‘But yet, Paulina,
Hermione was not so much wrinkled, nothing
So aged as this seems.’
Who can read this without choking? Like Exeter in _Henry V._:
‘I had not so much of man in me,
And all my mother came into mine eyes,
And gave me up to tears.’
Could I have continued to live when that music sounded and she descended?
I think not. I should have sought pardon and death.
‘Now, in age,
Is she become the suitor?’
Who can—I will not say express, but dream a tenderness deeper than that?
Sixteen years she had waited, and then she embraces him! It is difficult
to divine Shakespeare, the man, in his plays and poems, but in this
passage and one or two others resembling it he seems to be revealed.
* * * * *
_Pericles_.—The last act of Pericles, and especially the first scene, is
Shakespeare at his highest.
‘O Helicanus, strike me, honour’d sir;
Give me a gash, put me to present pain;
Lest this great sea of joys rushing upon me,
O’erbear the shores of my mortality,
And drown me with their sweetness.’
What can equal in purifying, regenerative power the fact that one human
being can be so much to another? No theology, morality, or philosophy
can bring a man so near to God.
* * * * *
_Tempest_.—Prospero’s pardon for those who had conspired against him
proceeds from ‘our little life is rounded with a sleep.’
The _Tempest_ is called a comedy, but it suggests a tragedy in Prospero’s
return to Milan and the months or years he spent there till he died. For
twelve years he had been on the island with Miranda, ‘a thrid of his own
life,’ ‘that for which he lived,’ ‘the cherubin that did preserve him’
during his voyage, who raised in him
‘An undergoing stomach, to bear up
Against what should ensue.’
He hears her, smitten with Ferdinand almost in a moment, declare to him:
‘I would not wish
Any companion in the world but you,
Nor can imagination form a shape,
Besides yourself, to like of’;
and she leaves her father and goes far away to Naples with her husband.
Ariel, whom Prospero had freed from his miserable enchantment, had never
ceased to thirst for liberty and returns to the winds. Dearly had
Prospero loved his delicate Ariel.
‘Why, that’s my dainty Ariel! I shall miss thee;
But yet thou shalt have freedom: so, so, so.’
Caliban he had tried to reclaim, had taught him speech and to name the
big and lesser light, but all his pains were ‘lost, quite lost,’ and the
‘born devil’ rewarded them by an attempt on Miranda’s chastity. He is
left behind, master of the island again, to take up his abode in the cell
which Prospero and Miranda had inhabited, and with the added experience
of Stephano’s drink, which he probably soon learned to imitate.
Antonio, the usurping brother, is said to have been penitent, but his
penitence was not profound. He offered no apology, and the first words
he is recorded to have uttered after his guilt was discovered were a joke
upon ‘the plain fish,’ Caliban. He was forgiven, and most likely once
more became malignant.
There is nothing to show us that the citizens of Milan were in much
trouble when Prospero was deposed, or that they rejoiced when he was
restored. They, doubtless, regretted Antonio, who
‘Set all hearts i’ the state
To what tune pleased his ear.’
The lord of the spirits, of the elves who chased the ebbing Neptune, he
who had given fire to the dread rattling thunder, broke his staff and
drowned his book and went back to his lonely palace. Did he never long
for his island, for Ariel’s music, for his daughter’s daily presence,
replaced by infrequent letters with news of the Court, her children, and
Ferdinand? He may have reflected that she was happy, but nevertheless
every third thought was his grave.
* * * * *
_Merchant of Venice_.—Jessica is hateful from the beginning; the disguise
in boy’s clothes, the robbery of her father, and the exchange for a
monkey of the jewel which belonged to her mother. I am afraid
Shakespeare intended we should like her. But she is only a part of the
perplexity of the play. That Shakespeare should have used the casket
story is inexplicable. Not only is it, as Johnson says, ‘wildly
improbable,’ it confuses Portia’s character: it is an irritating
absurdity.
‘But more, for that in low simplicity
He lends out money gratis.’
We have no proof that Antonio did this. He may have done it. He was the
kind of person who might like popularity. If he was really guilty of
‘low simplicity,’ I sympathise with Shylock’s hatred of him. But if he
was not, I understand it. Shylock was not bound to be generous. It
would have been ridiculous in him, an alien in blood and religion,
persecuted, spat upon.
The interest of the play departs with Shylock.
* * * * *
Shakespeare’s plays are organic, one character cannot be understood
without the other; Hamlet without Ophelia; Romeo without Juliet. Each is
in, by, and of the other; particularised by the other. I do not find
this quality, at least in anything like the same degree, in Beaumont and
Fletcher.
Note the way in which Shakespeare’s characters—Macbeth, for
example—unfold themselves by new circumstances, what unconjecturable
development takes place.
* * * * *
When a serious defect presents itself in a living friend it seems to
obtrude itself, press upon us, and affect our judgment more than if we
see it in a play of Shakespeare’s. In the play the background of
counterbalancing virtue is not obscured and forgotten. In actual life we
lose sight of it.
* * * * *