likening of Shakespeare to a ship, beaten and storm-tossed, but yet
entering harbour with sails full-set, to anchor in peace.
Such, in fact, is the general opinion of modern writers upon
Shakespeare; after a happy youth and a gloomy middle age he reached at
last--it is the universal opinion--a state of quiet serenity in which he
died. Professor Dowden's book on 'Shakespeare's Mind and Art' gives the
most popular expression to this view, a view which is also held by Mr.
Ten Brink, by Sir I. Gollancz, and, to a great extent, by Dr. Brandes.
Professor Dowden, indeed, has gone so far as to label this final period
with the appellation of 'On the Heights,' in opposition to the preceding
one, which, he says, was passed 'In the Depths.' Sir Sidney Lee, too,
seems to find, in the Plays at least, if not in Shakespeare's mind, the
orthodox succession of gaiety, of tragedy, and of the serenity of
meditative romance.
Now it is clear that the most important part of this version of
Shakespeare's mental history is the end of it. That he did eventually
attain to a state of calm content, that he did, in fact, die happy--it
is this that gives colour and interest to the whole theory. For some
reason or another, the end of a man's life seems naturally to afford the
light by which the rest of it should be read; last thoughts do appear in
some strange way to be really best and truest; and this is particularly
the case when they fit in nicely with the rest of the story, and are,
perhaps, just what one likes to think oneself. If it be true that
Shakespeare, to quote Professor Dowden, 'did at last attain to the
serene self-possession which he had sought with such persistent effort';
that, in the words of Dr. Furnivall, 'forgiven and forgiving, full of
the highest wisdom and peace, at one with family and friends and foes,
in harmony with Avon's flow and Stratford's level meads, Shakespeare
closed his life on earth'--we have obtained a piece of knowledge which
is both interesting and pleasant. But if it be not true, if, on the
contrary, it can be shown that something very different was actually the
case, then will it not follow that we must not only reverse our judgment
as to this particular point, but also readjust our view of the whole
drift and bearing of Shakespeare's 'inner life'?
The group of works which has given rise to this theory of ultimate
serenity was probably entirely composed after Shakespeare's final
retirement from London, and his establishment at New Place. It consists
of three plays--_Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale_, and _The Tempest_--and
three fragments--the Shakespearean parts of _Pericles, Henry VIII._,
and _The Two Noble Kinsmen_. All these plays and portions of plays form
a distinct group; they resemble each other in a multitude of ways, and
they differ in a multitude of ways from nearly all Shakespeare's
previous work.
One other complete play, however, and one other fragment, do resemble in
some degree these works of the final period; for, immediately preceding
them in date, they show clear traces of the beginnings of the new
method, and they are themselves curiously different from the plays they
immediately succeed--that great series of tragedies which began with
_Hamlet_ in 1601 and ended in 1608 with _Antony and Cleopatra_. In the
latter year, indeed, Shakespeare's entire method underwent an
astonishing change. For six years he had been persistently occupied with
a kind of writing which he had himself not only invented but brought to
the highest point of excellence--the tragedy of character. Every one of
his masterpieces has for its theme the action of tragic situation upon
character; and, without those stupendous creations in character, his
greatest tragedies would obviously have lost the precise thing that has
made them what they are. Yet, after _Antony and Cleopatra_ Shakespeare
deliberately turned his back upon the dramatic methods of all his past
career. There seems no reason why he should not have continued, year
after year, to produce _Othellos, Hamlets_, and _Macbeths_; instead, he
turned over a new leaf, and wrote _Coriolanus_.
_Coriolanus_ is certainly a remarkable, and perhaps an intolerable play:
remarkable, because it shows the sudden first appearance of the
Shakespeare of the final period; intolerable, because it is impossible
to forget how much better it might have been. The subject is thick with
situations; the conflicts of patriotism and pride, the effects of sudden
disgrace following upon the very height of fortune, the struggles
between family affection on the one hand and every interest of revenge
and egotism on the other--these would have made a tragic and tremendous
setting for some character worthy to rank with Shakespeare's best. But
it pleased him to ignore completely all these opportunities; and, in the
play he has given us, the situations, mutilated and degraded, serve
merely as miserable props for the gorgeous clothing of his rhetoric. For
rhetoric, enormously magnificent and extraordinarily elaborate, is the
beginning and the middle and the end of _Coriolanus_. The hero is not a
human being at all; he is the statue of a demi-god cast in bronze, which
roars its perfect periods, to use a phrase of Sir Walter Raleigh's,
through a melodious megaphone. The vigour of the presentment is, it is
true, amazing; but it is a presentment of decoration, not of life. So
far and so quickly had Shakespeare already wandered from the subtleties
of _Cleopatra_. The transformation is indeed astonishing; one wonders,
as one beholds it, what will happen next.
At about the same time, some of the scenes in _Timon of Athens_ were in
all probability composed: scenes which resemble _Coriolanus_ in their
lack of characterisation and abundance of rhetoric, but differ from it
in the peculiar grossness of their tone. For sheer virulence of
foul-mouthed abuse, some of the speeches in Timon are probably
unsurpassed in any literature; an outraged drayman would speak so, if
draymen were in the habit of talking poetry. From this whirlwind of
furious ejaculation, this splendid storm of nastiness, Shakespeare, we
are confidently told, passed in a moment to tranquillity and joy, to
blue skies, to young ladies, and to general forgiveness.
From 1604 to 1610 [says Professor Dowden] a show of tragic figures,
like the kings who passed before Macbeth, filled the vision of
Shakespeare; until at last the desperate image of Timon rose before
him; when, as though unable to endure or to conceive a more
lamentable ruin of man, he turned for relief to the pastoral loves
of Prince Florizel and Perdita; and as soon as the tone of his mind
was restored, gave expression to its ultimate mood of grave
serenity in _The Tempest_, and so ended.
This is a pretty picture, but is it true? It may, indeed, be admitted at
once that Prince Florizel and Perdita are charming creatures, that
Prospero is 'grave,' and that Hermione is more or less 'serene'; but why
is it that, in our consideration of the later plays, the whole of our
attention must always be fixed upon these particular characters? Modern
critics, in their eagerness to appraise everything that is beautiful and
good at its proper value, seem to have entirely forgotten that there is
another side to the medal; and they have omitted to point out that these
plays contain a series of portraits of peculiar infamy, whose wickedness
finds expression in language of extraordinary force. Coming fresh from
their pages to the pages of _Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale_, and _The
Tempest_, one is astonished and perplexed. How is it possible to fit
into their scheme of roses and maidens that 'Italian fiend' the 'yellow
Iachimo,' or Cloten, that 'thing too bad for bad report,' or the 'crafty
devil,' his mother, or Leontes, or Caliban, or Trinculo? To omit these
figures of discord and evil from our consideration, to banish them
comfortably to the background of the stage, while Autolycus and Miranda
dance before the footlights, is surely a fallacy in proportion; for the
presentment of the one group of persons is every whit as distinct and
vigorous as that of the other. Nowhere, indeed, is Shakespeare's
violence of expression more constantly displayed than in the 'gentle
utterances' of his last period; it is here that one finds Paulina, in a
torrent of indignation as far from 'grave serenity' as it is from
'pastoral love,' exclaiming to Leontes:
What studied torments, tyrant, hast for me?
What wheels? racks? fires? what flaying? boiling
In leads or oils? what old or newer torture
Must I receive, whose every word deserves
To taste of thy most worst? Thy tyranny,
Together working with thy jealousies,
Fancies too weak for boys, too green and idle
For girls of nine, O! think what they have done,
And then run mad indeed, stark mad; for all
Thy by-gone fooleries were but spices of it.
That thou betray'dst Polixenes, 'twas nothing;
That did but show thee, of a fool, inconstant
And damnable ingrateful; nor was't much
Thou would'st have poison'd good Camillo's honour,
To have him kill a king; poor trespasses,
More monstrous standing by; whereof I reckon
The casting forth to crows thy baby daughter
To be or none or little; though a devil
Would have shed water out of fire ere done't.
Nor is't directly laid to thee, the death
Of the young prince, whose honourable thoughts,
Thoughts high for one so tender, cleft the heart
That could conceive a gross and foolish sire
Blemished his gracious dam.
Nowhere are the poet's metaphors more nakedly material; nowhere does he
verge more often upon a sort of brutality of phrase, a cruel coarseness.
Iachimo tells us how:
The cloyed will,
That satiate yet unsatisfied desire, that tub
Both filled and running, ravening first the lamb,
Longs after for the garbage.
and talks of:
an eye
Base and unlustrous as the smoky light
That's fed with stinking tallow.
'The south fog rot him!' Cloten bursts out to Imogen, cursing her
husband in an access of hideous rage.
What traces do such passages as these show of 'serene self-possession,'
of 'the highest wisdom and peace,' or of 'meditative romance'? English
critics, overcome by the idea of Shakespeare's ultimate tranquillity,
have generally denied to him the authorship of the brothel scenes in
_Pericles_ but these scenes are entirely of a piece with the grossnesses
of _The Winter's Tale_ and _Cymbeline_.
Is there no way for men to be, but women
Must be half-workers?
says Posthumus when he hears of Imogen's guilt.
We are all bastards;
And that most venerable man, which I
Did call my father, was I know not where
When I was stamped. Some coiner with his tools
Made me a counterfeit; yet my mother seemed
The Dian of that time; so doth my wife
The nonpareil of this--O vengeance, vengeance!
Me of my lawful pleasure she restrained
And prayed me, oft, forbearance; did it with
A pudency so rosy, the sweet view on't
Might well have warmed old Saturn, that I thought her
As chaste as unsunned snow--O, all the devils!--
This yellow Iachimo, in an hour,--was't not?
Or less,--at first: perchance he spoke not; but,
Like a full-acorned boar, a German one,
Cried, oh! and mounted: found no opposition
But what he looked for should oppose, and she
Should from encounter guard.
And Leontes, in a similar situation, expresses himself in images no less
to the point.
There have been,
Or I am much deceived, cuckolds ere now,
And many a man there is, even at this present,
Now, while I speak this, holds his wife by the arm,
That little thinks she has been sluiced in's absence
And his pond fished by his next neighbour, by
Sir Smile, his neighbour: nay, there's comfort in't,
Whiles other men have gates, and those gates opened,
As mine, against their will. Should all despair
That have revolted wives, the tenth of mankind
Would hang themselves. Physic for't there's none;
It is a bawdy planet, that will strike
Where 'tis predominant; and 'tis powerful, think it,
From east, west, north and south: be it concluded,
No barricade for a belly, know't;
It will let in and out the enemy
With bag and baggage: many thousand on's
Have the disease, and feel't not.
It is really a little difficult, in the face of such passages, to agree
with Professor Dowden's dictum: 'In these latest plays the beautiful
pathetic light is always present.'
But how has it happened that the judgment of so many critics has been so
completely led astray? Charm and gravity, and even serenity, are to be
found in many other plays of Shakespeare. Ophelia is charming, Brutus is
grave, Cordelia is serene; are we then to suppose that _Hamlet_, and
_Julius Caesar_, and _King Lear_ give expression to the same mood of
high tranquillity which is betrayed by _Cymbeline, The Tempest_, and
_The Winter's Tale_? 'Certainly not,' reply the orthodox writers, 'for
you must distinguish. The plays of the last period are not tragedies;
they all end happily'--'in scenes,' says Sir I. Gollancz, 'of
forgiveness, reconciliation, and peace.' Virtue, in fact, is not only
virtuous, it is triumphant; what would you more?
But to this it may be retorted, that, in the case of one of
Shakespeare's plays, even the final vision of virtue and beauty
triumphant over ugliness and vice fails to dispel a total effect of
horror and of gloom. For, in _Measure for Measure_ Isabella is no whit
less pure and lovely than any Perdita or Miranda, and her success is as
complete; yet who would venture to deny that the atmosphere of _Measure
for Measure_ was more nearly one of despair than of serenity? What is
it, then, that makes the difference? Why should a happy ending seem in
one case futile, and in another satisfactory? Why does it sometimes
matter to us a great deal, and sometimes not at all, whether virtue is
rewarded or not?
The reason, in this case, is not far to seek. _Measure for Measure_ is,
like nearly every play of Shakespeare's before _Coriolanus_, essentially
realistic. The characters are real men and women; and what happens to
them upon the stage has all the effect of what happens to real men and
women in actual life. Their goodness appears to be real goodness, their
wickedness real wickedness; and, if their sufferings are terrible
enough, we regret the fact, even though in the end they triumph, just as
we regret the real sufferings of our friends. But, in the plays of the
final period, all this has changed; we are no longer in the real world,
but in a world of enchantment, of mystery, of wonder, a world of
shifting visions, a world of hopeless anachronisms, a world in which
anything may happen next. The pretences of reality are indeed usually
preserved, but only the pretences. Cymbeline is supposed to be the king
of a real Britain, and the real Augustus is supposed to demand tribute
of him; but these are the reasons which his queen, in solemn audience
with the Roman ambassador, urges to induce her husband to declare for
war:
Remember, sir, my liege,
The Kings your ancestors, together with
The natural bravery of your isle, which stands
As Neptune's park, ribbed and paled in
With rocks unscaleable and roaring waters,
With sands that will not bear your enemies' boats,
But suck them up to the topmast. A kind of conquest
Caesar made here; but made not here his brag
Of 'Came, and saw, and overcame'; with shame--
The first that ever touched him--he was carried
From off our coast, twice beaten; and his shipping--
Poor ignorant baubles!--on our terrible seas,
Like egg-shells moved upon the surges, crack'd
As easily 'gainst our rocks; for joy whereof
The famed Cassibelan, who was once at point--
O giglot fortune!--to master Caesar's sword,
Made Lud's town with rejoicing fires bright
And Britons strut with courage.
It comes with something of a shock to remember that this medley of
poetry, bombast, and myth will eventually reach the ears of no other
person than the Octavius of _Antony and Cleopatra_; and the contrast is
the more remarkable when one recalls the brilliant scene of negotiation
and diplomacy in the latter play, which passes between Octavius,
Maecenas, and Agrippa on the one side, and Antony and Enobarbus on the
other, and results in the reconciliation of the rivals and the marriage
of Antony and Octavia.
Thus strangely remote is the world of Shakespeare's latest period; and
it is peopled, this universe of his invention, with beings equally
unreal, with creatures either more or less than human, with fortunate
princes and wicked step-mothers, with goblins and spirits, with lost
princesses and insufferable kings. And of course, in this sort of fairy
land, it is an essential condition that everything shall end well; the
prince and princess are bound to marry and live happily ever afterwards,
or the whole story is unnecessary and absurd; and the villains and the
goblins must naturally repent and be forgiven. But it is clear that such
happy endings, such conventional closes to fantastic tales, cannot be
taken as evidences of serene tranquillity on the part of their maker;
they merely show that he knew, as well as anyone else, how such stories
ought to end.
Yet there can be no doubt that it is this combination of charming
heroines and happy endings which has blinded the eyes of modern critics
to everything else. Iachimo, and Leontes, and even Caliban, are to be
left out of account, as if, because in the end they repent or are
forgiven, words need not be wasted on such reconciled and harmonious
fiends. It is true they are grotesque; it is true that such personages
never could have lived; but who, one would like to know, has ever met
Miranda, or become acquainted with Prince Florizel of Bohemia? In this
land of faery, is it right to neglect the goblins? In this world of
dreams, are we justified in ignoring the nightmares? Is it fair to say
that Shakespeare was in 'a gentle, lofty spirit, a peaceful, tranquil
mood,' when he was creating the Queen in _Cymbeline_, or writing the
first two acts of _The Winter's Tale_?
Attention has never been sufficiently drawn to one other characteristic
of these plays, though it is touched upon both by Professor Dowden and
Dr. Brandes--the singular carelessness with which great parts of them
were obviously written. Could anything drag more wretchedly than the
_dénouement_ of _Cymbeline_? And with what perversity is the great
pastoral scene in _The Winter's Tale_ interspersed with long-winded
intrigues, and disguises, and homilies! For these blemishes are unlike
the blemishes which enrich rather than lessen the beauty of the earlier
plays; they are not, like them, interesting or delightful in themselves;
they are usually merely necessary to explain the action, and they are
sometimes purely irrelevant. One is, it cannot be denied, often bored,
and occasionally irritated, by Polixenes and Camillo and Sebastian and
Gonzalo and Belarius; these personages have not even the life of ghosts;
they are hardly more than speaking names, that give patient utterance to
involution upon involution. What a contrast to the minor characters of
Shakespeare's earlier works!
It is difficult to resist the conclusion that he was getting bored
himself. Bored with people, bored with real life, bored with drama,
bored, in fact, with everything except poetry and poetical dreams. He is
no longer interested, one often feels, in what happens, or who says
what, so long as he can find place for a faultless lyric, or a new,
unimagined rhythmical effect, or a grand and mystic speech. In this mood
he must have written his share in _The Two Noble Kinsmen_, leaving the
plot and characters to Fletcher to deal with as he pleased, and
reserving to himself only the opportunities for pompous verse. In this
mood he must have broken off half-way through the tedious history of
_Henry VIII_.; and in this mood he must have completed, with all the
resources of his rhetoric, the miserable archaic fragment of _Pericles_.
Is it not thus, then, that we should imagine him in the last years of
his life? Half enchanted by visions of beauty and loveliness, and half
bored to death; on the one side inspired by a soaring fancy to the
singing of ethereal songs, and on the other urged by a general disgust
to burst occasionally through his torpor into bitter and violent speech?
If we are to learn anything of his mind from his last works, it is
surely this.
And such is the conclusion which is particularly forced upon us by a
consideration of the play which is in many ways most typical of
Shakespeare's later work, and the one which critics most consistently
point to as containing the very essence of his final benignity--_The
Tempest_. There can be no doubt that the peculiar characteristics which
distinguish _Cymbeline_ and _The Winter's Tale_ from the dramas of
Shakespeare's prime, are present here in a still greater degree. In _The
Tempest_, unreality has reached its apotheosis. Two of the principal
characters are frankly not human beings at all; and the whole action
passes, through a series of impossible occurrences, in a place which can
only by courtesy be said to exist. The Enchanted Island, indeed,
peopled, for a timeless moment, by this strange fantastic medley of
persons and of things, has been cut adrift for ever from common sense,
and floats, buoyed up by a sea, not of waters, but of poetry. Never did
Shakespeare's magnificence of diction reach more marvellous heights than
in some of the speeches of Prospero, or his lyric art a purer beauty
than in the songs of Ariel; nor is it only in these ethereal regions
that the triumph of his language asserts itself. It finds as splendid a
vent in the curses of Caliban:
All the infection that the sun sucks up
From bogs, fens, flats, on Prosper fall, and make him
By inch-meal a disease!
and in the similes of Trinculo:
Yond' same black cloud, yond' huge one, looks like a foul
bombard that would shed his liquor.
The _dénouement_ itself, brought about by a preposterous piece of
machinery, and lost in a whirl of rhetoric, is hardly more than a peg
for fine writing.
O, it is monstrous, monstrous!
Methought the billows spoke and told me of it;
The winds did sing it to me; and the thunder,
That deep and dreadful organ-pipe, pronounced
The name of Prosper; it did bass my trespass.
Therefore my son i' th' ooze is bedded, and
I'll seek him deeper than e'er plummet sounded,
And with him there lie mudded.
And this gorgeous phantasm of a repentance from the mouth of the pale
phantom Alonzo is a fitting climax to the whole fantastic play.
A comparison naturally suggests itself, between what was perhaps the
last of Shakespeare's completed works, and that early drama which first
gave undoubted proof that his imagination had taken wings. The points of
resemblance between _The Tempest_ and _A Midsummer Night's Dream_, their
common atmosphere of romance and magic, the beautiful absurdities of
their intrigues, their studied contrasts of the grotesque with the
delicate, the ethereal with the earthly, the charm of their lyrics, the
_verve_ of their vulgar comedy--these, of course, are obvious enough;
but it is the points of difference which really make the comparison
striking. One thing, at any rate, is certain about the wood near
Athens--it is full of life. The persons that haunt it--though most of
them are hardly more than children, and some of them are fairies, and
all of them are too agreeable to be true--are nevertheless substantial
creatures, whose loves and jokes and quarrels receive our thorough
sympathy; and the air they breathe--the lords and the ladies, no less
than the mechanics and the elves--is instinct with an exquisite
good-humour, which makes us as happy as the night is long. To turn from
Theseus and Titania and Bottom to the Enchanted Island, is to step out
of a country lane into a conservatory. The roses and the dandelions have
vanished before preposterous cactuses, and fascinating orchids too
delicate for the open air; and, in the artificial atmosphere, the gaiety
of youth has been replaced by the disillusionment of middle age.
Prospero is the central figure of _The Tempest_; and it has often been
wildly asserted that he is a portrait of the author--an embodiment of
that spirit of wise benevolence which is supposed to have thrown a halo
over Shakespeare's later life. But, on closer inspection, the portrait
seems to be as imaginary as the original. To an irreverent eye, the
ex-Duke of Milan would perhaps appear as an unpleasantly crusty
personage, in whom a twelve years' monopoly of the conversation had
developed an inordinate propensity for talking. These may have been the
sentiments of Ariel, safe at the Bermoothes; but to state them is to
risk at least ten years in the knotty entrails of an oak, and it is
sufficient to point out, that if Prospero is wise, he is also
self-opinionated and sour, that his gravity is often another name for
pedantic severity, and that there is no character in the play to whom,
during some part of it, he is not studiously disagreeable. But his
Milanese countrymen are not even disagreeable; they are simply dull.
'This is the silliest stuff that e'er I heard,' remarked Hippolyta of
Bottom's amateur theatricals; and one is tempted to wonder what she
would have said to the dreary puns and interminable conspiracies of
Alonzo, and Gonzalo, and Sebastian, and Antonio, and Adrian, and
Francisco, and other shipwrecked noblemen. At all events, there can be
little doubt that they would not have had the entrée at Athens.
The depth of the gulf between the two plays is, however, best measured
by a comparison of Caliban and his masters with Bottom and his
companions. The guileless group of English mechanics, whose sports are
interrupted by the mischief of Puck, offers a strange contrast to the
hideous trio of the 'jester,' the 'drunken butler,' and the 'savage and
deformed slave,' whose designs are thwarted by the magic of Ariel.
Bottom was the first of Shakespeare's masterpieces in characterisation,
Caliban was the last: and what a world of bitterness and horror lies
between them! The charming coxcomb it is easy to know and love; but the
'freckled whelp hag-born' moves us mysteriously to pity and to terror,
eluding us for ever in fearful allegories, and strange coils of
disgusted laughter and phantasmagorical tears. The physical vigour of
the presentment is often so remorseless as to shock us. 'I left them,'
says Ariel, speaking of Caliban and his crew:
I' the filthy-mantled pool beyond your cell,
There dancing up to the chins, that the foul lake
O'erstunk their feet.
But at other times the great half-human shape seems to swell like the
'Pan' of Victor Hugo, into something unimaginably vast.
You taught me language, and my profit on't
Is, I know how to curse.
Is this Caliban addressing Prospero, or Job addressing God? It may be
either; but it is not serene, nor benign, nor pastoral, nor 'On the
Heights.'
1906.