A study of Shakespeare which fails to take account of Shakespeare's
humor must remain essentially incomplete. The character and spiritual
history of a man who is endowed with a capacity for humorous
appreciation of the world must differ throughout, and in every
particular, from that of the man whose moral nature has never rippled
over with genial laughter. At whatever final issue Shakespeare arrived
after long spiritual travail as to the attainment of his life, that
precise issue, rather than another, was arrived at in part by virtue
of the fact of Shakespeare's humor. In the composition of forces which
determined the orbit traversed by the mind of the poet, this must be
allowed for as a force among others, in importance not the least, and
efficient at all times even when little apparent. A man whose visage
"holds one stern intent" from day to day, and whose joy becomes at
times almost a supernatural rapture, may descend through circles of
hell to the narrowest and the lowest; he may mount from sphere to
sphere of Paradise until he stands within the light of the Divine
Majesty; but he will hardly succeed in presenting us with an adequate
image of life as it is on this earth of ours, in its oceanic amplitude
and variety. A few men of genius there have been, who with vision
penetrative as lightning have gazed as it were _through_ life, at some
eternal significances of which life is the symbol. Intent upon its
sacred meaning, they have had no eye to note the forms of the
grotesque hieroglyph of human existence. Such men are not framed for
laughter. To this little group the creator of Falstaff, of Bottom, and
of Touchstone does not belong.
Shakespeare, who saw life more widely and wisely than any other of the
seers, could laugh. That is a comfortable fact to bear in mind; a fact
which serves to rescue us from the domination of intense and narrow
natures, who claim authority by virtue of their grasp of one-half of
the realities of our existence and their denial of the rest.
Shakespeare could laugh. But we must go on to ask, "What did he laugh
at? and what was the manner of his laughter?" There are as many modes
of laughter as there are facets of the common soul of humanity, to
reflect the humorous appearances of the world. Hogarth, in one of his
pieces of coarse yet subtile engraving, has presented a group of
occupants of the pit of a theatre, sketched during the performance of
some broad comedy or farce. What proceeds upon the stage is invisible
and undiscoverable, save as we catch its reflection on the faces of
the spectators, in the same way that we infer a sunset from the
evening flame upon windows that front the west. Each laughing face in
Hogarth's print exhibits a different mode or a different stage of the
risible paroxysm. There is the habitual enjoyer of the broad comic,
abandoned to his mirth, which is open and unashamed; mirth which he is
evidently a match for, and able to sustain. By his side is a companion
female portrait--a woman with head thrown back to ease the violence of
the guffaw; all her loose redundant flesh is tickled into an orgasm of
merriment; she is fairly overcome. On the other side sits the
spectator who has passed the climax of his laughter; he wipes the
tears from his eyes, and is on the way to regain an insecure and
temporary composure. Below appears a girl of eighteen or twenty, whose
vacancy of intellect is captured and occupied by the innocuous folly
still in progress; she gazes on expectantly, assured that a new
blossom of the wonder of absurdity is about to display itself. Her
father, a man who does not often surrender himself to an indecent
convulsion, leans his face upon his hand, and with the other steadies
himself by grasping one of the iron spikes that inclose the orchestra.
In the right corner sits the humorist, whose eyes, around which the
wrinkles gather, are half closed, while he already goes over the jest
a second time in his imagination. At the opposite side an elderly
woman is seen, past the period when animal violences are possible,
laughing because she knows there is something to laugh at, though she
is too dull-witted to know precisely what. One spectator, as we guess
from his introverted air, is laughing to think what somebody else
would think of this. Finally, the thin-lipped, perk-nosed person of
refinement looks aside, and by his critical indifference condemns the
broad, injudicious mirth of the company.
All these laughers of Hogarth are very commonplace, and some are very
vulgar persons; one trivial, ludicrous spectacle is the occasion of
their mirth. When from such laughter as this we turn to the laughter
of men of genius, who gaze at the total play of the world's life; and
when we listen to this, as with the ages it goes on gathering and
swelling, our sense of hearing is enveloped and almost annihilated by
the chorus of mock and jest, of antic and buffoonery, of tender mirth
and indignant satire, of monstrous burlesque and sly absurdity, of
desperate misanthropic derision and genial affectionate caressing of
human imperfection and human folly. We hear from behind the mask the
enormous laughter of Aristophanes, ascending peal above peal until it
passes into jubilant ecstasy, or from the uproar springs some
exquisite lyric strain. We hear laughter of passionate indignation
from Juvenal, the indignation of "the ancient and free soul of the
dead republics." And there is Rabelais, with his huge buffoonery, and
the earnest eyes intent on freedom, which look out at us in the midst
of the zany's tumblings and indecencies. And Cervantes, with his
refined Castilian air and deep melancholy mirth, at odds with the
enthusiasm which is dearest to his soul. And Moliere, with his
laughter of unerring good sense, undeluded by fashion or vanity or
folly or hypocrisy, and brightly mocking these into modesty. And
Milton, with his fierce objurgatory laughter,--Elijah-like insult
against the enemies of freedom and of England. And Voltaire, with his
quick intellectual scorn and eager malice of the brain. And there is
the urbane and amiable play of Addison's invention, not capable of
large achievement, but stirring the corners of the mouth with a humane
smile,--gracious gayety for the breakfast-tables of England. And
Fielding's careless mastery of the whole broad common field of mirth.
And Sterne's exquisite curiosity of oddness, his subtile extravagances
and humors prepense. And there is the tragic laughter of Swift, which
announces the extinction of reason, and loss beyond recovery of human
faith and charity and hope. How in this chorus of laughters, joyous
and terrible, is the laughter of Shakespeare distinguishable?
In the first place, the humor of Shakespeare, like his total genius,
is many-sided. He does not pledge himself as dramatist to any one view
of human life. If we open a novel by Charles Dickens, we feel assured
beforehand that we are condemned to an exuberance of philanthropy; we
know how the writer will insist that we must all be good friends, all
be men and brothers, intoxicated with the delight of one another's
presence; we expect him to hold out the right hand of fellowship to
man, woman, and child; we are prepared for the bacchanalia of
benevolence. The lesson we have to learn from this teacher is, that
with the exception of a few inevitable and incredible monsters of
cruelty, every man naturally engendered of the offspring of Adam is of
his own nature inclined to every amiable virtue, Shakespeare abounds
in kindly mirth: he receives an exquisite pleasure from the alert wit
and bright good sense of a Rosalind; he can dandle a fool as tenderly
as any nurse qualified to take a baby from the birth can deal with her
charge. But Shakespeare is not pledged to deep-dyed ultra-amiability.
With Jacques, he can rail at the world while remaining curiously aloof
from all deep concern about its interests, this way or that. With
Timon he can turn upon the world with a rage no less than that of
Swift, and discover in man and woman a creature as abominable as the
Yahoo. In other words, the humor of Shakespeare, like his total
genius, is dramatic.
Then again, although Shakespeare laughs incomparably, mere laughter
wearies him. The only play of Shakespeare's, out of nearly forty,
which is farcical,--'The Comedy of Errors,'--was written in the poet's
earliest period of authorship, and was formed upon the suggestion of a
preceding piece. It has been observed with truth by Gervinus that the
farcical incidents of this play have been connected by Shakespeare
with a tragic background, which is probably his own invention. With
beauty, or with pathos, or with thought, Shakespeare can mingle his
mirth; and then he is happy, and knows how to deal with play of wit or
humorous characterization; but an entirely comic subject somewhat
disconcerts the poet. On this ground, if no other were forthcoming, it
might be suspected that 'The Taming of the Shrew' was not altogether
the work of Shakespeare's hand. The secondary intrigues and minor
incidents were of little interest to the poet. But in the buoyant
force of Petruchio's character, in his subduing tempest of high
spirits, and in the person of the foiled revoltress against the law of
sex, who carries into her wifely loyalty the same energy which she had
shown in her virgin _sauvagerie_, there were elements of human
character in which the imagination of the poet took delight.
Unless it be its own excess, however, Shakespeare's laughter seems to
fear nothing. It does not, when it has once arrived at its full
development, fear enthusiasm, or passion, or tragic intensity; nor do
these fear it. The traditions of the English drama had favored the
juxtaposition of the serious and comic: but it was reserved for
Shakespeare to make each a part of the other; to interpenetrate
tragedy with comedy, and comedy with tragic earnestness.