OF course it is admitted that there were many dramatists before and
during the time of Shakespeare--but they were only the foot hills of
that mighty peak the top of which the clouds and mists still hide.
Chapman and Marlowe, Heywood and Jonson, Webster, Beaumont and Fletcher
wrote some great lines, and in the monotony of declamation now and then
is found a strain of genuine music--but all of them together constituted
only a herald of Shakespeare. In all these Plays there is but a hint,
a prophecy, of the great drama destined to revolutionize the poetic
thought of the world.
Shakespeare was the greatest of poets. What Greece and Rome produced was
great until his time. "Lions make leopards tame."
The great poet is a great artist. He is painter and sculptor. The
greatest pictures and statues have been painted and chiseled with words.
They outlast all others. All the galleries of the world are poor and
cheap compared with the statues and pictures in Shakespeare's book.
Language is made of pictures represented by sounds. The outer world is
a dictionary of the mind, and the artist called the soul uses this
dictionary of things to express what happens in the noiseless and
invisible world of thought. First a sound represents something in the
outer world, and afterwards something in the inner, and this sound at
last is represented by a mark, and this mark stands for a picture,
and every brain is a gallery, and the artists--that is to say, the
souls--exchange pictures and statues.
All art is of the same parentage. The poet uses words--makes pictures
and statues of sounds. The sculptor expresses harmony, proportion,
passion, in marble; the composer, in music; the painter in form and
color. The dramatist expresses himself not only in words, not only
paints these pictures, but he expresses his thought in action.
Shakespeare was not only a poet, but a dramatist, and expressed the
ideal, the poetic, not only in words, but in action. There are the
wit, the humor, the pathos, the tragedy of situation, of relation. The
dramatist speaks and acts through others--his personality is lost.
The poet lives in the world of thought and feeling, and to this the
dramatist adds the world of action. He creates characters that seem to
act in accordance with their own natures and independently of him. He
compresses lives into hours, tells us the secrets of the heart, shows us
the springs of action--how desire bribes the judgment and corrupts the
will--how weak the reason is when passion pleads, and how grand it is to
stand for right against the world.
It is not enough to say fine things,--great things, dramatic things,
must be done.
Let me give you an illustration of dramatic incident accompanying the
highest form of poetic expression:
Macbeth having returned from the murder of Duncan says to his wife:
"Methought I heard a voice cry: Sleep no more,
Macbeth does murder sleep; the innocent sleep;
Sleep, that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care,
The death of each day's life, sore labor's bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great Nature's second course,
Chief nourisher in life's feast."...
"Still it cried: Sleep no more, to all the house,
Glamis hath murdered sleep, and therefore Cawdor
Shall sleep no more--Macbeth shall sleep no more."
She exclaims:
"Who was it that thus cried?
Why, worthy Thane, you do unbend your noble strength
To think so brain-sickly of things; get some water,
And wash this filthy witness from your hand.
Why did you bring the daggers from the place?"
Macbeth was so overcome with horror at his own deed, that he not only
mistook his thoughts for the words of others, but was so carried away
and beyond himself that he brought with him the daggers--the evidence of
his guilt--the daggers that he should have left with the dead. This is
dramatic.
In the same play, the difference of feeling before and after the
commission of a crime is illustrated to perfection. When Macbeth is
on his way to assassinate the king, the bell strikes, and he says, or
whispers:
"Hear it not, Duncan, for it is a knell."
Afterward, when the deed has been committed, and a knocking is heard at
the gate, he cries:
"Wake Duncan with thy knocking. I would thou couldst."
Let me give one more instance of dramatic action. When Antony speaks
above the body of Cæsar he says:
"You all do know this mantle:
I remember The first time ever Cæsar put it on--
'Twas on a summer's evening, in his tent,
That day he overcame the Nervii:
Look! In this place ran Cassius' dagger through:
See what a rent the envious Casca made!
Through this the well-beloved Brutus stabbed,
And as he plucked his cursed steel away,
Mark how the blood of Cæsar followed it."