Which had superfluous kings for messengers
Not many moons gone by.
_Antony and Cleopatra._
As the kings lag, and then pass away from the stage of the world, many
men will ask what there is to regret. Assuredly nothing, if not royalty
in the mind of Shakespeare. Mankind will in time probably forget or deny
that there was ever anything in the life of the world answering to
Shakespeare’s royalty in Perdita, or to his princeliness in Arviragus
and Guiderius, or to his kingliness in Lear, or to his glory in
Cleopatra. It may be so, as to the world; there may have been nothing
thus answerable. But there was Shakespeare.
And our regrets in regard to him cover all his regalities—the hidden and
hereditary and unconscious, and the conscious and braggart and manifest:
Perdita’s dignity among the romps, and her sportive disputes as to Art
and Nature among the clowns, her unflushed composure amid the
junketings, and also Lear’s loud and indignant death. The splendour of
Shakespeare’s veneration for kings is perhaps deeper where the
kingliness—the blood of it—is unrevealed, as in the shepherdess of _The
Winter’s Tale_, for here it is matter of Shakespeare’s faith. So with
the brothers of Imogen who, by the way—and not merely by the way—like
her, discuss flowers—‘Then to arms!’ They too have the implicit
distinction, unknown to the world of their exile, but known to
Shakespeare, who is aware of their blood and lineage. Here, and in _The
Winter’s Tale_, Shakespeare makes his resolute and implicit act of
belief in the blood of kings.
In _Lear_ that faith suffers outrage and defies it. Many years ago the
great actor, Rossi, who did not gain in England such honour as was
rendered to Salvini—I fear because his physical personal dignity was not
so obvious as Salvini’s—played King Lear in Italian. But there was one
cry, one royal proclamation, that could not be removed from the English.
So Rossi said ‘every inch’ in English. It needed Shakespeare’s word to
vindicate Shakespeare’s royalism. (One might make sport of any kind of
translation: say ‘_ogni centimetro_’—‘every centimetre a king’ is good
farce.) No Italian will serve; the Latin mind has not this degree of
imaginative reverence, nor has the Italian language the faculty of
giving sudden greatness to a customary word.
But Shakespeare, conceiving for royalty not only ‘the beauteous Majesty
of Denmark’, and the ‘courteous action’ of the dead—‘being so
majestical’—and the dignity of Hermione’s daughter, and the tempest of
Lear’s elemental tragedy, will not consent to touch us with nothing more
than pity and terror. He confronts us with the uttermost of pride of
life in the royalty he sings; confronts us—no, rather brings us to our
knees before the arrogant splendour he conceives:
Where souls do couch on flowers, we’ll hand in hand,
And with our sprightly port make the ghosts gaze.
It is the pride of life and the pride of death. Only hand in hand with a
queen does Antony venture on the prophecy of that immortal vanity. If to
him are given the most surprising lines in any of the tragedies, it is
only as the lover of a queen that he has the right to them. To him is
assigned that startling word, the incomparable word of amorous and
tender ceremony—‘Egypt’.