CHAPTER VII. DRAMAS OF REVENGE AND JEALOUSY: HAMLET.

“A beautiful, pure and most moral nature, without the strength of nerve

which makes the hero, sinks beneath a burden which it can neither bear

nor throw off; every duty is holy to him,--this too hard. The impossible

is required of him,--not the impossible in itself, but the impossible to

him. How he winds, turns, agonizes, advances and recoils, ever reminded,

ever reminding himself, and at last almost loses his purpose from his

thoughts, without ever again recovering his peace of

mind....”--“_Hamlet_” by _Goethe_.

Goethe's criticism of Hamlet is so much finer than any English criticism

that I am glad to quote it. It will serve, I think, as a standard to

distinguish the best criticism of the past from what I shall set forth

in the course of this analysis. In this chapter I shall try to show what

new light our knowledge of Shakespeare throws on the play, and

conversely what new light the play throws on its maker.

The first moment of disillusion brought out, as we have seen in Brutus,

all the kindness in Shakespeare's nature. He will believe in men in

spite of experience; but the idealistic pose could not be kept up:

sooner or later Shakespeare had to face the fact that he had been

befooled and scorned by friend and mistress--how did he meet it? Hamlet

is the answer: Shakespeare went about nursing dreams of revenge and

murder. Disillusion had deeper consequences; forced to see other men as

they were, he tried for a moment to see himself as he was. The outcome

of that objective vision was Hamlet--a masterpiece of self-revealing.

Yet, when he wrote “Hamlet,” nothing was clear to him; the significance

of the catastrophe had only dawned upon him; he had no notion how

complete his soul-shipwreck was, still less did he dream of painting

himself realistically in all his obsequious flunkeyism and ungovernable

sensuality. He saw himself less idealistically than heretofore, and,

trying to look at himself fairly, honestly, he could not but accuse

himself of irresolution at the very least; he had hung on with Herbert,

as the sonnets tell us, hoping to build again the confidence which had

been ruined by betrayal, hoping he knew not what of gain or place, to

the injury of his own self-respect; while brooding all the time on quite

impossible plans of revenge, impossible, for action had been “sicklied

o'er with the pale cast of thought.” Hamlet could not screw his courage

to the sticking point, and so became a type for ever of the philosopher

or man of letters who, by thinking, has lost the capacity for action.

Putting ourselves in Shakespeare's place for the moment we see at once

why he selected this story for treatment at this time. He knew, none

better, that no young aristocrat would have submitted patiently to the

wrong he had suffered from Lord Herbert; he created Laertes to show how

instant and determined such a man would be in taking murderous revenge;

but he still felt that what others would regard as faults, his

irresolution and shrinking from bloodshed were in themselves nobler, and

so, whilst half excusing, half realizing himself, he brought forth a

masterpiece. This brooding on revenge, which is the heart and

explanation of his great play, shows us how little Shakespeare cared for

Herbert, how completely he had condemned him. The soliloquy on this

point in “Hamlet” is the most characteristic thing in the drama:

“This is most brave,

That I, the son of a dear father murder'd

Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,

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

And fall a-cursing like a very drab.”

Shakespeare is thinking of Herbert's betrayal; “here I am,” he says,

“prompted to revenge by reason and custom, yet instead of acting I fall

a-cursing like a drab.” But behind his irresolution is his hatred of

bloodshed: he could whip out his sword and on a sudden kill Polonius,

mistaking him for the king (Herbert), but he could not, in cold blood,

make up his mind to kill and proceed to execution. Like his own Hubert,

Shakespeare had to confess:

“Within this bosom never enter'd yet

The dreadful motion of a murderous thought.”

He had none of the direct, passionate, conscienceless resolution of

Laertes. He whips himself to anger against the king by thinking of

Herbert in the king's place; but lackey-like has to admit that mere

regard for position and power gives him pause: Lord Herbert was too far

above him:

“There's such divinity doth hedge a king,

That treason can but peep to what it would.”

Shakespeare's personal feeling dominates and inspires the whole play.

One crucial instance will prove this. Why did Hamlet hate his mother's

lechery? Most men would hardly have condemned it, certainly would not

have suffered their thoughts to dwell on it beyond the moment; but to

Hamlet his mother's faithlessness was horrible, shameful, degrading,

simply because Hamlet-Shakespeare had identified her with Miss Fitton,

and it was Miss Fitton's faithlessness, it was her deception he was

condemning in the bitterest words he could find. He thus gets into a

somewhat unreal tragedy, a passionate intensity which is otherwise

wholly inexplicable. This is how he talks to his mother:

“Have you eyes?

Could you on this fair mountain leave to feed,

And batten on this moor? Ha! have you eyes ...

... ... ... What devil was't

That thus cozen'd you at hoodman-blind?

Eyes without feeling, feeling without sight,

Ears without hands or eyes, smelling sans all,

Or but a sickly part of one true sense

Could not so mope.

O, shame! where is thy blush?”

If anyone can imagine that this is the way a son thinks of a mother's

slip he is past my persuading. In all this Shakespeare is thinking of

himself in comparison with Herbert; and his advice to his mother is

almost as self-revealing, showing, as it does, what he would wish to say

to Miss Fitton:

“Repent what's past; avoid what is to come;

And do not spread the compost on the weeds

To make them ranker....

Assume a virtue if you have it not....”

In his description of the king and queen we get Shakespeare's view of

Lord Herbert and Miss Fitton: the king (Herbert) is “mildew'd” and foul

in comparison with his modest poet-rival--“A satyr to Hyperion.”

Hamlet's view of his mother (Miss Fitton), though bitterer still, is yet

the bitterness of disappointed love: he will have her repent, refrain

from the adultery, and be pure and good again. When the Queen asks:

“What shall I do?”

Hamlet answers:

“Not this, by no means, that I bid you do:

Let the king tempt you again to bed;

Pinch wanton on your cheek; call you his mouse;

And let him, for a pair of reechy kisses,

Or paddling in your neck with his damned fingers....”

Maddened with jealousy he sees the act, scourges himself with his own

lewd imagining as Posthumus scourges himself. No one ever felt this

intensity of jealous rage about a mother or a sister. The mere idea is

absurd; it is one's own passion-torture that speaks in such words as I

have here quoted.

Hamlet's treatment of Ophelia, too, and his advice to her are all the

outcome of Shakespeare's own disappointment:

“Get thee to a nunnery: why wouldst thou be a

breeder of sinners?”

We all expect from Hamlet some outburst of divine tenderness to Ophelia;

but the scenes with the pure and devoted girl whom he is supposed to

love are not half realized, are nothing like so intense as the scenes

with the guilty mother. It is jealousy that is blazing in Shakespeare at

this time, and not love; when Hamlet speaks to the Queen we hear

Shakespeare speaking to his own faithless, guilty love. Besides, Ophelia

is not even realized; she is submissive affection, an abstraction, and

not a character. Shakespeare did not take interest enough in her to give

her flesh and blood.

Shakespeare's jealousy and excessive sensuality come to full light in

the scene between Hamlet and Ophelia, when they are about to witness the

play before the king: he persists in talking smut to her, which she

pretends not to understand. The lewdness, we all feel, is out of place

in “Hamlet,” horribly out of place when Hamlet is talking to Ophelia,

but Shakespeare's sensuality has been stung to ecstasy by Miss Fitton's

frailty, and he cannot but give it voice. As soon as Ophelia goes out of

her mind she, too, becomes coarse--all of which is but a witness to

Shakespeare's tortured animality. Yet Goethe can talk of Hamlet's “pure

and most moral nature.” A goat is hardly less pure, though Hamlet was

moral enough in the high sense of the word.

There are one or two minor questions still to be considered, and the

chief of these is how far, even in this moment of disillusion, did our

Shakespeare see himself as he was? Hamlet says:

“I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious; with more

offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in,

imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such

fellows as I do crawling between heaven and earth? We are arrant knaves,

all; believe none of us.”

All this is mere rhetoric, and full of clever self-excusing. Hamlet is

not very revengeful or very ambitious; he is weakly-irresolute, and

excessively sensual, with all the faults that accompany these frailties.

Even at this moment, when he must know that he is not very revengeful,

that forgiveness were easier to him, Shakespeare will pose to himself,

and call himself revengeful: he is such an idealist that he absolutely

refuses to see himself as he is. In later dramas we shall find that he

grows to deeper self-knowledge. Hamlet is but the half-way house to

complete understanding.

Fortunately we have each of us an infallible touchstone by which we can

judge of our love of truth. Any of us, man or woman, would rather be

accused of a mental than a physical shortcoming. Do we see our bodily

imperfections as they are? Can we describe ourselves pitilessly with

snub nose, or coarse beak, bandy legs or thin shanks; gross paunch or

sedgy beard? Shakespeare in Hamlet can hardly bear even to suggest his

physical imperfections. Hamlet lets out inadvertently that he was fat,

but he will not say so openly. His mother says to Hamlet:

“You are fat and scant of breath.”

Many people, especially actors, have been so determined to see Hamlet as

slight and student-like, that they have tried to criticize this phrase,

and one of them, Mr. Beerbohm Tree, even in our day, went so far as to

degrade the text to “faint and scant of breath.” But the fatness is

there, and comes to view again in another phrase of Hamlet:

“O, that this too, too solid flesh would melt,

Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew.”

No thin man ever spoke of his flesh in that way. Shakespeare was

probably small, too. We know that he used to play Adam in “As You Like

it,” and in the play Orlando has to take Adam up and carry him off the

stage, a thing no actor would attempt if the Adam had been a big man.

Shakespeare was probably of middle height, or below it, and podgy. I

always picture him to myself as very like Swinburne. Yet even in Hamlet

he would make himself out to be a devil of a fellow: “valiant Hamlet,” a

swordsman of the finest, a superb duellist, who can touch Laertes again

and again, though lacking practice. At the last push of fate Shakespeare

will pose and deceive himself.

It is curiously characteristic of Shakespeare that when Hamlet broods on

retaliation he does not brood like a brave man, who gloats on

challenging his enemy to a fair fight, and killing him by sheer force or

resolution; his passion, his revenge, is almost that of an Italian

bravo. Not once does Hamlet think of forcing the king (Herbert) to

a duel; he goes about with ideas of assassination, and not of combat.

“Now might I do it pat”

he cries as he sees the king praying; and he does not do it because he

would thus send the king's soul to Heaven--shrill wordy intensity to

excuse want of nerve. Whenever we get under the skin, it is

Shakespeare's femininity which startles us.

One cannot leave this great picture of Hamlet-Shakespeare without

noticing one curious fact, which throws a flood of light on the

relations of literary art to life. Shakespeare, as we have seen, is

boiling with jealous passion, brooding continually on murderous revenge,

and so becomes conscious of his own irresolution. He dwells on this, and

makes this irresolution the chief feature of Hamlet's character, and yet

because he is writing about himself he manages to suggest so many other

qualities, and such amiable and noble ones, that we are all in love with

Hamlet, in spite of his irresolution, erotic mania and bloody thoughts.

In later dramas Shakespeare went on to deal with the deeper and more

elemental things in his nature, with jealousy in “Othello,” and

passionate desire in “Antony and Cleopatra”; but he never, perhaps, did

much better work than in this drama where he chooses to magnify a

secondary and ancillary weakness into the chief defect of his whole

being. The pathos of the drama is to be found in the fact that

Shakespeare realizes he is unable to take personal vengeance on Herbert.

“Hamlet” is a drama of pathetic weakness, strengthened by a drama of

revenge and jealousy. In these last respects it is a preparatory study

for “Othello.”

In “Hamlet” Shakespeare let out some of the foul matter which Herbert's

mean betrayal had bred in him. Even in “Hamlet,” however, his passion

for Mary Fitton, and his jealousy of her, constitute the real theme. We

shall soon see how this passion coloured all the rest of his life and

art, and at length brought about his ruin.

CHAPTER VIII. DRAMAS OF REVENGE AND JEALOUSY: PART II “OTHELLO”

There is perhaps no single drama which throws such light on Shakespeare

and his method of work as “Othello”: it is a long conflict between the

artist in him and the man, and, in the struggle, both his artistic

ideals and his passionate soul come to clearest view. From it we see

that Shakespeare's nature gave itself gradually to jealousy and revenge.

The fire of his passion burned more and more fiercely for years; was

infinitely hotter in 1604, when “Othello” was written, than it had been

when “Julius Caesar” was written in 1600. This proves to me that

Shakespeare's connection with Mary Fitton did not come to an end when he

first discovered her unfaithfulness. The intimacy continued for a dozen

years. In Sonnet 136 he prays her to allow him to be one of her lovers.

That she was liberal enough to consent appears clearly from the growth

of passion in his plays. It is certain, too, that she went on deceiving

him with other lovers, or his jealousy would have waned away, ebbing

with fulfilled desire. But his passion increases in intensity from 1597

to 1604, whipped no doubt to ecstasy by continual deception and wild

jealousy. Both lust and jealousy swing to madness in “Othello,” But

Shakespeare was so great an artist that, when he took the story from

Cinthio, he tried to realize it without bringing in his own personality:

hence a conflict between his art and his passion.

At first sight “Othello” reminds one of a picture by Titian or Veronese;

it is a romantic conception; the personages are all in gala dress; the

struggle between Iago and the Moor is melodramatic; the whole picture

aglow with a superb richness of colour. It is Shakespeare's finest play,

his supreme achievement as a playwright. It is impossible to read

“Othello” without admiring the art of it. The beginning is so easy: the

introduction of the chief characters so measured and impressive that

when the action really begins, it develops and increases in speed as by

its own weight to the inevitable end; inevitable--for the end in this

case is merely the resultant of the shock of these various

personalities. But if the action itself is superbly ordered, the

painting of character leaves much to be desired, as we shall see. There

is one notable difference between “Othello” and those dramas, “Hamlet,”

“Macbeth,” and “Cymbeline,” wherein Shakespeare has depicted himself as

the protagonist. In the self-revealing dramas not only does Shakespeare

give his hero licence to talk, in and out of season, and thus hinder the

development of the story, but he also allows him to occupy the whole

stage without a competitor. The explanation is obvious enough. Dramatic

art is to be congratulated on the fact that now and then Shakespeare

left himself for a little out of the play, for then not only does the

construction of the play improve, but the play grows in interest through

the encounter of evenly-matched antagonists. The first thing we notice

in “Othello” is that Iago is at least as important a character as the

hero himself. “Hamlet,” on the other hand, is almost a lyric; there is

no counterpoise to the student-prince.

Now let us get to the play itself. Othello's first appearance in

converse with Iago in the second scene of the first act does not seem to

me to deserve the praise that has been lavished on it. Though Othello

knows that “boasting is (not) an honour,” he nevertheless boasts himself

of royal blood. We have noticed already Shakespeare's love of good

blood, and belief in its wondrous efficacy; it is one of his permanent

and most characteristic traits. The passage about royal descent might be

left out with advantage; if these three lines are omitted, Othello's

pride in his own nature--his “parts and perfect soul”--is far more

strongly felt. But such trivial flaws are forgotten when Brabantio

enters and swords are drawn.

“Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them.”

is excellent in its contemptuous irony. A little later, however, Othello

finds an expression which is intensely characteristic of a great man of

action:

“Hold your hands,

Both you of my inclining, and the rest;

Were it my cue to fight, I should have known it

Without a prompter.”

This last line and a half is addressed especially to Iago who is bent on

provoking a fight, and is, I think, the best piece of character-painting

in all “Othello”; the born general knows instinctively the moment to

attack just as the trained boxer's hand strikes before he consciously

sees the opening. When Othello speaks before the Duke, too, he reveals

himself with admirable clearness and truth to nature. His pride is so

deep-rooted, his self-respect so great, that he respects all other

dignitaries: the Senators are his “very noble and approved good

masters.” Every word weighed and effectual. Admirable, too, is the

expression “round unvarnished tale.”

But pride and respect for others' greatness are not qualities peculiar

to the man of action; they belong to all men of ability. As soon as

Othello begins to tell how he won Desdemona, he falls out of his

character. Feeling certain that he has placed his hero before us in

strong outlines, Shakespeare lets himself go, and at once we catch him

speaking and not Othello. In “antres vast and deserts idle” I hear the

poet, and when the verse swings to--

“.... men whose heads

Do grow beneath their shoulders,”

it is plain that Othello, the lord and lover of realities, has deserted

the firm ground of fact. But Shakespeare pulls himself in almost before

he has yielded to the charm of his own words, and again Othello speaks:

“This to hear

Would Desdemona seriously incline,

But still the house-affairs would draw her thence,

and so forth.

The temptation, however, was overpowering, and again Shakespeare yields

to it:

“And often did beguile her of her tears

When I did speak of some distressful stroke

That my youth suffered.”

It is a characteristic of the man of action that he thinks lightly of

reverses; he loves hard buffets as a swimmer high waves, and when he

tells his life-story he does not talk of his “distress.” This

“distressful stroke that my youth suffered” is manifestly pure

Shakespeare--tender-hearted Shakespeare, who pitied himself and the

distressful strokes his youth suffered very profoundly. The

characterization of Othello in the rest of this scene is anything but

happy. He talks too much; I miss the short sharp words which would show

the man used to command, and not only does he talk too much, but he

talks in images like a poet, and exaggerates:

“The tyrant Custom, most grave senators,

Hath made the flinty and steel couch of war

My thrice-driven bed of down.”

Even the matter here is insincere; this is the poet's explanation of the

Captain's preference for a hard bed and hard living: “has been

accustomed to it,” says Shakespeare, not understanding that there are

born hunter and soldier natures who absolutely prefer hardships to

effeminate luxury. Othello's next speech is just as bad; he talks too

much of things particular and private, and the farther he goes, the

worse he gets, till we again hear the poet speaking, or rather mouthing:

“No, when light-winged toys

Of feathered Cupid seel with wanton dullness

My speculative and officed instruments,

That my disports corrupt and taint my business,

Let housewives make a skillet of my helm,

And all indign and base adversities

Make head against my estimation.”

Again when he says--

“Come, Desdemona: I have but an hour

Of love, of worldly matters and direction

To spend with thee; we must obey the time,”

I find no sharp impatience to get to work such as Hotspur felt, but a

certain reluctance to leave his love--a natural touch which indicates

that the poet was thinking of himself and not of his puppet.

The first scene of the second act shows us how Shakespeare, the

dramatist, worked. Cassio is plainly Shakespeare the poet; any of his

speeches taken at haphazard proves it. When he hears that Iago has

arrived he breaks out:

“He has had most favourable and happy speed;

Tempests themselves, high seas, and howling winds,

The guttered rocks and congregated sands--

Traitors ensteeped to clog the guiltless keel--

As having sense of beauty, do omit

Their mortal natures, letting go safely by

The divine Desdemona.”

And when Desdemona lands, Cassio's first exclamation is sufficient to

establish the fact that he is merely the poet's mask:

“O, behold,

The riches of the ship is come on shore!”

And just as clearly as Cassio is Shakespeare, the lyric poet, so is

Iago, at first, the embodiment of Shakespeare's intelligence. Iago has

been described as immoral; he does not seem to me to be immoral, but

amoral, as the intellect always is. He says to the women:

“Come on, come on; you're pictures out of doors,

Bells in your parlours, wild cats in your kitchens,

Saints in your injuries, devils being offended,

Players in your housewifery, and housewives in your

beds.”

Iago sees things as they are, fairly and not maliciously; he is “nothing

if not critical,” but his criticism has a touch of Shakespeare's erotic

mania in it. Think of that “housewives in your beds”! He will not

deceive himself, however; in spite of Cassio's admiration of Desdemona

Iago does not imagine that Cassio is in love with her; “well kissed,” he

says, “an excellent courtesy,” finding at once the true explanation.

[Footnote: At the end of this scene Iago says:

“That Cassio loves her I do well believe it,”

but that is merely one of the many inconsistencies in Shakespeare's

drawing of Iago. There are others; at one time he talks of Cassio as a

mere book soldier, at another equals him with Cæsar. Had Coleridge noted

these contradictions he would have declared them to be a higher

perfection than logical unity, and there is something to be said for the

argument, though in these instances I think the contradictions are due

to Shakespeare's carelessness rather than to his deeper insight.]

But having taken up this intellectual attitude in order to create Iago,

Shakespeare tries next to make his puppet concrete and individual by

giving him revenge for a soul, but in this he does not succeed, for

intellect is not maleficent. At moments Iago lives for us; “drown cats

and blind puppies ... put money in your purse”--his brains delight us;

but when he pursues Desdemona to her end, we revolt; such malignity is

inhuman. Shakespeare was so little inclined to evil, knew so little of

hate and revenge that his villain is unreal in his cruelty. Again and

again the reader asks himself why Iago is so venomous. He hates Othello

because Othello has passed him over and preferred Cassio; because he

thinks he has had reason to be jealous of Othello, because-----but every

one feels that these are reasons supplied by Shakespeare to explain the

inexplicable; taken all together they are inadequate, and we are apt to

throw them aside with Coleridge as the “motive hunting of motiveless

malignity.” But such a thing as “motiveless malignity” is not in nature,

Iago's villainy is too cruel, too steadfast to be human; perfect

pitiless malignity is as impossible to man as perfect innate goodness.

Though Iago and Othello hold the stage for nine-tenths of the play

Shakespeare does not realize them so completely as he realizes Cassio,

an altogether subordinate character. The drinking episode of Cassio was

not found by Shakespeare in Cinthio, and is, I think, clearly the

confession of Shakespeare himself, for though aptly invented to explain

Cassio's dismissal it is unduly prolonged, and thus constitutes perhaps

the most important fault in the construction of the play. Consider, too,

how the moral is applied by Iago to England in especial, with which

country neither Iago nor the story has anything whatever to do.

Othello's appearance stilling the riot, his words to Iago and his

dismissal of Cassio are alike honest work. The subsequent talk between

Cassio and Iago about “reputation” is scarcely more than a repetition of

what Falstaff said of “honour.”

Coleridge has made a great deal of the notion that Othello was justified

in describing himself as “not easily jealous”; but poor Coleridge's

perverse ingenuity never led him further astray. The exact contrary

must, I think, be admitted; Othello was surely very quick to suspect

Desdemona; he remembers Iago's first suspicious phrase, ponders it and

asks its meaning; he is as quick as Posthumus was to believe the worst

of Imogen, as quick as Richard II. to suspect his friends Bagot and

Green of traitorism, and this proneness to suspicion is the soul of

jealousy. And Othello is not only quick to suspect but easy to

convince--impulsive at once and credulous. His quick wits jump to the

conclusion that Iago, “this honest creature!” doubtless

“Sees and knows more, much more, than he unfolds.”

On hinted imputation he is already half persuaded, and persuaded as only

a sensualist would be that it is lust which has led Desdemona astray:

“O curse of marriage!

That we can call these delicate creatures ours,

And not their appetites.”

He is, indeed, so disposed to catch the foul infection that Iago cries:

“Trifles light as air

Are to the jealous confirmations strong

As proofs of holy writ.”

And well he may, for before he uses the handkerchief or any evidence, on

mere suspicion Othello is already racked with doubt, distraught with

jealousy, maddened with passion; “his occupation's gone”; he rages

against Iago and demands proof, Iago answers:

“I do not like the office;

But, sith I am entered in this cause so far

- - - - - - - - - - - -

I will go on.”

This is the same paltry reason Richard III. and Macbeth adduced for

adding to the number of their crimes, the truth being that Shakespeare

could find no reason in his own nature for effective hatred.

Othello gives immediate credence to Iago's dream, thinks it “a shrewd

doubt”; he is a “credulous fool,” as Iago calls him, and it is only our

sense of Iago's devilish cleverness that allows us to excuse Othello's

folly. The strawberry-spotted handkerchief is not needed: the magic in

its web is so strong that the mere mention of it blows his love away and

condemns both Cassio and Desdemona to death. If this Othello is not

easily jealous then no man is prone to doubt and quick to turn from love

to loathing.

The truth of the matter is that in the beginning of the play Othello is

a marionette fairly well shaped and exceedingly picturesque; but as soon

as jealousy is touched upon, the mask is thrown aside; Othello, the

self-contained captain, disappears, the poet takes his place and at once

shows himself to be the aptest subject for the green fever. The emotions

then put into Othello's mouth are intensely realized; his jealousy is

indeed Shakespeare's own confession, and it would be impossible to find

in all literature pages of more sincere and terrible self-revealing.

Shakespeare is not more at home in showing us the passion of Romeo and

Juliet or the irresolution of Richard II. or the scepticism of Hamlet

than in depicting the growth and paroxysms of jealousy; his overpowering

sensuality, the sensuality of Romeo and of Orsino, has sounded every

note of love's mortal sickness:

“_Oth._ I had been happy if the general camp,

Pioneers and all, had tasted her sweet body,

So I had nothing known.

- - - - - - - - - -

Damn her, lewd minx! O, damn her!”

We have here the proof that the jealousy of Othello was Shakespeare's

jealousy; it is all compounded of sensuality. But, and this is the

immediate point of my argument, the captain, Othello, is not presented

to us as a sensualist to whom such a suspicion would be, of course, the

nearest thought. On the contrary, Othello is depicted as sober

[Footnote: Shakespeare makes Lodovico speak of Othello's “solid

virtue”--“the nature whom passion could not shake.” Even Iago finds

Othello's anger ominous because of its rarity:

“There's matter in't, indeed, if he be angry.”]

and solid, slow to anger, and master of himself and his desires; he

expressly tells the lords of Venice that he does not wish Desdemona to

accompany him:

“To please the palate of my appetite

Nor to comply with heat--the young affects,

In me defunct--and proper satisfaction.”

Shakespeare goes out of his way to put this unnecessary explanation in

Othello's mouth; he will not have us think of him as passion's fool, but

as passion's master; Othello is not to be even suspicious; he tells

Iago:

“'Tis not to make me jealous

To say--my wife is fair, feeds well, loves company,

Is free of speech, sings, plays and dances well;

Where virtue is, these are more virtuous:

Nor from mine own weak merits will I draw

The smallest fear or doubt of her revolt;

For she had eyes and chose me.”

It was all this, no doubt, that misled Coleridge. He did not realize

that this Othello suddenly changes his nature; the sober lord of himself

becomes in an instant very quick to suspect, and being jealous, is

nothing if not sensual; he can think of no reason for Desdemona's fall

but her appetite; the imagination of the sensual act throws him into a

fit; it is this picture which gives life to his hate. The conclusion is

not to be avoided; as soon as Othello becomes jealous he is transformed

by Shakespeare's own passion. For this is the way Shakespeare conceived

jealousy and the only way. The jealousy of Leontes in “The Winter's

Tale” is precisely the same; Hermione gives her hand to Polixenes, and

at once Leontes suspects and hates, and his rage is all of “paddling

palms [1] and pinching fingers.” The jealousy of Posthumus, too, is of

the same kind:

“Never talk on 't;

She hath been colted by him.”

[Footnote 1: Iago's expression, too; cf. “Othello,” II. 1, and “Hamlet,”

III. 4.]

It is the imagining of the sensual act that drives him to incoherence

and the verge of madness, as it drove Othello. In all these characters

Shakespeare is only recalling the stages of the passion that desolated

his life.

The part that imagination usually plays in tormenting the jealous man

with obscene pictures is now played by Iago; the first scene of the

fourth act is this erotic self-torture put in Iago's mouth. As Othello's

passion rises to madness, as the self-analysis becomes more and more

intimate and personal, we have Shakespeare's re-lived agony clothing

itself in his favourite terms of expression:

“O! it comes o'er my memory,

As doth the raven o'er the infected house,

Boding to all,--he had my handkerchief.”

The interest swings still higher; the scene in which Iago uses Cassio's

conceit and laughter to exasperate further the already mad Othello is

one of the notable triumphs of dramatic art. But just as the quick

growth of his jealousy, and its terrible sensuality, have shown us that

Othello is not the self-contained master of his passions that he

pretends to be and that Shakespeare wishes us to believe, so this scene,

in which the listening Othello rages in savagery, reveals to us an

intense femininity of nature. For generally the man concentrates his

hatred upon the woman who deceives him, and is only disdainful of his

rival, whereas the woman for various reasons gives herself to hatred of

her rival, and feels only angry contempt for her lover's traitorism. But

Othello--or shall we not say Shakespeare?--discovers in the sincerest

ecstasy of this passion as much of the woman's nature as of the man's.

After seeing his handkerchief in Bianca's hands he asks:

“How shall I murder him, Iago?”

Manifestly, Shakespeare is thinking of Herbert and his base betrayal.

Othello would have Cassio thrown to the dogs, would have him “nine years

a-killing”; and though he adds that Desdemona shall “rot and perish and

be damned to-night,” immediately afterwards we see what an infinite

affection for her underlies his anger:

“O, the world hath not a sweeter creature: she might

lie by an emperor's side and command him tasks.”

And then Shakespeare uses his brains objectively, so to speak, to excuse

his persistent tenderness, and at once he reveals himself and proves to

us that he is thinking of Mary Fitton, and not of poor Desdemona:

“Hang her! I do but say what she is.--So delicate with her needle!--An

admirable musician! O, she will sing the savageness out of a bear.--Of

so high and plenteous wit and invention.”

Shakespeare himself speaks in this passage. For when has Desdemona shown

high and plenteous wit or invention? She is hardly more than a symbol of

constancy. It is Mary Fitton who has “wit and invention,” and is “an

admirable musician.”

The feminine tenderness in Shakespeare comes to perfect expression in

the next lines; no woman has a more enduring affection:

“_Iago_. She's the worse for all this.

_Oth_. O! a thousand, a thousand times. And, then of so gentle a

condition!

_Iago_. Ay, too gentle.

_Oth_. Nay, that's certain:--but yet the pity of it, Iago!--O,

Iago, the pity of it, Iago!”

The tenderness shrills to such exquisite poignancy that it becomes a

universal cry, the soul's lament for traitorism: “The pity of it, Iago!

O, Iago, the pity of it!” Othello's jealous passion is at its height in

the scene with Desdemona when he gives his accusations precise words,

and flings money to Emilia as the guilty confidante. And yet even here,

where he delights to soil his love, his tenderness reaches its most

passionate expression:

“O thou weed,

Who art so lovely fair, and smell'st so sweet,

That the sense aches at thee--would thou hadst ne'er

been born!”

As soon as jealousy reaches its end, and passes into revenge,

Shakespeare tries to get back into Othello the captain again. Othello's

first speech in the bedchamber is clear enough in all conscience, but it

has been so mangled by unintelligent actors such as Salvini that it

cries for explanation. Every one will remember how Salvini and others

playing this part stole into the room like murderers, and then bellowed

so that they would have waked the dead. And when the foolish mummers

were criticised for thus misreading the character, they answered boldly

that Othello was a Moor, that his passion was Southern, and I know not

what besides. It is clear that Shakespeare's Othello enters the room

quietly as a justicer with a duty to perform: he keeps his resolution to

the sticking-point by thinking of the offence; he says solemnly:

“It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul--”

and, Englishman-like, finds a moral reason for his intended action:

“Yet she must die, else she'll betray more men.”

But the reason fades and the resolution wavers in the passion for her

“body and beauty,” and the tenderness of the lover comes to hearing

again:

“[_Kissing her_.”] O balmy breath, that dost almost persuade

Justice to break her sword!--one more, one more.--

Be thus when thou art dead, and I will kill thee,

And love thee after.--One more, and this the last.

So sweet was ne'er so fatal. I must weep,

But they are cruel tears; this sorrow's heavenly;

It strikes where it doth love.--She wakes.”

So gentle a murderer was never seen save Macbeth, and the “heavenly

sorrow” that strikes where it doth love is one of the best examples in

literature of the Englishman's capacity for hypocritical self-deception.

The subsequent dialogue shows us in Othello the short, plain phrases of

immitigable resolution; in this scene Shakespeare comes nearer to

realizing strength than anywhere else in all his work. But even here his

nature shows itself; Othello has to be misled by Desdemona's weeping,

which he takes to be sorrow for Cassio's death, before he can pass to

action, and as soon as the murder is accomplished, he regrets:

“O, insupportable! O heavy hour!”

His frank avowal, however, is excellently characteristic of the soldier

Othello:

“'Twas I that killed her.”

A moment later there is a perfect poetic expression of his love:

“Nay, had she been true

If Heaven would make me such another world

Of one entire and perfect chrysolite,

I'd not have sold her for it.”

Then comes a revelation of sensuality and physical fastidiousness so

peculiar that by itself it proves much of what I have said of

Shakespeare:

“_Oth. ... Ay 'twas he that told me first;

An honest man he is, and hates the slime

That sticks on filthy deeds.”

For a breathing-space now before he is convinced of his fatal error,

Othello speaks as the soldier, but in spite of the fact that he has

fulfilled his revenge, and should be at his sincerest, we have no word

of profound self-revealing. But as soon as he realizes his mistake, his

regret becomes as passionate as a woman's and magical in expression:

“Cold, cold, my girl!

Even like thy chastity.”

Another proof that Shakespeare discards the captain, Othello, in order

to give utterance to his own jealousy and love, is to be found in the

similarity between this speech of Othello and the corresponding speech

of Posthumus in “Cymbeline.” As soon as Posthumus is convinced of his

mistake, he calls Iachimo “Italian fiend” and himself “most credulous

fool,” “egregious murderer,” and so forth. He asks for “some upright

justicer” to punish him as he deserves with “cord or knife or poison,”

nay, he will have “torturers ingenious.” He then praises Imogen as “the

temple of virtue,” and again shouts curses at himself and finally calls

upon his love:

“O Imogen!

My queen, my life, my wife! O Imogen,

Imogen, Imogen!”

Othello behaves in precisely the same manner; he calls Iago that

“demi-devil,” and himself “an honourable murderer”; and Iago calls him a

“credulous fool.” Othello, too, cries for punishment; instead of

“torturers ingenious,” he will have “devils” to “whip” him, and “roast

him in sulphur.” He praises Desdemona as chaste, “ill-starred wench,”

“my girl,” and so forth; then curses himself lustily and ends his lament

with the words:

“O Desdemon! dead, Desdemon! dead! O!”

The same changes in mood, the same words even--the likeness is so close

that it can only be explained as I have explained it; from beginning to

end of “Cymbeline” Posthumus is Shakespeare, and as soon as jealousy,

pity, remorse, or any tender emotion seizes Othello he becomes

Shakespeare too, and speaks with Shakespeare's voice.

From here on, it is all good work if not great work to Othello's last

speech, which merits particular consideration. He begins as the captain,

but soon passes into the poet; and then towards the end talks again in

quick measure as the man of action. I quote the whole speech, [Footnote:

This speech is curiously like the long speech of Richard II. which I

have already noticed; at the beginning Shakespeare speaks as a king for

a few lines, then naturally as a poet, and at the end pulls himself up

and tries to resume the character.] putting into italics the phrases in

which the poet betrays himself:

“_Oth_. Soft you; a word or two, before you go.

I have done the State some service, and they know it;

No more of that.--_I pray you_ in your letters,

When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,

Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,

Nor set down aught in malice; then must you speak

_Of one that loved not wisely, but too well;

Of one not easily jealous, but being wrought

Perplexed in the extreme; of one whose hand,

Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away

Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdued eyes,

Albeit unuséd to the melting mood,

Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees

Their medicinal gum._ Set you down this;

And say, besides, that in Aleppo once,

When a malignant and a turban'd Turk

Beat a Venetian, and traduced the State,

I took by the throat the circumcized dog

And smote him--thus.”

All the memorable words here are the words of the gentle poet revealing

his own nature ingenuously. The relief given by tears is exquisitely

expressed, but the relief itself is a feminine experience; men usually

find that tears humiliate them, and take refuge from their scalding

shame in anger. The deathless phrases of the poet's grief must be

contrasted with the braggart mouthings of the captain at the end in

order to realize how impossible it was for Shakespeare to depict a man

of deeds.

In the first two acts Shakespeare has tried to present Othello with some

sincerity and truth to the dramatic fiction. But as soon as jealousy

touches Othello, he becomes the transparent vessel of Shakespeare's own

emotion, and is filled with it as with his heart's blood. All the

magical phrases in the play are phrases of jealousy, passion, and pity.

The character of the captain in Othello is never deeply realized. It is

a brave sketch, but, after all, only the merest sketch when compared

with Hamlet or Macbeth. We know what they thought of life and death, and

of all things in the world and over it; but what do we know of Othello's

thoughts upon the deepest matters that concern man? Did he believe even

in his stories to Desdemona?--in the men whose heads do grow beneath

their shoulders? in his magic handkerchief? in what Iago calls his

“fantastical lies”? This, I submit, is another important indication that

Shakespeare drew Othello, the captain, from the outside; the jealous,

tender heart of him is Shakespeare's, but take that away and we scarcely

know more of him than the colour of his skin. What interests us in

Othello is not his strength, but his weakness, Shakespeare's

weakness--his passion and pity, his torture, rage, jealousy and remorse,

the successive stages of his soul's Calvary!

CHAPTER IX. DRAMAS OF LUST: PART I. _Troilus and Cressida_

“He probed from hell to hell

Of human passions, but of love deflowered

His wisdom was not....”

--_Meredith's Sonnet on Shakespeare_.

With “Hamlet” and his dreams of an impossible revenge Shakespeare got

rid of some of the perilous stuff which his friend's traitorism had bred

in him. In “Othello” he gave deathless expression to the madness of his

jealous rage and so cleared his soul, to some extent, of that poisonous

infection. But passion in Shakespeare survived hatred of the betrayer

and jealousy of him; he had quickly finished with Herbert; but Mary

Fitton lived still for him and tempted him perpetually--the lust of the

flesh, the desire of the eye, insatiable, cruel as the grave. He will

now portray his mistress for us dramatically--unveil her very soul, show

the gipsy-wanton as she is. He who has always painted in high lights is

now going to paint French fashion, in blackest shadows, for with the

years his passion and his bitterness have grown in intensity. Mary

Fitton is now “false Cressid.” Pandarus says of her in the first scene

of the first act:

“An her hair were not somewhat darker than Helen's--well,

go to--there were no more comparison between

the women.”

Mary Fitton's hair, we know, was raven-black, but the evidence

connecting Shakespeare's mistress with “false Cressid” is stronger, as

we shall see, than any particular line or expression.

“Troilus and Cressida” is a wretched, invertebrate play without even a

main current of interest. Of course there are fine phrases in it, as in

most of the productions of Shakespeare's maturity; but the

characterization is worse than careless, and at first one wonders why

Shakespeare wrote the tedious, foolish stuff except to get rid of his

own bitterness in the railing of Thersites, and in the depicting of

Cressida's shameless wantonness. It is impossible to doubt that “false

Cressid” was meant for Mary Fitton. The moment she appears the play

begins to live; personal bitterness turns her portrait into a

caricature; every fault is exaggerated and lashed with rage; it is not

so much a drama as a scene where Shakespeare insults his mistress.

Let us look at this phase of his passion in perspective. Almost as soon

as he became acquainted with Miss Fitton, about Christmas 1597,

Shakespeare wrote of her as a wanton; yet so long as she gave herself to

him he appears to have been able to take refuge in his tenderness and

endure her strayings. But passion in him grew with what it fed on, and

after she faulted with Lord Herbert, we find him in a sonnet threatening

her that his “pity-wanting pain” may induce him to write of her as she

was. No doubt her pride and scornful strength revolted under this

treatment and she drew away from him. Tortured by desire he would then

praise her with some astonishing phrases; call her “the heart's blood of

beauty, love's invisible soul,” and after some hesitation she would

yield again. No sooner was the “ruined love” rebuilt than she would

offend again, and again he would curse and threaten, and so the

wretched, half-miserable, half-ecstatic life of passion stormed along,

one moment in Heaven, the next in Hell.

All the while Shakespeare was longing, or thought he was longing for

truth and constancy, and at length he gave form and name to his desire

for winnowed purity of love and perfect constancy, and this consoling

but impalpable ideal he called Ophelia, Desdemona, Cordelia. But again

and again Miss Fitton reconquered him and at length his accumulated

bitterness compelled him to depict his mistress realistically. Cressida

is his first attempt, the first dramatic portrait of the mistress who

got into Shakespeare's blood and infected the current of his being, and

the portrait is spoiled by the poet's hatred and contempt just as the

whole drama is spoiled by a passion of bitterness that is surely the

sign of intense personal suffering. Cressida is depicted as a vile

wanton, a drab by nature; but it is no part even of this conception to

make her soulless and devilish. On the contrary, an artist of

Shakespeare's imaginative sympathy loves to put in high relief the grain

of good in things evil and the taint of evil in things good that give

humanity its curious complexity. Shakespeare observed this rule of

dramatic presentation more consistently than any of his predecessors or

contemporaries--more consistently, more finely far than Homer or

Sophocles, whose heroes had only such faults as their creators thought

virtues; why then did he forget nature so far as to picture “false

Cressida” without a redeeming quality? He first shows her coquetting

with Troilus, and her coquetry even is unattractive, shallow, and

obvious; then she gives herself to Troilus out of passionate desire; but

Shakespeare omits to tell us why she takes up with Diomedes immediately

afterwards. We are to understand merely that she is what Ulysses calls a

“sluttish spoil of opportunity,” and “daughter of the game.” But as

passionate desire is not of necessity faithless we are distressed and

puzzled by her soulless wantonness. And when she goes on to present

Diomedes with the scarf that Troilus gave her, we revolt; the woman is

too full of blood to be so entirely heartless. Here is the scene

embittered by the fact that Troilus witnesses Cressida's betrayal:

“_Diomedes._ I had your heart before, this follows it.

_Troilus._ [_Aside._] I did swear patience.

_Cressida._ You shall not have it, Diomed, faith you shall not;

I'll give you something else.

_Diomedes._ I will have this: whose was it?

_Cressida._ It is no matter.

_Diomedes._ Come, tell me whose it was?

_Cressida_. 'Twas one that loved me better than you will,

But, now you have it, take it.”

The scene is a splendid dramatic scene, a piece torn from life, so

realistic that it convinces, and yet we revolt; we feel that we have not

got to the heart of the mystery. There is so much evil in Cressida that

we want to see the spark of goodness in her, however fleeting and

ineffective the spark may be. But Shakespeare makes her attempt at

justification a confession of absolute faithlessness:

“Troilus, farewell! one eye yet looks on thee,

But with my heart the other eye doth see.

Ah! poor our sex! This fault in us I find,

The error of our eye directs our mind.”

This is plainly Shakespeare's reflection and not Cressida's apology, and

if we contrast this speech with the dialogue given above, it becomes

plain, I think, that the terrible scene with Diomedes is taken from

life, or is at least Shakespeare's vision of the way Mary Fitton

behaved. There's a magic in those devilish words of Cressida that

outdoes imagination:

“'Twas one that loved me better than you will,

But, now you have it, take it.”

And then:

“Sweet, honey Greek, tempt me no more to folly:”

The very power of the characterization makes the traitress hateful. If

Mary Fitton ever gave any gift of Shakespeare to Lord Herbert, the

dramatist should have known that she no longer loved him, had in reality

already forgotten him in her new passion; but to paint a woman as

remembering a lover, indeed as still loving him, and yet as giving his

gift to another, is an offence in art though it may be true to nature.

It is a fault in art because it is impossible to motive it in a few

lines. The fact of the gift is bad enough; without explanation it is

horrible. For this and other reasons I infer that Shakespeare took the

fact from his own experience: he had suffered, it seems to me, from some

such traitorism on the part of his mistress, or he ascribed to Mary

Fitton some traitorism of his own.

In sonnet 122 he finds weighty excuse for having given away the

table-book which his friend had given to him. His own confessed

shortcoming might have taught him to exercise more lenient judgment

towards his frail love.

But when Shakespeare wrote “Troilus and Cressida” a passion of

bitterness possessed him; he not only vilified Cressida but all the

world, Agamemnon, Nestor, Achilles, Ajax; he seems indeed to have taken

more pleasure in the railing of Thersites than in any other part of the

work except the scourging of Cressida. He shocks us by the picture of

Achilles and his myrmidons murdering Hector when they come upon him

unarmed.

One or two incidental difficulties must be settled before we pass to a

greater play.

“Troilus and Cressida” has always been regarded as a sort of enigma.

Professor Dowden asks: “With what intention and in what spirit did

Shakespeare write this strange comedy? All the Greek heroes who fought

against Troy are pitilessly exposed to ridicule?” And from this fact and

the bitterness of “Timon” some German critics have drawn the inference

that Shakespeare was incapable of comprehending Greek life, and that

indeed he only realized his Romans so perfectly because the Roman was

very like the Briton in his mastery of practical affairs, of the details

of administration and of government. This is an excellent instance of

German prejudice. No one could have been better fitted than Shakespeare

to understand Greek civilization and Greek art with its supreme love of

plastic beauty, but his master Plutarch gave him far better pictures of

Roman life than of Greek life, partly because Plutarch lived in the time

of Roman domination and partly because he was in far closer sympathy

with the masters of practical affairs than with artists in stone like

Phidias or artists in thought like Plato. The true explanation of

Shakespeare's caricatures of Greek life, whether Homeric or Athenian, is

to be found in the fact that he was not only entirely ignorant of it but

prejudiced against it. And this prejudice in him had an obvious root.

Chapman had just translated and published the first books of his Iliad,

and Chapman was the poet whom Shakespeare speaks of as his rival in

Sonnets 78-86. He cannot help smiling at the “strained touches” of

Chapman's rhetoric and his heavy learning. Those who care to remember

the first scene of “Love's Labour's Lost” will recall how Shakespeare in

that early work mocked at learning and derided study. When he first

reached London he was no doubt despised for his ignorance of Greek and

Latin; he had had to bear the sneers and flouts of the many who

appraised learning, an university training and gentility above genius.

He took the first opportunity of answering his critics:

“Small have continual plodders ever won,

Save bare authority from others' books.”

But the taunts rankled, and when the bitter days came of disappointment

and disillusion he took up that Greek life which his rival had tried to

depict in its fairest colours, and showed what he thought was the seamy

side of it. But had he known anything of Greek life and Greek art it

would have been his pleasure to outdo his rival by giving at once a

truer and a fairer presentation of Greece than Chapman could conceive.

It is the rivalry of Chapman that irritates Shakespeare into pouring

contempt on Greek life in “Troilus and Cressida.” As Chapman was for the

Greeks, Shakespeare took sides with the Trojans.

But why do I assume that “Troilus and Cressida” is earlier than “Antony

and Cleopatra?” Some critics, and among them Dr. Brandes, place it

later, and they have some reason for their belief. The bitterness in

“Troilus and Cressida,” they say rightly, is more intense; and as

Shakespeare's disappointment with men and things appears to have

increased from “Hamlet” to “Timon,” or from 1602 to 1607-8, they put the

bitterer play later. Cogent as is this reasoning, I cannot believe that

Shakespeare could have painted Cressida after having painted Cleopatra.

The same model has evidently served for both women; but while Cleopatra

is perhaps the most superb portrait of a courtesan in all literature,

Cressida is a crude and harsh sketch such as a Dumas or a Pinero might

have conceived.

It is more than probable, I think, that “Troilus and Cressida” was

planned and the love-story at least written about 1603, while

Shakespeare's memory of one of his mistress's betrayals was still vivid

and sharp. The play was taken up again four or five years later and the

character of Ulysses deepened and strengthened. In this later revision

the outlook is so piercing-sad, the phrases of such pregnancy, that the

work must belong to Shakespeare's ripest maturity. Moreover, he has

grown comparatively careless of characterization as in all his later

work; he gives his wise sayings almost as freely to Achilles as to

Ulysses.

“Troilus and Cressida” is interesting because it establishes the opinion

that Chapman was indeed the rival poet whom Shakespeare referred to in

the sonnets, and especially because it shows us the poet's mistress

painted in a rage of erotic passion so violent that it defeats itself,

and the portrait becomes an incredible caricature--that way madness

lies. “Troilus and Cressida” points to “Lear” and “Timon.”

CHAPTER X. DRAMAS OF LUST: PART II. _Antony and Cleopatra_

We now come to the finest work of Shakespeare's maturity, to the drama

in which his passion for Mary Fitton finds supreme expression.

“Antony and Cleopatra” is an astonishing production not yet fairly

appreciated even in England, and perhaps not likely to be appreciated

anywhere at its full worth for many a year to come. But when we English

have finally left that dark prison of Puritanism and lived for some time

in the sun-light where the wayside crosses are hidden under climbing

roses, we shall probably couple “Antony and Cleopatra” with “Hamlet” in

our love as Shakespeare's supremest works. It was fitting that the same

man who wrote “Romeo and Juliet,” the incomparable symphony of first

love, should also write “Antony and Cleopatra,” the far more wonderful

and more terrible tragedy of mature passion.

Let us begin with the least interesting part of the play, and we shall

see that all the difficulties in it resolve themselves as soon as we

think of it as Shakespeare's own confession. Wherever he leaves

Plutarch, it is to tell his own story.

Some critics have reproached Shakespeare with the sensualism of “Romeo

and Juliet”; no one, so far as I can remember, has blamed the Sapphic

intensity of “Antony and Cleopatra,” where the lust of the flesh and

desire of the eye reign triumphant. Professor Dowden indeed says: “The

spirit of the play, though superficially it appear voluptuous, is

essentially severe. That is to say, Shakespeare is faithful to the

fact.” Antony and Cleopatra kill themselves, forsooth, and thus

conventional virtue is justified by self-murder. So superficial and

false a judgement is a quaint example of mid-Victorian taste: it reminds

me of the horsehair sofa and the antimacassar. Would Professor Dowden

have had Shakespeare alter the historical facts, making Antony conquer

Caesar and Cleopatra triumph over death? Would this have been sufficient

to prove to the professor that Shakespeare's morals are not his, and

that the play is certainly the most voluptuous in modern literature?

Well, this is just what Shakespeare has done. Throughout the play Caesar

is a subordinate figure while Antony is the protagonist and engages all

our sympathies; whenever they meet Antony shows as the larger, richer,

more generous nature. In every act he conquers Caesar; leaving on us the

gorgeous ineffaceable impression of a great personality whose superb

temperament moves everyone to admiration and love; Caesar, on the other

hand, affects one as a calculating machine.

But Shakespeare's fidelity to the fact is so extraordinary that he gives

Caesar one speech which shows his moral superiority to Antony. When his

sister weeps on hearing that Antony has gone back to Cleopatra, Caesar

bids her dry her tears,

...

But let determined things to destiny

Hold unbewailed their way ...”

This line alone suffices to show why Antony was defeated; the force of

imperial Rome is in the great phrase; but Shakespeare will not admit his

favourite's inferiority, and in order to explain Antony's defeat

Shakespeare represents luck as being against him, luck or fate, and this

is not the only or even the chief proof of the poet's partiality.

Pompey, who scarcely notices Caesar when Antony is by, says of Antony:

“his soldiership

Is twice the other twain.”

And, indeed, Antony in the play appears to be able to beat Caesar

whenever he chooses or whenever he is not betrayed.

All the personages of the play praise Antony, and when he dies the most

magnificent eulogy of him is pronounced by Agrippa, Caesar's friend:

“A rarer spirit never

Did steer humanity; but you, Gods, will give us

Some faults to make us men.”

Antony is even permitted at the last to console himself; he declares

exultantly that in the other world the ghosts shall come to gaze at him

and Cleopatra, and:

“Dido and her Aeneas shall want troops.”

Shakespeare makes conquering Caesar admit the truth of this boast:

“No grave upon the earth shall clip in it

A pair so famous.”

To win in life universal admiration and love, and in death imperishable

renown, is to succeed in spite of failure and suicide, and this is the

lesson which Shakespeare read into Plutarch's story. Even Enobarbus is

conquered at the last by Antony's noble magnanimity. But why does

Shakespeare show this extraordinary, this extravagant liking for him who

was “the bellows and the fan to cool a gipsy's lust,” for that Marc

Antony who might have been the master of the world, and who threw away

empire, life, and honour to be “a strumpet's fool?” There is only one

possible explanation: Shakespeare felt the most intense, the most

intimate sympathy with Antony because he, too, was passion's slave, and

had himself experienced with his dark mistress, Mary Fitton, the

ultimate degradation of lust. For this reason he took Plutarch's

portrait of Antony, and, by emphasizing the kingly traits, transformed

it. In the play, as Dr. Brandes sees, Antony takes on something of the

“artist-nature.” It is Antony's greatness and weakness; the spectacle of

a high intellect struggling with an overpowering sensuality; of a noble

nature at odds with passionate human frailty, that endeared him to

Shakespeare. The pomp of Antony's position, too, and his kingly

personality pleased our poet. As soon as Shakespeare reached maturity,

he began to depict himself as a monarch; from “Twelfth Night” on he

assumed royal state in his plays, and surely in this figure of Antony he

must for the moment have satisfied his longing for regal magnificence

and domination. From the first scene to the last Antony is a king of men

by right divine of nature.

It is, however, plain that Antony's pride, his superb mastery of life,

the touch of imperious brutality in him, are all traits taken from

Plutarch, and are indeed wholly inconsistent with Shakespeare's own

character. Had Shakespeare possessed these qualities his portraits of

men of action would have been infinitely better than they are, while his

portraits of the gentle thinker and lover of the arts, his Hamlets and

his Dukes, would have been to seek.

The personal note of every one of his great tragedies is that

Shakespeare feels he has failed in life, failed lamentably. His Brutus,

we feel, failed of necessity because of his aloofness from practical

life; his Coriolanus, too, had to fail, and almost forgoes sympathy by

his faults; but this Antony ought not to have failed: we cannot

understand why the man leaves the sea-battle to follow Cleopatra's

flight, who but an act or two before, with lesser reason, realized his

danger and was able to break off from his enchantress. Yet the passion

of desire that sways Antony is so splendidly portrayed; is, too, so

dominant in all of us, that we accept it at once as explaining the

inexplicable.

In measure as Shakespeare ennobled Antony, the historical fact of

ultimate defeat and failure allowed him to degrade Cleopatra. And this

he did willingly enough, for from the moment he took up the subject he

identified the Queen of Egypt with his own faithless mistress, Mary

Fitton, whom he had already tried to depict as “false Cressid.” This

identification of himself and his own experience of passion with the

persons and passions of the story explains some of the faults of the

drama; while being the source, also, of its singular splendour.

In this play we have the finest possible example of the strife between

Shakespeare's yielding poetic temperament and the severity of his

intellect. He heaps praises on Antony, as we have seen, from all sides;

he loved the man as a sort of superb _alter ego_, and yet his

intellectual fairness is so extraordinary that it compelled him to

create a character who should uphold the truth even against his heart's

favourite. Dr. Brandes speaks of Enobarbus as a “sort of chorus”; he is

far more than that; he is the intellectual conscience of the play, a

weight, so to speak, to redress the balance which Shakespeare used this

once and never again. What a confession this is of personal partiality!

A single instance will suffice to prove my point: Shakespeare makes

Antony cast the blame for the flight at Actium on Cleopatra, and manages

almost to hide the unmanly weakness of the plaint by its infinitely

pathetic wording:

“Whither hast them led me, Egypt?

A little later Cleopatra asks:

“Is Antony or we in fault for this?”

and at once Enobarbus voices the exact truth:

“Antony only, that would make his will

Lord of his reason. What though you fled

. . . . . .

. . . why should he follow?”

Again and again Antony reproaches Cleopatra, and again and again

Enobarbus is used to keep the truth before us. Some of these reproaches,

it seems to me, are so extravagant and so ill-founded that they discover

the personal passion of the poet. For example, Antony insults Cleopatra:

“You have been a boggler ever.”

And the proof forsooth is:

“I found you as a morsel cold upon

Dead Caesar's trencher.”

But to have been Caesar's mistress was Cleopatra's chief title to fame.

Shakespeare is here probably reviling Mary Fitton for being deserted by

some early lover. Curiously enough, this weakness of Antony increases

the complexity of his character, while the naturalistic passion of his

words adds enormously to the effect of the play. Again and again in this

drama Shakespeare's personal vindictiveness serves an artistic purpose.

The story of “Troilus and Cressida” is in itself low and vile, and when

loaded with Shakespeare's bitterness outrages probability; but the love

of Antony and Cleopatra is so overwhelming that it goes to ruin and

suicide and beyond, and when intensified by Shakespeare's personal

feeling becomes a world's masterpiece.

We have already seen that the feminine railing Shakespeare puts in the

mouth of Antony increases the realistic effect, and just in the same way

the low cunning, temper, and mean greed which he attributes to

Cleopatra, transform her from a somewhat incomprehensible historical

marionette into the most splendid specimen of the courtesan in the

world's literature. Heine speaks of her contemptuously as a “kept

woman,” but the epithet only shows how Heine in default of knowledge

fell back on his racial gift of feminine denigration. Even before she

enters we see that Shakespeare has not forgiven his dark scornful

mistress; Cleopatra is the finest picture he ever painted of Mary

Fitton; but Antony's friends tell us, at the outset, she is a “lustful

gipsy,” a “strumpet,” and at first she merely plays on Antony's

manliness; she sends for him, and when he comes, departs. A little later

she sends again, telling her messenger:

“I did not send you: if you find him sad,

Say, I am dancing; if in mirth, report

That I am sudden sick: quick, and return.”

And when Charmian, her woman, declares that the way to keep a man is to

“cross him in nothing,” she replies scornfully:

“Thou teachest, like a fool, the way to lose him.”

She uses a dozen taunts to prevent her lover from leaving her; but when

she sees him resolved, she wishes him victory and success. And so

through a myriad changes of mood and of cunning wiles we discover that

love for Antony which is the anchor to her unstable nature.

The scene with the eunuch Mardian is a little gem. She asks:

“Hast thou affections?

_Mar_. Yes, gracious madam.

_Cleo_. Indeed?

_Mar_. Not in deed, madam; for I can do nothing.

But what indeed is honest to be done;

Yet have I fierce affections, and think

What Venus did with Mars.

_Cleo_. O, Charmian!

Where think'st thou he is now? Stands he, or sits he?”

She is with her lover again, and recalls his phrase for her, “my serpent

of old Nile,” and feeds herself with love's “delicious poison.”

No sooner does she win our sympathy by her passion for Antony than

Shakespeare chills our admiration by showing her as the courtesan:

“_Cleo_. Did I, Charmian,

Ever love Caesar so?

_Char_. O, that brave Caesar!

_Cleo_. Be choked with such another emphasis!

Say, the brave Antony.

_Char_. The valiant Caesar!

_Cleo_. By Isis, I will give thee bloody teeth

If thou with Caesar paragon again

My man of men.

_Char_. By your most gracious pardon,

I sing but after you.

_Cleo_. My salad days,

When I was green in judgement: cold in blood,

To say as I said then!”

Already we see and know her, her wiles, her passion, her quick temper,

her chameleon-like changes, her subtle charms of person and of word, and

yet we have not reached the end of the first act. Next to Falstaff and

to Hamlet, Cleopatra is the most astonishing piece of portraiture in all

Shakespeare. Enobarbus gives the soul of her:

“_Ant_. She is cunning past man's thought.

_Eno_. Alack, sir, no; her passions are made of nothing

but the finest part of pure love....

_Ant_. Would I had never seen her!

_Eno_. O, sir, you had then left unseen a wonderful

piece of work; which not to have been blest withal would

have discredited your travel.”

Here Shakespeare gives his true opinion of Mary Fitton: then comes the

miraculous expression:

“Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale

Her infinite variety. Other women cloy

The appetites they feed; but she makes hungry

Where most she satisfies.”

Act by act Shakespeare makes the portrait more complex and more perfect.

In the second act she calls for music like the dark lady of the Sonnets:

“Music--moody food of us that trade in love,”

and then she'll have no music, but will play billiards, and not

billiards either, but will fish and think every fish caught an Antony.

And again she flies to memory:

“That time--O times!--

I laughed him out of patience; and that night

I laughed him into patience; and next morn,

Ere the ninth hour, I drunk him to his bed;

Then put my tires and mantles on him, whilst

I wore his sword Philippan.”

The charm of it all, the deathless charm and the astounding veracity!

The messenger enters, and she promises him for good news “gold and her

bluest veins to kiss.” When she hears that Antony is well she pours more

gold on him, but when he pauses in his recital she has a mind to strike

him. When he tells that Caesar and Antony are friends, it is a fortune

she'll give; but when she learns that Antony is betrothed to Octavia she

turns to her women with “I am pale, Charmian,” and when she hears that

Antony is married she flies into a fury, strikes the messenger down and

hales him up and down the room by his hair. When he runs from her knife

she sends for him:

“I will not hurt him.

These hands do lack nobility, that they strike

A meaner than myself.”

She has the fascination of great pride and the magic of manners. When

the messenger returns she is a queen again, most courteous-wise:

“Come hither, sir.

Though it be honest, it is never good

To bring bad news.”

She wants to know the features of Octavia, her years, her inclination,

the colour of her hair, her height--everything.

A most veracious full-length portrait, with the minute finish of a

miniature; it shows how Shakespeare had studied every fold and foible of

Mary Fitton's soul. In the third act Cleopatra takes up again the theme

of Octavia's appearance, only to run down her rival, and so salve her

wounded vanity and cheat her heart to hope. The messenger, too, who

lends himself to her humour now becomes a proper man. Shakespeare seizes

every opportunity to add another touch to the wonderful picture.

Cleopatra appears next in Antony's camp at Actium talking with

Enobarbus:

“_Cleo_. I will be even with thee, doubt it not.

_Eno_. But why, why, why?

_Cleo_. Thou hast forspoke my being in these wars,

And say'st it is not fit.”

Each phrase of the dialogue reveals her soul, dark fold on fold.

She is the only person who strengthens Antony in his quixotic-foolish

resolve to fight at sea.

“_Cleo_. I have sixty sails, Caesar none better.”

And then the shameful flight.

I have pursued this bald analysis thus far, not for pleasure merely, but

to show the miracle of that portraiture the traits of which can bear

examination one by one. So far Cleopatra is, as Enobarbus calls her, “a

wonderful piece of work,” a woman of women, inscrutable, cunning,

deceitful, prodigal, with a good memory for injuries, yet as quick to

forgiveness as to anger, a minion of the moon, fleeting as water yet

loving-true withal, a sumptuous bubble, whose perpetual vagaries are but

perfect obedience to every breath of passion. But now Shakespeare

without reason makes her faithless to Antony and to love. In the second

scene of the third act Thyreus comes to her with Caesar's message:

“_Thyr_. He knows that you embrace not Antony

As you did love but as you feared him.

_Cleo_. O!

_Thyr_. The scars upon your honour therefore he

Does pity as constrained blemishes,

Not as deserved.

_Cleo_. He is a god, and knows

What is most right. Mine honour was not yielded,

But conquered merely.

_Eno_. [_Aside_.] To be sure of that

I will ask Antony.--Sir, sir, thou'rt so leaky

That we must leave thee to thy sinking, for

Thy dearest quit thee.”

And when Thyreus asks her to leave Antony and put herself under Caesar's

protection, who “desires to give,” she tells him:

“I am prompt

To lay my crown at his feet, and there to kneel.”

Thyreus then asks for grace to lay his duty on her hand. She gives it to

him with the words:

“Your Caesar's father oft,

When he hath mused of taking kingdoms in,

Bestowed his lips on that unworthy place

As it rained kisses.”

It is as if Antony were forgotten, clean wiped from her mind. The whole

scene is a libel upon Cleopatra and upon womanhood. When betrayed, women

are faithless out of anger, pique, desire of revenge; they are faithless

out of fear, out of ambition, for fancy's sake--for fifty motives, but

not without motive. It would have been easy to justify this scene. All

the dramatist had to do was to show us that Cleopatra, a proud woman and

scorned queen, could not forget Antony's faithlessness in leaving her to

marry Octavia; but she never mentions Octavia, never seems to remember

her after she has got Antony back. This omission, too, implies a slur

upon her. Nor does she kiss Caesar's “conquering hand” out of fear.

Thyreus has told her it would please Caesar if she would make of his

fortunes a staff to lean upon; she has no fear, and her ambitions are

wreathed round Antony: Caesar has nothing to offer that can tempt her,

as we shall see later. The scene is a libel upon her. The more one

studies it, the clearer it becomes that Shakespeare wrote it out of

wounded personal feeling. Cleopatra's prototype, Mary Fitton, had

betrayed him again and again, and the faithlessness rankled. Cleopatra,

therefore, shall be painted as faithless, without cause, as Cressid was,

from incurable vice of nature. Shakespeare tried to get rid of his

bitterness in this way, and if his art suffered, so much the worse for

his art. Curiously enough, in this instance, for reasons that will

appear later, the artistic effect is deepened.

The conclusion of this scene, where Thyreus is whipped and Cleopatra

overwhelmed with insults by Antony, does not add much to our knowledge

of Cleopatra's character: one may notice, however, that it is the

reproach of cold-heartedness that she catches up to answer. The scene

follows in which she plays squire to Antony and helps to buckle on his

armour. But this scene (invented by Shakespeare), which might bring out

the sweet woman-weakness in her, and so reconcile us to her again, is

used against her remorselessly by the poet. When Antony wakes and cries

for his armour she begs him to “sleep a little”; the touch is natural

enough, but coming after her faithlessness to her lover and her

acceptance of Caesar it shows more than human frailty. It is plain that,

intent upon ennobling Antony, Shakespeare is willing to degrade

Cleopatra beyond nature. Then comes Antony's victory, and his passion at

length finds perfect lyrical expression:

“O thou day o' the world,

Chain mine armed neck; leap thou, attire and all,

Through proof of harness to my heart, and there

Ride on the pants triumphing.”

At once Cleopatra catches fire with that responsive flame of womanhood

which was surely her chiefest charm:

“Lord of lords!

O infinite virtue! Com'st thou smiling from

The world's great snare uncaught?”

What magic in the utterance, what a revelation of Cleopatra's character

and of Shakespeare's! To Cleopatra's feminine weakness the world seems

one huge snare which only cunning may escape.

Another day, and final irremediable defeat drives her in fear to the

monument and to that pretended suicide which is the immediate cause of

Antony's despair:

“Unarm, Eros: the long day's task is done,

And we must sleep.”

When Antony leaves the stage, Shakespeare's idealizing vision turns to

Cleopatra. About this point, too, the historical fact fetters

Shakespeare and forces him to realize the other side of Cleopatra. After

Antony's death Cleopatra did kill herself. One can only motive and

explain this suicide by self-immolating love. It is natural that at

first Shakespeare will have it that Cleopatra's nobility of nature is

merely a reflection, a light borrowed from Antony. She will not open the

monument to let the dying man enter, but her sincerity and love enable

us to forgive this:

“I dare not, dear,--

Dear my lord, pardon,--I dare not,

Lest I be taken....”

Here occurs a fault of taste which I find inexplicable. While Cleopatra

and her women are drawing Antony up, he cries;

“O quick, or I am gone.”

And Cleopatra answers:

“Here's sport, indeed!--How heavy weighs my lord!

Our strength has all gone into heaviness,

That makes the weight.”

The “Here's sport, indeed”! seems to me a terrible fault, an inexcusable

lapse of taste. I should like to think it a misprint or misreading, but

it is unfortunately like Shakespeare in a certain mood, possible to him,

at least, here as elsewhere.

Cleopatra's lament over Antony's dead body is a piece of Shakespeare's

self-revealing made lyrical by beauty of word and image. The allusion to

his boy-rival, Pembroke, is unmistakable; for women are not contemptuous

of youth:

“Young boys and girls

Are level now with men; the odds is gone,

And there is nothing left remarkable

Beneath the visiting moon.”

When Cleopatra comes to herself after swooning, her anger is

characteristic because wholly unexpected; it is one sign more that

Shakespeare had a living model in his mind:

“It were for me

To throw my sceptre at the injurious gods;

To tell them that this world did equal theirs

Till they had stolen our jewel. All's but naught.”

Her resolve to kill herself is borrowed:

“We'll bury him; and then, what's brave, what's noble,

Let's do it after the high Roman fashion,

And make death proud to take us.”

But the resolution holds:

“It is great

To do that thing that ends all other deeds,

Which shackles accidents and bolts up change.”

It is this greatness of soul in Cleopatra which Shakespeare has now to

portray. Caesar's messenger, Proculeius, whom Antony has told her to

trust, promises her everything in return for her “sweet dependency.” On

being surprised she tries to kill herself, and when disarmed shows again

that characteristic petulant anger:

“Sir, I will eat no meat, I'll not drink, sir;

. . . . . This mortal house I'll ruin,

Do Caesar what he can.”

And her reasons are all of pride and hatred of disgrace. She'll not be

“chastised with the sober eye of dull Octavia,” nor shown “to the

shouting varletry of censuring Rome.” Her imagination is at work now,

that quick forecast of the mind that steels her desperate resolve:

“Rather on Nilus' mud

Lay me stark nak'd, and let the water-flies

Blow me into abhorring.”

The heroic mood passes. She tries to deceive Caesar as to her wealth,

and is shamed by her treasurer Seleucus. The scene is appalling; poor

human nature stripped to the skin--all imperfections exposed; Cleopatra

cheating, lying, raging like a drab; her words to Seleucus are merciless

while self-revealing:

“O slave, of no more trust

Than love that's hired.”

This scene deepens and darkens the impression made by her unmotived

faithlessness to Antony. It is, however, splendidly characteristic and I

think needful; but it renders that previous avowal of faithlessness to

Antony altogether superfluous, the sole fault in an almost perfect

portrait. For, as I have said already, Shakespeare's mistakes in

characterization nearly always spring from his desire to idealize; but

here his personal vindictiveness comes to help his art. The historical

fact compels him now to give his harlot, Cleopatra, heroic attributes;

in spite of Caesar's threats to treat her sons severely if she dares to

take her own life and thus deprive his triumph of its glory, she outwits

him and dies a queen, a worthy descendant, as Charmian says, of “many

royal kings.” Nothing but personal bitterness could have prevented

Shakespeare from idealizing such a woman out of likeness to humanity.

But in this solitary and singular case his personal suffering bound him

to realism though the history justified idealization. The high lights

were for once balanced by the depths of shadow, and a masterpiece was

the result.

Shakespeare leaves out Caesar's threats to put Cleopatra's sons to

death; had he used these menaces he would have made Caesar more natural

in my opinion, given a touch of characteristic brutality to the

calculating intellect; but he omitted them probably because he felt that

Cleopatra's pedestal was high enough without that addition.

The end is very characteristic of Shakespeare's temper. Caesar becomes

nobly generous; he approves Cleopatra's wisdom in swearing falsehoods

about her treasure; he will not reckon with her like “a merchant,” and

Cleopatra herself puts on the royal robes, and she who has played wanton

before us so long becomes a queen of queens. And yet her character is

wonderfully maintained; no cunning can cheat this mistress of duplicity:

“He words me, girls, he words me that I should not

Be noble to myself.”

She holds to her heroic resolve; she will never be degraded before the

base Roman public; she will not see

“Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness.”

It is, perhaps, worth noting here that Shakespeare lends Cleopatra, as

he afterwards lent Coriolanus, his own delicate senses and neuropathic

loathing for mechanic slaves with “greasy aprons” and “thick breaths

rank of gross diet”; it is Shakespeare too and not Cleopatra who speaks

of death as bringing “liberty.” In “Cymbeline,” Shakespeare's mask

Posthumus dwells on the same idea. But these lapses are momentary; the

superb declaration that follows is worthy of the queen:

“My resolution's placed, and I have nothing

Of woman in me: now from head to foot

I am marble-constant; now the fleeting moon

No planet is of mine.”

The scene with the clown who brings the “pretty worm” is the solid

ground of reality on which Cleopatra rests for a breathing space before

rising into the blue:

“_Cleo_. Give me my robe, put on my crown; I have

Immortal longings in me. Now no more

The juice of Egypt's grape shall moist this lip.--

Yare, yare, good Iras! quick.--Methinks I hear

Antony call; I see him rouse himself

To praise my noble act; I hear him mock

The luck of Caesar, which the gods give men

To excuse their after-wrath. Husband, I come,

Now to that name my courage prove my title!

I am fire and air; my other elements

I give to baser life.”

The whole speech is miraculous in speed of mounting emotion, and when

Iras dies first, this Cleopatra finds again the perfect word in which

truth and beauty meet:

“This proves me base:

If she first meet the curled Antony

He'll make demand of her, and spend that kiss

Which is my heaven to have. Come, thou mortal wretch,

[_To the asp, which she applies to her breast_.]

With thy sharp teeth this knot intrinsicate

Of life at once untie: poor venomous fool,

Be angry, and despatch. O, could'st thou speak,

That I might hear thee call great Caesar, ass

Unpolicied!”

The characteristic high temper of Mary Fitton breaking out again--“ass

unpolicied”--and then the end:

“Peace, peace!

Dost thou not see my baby at my breast,

That sucks the nurse asleep?”

The final touch is of soft pleasure:

“As sweet a balm, as soft as air, as gentle,--

Antony!--Nay, I will take thee too.

[_Applying another asp to her arm_.]

What should I stay--”

For ever fortunate in her self-inflicted death Cleopatra thereby frees

herself from the ignominy of certain of her actions: she is woman at

once and queen, and if she cringes lower than other women, she rises,

too, to higher levels than other women know. The historical fact of her

self-inflicted death forced the poet to make false Cressid a

Cleopatra--and his wanton gipsy-mistress was at length redeemed by a

passion of heroic resolve. The majority of critics are still debating

whether indeed Cleopatra is the “dark lady” of the sonnets or not.

Professor Dowden puts forward the theory as a daring conjecture; but the

identity of the two cannot be doubted. It is impossible not to notice

that Shakespeare makes Cleopatra, who was a fair Greek, gipsy-dark like

his sonnet-heroine. He says, too, of the “dark lady” of the sonnets:

“Whence hast thou this becoming of things ill,

That in the very refuse of thy deeds

There is such strength and warrantise of skill,

That, in my mind, thy worst all best exceeds?”

Enobarbus praises Cleopatra in precisely the same words:

“Vilest things,

Become themselves in her.”

Antony, too, uses the same expression:

“Fie, wrangling queen!

Whom everything becomes--to chide, to laugh,

To weep; whose every passion fully strives

To make itself, in thee, fair and admired.”

These professors have no distinct mental image of the “dark lady” or of

Cleopatra, or they would never talk of “daring conjecture” in regard to

this simple identification. The points of likeness are numberless.

Ninety-nine poets and dramatists out of a hundred would have followed

Plutarch and made Cleopatra's love for Antony the mainspring of her

being, the _causa causans_ of her self-murder. Shakespeare does not

do this; he allows the love of Antony to count with her, but it is

imperious pride and hatred of degradation that compel his Cleopatra to

embrace the Arch-fear. And just this same quality of pride is attributed

to the “dark lady.” Sonnet 131 begins:

“Thou art as tyrannous, so as thou art,

As those whose beauties proudly make them cruel.”

Both are women of infinite cunning and small regard for faith or truth;

hearts steeled with an insane pride, and violent tempers suited with

scolding slanderous tongues. Prolonged analysis is not needed. A point

of seeming difference between them establishes their identity. Cleopatra

is beautiful, “a lass unparalleled,” as Charmian calls her, and

accordingly we can believe that all emotions became her, and that when

hopping on the street or pretending to die she was alike be-witching;

beauty has this magic. But how can all things become a woman who is not

beautiful, whose face some say “hath not the power to make love groan,”

who cannot even blind the senses with desire? And yet the “dark lady” of

the sonnets who is thus described, has the “powerful might” of

personality in as full measure as Egypt's queen. The point of seeming

unlikeness is as convincing as any likeness could be; the peculiarities

of both women are the same and spring from the same dominant quality.

Cleopatra is cunning, wily, faithless, passionately unrestrained in

speech and proud as Lucifer, and so is the sonnet-heroine. We may be

sure that the faithlessness, scolding, and mad vanity of his mistress

were defects in Shakespeare's eyes as in ours; these, indeed, were “the

things ill” which nevertheless became her. What Shakespeare loved in her

was what he himself lacked or possessed in lesser degree--that dæmonic

power of personality which he makes Enobarbus praise in Cleopatra and

which he praises directly in the sonnet-heroine. Enobarbus says of

Cleopatra:

“I saw her once

Hop forty paces through the public street,

And, having lost her breath, she spoke and panted,

That she did make defect perfection,

And, breathless, power breathe forth.”

One would be willing to wager that Shakespeare is here recalling a

performance of his mistress; but it is enough for my purpose now to draw

attention to the unexpectedness of the attribute “power.” The sonnet

fastens on the same word:

“O, from what power hast thou this powerful might

With insufficiency my heart to sway?”

In the same sonnet he again dwells upon her “strength”: she was bold,

too, to unreason, and of unbridled tongue, for, “twice forsworn

herself,” she had yet urged his “amiss,” though guilty of the same

fault. What he admired most in her was force of character. Perhaps the

old saying held in her case: _ex forti dulcedo_; perhaps her

confident strength had abandonments more flattering and complete than

those of weaker women; perhaps in those moments her forceful dark face

took on a soulful beauty that entranced his exquisite susceptibility;

perhaps--but the suppositions are infinite.

Though a lover and possessed by his mistress Shakespeare was still an

artist. In the sonnets he brings out her overbearing will, boldness,

pride--the elemental force of her nature; in the play, on the other

hand, while just mentioning her “power,” he lays the chief stress upon

the cunning wiles and faithlessness of her whose trade was love. But

just as Cleopatra has power, so there can be no doubt of the wily

cunning--“the warrantise of skill”--of the sonnet-heroine, and no doubt

her faithlessness was that “just cause of hate” which Shakespeare

bemoaned.

It is worth while here to notice his perfect comprehension of the powers

and limits of the different forms of his art. Just as he has used the

sonnets in order to portray certain intimate weaknesses and maladies of

his own nature that he could not present dramatically without making his

hero ridiculously effeminate, so also he used the sonnets to convey to

us the domineering will and strength of his mistress--qualities which if

presented dramatically would have seemed masculine-monstrous.

By taking the sonnets and the play together we get an excellent portrait

of Shakespeare's mistress. In person she was probably tall and vain of

her height, as Cleopatra is vain of her superiority in this respect to

Octavia, with dark complexion, black eyebrows and hair, and pitch-black

eyes that mirrored emotion as the lakelet mirrors the ever-changing

skies; her cheeks are “damask'd white”; her breath fragrant with health,

her voice melodious, her movements full of dignity--a superb gipsy to

whom beauty may be denied but not distinction.

If we have a very good idea of her person we have a still better idea of

her mind and soul. I must begin by stating that I do not accept

implicitly Shakespeare's angry declarations that his mistress was a mere

strumpet. A nature of great strength and pride is seldom merely wanton;

but the fact stands that Shakespeare makes a definite charge of

faithlessness against his mistress; she is, he tells us, “the bay where

all men ride”; no “several plot,” but “the wide world's common place.”

The accusation is most explicit. But if it were well founded why should

he devote two sonnets (135 and 136) to imploring her to be as liberal as

the sea and to receive his love-offering as well as the tributes of

others?

“Among a number one is reckon'd none

Then in the number let me pass untold.”

It is plain that Mistress Fitton drew away from Shakespeare after she

had given herself to his friend, and this fact throws some doubt upon

his accusations of utter wantonness. A true “daughter of the game,” as

he says in “Troilus and Cressida,” is nothing but “a sluttish spoil of

opportunity” who falls to Troilus or to Diomedes in turn, knowing no

reserve. It must be reckoned to the credit of Mary Fitton, or to her

pride, that she appears to have been faithful to her lover for the time

being, and able to resist even the solicitings of Shakespeare. But her

desires seem to have been her sole restraint, and therefore we must add

an extraordinary lewdness to that strength, pride, and passionate temper

which Shakespeare again and again attributes to her. Her boldness is so

reckless that she shows her love for his friend even before

Shakespeare's face; she knows no pity in her passion, and always defends

herself by attacking her accuser. But she is cunning in love's ways and

dulls Shakespeare's resentment with “I don't hate you.” Unwilling

perhaps to lose her empire over him and to forego the sweetness of his

honeyed flatteries, she blinded him to her faults by occasional

caresses. Yet this creature, with the soul of a strumpet, the tongue of

a fishwife and the “proud heart” of a queen, was the crown and flower of

womanhood to Shakespeare, his counterpart and ideal. Hamlet in love with

Cleopatra, the poet lost in desire of the wanton--that is the tragedy of

Shakespeare's life.

In this wonderful world of ours great dramatic writers are sure to have

dramatic lives. Again and again in his disgrace Antony cries:

“Whither hast thou led me, Egypt?”

Shakespeare's passion for Mary Fitton led him to shame and madness and

despair; his strength broke down under the strain and he never won back

again to health. He paid the price of passion with his very blood. It is

Shakespeare and not Antony who groans:

“O this false soul of Egypt! this grave charm,--

- - - - - - - - - -

Like a right gipsy, hath, at fast and loose,

Beguil'd me to the very heart of loss.”

Shakespeare's love for Mary Fitton is to me one of the typical tragedies

of life--a symbol for ever. In its progress through the world genius is

inevitably scourged and crowned with thorns and done to death;

inevitably, I say, for the vast majority of men hate and despise what is

superior to them: Don Quixote, too, was trodden into the mire by the

swine. But the worst of it is that genius suffers also through its own

excess; is bound, so to speak, to the stake of its own passionate

sensibilities, and consumed, as with fire.