That territorial name, murmured to his love in the hour of death, and in
her arms—I know not in the records of all genius any other such august
farewell. Lear’s word is outdone here. Lear a king in every inch of his
aged body, but Cleopatra a queen in every league of her ancient realm.
Has not majesty spoken its one unexpected word in the mouth of such a
lover?
Superfluous kings—Shakespeare’s irony could find no other adjective so
overcharged with insolence as this. Kings must be as he conceived them
in order to that antithesis:
Superfluous kings for messengers.
But an antithesis more complete than that of downfall and of servitude
is that of mortality. The humiliation of the beaten monarch leaves the
Shakespearian conception of kingliness face to face with the mere
fortunes of war; the derision of the word ‘superfluous’ implies, in
reversal, an inalienable dignity; so in the act of dying, the visible
act, done in life; so with ‘sad stories of the death of kings’. The
final contradiction is not here; but in the grave itself, in the hidden
burial, out of the sight of the populace: it needs the utmost of
Shakespeare’s passion of royalty to answer to that depth. And here is
poetry, not by him, but wonderfully worthy of him, that tells us of
High-born dust
In vaults, thin courts of poor unflattered kings.
Shakespeare only, besides Young, could have written this.
Literature, then, will lose this glory, and with this glory this
humiliation. Who will say which is greater, the thesis or the
antithesis? But they cannot be parted to be compared. There they are, in
our national literature, and cannot be effaced. But who shall hinder
their becoming, for the student, first a matter of mere literary
interest, then a matter of mere literary curiosity, next a matter of
some new derision? (We need no new derisions: our wits are apt to
mockery.) Is it well that any one of Shakespeare’s many passions should
come under our frigid inspection, to be examined so?
When kings are in fact superfluous, Shakespeare’s great word
‘superfluous’ will be cancelled out; when kings are no longer flattered,
Young’s great word ‘unflattered’ will be a futile word; when there are
no full assiduous courts, the ‘thin courts’ will suggest no spectres.
Regret is for Shakespeare, as has been said; not for Saul, or Louis the
Fourteenth, or Charles the Twelfth. But, short of Shakespeare’s
devotion, there will be some sentiment damaged. When the mortality of
kings is no sharper sarcasm than is the mortality we all inherit, then
the lamps and the gold that enshrine the bony heads of Caspar, Melchior,
and Balthasar at Cologne may take their place, outside of cathedrals,
with the unnamed relics of the shepherds who preceded the kings to the
manger.
Shakespeare’s greatest splendour, then, that so shines down the
splendour of history and the world, is under sentence, and under
sentence his greatest compassion, and under sentence his greatest
terror, and under sentence his greatest irony. And I have placed at the
head of these pages a word of neither terror nor compassion, because the
word of irony implies the rest.