THE ordinary dramatists--the men of talent--(and there is the same
difference between talent and genius that there is between a stone-mason
and a sculptor) create characters that become types. Types are
of necessity caricatures--actual men and women are to some extent
contradictory in their actions. Types are blown in the one direction by
the one wind--characters have pilots.
In real people, good and evil mingle. Types are all one way, or all the
other--all good, or all bad, all wise, or all foolish.
Pecksniff was a perfect type, a perfect hypocrite--and will remain a
type as long as language lives--a hypocrite that even drunkenness could
not change. Everybody understands Pecksniff, and compared with him
Tartuffe was an honest man.
Hamlet is an individual, a person, an actual being--and for that
reason there is a difference of opinion as to his motives and as to
his character. We differ about Hamlet as we do about Cæsar, or about
Shakespeare himself.
Hamlet saw the ghost of his father and heard again his fathers voice,
and yet, afterward, he speaks of "the undiscovered country from whose
bourne no traveler returns."
In this there is no contradiction. The reason outweighs the senses. If
we should see a dead man rise from his grave, we would not, the next
day, believe that we did. No one can credit a miracle until it becomes
so common that it ceases to be miraculous.
Types are puppets--controlled from without--characters act from within.
There is the same difference between characters and types that there
is between springs and water-works, between canals and rivers, between
wooden soldiers and heroes.
In most plays and in most novels the characters are so shadowy that we
have to piece them out with the imagination.
One waking in the morning sometimes sees at the foot of his bed a
strange figure--it may be of an ancient lady with cap and ruffles and
with the expression of garrulous and fussy old age--but when the light
gets stronger, the figure gradually changes and he sees a few clothes on
a chair.
The dramatist lives the lives of others, and in order to delineate
character must not only have imagination but sympathy with the character
delineated. The great dramatist thinks of a character as an entirety, as
an individual.
I once had a dream, and in this dream I was discussing a subject with
another man. It occurred to me that I was dreaming, and I then said
to myself: If this is a dream, I am doing the talking for both
sides--consequently I ought to know in advance what the other man is
going to say. In my dream I tried the experiment. I then asked the other
man a question, and before he answered made up my mind what the answer
was to be. To my surprise, the man did not say what I expected he would,
and so great was my astonishment that I awoke.
It then occurred to me that I had discovered the secret of Shakespeare.
He did, when awake, what I did when asleep--that is, he threw off a
character so perfect that it acted independently of him.
In the delineation of character Shakespeare has no rivals. He creates no
monsters. His characters do not act without reason, without motive.
Iago had his reasons. In Caliban, nature was not destroyed--and Lady
Macbeth certifies that the woman still was in her heart, by saying:
"Had he not resembled my father as he slept, I had done it."
Shakespeare's characters act from within. They are centres of energy.
They are not pushed by unseen hands, or pulled by unseen strings. They
have objects, desires. They are persons--real, living beings.
Few dramatists succeed in getting their characters loose from the
canvas--their backs stick to the wall--they do not have free and
independent action--they have no background, no unexpressed motives--no
untold desires. They lack the complexity of the real.
Shakespeare makes the character true to itself. Christopher Sly,
surrounded by the luxuries of a lord, true to his station, calls for a
pot of the smallest ale.
Take one expression by Lady Macbeth. You remember that after the murder
is discovered--after the alarm bell is rung--she appears upon the scene
wanting to know what has happened. Macduff refuses to tell her, saying
that the slightest word would murder as it fell. At this moment Banquo
comes upon the scene and Macduff cries out to him:
"Our royal master's murdered."
What does Lady Macbeth then say? She in fact makes a confession of
guilt. The weak point in the terrible tragedy is that Duncan was
murdered in Macbeth's castle. So when Lady Macbeth hears what they
suppose is news to her, she cries:
"What! In our house!"
Had she been innocent, her horror of the crime would have made her
forget the place--the venue. Banquo sees through this, and sees through
her.
Her expression was a light, by which he saw her guilt--and he answers:
"Too cruel anywhere."
No matter whether Shakespeare delineated clown or king, warrior or
maiden--no matter whether his characters are taken from the gutter or
the throne--each is a work of consummate art, and when he is unnatural,
he is so splendid that the defect is forgotten.
When Romeo is told of the death of Juliet, and thereupon makes up his
mind to die upon her grave, he gives a description of the shop where
poison could be purchased. He goes into particulars and tells of the
alligators stuffed, of the skins of ill-shaped fishes, of the beggarly
account of empty boxes, of the remnants of pack-thread, and old cakes
of roses--and while it is hardly possible to believe that under such
circumstances a man would take the trouble to make an inventory of a
strange kind of drug-store, yet the inventory is so perfect--the picture
is so marvelously drawn--that we forget to think whether it is natural
or not.
In making the frame of a great picture--of a great scene--Shakespeare
was often careless, but the picture is perfect. In making the sides of
the arch he was negligent, but when he placed the keystone, it burst
into blossom. Of course there are many lines in Shakespeare that never
should have been written. In other words, there are imperfections in his
plays. But we must remember that Shakespeare furnished the torch that
enables us to see these imperfections.
Shakespeare speaks through his characters, and we must not mistake what
the characters say, for the opinion of Shakespeare. No one can believe
that Shakespeare regarded life as "a tale told by an idiot, full of
sound and fury, signifying nothing." That was the opinion of a murderer,
surrounded by avengers, and whose wife--partner in his crimes--troubled
with thick-coming fancies--had gone down to her death.
Most actors and writers seem to suppose that the lines called "The Seven
Ages" contain Shakespeare's view of human life. Nothing could be further
from the truth. The lines were uttered by a cynic, in contempt and scorn
of the human race.
Shakespeare did not put his characters in the livery and uniform of
some weakness, peculiarity or passion. He did not use names as tags or
brands. He did not write under the picture, "This is a villain." His
characters need no suggestive names to tell us what they are--we see
them and we know them for ourselves.
It may be that in the greatest utterances of the greatest characters in
the supreme moments, we have the real thoughts, opinions and convictions
of Shakespeare.
Of all writers Shakespeare is the most impersonal. He speaks through
others, and the others seem to speak for themselves. The didactic is
lost in the dramatic. He does not use the stage as a pulpit to enforce
some maxim. He is as reticent as Nature.
He idealizes the common and transfigures all he touches--but he does
not preach. He was interested in men and things as they were. He did not
seek to change them--but to portray. He was Natures mirror--and in that
mirror Nature saw herself.
When I stood amid the great trees of California that lift their
spreading capitals against the clouds, looking like Nature's columns to
support the sky, I thought of the poetry of Shakespeare.