MOTIVES AND DEVELOPMENT OF SHAKESPEARE'S POETRY
I
THE "COMEDY OF LOVE"
What we have hitherto described as the sentiment of Shakespeare
corresponds to the Shakespeare carven in the general consciousness,
that which is Shakespeare in an eminent degree, almost, we might say, a
symbol of his greater self, the poet of the great tragedies _(Othello,
Macbeth, King Lear, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet)_ and
of the tragic portions of those that are less intense and less perfect.
But the work that bears his name is far more varied in tones and
personalities and in order to prepare the way for the passage of more
particular characteristics, we must distinguish (and here the students
of Shakespeare have always been industrious) the various configurations
and degrees, or sources of inspiration of the poet, and make of them
groups, which may then be arranged in a series of relations, an ideal
succession.
On casting the eye over the rich extent of his works, the attention
is at once drawn to certain of them, whose fresh, smiling colours
indicate that their principal and proper theme is love. Not the love
that becomes joined to other graver passions and unified with them,
forms a complex, as in the _Othello,_ or in _Antony and Cleopatra,_
thus acquiring a profoundly tragic quality, but love and love alone,
love considered in itself. These passions then are to be found rather
in the _comedy of love_ than in the tragedies or dramas: in love,
regarded certainly with affectionate sympathy, but also with curiosity,
instinct with softness and tenderness, indeed, one might almost say,
with the superiority of an expert mind and thus with delicate irony.
The mind that accompanies this amorous heart, observes the caprices and
illusions, recognising their inevitability and their necessity, but yet
knowing them for what they are, imaginings, however irresistible and
delicious they be, caprices, though noble and beautiful, weaknesses,
deserving of indulgence and of gentle treatment, because human, and
belonging to man as he passes through the happy and stormy season of
youth. This mode of experiencing love is something that manifests
itself only episodically in the Greek, Latin and medieval poets. With
them we find love represented, sometimes as a pleasant, a sensual
strife, or as a furious blind passion, fearless of death, or as a
spiritual cult of lofty and superhuman beauty. Sometimes indeed, as in
the comedy of Menander and its long suite of descendants and posterity
among the Latins and the Italians, it gives rise to a general and
rather cold psychological simplification, in which love is not found to
differ much from any other passion or desire, such as avarice, courage
or greed. In the form we have described, it belongs entirely to the
mode of feeling of the Renaissance, to one of those attitudes which
the anti-ascetic and realistic view of human affairs developed and
bequeathed in a perfected form to modern times. Here we must again note
the similarity between Shakespeare and Ariosto, for both painted the
eternal comedy of love in the same manner.
That love is sincere, yet deceives and is deceived; it imagines itself
to be firm and constant, and turns out to be fragile and fleeting;
it claims to be founded upon a dispassionate judgment of the mind and
upon luminous moral choice, whereas, on the contrary, it is guided in
an altogether irrational manner by impressions and fancies, fluctuating
with these. Sometimes, too, it is represented as repugnance and
aversion, whereas it is really irresistible attraction; it is content
to suppress itself with deliberate humbleness before works and thoughts
that are more austere, but reappears on the first occasion, more
vehement, tenacious and indomitable than ever.
"In his men, as in his women," says Heine, with his accustomed grace,
when talking of the Shakespearean comedy, "passion is altogether
without that fearful seriousness, that fatalistic necessity, which it
manifests in the tragedies. Love does in truth wear there, as ever, a
bandage over his eyes and bears a quiver full of darts. But these darts
are rather winged than sharpened to a deadly point, and the little god
sometimes stealthily and maliciously peeps out, removing the bandage.
Their flames too rather shine than burn; but they are always flames,
and in the comedies of Shakespeare, love always preserves the character
of truth." Of truth, and for this reason, none of these comedies
descends altogether to the level of farce, not even those that most
nearly approach it, such as _Love's Labour Lost, The Taming of the
Shrew,_ nor even _The Comedy of Errors,_ where some element of human
truth always leads us back to the seriousness of art. Still less is
there satire there, intellectual and angular satire, constructor of
types, exaggerates in the interest of polemic; always we find there
suavity of outline, the soft veil of poetry. Even in the most feeble,
as _The Two Gentlemen of Verona,_ we enjoy the fresh love scenes,
mingled with the saltatory course of the narrative, the abundant
dialogues, the misunderstandings and the verbal witticisms. Even in
those that are developed in a somewhat mechanical and superficial
manner, which we should now describe as being _à thèse,_ there is
vivacity, joking, festivity, and an eloquence so flowery (for instance
in the scene where Biron defends the rights of youth and of love) that
it has almost lyrical quality.
In this last comedy there is a king and his three gentlemen, who,
in order to devote themselves to study and to attain to fame and
immortality, have sworn to one another that they will not see a woman
for three years. All three of them fail of this and fall in love almost
as soon as the Princess of France arrives with her three ladies. These
ladies, when they have received the most solemn declarations of love
from the four of them, each one faithless to himself, punish them in
their turn for their levity by condemning them to wait for a certain
period, before receiving a reply to their offers. Thus it was that
Angelica, in the Italian poems of chivalry, succeeded in setting the
hearts of the most obdurate cavaliers aflame with love, even of those
who held severest discourse. She made them all follow the queen of
love, whom no mortal could resist.
In the _Taming of the Shrew,_ Petruchio the male, who knows what he
wants and wants his own ease and comfort, hits immediately upon the
right line of conduct, a line that is, however, altogether spiritual,
because based upon psychological knowledge and volitional resolve. He
espouses the terrible Catherine and reduces her to lamblike obedience,
afraid of her husband, no longer able not only to say, but even to
think, anything save what he has forced her to think. Yet who can tell
that she does not love him who maltreats and tyrannises over her?
In _Twelfth Night,_ we behold the Duke vainly sighing for the beautiful
widow Olivia, and the love that suddenly blossoms in her for the
intermediary sent by the Duke, a woman dressed as a man; while the
steward Malvolio, the Puritan, the pedantic Malvolio, is urged on to
the most ridiculous acts, by hope and the illusion of being loved.
Finally, fortune in this case making the single beloved into two, a
man and a woman (in a more modest but identical manner to that in the
adventure of Fiordispina with Bradamante and Ricciardetto) brings about
a happy ending for all.
In _All's Welly_ the Countess of Roussillon, receives the discovery
that poor Helena, the orphan child of the family doctor, is in love
with her son, rather with benevolence than with hostility and reflects:
"Even so it was with me when I was young:
If we are nature's, these are ours;...
By our remembrance of days foregone,
Such were our faults though then we thought them none."
The amorous couples of princesses, exiles or fugitives, and of exile
and fugitive gentlemen, wander about the forest of Arden, in _As You
Like It,_ alternating and mingling with the couples of rustic lovers.
Perhaps the best example of this "comedy of love" is the fencing of
the two unconscious lovers, Beatrice and Benedick, in _Much Ado About
Nothing._ This young couple seek one another only to measure weapons,
to sneer and to fence, with the fine-pointed swords of biting jest and
disdain, they believe themselves to be antipathetic, disbelieve one
another; yet the simplest little intrigue of their friends suffices
to reveal each to each as whole-heartedly loving and desiring the
adversary. The union of the two is sealed, when they find themselves
united in the same sentiment to defend their friend, who has been
calumniated and rejected, thus discovering that their perpetual
following of one another to engage in strife, had not concealed the
struggle, which implies affinity of sex, but the spiritual affinity of
two generous hearts.
_Benedick._ And, I pray thee now, tell me for which of my bad faults
didst thou first fall in love with me?...
And the other, speaking with tenderness and ceasing to carry on the
pinpricking:
"Suffer love,--a good epithet!
I do suffer love indeed, for I love thee against my will."
A light touch permeates the treatment of these characters and suffices
to animate them and make them act. The dramatic or indeed tragic
situations, which at times arise, are treated as it were with the
implied consciousness of their slight gravity and danger, which shall
soon be evident and dispel all the apprehensions of those who doubt.
They sometimes consist of nothing but an external action or occurrence,
suited to the theatre, and more frequently a decorative background.
Parallelism of personages and symmetry of events also abound in these
plays, suitable to the merry teaching that pervades them.
The quintessence of all these comedies (as we may say of _Hamlet_ in
respect of the great tragedies) is the _Midsummer Night's Dream._ Here
the quick ardours, the inconstancies, the caprices, the illusions, the
delusions, every sort of love folly, become embodied and weave a world
of their own, as living and as real as that of those who are visited by
these affections, tormented or rendered ecstatic, raised on high or
hurled downward by them, in such a way that everything is equally real
or equally fantastic, as you may please to call it. The sense of dream,
of a dream-reality, persists and prevents our feeling the chilly sense
of allegory or of apology. The little drama seems born of a smile, so
delicate, refined and ethereal it is. Graceful and delicate to a degree
is also the setting of the dream, the celebration of the wedding of
Theseus and Hippolyta and the theatrical performance of the artisans,
for these are not merely ridiculous in their clumsiness; they are
also childlike and ingenuous, arousing a sort of gay pity: we do not
laugh at them: we smile. Oberon and Titania are at variance owing to
reciprocal wrongs, and trouble has arisen in the world. Puck obeys the
command of Oberon and sets to work, teasing, punishing and correcting.
But in performing this duty of punishing and correcting, he too makes
mistakes, and the love intrigue becomes more complicated and active.
Here we find a resemblance to the rapid passage into opposite states
and the strange complications that arose in Italian knightly romances,
as the result of drinking the water from one of two opposite fountains
whereof one filled the heart with amorous desires, the other turned
first ardours to ice. In Titania, who embraces the Ass's head and raves
about him, caressing and looking upon him as a graceful and gracious
creature, the comedy creates a symbol so ample and so efficacious as
rightly to have become proverbial. Puck meanwhile, astonished at the
effect upon men of the subtle intoxication that he has been himself
distributing, exclaims in his surprise "Lord, what fools these mortals
be!"; and Lysander, one of the madmen who are constantly passing from
one love to another, from one thing to its opposite, is nevertheless
perfectly convinced that
"The will of man is by his _reason_ sway'd;
And _reason says_ you are the _worthier_ maid."
Yet the individual reality of the figures appears through this
exquisite version of the eternal comedy, as though to remind us that
they really belong to life. Helena follows the man she loves, but who
does not love her, like a lapdog, which, the more it is beaten, the
more it runs round and round its master; she trembles at the outbreak
of furious jealousy in her little friend Hermia, who threatens to put
out her eyes, believing her to be capable of it, when she remembers
the time when they were at school together:
"O, when she's angry, she is keen and shrewd!
She was a vixen when she went to school:
And though she be but little she is fierce."
When we read _Romeo and Juliet,_ after the _Dream,_ we seem not to have
left that poetical environment, to which Mercutio expressly recalls
us, with his fantastic embroidery around Queen Mab, above all, when
we consider the style, the rhyming and the general physiognomy of
the little story. All have inclined to suave and gentle speech and
metaphor, when speaking of _Romeo and Juliet._ For Schlegel it was
scented with "the perfumes of springtide, the song of the nightingales,
the freshness of a newly budded rose." Hegel too found himself face
to face with that rose: "sweet rose in the valley of the world, torn
asunder by the rude tempest and the hurricane." Coleridge too speaks
of that sense of spring: "The spring with its odours, its flowers and
its fleetingness." All have looked upon it as the poem of youthful
love and have remarked that the play reaches its acme in the two love
scenes in the garden at night, and in the departure after the nuptial
night, in which some have seen the renovation of the traditional forms
of love poetry, "the epithalamium," "the dawn." This play is not only
closely connected with the _Dream,_ but also with the other comedies of
love; Romeo passes there with like rapidity, indeed suddenness to the
personages of those comedies from love of Rosalind to love of Juliet.
At the first sight of Juliet he is conquered and believes that he then
loves for the first time:
"Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight!
For I ne'er saw true beauty till this night."
Saintly Friar Laurence, a mixture of astonishment, of being scandalised
and of good nature, sometimes almost plays there the part of Puck. When
he learns that Romeo no longer loves Rosalind, about whom he had been
so crazy; he says:
"So soon forsaken! Young men's love there lies
Not truly in their hearts, but in their eyes.
Jesu Maria!"
When Juliet enters her cell, the friar remarks with admiration her
lightsome tread, which will never wear out the pavement, and reflects
that a lover "may bestride the gossamer that idles in the wanton
summer air, and yet not fall; so light is vanity." Is it tragedy or
comedy? It is another situation of the eternal comedy: the love of two
young people, almost children, which surmounts all social obstacles,
including the hardest of all, family hatred and party feud, and goes
on its way, careless of these obstacles and as though they had no
importance for their hearts, no existence in reality. And in truth
those obstacles seem to yield before their advance, or rather their
winged flight, like soft clouds. Certainly, those obstacles reappear
solidly enough later on, asserting their value and taking their
revenge, so much so, that the young lovers are obliged to separate
and Romeo goes into exile. But it will be only for a little while,
for Friar Laurence has promised to interest himself in their affairs,
to obtain the pardon of the Prince, to reconcile the parents and the
other relations, and to obtain sanction for their secret marriage.
And if nothing of all this happens, if the subtle previsions and the
acuteness of Friar Laurence turn out to be fallacious, if a sequence of
misunderstandings makes them lose their way and take a wrong turning,
if the two young lovers perish, it is the result of chance, and the
sentiment that arises from it is one of compassion, of compassion not
divorced from envy, a sorrow, which, as Hegel said, is "a dolorous
reconciliation and an unhappy beatitude in unhappiness." This too then
is tragedy, but tragedy in a minor key, what one might call the tragedy
of a comedy.
"A greater power than we can contradict
Hath thwarted our intents."
But that power is not the mysterious power, something between destiny
and providence and moral necessity, which weighs upon the great
tragedies; rather is it Chance, which Friar Laurence hardly succeeds in
dignifying with the words of religion:
"So hath willed it God."
There is a metaphor which is repeated in the terrible accents of _King
Lear,_ and which is itself able to reveal the difference between the
two tragedies. Romeo, whose life has been spared and who has been sent
into exile, thinks that what has been done for him, is torture rather
than pardon, because Paradise is only where Juliet lives:
"And every cat, and dog,
And little mouse, every unworthy thing,
Live here in heaven, and may look on her;
But Romeo may not!"
Juliet, who is preparing to drink the medicine that may be poisonous,
is the shy and timid young girl of Leopardi's _Amore e Morte,_ who
"feels her hair stand on end at the very name of death," but when she
has fallen in love "dares meditate at length on steel and on poison."
The very sepulchral cave shines, and Romeo after having stabbed Paris
at the feet of Juliet, whom he believes to be dead, feels that he is a
companion in misfortune and wishes to bury him there "In a triumphant
grave."
"A grave, O no, a lantern, slaughtered youth,
For here lies Juliet, and her beauty makes
This vault a feasting presence full of light."
Such words of admiration for love and for the youthful lovers are found
in other poets, for instance in Dante's words for Beatrice: "Death, I
hold thee very sweet: Thou must ever after be a noble thing, since thou
hast been in my lady."
If we find love in rather piteous guise in _Romeo and Juliet,_ comedy
reappears in the wise Portia, bound to the promise of allowing, her
fate to be decided by means of a guess, because although she submits
to selection by chance, she has already chosen in her heart, not among
the dukes and princes of the various nationalities, indeed of various
continents, who are competing for her hand, but a youthful Venetian,
something between a student and a soldier, half an adventurer, but
courteous and pleasing in address, who has contrived to please, not
only mistress, but maid, which shows, in this agreement of feminine
choice, where feminine taste really lies. "By my troth, Nerissa, my
little body is a-weary of this great world" (she sighs, with gentle
coquettishness toward herself), perhaps with that languor, which is
the desire of loving and of being loved, the budding of love; weary,
as those amorous souls feel, weary, who vibrate with an exquisite
sensibility. And indeed she is most sensible to music and to the
spectacles of nature; and the music that she hears in the night causes
her to stay and listen to it, and it seems to her far sweeter than when
heard in the daytime. Nocturnal moonlight gives her the impression of a
day that is ailing, of a rather pallid day when the sun is hidden.
In the _Merchant of Venice,_ there is also the couple of Jessica
and Lorenzo, those two lovers who do not feel the want of moral
idealisation, nor, one would be inclined to say, any solicitude for the
esteem of others. The man steals without scruple from the old Jew his
daughter and his jewels, and the girl has not even a slight feeling of
pity for the father, both alike plunged in the happy egotism of their
pleasure. Jessica is unperturbed, sustaining and exchanging epigrams
with her husband and the salacious jesting and somewhat insolent
familiarity of the servant Lancellotto, though abandoning herself all
the time to ecstasy, a sensual ecstasy, for she too is sensible to
music and attains by means of it to a melancholy of the only sort that
she is capable of experiencing, namely, the sensual.
There is malice, almost mockery, though tempered with other elements,
in the portrayal of these loves of the daughter of Shylock. But in
those of Troilus and Cressida, we meet at once with sarcasm, a bitter
sarcasm. The same background, the doings of the Trojan war, which in
other comedies has the superficial charm of a decoration, is here also
a decoration, but treated with sarcasm and bitterness. Thersites
fills the part of the cynic among the Greek warriors, in the relations
between Troilus and Cressida, as does Pandarus in Troy. The hastening
of the last scenes should be noted, the large amount of fighting, the
tumult: the world is dancing as in a puppet show, while the story of
Troilus and Cressida is drawing to its close, amid the imprecations of
the nauseated Troilus and the grotesquely burlesque lamentations of
Pandarus. Another great artist of the Renaissance comes to mind, in
relation to this play: not Ariosto, but Rabelais. The theme is still,
however, the comedy of love, but a comedy bordering on the faunesque,
the immoral, the baser instinct, upon lust and feminine faithlessness.
Pandarus is ever the go-between; he laughs and enjoys himself, for he
is an expert at this sort of business, a battle-stained warrior, as
it were, bearing traces of that long amorous warfare, if not in his
soul, in his old bones; he is the living destruction of love, of the
credulous, sensual cupidity of man and of the non-credulous, frivolous
vanity of woman. His too is the obsession of love-making: he is unable
to extricate himself from it, taking an almost devilish delight in
involving those who have recourse to him. Troilus does not displease
Cressida, on the contrary, he pleases her greatly, yet she fences with
him, because she is already in full possession of feminine wisdom and
philosophy. She knows that women are admired, sighed after and desired
as angels, while being courted, but once they have said yes, all is
over. She knows that the true pleasure lies _in the doing,_ in the act
and not in the fact, in the becoming, not in the become. She knows that
in yielding, she is committing a folly, by breaking the law, which is
known to her, but she puts everything she now undertakes upon Pandarus:
"Well, uncle, what folly I commit, I dedicate to you." How different
is her union with her lover, to that of Romeo and Juliet! There is an
ironic-comic solemnity in the rite performed by the pander uncle and in
the oaths of constancy and loyalty, which all three of them exchange,
while the uncle intones: "Say amen," and the two reply, "Amen," and
are then pushed into the nuptial chamber by the profane priest. How
different too is "the dawn," their separation in the morning!
"But that the busy day,
Waked by the lark, hath raised the ribald crows
And dreaming night will hide our joys no longer,
I would not from thee."
Whereupon the uncle begins to utter improper epigrams and plays upon
words, which the impatient Cressida repays, by sending him to the
devil. Cressida begins the new intrigue with Diomede, as soon as she is
face to face with him alone, in spite of this scene and the numerous
oaths that preceded and followed it. She is perfectly aware that she is
betraying her love for Troilus and that she has no excuse for doing so.
She gives to Diomede the gift of Troilus and when he asks her to whom
it belongs, she replies:
"'Twas one that lov'd me better than you will,
But now you have it, take it."
Here we find consciousness of her own feminine levity, looked upon
not merely as a natural force dragging her after it, but almost as a
right, as the exercise of a mission or vocation. Cressida can even be
sentimental, as she abandons herself to another!
"Troilus farewell, one eye yet looks on thee;
But with my heart the other eye doth see.
Ah! poor our sex!"
Troilus is meanwhile indignant, not from a sense of injured morality,
for that sort of love does not admit of such a thing: he is mad with
masculine jealousy. "Was Cressida here?" ... and further on: "Nothing
at all, unless that they were she ..."
The figures of Ferdinand and Miranda bring us back to love, youthful
and pure, all the more pure, because it reveals itself, not in the
midst of a great court or city, but in a desert island. The young man
comes there ship-wrecked, cut off from the world that once was his,
born as it were anew; the maiden has been brought up in solitude.
Yet her love is awakened at first sight, in the beautiful phrase of
Marlowe, which Shakespeare was so fond of quoting: "Who ever loved that
loved not at first sight?" It is love, law of beings as of things,
which returns eternally new and fresh as the dawn, making his Goddess
appear to the youth, her God to the maiden, each to each as beings
without their equal upon earth:
"I might call him
A thing divine, for nothing natural
I ever saw so noble." "Most sure, the goddess,
On whom these airs attend," says Ferdinand.
The choice is soon made, firm, resolute and determined. When Prospero
tells her that there are men in the world, compared with whom, the
youth she admires would seem a monster, Miranda replies:
"My affections
Are then most humble; I have no ambition
To see a goodlier man."
All noble things that can be imagined surround and elevate their loves:
misfortune, compassion, chaste desire, virginal respect. These things,
though infinitely repeated in the world's history seem new, as the two
live through them, "surprised withal," surprised and ravished at the
mystery, which in them is celebrated once more.
2
THE LONGING FOR ROMANCE
Another motive, related to the preceding, may be described as the
longing for romance, but this expression must be taken with all due
limitations.
Amorous damsels don the travesty of masculine attire, in order to
follow their faithless or cruel lovers, to escape persecution, or to
perform wondrous deeds; brothers, or brothers and sisters, who resemble
one another, are taken for one another, and thus form a centre for the
most curious adventures; with like objects in view, princes travesty
themselves as shepherds; gentlemen are discovered in forests with
bandits and are themselves bandits; children of royal blood, ignorant
of their origin, live like peasants, yet are moved by inclinations,
which make them impatient of their quiet, humble lives, urging them
on to great adventures; sovereigns move, disguised and unknown, among
their subjects, listening to the free speech around them and observant
of everything; rustic or city maidens become queens and countesses, or
are discovered to be of royal stock; brothers, who are enemies, become
reconciled; those who are innocent and having been wrongfully accused
and condemned, are believed to have died or been put to death, survive,
to reappear at the right moment, thus gratifying the long-cherished
hopes of those who had once believed them guilty and had mourned their
loss.
Strange rules and compacts are imposed, strange understandings come to,
such as the winning of husband or wife upon the solution of an enigma,
or upon the discovery of some object; then there is the bet as to the
virtue of a woman, won with a trick by the punster or by the perfidious
accuser; the betrothed or unwilling husband, finally obtained by the
substitution of another person; there are miraculous events, dreams,
magical arts, work of spirits of earth and sky ... Men and women are
tossed from land to sea, from city to forest and desert, from court to
country, from a civil and cultured, to a rustic and simple life. These
latter situations are peculiar to romance in the form of the idyll,
which is really the most romantic of romanticisms, though it may seem
to be the opposite. This is so true that even Don Quixote, when he saw
the way closed for the time being to the performance of chivalrous
feats of knight errantry, thought of retiring to the country, there
to pasture herds and to pipe songs to the beloved, in the company of
Sancho Panza.
Several of Shakespeare's plays derive both plot and material from
suchlike things and persons, as for instance, _As You Like It, Twelfth
Night, All's Well That Ends Well, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale,
Pericles, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Much Ado About Nothing, The
Merchant of Venice, Measure for Measure._ These plays may be said
to be altogether or in part, of literary origin, or suggested by
books, in a sense different from that in which Shakespeare treated
the other plays, where, although not bookish, he gathered his raw
materials from the English chroniclers, from ancient historians, or
Italian novelists, breathing upon it a new spirit and thus making of
it something altogether new to the world. Here on the other hand, he
found the spirit itself, the general sentiment, in the literature of
his time. Italy had worked upon the ancient poetry of Greece and Rome,
upon Hellenistic and Byzantine romances, upon mediaeval romances,
upon poems and plays, novels and comedies, and with Italy was also
Spain, whose _Amadigi_ and _Diane_ were known throughout Europe. The
genesis of these themes and of his attraction towards them, is to be
sought, therefore, rather in the times than in Shakespeare himself,
and for this reason we shall not delay our progress, to show how
the play of sentiment within made dear to him that wandering away
in imagination to the idyllic life of the country, far from pomp
and artifice, the deceits and the delusions of courts; though this
idyllic life itself became in its turn refined and artificial at his
hand, a pastoral theme. It is important to note, too, that all the
above-mentioned material of situations and adventures had already been
fashioned and arranged for the theatre, in the course of the second
half of the century. This was especially due to the Italian theatre of
improvisation or of "art," as it was called. This literature, so often
of a most romantic and imaginative kind, has had but little attention
at the hand of investigators into Shakespeare's sources of inspiration.
Both material derived from books and literary inspiration combine to
throw light upon certain of Shakespeare's works, which have given
great trouble to the historians of his art. It is quite natural that
writers should draw upon what they have done before and should execute
variations upon it, particularly in their earlier years, but also later
in the course of their lives, when they have afforded far greater
proofs of their capacity. Shakespeare was no exception to this, any
more than the great contemporary poet of _Don Quixote,_ who was also
the author of the _Galatea_ and of _Persiles y Sigismunda. The Comedy
of Errors,_ as we know, consists of a motive from Plautus, repeated
and rearranged innumerable times by the dramatists of the Renaissance.
In treating this theme, Shakespeare rendered it on the one hand yet
more artificial, while on the other, he endowed it with a more marked
tendency towards the romantic, and notwithstanding the frivolity and
frigidity of misunderstandings arising from identity of appearance,
he yet revived them here and there according to his wont with a touch
of the reality of life. The intrigue of the Menecmi, or of very close
resemblance, pleased him so much that he introduced it in _Twelfth
Night,_ where the pair are of different sex. This variation was first
employed by Cardinal Bibbiena in his _Calandria,_ but the Cardinal made
use of it to increase the lubricity of the intrigue, while Shakespeare
drew from it a theme for most graceful poetic inspiration.
One would think that the tragic theme of _Titus Andronicus_ (which
many critics would like to say was not by Shakespeare, but dare not,
because here the proofs of authenticity are very strong), was also
born of a love for literary models, for the tragedy of horrors, so
common in Italy in those days of the _Canaci_ and the _Orbecchi,_
which were rather imitations of Seneca than of Sophocles and Euripides,
and had already inspired plays to the predecessors of Shakespeare,
with slaughter for their theme. What more natural then, than that
Shakespeare as a young man should strike this note? The splendid
eloquence with which he adorned the horrible tale is Shakespearean.
His two poems, _Venus and Adonis_ and _The Rape of Lucrèce,_ are to
be attributed to this same literary taste for favorite models. These
poems received much praise from contemporaries, but are so far from the
"greater Shakespeare," that they might almost appear not to be his,
always, that is to say, if the greater Shakespeare be turned into a
rigidly historical and conventional personage. Their literary origin
is evident, not only to those who know well the English literature of
the period of the Renaissance (when Marlowe was composing _Hero and
Leander)_, but yet more to those versed in the Italian literature of
the same period, where the themes of the two little poems were in great
favour. As regards the first of these, Giambattista Marino, who was
destined to expand it into a long and celebrated poem, was already born
at Naples. Shakespeare here flaunts his virtuosity like our Italian
composers of melodious and voluptuous octaves, revelling in a wealth
of flowery image phrase, in his abundant, rhetorical capacity and in a
formal beauty which contains something of aesthetic voluptuousness.
The _Sonnets_ are also based upon Italian models, where we find
exhortations addressed to admired youth set upon a pinnacle, similar to
those that passed between Venus and Adonis. The beautiful youth, posing
as Adonis, and treated like him, became very common in our lyric poetry
of the time of Marino, in the seventeenth century, as were also love
sonnets addressed to ladies, possessing some peculiar characteristic,
such as red hair or a dark complexion, or even something different
or unfamiliar in their beauty, such as too lofty or too diminutive a
stature.
Notwithstanding this literary tendency in his inspiration, Shakespeare
does not cease to be a poet, because he is never altogether able to
separate himself from himself, everywhere he infuses his own thoughts
and modes of feeling, those harmonies, peculiar to himself, those
movements of the soul, so delicate and so profound. This has endowed
the _Sonnets_ with the aspect of a biographical mystery, of a poem
containing some hidden moral and philosophical sense. When we read
verses such as these:
The canker-blooms have full as deep a dye
As the perfumed tincture of the roses,
Hang on such thorns, and play as wantonly
When summer's breath their masked buds discloses.
But, for their virtue only is their show,
They live unwoo'd and unrespected fade;
Die to themselves. Sweet roses do not so;
Of their sweet deaths are sweetest odours made....
we feel the commonplace of literature, revived with lyric emotion. Note
too in the _Sonnets_ their pensiveness, their exquisite moral tone,
their wealth of psychological allusions, in which we often recognise
the poet of the great plays. Sometimes there echoes in them that
malediction of the chains of pleasure, which will afterwards become
_Anthony and Cleopatra_[1]; at others we hear Hamlet, tormented and
perplexed; yet more often we catch glimpses of reality as appearance
and appearance as reality, as in the _Dream_ or the _Tempest._ The
truth is that the soul of Shakespeare, poured into a fixed and
therefore inadequate mould, his lyrical impulse confined to the
epigrammatic, cause the poetry to flow together there, but deny to
it complete expansion and unfolding. To note but one example, the
celebrated sonnet LXVI ("Tired with all these for restful death I
cry"), is in the manner of Hamlet, but developed analytically, by
means of enumerations and parallelisms, and in obedience to literary
usage, and is obliged to terminate on the cadence of a madrigal,
in the last rhymed couplet. The soft, flexible verse of the early
_Venus and Adonis_ is also free of Marino's cold ingenuity, of his
external sonority and melody, and is inspired rather with a sense of
voluptuousness, a grace, an elegance, which recall at times the stanzas
of Politian:
The night of sorrow now is turned to day;
Her two blue windows faintly she upheaveth,
Like the fair sun, when in his fresh array
He cheers the morn, and all the earth relieveth:
And as the bright sun glorifies the sky,
So is her face illumined with her eye.
In Shakespeare is nothing of the cold literary exercise; he takes a
vivid interest even in the play of fancy, in the bringing about of
marvellous coincidences, of unexpected meetings, in the romantic and
the idyllic. He loves all these things, composing them for his own
enjoyment and fondling them with the magic of his style. He cannot of
course make them what they are not, he cannot change their intimate
qualities into something different from what they are; he cannot
destroy their externality, since they came to him from without. What
he can and does put into them is above all their attractiveness as
images. For this reason, the poetry that we find here is of necessity
rather superficial and tenuous, far more so than the poetry of the
love dramas, where his powers have a wider scope for observation, for
reflexion and for meditation upon human affections.
What has been said above as to the inventions and fables, which serve
as a decorative background to certain of the comedies of love, is also
applicable to these romantic and idyllic plays, in which the decorative
background takes the first place and becomes the principal theme. For
the rest, it goes without saying that the plots or decorations referred
to are also to be included (as has been done) in the present argument,
because it turns upon the different motives of Shakespeare's poetry,
not upon the works that are materially distinct, where several motives
usually meet and are sometimes so very loosely connected, as to form no
more intimate a unity than the rather capricious one, of general tone.
A sense of _unreality_ is therefore diffused upon the romantic plays,
not of falsity, but just of unreality, such as we experience in the
play of fancy, when we recount a fairy tale, well aware that it is
a fairy tale, yet greatly enjoying the passage to and fro before us
of the prince, the beauty, the ogre and the fairy. A proof of this
is to be found in the summary treatment of the characters and the
turning-points or crises of the action, the easy pardoning and making
of peace, and the bizarre expedients adopted to bring the intrigue to
an end. Instances of the second sort are the adventure of the lion in
the Forest of Arden the reconciliation of the two enemy brothers in
_As You Like It,_ the dream of Posthumus in _Cymbeline,_ the advent
of the bear and the ship-wreck in the _Winter's Tale,_ and the like.
And as regards summary treatment, where could we find a more off-hand
Iago than the Hyacinth of _Cymbeline,_ guilty of the most audacious
and perverse betrayals, as though by chance, yet later on, when he,
confesses his sins, he is forgiven and starts again, so far as we can
see, a gentleman and perfect knight. We do not speak of Posthumus,
of Cloten, of King Cymbeline and of so many personages in this and
others of the romantic plays. The wicked turn out to be all the more
harmless, the greater their wickedness; the good are good _nunc et
semper,_ without intermission, exactly as introduced at the beginning
of the play; the most desperate situations, the most terrible passes,
are speedily and completely overcome, or one foresees that they will be
overcome. Here romance has no intention whatever of ending unhappily
or in pensive sadness; it wishes to stimulate the imagination, but at
the same time to keep it agile and happy and to leave it contented.
Indeed, in those rare cases when we do meet with painful or terrible
motives, which are not easily overcome in the course of the imaginative
development of the work, we are sensible of being slightly jarred,
and this is perhaps the reason for that "displeasure," which such
fine judges as Coleridge note in _Measure for Measure,_ so rich,
nevertheless, in splendid passages, worthy of Shakespeare. Not only
does this comedy verge upon tragedy, but here and there it becomes
immersed in it, vainly attempting to return to the light romantic vein
and end like a fairy story, with everyone happy.
Another element which adds to the imaginative unreality and the gay
lightsomeness of the romantic dramas, is to be found in the clown,
the burlesque incidents, which abound in all of them: Malvolio and
Uncle Toby in _Twelfth Night,_ Parolles in _All's Well,_ the watch
in _Much Ado_ and so on. Certain personages also, who might seem to
be characters, such as the melancholy Jacques in _As You Like It_ or
Autolycus in the _Winter's Tale,_ are treated rather as character
studies.
These comedies excel in the weaving of intricate incidents, they are
replete with grace and winsomeness, melodious with songs inspired by
idyllic themes. They are far superior in emotional quality, as is the
rustic, woodland, pastoral poetry of Shakespeare, to that of Italy and
of Spain, not only to the _Pastor Fido,_ but also to the _Aminta,_
because Shakespeare succeeds in grafting his gay and gentle heart
upon his artificial and conventional models. Take for instance in _As
You Like It_ the scenes in the third act, between Rosalind and Celia,
Rosalind and Orlando, Corin and Touchstone, and in general, the whole
life led by the young men and maidens, the shepherds and gentlemen, in
that idyllic Forest of Arden; or the open air banquet, in the _Winter's
Tale,_ at which the king surprises his son on the point of marrying
Perdita; or in _Cymbeline,_ Hyacinth's contemplation of the chaste and
tender beauty of the sleeping Imogen; and in the same play, all the
scenes among the mountains between Bellario and the two refugee sons of
the king, Guiderio and Arviragus.
They correspond to that most beautiful utterance in exquisite verse of
Tasso's Hermione Among the Shepherds. His thoughts come back in such
lines as the following:
"O, this life
Is nobler than attending for a check,
Richer than doing nothing for a bribe,
Prouder than rustling in unpaid for silk:
Such gain the cap of him that makes 'em fine...."
or
"Come, our stomachs
Will make what's homely savoury: weariness
Can snore upon the flint, when rusty sloth
Finds the down pillow hard. Now, peace be here,
Poor house that keepest thyself!"
But Shakespeare can rise yet higher, to that most tender of songs by
the two brothers over Imogene, whom they believe to be dead.
[Footnote 1: See Sonnet CXXIX: "The expense of spirit in a waste of
shame."]
3
SHAKESPEARE'S INTEREST IN PRACTICAL ACTION
The third conspicuous aspect of Shakespeare's genius corresponds to
what are known as the "historical plays." Only here and there do we
find a critic who takes them to be the loftiest form of Shakespearean
poetry, while the majority on the other hand hold them to be merely a
preparatory form for other poetry, and the general view (always worthy
consideration) is that they are less happy or less intense than the
"great tragedies."
It is also said of them that they represent the period of the
"historical education," which Shakespeare undertook, with a view to
acquiring a full sense of real life and the capacity for drawing
personages and situations with firmness of outline. One critic
has defined them as a series of "studies," studies of "heads," of
"physiognomies," of "movements," taken from historical life or reality,
in order to form the eye and the hand, something like the sketch-books
and collections of designs of a future great painter.
The defect of such critical explanations lies in continuing to conceive
of the artistic process as something mechanical, and the unrecognised
but understood presumption of some sort of "imitation of nature." Had
Shakespeare intended to educate himself "historically," by writing the
historical plays, (assuming, but not admitting, that to run through the
English chronicles, and even Plutarch's lives, can be called historical
education), he would have developed and formed his historical thought
and become a thinker and a critic, he would not have conceived and
realised the scenes and personages of the plays. Neither Shakespeare
nor any other artist can ever attempt to reproduce external nature or
history turned into external reality (since they do not exist in a
concrete form) even in the period of first attempts and studies; all he
can do is to try to produce and recognise his own sentiment and to give
it form. We are thus always brought back and confined to the study of
sentiment, or, as in the present case, to the sentiment which inspired
what are known as the historical plays.
Among these are to be numbered all those that deal with English
history, _The Life and Death of King John, Richard II, Henry IV, V,
VI,_ and _Richard III,_ setting aside for certain reasons _Henry VIII,_
but including among the plays from Roman history (or from Plutarch as
they are also called), _Coriolanus,_ while _Julius Caesar_ and _Anthony
and Cleopatra_ are connected with the great tragedies. The historical
quality of the material, in like manner, with every other material
determination, is not conclusive as to the quality of the poetic works,
and is therefore not independently valid in the estimation of the
critic, as a criterion for separation or conjunction. A reconsideration
of the plays mentioned above and their prominent characteristics, does
not lead to accepting them as a kind of "dramatised epic," or as "works
which stand half way between epic and drama" (Schlegel, Coleridge), not
that there is any difficulty in the appearance of epic quality in the
form of theatrical dialogue, but just because epic quality is absent in
those dramas. It would indeed be strange to see epic quality appearing
in an episodic manner in an author, during the period of youth alone.
Epicity, in fact, means feeling for human struggles, but for human
struggles lit with the light of an aspiration and an ideal, such as
one's own people, one's own religious faith and the like, and therefore
containing the antitheses of friends and foes, of heroes on both
sides, some on the side finally victorious, because protected by God
or justice, others upon that which is to be discomfited, subjected, or
destroyed. Now Shakespeare, as has already been said and is universally
recognized, is not a partisan; he marches under no political or
religious banner, he is not the poet of particular practical ideals,
_non est de hoc mundo,_ because he always goes beyond, to the universal
man, to the cosmic problem.
Commentators have, it is true, laboured to extract from these and
others of his plays, the ideals which they suppose him to have
cultivated, concerning the perfect king, the independence and greatness
of England, the aristocracy, which in their judgment was the main-stay
and glory of his country. They have discovered his Achilles (in the
double form of "Achilles in Sciro" and of "Achilles at Troy") in Prince
Henry, and his _pius Aeneas,_ in the same prince become Henry V, who,
grown conscious of his new duties, resolutely and definitely severs
himself, not from a Dido, but from a Falstaff. They have discovered
his paladins in the great representatives of the English aristocracy,
and as reflected in the Roman aristocracy, by a Coriolanus, and on
the other hand the class which he suspected and despised, in the
populace and plebeians of all time, whether of those that surrounded
Menenius Agrippa or who created tumult for and against Julius Caesar
in the Forum, or those others who bestowed upon Jack Cade a fortune
as evanescent as it was sudden. Finally, his Trojans or Rutulians,
enemies of his people, are supposed by them to be the French. But if
the epic ideal had possessed real force and consistency in the mind
of Shakespeare, we should not have needed industrious interpreters
to track it down and demonstrate it. On the other hand, it is clear
that the author of _Henry VI,_ in treating as he did Talbot and the
Maid of Orleans, and the author of _Henry V,_ in his illustration of
the struggles between the English and the French and the victory of
Agincourt, restricted himself to adopting the popular and traditional
English view, without identifying that with his spiritual self, or
taxing it as his guide to the conception of the English and Roman
plays.
Nor is there any value in another view, to the effect that Shakespeare
in these plays set the example and paved the way for what was
afterwards called historical and romantic drama. Had he sought this
end, he would not only have required some sort of political, social
and religious ideal, but also historical reflection, the sense of what
distinguishes and gives character to past times in respect to present,
and also that nostalgia for the past, which both Shakespeare and the
Italian and English Renaissance were altogether without. About two
centuries had to elapse before an imitator of Shakespeare, or rather
of some of his external forms and methods, arose, in the composer
of _Goetz von Berlichingen._ He had assimilated the new historical
curiosity and affection for the rude and powerful past, and there
provided the first model of what was soon afterwards developed as
historical romance and drama, especially by Walter Scott.
Whoever tries to discover the internal stimulus, the constructive idea,
the lyrical motive, which led Shakespeare to convert the Chronicles
of Holinshed and the Lives of Plutarch into dramatic form, when his
possession of the epic ideal and nostalgia for the past have been
excluded, finds nothing save an interest in and an affection for
practical achievement, for action attentively followed, in its cunning
and audacity, in the obstacles that it meets, in the discomfitures,
the triumphs, the various attitudes of the different temperaments and
characters of men. This interest, finding its most suitable material
in political and warlike conflicts, was naturally attracted to history
and to that especial form of it, which was nearest to the soul and to
the culture of the poet of his people and of his time, English and
Roman history. This material had already been brought to the theatre
by other writers and was in this way introduced to the attention and
used by the new poet. A psychological origin of this sort explains the
vigour of the representations, which Shakespeare derived from history,
incomprehensible, if as philologists maintain, he had simply set
himself to cultivate, a "style" that was demanded in the theatre and
known as _chronicle plays,_ or had there set himself a merely technical
task, with a view to attaining dexterity.
That psychological interest, too, in so far as separated from a
supreme end or ideal, towards which actions tend, or rather in so far
as it remains uncertain and vague in this respect, limiting itself to
questions of loss or gain, of success or failure, of living or dying,
is not a qualitative, but a _formal_ interest. It can also be called
political, if you will, but political in the sense of Machiavelli and
the Renaissance, in so far as politics are considered for themselves,
and therefore only formally. Hence the impression caused by the
historical plays of Shakespeare, of being now "a gallery of portraits,"
now "a series of personal experiences," which the poet is supposed to
have achieved in imagination.
It is certain that their richness, their brilliancy, their attraction,
lie in the emotional representation of practical activity. Bolingbroke
ascends the throne, by the adoption of violent and tortuous means,
knowing when to withdraw himself and when to dare. Later he recounts
to his son how artfully he composed and maintained the attitude,
which caused him to be looked upon with sympathy and reverence by the
people, affecting humility and humanity, but preserving at the same
time the element of the marvellous, so that his presence, _like a robe
pontifical,_ was _ne'er seen but wondered at._ He causes the blood of
the deposed king to be shed, while protesting after the deed his great
grief _that blood should sprinkle me to make me grow,_ and promising
to undertake a voyage of expiation to the Holy Land. Facing him is the
falling monarch, Richard II, in whose breast consciousness of his own
sacred character as legitimate sovereign and of the inviolable dignity
attached to it, the sense of being to blame, of pride humiliated, of
resignation to destiny or divine decree, of bitterness, of sarcasm
towards himself and towards others, succeed, alternate and combat
one another, a swarm of writhing sentiments, an agony of suffocated
passions.
"O, that I were as great
As is my grief, or lesser than my name!
Or that I could forget what I have been!
Or not remember what I must be now!
Swell'st thou, proud heart? I'll give thee scope to
beat...."
Elsewhere we find the same inexorable conqueror, Bolingbroke, as Henry
IV, triumphant on several occasions against different enemies, now
infirm and approaching death, raving from lack of sleep, and envying
the meanest of his subjects, blindly groping in the vain shadows
of human effort, as once his conquered predecessor, and filled with
terror, as he views the whole extent of the universe and the
"Revolution of the times
Make mountains level, and the continent,
Weary of solid firmness, melt itself
Into the sea!...
And changes fill the cup of alteration
With divers liquors! O, if this were seen,
The happiest youth,--viewing his progress through
What perils past, what crosses to ensue,--
Would shut the book and sit him down and die."
And hearing of some friends becoming estranged and of others changing
into enemies, he is no longer indignant nor astonished:
"Are these things then necessities?
Then let us meet them as necessities."
Henry V meditates upon the singular condition of kings, upon their
majesty, which separates them from all other men and by thus elevating,
loads them with a weight equal to that which all men together have to
carry, while taking from them the joys given to others, and depriving
them of hearing the truth or of obtaining justice.
He feels himself to be more than a king in those moments when he tears
off his own kingly mask and mirrors himself in his naked reality as
man. Facing the enemies who are drawn up on the field of battle and
ready to attack him, he murmurs to himself the profound words:
"Besides they are our _natural consciences._
And preachers to us all; admonishing
That we should dress us fairly for our end."
Death reigns above all else in these dramas, death, which brings every
great effort to an end, all torment of burning passion and ambition,
all rage of barbarous crimes, and is therefore received as a lofty and
severe matron; in her presence, countenances are composed, however
ardently she has been withstood, however loudly the brave show of life
has been affirmed. Death is received thus by all or nearly all the men
in Shakespeare, by the tortured and elegiac Richard II, by the great
sinner Suffolk, by the diabolic Richard III, down to the other lesser
victims of fate. The vileness of the vile, the rascality of rascals,
the brutal stupidity of acclaiming or imprecating crowds, are felt and
represented with equal intensity, without once permitting anything of
the struggle of life to escape, so vast in its variety.
The personages of these plays arise like three-dimensional statues,
that is to say they are treated with full reality, and thus form a
perfect antithesis to the figures of the romantic plays. These are
superficial portraits, vivid, but light and vanishing into air; they
are rather types than individuals. This does not imply a judgment of
greater or lesser value or a difference in the art of portraying the
true; it only expresses in other words and formulas the different
sentiment that animates the two different groups of artistic creations,
that which springs from delight in the romantic and that due to
interest in human action. A Hotspur, introduced upon the scene of the
romantic dramas, would break through them like a statue of bronze
placed upon a fragile flooring of boards and painted canvas. He is
the true "formal" hero, volitional, inrushing, disdainful, impatient,
exuberant; we walk round him, admiring his lofty stature, his muscular
strength, his potent gestures. He is like a splendid bow, with its
mighty string drawn tight to hurl the missile, but wherefore or whither
it will strike, we cannot tell. He is all rebellion and battle, yet
his wit and satire is worthy of an artist; he loves, too, with a pure
tenderness. But wit and satire and the words of love, alike, bear even
the imprint and are hastened by impetuosity, as of a man engaged in
conversation between one combat and another, still joyful and hot from
the battle that is over, already hot and joyful for that which is to
begin. "Away, away, you trifler," he says to his wife, "you that are
thinking of love. Love! I love thee not,
I care not for thee, Kate: this is no world
To play with memmets and to tilt with lips:
We must have bloody noses and cracked crowns,
And pass them current too. Gods me, my horse!
What say'st thou, Kate? What would'st thou have
with me?"
His parallel (perhaps slightly inferior artistically), is the Roman
Coriolanus, as brave, as violent and as disdainful as he, a despiser
of the people and of the people's praise; he too rushes over the
precipice to death and is also a "formal" hero, because his bravery is
not founded upon love of country, or upon a faith or ideal of any kind,
one might almost say that it was without object or that its object was
itself. Nor, on the other hand, is Coriolanus a superman, in the sense
suggested by the works of some of the predecessors and contemporaries
of Shakespeare. He is not less tenderly demonstrative towards his
mother or his silent wife (_"my gracious silence"_), than is Hotspur
to Kate, or when, yielding to a woman's prayers, he stays the course
of his triumphant vengeance. It would be tedious to record all the
personages of indomitable power that we meet with in these historical
dramas, such as the bastard Faulconbridge, in _King John,_ and most
popular of all, though not the most artistically executed, Richard
III, replete with iniquity, who clears the way by dealing death around
himself without pity, and dies in the midst of combat with that last
cry of desperate courage, "A horse, a horse! My kingdom for a horse!"
At their side stand, not less powerfully delineated, and set in relief,
those queens Constance and Margaret: deprived of their power and full
of maledictions, terrible in their fury, they are either ferocious or
shut themselves up in their majestic sorrow. Queen Constance, when she
sees herself abandoned by her protectors in the face of her enemies,
who have become their allies, says, as she lets herself fall to the
ground:
"Let kings assemble; for my grief's so great
That no supporter but the huge firm earth
Can hold it up: here I and sorrows sit;
Here is my throne: bid kings come bow to it."
This gallery of historical figures is most varied; we find here not
only the vigorous and proud, the sorrowful and troubled, but also the
noble and severe, like Gaunt, the touching, like the little princes
destined to the dagger of the assassins, Prince Arthur and the sons of
Edward IV, down to the laughing and the credulous, to those who defy
prejudice to wallow in debauch.
Sir John Falstaff is the first of these latter, and it is important
not to misunderstand him, as certain critics have done, especially
among the French. They have looked upon him as a jovial, comic type,
a theatrical buffoon, and have compared him with the comic theatrical
types of other stages, arriving at the conclusion that he is a less
happy and less successful conception than they, because his comicality
is exclusively English, and is not to be well understood outside
England and America. But we must on the other hand be careful not to
interpret the character moralistically, as an image of baseness, darkly
coloured with the poet's contempt, as one towards whom he experienced
a feeling of disgust. Falstaff could call himself a "formal" hero in
his own way: magnificent in ignoring morality and honour, logical,
coherent, acute and dexterous. He is a being in whom the sense of
honour has never appeared, or has been obliterated, but the intellect
has developed and become what alone it could become, namely, _esprit,_
or sharpness of wit. He is without malice, because malice is the
antithesis of moral conscientiousness, and he lacks both thesis and
antithesis. There is in him, on the contrary, a sort of innocence, the
result of the complete liberty of his relation toward all restraint
and towards ethical law. His great body, his old sinner's flesh, his
complete experience of taverns and lupanars, of rogues male and female,
complicates without destroying the soul of the boy that is in him, a
very vicious boy, but yet a boy. For this reason, he is sympathetic,
that is to say, he is sympathetically felt and lovingly depicted by the
poet. The image of a child, that is to say of childish innocence, comes
spontaneously to the lips of the hostess, as she tells of how he died:
"Nay, sure, he's not in hell: he's in Arthur's bosom, if ever man went
to Arthur's bosom. 'A made a fine end, and went away, an it had been
any Christom child...."
Shylock the Jew also finds a place in the historical gallery, for
the very reason that he is a Jew, "the Jew," indeed, a historical
formation, and Shakespeare conceives and describes him with the
characteristics proper to his race and religion, one might almost say,
sociologically. It has been asserted that for Shakespeare and for
his public Shylock was a comic personage, intended to be flouted and
laughed at by the pit; but we do not know what were the intentions of
Shakespeare and as usual they matter little, because Shylock lives
and speaks, himself explaining what he means, without the aid of
commentaries, even such as the author might possibly have supplied.
Shylock crying out in his desperation: "My daughter! O my ducats!..."
may have made laugh the spectators in the theatre, but that cry of the
wounded and tortured animal does not make the poetical reader laugh;
he forms anything but a comic conception of that being, trampled down,
poisoned at heart and unshakeable in his desire for vengeance. On the
other hand the pathetic and biassed interpretations of Shylock that
have been given during the nineteenth century, are foreign to the
ingenuousness of a creation, without a shadow of humanitarianism or of
polemic. What Shakespeare has created, fusing his own impressions and
experiences in the crucible of his attentive and thoughtful humanity,
is the Jew, with his firm cleaving to the law and to the written word,
with his hatred for Christian feeling, with his biblical language,
now sententious now sublime, the Jew with his peculiar attitude of
intellect, will and morality.