HINTS ON THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS--HOW TO
MASTER THE BEST OF THESE DRAMAS, THE FINEST OF MODERN
WORK.
Next to the Bible in the list of great books of the world stands
Shakespeare. No other work, ancient or modern, can challenge this; but,
like the Bible, the great plays of Shakespeare are little read. Many of
today prefer to read criticism about the dramatist rather than to get
their ideas at first hand from his best works. Others spend much time on
such nonsense as the Baconian theory--hours which they might devote to a
close and loving study of the greatest plays the world has ever seen.
Such a study would make the theory that the author of the _Essays_ and
the _Novum Organum_ wrote _Hamlet_ or _Othello_ seem like midsummer
madness. As well ask one to believe that Herbert Spencer wrote _Pippa
Passes_ or _The Idyls of the King_.
[Illustration:
A PAGE FROM THE COVERDALE BIBLE
BEING THE FIRST COMPLETE ENGLISH BIBLE
IT WAS TYNDALE'S TRANSLATION REVISED BY COVERDALE
IT BEARS DATE OF 1535, AND DESIGNS ON THE
TITLE PAGE ARE ATTRIBUTED TO HOLBEIN]
The peculiarity of Shakespeare's genius was that it reached far beyond
his time; it makes him modern today, when the best work of his
contemporaries, like Ben Jonson, Marlowe and Ford, are unreadable. Any
theatrical manager of our time who should have the hardihood to put on
the stage Jonson's _The Silent Woman_ or Marlowe's _Tamburlaine_ would
court disaster. Yet any good actor can win success with Shakespeare's
plays, although he may not coin as much money as he would from a
screaming farce or a homespun play of American country life.
Those who have heard Robert Mantell in Lear, Richard III, Hamlet or Iago
can form some idea of the vitality and the essential modernism of
Shakespeare's work. The good actor or the good stage manager cuts out
the coarse and the stupid lines that may be found in all Shakespeare's
plays. The remainder reaches a height of poetic beauty, keen insight
into human nature and dramatic perfection which no modern work even
approaches. Take an unlettered spectator who may never have heard
Shakespeare's name and he soon becomes thrall to the genius of this
great Elizabethan wizard, whose master hand reaches across the centuries
and moves him to laughter and tears. The only modern who can claim a
place beside him is Goethe, whose _Faust_, whether in play or in opera,
has the same deathless grip on the sympathies of an audience.
And yet in taking up Shakespeare the reader who has no guide is apt to
stumble at the threshold and retire without satisfaction. As arranged,
the comedies are given first, and it is not well to begin with
Shakespeare's comedies. In reading any author it is the part of wisdom
to begin with his best works. Our knowledge of Shakespeare is terribly
meager, but we know that he went up to London from his boyhood home at
Stratford-on-Avon, that he secured work in a playhouse, and that very
soon he began to write plays. To many this sudden development of a raw
country boy into a successful dramatist seems incredible.
[Illustration:
CHANDOS' PORTRAIT OF SHAKESPEARE
SO CALLED BECAUSE IT WAS OWNED BY THE
DUKE OF CHANDOS--PROBABLY
PAINTED AFTER DEATH FROM PERSONAL DESCRIPTION
THE ORIGINAL IS IN THE NATIONAL
GALLERY, LONDON]
Yet a similar instance is afforded by Alexander Dumas, the greatest
imaginative writer of his time, and the finest story-teller in all
French literature. Dumas had little education, and his work, when he
went to Paris from his native province, was purely clerical, yet he read
very widely, and the novels and romances of Scott aroused his
imagination. But who taught Dumas the perfect use of French verse? Who
gave him his prose style as limpid and flowing as a country brook? These
things Dumas doesn't think it necessary to explain in his voluminous
memoirs. They are simply a part of that literary genius which is the
despair of the writer who has not the gift of style or the power to move
his readers by creative imagination.
In the same way, had Shakespeare left any biographical notes, we should
see that this raw Stratford youth unconsciously acquired every bit of
culture that came in his way; that his mind absorbed like a sponge all
the learning and the literary art of his famous contemporaries. The
Elizabethan age was charged with a peculiar imaginative power; the verse
written then surpasses in uniform strength and beauty any verse that has
been written since; the men who wrote were as lawless, as daring, as
superbly conscious of their own powers as the great explorers and
adventurers who carried the British flag to the ends of the earth and
made the English sailor feared as one whose high courage and bulldog
tenacity never recognized defeat.
Given creative literary genius in greater measure than any other man was
ever endowed with, the limits of Shakespeare's development could not be
marked. His capacity was boundless and, living in an atmosphere as
favorable to literary art as that of Athens in the time of Pericles,
Shakespeare produced in a few years those immortal plays which have
never been equaled in mastery of human emotion and beauty and power of
diction.
There is no guide to the order in which Shakespeare wrote his plays,
except the internal evidence of his verse. Certain habits of metrical
work, as shown in the meter and the arrangement of the lines, have
enabled close students of Shakespeare to place most of the comedies
after the historical plays. Thus in the early plays Shakespeare arranged
his blank verse so that the sense ends with each line and he was much
given to rhymed couplets at the close of each long speech. But later,
when he had gained greater mastery of his favorite blank verse, many
lines are carried over, thus welding them more closely and forming verse
that has the rhythm and beauty of organ tones. As Shakespeare advanced
in command over the difficult blank verse he showed less desire to use
rhyme.
This close study of versification shows that _Love's Labor's Lost_ was
probably Shakespeare's first play, followed by _The Comedy of Errors_
and by several historical plays. One year after his first rollicking
comedy appeared he produced _Romeo and Juliet_, but this great drama of
young love was revised carefully six years later and put into the form
that we know. Three years after his start he produced _Midsummer Night's
Dream_ and _The Merchant of Venice_, and followed these with his
greatest comedies, _Much Ado About Nothing_, _Twelfth Night_ and _As You
Like It_, the latter the comedy which appeals most strongly to modern
readers and modern audiences.
Then came a period in which Shakespeare's world was somber, and his
creative genius found expression in the great tragedies--_Julius Caesar_,
_Hamlet_, _Othello_, _King Lear_, _Macbeth_ and _Antony and Cleopatra_.
And finally we have the closing years of production, in which he wrote
three fine plays--_The Tempest_, _Cymbeline_ and _The Winter's Tale_.
According to the best authorities, Shakespeare began writing plays in
1590 and he ended early in 1613. Into these twenty-three years he
crowded greater intellectual activity than any other man ever showed in
the same space of time. Probably Sir Walter Scott, laboring like a
galley slave at the oar to pay off the huge debt rolled up by the
reckless Ballantyne, comes next in creative literary power to
Shakespeare; but Scott's work was in prose and was far easier of
production.
Shakespeare, like all writers of his day, took his materials from all
sources and never scrupled to borrow plots from old or contemporary
authors. But he so transmuted his materials by the alchemy of genius
that one would never recognize the originals from his finished version.
And he put into his great plays such a wealth of material drawn from
real life that one goes to them for comfort and sympathy in affliction
as he goes to the great books of the Bible. In a single play, as in
_Hamlet_, the whole round of human life and passions is reviewed.
Whatever may be his woe or his disappointment, no one goes to _Hamlet_
without getting some response to his grief or his despair.
To give a list of the plays of Shakespeare which one should read is very
difficult, because one reader prefers this and another that, and each
can give good reasons for his liking. What I shall try to do here is to
indicate certain plays which, if carefully read several times, will make
you master of Shakespeare's art and will prepare you for wider reading
in this great storehouse of human nature. _Romeo and Juliet_, a tragedy
of young, impulsive love, represents the fine flower of Shakespeare's
young imagination, before it had been clouded by sorrow. The verse
betrays some of the defects of his early style, but it is rich in beauty
and passion. The plot is one of the best, and this, with the opportunity
for striking stage effects and brilliant costumes, has made it the most
popular of all Shakespeare's plays. The characters are all sharply drawn
and the swift unfolding of the plot represents the height of dramatic
skill. Next to this, one should read _The Merchant of Venice_. Shylock
is one of the great characters in Shakespeare's gallery, a pathetic,
lonely figure, barred out from all close association with his fellows in
trade by evil traits, that finally drive him to ruin. Then take up a
comedy like _As You Like It_, as restful to the senses as fine music,
and filled with verse as tuneful and as varied as the singing of a great
artist.
By this reading you will be prepared for the supreme tragedies--each a
masterpiece without a superior in any literature. These are _Hamlet_,
_Othello_, _King Lear_, _Julius Caesar_, _Macbeth_ and _Antony and
Cleopatra_. In no other six works in any language can one find such
range of thought, such splendor of verse, such soundings of the great
sea of human passions--love, jealousy, ambition, hate, remorse, fear and
shame. Each typifies some overmastering passion, but _Hamlet_ stands
above all as a study of a splendid mind, swayed by every wind of
impulse, noble in defeat and pathetic in the final ruin of hope and
love, largely due to lack of courage and decision of character. Take it
all in all, _Hamlet_ represents the finest creative work of any modern
author. This play is packed with bitter experience of life, cast in
verse that is immortal in its beauty and melody.
[Illustration:
1. SHAKESPEARE'S BIRTHPLACE AT
STRATFORD-ON-AVON BEFORE THE RESTORATION
WHICH HAS SPOILED IT]
[Illustration: