when the energies of intellect in the cycle of genius were, though in a
rich and more potentiated form, becoming predominant over passion and
creative self-manifestation—
Measure for Measure,
Timon of Athens.
Coriolanus.
Julius Cæsar.
Antony and Cleopatra.
Troilus and Cressida.
Merciful, wonder-making Heaven! what a man was this Shakespeare!
Myriad-minded, indeed, he was.
Notes On The “Tempest.”
There is a sort of improbability with which we are shocked in dramatic
representation, not less than in a narrative of real life. Consequently,
there must be rules respecting it; and as rules are nothing but means to
an end previously ascertained—(inattention to which simple truth has been
the occasion of all the pedantry of the French school),—we must first
determine what the immediate end or object of the drama is. And here, as I
have previously remarked, I find two extremes of critical decision;—the
French, which evidently presupposes that a perfect delusion is to be aimed
at,—an opinion which needs no fresh confutation; and the exact opposite to
it, brought forward by Dr. Johnson, who supposes the auditors throughout
in the full reflective knowledge of the contrary. In evincing the
impossibility of delusion, he makes no sufficient allowance for an
intermediate state, which I have before distinguished by the term
illusion, and have attempted to illustrate its quality and character by
reference to our mental state when dreaming. In both cases we simply do
not judge the imagery to be unreal; there is a negative reality, and no
more. Whatever, therefore, tends to prevent the mind from placing itself,
or being placed, gradually in that state in which the images have such
negative reality for the auditor, destroys this illusion, and is
dramatically improbable.
Now, the production of this effect—a sense of improbability—will depend on
the degree of excitement in which the mind is supposed to be. Many things
would be intolerable in the first scene of a play, that would not at all
interrupt our enjoyment in the height of the interest, when the narrow
cockpit may be made to hold
“The vasty field of France, or we may cram
Within its wooden O, the very casques,
That did affright the air at Agincourt.”
Again, on the other hand, many obvious improbabilities will be endured, as
belonging to the groundwork of the story rather than to the drama itself,
in the first scenes, which would disturb or disentrance us from all
illusion in the acme of our excitement; as for instance, Lear’s division
of his kingdom, and the banishment of Cordelia.
But, although the other excellences of the drama besides this dramatic
probability, as unity of interest, with distinctness and subordination of
the characters, and appropriateness of style, are all, so far as they tend
to increase the inward excitement, means towards accomplishing the chief
end, that of producing and supporting this willing illusion,—yet they do
not on that account cease to be ends themselves; and we must remember
that, as such, they carry their own justification with them, as long as
they do not contravene or interrupt the total illusion. It is not even
always, or of necessity, an objection to them, that they prevent the
illusion from rising to as great a height as it might otherwise have
attained;—it is enough that they are simply compatible with as high a
degree of it as is requisite for the purpose. Nay, upon particular
occasions, a palpable improbability may be hazarded by a great genius for
the express purpose of keeping down the interest of a merely instrumental
scene, which would otherwise make too great an impression for the harmony
of the entire illusion. Had the panorama been invented in the time of Pope
Leo X., Raffael would still, I doubt not, have smiled in contempt at the
regret, that the broom twigs and scrubby bushes at the back of some of his
grand pictures were not as probable trees as those in the exhibition.
The _Tempest_ is a specimen of the purely romantic drama, in which the
interest is not historical, or dependent upon fidelity of portraiture, or
the natural connection of events, but is a birth of the imagination, and
rests only upon the coaptation and union of the elements granted to, or
assumed by, the poet. It is a species of drama which owes no allegiance to
time or space, and in which, therefore, errors of chronology and
geography—no mortal sins in any species—are venial faults, and count for
nothing. It addresses itself entirely to the imaginative faculty; and
although the illusion may be assisted by the effect on the senses of the
complicated scenery and decorations of modern times, yet this sort of
assistance is dangerous. For the principal and only genuine excitement
ought to come from within—from the moved and sympathetic imagination;
whereas, where so much is addressed to the mere external senses of seeing
and bearing, the spiritual vision is apt to languish, and the attraction
from without will withdraw the mind from the proper and only legitimate
interest which is intended to spring from within.
The romance opens with a busy scene admirably appropriate to the kind of
drama, and giving, as it were, the key-note to the whole harmony. It
prepares and initiates the excitement required for the entire piece, and
yet does not demand anything from the spectators, which their previous
habits had not fitted them to understand. It is the bustle of a tempest,
from which the real horrors are abstracted;—therefore it is poetical,
though not in strictness natural—(the distinction to which I have so often
alluded)—and is purposely restrained from concentering the interest on
itself, but used merely as an induction or tuning for what is to follow.
In the second scene, Prospero’s speeches, till the entrance of Ariel,
contain the finest example I remember of retrospective narration for the
purpose of exciting immediate interest, and putting the audience in
possession of all the information necessary for the understanding of the
plot. Observe, too, the perfect probability of the moment chosen by
Prospero (the very Shakespeare himself, as it were, of the tempest) to
open out the truth to his daughter, his own romantic bearing, and how
completely anything that might have been disagreeable to us in the
magician, is reconciled and shaded in the humanity and natural feelings of
the father. In the very first speech of Miranda, the simplicity and
tenderness of her character are at once laid open;—it would have been lost
in direct contact with the agitation of the first scene. The opinion once
prevailed, but happily is now abandoned, that Fletcher alone wrote for
women;—the truth is, that with very few, and those partial exceptions, the
female characters in the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher are, when of the
light kind, not decent; when heroic, complete viragos. But in Shakespeare
all the elements of womanhood are holy, and there is the sweet yet
dignified feeling of all that _continuates_ society, as sense of ancestry
and of sex, with a purity unassailable by sophistry, because it rests not
in the analytic processes, but in that sane equipoise of the faculties,
during which the feelings are representative of all past experience,—not
of the individual only, but of all those by whom she has been educated,
and their predecessors, even up to the first mother that lived.
Shakespeare saw that the want of prominence, which Pope notices for
sarcasm, was the blessed beauty of the woman’s character, and knew that it
arose not from any deficiency, but from the more exquisite harmony of all
the parts of the moral being constituing one living total of head and
heart. He has drawn it, indeed, in all its distinctive energies of faith,
patience, constancy, fortitude,—shown in all of them as following the
heart, which gives its results by a nice tact and happy intuition, without
the intervention of the discursive faculty, sees all things in and by the
light of the affections, and errs, if it ever err, in the exaggerations of
love alone. In all the Shakespearian women there is essentially the same
foundation and principle; the distinct individuality and variety are
merely the result of modification of circumstances, whether in Miranda the
maiden, in Imogen the wife, or in Katherine the queen.
But to return. The appearance and characters of the super or ultra natural
servants are finely contrasted. Ariel has in everything the airy tint
which gives the name; and it is worthy of remark that Miranda is never
directly brought into comparison with Ariel, lest the natural and human of
the one and the supernatural of the other should tend to neutralise each
other; Caliban, on the other hand, is all earth, all condensed and gross
in feelings and images; he has the dawnings of understanding without
reason or the moral sense, and in him, as in some brute animals, this
advance to the intellectual faculties, without the moral sense, is marked
by the appearance of vice. For it is in the primacy of the moral being
only that man is truly human; in his intellectual powers he is certainly
approached by the brutes, and, man’s whole system duly considered, those
powers cannot be considered other than means to an end—that is, to
morality.
In this scene, as it proceeds, is displayed the impression made by
Ferdinand and Miranda on each other; it is love at first sight;—
... “At the first sight
They have chang’d eyes;”—
and it appears to me, that in all cases of real love, it is at one moment
that it takes place. That moment may have been prepared by previous
esteem, admiration, or even affection,—yet love seems to require a
momentary act of volition, by which a tacit bond of devotion is imposed,—a
bond not to be thereafter broken without violating what should be sacred
in our nature. How finely is the true Shakespearian scene contrasted with
Dryden’s vulgar alteration of it, in which a mere ludicrous psychological
experiment, as it were, is tried—displaying nothing but indelicacy without
passion.
Prospero’s interruption of the courtship has often seemed to me to have
had no sufficient motive; still, his alleged reason—
... “Lest too light winning
Make the prize light”—
is enough for the ethereal connections of the romantic imagination,
although it would not be so for the historical. The whole courting scene,
indeed, in the beginning of the third act, between the lovers, is a
masterpiece; and the first dawn of disobedience in the mind of Miranda to
the command of her father is very finely drawn, so as to seem the working
of the Scriptural command—“Thou shalt leave father and mother,” &c. Oh!
with what exquisite purity this scene is conceived and executed!
Shakespeare may sometimes be gross, but I boldly say that he is always
moral and modest. Alas! in this our day, decency of manners is preserved
at the expense of morality of heart, and delicacies for vice are allowed,
whilst grossness against it is hypocritically, or at least morbidly,
condemned.
In this play are admirably sketched the vices generally accompanying a low
degree of civilisation; and in the first scene of the second act
Shakespeare has, as in many other places, shown the tendency in bad men to
indulge in scorn and contemptuous expressions as a mode of getting rid of
their own uneasy feelings of inferiority to the good, and also, by making
the good ridiculous, of rendering the transition of others to wickedness
easy. Shakespeare never puts habitual scorn into the mouths of other than
bad men, as here in the instances of Antonio and Sebastian. The scene of
the intended assassination of Alonzo and Gonzalo is an exact counterpart
of the scene between Macbeth and his lady, only pitched in a lower key
throughout, as designed to be frustrated and concealed, and exhibiting the
same profound management in the manner of familiarising a mind, not
immediately recipient, to the suggestion of guilt, by associating the
proposed crime with something ludicrous or out of place,—something not
habitually matter of reverence. By this kind of sophistry the imagination
and fancy are first bribed to contemplate the suggested act, and at length
to become acquainted with it. Observe how the effect of this scene is
heightened by contrast with another counterpart of it in low life,—that
between the conspirators Stephano, Caliban, and Trinculo in the second
scene of the third act, in which there are the same essential
characteristics.
In this play, and in this scene of it, are also shown the springs of the
vulgar in politics,—of that kind of politics which is inwoven with human
nature. In his treatment of this subject, wherever it occurs, Shakespeare
is quite peculiar. In other writers we find the particular opinions of the
individual; in Massinger it is rank republicanism; in Beaumont and
Fletcher even _jure divino_ principles are carried to excess;—but
Shakespeare never promulgates any party tenets. He is always the
philosopher and the moralist, but at the same time with a profound
veneration for all the established institutions of society, and for those
classes which form the permanent elements of the State,—especially never
introducing a professional character, as such, otherwise than as
respectable. If he must have any name, he should be styled a philosophical
aristocrat, delighting in those hereditary institutions which have a
tendency to bind one age to another, and in that distinction of ranks, of
which, although few may be in possession, all enjoy the advantages. Hence,
again, you will observe the good nature with which he seems always to make
sport with the passions and follies of a mob, as with an irrational
animal. He is never angry with it, but hugely content with holding up its
absurdities to its face; and sometimes you may trace a tone of almost
affectionate superiority, something like that in which a father speaks of
the rogueries of a child. See the good-humoured way in which he describes
Stephano passing from the most licentious freedom to absolute despotism
over Trinculo and Caliban. The truth is, Shakespeare’s characters are all
_genera_ intensely individualised; the results of meditation, of which
observation supplied the drapery and the colours necessary to combine them
with each other. He had virtually surveyed all the great component powers
and impulses of human nature,—had seen that their different combinations
and subordinations were in fact the individualisers of men, and showed how
their harmony was produced by reciprocal disproportions of excess or
deficiency. The language in which these truths are expressed was not drawn
from any set fashion, but from the profoundest depths of his moral being,
and is therefore for all ages.
“Love’s Labour’s Lost.”
The characters in this play are either impersonated out of Shakespeare’s
own multiformity by imaginative self-position, or out of such as a country
town and schoolboy’s observation might supply,—the curate, the
schoolmaster, the Armado (who even in my time was not extinct in the
cheaper inns of North Wales), and so on. The satire is chiefly on follies
of words. Biron and Rosaline are evidently the pre-existent state of
Benedict and Beatrice, and so, perhaps, is Boyet of Lafeu, and Costard of
the tapster in _Measure for Measure_; and the frequency of the rhymes, the
sweetness as well as the smoothness of the metre, and the number of acute
and fancifully illustrated aphorisms, are all as they ought to be in a
poet’s youth. True genius begins by generalising and condensing; it ends
in realising and expanding. It first collects the seeds.
Yet, if this juvenile drama had been the only one extant of our
Shakespeare, and we possessed the tradition only of his riper works, or
accounts of them in writers who had not even mentioned this play,—how many
of Shakespeare’s characteristic features might we not still have
discovered in _Love’s Labour’s Lost_, though as in a portrait taken of him
in his boyhood.
I can never sufficiently admire the wonderful activity of thought
throughout the whole of the first scene of the play, rendered natural, as
it is, by the choice of the characters, and the whimsical determination on
which the drama is founded. A whimsical determination certainly;—yet not
altogether so very improbable to those who are conversant in the history
of the middle ages, with their Courts of Love, and all that lighter
drapery of chivalry, which engaged even mighty kings with a sort of
serio-comic interest, and may well be supposed to have occupied more
completely the smaller princes, at a time when the noble’s or prince’s
court contained the only theatre of the domain or principality. This sort
of story, too, was admirably suited to Shakespeare’s times, when the
English court was still the foster-mother of the state and the muses; and
when, in consequence, the courtiers, and men of rank and fashion, affected
a display of wit, point, and sententious observation, that would be deemed
intolerable at present,—but in which a hundred years of controversy,
involving every great political, and every dear domestic, interest, had
trained all but the lowest classes to participate. Add to this the very
style of the sermons of the time, and the eagerness of the Protestants to
distinguish themselves by long and frequent preaching, and it will be
found that, from the reign of Henry VIII. to the abdication of James II.
no country ever received such a national education as England.
Hence the comic matter chosen in the first instance is a ridiculous
imitation or apery of this constant striving after logical precision and
subtle opposition of thoughts, together with a making the most of every
conception or image, by expressing it under the least expected property
belonging to it, and this, again, rendered specially absurd by being
applied to the most current subjects and occurrences. The phrases and
modes of combination in argument were caught by the most ignorant from the
custom of the age, and their ridiculous misapplication of them is most
amusingly exhibited in Costard; whilst examples suited only to the gravest
propositions and impersonations, or apostrophes to abstract thoughts
impersonated, which are in fact the natural language only of the most
vehement agitations of the mind, are adopted by the coxcombry of Armado as
mere artifices of ornament.
The same kind of intellectual action is exhibited in a more serious and
elevated strain in many other parts of this play. Biron’s speech at the
end of the Fourth Act is an excellent specimen of it. It is logic clothed
in rhetoric;—but observe how Shakespeare, in his two-fold being of poet
and philosopher, avails himself of it to convey profound truths in the
most lively images,—the whole remaining faithful to the character supposed
to utter the lines, and the expressions themselves constituting a further
development of that character:—
“Other slow arts entirely keep the brain:
And therefore finding barren practisers,
Scarce show a harvest of their heavy toil:
But love, first learned in a lady’s eyes,
Lives not alone immured in the brain;
But, with the motion of all elements,
Courses as swift as thought in every power;
And gives to every power a double power,
Above their functions and their offices.
It adds a precious seeing to the eye,
A lover’s eyes will gaze an eagle blind;
A lover’s ear will hear the lowest sound,
When the suspicious head of theft is stopp’d:
Love’s feeling is more soft and sensible,
Than are the tender horns of cockled snails;
Love’s tongue proves dainty Bacchus gross in taste;
For valour, is not love a Hercules,
Still climbing trees in the Hesperides?
Subtle as Sphinx; as sweet and musical,
As bright Apollo’s lute, strung with his hair;
And when love speaks, the voice of all the gods
Makes heaven drowsy with the harmony.
Never durst poet touch a pen to write,
Until his ink were tempered with love’s sighs;
Oh, then his lines would ravish savage ears,
And plant in tyrants mild humility.
From women’s eyes this doctrine I derive:
They sparkle still the right Promethean fire;
They are the books, the arts, the academes,
That show, contain, and nourish all the world;
Else, none at all in aught proves excellent;
Then fools you were these women to forswear;
Or, keeping what is sworn, you will prove fools.
For wisdom’s sake, a word that all men love;
Or for love’s sake, a word that loves all men;
Or for men’s sake, the authors of these women;
Or women’s sake, by whom we men are men;
Let us once lose our oaths, to find ourselves,
Or else we lose ourselves to keep our oaths:
It is religion to be thus forsworn:
For charity itself fulfils the law:
And who can sever love from charity?”—
This is quite a study;—sometimes you see this youthful god of poetry
connecting disparate thoughts purely by means of resemblances in the words
expressing them,—a thing in character in lighter comedy, especially of
that kind in which Shakespeare delights, namely, the purposed display of
wit, though sometimes too, disfiguring his graver scenes;—but more often
you may see him doubling the natural connection or order of logical
consequence in the thoughts by the introduction of an artificial and
sought for resemblance in the words, as, for instance, in the third line
of the play,—
“And then grace us in the disgrace of death;”—
this being a figure often having its force and propriety, as justified by
the law of passion, which, inducing in the mind an unusual activity, seeks
for means to waste its superfluity,—when in the highest degree—in lyric
repetitions and sublime tautology—“At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay
down; at her feet he bowed, he fell; where he bowed, there he fell down
dead,”—and, in lower degrees, in making the words themselves the subjects
and materials of that surplus action, and for the same cause that agitates
our limbs, and forces our very gestures into a tempest in states of high
excitement.
The mere style of narration in _Love’s Labour’s Lost_, like that of Ægeon
in the first scene of the _Comedy of Errors_, and of the Captain in the
second scene of _Macbeth_, seems imitated with its defects and its
beauties from Sir Philip Sidney; whose _Arcadia_, though not then
published, was already well known in manuscript copies, and could hardly
have escaped the notice and admiration of Shakespeare as the friend and
client of the Earl of Southampton. The chief defect consists in the
parentheses and parenthetic thoughts and descriptions, suited neither to
the passion of the speaker, nor the purpose of the person to whom the
information is to be given, but manifestly betraying the author
himself,—not by way of continuous undersong, but—palpably, and so as to
show themselves addressed to the general reader. However, it is not
unimportant to notice how strong a presumption the diction and allusions
of this play afford, that, though Shakespeare’s acquirements in the dead
languages might not be such as we suppose in a learned education, his
habits had, nevertheless, been scholastic, and those of a student. For a
young author’s first work almost always bespeaks his recent pursuits, and
his first observations of life are either drawn from the immediate
employments of his youth, and from the characters and images most deeply
impressed on his mind in the situations in which those employments had
placed him;—or else they are fixed on such objects and occurrences in the
world, as are easily connected with, and seem to bear upon, his studies
and the hitherto exclusive subjects of his meditation. Just as Ben Jonson,
who applied himself to the drama after having served in Flanders, fills
his earliest plays with true or pretended soldiers, the wrongs and
neglects of the former, and the absurd boasts and knavery of their
counterfeits. So Lessing’s first comedies are placed in the universities,
and consist of events and characters conceivable in an academic life.
I will only further remark the sweet and tempered gravity, with which
Shakespeare in the end draws the only fitting moral which such a drama
afforded. Here Rosaline rises up to the full height of Beatrice:—
“_Ros._ Oft have I heard of you, my lord Biron,
Before I saw you: and the world’s large tongue
Proclaims you for a man replete with mocks;
Full of comparisons, and wounding flouts,
Which you on all estates will execute
That lie within the mercy of your wit:
To weed this wormwood from your fruitful brain,
And therewithal, to win me, if you please
(Without the which I am not to be won),
You shall this twelvemonth term from day to day
Visit the speechless sick, and still converse
With groaning wretches; and your talk shall be,
With all the fierce endeavour of your wit,
To enforce the pained impotent to smile.
_Biron._ To move wild laughter in the throat of death?
It cannot be; it is impossible;
Mirth cannot move a soul in agony.
_Ros._ Why, that’s the way to choke a gibing spirit,
Whose influence is begot of that loose grace,
Which shallow laughing hearers give to fools;
A jest’s prosperity lies in the ear
Of him that hears it, never in the tongue
Of him that makes it: then, if sickly ears,
Deaf’d with the clamours of their own dear groans,
Will hear your idle scorns, continue then,
And I will have you, and that fault withal:
But, if they will not, throw away that spirit,
And I shall find you empty of that fault,
Right joyful of your reformation.”
Act v. sc. 2. In Biron’s speech to the Princess:
“And, therefore, like the eye,
Full of _straying_ shapes, of habits, and of forms”—
either read _stray_, which I prefer; or throw _full_ back to the preceding
lines,—
“Like the eye, full
Of straying shapes,” &c,