were to be decided by ‘Venus and Adonis,’ in spite of the unmeasured
panegyrics of many writers, we should be obliged in equity to hold, that
as a poet of mere fancy Shakespeare was much inferior to the late Mr.
Keats and even to meaner men. Moreover, we should have been prepared
with some refined reasonings to show that it was unlikely that a poet
with so much hold on reality, in life and nature, both in solitude and
in society, should have also a similar command over unreality: should
possess a command not only of flesh and blood, but of the imaginary
entities which the self-inworking fancy brings forth—impalpable
conceptions of mere mind: _quædam simulacra miris pallentia modis_ thin
ideas, which come we know not whence, and are given us we know not why.
But, unfortunately for this ingenious, if not profound suggestion,
Shakespeare in fact possessed the very faculty which it tends to prove
that he would not possess. He could paint Poins and Falstaff, but he
excelled also in fairy legends. He had such
‘Seething brains;
Such shaping fantasies as apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.’
As, for example, the idea of Puck, or Queen Mab, of Ariel, or such a
passage as the following:—
‘_Puck._ How now, spirit! whither wander you?
_Fai._ Over hill, over dale,
Thorough bush, thorough briar,
Over park, over pale,
Thorough flood, thorough fire,
I do wander everywhere,
Swifter than the moones sphere;
And I serve the fairy queen,
To dew her orbs upon the green:
The cowslips tall her pensioners be;
In their gold coats spots you see;
Those be rubies, fairy favours,
In those freckles live their savours:
I must go seek some dew-drops here,
And hang a pearl in every cowslip’s ear.
Farewell, thou lob of spirits, I’ll be gone;
Our queen and all our elves come here anon.
_Puck._ The king doth keep his revels here to-night;
Take heed the queen come not within his sight.
For Oberon is passing fell and wrath,
Because that she, as her attendant, hath
A lovely boy, stolen from an Indian king;
She never had so sweet a changeling:
And jealous Oberon would have the child
Knight of his train, to trace the forests wild:
But she, perforce, withholds the lovèd boy,
Crowns him with flowers, and makes him all her joy:
And now they never meet in grove, or green,
By fountain clear, or spangled star-light sheen,
But they do square; that all their elves, for fear,
Creep into acorn-cups, and hide them there.
_Fai._ Either I mistake your shape and making quite,
Or else you are that shrewd and knavish sprite
Call’d Robin Good-fellow: are you not he
That fright the maidens of the villagery;
Skim milk; and sometimes labour in the quern,
And bootless make the breathless housewife churn;
And sometimes make the drink to bear no barm;
Mislead night-wanderers, laughing at their harm?
Those that Hobgoblin call you, and sweet Puck,
You do their work, and they shall have good luck:
Are not you he?
_Puck._ Thou speak’st aright;
I am that merry wanderer of the night.
I jest to Oberon, and make him smile,
When I a fat and bean-fed horse beguile,
Neighing in likeness of a filly foal:
And sometime lurk I in a gossip’s bowl,
In very likeness of a roasted crab;
And, when she drinks, against her lips I bob,
And on her wither’d dew-lap pour the ale.
The wisest aunt, telling the saddest tale,
Sometime for three-foot stool mistaketh me;
Then slip I from beneath, down topples she,
And _tailor_ cries, and falls into a cough;
And then the whole quire hold their hips, and loffe;
And waxen in their mirth, and neeze and swear
A merrier hour was never wasted there.—
But room, Fairy, here comes Oberon.
_Fai._ And here my mistress:—Would that he were gone!’
Probably he believed in these things. Why not? Everybody else believed in
them then. They suit our climate. As the Greek mythology suits the keen
Attic sky, the fairies, indistinct and half-defined, suit a land of mild
mists and gentle airs. They confuse the ‘maidens of the villagery;’ they
are the paganism of the South of England.
Can it be made out what were Shakespeare’s political views? We think it
certainly can, and that without difficulty. From the English historical
plays, it distinctly appears that he accepted, like everybody then, the
Constitution of his country. His lot was not cast in an age of political
controversy, nor of reform. What was, was from of old. The Wars of the
Roses had made it very evident how much room there was for the evils
incident to an hereditary monarchy, for instance, those of a controverted
succession, and the evils incident to an aristocracy, as want of public
spirit and audacious selfishness, to arise and continue within the realm
of England. Yet they had not repelled, and had barely disconcerted our
conservative ancestors. They had not become Jacobins; they did not
concur—and history, except in Shakespeare, hardly does justice to them—in
Jack Cade’s notion that the laws should come out of his mouth, or that
the commonwealth was to be reformed by interlocutors in this scene.
‘_Geo._ I tell thee, Jack Cade the clothier means to dress the
Commonwealth, and turn it, and set a new nap on it.
_John._ So he had need, for ’tis threadbare. Well, I say it was
never a merry world in England since gentlemen came up.
_Geo._ O miserable age! Virtue is not regarded in
handycraftsmen.
_John._ The nobility think scorn to go in leather aprons.
_Geo._ Nay more: the king’s council are no good workmen.
_John._ True; and yet it is said, Labour in thy vocation; which
is as much as to say, as let the magistrates be labouring men,
and therefore should we be magistrates.
_Geo._ Thou hast hit it, for there is no better sign of a brave
mind than a hard hand.
_John._ I see them! I see them!’
The English people did see them, and know them, and therefore have
rejected them. An audience which, _bonâ fide_, entered into the merit
of this scene, would never believe in everybody’s suffrage. They would
know that there is such a thing as nonsense, and when a man has once
attained to that deep conception, you may be sure of him ever after. And
though it would be absurd to say that Shakespeare originated this idea,
or that the disbelief in simple democracy is owing to his teaching or
suggestions, yet it may, nevertheless, be truly said, that he shared
in the peculiar knowledge of men—and also possessed the peculiar
constitution of mind—which engender this effect. The author of Coriolanus
never believed in a mob, and did something towards preventing anybody
else from doing so. But this political idea was not exactly the strongest
in Shakespeare’s mind. We think he had two other stronger, or as strong.
First, the feeling of loyalty to the ancient polity of this country—not
because it was good, but because it existed. In his time, people no more
thought of the origin of the monarchy than they did of the origin of the
Mendip Hills. The one had always been there, and so had the other. God
(such was the common notion) had made both, and one as much as the other.
Everywhere, in that age, the common modes of political speech assumed
the existence of certain utterly national institutions, and would have
been worthless and nonsensical except on that assumption. This national
habit appears as it ought to appear in our national dramatist. A great
divine tells us that the Thirty-nine Articles are ‘forms of thought;’
inevitable conditions of the religious understanding: in politics,
‘kings, lords, and commons’ are, no doubt, ‘forms of thought,’ to the
great majority of Englishmen; in these, they live, and beyond these, they
never move. You can’t reason on the removal (such is the notion) of the
English Channel, nor St. George’s Channel, nor can you of the English
Constitution in like manner. It is to most of us, and to the happiest of
us, a thing immutable, and such, no doubt, it was to Shakespeare, which,
if any one would have proved, let him refer at random to any page of the
historical English plays.
The second peculiar tenet which we ascribe to his political creed,
is a disbelief in the middle classes. We fear he had no opinion of
traders. In this age, we know, it is held that the keeping of a shop is
equivalent to a political education. Occasionally, in country villages,
where the trader sells everything, he is thought to know nothing, and
has no vote; but in a town where he is a householder (as, indeed, he is
in the country), and sells only one thing—there we assume that he knows
everything. And this assumption is in the opinion of some observers
confirmed by the fact. Sir Walter Scott used to relate, that when, after
a trip to London, he returned to Tweedside, he always found the people in
that district knew more of politics than the Cabinet. And so it is with
the mercantile community in modern times. If you are a Chancellor of the
Exchequer, it is possible that you may be acquainted with finance; but if
you sell figs it is certain that you will. Now we nowhere find this laid
down in Shakespeare. On the contrary, you will generally find that when
a ‘citizen’ is mentioned, he generally does or says something absurd.
Shakespeare had a clear perception that it is possible to bribe a class
as well as an individual, and that personal obscurity is but an insecure
guarantee for political disinterestedness.
‘Moreover, he hath left you all his walks,
His private arbours and new-planted orchards
On this side Tiber; he hath left them you,
And to your heirs for ever: common pleasures,
To walk abroad and recreate yourselves.
Here was a Cæsar! when comes such another?’
He everywhere speaks in praise of a tempered and ordered and qualified
polity, in which the pecuniary classes have a certain influence, but no
more, and shows in every page a keen sensibility to the large views,
and high-souled energies, the gentle refinements and disinterested
desires in which those classes are likely to be especially deficient.
He is particularly the poet of personal nobility, though, throughout
his writings, there is a sense of freedom, just as Milton is the poet
of freedom, though with an underlying reference to personal nobility;
indeed, we might well expect our two poets to combine the appreciation
of a rude and generous liberty with that of a delicate and refined
nobleness, since it is the union of these two elements that characterises
our society and their experience.
There are two things—good-tempered sense and ill-tempered sense. In our
remarks on the character of Falstaff, we hope we have made it very clear
that Shakespeare had the former; we think it nearly as certain that he
possessed the latter also. An instance of this might be taken from that
contempt for the perspicacity of the _bourgeoisie_ which we have just
been mentioning. It is within the limits of what may be called malevolent
sense, to take extreme and habitual pleasure in remarking the foolish
opinions, the narrow notions, and fallacious deductions which seem to
cling to the pompous and prosperous man of business. Ask him his opinion
of the currency question, and he puts ‘bills’ and ‘bullion’ together
in a sentence, and he does not seem to care what he puts between them.
But a more proper instance of (what has an odd sound), the malevolence
of Shakespeare is to be found in the play of ‘Measure for Measure.’ We
agree with Hazlitt, that this play seems to be written, perhaps more
than any other, _con amore_, and with a relish; and this seems to be the
reason why, notwithstanding the unpleasant nature of its plot, and the
absence of any very attractive character, it is yet one of the plays
which take hold on the mind most easily and most powerfully. Now the
entire character of Angelo, which is the expressive feature of the piece,
is nothing but a successful embodiment of the pleasure, the malevolent
pleasure, which a warm-blooded and expansive man takes in watching
the rare, the dangerous and inanimate excesses of the constrained and
cold-blooded. One seems to see Shakespeare, with his bright eyes and his
large lips and buoyant face, watching with a pleasant excitement the
excesses of his thin-lipped and calculating creation, as though they were
the excesses of a real person. It is the complete picture of a natural
hypocrite, who does not consciously disguise strong impulses, but whose
very passions seem of their own accord to have disguised themselves and
retreated into the recesses of the character, yet only to recur even
more dangerously when their proper period is expired, when the will is
cheated into security by their absence, and the world (and, it may be,
the ‘judicious person’ himself) is impressed with a sure reliance in his
chilling and remarkable rectitude.
It has, we believe, been doubted whether Shakespeare was a man much
conversant with the intimate society of women. Of course no one denies
that he possessed a great knowledge of them—a capital acquaintance with
their excellences, faults, and foibles; but it has been thought that this
was the result rather of imagination than of society, of creative fancy
rather than of perceptive experience. Now that Shakespeare possessed,
among other singular qualities, a remarkable imaginative knowledge of
women, is quite certain, for he was acquainted with the soliloquies of
women. A woman we suppose, like a man, must be alone, in order to speak a
soliloquy. After the greatest possible intimacy and experience, it must
still be imagination, or fancy at least, which tells any man what a woman
thinks of herself and to herself. There will still—get as near the limits
of confidence or observation as you can—be a space which must be filled
up from other means. Men can only divine the truth—reserve, indeed, is
a part of its charm. Seeing, therefore, that Shakespeare had done what
necessarily and certainly must be done without experience, we were in
some doubt whether he might not have dispensed with it altogether. A
grave reviewer cannot know these things. We thought indeed of reasoning
that since the delineations of women in Shakespeare were admitted to be
first-rate, it should follow,—at least there was a fair presumption,—that
no means or aid had been wanting to their production, and that
consequently we ought, in the absence of distinct evidence, to assume
that personal intimacy as well as solitary imagination had been concerned
in their production. And we meant to cite the ‘questions about Octavia,’
which Lord Byron, who thought he had the means of knowing, declared to be
‘women all over.’
But all doubt was removed and all conjecture set to rest by the coming
in of an ably-dressed friend from the external world, who mentioned that
the language of Shakespeare’s women was essentially female language; that
there were certain points and peculiarities in the English of cultivated
English women, which made it a language of itself, which must be heard
familiarly in order to be known. And he added, ‘except a greater use of
words of Latin derivation, as was natural in an age when ladies received
a learned education, a few words not now proper, a few conceits that
were the fashion of the time, and there is the very same English in the
women’s speeches in Shakespeare.’ He quoted—
‘Think not I love him, though I ask for him;
’Tis but a peevish boy:—yet he talks well;—
But what care I for words? yet words do well,
When he that speaks them pleases those that hear.
It is a pretty youth:—not very pretty:—
But, sure, he’s proud; and yet his pride becomes him;
He’ll make a proper man: The best thing in him
Is his complexion; and faster than his tongue
Did make offence, his eye did heal it up.
He is not tall; yet for his years he’s tall:
His leg is but so so: and yet ’tis well.
There was a pretty redness in his lip;
A little riper and more lusty red
Than that mix’d in his cheek; ’twas just the difference
Betwixt the constant red, and mingled damask.
There be some women, Silvius, had they mark’d him
In parcels as I did, would have gone near
To fall in love with him: but, for my part,
I love him not, nor hate him not; and yet
I have more cause to hate him than to love him:
For what had he to do to chide at me?
He said, my eyes were black, and my hair black,
And, now I am remember’d, scorn’d at me:
I marvel, why I answer’d not again;
But that’s all one;’
and the passage of Perdita’s cited before about the daffodils that—
‘take
The winds of March with beauty; violets dim,
But sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes,
Or Cytherea’s breath;’
and said that these were conclusive. But we have not, ourselves, heard
young ladies converse in that manner.
Perhaps it is in his power of delineating women, that Shakespeare
contrasts most strikingly with the greatest master of the art of
dialogue in antiquity—we mean Plato. It will, no doubt, be said that the
delineation of women did not fall within Plato’s plan; that men’s life
was in that age so separate and predominant that it could be delineated
by itself and apart; and no doubt these remarks are very true. But what
led Plato to form that plan? What led him to select that peculiar
argumentative aspect of life, in which the masculine element is in so
high a degree superior? We believe that he did it because he felt that
he could paint that kind of scene much better than he could paint any
other. If a person will consider the sort of conversation that was held
in the cool summer morning, when Socrates was knocked up early to talk
definitions and philosophy with Protagoras, he will feel, not only
that women would fancy such dialogues to be certainly stupid, and very
possibly to be without meaning, but also that the side of character
which is there presented is one from which not only the feminine but
even the epicene element is nearly if not perfectly excluded. It is
the intellect surveying and delineating intellectual characteristics.
We have a dialogue of thinking faculties; the character of every man
is delineated by showing us, not his mode of action or feeling, but
his mode of thinking, alone and by itself. The pure mind, purged of
all passion and affection, strives to view and describe others in like
manner; and the singularity is, that the likenesses so taken are so
good,—that the accurate copying of the merely intellectual effects and
indications of character gives so true and so firm an impression of the
whole character,—that a daguerreotype of the mind should almost seem to
be a delineation of the life. But though in the hand of a consummate
artist, such a way of representation may in some sense succeed in the
case of men, it would certainly seem sure to fail in the case of women.
The mere intellect of a woman is a mere nothing. It originates nothing,
it transmits nothing, it retains nothing; it has little life of its own,
and therefore it can hardly be expected to attain any vigour. Of the
lofty Platonic world of the ideas, which the soul in the old doctrine
was to arrive at by pure and continuous reasoning, women were never
expected to know anything. Plato (though Mr. Grote denies that he was a
practical man) was much too practical for that; he reserved his teaching
for people whose belief was regulated and induced in some measure by
abstract investigations; who had an interest in the pure and (as it
were) geometrical truth itself; who had an intellectual character (apart
from and accessory to their other character) capable of being viewed as
a large and substantial existence, Shakespeare’s being, like a woman’s,
worked as a whole. He was capable of intellectual abstractedness, but
commonly he was touched with the sense of earth. One thinks of him as
firmly set on our coarse world of common clay, but from it he could paint
the moving essence of thoughtful feeling—which is the best refinement
of the best women. Imogen or Juliet would have thought little of the
conversation of Gorgias.
On few subjects has more nonsense been written than on the learning of
Shakespeare. In former times, the established tenet was, that he was
acquainted with the entire range of the Greek and Latin classics, and
familiarly resorted to Sophocles and Æschylus as guides and models.
This creed reposed not so much on any painful or elaborate criticism of
Shakespeare’s plays, as on one of the _à priori_ assumptions permitted
to the indolence of the wise old world. It was then considered clear,
by all critics, that no one could write good English who could not also
write bad Latin. Questioning scepticism has rejected this axiom, and
refuted with contemptuous facility the slight attempt which had been made
to verify this case of it from the evidence of the plays themselves. But
the new school, not content with showing that Shakespeare was no formed
or elaborate scholar, propounded the idea that he was quite ignorant,
just as Mr. Croker ‘demonstrates’ that Napoleon Bonaparte could scarcely
write or read. The answer is, that Shakespeare wrote his plays, and that
those plays show not only a very powerful, but also a very cultivated
mind. A hard student Shakespeare was not, yet he was a happy and pleased
reader of interesting books. He was a natural reader; when a book was
dull he put it down, when it looked fascinating he took it up, and the
consequence is, that he remembered and mastered what he read. Lively
books, read with lively interest, leave strong and living recollections;
the instructors, no doubt, say that they ought not to do so, and
inculcate the necessity of dry reading. Yet the good sense of a busy
public has practically discovered that what is read easily is recollected
easily, and what is read with difficulty is remembered with more. It is
certain that Shakespeare read the novels of his time, for he has founded
on them the stories of his plays; he read Plutarch, for his words still
live in the dialogue of the ‘proud Roman’ plays; and it is remarkable
that Montaigne is the only philosopher that Shakespeare can be proved
to have read, because he deals more than any other philosopher with the
first impressions of things which exist. On the other hand, it may be
doubted if Shakespeare would have perused his commentators. Certainly,
he would have never read a page of this review, and we go so far as to
doubt whether he would have been pleased with the admirable discourses of
M. Guizot, which we ourselves, though ardent admirers of his style and
ideas, still find it a little difficult to _read_—and what would he have
thought of the following speculations of an anonymous individual, whose
notes have been recently published in a fine octavo by Mr. Collier, and,
according to the periodical essayists, ‘contribute valuable suggestions
to the illustration of the immortal bard’?
‘THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA.
‘ACT I. SCENE I.
‘P. 92. The reading of the subsequent line has hitherto been
“’Tis true; for you are over boots in love;”
but the manuscript corrector of the Folio, 1632, has changed it
to
“’Tis true; _but_ you are over boots in love,”
which seems more consistent with the course of the dialogue;
for Proteus, remarking that Leander had been “more than over
shoes in love,” with Hero, Valentine answers, that Proteus was
even more deeply in love than Leander. Proteus observes of the
fable of Hero and Leander—
“That’s a deep story of a deeper love,
_For_ he was more than over shoes in love.”
Valentine retorts—
“’Tis true; _but_ you are over boots in love.”
_For_ instead of _but_ was perhaps caught by the compositor
from the preceding line.’
It is difficult to fancy Shakespeare perusing a volume of such
annotations, though we allow that we admire them ourselves. As to the
controversy on his school learning, we have only to say, that though
the alleged imitations of the Greek tragedians are mere nonsense, yet
there is clear evidence that Shakespeare received the ordinary grammar
school education of his time, and that he had derived from the pain
and suffering of several years, not exactly an acquaintance with Greek
or Latin, but, like Eton boys, a firm conviction that there are such
languages.