‘O Harry, thou hast robb’d me of my youth!
I better brook the loss of brittle life
Than those proud titles thou hast won of me;
They wound my thoughts worse than thy sword my flesh:
But thought’s the slave of life, and life time’s fool;
And time, that takes survey of all the world,
Must have a stop.’
The last three lines are not melancholy philosophising. As such they
would be out of place coming from Hotspur. They are consolation and joy.
Death will extinguish for us the memory of certain things suffered and
done. That is a gain which is not outweighed by the loss of any pleasure
life can give.
Luders’ essay three parts of a century ago showed conclusively that
Holinshed’s and Shakespeare’s Prince of Wales, as we see him in the play
of _Henry IV._, wild and dissolute with ignoble companions, is a legend
which is disproved by documentary history, but Shakespeare’s Prince is
nevertheless dramatically true. Johnson says, ‘He is great without
effort, and brave without tumult. The trifler is roused into a hero, and
the hero again reposes in the trifler. The character is great, original,
and just.’ Johnson’s criticism is true. There is no interruption or
strain in the passage from one self to the other self: they are both in
fact the same self. It is something of a shock that the King should cast
off Falstaff, but if a man is appointed to command it is necessary that
he should at once take up his proper position. I remember the promotion
of a subordinate to a responsible post. His manner changed the next day.
He had the courage to ring his bell and give orders to his senior under
whom he had been serving.
He became one of the most efficient administrators I ever knew. On the
other hand, nearly at the same time another subordinate was promoted who
was timid and continued his habits of familiarity with his colleagues.
His department fell into disorder and he was dismissed.
* * * * *
_As You Like It_.—Lady Anne Blunt in her admirable books, _A Pilgrimage
to Nejd_ and _The Bedouin Tribes of the Euphrates_, notices that the true
Arab sheykh of the desert, when a traveller seeks his hospitality, asks
no questions until food and drink have been offered, and even then is in
no hurry. So also the Duke:
‘Welcome, fall to: I will not trouble you
As yet, to question you about your fortunes.’
Curiosity about personal matters is ignoble.
Rosalind’s love for Orlando is born of pity. ‘If I be foiled, there is
but one shamed that was never gracious; if killed, but one dead that is
willing to be so: I shall do my friends no wrong, for I have none to
lament me; the world no injury, for in it I have nothing; only in the
world I fill up a place, which may be better supplied when I have made it
empty.’
It is a proof of Orlando’s gentle breeding that he instantly yields to
courtesy:
‘Speak you so gently? Pardon me, I pray you.’
Orlando says to Jaques: ‘I will chide no breather in the world, but
myself, against whom I know most faults.’ This is characteristic of
Shakespeare, and is in the spirit of the Gospels.
The difficulty in this play is not Oliver’s sudden love for Celia,
although Shakespeare seems to have felt that it was a little too rapid,
for Orlando asks Oliver, ‘Is’t possible that on so little acquaintance
you should like her?’ It is rather Celia’s prompt response which takes
us aback. It looks too much like ‘any woman to any man.’ It may be said
in excuse that Celia had heard the piteous story of his conversion, how
he had become ‘a wretched ragged man o’ergrown with hair,’ and what is
more to the point, she had heard of Orlando’s noble kindness to him. It
is odd that Shakespeare does not adopt from Lodge’s novel Oliver’s rescue
of Celia from a band of ruffians. Johnson says, ‘To Celia much may be
forgiven for the heroism of her friendship.’ She forsook not only her
father—she had reason not to care much about him—but she forsook the
_court_ for Rosalind.
* * * * *
_Much Ado about Nothing_.—Why should Don Pedro offer to take Claudio’s
place in the wooing of Hero and why should Claudio consent?
Borachio says, ‘Hear me call Margaret, Hero; hear Margaret call me
Claudio.’
When Borachio recounts to Conrad what he had done, he makes no mention of
his personation of Claudio—‘Know, that I have to-night wooed Margaret,
the lady Hero’s gentlewoman, by the name of Hero; she leans me out at her
mistress’s chamber-window, bids me a thousand times good night.’
Theobald remarks that if Claudio saw another man with the woman supposed
to be Hero and heard her call him Claudio, Claudio would merely suppose
that Hero was deceived. Theobald proposes to substitute ‘Borachio’ for
‘Claudio’ in the line just quoted. Borachio had just asked Don John to
tell Don Pedro and Claudio that Hero loved him, Borachio. But if
Theobald’s emendation be received, difficulties still remain. Margaret
must have been persuaded to answer to the name of Hero. After Borachio’s
arrest he tells us that Margaret wore Hero’s garments. But Shakespeare,
deserting Spenser, from whom this mystification appears to be borrowed,
gives no reason which induced Margaret to play this part.
Where was Hero on that night? Borachio promises Don John that ‘he will
so fashion the matter, that Hero shall be absent.’ Claudio asks Hero
‘What man was he talk’d with you yesternight
Out at your window betwixt twelve and one?’
She does not reply, as we should think she would, that she was not
sleeping in that room, although Benedick asks Beatrice,
‘Lady, were you her bedfellow last night?’
and Beatrice replies,
‘No, truly not; although until last night,
I have this twelvemonth been her bedfellow.’
Claudio is despicable, and his marriage with Hero is a foul, black spot
in the play. Observe that in the first scene he asks Don Pedro,
‘Hath Leonato any son, my lord?’
and Don Pedro, understanding the drift of the question, replies:
‘No child but Hero, she’s his only heir.’
What a mean, damnable excuse he makes.
‘Yet sinn’d I not,
But in mistaking.’
Beatrice with sure eye discerns the scoundrel. ‘Kill Claudio.’ Not Don
Pedro, not even Don John, although she had heard Benedick denounce him as
the author of the villainy.
Beatrice and the Friar never doubt Hero’s innocence. The Friar declares
that
‘In her eye there hath appear’d a fire
To burn the errors that these princes hold
Against her maiden truth.’
What an amplitude there is in Beatrice! What a sweep it is to bring into
what we already know of her such divine faith in her friend! This
light-hearted girl suddenly becomes sublime.
* * * * *
_Hamlet_.—Coleridge’s remark that the two former appearances of the Ghost
increase its objectivity when it appears to Hamlet is subtle and true.
Observe that the Ghost is visible to Hamlet, Marcellus, Bernardo and
Horatio, but not to the Queen.
There is in Coleridge an activity of intellect which is so fascinating
that we do not stay to inquire whether the result is in accordance with
the facts. He says that _tædium vitæ_ as in the case of Hamlet is due to
‘unchecked appetency of the ideal.’ Was the appetency of the ideal
strong in Hamlet? The ideal exalts our interest in earthly things.
‘Now might I do it pat, now he is praying.’ Johnson says that this
speech, in which Hamlet contrives damnation for the man he would punish,
is too horrible to be read or to be uttered; whereupon Coleridge remarks
that Hamlet’s postponement of revenge till it should bring damnation to
soul as well as body ‘was merely the excuse Hamlet made to himself for
not taking advantage of this particular and favourable moment for doing
justice upon his guilty uncle, at the urgent instance of the spirit of
his father.’ I doubt if this is a complete explanation. Would it strike
the audience as the motive? Men of Hamlet’s mould not only speak but
feel extravagantly. Incapacity for prompt action is accompanied with
more intense emotion than that which is felt by him who acts at once.
Hamlet meditates on revenge instead of executing it, and his desire, by
brooding, becomes diabolic.
Generalisations like those of Polonius are obtained from observation
during youth and middle age. In old age the creation of generalisations
ceases and we fall back on our acquired stock. They remain true, but the
application fails. We must be increasingly careful in the use of these
ancient abstractions, and more intent on the consideration of the
instance before us. The temptation to drag it under what we already know
is great and must be resisted. Proverbs and wise saws are more suitable
to common life than to intricate relationships. They are inapplicable to
deep passion and spiritual matters.
Johnson notes that the Ghost’s visits are a failure so far as Hamlet’s
resolution is concerned.
Hamlet says,
‘O! from this time forth,
My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!’
but they remained thoughts. The play is to be the thing to decide him,
but when it is over and he has the clearest proofs, he does not act, but
consents to leave Denmark and returns by accident. Had he obeyed the
Ghost’s promptings and killed the King at the end of the play in the
third act, Polonius, Ophelia, the Queen, Laertes, and Hamlet himself
might have been saved.
* * * * *
_Troilus and Cressida_ is an inexplicable play. It is a justification of
those critics who obstinately, but without external evidence, refuse to
believe that much which is attributed to Shakespeare really belongs to
him. It is absolutely impossible that the man who put these words into
the mouth of Achilles:
‘I have a woman’s longing,
An appetite that I am sick withal,
To see great Hector in his weeds of peace;
To talk with him, and to behold his visage,
Even to my full of view.’
could have adapted from the _Recuyell_ the shocking ignominy of the ninth
scene in the fifth act in which Achilles calls on his myrmidons to slay
Hector unarmed, and then triumphs in these lines:
‘My half-supp’d sword, that frankly would have fed,
Pleas’d with this dainty bit, thus goes to bed.
[_Sheathes his sword_.
Come, tie his body to my horse’s tail;
Along the field I will the Trojan trail.’
* * * * *
_Measure for Measure_ as a play is hateful to me, although there are
passages in it as truly Shakespeare as anything to be found in all his
works. The chief objection to it is that justice, to use Coleridge’s
word, is ‘baffled.’ There are other objections almost as great. From
beginning to end almost everybody is base, foolish, or uninteresting.
The Duke’s temporary withdrawal is stupid and contemptible, considering
that he is the governor of the state; the condemnation of Claudio is
wildly unnatural; the substitution of Mariana loathsome; the treachery of
Angelo in not reprieving Claudio inconceivable, notwithstanding what we
already know of the deputy’s hypocrisy and villainy. The lowest depth of
scoundrelism is reached when, face to face with Mariana and publicly at
the city gate before the Duke and all the company assembled, he excuses
himself from marrying her because
‘her reputation was disvalued
In levity.’
And yet he is let off scot-free, and Mariana marries him! Isabella’s
apology,
‘I partly think,
A due sincerity govern’d his deeds,
Till he did look on me,’
might be sufficient for an outbreak of his lust but not for his lying,
and Mariana’s is still worse:
‘Best men are moulded out of faults.’
Not out of such faults as Angelo’s are the best men moulded.
The punishment inflicted on the poor wretch Lucio is horrible.
_Lucio_. ‘I beseech your highness, do not marry me to a whore! . . .
Marrying a punk, my lord, is pressing to death, whipping and hanging.
_Duke_. Slandering a prince deserves it.’
This is a foul line. I should like to discover documentary proof that it
is not Shakespeare’s, but the gag of some actor desirous of pleasing
court folk!
The _Promos and Cassandra_ from which _Measure for Measure_ is taken is
certainly worse, for Promos (Angelo) is made to marry Cassandra
(Isabella) and after the marriage is to die, but Cassandra, ‘tyed in the
greatest bondes of affection to her husband, becomes an earnest suter for
his life.’
* * * * *
_Henry VIII._—The scene in which Katherine appears before the court is
perhaps the finest in the play. To what noble use is her Spanish pride
turned! The last line of the following quotation from Katherine’s reply
to Wolsey is infinite:
‘For it is you
Have blown this coal betwixt my lord and me,
Which God’s dew quench.’
* * * * *
_Othello_ is pure tragedy, for the judgment which falls on Othello and
Desdemona, although it is disproportionate to the character or life of
either, is necessary from the beginning. Brabantio was not wholly
without justification in thinking the marriage unnatural, and Desdemona’s
desertion of him without a word was unfeeling. The depth of the tragedy
is increased by his death.
‘Poor Desdemon I am glad thy father’s dead.
Thy match was mortal to him.’
Iago feels the necessity of obtaining motives for his conduct. He tries
to find them in the supposed infidelity of his wife with Othello and in
his supersession by Cassio. Neither is sufficient, but he partly
believes in them, and they partly serve their purpose.
Coleridge says Othello was not jealous: he lacked the suspicion that is
essential to jealousy. Perhaps so, but in that case we want a name for
the passion which rushes to belief of that which it prays may be false.
The very intensity of love, so far from inducing careful examination of
slander against the divinity I worship, prevents reflection by anxiety;
by terror lest the love should be disturbed. Iago’s evidence, thinks
Coleridge, was so strong that Othello could not have done otherwise; but
would he have acted in war on evidence equally weak?
How mad Iago is with all his cunning! What a fool! Had he been anything
but the maddest fool, he would have seen that in the end his plans must
break down. Intellect? Yes, of a kind he had it pre-eminently, but
intellect becomes folly when it is inhuman.
‘Farewell the plumed troop, and the big wars.’
Shakespeare might have made Othello the more eager to plunge into the big
wars, but Desdemona is so inwoven with him that the whole fabric goes to
ruin when she is torn out.
Othello ‘falls in a trance’ after his outburst at the beginning of the
fourth act. He is a Moor. In the background also lies Brabantio’s
prophecy. Venice cannot do without him, but he cannot hold a Venetian
woman.
* * * * *
_King Lear_.—There are passages in _King Lear_ which are enough to make
us wish we had never been born. They are almost an impeachment of the
Ruler of the Universe, and yet—there is Cordelia. Whence did she come?
She is as much His handiwork as Regan, and in all our conclusions about
Him we must take her into account.
Lear does not go mad. He is mad from the beginning, but his madness is
in abeyance. Look at the style of his curses on Goneril.
Coleridge’s criticism is exact: ‘Lear’s self-supportless leaning for all
pleasure on another’s breast.’ If a man desires not to go mad or not to
be soured into oil of vitriol, let him watch the doors of his heart; let
him never solicit any expression of love.
Cordelia’s ‘nothing, my lord,’ as Coleridge says, is partly irrepressible
disgust at her sisters’ hypocrisy. There was also, as France admits, ‘a
tardiness in nature’ in Cordelia. She was her father’s favourite, but
what sort of a life must she have lived with such a father before the
time at which the play opens? We ought not to be surprised that she
refuses to be demonstrative. She reacts against his exaggeration.
I cannot read the blinding of Gloucester. The only excuse that can be
offered, not good for much, is that Shakespeare found the story in the
_Arcadia_, and that in his day horrors on the stage were not so repulsive
as they are to us. Cordelia’s death taken from Holinshed is almost as
bad. It is not involved in the tragedy like the death of Ophelia or of
Desdemona.
* * * * *
_All’s Well that Ends Well_.—Johnson comments, ‘I cannot reconcile my
heart to Bertram; a man noble without generosity, and young without
truth; who married Helena as a coward, and leaves her as a profligate:
when she is dead by his unkindness, sneaks home to a second marriage, is
accused by a woman whom he has wronged, defends himself by falsehood, and
is dismissed to happiness.’ This is just. Bertram is atrocious. With
Helena before him he says,
‘If she, my liege, can make me know this clearly,
I’ll love her dearly, ever, ever dearly.’
Did he require a deposition on oath in presence of a magistrate? He
deserved a scourging in the market place.
Coleridge calls Helena one of Shakespeare’s loveliest women. I cannot
agree. She secures her husband’s embraces under a false pretence. How a
woman could consent to lie in the arms of a man who had cast her off, and
who believed when he was enjoying her that she was a mistress whom he
preferred is beyond my comprehension. It is so in Boccaccio, but that is
no excuse. Devotion to a man who is indifferent or who hates, is
tragically possible, but in its greatest intensity would hardly permit
such humiliation.
The play is bad altogether. What was the necessity for suggesting
Bertram’s second marriage? There is nowhere any trace of Shakespeare’s
depth. The difficulties of the text are singular, and seem to mark this
drama as one different from the rest.
* * * * *
_Macbeth_.—Johnson’s remark that the events are so great that they
overpower the persons and prevent nice discrimination of character is
partly true.
Coleridge notices that Lady Macbeth was a person of high rank, living
much alone. A darkly meditative mind left in solitude can conceive
without being startled the most awful designs. The same imagination in
Lady Macbeth which brooded over the plot against Duncan’s life drove her
to delirium and suicide.
Shakespeare transfers the most perilous stuff in him to Macbeth. The
function smothered in surmise; the reflection on the emptiness of
life—tale told by an idiot—Shakespeare empties it into this murderous
traitor. He makes him the _prey_ of that which is mixed in the
composition of the best.
The witches do not strike us as miraculous. They are not supernatural,
but extensions of the natural.
It is an apology for emendation that one of the most celebrated passages
in the play is based on conjecture (confirmed by what follows) and on
analogy.
‘I dare do all that may become a man;
Who dares _no_ [Folio] more is none.’
‘No’—corrected by Rowe to ‘do.’