first importance to the poet who works for it. He loses no time in
idle experiments. Here is audience and expectation prepared. In the
case of Shakespeare there is much more. At the time when he left
Stratford, and went up to London, a great body of stage-plays, of
all dates and writers, existed in manuscript, and were in turn produced
on the boards. Here is the Tale of Troy, which the audience will bear
hearing some part of every week; the Death of Julius Caesar, and other
stories out of Plutarch, which they never tire of; a shelf full of
English history, from the chronicles of Brut and Arthur, down to the
royal Henries, which men hear eagerly; and a string of doleful
tragedies, merry Italian tales, and Spanish voyages, which all the
London 'prentices know. All the mass has been treated, with more or
less skill, by every playwright, and the prompter has the soiled and
tattered manuscripts. It is now no longer possible to say who wrote
them first. They have been the property of the Theatre so long, and
so many rising geniuses have enlarged or altered them, inserting a
speech, or a whole scene, or adding a song, that no man can any longer
claim copyright on this work of numbers. Happily, no man wishes to.
They are not yet desired in that way. We have few readers, many
spectators and hearers. They had best lie where they are.
Shakspeare, in common with his comrades, esteemed the mass of old
plays, waste stock, in which any experiment could be freely tried. Had
the _prestige_ which hedges about a modern tragedy existed, nothing
could have been done. The rude warm blood of the living England
circulated in the play, as in street-ballads, and gave body which he
wanted to his airy and majestic fancy. The poet needs a ground in
popular tradition on which he may work, and which, again, may restrain
his art within the due temperance. It holds him to the people, supplies
a foundation for his edifice; and, in furnishing so much work done to
his hand, leaves him at leisure, and in full strength for the audacities
of his imagination. In short, the poet owes to his legend what sculpture
owed to the temple. Sculpture in Egypt, and in Greece, grew up in
subordination to architecture. It was the ornament of the temple wall:
at first, a rude relief carved on pediments, then the relief became
bolder, and a head or arm was projected from the wall, the groups being
still arrayed with reference to the building, which serves also as a
frame to hold the figures; and when, at last, the greatest freedom of
style and treatment was reached, the prevailing genius of architecture
still enforced a certain calmness and continence in the statue. As
soon as the statue was begun for itself, and with no reference to the
temple or palace, the art began to decline: freak, extravagance, and
exhibition, took the place of the old temperance. This balance-wheel,
which the sculptor found in architecture, the perilous irritability
of poetic talent found in the accumulated dramatic materials to which
the people were already wonted, and which had a certain excellence
which no single genius, however extraordinary, could hope to create.
In point of fact, it appears that Shakspeare did owe debts in all
directions, and was able to use whatever he found; and the amount of
indebtedness may be inferred from Malone's laborious computations in
regard to the First, Second, and Third parts of Henry VI., in which,
"out of 6043 lines, 1771 were written by some author preceding
Shakspeare; 2373 by him, on the foundation laid by his predecessors;
and 1899 were entirely his own." And the preceding investigation hardly
leaves a single drama of his absolute invention. Malone's sentence is
an important piece of external history. In Henry VIII., I think I see
plainly the cropping out of the original rock on which his own finer
stratum was laid. The first play was written by a superior, thoughtful
man, with a vicious ear. I can mark his lines, and know well their
cadence. See Wolsey's soliloquy, and the following scene with Cromwell,
where,--instead of the metre of Shakspeare, whose secret is, that the
thought constructs the tune, so that reading for the sense will best
bring out the rhythm,--here the lines are constructed on a given tune,
and the verse has even a trace of pulpit eloquence. But the play
contains, through all its length, unmistakable traits of Shakspeare's
hand, and some passages, as the account of the coronation, are like
autographs. What is odd, the compliment to Queen Elizabeth is in the
bad rhythm.
Shakspeare knew that tradition supplies a better fable that any
invention can. If he lost any credit of design, he augmented his
resources; and, at that day our petulant demand for originality was
not so much pressed. There was no literature for the million. The
universal reading, the cheap press, were unknown. A great poet, who
appears in illiterate times, absorbs into his sphere all the light
which is anywhere radiating. Every intellectual jewel, every flower
of sentiment, it is his fine office to bring to his people; and he
comes to value his memory equally with his invention. He is therefore
little solicitous whence his thoughts have been derived; whether through
translation, whether through tradition, whether by travel in distant
countries, whether by inspiration; from whatever source, they are
equally welcome to his uncritical audience. Nay, he borrows very near
home. Other men say wise things as well as he; only they say a good
many foolish things, and do not know when they have spoken wisely. He
knows the sparkle of the true stone, and puts it in high place, wherever
he finds it. Such is the happy position of Homer, perhaps; of Chaucer,
of Saadi. They felt that all wit was their wit. And they are librarians
and historiographers, as well as poets. Each romancer was heir and
dispenser of all the hundred tales of the world,--
"Presenting Thebes' and Pelops' line
And the tale of Troy divine."
The influence of Chaucer is conspicuous in all our early literature;
and, more recently, not only Pope and Dryden have been beholden to
him, but, in the whole society of English writers, a large
unacknowledged debt is easily traced. One is charmed with the opulence
which feeds so many pensioners. But Chaucer is a huge borrower. Chaucer,
it seems, drew continually, through Lydgate and Caxton, from Guido di
Colonna, whose Latin romance of the Trojan war was in turn a compilation
from Dares Phrygius, Ovid, and Statius. Then Petrarch, Boccaccio, and
the Provencal poets, are his benefactors: the Romaunt of the Rose is
only judicious translation from William of Lorris and John of Meun:
Troilus and Creseide, from Lollius of Urbino: The Cock and the Fox,
from the _Lais_ of Marie: The House of Fame, from the French or
Italian: and poor Gower he uses as if he were only a brick-kiln or
stone-quarry out of which to build his house. He steals by this
apology,--that what he takes has no worth where he finds it, and the
greatest where he leaves it. It has come to be practically a sort of
rule in literature, that a man, having once shown himself capable of
original writing, is entitled thenceforth to steal from the writings
of others at discretion. Thought is the property of him who can
entertain it; and of him who can adequately place it. A certain
awkwardness marks the use of borrowed thoughts; but, as soon as we
have learned what to do with them, they become our own.
Thus, all originality is relative. Every thinker is retrospective. The
learned member of the legislature, at Westminster, or at Washington,
speaks and votes for thousands. Show us the constituency, and the now
invisible channels by which the senator is made aware of their wishes,
the crowd of practical and knowing men, who, by correspondence or
conversation, are feeding him with evidence, anecdotes, and estimates,
and it will bereave his fine attitude and resistance of something of
their impressiveness. As Sir Robert Peel and Mr. Webster vote, so Locke
and Rousseau think for thousands; and so there were fountains all
around Homer, Menu, Saadi, or Milton, from which they drew; friends,
lovers, books, traditions, proverbs,--all perished,--which, if seen,
would go to reduce the wonder. Did the bard speak with authority? Did
he feel himself, overmatched by any companion? The appeal is to the
consciousness of the writer. Is there at last in his breast a Delhi
whereof to ask concerning any thought or thing, whether it be verily
so, yea or nay? and to have answer, and to rely on that? All the debt
which such a man could contract to other wit, would never disturb his
consciousness of originality: for the ministrations of books, and of
other minds, are a whiff of smoke to that most private reality with
which he has conversed.
It is easy to see that what is best written or done by genius, in the
world, was no man's work, but came by wide social labor, when a thousand
wrought like one, sharing the same impulse. Our English Bible is a
wonderful specimen of the strength and music of the English language.
But it was not made by one man, or at one time; but centuries and
churches brought it to perfection. There never was a time when there
was not some translation existing. The Liturgy, admired for its energy
and pathos, is an anthology of the piety of ages and nations, a
translation of the prayers and forms of the Catholic church,--these
collected, too, in long periods, from the prayers and meditations of
every saint and sacred writer, all over the world. Grotius makes the
like remark in respect to the Lord's Prayer, that the single clauses
of which it is composed were already in use, in the time of Christ,
in the rabbinical forms. He picked out the grains of gold. The nervous
language of the Common Law, the impressive forms of our courts, and
the precision and substantial truth of the legal distinctions, are the
contribution of all the sharp-sighted, strong-minded men who have lived
in the countries where these laws govern. The translation of Plutarch
gets its excellence by being translation on translation. There never
was a time when there was none. All the truly diomatic and national
phrases are kept, and all others successively picked out and thrown
away. Something like the same process had gone on, long before, with
the originals of these books. The world takes liberties with
world-books. Vedas, Aesop's Fables, Pilpay, Arabian Nights, Cid, Iliad,
Robin Hood, Scottish Minstrelsy, are not the work of single men. In
the composition of such works, the time thinks, the market thinks, the
mason, the carpenter, the merchant, the farmer, the fop, all think for
us. Every book supplies its time with one good word; every municipal
law, every trade, every folly of the day, and the generic catholic
genius who is not afraid or ashamed to owe his originality to the
originality of all, stands with the next age as the recorder and
embodiment of his own.
We have to thank the researches of antiquaries, and the Shakspeare
Society, for ascertaining the steps of the English drama, from the
Mysteries celebrated in churches and by churchmen, and the final
detachment from the church, and the completion of secular plays, from
Ferrex and Porrex, and Gammer Gurton's Needle, down to the possession
of the stage by the very pieces which Shakspeare altered, remodelled,
and finally made his own. Elated with success, and piqued by the growing
interest of the problem, they have left no book-stall unsearched, no
chest in a garret unopened, no file of old yellow accounts to decompose
in damp and worms, so keen was the hope to discover whether the boy
Shakspeare poached or not, whether he held horses at the theater door,
whether he kept school, and why he left in his will only his second-best
bed to Ann Hathaway, his wife.
There is somewhat touching in the madness with which the passing age
mischooses the object on which all candles shine, and all eyes are
turned; the care with which it registers every trifle touching Queen
Elizabeth, and King James, and the Essexes, Leicesters, Burleighs, and
Buckinghams; and let pass without a single valuable note the founder
of another dynasty, which alone will cause the Tudor dynasty to be
remembered,--the man who carries the Saxon race in him by the
inspiration which feeds him, and on whose thoughts the foremost people
of the world are now for some ages to be nourished, and minds to receive
this and not another bias. A popular player,--nobody suspected he was
the poet of the human race; and the secret was kept as faithfully from
poets and intellectual men, as from courtiers and frivolous people.
Bacon, who took the inventory of the human understanding for his times,
never mentioned his name. Ben Jonson, though we have strained his few
words of regard and panegyric, had no suspicion of the elastic fame
whose first vibrations he was attempting. He no doubt thought the
praise he has conceded to him generous, and esteemed himself, out of
all question, the better poet of the two.
If it need wit to know wit, according to the proverb, Shakspeare's
time should be capable of recognizing it. Sir Henry Wotton was born
four years after Shakspeare, and died twenty-three years after him;
and I find among his correspondents and acquaintances, the following
persons: Theodore Beza, Isaac Casaubon, Sir Philip Sidney, Earl of
Essex, Lord Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh, John Milton, Sir Henry Vane,
Isaac Walton, Dr. Donne, Abraham Cowley, Bellarmine, Charles Cotton,
John Pym, John Hales, Kepler, Vieta, Albericus Gentilis, Paul Sarpi,
Ariminius; with all of whom exist some token of his having communicated,
without enumerating many others, whom doubtless he saw,--Shakspeare,
Spenser, Jonson, Beaumont, Massinger, two Herberts, Marlow, Chapman,
and the rest. Since the constellation of great men who appeared in
Greece in the time of Pericles, there was never any such society;--yet
their genius failed them to find out the best head in the universe.
Our poet's mask was impenetrable. You cannot see the mountain near.
It took a century to make it suspected; and not until two centuries
had passed, after his death, did any criticism which we think adequate
begin to appear. It was not possible to write the history of Shakspeare
till now; for he is the father of German literature: it was on the
introduction of Shakspeare into German by Lessing, and the translation
of his works by Wieland and Schlegel, that the rapid burst of German
literature was most intimately connected. It was not until the
nineteenth century, whose speculative genius is a sort of living Hamlet,
that the tragedy of Hamlet should find such wondering readers. Now,
literature, philosophy, and thought are Shakspearized. His mind is the
horizon beyond which, at present, we do not see. Our ears are educated
to music by his rhythm. Coleridge and Goethe are the only critics who
have expressed our convictions with any adequate fidelity: but there
is in all cultivated minds a silent appreciation of his superlative
power and beauty, which, like Christianity, qualifies the period.
The Shakspeare Society have inquired in all directions, advertised the
missing facts, offered money for any information that will lead to
proof; and with what results? Beside some important illustration of
the history of the English stage, to which I have adverted, they have
gleaned a few facts touching the property, and dealings in regard to
property, of the poet. It appears that, from year to year, he owned
a larger share in the Blackfriars' Theater: its wardrobe and other
appurtenances were his: that he bought an estate in his native village,
with his earnings, as writer and shareholder; that he lived in the
best house in Stratford; was intrusted by his neighbors with their
commissions in London, as of borrowing money, and the like; that he
was a veritable farmer. About the time when he was writing Macbeth,
he sues Philip Rogers, in the borough-court of Stratford, for
thirty-five shillings ten pence, for corn delivered to him at different
times; and, in all respects, appears as a good husband, with no
reputation for eccentricity or excess. He was a good-natured sort of
man, an actor and shareholder in the theater, not in any striking
manner distinguished from other actors and managers. I admit the
importance of this information. It was well worth the pains that have
been taken to procure it.
But whatever scraps of information concerning his condition these
researches may have rescued, they can shed no light upon that infinite
invention which is the concealed magnet of his attraction for us. We
are very clumsy writers of history. We tell the chronicle of parentage,
birth, birthplace, schooling, schoolmates, earning of money, marriage,
publication of books, celebrity, death; and when we have come to an
end of this gossip, no ray of relation appears between it and the
goddess-born; and it seems as if, had we dipped at random into the
"Modern Plutarch," and read any other life there, it would have fitted
the poems as well, It is the essence of poetry to spring, like the
rainbow daughter of Wonder, from the invisible, to abolish the past,
and refuse all history. Malone, Warburton, Dyce, and Collier, have
wasted their oil. The famed theaters, Covent Garden, Drury Lane, the
Park, and Tremont, have vainly assisted. Betterton, Garrick, Kemble,
Kean, and Macready, dedicate their lives to this genius; him they
crown, elucidate, obey, and express. The genius knows them not. The
recitation begins; one golden word leaps out immortal from all this
painted pedantry, and sweetly torments us with invitations to its own
inaccessible homes. I remember, I went once to see the Hamlet of a
famed performer, the pride of the English stage; and all I then heard,
and all I now remember, of the tragedian, was that in which the
tragedian had no part; simply, Hamlet's question to the ghost,--
"What may this mean,
That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel
Revisit'st thus the glimpses of the moon?"
That imagination which dilates the closet he writes into the world's
dimension, crowds it with agents in rank and order, as quickly reduces
the big reality to be the glimpses of the moon. These tricks of his
magic spoil for us the illusions of the green-room. Can any biography
shed light on the localities into which the Midsummer Night's Dream
admits me? Did Shakspeare confide to any notary or parish recorder,
sacristan, or surrogate, in Stratford, the genesis of that delicate
creation? The forest of Arden, the nimble air of Scone Castle, the
moonlight of Portia's villa, "the antres vast and desarts idle," of
Othello's captivity,--where is the third cousin, or grand-nephew, the
chancellor's file of accounts, or private letter, that has kept one
word of those transcendent secrets. In fine, in this drama, as in all
great works of art,--in the Cyclopaean architecture of Egypt and India;
in the Phidian sculpture; the Gothic minsters; the Italian painting;
the Ballads of Spain and Scotland,--the Genius draws up the ladder
after him, when the creative age goes up to heaven, and gives way to
a new, who see the works, and ask in vain for a history.
Shakspeare is the only biographer of Shakspeare; and even he can tell
nothing, except to the Shakspeare in us; that is, to our most
apprehensive and sympathetic hour. He cannot step from off his tripod,
and give us anecdotes of his inspirations. Read the antique documents
extricated, analyzed, and compared, by the assiduous Dyce and Collier;
and now read one of those skyey sentences,--aerolites,--which seem to
have fallen out of heaven, and which, not your experience, but the man
within the breast, has accepted as words of fate; and tell me if they
match; if the former account in any manner for the latter; or, which
gives the most historical insight into the man.
Hence, though our external history is so meager, yet, with Shakspeare
for biographer, instead of Aubrey and Rowe, we have really the
information which is material, that which describes character and
fortune; that which, if we were about to meet the man and deal with
him, would most import us to know. We have his recorded convictions
on those questions which knock for answer at every heart,--on life and
death, on love, on wealth and poverty, on the prizes of life, and the
ways whereby we may come at them; on the characters of men, and the
influences, occult and open, which affect their fortunes: and on those
mysterious and demoniacal powers which defy our science, and which yet
interweave their malice and their gift in our brightest hours. Who
ever read the volume of Sonnets, without finding that the poet had
there revealed, under masks that are no masks to the intelligent, the
lore of friendship and of love; the confusion of sentiments in the
most susceptible, and, at the same time, the most intellectual of men?
What trait of his private mind has he hidden in his dramas? One can
discern, in his ample pictures of the gentleman and the king, what
forms and humanities pleased him; his delight in troops of friends,
in large hospitality, in cheerful giving. Let Timon, let Warwick, let
Antonio the merchant, answer for his great heart. So far from Shakspeare
being the least known, he is the one person, in all modern history,
known to us. What point of morals, of manners, of economy, of
philosophy, of religion, of taste, of the conduct of life, has he not
settled? What mystery has he not signified his knowledge of? What
office or function, or district of man's work, has he not remembered?
What king has he not taught state, as Talma taught Napoleon? What
maiden has not found him finer than her delicacy? What lover has he
not outloved? What sage has he not outseen? What gentleman has he not
instructed in the rudeness of his behavior?
Some able and appreciating critics think no criticism on Shakspeare
valuable, that does not rest purely on the dramatic merit; that he is
falsely judged as poet and philosopher. I think as highly as these
critics of his dramatic merit, but still think it secondary. He was
a full man, who liked to talk; a brain exhaling thoughts and images,
which, seeking vent, found the drama next at hand. Had he been less,
we should have had to consider how well he filled his place, how good
a dramatist he was,--and he is the best in the world. But it turns
out; that what he has to say is of that weight, as to withdraw some
attention from the vehicle; and he is like some saint whose history
is to be rendered into all languages, into verse and prose, into songs
and pictures, and cut up into proverbs; so that the occasions which
gave the saint's meaning the form of a conversation, or of a prayer,
or of a code of laws, is immaterial compared with the universality of
its application. So it fares with the wise Shakspeare and his book of
life. He wrote the airs for all our modern music: he wrote the text
of modern life; the text of manners: he drew the man of England and
Europe; the father of the man in America: he drew the man and described
the day, and what is done in it: he read the hearts of men and women,
their probity, and their second thought, and wiles; the wiles of
innocence, and the transitions by which virtues and vices slide into
their contraries: he could divide the mother's part from the father's
part in the face of the child, or draw the fine demarcations of freedom
and fate: he knew the laws of repression which make the police of
nature: and all the sweets and all the terrors of human lot lay in his
mind as truly but as softly as the landscape lies on the eye. And the
importance of this wisdom of life sinks the form, as of Drama or Epic,
out of notice. 'Tis like making a question concerning the paper on
which a king's message is written.