THERE is in Shakespeare the mingling of laughter and tears, humor and
pathos. Humor is the rose, wit the thorn. Wit is a crystallization,
humor an efflorescence. Wit comes from the brain, humor from the heart.
Wit is the lightning of the soul.
In Shakespeare's nature was the climate of humor. He saw and felt the
sunny side even of the saddest things. You have seen sunshine and rain
at once. So Shakespeare's tears fell oft upon his smiles. In moments of
peril--on the very darkness of death--there comes a touch of humor that
falls like a fleck of sunshine.
Gonzalo, when the ship is about to sink, having seen the boatswain,
exclaims:
"I have great comfort from this fellow;
Methinks he hath no drowning mark upon him;
His complexion is perfect gallows."
Shakespeare is filled with the strange contrasts of grief and laughter.
While poor Hero is supposed to be dead--wrapped in the shroud of
dishonor--Dogberry and Verges unconsciously put again the wedding wreath
upon her pure brow.
The soliloquy of Launcelot--great as Hamlet's--offsets the bitter and
burning words of Shylock.
There is only time to speak of Maria in "Twelfth Night," of Autolycus in
the "Winter's Tale," of the parallel drawn by Fluellen between Alexander
of Macedon and Harry of Monmouth, or of the marvelous humor of Falstaff,
who never had the faintest thought of right or wrong--or of Mercutio,
that embodiment of wit and humor--or of the gravediggers who lamented
that "great folk should have countenance in this world to drown and
hang themselves, more than their even Christian," and who reached the
generalization that "the gallows does well because it does well to those
who do ill."
There is also an example of grim humor--an example without a parallel in
literature, so far as I know. Hamlet having killed Polonius is asked:
"Where's Polonius?"
"At supper."
"At supper! where?"
"Not where he eats, but where he is eaten."
Above all others, Shakespeare appreciated the pathos of situation.
Nothing is more pathetic than the last scene in "Lear." No one has
ever bent above his dead who did not feel the words uttered by the mad
king,--words born of a despair deeper than tears:
"Oh, that a horse, a dog, a rat hath life
And thou no breath!"
So Iago, after he has been wounded, says:
"I bleed, sir; but not killed."
And Othello answers from the wreck and shattered remnant of his life:
"I would have thee live;
For in my sense it is happiness to die."
When Troilus finds Cressida has been false, he cries:
"Let it not be believed for womanhood;
Think! we had mothers."
Ophelia, in her madness, "_the sweet bells jangled out o' tune,_" says
softly:
"I would give you some violets;
But they withered all when my father died."
When Macbeth has reaped the harvest, the seeds of which were sown by his
murderous hand, he exclaims,--and what could be more pitiful?
"I 'gin to be aweary of the sun."
Richard the Second feels how small a thing it is to be, or to have been,
a king, or to receive honors before or after power is lost; and so, of
those who stood uncovered before him, he asks this piteous question:
"I live with bread, like you; feel want,
Taste grief, need friends; subjected thus,
How can you say to me I am a king?"
Think of the salutation of Antony to the dead Cæsar:
"Pardon me, thou piece of bleeding earth."
When Pisanio informs Imogen that he had been ordered by Posthumus to
murder her, she bares her neck and cries:
"The lamb entreats the butcher:
Where is thy knife? Thou art too slow
To do thy master's bidding when I desire it."
Antony, as the last drops are falling from his self-inflicted wound,
utters with his dying breath to Cleopatra, this:
"I here importune death awhile, until
Of many thousand kisses the poor last
I lay upon thy lips."
To me, the last words of Hamlet are full of pathos:
"I die, Horatio.
The potent poison quite o' er crows my spirit...
The rest is silence."