first scene, where

the two rebels, George Bevis and John Holland, talk of Cade's rising and

his intention to set a “new nap upon the commonwealth,” George's remark:

“Oh, miserable age! virtue is not regarded in handicraftsmen”--

an addition, and may be compared with Falstaff's:

“there is no virtue extant.”

John answers:

“The nobility think scorn to go in leather aprons,”

which is in the first sketch.

But George's reply--

“Nay, more; the King's Council are no good workmen”--

is only to be found in the revised version. The heightened humour of

that “Oh, miserable age! virtue is not regarded in handicraftsmen,”

assures us that the reviser was Shakespeare.

What is true of the “Second Part” is true in the main of the “Third Part

of King Henry VI.” Shakespeare's revisions are chiefly the revisions of

a lyric poet, and he scatters his emendations about without much regard

for character. In the Third Part, as in the Second, however, he

transposes scenes, gives deeper life to the marionettes, and in various

ways quickens the dramatic interest. This Third Part resembles “King

John” in some respects and a similar inference can be drawn from it. As

in “King John” we have the sharply contrasted figures of the Bastard and

Arthur, so in this “Third Part” there are two contrasted characters,

Richard Duke of Gloster and King Henry VI., the one a wild beast whose

life is action, and who knows neither fear, love, pity, nor touch of any

scruple; the other, a saint-like King whose worst fault is gentle

weakness. In “The True Tragedie of Richard,” the old play on which this

“Third Part” was founded, the character of Richard is powerfully

sketched, even though the human outlines are sometimes confused by his

devilish malignity. Shakespeare takes this character from the old play,

and alters it but very slightly. Indeed, the most splendid piece of

character-revealing in his Richard is to be found in the old play:

“I had no father, I am like no father,

I have no brother, I am like no brother;

And this word _Love_b, which greybeards call divine,

Be resident in men like one another,

And not in me:--I am myself alone.”

The Satanic energy of this outburst proclaims its author, Marlowe.

[Footnote: Mr. Swinburne was the first, I believe, to attribute this

passage to Marlowe; he praises the verses, too, as they deserve; but as

I had written the above before reading his work, I let it stand.]

Shakespeare copies it word for word, only omitting with admirable art

the first line. Indeed, though he alters the speeches of Richard and

improves them, he does nothing more; he adds no new quality; his Richard

is the Richard of “The True Tragedie.” But King Henry may be regarded as

Shakespeare's creation. In the old play the outlines of Henry's

character are so feebly, faintly sketched that he is scarcely

recognizable, but with two or three touches Shakespeare makes the saint

a living man. This King is happier in prison than in his palace; this is

how he speaks to his keeper, the Lieutenant of the Tower:

“Nay, be thou sure, I'll well requite thy kindness,

For that it made my imprisonment a pleasure;

Ay, such a pleasure as encagèd birds

Conceive, when, after many moody thoughts,

At last by notes of household harmony

They quite forget their loss of liberty.”

Just as the bird runs a little before he springs from the earth and

takes flight, so Shakespeare often writes, as in this instance, an

awkward weak line or two before his song-wings move with freedom. But

the last four lines are peculiarly his; his the thought; his, too, the

sweetness of the words “encagèd birds” and “household harmony.”

Finally, Henry is not only shown to us as gentle and loving, but as a

man who prefers quiet and the country to a King's Court and state. Even

in eager, mounting youth this was Shakespeare's own choice: Prince

Arthur in “King John” longs to be a shepherd: and this crowned saint has

the same desire. From boyhood to old age Shakespeare preferred the “life

removed”:

“O God, methinks it were a happy life

To be no better than a homely swain;

To sit upon a hill, as I do now,

To carve out dials quaintly point by point,

Thereby to see the minutes how they run;

How many make the hour full complete;

How many hours bring about the day;

How many days will finish up the year;

How many years a mortal man may live.

- - - - - - - - - -

So minutes, hours, days, months, and years,

Passed over to the end they were created,

Would bring white hairs unto a quiet grave.”

All this it seems to me is as finely characteristic of the gentle

melancholy of Shakespeare's youth as Jaques' bitter words are of the

deeper melancholy of his manhood:

“And so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe,

And then from hour to hour we rot and rot

And thereby hangs a tale.”

The “Third Part of Henry VI.” leads one directly to “Richard III.” It

was Coleridge's opinion that Shakespeare “wrote hardly anything of this

play except the character of Richard. He found the piece a stock play

and re-wrote the parts which developed the hero's character; he

certainly did not write the scenes in which Lady Anne yielded to the

usurper's solicitations.” In this instance Coleridge's positive opinion

deserves to be weighed respectfully. At the time when “Richard III.” was

written Shakespeare was still rather a lyric than a dramatic poet, and

Coleridge was a good judge of the peculiarities of his lyric style. Of

course, Professor Dowden, too, is in doubt whether “Richard III.” should

be ascribed to Shakespeare. He says: “Its manner of conceiving and

presenting character has a certain resemblance, not elsewhere to be

found in Shakespeare's writings, to the ideal manner of Marlowe. As in

the plays of Marlowe, there is here one dominant figure distinguished by

a few strongly marked and inordinately developed qualities.”

This faulty reasoning only shows how dangerous it is for a professor to

copy his teacher slavishly: in “Coriolanus,” too, we have the “one

dominant figure,” and all the rest of it. The truth seems to be that in

the “Third Part of Henry VI.” Shakespeare had been working with Marlowe,

or, at least, revising Marlowe's work; in either case he was so steeped

in Marlowe's spirit that he took, as we have seen, the most splendid

piece of Richard's self-revealing directly from the older poet.

Moreover, the words of deepest characterization in Shakespeare's

“Richard III.,”

“Richard loves Richard--that is, I am I,”

are manifestly a weak echo of the tremendous

“I am myself alone”

of Marlowe's Richard. At least to this extent, then, Shakespeare used

Marlowe in depicting Richard's character. But this trait, important as

it was did not carry him far, and he was soon forced to draw on his own

experience of life. Already he seems to have noticed that one

characteristic of men of action is a blunt plainness of speech; their

courage is shown in their frankness, and, besides, words stand for

realities with them, and are, therefore, used with sincerity.

Shakespeare's Richard III. uses plain speech as a hypocritical mask, but

already Shakespeare is a dramatist and in his clever hands Richard's

plain speaking is so allied with his incisive intelligence that it

appears to be now a mask, now native shamelessness, and thus the

characterization wins in depth and mystery. Every now and then, too,

this Richard sees things which no Englishman has been capable of seeing,

except Shakespeare himself. The whole of Plato's “Gorgias” is comprised

in the two lines:

“Conscience is but a word that cowards use,

Devised at first to keep the strong in awe.”

The declaration of the second murderer that conscience “makes a man a

coward ... it beggars any man that keeps it; it is turned out of all

towns and cities for a dangerous thing; and every man that means to live

well endeavours to trust to himself and to live without it,” should be

regarded as the complement of what Falstaff says of honour; in both the

humour of Shakespeare's characteristic irony is not to be mistaken.

The whole play, I think, must be ascribed to Shakespeare; all the

memorable words in it are indubitably his, and I cannot believe that any

other hand drew for us that marvellous, masterful courtship of Anne

which Coleridge, naturally enough, was unwilling to appreciate. The

structure of the play, however, shows all the weakness of Marlowe's

method: the interest is concentrated on the protagonist; there is not

humour enough to relieve the gloomy intensity, and the scenes in which

Richard does not figure are unattractive and feeble.

One has only to think of the two characters--Richard II. and Richard

III.--and to recall their handling in order to get a deep impression of

Shakespeare's nature. He cannot present the vile Richard II. at all; he

has no interest in him; but as soon as he thinks of Richard's youth and

remembers that he was led astray by others, he begins to identify

himself with him, and at once Richard's weakness is made amiable and his

sufferings affecting. In measure as Shakespeare lets himself go and

paints himself more and more freely, his portraiture becomes

astonishing, till at length the imprisoned Richard gives himself up to

melancholy philosophic musing, without a tinge of bitterness or envy or

hate, and every one with eyes to see, is forced to recognize in him a

younger brother to Hamlet and Posthumus. “Richard III.” was produced in

a very different way. It was Marlowe's daemonic power and intensity that

first interested Shakespeare in this Richard; under the spell of

Marlowe's personality Shakespeare conceived the play, and especially the

scene between Richard and Anne; but the original impulse exhausted

itself quickly, and then Shakespeare fell back on his own experience and

made Richard keen of insight and hypocritically blunt of speech--a sort

of sketch of Iago. A little later Shakespeare either felt that the

action was unsuitable to the development of such a character, or more

probably he grew weary of the effort to depict a fiend; in any case, the

play becomes less and less interesting, and even the character of

Richard begins to waver. There is one astonishing instance of this

towards the end of the drama. On the eve of the decisive battle Richard

starts awake from his terrifying dreams, and now, if ever, one would

expect from him perfect sincerity of utterance. This is what we find:

“There is no creature loves me;

And if I die no soul shall pity me;

Nay, wherefore should they, since that I myself

Find in myself no pity to myself?”

The first two lines bespeak a loving, gentle nature, Shakespeare's

nature, the nature of a Henry VI. or an Arthur, a nature which Richard

III. would certainly have despised, and the last two lines are merely an

objective ethical judgement wholly out of place and very clumsily

expressed.

To sum up, then, for this is not the place to consider Shakespeare's

share in “Henry VIII.,” I find that in the English historical plays the

manly characters, Hotspur, Harry V., the great Bastard, and Richard

III., are all taken from tradition or from old plays, and Shakespeare

did nothing more than copy the traits which were given to him; on the

other hand, the weak, irresolute, gentle, melancholy characters are his

own, and he shows extraordinary resource in revealing the secret

workings of their souls. Even in early manhood, and when handling

histories and men of action, Shakespeare cannot conceal his want of

sympathy for the practical leaders of men; he neither understands them

deeply nor loves them; but in portraying the girlish Arthur and the

Hamlet-like Richard II., and in drawing forth the pathos of their

weakness, he is already without a rival or second in all literature.

I am anxious not to deform the truth by exaggeration; a caricature of

Shakespeare would offend me as a sacrilege, even though the caricature

were characteristic, and when I find him even in youth one-sided, a poet

and dreamer, I am minded to tell less than the truth rather than more.

He was extraordinarily sensitive, I say to myself, and lived in the

stress of great deeds; he treated Henry V., a man of action if ever

there was one, as an ideal, and lavished on him all his admiration, but

it will not do: I cannot shut my eyes to the fact; the effort is worse

than useless. He liked Henry V. because of his misled youth and his

subsequent rise to highest honour, and not because of his practical

genius. Where in his portrait gallery is the picture of a Drake, or even

of a Raleigh? The adventurer was the characteristic product of that

jostling time; but Shakespeare turned his head away; he was not

interested in him. In spite of himself, however, he became passionately

interested in the pitiful Richard II. and his untimely fate.

Notwithstanding the praise of the critics, his King Henry V. is a wooden

marionette; the intense life of the traditional madcap Prince has died

out of him; but Prince Arthur lives deathlessly, and we still hear his

childish treble telling Hubert of his love.

Those who disagree with me will have to account for the fact that, even

in the historical plays written in early manhood, all his portraits of

men of action are mere copies, while his genius shines in the portraits

of a gentle saint like Henry VI., of a weakling like Richard II., or of

a girlish youth like Arthur--all these favourite studies being alike in

pathetic helplessness and tender affection.

It is curious that no one of the commentators has noticed this

extraordinary one-sidedness of Shakespeare. In spite of his miraculous

faculty of expression, he never found wonderful phrases for the virile

virtues or virile vices. For courage, revenge, self-assertion, and

ambition we have finer words in English than any that Shakespeare

coined. In this field Chapman, Milton, Byron, Carlyle, and even Bunyan

are his masters.

Of course, as a man he had the instinct of courage, and an admiration of

courage; his intellect, too, gave him some understanding of its range.

Dr. Brandes declares that Shakespeare has only depicted physical

courage, the courage of the swordsman; but that is beside the truth: Dr.

Brandes has evidently forgotten the passage in “Antony and Cleopatra,”

when Caesar contemptuously refuses the duel with Antony and speaks of

his antagonist as an “old ruffian.” Enobarbus, too, sneers at Antony's

proposed duel:

“Yes, like enough, high-battled Caesar will

Unstate his happiness, and be staged to the show

Against a sworder.”

Unhelped by memory, Dr. Brandes might have guessed that Shakespeare

would exhaust the obvious at first glance. But the soul of courage to

Shakespeare is, as we have seen, a love of honour working on quick

generous blood--a feminine rather than a masculine view of the matter.

Carlyle has a deeper sense of this aboriginal virtue. With the fanatic's

trust in God his Luther will go to Worms “though it rain devils”; and

when in his own person Carlyle spoke of the small, honest minority

desperately resolved to maintain their ideas though opposed by a huge

hostile majority of fools and the insincere, he found one of the finest

expressions for courage in all our literature. The vast host shall be to

us, he cried, as “stubble is to fire.” It may be objected that this is

the voice of religious faith rather than of courage pure and simple, and

the objection is valid so far as it goes; but this genesis of courage is

peculiarly English, and the courage so formed is of the highest. Every

one remembers how Valiant-for-Truth fights in Bunyan's allegory: “I

fought till my sword did cleave to my hand; and when they were joined

together, as if a sword grew out of my arm, and when the blood ran

through my fingers, then I fought with most courage.” The mere

expression gives us an understanding of the desperate resolution of

Cromwell's Ironsides.

But if desperate courage is not in Shakespeare, neither are its

ancillary qualities--cruelty, hatred, ambition, revenge. Whenever he

talks on these themes, he talks from the teeth outwards, as one without

experience of their violent delights. His Gloucester rants about

ambition without an illuminating or even a convincing word. Hatred and

revenge Shakespeare only studied superficially, and cruelty he shudders

from like a woman.

It is astounding how ill-endowed Shakespeare was on the side of

manliness. His intellect was so fine, his power of expression so

magical, the men about him, his models, so brave--founders as they were

of the British empire and sea-tyranny--that he is able to use his

Hotspurs and Harrys to hide from the general the poverty of his

temperament. But the truth will out: Shakespeare was the greatest of

poets, a miraculous artist, too, when he liked; but he was not a hero,

and manliness was not his _forte_: he was by nature a neuropath and

a lover.

He was a master of passion and pity, and it astonishes one to notice how

willingly he passed always to that extreme of sympathy where nothing but

his exquisite choice of words and images saved him from falling into the

silly. For example, in “Titus Andronicus,” with its crude, unmotived

horrors, Titus calls Marcus a murderer, and when Marcus replies: “Alas,

my lord, I have but killed a fly,” Titus answers:

“But how, if that fly had a father and mother?

How would he hang his slender gilded wings,

And buzz lamenting doings in the air?

Poor harmless fly!

That with his pretty buzzing melody,

Came here to make us merry! and thou hast killed him.”

Even in his earliest plays in the noontide of lusty youth, when the heat

of the blood makes most men cruel, or at least heedless of others'

sorrows, Shakespeare was full of sympathy; his gentle soul wept with the

stricken deer and suffered through the killing of a fly. Just as Ophelia

turned “thought and affliction, passion, hell itself” to “favour and to

prettiness,” so Shakespeare's genius turned the afflictions and passions

of man to pathos and to pity.

CHAPTER VII. SHAKESPEARE AS LYRIC POET: “TWELFTH NIGHT”

Shakespeare began the work of life as a lyric poet. It was to be

expected therefore that when he took up playwriting he would use the

play from time to time as an opportunity for a lyric, and in fact this

was his constant habit. From the beginning to the end of his career he

was as much a lyric poet as a dramatist. His first comedies are feeble

and thin in character-drawing and the lyrical sweetness is everywhere

predominant. His apprenticeship period may be said to have closed with

his first tragedy, “Romeo and Juliet.” I am usually content to follow

Mr. Furnival's “Trial Table of the order of Shakspere's Plays,” in which

“Richard II.,” “Richard III.,” and “King John” are all placed later than

“Romeo and Juliet,” and yet included in the first period that stretches

from 1585 to 1595. But “Romeo and Juliet” seems to me to be far more

characteristic of the poet's genius than any of these histories; it is

not only a finer work of art than any of them, and therefore of higher

promise, but in its lyrical sweetness far more truly representative of

Shakespeare's youth than any of the early comedies or historical plays.

Whatever their form may be, nearly all Shakespeare's early works are

love-songs, “Venus and Adonis,” “Lucrece,” “Love's Labour's Lost,” “The

Two Gentlemen of Verona,” and he may be said to have ended his

apprenticeship with the imperishable tragedy of first love “Romeo and

Juliet.”

In the years from 1585 to 1595 Shakespeare brought the lyric element

into something like due subordination and managed to free himself almost

completely from his early habit of rhyming. Mr. Swinburne has written of

Shakespeare's use of rhymed verse with a fullness of knowledge and

sympathy that leaves little to be desired. He compares it aptly to the

use of the left hand instead of the right, and doubts cogently whether

Shakespeare ever attained such mastery of rhyme as Marlowe in “Hero and

Leander.” But I like to think that Shakespeare's singing quickly became

too sincere in its emotion and too complex in its harmonies to tolerate

the definite limits set by rhyme. In any case by 1595 Shakespeare had

learned to prefer blank verse to rhyme, at least for play-writing; he

thus made the first great step towards a superb knowledge of his

instrument.

The period of Shakespeare's maturity defines itself sharply; it

stretches from 1595 to 1608 and falls naturally into two parts; the

first part includes the trilogy “Henry IV.” and “Henry V.” and his

golden comedies; the second, from 1600 to 1608, is entirely filled with

his great tragedies. The characteristic of this period so far as regards

the instrument is that Shakespeare has come to understand the proper

function of prose. He sees first that it is the only language suited to

broad comedy, and goes on to use it in moments of sudden excitement, or

when dramatic truth to character seems to him all important. At his best

he uses blank verse when some emotion sings itself to him, and prose as

the ordinary language of life, the language of surprise, laughter,

strife, and of all the commoner feelings. During these twelve or

fourteen years the lyric note is not obtrusive; it is usually

subordinated to character and suited to action.

His third and last period begins with “Pericles” and ends with the

“Tempest”; it is characterized, as we shall see later, by bodily

weakness and by a certain contempt for the dramatic fiction. But the

knowledge of the instrument once acquired never left Shakespeare. It is

true that the lyric note becomes increasingly clear in his late

comedies; but prose too is used by him with the same mastery that he

showed in his maturity.

In the first period Shakespeare was often unable to give his puppets

individual life; in maturity he was interested in the puppets themselves

and used them with considerable artistry; in the third period he had

grown a little weary of them and in “The Tempest” showed himself

inclined, just as Goethe in later life was inclined, to turn his

characters into symbols or types.

The place of “Twelfth Night” is as clearly marked in Shakespeare's works

as “Romeo and Juliet” or “The Tempest.” It stands on the dividing line

between his light, joyous comedies and the great tragedies; it was all

done at the topmost height of happy hours, but there are hints in it

which we shall have to notice later, which show that when writing it

Shakespeare had already looked into the valley of disillusion which he

was about to tread. But “Twelfth Night” is written in the spirit of “As

You Like It” or “Much Ado,” only it is still more personal-ingenuous and

less dramatic than these; it is, indeed, a lyric of love and the joy of

living.

There is no intenser delight to a lover of letters than to find

Shakespeare singing, with happy unconcern, of the things he loved

best--not the Shakespeare of Hamlet or Macbeth, whose intellect speaks

in critical judgements of men and of life, and whose heart we are fain

to divine from slight indications; nor Shakespeare the dramatist, who

tried now and again to give life to puppets like Coriolanus and Iago,

with whom he had little sympathy; but Shakespeare the poet, Shakespeare

the lover, Shakespeare whom Ben Jonson called “the gentle,” Shakespeare

the sweet-hearted singer, as he lived and suffered and enjoyed. If I

were asked to complete the portrait given to us by Shakespeare of

himself in Hamlet-Macbeth with one single passage, I should certainly

choose the first words of the Duke in “Twelfth Night.” I must transcribe

the poem, though it will be in every reader's remembrance; for it

contains the completest, the most characteristic, confession of

Shakespeare's feelings ever given in a few lines:

“If music be the food of love, play on;

Give me excess of it, that surfeiting

The appetite may sicken, and so die.

That strain again;--it had a dying fall:

Oh, it came o'er my ear like the sweet south

That breathes upon a bank of violets,

Stealing and giving odour.--Enough! no more

'Tis not so sweet now as it was before.”

Every one will notice that Shakespeare as we know him in Romeo is here

depicted again with insistence on a few salient traits; here, too, we

have the poet of the Sonnets masquerading as a Duke and the protagonist

of yet another play. There is still less art used in characterizing this

Duke than there is in characterizing Macbeth; Shakespeare merely lets

himself go and sings his feelings in the most beautiful words. This is

his philosophy of music and of love:

“Give me excess of it, that surfeiting,

The appetite may sicken, and so die”;

and then:

“Enough, no more; 'Tis not so sweet now as it was before.”

--the quick revulsion of the delicate artist-voluptuary who wishes to

keep unblunted in memory the most exquisite pang of pleasure.

Speech after speech discovers the same happy freedom and absolute

abandonment to the “sense of beauty.” Curio proposes hunting the hart,

and at once the Duke breaks out:

“Why, so I do, the noblest that I have.

O, when mine eyes did see Olivia first,

Methought she purged the air of pestilence.

That instant was I turned into a hart,

And my desires, like fell and cruel hounds,

E'er since pursue me.”--

Valentine then comes to tell him that Olivia is still mourning for her

brother, and the Duke seizes the opportunity for another lyric:

“O, she that hath a heart of that fine frame

To pay this debt of love but to a brother,

How will she love, when the rich golden shaft

Hath killed the flock of all affections else

That live in her; when liver, brain, and heart,

These sovereign thrones, are all supplied and filled--

Her sweet perfections--with one self King!--

Away before me to sweet beds of flowers,

Love-thoughts lie rich when canopied with bowers.”

The last two lines show clearly enough that Shakespeare was not troubled

with any thought of reality as he wrote: he was transported by Fancy

into that enchanted country of romance where beds of flowers are couches

and bowers, canopies of love. But what a sensuality there is in him!

“When liver, brain, and heart,

These sovereign thrones, are all supplied and filled--

Her sweet perfections--with one self King!--”

Of course, too, this Duke is inconstant, and swings from persistent

pursuit of Olivia to love of Viola without any other reason than the

discovery of Viola's sex. In the same way Romeo turns from Rosaline to

Juliet at first sight. This trait has been praised by Coleridge and

others as showing singular knowledge of a young man's character, but I

should rather say that inconstancy was a characteristic of sensuality

and belonged to Shakespeare himself, for Orsino, like Romeo, has no

reason to change his love; and the curious part of the matter is that

Shakespeare does not seem to think that the quick change in Orsino

requires any explanation at all. Moreover, the love of Duke Orsino for

Olivia is merely the desire of her bodily beauty--the counterpart of the

sensual jealousy of Othello. Speaking from Shakespeare's very heart, the

Duke says:

“Tell her, my love, more noble than the world,

Prizes not quantity of dirty lands;

The parts that Fortune hath bestowed upon her,

Tell her, I hold as giddily as Fortune;

But 'tis that miracle and queen of gems

That nature pranks her in attracts my soul.”

So the body wins the soul according to this Orsino, who is, I repeat

again, Shakespeare in his most ingenuous and frankest mood; the contempt

of wealth--“dirty lands”--and the sensuality--“that miracle and queen of

gems”--are alike characteristic. A few more touches and the portrait of

this Duke will be complete; he says to the pretended Cesario when

sending him as ambassador to Olivia:

“Cesario, Thou knowest no less but all; I have unclasped

To thee the book even of my secret soul; Therefore, good youth,”--

and so forth.

It is a matter of course that this Duke should tell everything to his

friend; a matter of course, too, that he should love books and bookish

metaphors. Without being told, one knows that he delights in all

beautiful things--pictures with their faërie false presentment of forms

and life; the flesh-firm outline of marble, the warmth of ivory and the

sea-green patine of bronze--was not the poop of the vessel beaten gold,

the sails purple, the oars silver, and the very water amorous?

This Duke shows us Shakespeare's most intimate traits even when the

action does not suggest the self-revelation. When sending Viola to woo

Olivia for him he adds:

“Some four or five, attend him;

All if you will; for I myself am best

When least in company.”

Like Vincentio, that other mask of Shakespeare, this Duke too loves

solitude and “the life removed”; he is “best when least in company.”

If there is any one who still doubts the essential identity of Duke

Orsino and Shakespeare, let him consider the likeness in thought and

form between the Duke's lyric effusions and the Sonnets, and if that

does not convince him I might use a hitherto untried argument. When a

dramatist creates a man's character he is apt to make him, as the French

say, too much of a piece--too logical. But, in this instance, though

Shakespeare has given the Duke only a short part, he has made him

contradict himself with the charming ease that belongs peculiarly to

self-revealing. The Duke tells us:

“For such as I am all true lovers are,

--Unstaid and skittish in all motions else,

Save in the constant image of the creature

That is beloved.”

The next moment he repeats this:

“For, boy, however we do praise ourselves,

Our fancies are more giddy and unfirm,

More longing, wavering, sooner lost and won,

Than women's are.”

And the moment after he asserts:

“There is no woman's sides

Can bide the beating of so strong a passion

As love doth give my heart; no woman's heart

So big, to hold so much; they lack retention.

Alas! their love may be called appetite,

No motion of the liver, but the palate,

That suffers surfeit, cloyment, and revolt!”

Hamlet contradicts himself, too: at one moment he declares that his soul

is immortal, and at the next is full of despair. But Hamlet is so

elaborate a portrait, built up of so many minute touches, that

self-contradiction is a part, and a necessary part, of his many-sided

complexity. But the Duke in “Twelfth Night” reveals himself as it were

accidentally; we know little more of him than that he loves music and

love, books and flowers, and that he despises wealth and company;

accordingly, when he contradicts himself, we may suspect that

Shakespeare is letting himself speak freely without much care for the

coherence of characterization. And the result of this frankness is that

he has given a more intimate, a more confidential, sketch of himself in

Duke Orsino of “Twelfth Night” than he has given us in any play except

perhaps “Hamlet” and “Macbeth.”

I hardly need to prove that Shakespeare in his earliest plays, as in his

latest, in his Sonnets as in his darkest tragedy, loved flowers and

music. In almost every play he speaks of flowers with affection and

delight. One only needs to recall the song in “A Midsummer's Night's

Dream,” “I know a bank,” or Perdita's exquisite words:

“Daffodils,

That come before the swallow dares, and take

The winds of March with beauty; violets dim,

But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes

Or Cytherea's breath; pale primroses,

That die unmarried ere they can behold

Bright Phoebus in his strength, a malady

Most incident to maids; bold oxlips, and

The crown-imperial; lilies of all kinds,

The flower-de-luce being one”;

or Arviragus' praise of Imogen:

“Thou shalt not lack

The flower that's like thy face, pale primrose, nor

The azured harebell like thy veins; no, nor

The leaf of eglantine, whom not to slander

Outsweetened not thy breath.”

Shakespeare praises music so frequently and so enthusiastically that we

must regard the trait as characteristic of his deepest nature. Take this

play which we are handling now. Not only the Duke, but both the

heroines, Viola and Olivia, love music. Viola can sing “in many sorts of

music,” and Olivia admits that she would rather hear Viola solicit love

than “music from the spheres.” Romeo almost confounds music with love,

as does Duke Orsino:

“How silver-sweet sound lovers' tongues by night,

Like softest music to attending ears!”

And again:

“And let rich music's tongue

Unfold the imagin'd happiness that both

Receive in either by this dear encounter.”

It is a curious and characteristic fact that Shakespeare gives almost

the same words to Ferdinand in the “Tempest” that he gave ten years

earlier to the Duke in “Twelfth Night.” In both passages music goes with

passion to allay its madness:

“This music crept by me upon the waters,

Allaying both their fury and my passion

With its sweet air”

and Duke Orsino says:

“That old and antique song we heard last night,

Methought it did relieve my passion much.”

This confession is so peculiar; shows, too, so exquisitely fine a

sensibility, that its repetition makes me regard it as Shakespeare's.

The most splendid lyric on music is given to Lorenzo in the “Merchant of

Venice,” and it may be remarked in passing that Lorenzo is not a

character, but, like Claudio, a mere name and a mouthpiece of

Shakespeare's feeling. Shakespeare was almost as well content, it

appears, to play the lover as to play the Duke. I cannot help

transcribing the magical verses, though they must be familiar to every

lover of our English tongue:

“How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!

Here will we sit, and let the sounds of music

Creep in our ears; soft stillness and the night

Become the touches of sweet harmony.

Sit, Jessica: Look how the floor of heaven

Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold.

There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st

But in his motion like an angel sings,

Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubims.

Such harmony is in immortal souls;

But, whilst this muddy vesture of decay

Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.”

The first lines of this poem are conceived in the very spirit of the

poems of “Twelfth Night,” and in the last lines Shakespeare puts to use

that divine imagination which lifts all his best verse into the higher

air of life, and reaches its noblest in Prospero's solemn-sad lyric.

Shakespeare's love of music is so much a part of himself that he

condemns those who do not share it; this argument, too, is given to

Lorenzo:

“The man that hath no music to himself,

Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,

Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils;

The motions of his spirit are dull as night,

And his affections dark as Erebus:

Let no such man be trusted.”

That this view was not merely the expression of a passing mood is shown

by the fact that Shakespeare lends no music to his villains; but Timon

gives welcome to his friends with music, just as Hamlet welcomes the

players with music and Portia calls for music while her suitors make

their eventful choice. Titania and Oberon both seek the aid of music to

help them in their loves, and the war-worn and time-worn Henry IV. prays

for music to bring some rest to his “weary spirit”; in much the same

mood Prospero desires music when he breaks his wand and resigns his

magical powers.

Here, again, in “Twelfth Night” in full manhood Shakespeare shows

himself to us as Romeo, in love with flowers and music and passion.

True, this Orsino is a little less occupied with verbal quips, a little

more frankly sensual, too, than Romeo; but then Romeo would have been

more frankly sensual had he lived from twenty-five to thirty-five. As an

older man, too, Orsino has naturally more of Hamlet-Shakespeare's

peculiar traits than Romeo showed; the contempt of wealth and love of

solitude are qualities hardly indicated in Romeo, while in Orsino as in

the mature Shakespeare they are salient characteristics. To sum up:

Hamlet-Macbeth gives us Shakespeare's mind; but in Romeo-Orsino he has

discovered his heart and poetic temperament to us as ingenuously, though

not, perhaps, so completely, as he does in the Sonnets.

CHAPTER VIII. SHAKESPEARE'S HUMOUR: FALSTAFF

Shakespeare's portraits of himself are not to be mistaken; the changes

in him caused by age bring into clearer light the indestructible

individuality, and no difference of circumstance or position has any

effect upon this distinctive character: whether he is the lover, Romeo;

the murderer, Macbeth; the courtier, Hamlet; or the warrior, Posthumus;

he is always the same--a gentle yet impulsive nature, sensuous at once

and meditative; half poet, half philosopher, preferring nature and his

own reveries to action and the life of courts; a man physically

fastidious to disgust, as is a delicate woman, with dirt and smells and

common things; an idealist daintily sensitive to all courtesies,

chivalries, and distinctions. The portrait is not yet complete--far from

it, indeed; but already it is manifest that Shakespeare's nature was so

complex, so tremulously poised between world-wide poles of poetry and

philosophy, of what is individual and concrete on the one hand and what

is abstract and general on the other, that the task of revealing himself

was singularly difficult. It is not easy even to describe him as he

painted himself: it may be that, wishing to avoid a mere catalogue of

disparate qualities, I have brought into too great prominence the gentle

passionate side of Shakespeare's nature; though that would be difficult

and in any case no bad fault; for this is the side which has hitherto

been neglected or rather overlooked by the critics.

My view of Shakespeare can be made clearer by examples. I began by

taking Hamlet the philosopher as Shakespeare's most profound and complex

study, and went on to prove that Hamlet is the most complete portrait

which Shakespeare has given of himself, other portraits being as it were

sides of Hamlet or less successful _replicas_ of him; and finally I

tried to complete the Hamlet by uniting him with Duke Orsino, Orsino the

poet-lover being, so to speak, Shakespeare's easiest and most natural

portrait. In Hamlet, if one may dare to say so, Shakespeare has

discovered too much of himself: Hamlet is at one and the same time

philosopher and poet, critic and courtier, lover and cynic--the extremes

that Shakespeare's intellect could cover--and he fills every part so

easily that he might almost be a bookish Admirable Crichton, a type of

perfection rather than an individual man, were it not for his feminine

gentleness and forgivingness of nature, and particularly for the

brooding melancholy and disbelief which darkened Shakespeare's outlook

at the time. But though the melancholy scepticism was an abiding

characteristic of Shakespeare, to be found in his Richard II. as in his

Prospero, it did not overshadow all his being as it does Hamlet's. There

was a summer-time, too, in Shakespeare's life, and in his nature a

capacity for sunny gaiety and a delight in life and love which came to

full expression in the golden comedies, “Much Ado,” “As You Like It” and

“Twelfth Night.” The complement to Hamlet the sad philosopher-sceptic is

the sensuous happy poet-lover Orsino, and when we take these seeming

antitheses and unite them we have a good portrait of Shakespeare. But

these two, Hamlet and Orsino, are in reality one; every quality of

Orsino is to be found or divined in Hamlet, and therefore the easiest

and surest way to get at Shakespeare is to take Hamlet and deepen those

peculiarities in him which we find in Orsino.

Some critics are sure to say that I have now given a portrait of

Coleridge rather than a portrait of Shakespeare. This is not altogether

the fact, though I for one see no shame in acknowledging the likeness.

Coleridge had a “smack of Hamlet” in him, as he himself saw; indeed, in

his rich endowment as poet and philosopher, and in his gentleness and

sweetness of disposition, he was more like Shakespeare than any other

Englishman whom I can think of; but in Coleridge the poet soon

disappeared, and a little later the philosopher in him faded into the

visionary and sophist; he became an upholder of the English Church and

found reasons in the immutable constitution of the universe for aprons

and shovel-hats. Shakespeare, on the other hand, though similarly

endowed, was far more richly endowed: he had stronger passions and

greater depth of feeling; the sensuousness of Keats was in him; and this

richness of nature not only made him a greater lyric poet than Coleridge

and a far saner thinker, but carried him in spite of a constitutional

dislike of resolve and action to his astounding achievement.

But even when we thus compare Shakespeare with Coleridge, as we compare

trees of the same species, showing that as the roots of the one go

deeper and take a firmer hold of earth, so in exact measure the crest

rises into higher air, still there is something lacking to our

comparison. Even when we hold Hamlet-Orsino before us as the best

likeness of the master-poet, our impression of him is still incomplete.

There remains a host of creations from Launce to Autolycus, and from

Dame Quickly to Maria, which proves that Shakespeare was something more

than the gentle lover-thinker-poet whom we have shown. It is

Shakespeare's humour that differentiates him not only from Coleridge and

Keats, but also from the world-poets, Goethe, Dante, and Homer. It is

this unique endowment that brings him into vital touch with reality and

common life, and hinders us from feeling his all-pervading ideality as

disproportioned or one-sided. Strip him of his humour and he would have

been seen long ago in his true proportions. His sympathies are not more

broad and generous than Balzac's; his nature is too delicate, too

sensitive, too sensuous; but his humour blinds us to the truth. Of

course his comic characters, like his captains and men of action, are

due originally to his faculty of observation; but while his observation

of the fighting men is always superficial and at times indifferent, his

humorous observation is so intensely interested and sympathetic that its

creations are only inferior in artistic value to his portraits of the

poet-philosopher-lover.

The intellect in him had little or nothing to go upon in the case of the

man of action; he never loved the Captain or watched him at work; it is

his mind and second-hand knowledge that made Henry V. and Richard III.;

and how slight and shallow are these portraits in comparison with the

portrait of a Parolles or a Sir Toby Belch, or the ever-famous Nurse,

where the same intellect has played about the humorous trait and

heightened the effect of loving observation. The critics who have

ignorantly praised his Hotspur and Bastard as if he had been a man of

deeds as well as a man of words have only obscured the truth that

Shakespeare the poet-philosopher, the lover _quand même_, only

reached a sane balance of nature through his overflowing humour. He

whose intellect and sensibilities inspired him with nothing but contempt

and loathing for the mass of mankind, the aristocrat who in a dozen

plays sneers at the greasy caps and foul breaths of the multitude, fell

in love with Dogberry, and Bottom, Quickly and Tearsheet, clod and

clown, pimp and prostitute, for the laughter they afforded. His humour

is rarely sardonic; it is almost purged of contempt; a product not of

hate but of love; full of sympathy; summer-lightning humour, harmless

and beautiful.

Sometimes the sympathy fails and the laughter grows grim, and these

lapses are characteristic. He hates false friends and timeservers, the

whole tribe of the ungrateful, the lords of Timon's acquaintance and his

artists; he loathes Shylock, whose god is greed and who battens on

others' misfortunes; he laughs at the self-righteous Malvolio and not

with him, and takes pleasure in unmasking the pretended ascetic and

Puritan Angelo; but for the frailties of the flesh he has an ever-ready

forgiveness. Like the greatest of ethical teachers, he can take the

publican and the sinner to his heart, but not the hypocrite or the

Pharisee or the money-lender.

It does not come within the scope of this essay to attempt a detailed

criticism of Shakespeare's comic characters; it will be enough for my

purpose to show that even in his masterpiece of humour, the incomparable

Falstaff, he betrays himself more than once: more than once we shall

find Shakespeare, the poet, or Shakespeare, the thinker, speaking

through Falstaff's mouth. Yet to criticize Falstaff is difficult, and if

easy, it would still be an offence to those capable of gratitude. I

would as soon find fault with Ariel's most exquisite lyric, or the

impeccable loveliness of the “Dove Sono,” as weigh the rich words of the

Lord of Comedy in small balances of reason. But such considerations must

not divert me from my purpose; I have undertaken to discover the very

soul of Shakespeare, and I must, therefore, trace him in Falstaff as in

Hamlet.

Falstaff enters and asks the Prince the time. The Prince answers that

unless “hours were cups of sack and so forth, he can't understand why

Falstaff should care about anything so superfluous as time.” Falstaff

replies: “Indeed you come near me now, Hal; for we that take purses go

by the moon and the seven stars and not by Phoebus, he, 'that wandering

knight so fair.'” Here we have a sort of lyrical strain in Falstaff and

then a tag of poetry which gives food for thought; but his next speech

is unmistakable:

“Let us be Diana's foresters, gentlemen of the shade,

minions of the moon; and let men say we be men of

good government, being governed, as the sea is, by our

noble and chaste mistress, the moon, under whose

countenance we--steal.”

This is Shakespeare speaking, and Shakespeare alone: the phrases sing to

us in the unmistakable music of the master-poet, though the fall at the

last to “--steal,” seems to be an attempt to get into the character of

Falstaff. It is, of course, difficult to make the first words of a

person sharply characteristic; a writer is apt to work himself into a

new character gradually; it is only the sensitive self-consciousness of

our time that demands an absolute fidelity in characterization from the

first word to the last. Yet this scene is so excellent and natural, that

the uncertainty in the painting of Falstaff strikes me as peculiar. But

this first speech is not the only speech of Falstaff in which

Shakespeare betrays himself; again and again we catch the very accent of

the poet. It is not Falstaff but Shakespeare who says that “the poor

abuses of the time want countenance”; and later in the play, when the

character of Falstaff is fully developed, it is Shakespeare, the

thinker, who calls Falstaff's ragged regiment “the cankers of a calm

world and a long peace.” In just the same way Hamlet speaks of the

expedition of Fortinbras:

“This is the imposthume of much wealth and peace,

That inward breaks.”

But though the belief that Shakespeare sometimes falls out of the

character and slips phrases of his own into Falstaff's mouth is

well-founded, it should nevertheless be put aside as a heresy, for the

true faith is that the white-bearded old footpad who cheered on his

fellow-ruffians with

“Strike.... Bacon-fed knaves! they hate us youth:

down with them! fleece them!”

and again:

“On, bacons, on! What, ye knaves! young men

must live!”

is the most splendid piece of humorous portraiture in the world's

fiction.

Who but Falstaff would have found his self-justification in his

youth?--_splendide mendax_! and yet the excuse is as true to his

sack-heated blood when he uses it on Gadshill as it was true also to

fact when he first used it forty years before. And who but Falstaff

would have had the words of repentance always on his lips and never in

his heart? I ascribe these illuminating flashes to Falstaff, and not to

Shakespeare, for no imagination in the world has yet accomplished such a

miracle; as a miracle of representment Falstaff is astonishing enough,

as a miracle of creation he is simply unthinkable. I would almost as

soon believe that Falstaff made Shakespeare as that Shakespeare made

Falstaff without a living model. All hail to thee, inimitable,

incomparable Jack! Never before or since has poet been blessed with such

a teacher, as rich and laughterful, as mendacious and corrupting as life

itself.

I must not be taken to mean that the living original of Falstaff was as

richly humorous, as inexhaustibly diverting as the dramatic counterfeit

who is now a citizen and chief personage in that world of literature

which outlasts all the fleeting shows of the so-called real world. It

seems to me to be possible for a good reader to notice not only

Shakespeare's lapses and faults in the drawing of this character, but

also to make a very fair guess at his heightening touches, and so arrive

at last at the humorous old lewdster who furnished the living model for

the inimitable portrait. The first scene in which Falstaff appears

talking with Prince Henry will supply examples to illustrate my meaning.

Falstaff's very first speech after he asks Hal the time of day gives us

the key; he ends it with:

“And I pr'ythee, sweet wag, when thou art king,--as,

God save thy grace--majesty, I should say, for grace

thou wilt have none,--”

Here he is interrupted and breaks off, but a minute or two later he

comes back again to his argument, and curiously enough uses exactly the

same words:

“But, I pr'ythee, sweet wag, shall there be gallows

standing in England when thou art king? and resolution

thus fobbed as it is with the rusty curb of old father

Antick, the law?”

Now, this question and the hope it expresses that justice would be put

to shame in England on Prince Henry's accession to the throne is taken

from a speech of the Prince in the old play, “The Famous Victories of

Henry the Fifth.” Shakespeare would have done better to leave it out,

for Falstaff has far too good brains to imagine that all thieves could

ever have his licence and far too much conceit ever to desire so unholy

a consummation. And Shakespeare must have felt that the borrowed words

were too shallow-common, for he immediately falls back on his own brains

for the next phrase and gives us of his hoarded best. The second part of

the question, “resolution thus fobbed,” and so forth, is only another

statement of the famous couplet in “Richard III.”:

“Conscience is but a word that cowards use,

Devised at first to keep the strong in awe.”

These faults show that Shakespeare is at first unsure of his personage;

he fumbles a little; yet the vivacity, the roaring life, is certainly a

quality of the original Falstaff, for it attends him as constantly as

his shadow; the pun, too, is his, and the phrase “sweet wag” is probably

taken from his mouth, for he repeats it again, “sweet wag,” and again

“mad wag.” The shamelessness, too, and the lechery are marks of him, and

the love of witty word-warfare, and, above all, the pretended

repentance:

“O, thou hast damnable iteration, and art, indeed,

able to corrupt a saint. Thou hast done much harm

upon me, Hal,--God forgive thee for it. Before I knew

thee, Hal, I knew nothing; and now am I, if a man

should speak truly, little better than one of the wicked.

I must give over this life, and I will give it over; by the

Lord, an I do not, I am a villain; I'll be damned for

never a king's son in Christendom.”

In this first scene between Falstaff and Prince Henry, Shakespeare is

feeling his way, so to speak, blindfold to Falstaff, with gropings of

memory and dashes of poetry that lead him past the mark. In this first

scene, as we noticed, he puts fine lyric phrases in Falstaff's mouth;

but he never repeats the experiment; Falstaff and high poetry are

anti-podes--all of which merely proves that at first Shakespeare had not

got into the skin of his personage. But the real Falstaff had probably

tags of verse in memory and lilts of song, for Shakespeare repeats this

trait. Here we reach the test: Whenever a feature is accentuated by

repetition, we may guess that it belongs to the living model. There was

assuredly a strong dash of Puritanism in the real Falstaff, for when

Shakespeare comes to render this, he multiplies the brush-strokes with

perfect confidence; Falstaff is perpetually repenting.

After the first scene Shakespeare seems to have made up his mind to keep

closely to his model and only to permit himself heightening touches.

In order to come closer to the original, I will now take another passage

later in the play, when Shakespeare is drawing Falstaff with a sure

hand:

“_Fal_. A plague of all cowards, I say, and a vengeance

too! marry and amen!--Give me a cup of sack, boy.--

Ere I lead this life long, I'll sew netherstocks, and mend

them, and foot them, too. A plague of all cowards!--

give me a cup of sack, rogue.--Is there no virtue extant?

[_Drinks_.]”

Here is surely the true Falstaff; he will not lead this life long; this

is the soul of him; but the exquisite heightening phrase, “Is there no

virtue extant?” is pure Shakespeare, Shakespeare generalizing as we saw

him generalizing in just the same way in the scene where Cade is talked

of in the Second Part of “King Henry VI.” The form too is Shakespeare's.

Who does not remember the magic line in “The Two Noble Kinsmen “?

“She is all the beauty extant.”

And the next speech of Falstaff is just as illuminating:

“_Fal_. You rogue, here's lime in this sack, too; there is

nothing but roguery to be found in villainous man: yet a coward

is worse than a cup of sack with lime in it--a villainous

coward.--Go thy ways, old Jack; die when thou wilt, if manhood,

good manhood, be not forgot upon the face of the earth, then am I

a shotten herring. There live not three good men unhanged in

England, and one of them is fat and grows old: God help the

while! A bad world I say----”

At the beginning the concrete fact, then generalization, and then merely

a repetition of the traits marked in the first scene, with the addition

of bragging. Evidently Shakespeare has the model in memory as he writes.

I say “evidently,” for Falstaff is the only character in Shakespeare

that repeats the same words with damnable iteration, and in whom the

same traits are shown again and again and again. When Shakespeare is

painting himself in Richard II. he depicts irresolution again and again

as he depicts it also in Hamlet; but neither Hamlet nor Richard repeats

the same words, nor is any trait in either of them accentuated so

grossly as are the principal traits of Falstaff's character. The

features in Falstaff which are so harped upon, are to me the features of

the original model. Shakespeare did not know Falstaff quite as well as

he knew himself; so he has to confine himself to certain qualities which

he had observed, and stick, besides, to certain tags of speech, which

were probably favourites with the living man.

In another important particular, too, Falstaff is unlike any other comic

character in Shakespeare: he tells the truth about himself in a magical

way. The passage I allude to is the first speech made by Falstaff in the

Second Part of “Henry IV.”; it shows us Shakespeare getting into the

character again--after a certain lapse of time:

“_Fal_. Men of all sorts take a pride to gird at me; the

brain of this foolish-compounded clay, man, is not able

to invent anything that tends to laughter, more than I

invent or is invented on me: I am not only witty in myself,

but the cause that wit is in other men--”

Just as in the first act Shakespeare introducing Falstaff makes him talk

poetically, so here there is a certain exaltation and lyrical swing

which betrays the poet-creator. “Foolish-compounded,” too, shows

Shakespeare's hand, but the boast, I feel sure, was a boast often made

by the original, and thus brings Shakespeare into intimate union with

the character; for after this introduction Falstaff goes on to talk pure

Falstaff, unmixed with any slightest dash of poetry.

Who was the original of Falstaff? Is a guess possible? It seems to me it

must have been some lover of poetry--perhaps Chettle, the Chettle who

years before had published Greene's attack upon Shakespeare and who

afterwards made amends for it. In Dekker's tract, “A Knight's

Conjuring,” Chettle figures among the poets in Elysium: “In comes

Chettle sweating and blowing by reason of his fatnes; to welcome whom,

because hee was of olde acquaintance, all rose up, and fell presentlie

on their knees, to drinck a health to all the louers of Hellicon.” Here

we have a fat man greeted with laughter and mock reverence by the

poets--just such a model as Shakespeare needed, but the guess is mere

conjecture: we don't know enough about Chettle to be at all sure. Yet

Chettle was by way of being a poet, and Falstaff uses tags of

verse--still, as I say, it is all pure guesswork. The only reason I put

his name forward is that some have talked of Ben Jonson as Falstaff's

original merely because he was fat. I cannot believe that gentle

Shakespeare would ever have treated Jonson with such contempt; but

Chettle seems to have been a butt by nature.

That Falstaff was taken from one model is to me certain. Shakespeare

very seldom tells us what his characters look like; whenever he gives us

a photograph, so to speak, of a person, it is always taken from life and

extraordinarily significant. We have several portraits of Falstaff: the

Prince gives a picture of the “old fat man,...” that trunk of humours

“... that old white-bearded Satan”; the Chief Justice gives us another

of his “moist eye, white beard, increasing belly and double chin.”

Falstaff himself has another: “a goodly portly man, i' faith and a

corpulent; of a cheerful look, a pleasing eye, and a most noble

carriage.” Such physical portraiture alone would convince me that there

was a living model for Falstaff. But there are more obvious arguments:

the other humorous characters of Shakespeare are infinitely inferior to

Falstaff, and the best of them are merely sides of Falstaff or poor

reflections of him. Autolycus and Parolles have many of his traits, but

they are not old, and taken together, they are only a faint

_replica_ of the immortal footpad.

Listening with my heart in my ears, I catch a living voice, a round, fat

voice with tags of “pr'ythee,” “wag,” and “marry,” and behind the

inimitable dramatic counterfeit I see a big man with a white head and

round belly who loved wine and women and jovial nights, a Triton among

the minnows of boon companions, whose shameless effrontery was backed by

cunning, whose wit though common was abundant and effective through long

practice--a sort of licensed tavern-king, whose mere entrance into a

room set the table in a roar. Shakespeare was attracted by the

many-sided racy ruffian, delighted perhaps most by his easy mastery of

life and men; he studied him with infinite zest, absorbed him wholly,

and afterwards reproduced him with such richness of sympathy, such magic

of enlarging invention that he has become, so to speak, the symbol of

laughter throughout the world, for men of all races the true Comic Muse.

In any case I may be allowed one last argument. The Falstaff of “The

Merry Wives of Windsor” is not the Falstaff of the two parts of “King

Henry IV.”; it is but a shadow of the great knight that we see, an echo

of him that we hear in the later comedy. Falstaff would never have

written the same letter to Mrs. Ford and Mrs. Page; there was too much

fancy in him, too much fertility, too much delight in his own mind- and

word-wealth ever to show himself so painfully stinted and barren. Nor is

it credible that Falstaff would ever have fallen three times running

into the same trap; Falstaff made traps; he did not fall into them. We

know, too, that Falstaff would not fight “longer than he saw reason”;

his instinct of self-preservation was largely developed; but he could

face a sword; he drew on Pistol and chased him from the room; he was not

such a pitiful coward as to take Ford's cudgelling. Finally, the

Falstaff whom we all know could never have been befooled by the Welshman

and his child-fairies. And this objection Shakespeare himself felt, for

he meets it by making Falstaff explain how near he came to discovering

the fraud, and how wit is made “a Jack-a-Lent when 'tis upon ill

employment.” But the fact that some explanation is necessary is an

admission of the fault. Falstaff must indeed have laid his brains in the

sun before he could have been taken in by foppery so gross and palpable.

This is not the same man who at once recognized the Prince and Poins

through their disguise as drawers. Yet there are moments when the

Falstaff of “The Merry Wives” resumes his old nature. For example, when

he is accused by Pistol of sharing in the proceeds of the theft, he

answers with all the old shameless wit:

“Reason, you rogue, reason; think'st thou I'll endanger

my soul gratis?”

and, again, when he has been cozened and beaten, he speaks almost in the

old way:

“I never prospered since I forswore myself at primero.

Well, if my wind were but long enough to say my

prayers, I would repent.”

But on the whole the Falstaff of “The Merry Wives” is but a poor thin

shadow of the Falstaff of the two parts of “Henry IV.”

Had “The Merry Wives” been produced under ordinary conditions, one would

have had to rack one's brains to account for its feebleness. Not only is

the genial Lord of Humour degraded in it into a buffoon, but the

amusement of it is chiefly in situation; it is almost as much a farce as

a comedy. For these and other reasons I believe in the truth of the

tradition that Elizabeth was so pleased with the character of Falstaff

that she ordered Shakespeare to write another play showing the fat

knight in love, and that in obedience to this command Shakespeare wrote

“The Merry Wives” in a fortnight. For what does a dramatist do when he

is in a hurry to strike while the iron is hot and to catch a Queen's

fancy before it changes? Naturally he goes to his memory for his

characters, to that vivid memory of youth which makes up by precision of

portraiture for what it lacks in depth of comprehension. And this is the

distinguishing characteristic of “The Merry Wives,” particularly in the

beginning. Even without “the dozen white luces” in his coat, one would

swear that this Justice Shallow, with his pompous pride of birth and his

stilted stupidity, is a portrait from life, some Sir Thomas Lucy or

other, and Justice Shallow is not so deeply etched in as his cousin,

Master Slender--“a little wee face, with a little yellow beard,--a

cane-coloured beard.” Such physical portraiture, as I have said, is very

rare and very significant in Shakespeare. This photograph is slightly

malevolent, too, as of one whose malice is protected by a Queen's

commission. Those who do not believe traditions when thus

circumstantially supported would not believe though one rose from the

dead to witness to them. “The Merry Wives” is worthful to me as the only

piece of Shakespeare's journalism that we possess; here we find him

doing task-work, and doing it at utmost speed. Those who wish to measure

the difference between the conscious, deliberate work of the artist and

the hurried slap-dash performance of the journalist, have only to

compare the Falstaff of “The Merry Wives” with the Falstaff of the two

parts of “Henry IV.” But if we take it for granted that “The Merry

Wives” was done in haste and to order, can any inference be fairly drawn

from the feebleness of Falstaff and the unreality of his love-making? I

think so; it seems to me that, if Falstaff had been a creation,

Shakespeare must have reproduced him more effectively. His love-making

in the second part of “Henry IV.” is real enough. But just because

Falstaff was taken from life, and studied from the outside, Shakespeare

having painted him once could not paint him again, he had exhausted his

model and could only echo him.

The heart of the matter is that, whereas Shakespeare's men of action,

when he is not helped by history or tradition, are thinly conceived and

poorly painted, his comic characters--Falstaff, Sir Toby Belch, and

Dogberry; Maria, Dame Quickly, and the Nurse, creatures of observation

though they be, are only inferior as works of art to the portraits of

himself which he has given us in Romeo, Hamlet, Macbeth, Orsino, and

Posthumus. It is his humour which makes Shakespeare the greatest of

dramatists, the most complete of men.

BOOK II.

CHAPTER I. SHAKESPEARE'S EARLY ATTEMPTS TO PORTRAY HIMSELF

AND HIS WIFE: BIRON, ADRIANA, VALENTINE

In the preceding chapters I have considered those impersonations of

Shakespeare which revealed most distinctly the salient features of his

character. I now regard this part of my work as finished: the outlines

at least of his nature are established beyond dispute, and I may

therefore be permitted to return upon my steps, and beginning with the

earliest works pass in review most of the other personages who discover

him, however feebly or profoundly. Hitherto I have rather challenged

contradiction than tried to conciliate or persuade; it was necessary to

convince the reader that Shakespeare was indeed Hamlet-Orsino, plus an

exquisite sense of humour; and as the proofs of this were almost

inexhaustible, and as the stability of the whole structure depended on

the firmness of the foundations, I was more than willing to call forth

opposition in order once for all to strangle doubt. But now that I have

to put in the finer traits of the portrait I have to hope for the

goodwill at least of my readers. Even then my task is not easy. The

subtler traits of a man's character often elude accurate description, to

say nothing of exact proof; the differences in tone between a

dramatist's own experiences of life and his observation of the

experiences of others are often so slight as to be all but unnoticeable.

In the case of some peculiarities I have only a mere suggestion to go

upon, in that of others a bare surmise, a hint so fleeting that it may

well seem to the judicious as if the meshes of language were too coarse

to catch such evanescent indication.

Fortunately in this work I am not called on to limit myself to that

which can be proved beyond question, or to the ordinary man. I think my

reader will allow me, or indeed expect me, now to throw off constraint

and finish my picture as I please.

In this second book then I shall try to correct Shakespeare's portraits

of himself by bringing out his concealed faults and vices--the

shortcomings one's vanity slurs over and omits. Above all I shall try to

notice anything that throws light upon his life, for I have to tell here

the story of his passion and his soul's wreck. At the crisis of his life

he revealed himself almost without affectation; in agony men forget to

pose. And this more intimate understanding of the man will enable us to

reconstruct, partially at least, the happenings of his life, and so

trace not only his development, but the incidents of his life's journey

from his school days in 1575 till he crept home to Stratford to die

nearly forty years later.

The chief academic critics, such as Professor Dowden and Dr. Brandes,

take pains to inform us that Biron in “Love's Labour's Lost” is nothing

but an impersonation of Shakespeare. This would show much insight on the

part of the Professors were it not that Coleridge as usual has been

before them, and that Coleridge's statement is to be preferred to

theirs. Coleridge was careful to say that the whole play revealed many

of Shakespeare's characteristic features, and he added finely, “as in a

portrait taken of him in his boyhood.” This is far truer than Dowden's

more precise statement that “Berowne is the exponent of Shakespeare's

own thought.” For though, of course, Biron is especially the mouthpiece

of the poet, yet Shakespeare reveals himself in the first speech of the

King as clearly as he does in any speech of Biron:

“Let Fame, that all hunt after in their lives,

Live registered upon our brazen tombs,

And then grace us in the disgrace of death;

When, spite of cormorant devouring Time,

The endeavour of this present breath may buy

That honour which shall 'bate his scythe's keen edge,

And make us heirs of all eternity.”

The King's criticism, too, of Armado in the first scene is more finely

characteristic of Shakespeare than Biron's criticism of Boyet in the

last act. In this, his first drama, Shakespeare can hardly sketch a

sympathetic character without putting something of himself into it.

I regard “Love's Labour's Lost” as Shakespeare's earliest comedy, not

only because the greater part of it is in rhymed verse, but also because

he was unable in it to individualize his serious personages at all; the

comic characters, on the other hand, are already carefully observed and

distinctly differenced. Biron himself is scarcely more than a charming

sketch: he is almost as interested in language as in love, and he plays

with words till they revenge themselves by obscuring his wit; he is

filled with the high spirits of youth; in fact, he shows us the form and

pressure of the Renaissance as clearly as the features of Shakespeare.

It is, however, Biron-Shakespeare, who understands that the real world

is built on broader natural foundations than the King's womanless

Academe, and therefore predicts the failure of the ascetic experiment.

Another trait in Biron that brings us close to Shakespeare is his

contempt for book-learning;

“Small have continual plodders ever won

Save bare authority from others' books.

- - - - - - - - - -

Too much to know is to know nought but fame;

And every godfather can give a name.”

Again and again he returns to the charge:

“To study now it is too late,

Climb o'er the house to unlock the little gate.”

The summing up is triumphant:

“So, study evermore is overshot.”

In fine, Biron ridicules study at such length and with such earnestness

and pointed phrase that it is manifest the discussion was intensely

interesting to Shakespeare himself. But we should have expected

Shakespeare's _alter ego_ to be arguing on the other side; for

again and again we have had to notice that Shakespeare was a confirmed

lover of books; he was always using bookish metaphors, and Hamlet was a

student by nature. This attitude on the part of Biron, then, calls for

explanation, and it seems to me that the only possible explanation is to

be found in Shakespeare's own experience. Those who know England as she

was in the days of Elizabeth, or as she is to-day, will hardly need to

be told that when Shakespeare first came to London he was regarded as an

unlettered provincial (“with little Latin and less Greek”), and had to

bear the mocks and flouts of his beschooled fellows, who esteemed

learning and gentility above genius. In his very first independent play

he answered the scorners with scorn. But this disdain of study was not

Shakespeare's real feeling; and his natural loyalty to the deeper truth

forced him to make Biron contradict and excuse his own argument in a way

which seems to me altogether charming; but is certainly undramatic:

“--Though I have for barbarism spoke more

Than for that angel knowledge you can say.”

Undramatic the declaration is because it is at war with the length and

earnestness with which Biron has maintained his contempt for learning;

but here undoubtedly we find the true Shakespeare who as a youth speaks

of “that angel, knowledge,” just as in “Cymbeline” twenty years later he

calls reverence, “that angel of the world.”

When we come to his “Life” we shall see that Shakespeare, who was thrown

into the scrimmage of existence as a youth, and had to win his own way

in the world, had, naturally enough, a much higher opinion of books and

book-learning than Goethe, who was bred a student and knew life only as

an amateur:

“Einen Blick in's Buch hinein und zwei in's Leben

Das muss die rechte Form dem Geiste geben.”

Shakespeare would undoubtedly have given “two glances” to books and one

to life, had he been free to choose; but perhaps after all Goethe was

right in warning us that life is more valuable to the artist than any

transcript of it.

To return to our theme; Biron is not among Shakespeare's successful

portraits of himself. As might be expected in a first essay, the drawing

is now over-minute, now too loose. When Biron talks of study, he

reveals, as we have seen, personal feelings that are merely transient;

on the other hand, when he talks about Boyet he talks merely to hear

“the music of his own vain tongue.” He is, however, always nimble-witted

and impulsive; “quick Biron” as the Princess calls him, a gentleman of

charming manners, of incomparable fluent, graceful, and witty speech,

which qualities afterwards came to blossom in Mercutio and Gratiano. The

faults in portraiture are manifestly due to inexperience: Shakespeare

was still too youthful-timid to paint his chief features boldly, and it

is left for Rosaline to picture Biron for us as Shakespeare doubtless

desired to appear:

“A merrier man,

Within the limits of becoming mirth,

I never spent an hour's talk withal.

His eye begets occasion for his wit;

For every object that the one doth catch,

The other turns to a mirth-moving jest,

Which his fair tongue, conceit's expositor,

Delivers in such apt and gracious words

That agèd ears play truant at his tales,

And younger hearings are quite ravishèd,

So sweet and voluble is his discourse.”

Every touch of this self-painted portrait deserves to be studied: it is

the first photograph of our poet which we possess--a photograph, too,

taken in early manhood. Shakespeare's wit we knew, his mirth too, and

that his conversation was voluble and sweet enough to ravish youthful

ears and enthrall the aged we might have guessed from Jonson's report.

But it is delightful to hear of his mirth-moving words and to know that

he regarded himself as the best talker in the world. But just as the

play at the end turns from love-making and gay courtesies to thoughts of

death and “world-without-end” pledges, so Biron's merriment is only the

effervescence of youth, and love brings out in him Shakespeare's

characteristic melancholy:

“By heaven, I do love, and it hath taught me to

rhyme, and to be melancholy.”

Again and again, as in his apology to Rosaline and his appeal at the end

of the play to “honest plain words,” he shows a deep underlying

seriousness. The soul of quick talkative mirthful Biron is that he loves

beauty whether of women or of words, and though he condemns “taffeta

phrases,” he shows his liking for the “silken terms precise” in the very

form of his condemnation.

Of course all careful readers know that the greater seriousness of the

last two acts of “Love's Labour's Lost,” and the frequent use of blank

verse instead of rhymed verse in them, are due to the fact that

Shakespeare revised the play in 1597, some eight or nine years probably

after he had first written it. Every one must have noticed the

repetitions in Biron's long speech at the end of the fourth act, which

show the original garment and the later, finer embroidery. As I shall

have to return to this revision for other reasons, it will be enough

here to remark that it is especially the speeches of Biron which

Shakespeare improved in the second handling

Dr. Brandes, or rather Coleridge, tells us that in Biron and his

Rosaline we have the first hesitating sketch of the masterly Benedick

and Beatrice of “Much Ado about Nothing”; but in this I think Coleridge

goes too far. Unformed as Biron is, he is Shakespeare in early youth,

whereas in Benedick the likeness is not by any means so clear. In fact,

Benedick is merely an admirable stage silhouette and needs to be filled

out with an actor's personality. Beatrice, on the other hand, is a woman

of a very distinct type, whereas Rosaline needs pages of explanation,

which Coleridge never dreamed of. A certain similarity rather of

situation than of character seems to have misled Coleridge in this

instance. Boyet jests with Maria and Rosaline just as Biron does, and

just as Benedick jests with Beatrice: all these scenes simply show how

intensely young Shakespeare enjoyed a combat of wits, spiced with the

suggestiveness that nearly always shows itself when the combatants are

of different sexes.

It is almost certain that “Love's Labour's Lost” was wholly conceived

and constructed as well as written by Shakespeare; no play or story has

yet been found which might, in this case, have served him as a model.

For the first and probably the last time he seems to have taken the

entire drama from his imagination, and the result from a playwright's

point of view is unfortunate; “Love's Labour's Lost” is his slightest

and feeblest play. It is scarcely ever seen on the stage--is, indeed,

practically unactable. This fact goes to confirm the view already put

forth more than once in these pages, that Shakespeare was not a good

playwright and took little or no interest in the external incidents of

his dramas. The plot and action of the story, so carefully worked out by

the ordinary playwright and so highly esteemed by critics and

spectators, he always borrows, as if he had recognized the weakness of

this first attempt, and when he sets himself to construct a play, it has

no action, no plot--is, indeed, merely a succession of fantastic

occurrences that give occasion for light love-making and brilliant talk.

Even in regard to the grouping of characters the construction of his

early plays is puerile, mechanical; in “Love's Labour's Lost” the King

with his three courtiers is set against the Princess and her three

ladies; in “The Two Gentlemen of Verona” there is the faithful Valentine

opposed to the inconstant Proteus, and each of them has a comic servant;

and when later his plays from this point of view were not manufactured

but grew, and thus assumed the beautiful irregular symmetry of life, the

incidents were still neglected. Neither the poet nor the philosopher in

Shakespeare felt much of the child's interest in the story; he chose his

tales for the sake of the characters and the poetry, and whether they

were effective stage-tales or not troubled him but little. There is

hardly more plot or action in “Lear” than in “Love's Labour's Lost.”

It is probable that “The Comedy of Errors” followed hard on the heels of

“Love's Labour's Lost.” It practically belongs to the same period: it

has fewer lines of prose in it than “Love's Labour's Lost”; but, on the

other hand, the intrigue-spinning is clever, and the whole play shows a

riper knowledge of theatrical conditions. Perhaps because the intrigue

is more interesting, the character-drawing is even feebler than that of

the earlier comedy: indeed, so far as the men go there is hardly

anything worth calling character-drawing at all. Shakespeare speaks

through this or that mask as occasion tempts him: and if the women are

sharply, crudely differentiated, it is because Shakespeare, as I shall

show later, has sketched his wife for us in Adriana, and his view of her

character is decided enough if not over kind. Still, any and every

peculiarity of character deserves notice, for in these earliest works

Shakespeare is compelled to use his personal experience, to tell us of

his own life and his own feelings, not having any wider knowledge to

draw upon. Every word, therefore, in these first comedies, is important

to those who would learn the story of his youth and fathom the

idiosyncrasies of his being. When AEgeon, in the opening scenes, tells

the Duke about the shipwreck in which he is separated from his wife and

child, he declares that he himself “would gladly have embraced immediate

death.” No reason is given for this extraordinary contempt of living. It

was the “incessant weepings” of his wife, the “piteous plainings of the

pretty babes,” that forced him, he says, to exert himself. But wives

don't weep incessantly in danger, nor are the “piteous plainings of the

pretty babes” a feature of shipwreck; I find here a little picture of

Shakespeare's early married life in Stratford--a snapshot of memory.

AEgeon concludes his account by saying that his life was prolonged in

order

“To tell sad stories of my own mishaps”

--which reminds one of similar words used later by Richard II. This

personal, melancholy note is here forced and false, for Aegeon surely

lives in hope of finding his wife and child and not in order to tell of

his misfortunes. Aegeon is evidently a breath of Shakespeare himself,

and not more than a breath, because he only appears again when the play

is practically finished. Deep-brooding melancholy was the customary

habit of Shakespeare even in youth.

Just as in “Love's Labour's Lost” we find Shakespeare speaking first

through the King and then more fully through the hero, Biron, so here he

first speaks through Aegeon and then at greater length through the

protagonist Antipholus of Syracuse. Antipholus is introduced to us as

new come to Ephesus, and Shakespeare is evidently thinking of his own

first day in London when he puts in his mouth these words:

“Within this hour it will be dinner-time:

Till that, I'll view the manners of the town,

Peruse the traders, gaze upon the buildings,

And then return and sleep within mine inn;

For with long travel I am stiff and weary.”

Though “stiff and weary” he is too eager-young to rest; he will see

everything--even “peruse the traders”--how the bookish metaphor always

comes to Shakespeare's lips!--before he will eat or sleep. The utterly

needless last line, with its emphatic description--“stiff and

weary”--corroborates my belief that Shakespeare in this passage is

telling us what he himself felt and did on his first arrival in London.

In the second scene of the third act Antipholus sends his servant to the

port:

“I will not harbour in this town to-night

If any bark put forth.”

From the fact that Shakespeare represented Antipholus to himself as

wishing to leave Ephesus by sea, it is probable that he pictured him

coming to Ephesus in a ship. But when Shakespeare begins to tell us what

he did on reaching London he recalls his own desires and then his own

feelings; he was “stiff and weary” on that first day because he rode, or

more probably walked, into London; one does not become “stiff and weary”

on board ship. This is another snapshot at that early life of

Shakespeare, and his arrival in London, which one would not willingly

miss. And surely it is the country-bred lad from Stratford who, fearing

all manner of town-tricks, speaks in this way:

“They say this town is full of cozenage;

As, nimble jugglers that deceive the eye,

Dark-working sorcerers that change the mind,

Soul-killing witches that deform the body,

Disguised cheaters, prating mountebanks,

And many such-like liberties of sin:

- - - - - - - - - -

I greatly fear my money is not safe.”

This Antipholus is most ingenuous-talkative; without being questioned he

tells about his servant:

“A trusty villain, sir; that very oft,

When I am dull with care and melancholy,

Lightens my humour with his merry jests.”

And as if this did not mark his peculiar thoughtful temperament

sufficiently, he tells the merchant:

“I will go lose myself,

And wander up and down to view the city.”

And when the merchant leaves him, commending him to his own content, he

talks to himself in this strain:

“He that commends me to mine own content,

Commends me to the thing I cannot get,

- - - - - - - - - -

So I, to find a mother and a brother,

In quest of them, unhappy, lose myself.”

A most curious way, it must be confessed, to seek for any one; but

perfectly natural to the refined, melancholy, meditative, book-loving

temperament which was already Shakespeare's. In this “unhappy” and

“mother” I think I hear an echo of Shakespeare's sorrow at parting from

his own mother.

This Antipholus, although very free and open, has a reserve of dignity,

as we see in the second scene of the second act, when he talks with his

servant, who, as he thinks, has played with him:

“Because that I familiarly sometimes

Do use you for my fool, and chat with you,

Your sauciness will jest upon my love,

And make a common of my serious hours.

When the sun shines let foolish gnats make sport,

But creep in crannies when he hides his beams.”

The self-esteem seems a little exaggerated here; but, after all, it is

only natural; the whole scene is taken from Shakespeare's experience:

the man who will chat familiarly with his servant, and jest with him as

well, must expect to have to pull him up at times rather sharply.

Antipholus proceeds to play with his servant in a fencing match of

wit--a practice Shakespeare seems to have delighted in. But it is when

Antipholus falls in love with Luciana that he shows us Shakespeare at

his most natural as a lover. Luciana has just taken him to task for not

loving her sister Adriana, who, she thinks, is his wife. Antipholus

answers her thus:

“Sweet mistress,--what your name is else, I know not,

Nor by what wonder you do hit of mine,--

Less in your knowledge and your face you show not,

Than our earth's wonder; more than earth divine,

Teach me, dear creature, how to think and speak;

Lay open to my earthy-gross conceit,

Smother'd in errors, feeble, shallow, weak,

The folded meaning of your words' deceit. ...”

He declares, in fact, that he loves her and not her sister:

“Sing, siren, for thyself and I will dote:

Spread o'er the silver waves thy golden hairs,

And as a bed I'll take them and there lie;

- - - - - - - - - -

It is thyself, mine own self's better part,

Mine eye's clear eye, my dear heart's dearer heart.”

And as if this were not enough he goes on:

“My food, my fortune, and my sweet hope's aim,

My sole earth's heaven, and my heaven's claim.”

The word-conceits were a fashion of the time; but in spite of the verbal

affectation, the courting shows the cunning of experience, and has,

besides, a sort of echo of sincere feeling. How Shakespeare delights in

making love! It reminds one of the first flutings of a thrush in early

spring; over and over again he tries the notes with delighted iteration

till he becomes a master of his music and charms the copses to silence

with his song: and so Shakespeare sings of love again and again till at

length we get the liquid notes of passion and the trills of joy all

perfected in “Romeo and Juliet”; but the voice is the voice we heard

before in “Venus and Adonis” and “The Comedy of Errors.”

Antipholus' other appearances are not important. He merely fills his

part till in the last scene he assures Luciana that he will make good

his earlier protestations of love; but so far as he has any character at

all, or distinctive individuality, he is young Shakespeare himself and

his experiences are Shakespeare's.

Now a word or two about Adriana. Shakespeare makes her a jealous,

nagging, violent scold, who will have her husband arrested for debt,

though she will give money to free him. But the comedy of the play would

be better brought out if Adriana were pictured as loving and constant,

inflicting her inconvenient affection upon the false husband as upon the

true. Why did Shakespeare want to paint this unpleasant bitter-tongued

wife?

When Adriana appears in the first scene of the second act she is at once

sketched in her impatience and jealousy. She wants to know why her

husband should have more liberty than she has, and declares that none

but asses will be bridled so. Then she will strike her servant. In the

first five minutes of this act she is sketched to the life, and

Shakespeare does nothing afterwards but repeat and deepen the same

strokes: it seems as if he knew nothing about her or would depict

nothing of her except her jealousy and nagging, her impatience and

violence. We have had occasion to notice more than once that when

Shakespeare repeats touches in this way, he is drawing from life, from

memory, and not from imagination. Moreover, in this case, he shows us at

once that he is telling of his wife, because she defends herself against

the accusation of age, which no one brings against her, though every one

knows that Shakespeare's wife was eight years older than himself.

“His company must do his minions grace,

Whilst I at home starve for a merry look.

Hath homely age the alluring beauty took

From my poor cheek? then he hath wasted it ...

... My decayed fair

A sunny look of his would soon repair:

But, poor unruly deer, he breaks the pale,

And feeds from home; poor I am but his stale.”

The appeal is pathetic; but Luciana will not see it. She cries:

“Self-harming jealousy! fie, beat it hence!”

In the second scene of this second act Adriana goes on nagging in almost

the same way.

In the second scene of the third act there is a phrase from the hero,

Antipholus of Syracuse, about Adriana which I find significant:

“She that doth call me husband, even my soul

Doth for a wife abhor!”

There is no reason in the comedy for such strong words. Most men would

be amused or pleased by a woman who makes up to them as Adriana makes up

to Antipholus. I hear Shakespeare in this uncalled-for, over-emphatic

“even my soul doth for a wife abhor.”

In the fifth act Adriana is brought before the Abbess, and is proved to

be a jealous scold. Shakespeare will not be satisfied till some

impartial great person of Adriana's own sex has condemned her. Adriana

admits that she has scolded her husband in public and in private, too;

the Abbess replies:

“And thereof came it that the man was mad.”

And she adds:

“The venom clamours of a jealous woman

Poisons more deadly than a mad dog's tooth.”

Again, a needlessly emphatic condemnation. But Adriana will not accept

the reproof: she will have her husband at all costs. The whole scene

discovers personal feeling. Adriana is the portrait that Shakespeare

wished to give us of his wife.

The learned commentators have seemingly conspired to say as little about

“The Two Gentlemen of Verona” as possible. No one of them identifies the

protagonist, Valentine, with Shakespeare, though all of them identified

Biron with Shakespeare, and yet Valentine, as we shall see, is a far

better portrait of the master than Biron. This untimely blindness of the

critics is, evidently, due to the fact that Coleridge has hardly

mentioned “The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” and they have consequently been

unable to parrot his opinions.

“The Two Gentlemen of Verona” is manifestly a later work than “Love's

Labour's Lost”; there is more blank verse and less rhyme in it, and a

considerable improvement in character-drawing. Julia, for example, is

individualized and lives for us in her affection and jealousy; her talks

with her maid Lucetta are taken from life; they are indeed the first

sketch of the delightful talks between Portia and Nerissa, and mark an

immense advance upon the wordy _badinage_ of the Princess and her

ladies in “Love's Labour's Lost,” where there was no attempt at

differentiation of character. It seems indubitable to me that “The Two

Gentlemen of Verona” is also later than “The Comedy of Errors,” and just

as far beyond doubt that it is earlier than “A Midsummer Night's Dream,”

in spite of Dr. Furnival's “Trial Table.”

The first three comedies, “Love's Labour's Lost,” “The Comedy of

Errors,” and “The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” are all noteworthy for the

light they throw on Shakespeare's early life.

In “The Two Gentlemen of Verona” Shakespeare makes similar youthful

mistakes in portraiture to those we noticed in “Love's Labour's Lost”;

mistakes which show that he is thinking of himself and his own

circumstances. At the beginning of the play the only difference between

Proteus and Valentine is that one is in love, and the other, heart-free,

is leaving home to go to Milan. In this first scene Shakespeare speaks

frankly through both Proteus and Valentine, just as he spoke through

both the King and Biron in the first scene of “Love's Labour's Lost,”

and through both AEgeon and Antipholus of Syracuse in “The Comedy of

Errors.” But whilst the circumstances in the earliest comedy are

imaginary and fantastic, the circumstances in “The Two Gentlemen of

Verona” are manifestly, I think, taken from the poet's own experience.

In the dialogue between Valentine and Proteus I hear Shakespeare

persuading himself that he should leave Stratford. Some readers may

regard this assumption as far-fetched, but it will appear the more

plausible, I think, the more the dialogue is studied. Valentine begins

the argument:

“Home-keeping youth have ever homely wits,”--

he will “see the wonders of the world abroad” rather than live “dully

sluggardiz'd at home,” wearing out “youth with shapeless idleness.” But

all these reasons are at once superfluous and peculiar. The audience

needs no persuasion to believe that a young man is eager to travel and

go to Court. Shakespeare's quick mounting spirit is in the lines, and

the needlessness of the argument shows that we have here a personal

confession. Valentine, then, mocks at love, because it was love that

held Shakespeare so long in Stratford, and when Proteus defends it, he

replies:

“Even so by Love the young and tender wit

Is turned to folly; blasting in the bud,

Losing his verdure even in the prime,

And all the fair effects of future hopes.”

Here is Shakespeare's confession that his marriage had been a failure,

not only because of his wife's mad jealousy and violent temper, which we

have been forced to realize in “The Comedy of Errors,” but also because

love and its home-keeping ways threatened to dull and imprison the eager

artist spirit. In the last charming line I find not only the music of

Shakespeare's voice, but also one of the reasons--perhaps, indeed, the

chief because the highest reason--which drew him from Stratford to

London. And what the “future hope” was, he told us in the very first

line of “Love's Labour's Lost.” The King begins the play with”

“Let Fame, that all hunt after in their lives.”

Now all men don't hunt after fame; it was Shakespeare who felt that Fame

pieced out Life's span and made us “heirs of all eternity”; it was young

Shakespeare who desired fame so passionately that he believed all other

men must share his immortal longing, the desire in him being a forecast

of capacity, as, indeed, it usually is. If any one is inclined to think

that I am here abusing conjecture let him remember that Proteus, too,

tells us that Valentine is hunting after honour.

When Proteus defends love we hear Shakespeare just as clearly as when

Valentine inveighs against it:

“Yet writers say, as in the sweetest bud

The eating canker dwells, so eating love

Inhabits in the finest wits of all.”

Shakespeare could not be disloyal to that passion of desire in him which

he instinctively felt was, in some way or other, the necessary

complement of his splendid intelligence. We must take the summing-up of

Proteus when Valentine leaves him as the other half of Shakespeare's

personal confession:

“He after honour hunts, I after love:

He leaves his friends to dignify them more;

I leave myself, my friends, and all for love.

Thou, Julia, thou hast metamorphosed me,--

Made me neglect my studies, lose my time,

War with good counsel, set the world at naught;

Made wit with musing weak, heart sick with thought.”

Young Shakespeare hunted as much after love as after honour, and these

verses show that he has fully understood what a drag on him his foolish

marriage has been. That all this is true to Shakespeare appears from the

fact that it is false to the character of Proteus. Proteus is supposed

to talk like this in the first blush of passion, before he has won

Julia, before he even knows that she loves him. Is that natural? Or is

it not rather Shakespeare's confession of what two wasted years of

married life in Stratford had done for him? It was ambition--desire of

fame and new love--that drove the tired and discontented Shakespeare

from Anne Hathaway's arms to London.

When his father tells Proteus he must to Court on the morrow, instead of

showing indignation or obstinate resolve to outwit tyranny, he

generalizes in Shakespeare's way, exactly as Romeo and Orsino generalize

in poetic numbers:

“O, how this spring of love resembleth

The uncertain glory of an April day.”

Another reason for believing that this play deals with Shakespeare's own

experiences is to be found in the curious change that takes place in

Valentine. In the first act Valentine disdains love: he prefers to

travel and win honour; but as soon as he reaches Milan and sees Silvia,

he falls even more desperately in love than Proteus. What was the

object, then, in making him talk so earnestly against love in the first

act? It may be argued that Shakespeare intended merely to contrast the

two characters in the first act; but he contrasts them in the first act

on this matter of love, only in the second act to annul the distinction

himself created. Moreover, and this is decisive, Valentine rails against

love in the first act as one who has experienced love's utmost rage:

“To be

In love: when scorn is bought with groans; coy looks,

With heart-sore sighs; one fading moment's mirth,

With twenty watchful, weary, tedious nights.”

The man who speaks like this is not the man who despises love and

prefers honour, but one who has already given himself to passion with an

absolute abandonment. Such inconsistencies and flaws in workmanship are

in themselves trivial, but, from my point of view, significant; for

whenever Shakespeare slips in drawing character, in nine cases out of

ten he slips through dragging in his own personality or his personal

experience, and not through carelessness, much less incompetence; his

mistakes, therefore, nearly always throw light on his nature or on his

life's story. From the beginning, too, Valentine like Shakespeare is a

born lover.

As soon, moreover, as he has gone to the capital and fallen in love he

becomes Shakespeare's avowed favourite. He finds Silvia's glove and

cries:

“Sweet ornament that decks a thing divine--”

the exclamation reminding us of how Romeo talks of Juliet's glove. Like

other men, Shakespeare learned life gradually, and in youth poverty of

experience forces him to repeat his effects.

Again, when Valentine praises his friend Proteus to the Duke, we find a

characteristic touch of Shakespeare. Valentine says:

“His years but young; but his experience old;

His head unmellowed; but his judgement ripe.”

In “The Merchant of Venice” Bellario, the learned doctor of Padua,

praises Portia in similar terms:

“I never knew so young a body with so old a head.”

But it is when Valentine confesses his love that Shakespeare speaks

through him most clearly:

“Ay, Proteus, but that life is altered now,

I have done penance for contemning love;

- - - - - - - - - -

For in revenge of my contempt of love

Love hath chased sleep from my enthralled eyes

And made them watchers of my own heart's sorrow.

O gentle Proteus, Love's a mighty lord,”--

and so on.

Every word in this confession is characteristic of the poet and

especially the fact that his insomnia is due to love. Valentine then

gives himself to passionate praise of Silvia, and ends with the “She is

alone” that recalls “She is all the beauty extant” of “The Two Noble

Kinsmen.” Valentine the lover reminds us of Romeo as the sketch

resembles the finished picture; when banished, he cries:

“And why not death, rather than living torment? To die is to be banished

from myself; And Silvia is myself: banished from her, Is self from self;

a deadly banishment. What light is light, if Silvia be not seen? What

joy is joy, if Silvia be not by? Unless it be to think that she is by

And feed upon the shadow of perfection. Except I be by Silvia in the

night There is no music in the nightingale,”

and so forth. I might compare this with what Romeo says of his

banishment, and perhaps infer from this two-fold treatment of the theme

that Shakespeare left behind in Stratford some dark beauty who may have

given Anne Hathaway good cause for jealous rage. It must not be

forgotten here that Dryasdust tells us he was betrothed to another girl

when Anne Hathaway's relations forced him to marry their kinswoman.

A moment later and this lover Valentine uses the very words that we

found so characteristic in the mouth of the lover Orsino in Twelfth

Night”:

“O I have fed upon this woe already,

And now excess of it will make me surfeit.”

Valentine, indeed, shows us traits of nearly all Shakespeare's later

lovers, and this seems to me interesting, because of course all the

qualities were in the youth, which were later differenced into various

characters. His advice to the Duke, who pretends to be in love, is far

too ripe, too contemptuous-true, to suit the character of such a votary

of fond desire as Valentine was; it is mellow with experience and

man-of-the-world wisdom, and the last couplet of it distinctly

fore-shadows Benedick:

“Flatter and praise, commend, extol their graces;

Though ne'er so black, say they have angels' faces.

That man that hath a tongue, I say, is no man

If with his tongue he cannot win a woman.”

But this is only an involuntary _aperçu_ of Valentine, as indeed

Benedick is only an intellectual mood of Shakespeare. And here Valentine

is contrasted with Proteus, who gives somewhat different advice to

Thurio, and yet advice which is still more characteristic of Shakespeare

than Valentine-Benedick's counsel. Proteus says:

“You must lay lime to tangle her desires

By wailful sonnets, whose composéd rhymes

Should be full fraught with serviceable vows.”

In this way the young poet sought to give expression to different views

of life, and so realize the complexity of his own nature.

The other traits of Valentine's character that do not necessarily belong

to him as a lover are all characteristic traits of Shakespeare. When he

is playing the banished robber-chief far from his love, this is how

Valentine consoles himself:

“This shadowy desert, unfrequented woods,

I better brook than flourishing peopled towns:

Here can I sit alone unseen of any,

And to the nightingale's complaining notes

Tune my distresses and record my woes.”

This idyllic love of nature, this marked preference for the country over

the city, however peculiar in a highway robber, are characteristics of

Shakespeare from youth to age. Not only do his comedies lead us

continually from the haunts of men to the forest and stream, but also

his tragedies. He turns to nature, indeed, in all times of stress and

trouble for its healing unconsciousness, its gentle changes that can be

foreseen and reckoned upon, and that yet bring fresh interests and

charming surprises; and in times of health and happiness he pictures the

pleasant earth and its diviner beauties with a passionate intensity.

Again and again we shall have to notice his poet's love for

“unfrequented woods,” his thinker's longing for “the life removed.”

At the end of the drama Valentine displays the gentle forgivingness of

disposition which we have already had reason to regard as one of

Shakespeare's most marked characteristics. As soon as “false, fleeting

Proteus” confesses his sin Valentine pardons him with words that echo

and re-echo through Shakespeare's later dramas:

“Then I am paid,

And once again I do receive thee honest.

Who by repentance is not satisfied

Is nor of heaven nor earth; for these are pleased;

By patience the Eternal's wrath's appeased.”

He even goes further than this, and confounds our knowledge of human

nature by adding:

“And that my love may appear plain and free

All that was mine in Silvia I give thee.”

And that the meaning may be made more distinct than words can make it,

he causes Julia to faint on hearing the proposal. One cannot help

recalling the passage in “The Merchant of Venice” when Bassanio and

Gratiano both declare they would sacrifice their wives to free Antonio,

and a well-known sonnet which seems to prove that Shakespeare thought

more of a man's friendship for a man than of a man's love for a woman.

But as I shall have to discuss this point at length when I handle the

Sonnets, I have, perhaps, said enough for the moment. Nor need I

consider the fact here that the whole of this last scene of the last act

was manifestly revised or rewritten by Shakespeare _circa_

1598--years after the rest of the play.

I think every one will admit now that Shakespeare revealed himself in

“The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” and especially in Valentine, much more

fully than in Biron and in “Love's Labour's Lost” The three earliest

comedies prove that from the very beginning of his career Shakespeare's

chief aim was to reveal and realize himself.