A good and true man himself, he believes in goodness in others,

especially in those who make a show of outspokenness, bluffness,

undaunted determination to blame where blame is due--like Iago, who

characteristically says of himself to Desdemona:

"For I am nothing if not critical."

And Othello not only believes in Iago's honesty, but is inclined to

take him for his guide, as being far superior to himself in knowledge

of men and of the world.

Again, Othello belongs to the noble natures that are never preoccupied

with the thought of their own worth. He is devoid of vanity. He has

never said to himself that such exploits, such heroic deeds, as have

won him his renown, must make a far deeper impression on the fancy of a

young girl of Desdemona's disposition than the smooth face and pleasant

manners of a Cassio. He is so little impressed with the idea of his

greatness that it almost at once appears quite natural to him that he

should be scorned.

Othello is the man of despised race, with the fiery African

temperament. In comparison with Desdemona he is old--more of an age

with her father than with herself. He tells himself that he has neither

youth nor good looks to keep her love with, not even affinity of race

to build upon. Iago exasperates Brabantio by crying:

"Even now, now, very now, an old black ram

Is tupping your white ewe."

Othello's race has a reputation for low sensuality, therefore Roderigo

can inflame the rage of Desdemona's father by such expressions as

"gross clasps of a lascivious Moor."

That she should feel attracted by him must have seemed to outsiders

like madness or the effect of sorcery. For, far from being of an

inviting, forward, or coquettish nature Desdemona is represented as

more than ordinarily reserved and modest. Her father calls her (i. 3):

"A maiden never bold;

Of spirit so still and quiet, that her motion

Blush'd at herself."

She has been brought up as a tenderly-nurtured patrician child in rich,

happy Venice. The gilded youth of the city have fluttered around her

daily, but she has shown favour to none of them, Therefore, her father

says (i. 2):

"For I'll refer me to all things of sense,

If she in chains of magic were not bound,

Whether a maid so tender, fair, and happy,

So opposite to marriage, that she shunn'd

The wealthy curled darlings of our nation,

Would ever have, to incur a general mock,

Run from her guardage to the sooty bosom

Of such a thing as thou."

Shakespeare, who knew everything about Italy, knew that the Venetian

youth of that period had their hair curled, and wore a lock down on the

forehead.

Othello, on his part, at once feels himself strongly drawn to

Desdemona. And it is not merely the fair, delicate girl in her that

allures him. Had he not loved her, her only, with burning passion, he

would never have married her; for he has the fear of marriage that

belongs to his wild, freedom-loving nature, and he in no wise considers

himself honoured and exalted by this connection with a patrician

family. He is descended from the princes of his country (i. 2):

"I fetch my life and being

From men of royal siege;"

And he has shrunk from binding himself:

"But that I love the gentle Desdemona,

I would not my unhoused free condition

Put into circumscription and confine

For the sea's worth."

Truly there is magic in it--not the gross and common sorcery which the

others believe in and suppose to have been employed--not the "foul

charms" and "drugs or minerals that weaken motion," to which her father

alludes--but the sweet, alluring magic by which a man and a woman are

mysteriously enchained.

Othello's speech of self-vindication in the council chamber, in which

he explains to the Duke how he came to win Desdemona's sympathy and

tenderness, has been universally admired.

Having gained her father's favour, he was often asked by him to

tell the story of his life, of its dangers and adventures. He told

of sufferings and hardships, of hairbreadth 'scapes from death, of

imprisonment by cruel enemies, of far-off strange countries he had

journeyed through. (The fantastic catalogue, it may be noted, is taken

from the fabulous books of travel of the day.) Desdemona loved to

listen, but was often called away by household cares, always returning

when these were despatched to follow his story with a greedy ear. He

"found means" to draw from her a request to tell her his history, not

in fragments, but entire. He consented, and often her eyes were filled

with tears when she heard of the distresses of his youth. With innocent

candour she bade him at last, if ever he had a friend that loved her,

to teach him how to tell her Othello's story--"and that would woo her."

In other words, she is not won through the eye, though we must take

Othello to have been a stately figure, but through the ear--"I saw

Othello's visage in his mind." She becomes his through her sympathy

with him in all he has suffered and achieved:--

"She lov'd me for the dangers I had pass'd,

And I lov'd her that she did pity them.

This only is the witchcraft I have us'd.

_Duke_. I think, this tale would win my daughter too."

Such, then, is the relation in which the poet has decreed that these

two shall stand to each other. This is no love between two of the same

age and the same race, whom only family enmity keeps apart, as in

_Romeo and Juliet_. Still less is it a union of hearts like that of

Brutus and Portia, where the perfect harmony is the result of tenderest

friendship in combination with closest kinship, added to the fact

that the wife's father is her husband's hero and ideal. No, in direct

contrast to this last, it is a union which rests on the attraction of

opposites, and which has everything against it--difference of race,

difference of age, and the strange, exotic aspect of the man, with the

lack of self-confidence which it awakens in him.

Iago expounds to Roderigo how impossible it is that this alliance

should last. Desdemona fell in love with the Moor because he bragged

to her and told her fantastical lies; does any one believe that love

can be kept alive by prating? To inflame the blood anew, "sympathy

in years, manners, and beauties" is required, "all which the Moor is

defective in."

The Moor himself is at first troubled by none of these reflections. And

why not? Because Othello is not jealous.

This sounds paradoxical, yet it is the plain truth. Othello not

jealous! It is as though one were to say water is not wet or fire does

not burn. But Othello's is no jealous nature; jealous men and women

think very differently and act very differently. He is unsuspicious,

confiding, and in so far stupid--there lies the misfortune; but

jealous, in the proper sense of the word, he is not. When Iago

is preparing to insinuate his calumnies of Desdemona, he begins

hypocritically (iii. 3):

"O beware, my lord, of jealousy;

It is the green-eyed monster...."

Othello answers:

"'Tis not to make me jealous,

To say--my wife is fair, feeds well, loves company,

Is free of speech, sings, plays, and dances well;

Where virtue is, these are more virtuous:

Nor from mine own weak merits will I draw

The smallest fear, or doubt of her revolt;

For she had eyes, and chose me."

Thus not even his exceptional position causes him any uneasiness, so

long as things take their natural course. But there is no escaping the

steady pursuit of which he, all unwitting, is the object. He becomes as

suspicious towards Desdemona as he is credulous towards Iago--"Brave

Iago!" "Honest Iago!" Brabantio's malison recurs to his mind--"She

has deceived her father, and may thee;" and close on it crowd Iago's

reasons:

"Haply, for I am black,

And have not those soft parts of conversation

That chamberers have; or, for I am declin'd

Into the vale of years;--yet that's not much."

And the torment seizes him of feeling that one human being is a

sealed book to the other--that it is impossible to control passion

and appetite in a woman, though the law may have given her into one's

hand--until at last he feels as if he were stretched on the rack, and

Iago can exult in the thought that not all the drowsy syrups of the

world can procure him the untroubled sleep of yesterday. Then follows

the mournful farewell to all his previous life, and on this sadness

once more follows doubt, and despair at the doubt:--

"I think my wife be honest and think she is not;

I think that thou art just and think thou art not,"

--until all his thoughts are centred in the craving for revenge and

blood.

Not naturally jealous, he has become so through the working of the base

but devilishly subtle slander which he is too simple to penetrate and

spurn.

In these masterly scenes (the third and fourth of the third act)

there are more reminiscences of other poets than we find elsewhere in

Shakespeare within such narrow compass; and they are of interest as

showing us what he knew, and what his mind was dwelling upon in those

days.

In Berni's _Orlando Innamorato_ (Canto 51, Stanza I), we come upon

Iago's declaration:--

"Who steals my purse, steals trash; 'tis something, nothing;

'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands;

But he that filches from me my good name,

Robs me of that which not enriches him,

And makes me poor indeed."

The passage in Berni runs thus:--

"Chi ruba un corno, un cavallo, un anello,

E simil cose, ha qualche discrezione,

E potrebbe chiamarsi ladroncello;

Ma quel che ruba la riputazione

E de Paltrui fatiche si fa bello

Si può chiamare assassino e ladrone."

A reminiscence also lies hidden in Othello's exquisite farewell to a

soldier's life:--

"O now for ever

Farewell the tranquil mind! farewell content!

Farewell the plumed troops, and the big wars,

That make ambition virtue! O, farewell!

Farewell the neighing steed, and the shrill trump,

The spirit-stirring drum, the ear-piercing fife,

The royal banner, and all quality,

Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war!"

It is clear that there must have lurked in Shakespeare's mind a

reminiscence of an apostrophe contained in the old play, _A Pleasant

Comedie called Common Conditions_, which he must, doubtless, have seen

as a youth in Stratford. In it the hero says:--

"But farewell now, my coursers brave, attrapped to the ground.

Farewell, adieu, all pleasures eke, with comely hawk and hound!

Farewell, ye nobles all! Farewell, each martial knight!

Farewell, ye famous ladies all, in whom I did delight!"

The study of Ariosto in Italian has also left its trace. It is where

Othello, talking of the handkerchief, says:--

"A sibyl, that had number'd in the world

The sun to course two hundred compasses,

_In her prophetic fury_ sew'd the work."

In _Orlando Furioso_ (Canto 46, Stanza 80) we read:--

"Una donzella della terra d'Ilia,

Ch'avea _il furor profetico_ congiunto

Con studio di gran tempo, e con vigilia

Lo fece di sua man di tutto punto."

The agreement here cannot possibly be accidental. And what makes it

still more certain that Shakespeare had the Italian text before him is

that the words _prophetic fury_, which are the same in _Othello_ as in

the Italian, are not to be found in Harington's English translation,

the only one then in existence. He must thus, whilst writing _Othello_,

have been interested in Orlando, and had Berni's and Ariosto's poems

lying on his table.

Desdemona's innocent simplicity in these scenes rivals the boundless

and actually tragic simplicity of Othello. In the first place, she

is convinced that the Moor, whom she sees wrought up to the verge of

madness, cannot possibly suspect her, and is unassailable by jealousy.

"_Emilia_. Is he not jealous?

_Desdemona_. Who? he! I think the sun where he was born

Drew all such humours from him."

So she acts with foolish indiscretion, continuing to tease Othello

about Cassio's reinstatement, although she ought to feel that it is her

harping on this topic that enrages him.

Then follow Iago's still more monstrous lies: the confession he

pretends to have heard Cassio make in his sleep; the story that she

has presented the precious handkerchief to Cassio; and the pretence

that Desdemona is the subject of the words which Othello, from his

hiding-place, hears Cassio let fall as to his relations with the

courtesan, Bianca. To hear his wife, his beloved, thus derided, stings

the Moor to frenzy.

It is such a consistently sustained imposture that there is, perhaps,

only one at all comparable to it in history--the intrigue of the

diamond necklace, in which Cardinal de Rohan was as utterly duped and

ruined as Othello is here.

And now Othello has reached the stage at which he can no longer think

coherently, or speak except in ejaculations (iv. I):--

"_Iago_. Lie with her.

"_Othello_. With her?

"_Iago_. With her, on her, what you will.

"_Othello_. Lie with her! lie on her!--We say, lie

on her when they belie her. Lie with her! that's

fulsome.--Handkerchief,--confessions,--handkerchief.--To

confess, and be hanged for his labour.--First, to be

hanged, and then to confess. ... It is not words, that

shakes me thus.--Pish!--Noses, ears, and lips.--Is it

possible?--Confess!--Handkerchief!--O devil!"

With the mind's eye he sees them in each other's arms.[1] He is seized

with an epileptic fit and falls.

This is not a representation of spontaneous but of artificially induced

jealousy; in other words, of credulity poisoned by malignity. Hence the

moral which Shakespeare, through the mouth of Iago, bids the audience

take home with them:

"Thus credulous fools are caught;

And many worthy and chaste dames even thus,

All guiltless, meet reproach."

It is not Othello's jealousy, but his credulity that is the prime cause

of the disaster; and even so must Desdemona's noble simplicity bear

its share in the blame. Between them they render possible the complete

success of a man like Iago.

When Othello bursts into tears before Desdemona's eyes, without her

suspecting the reason (iv. 2), he says most touchingly that he could

have borne affliction and shame, poverty and captivity--could even have

endured to be made the butt of mockery and scorn--but that he cannot

bear to see her whom he worshipped the object of his own contempt.

He does not suffer most from jealousy, but from seeing "the fountain

from the which his current runs" a dried-up swamp, or "a cistern for

foul toads to knot and gender in." This is pure, deep sorrow at seeing

his idol sullied, not mean frenzy at the idol's preferring another

worshipper.

And with that grace which is an attribute of perfect strength,

Shakespeare has introduced as a contrast, directly before the terrible

catastrophe, Desdemona's delicate little ditty of the willowtree--of

the maiden who weeps because her lover is untrue to her, but who loves

him none the less. Desdemona is deeply touching when she pleads with

her cruel lord for but a few moments' respite, but she is great in the

instant of death, when she expires with the sublime lie, the one lie

of her life, upon her lips, designed to shield her murderer from his

punishment.

Ophelia, Desdemona, Cordelia--what a trefoil! Each has her

characteristic features, but they resemble one another like sisters

they all present the type which Shakespeare at this point loves

and most affects. Had they a model? Had they perhaps one and the

same model? Had he about this time encountered a young and charming

woman, living, as it were, under a cloud of sorrow, injustice,

misunderstanding, who was all heart and tenderness, without any claims

to intellect or wit? We may suspect this, but we know nothing of it.

The figure of Desdemona is one of the most charming Shakespeare has

drawn. She is more womanly than other women, as the noble Othello is

more manly than other men. So that after all there is a very good

reason for the attraction between them; the most womanly of women feels

herself drawn to the manliest of men.

The subordinate figures are worked out with hardly less skill than

the principal characters of the tragedy. Emilia especially is

inimitable--good-hearted, honest, and not exactly light, but still

sufficiently the daughter of Eve to be unable to understand Desdemona's

naïve and innocent chastity.

At the end of Act iv. (in the bedroom scene) Desdemona asks Emilia if

she believes that there really are women who do what Othello accuses

her of. Emilia answers in the affirmative. Then her mistress asks

again: "Would'st thou do such a deed for all the world?" and receives

the jesting answer, "The world is a huge thing; 'tis a great price for

a small vice:

"Marry, I would not do such a thing for a joint-ring, nor

for measures of lawn, nor for gowns, petticoats, nor caps,

nor any petty exhibition; but, for the whole world! ... Why,

the wrong is but a wrong i' the world; and, having the world

for your labour, 'tis a wrong in your own world, and you

might quickly make it right."

In passages like this a mildly playful note is struck in the very

midst of the horror. And according to his habit and the custom of the

times, Shakespeare also introduces, by means of the Clown, one or two

deliberately comic passages; but the Clown's merriment is subdued, as

Shakespeare's merriment at this period always is.

The composition of _Othello_ is closely akin to that of _Macbeth_.

In these two tragedies alone there are no episodes; the action moves

onward uninterrupted and undissipated. But the beautiful proportion

of all its parts and articulations gives _Othello_ the advantage over

the mutilated _Macbeth_ which we possess. Here the crescendo of the

tragedy is executed with absolute _maestria_; the passion rises with

a positively musical effect; Iago's devilish plan is realised step by

step with consummate certainty; all details are knit together into

one firm and well-nigh inextricable knot; and the carelessness with

which Shakespeare has treated the necessary lapse of time between the

different stages of the action, has, by compressing the events of

months and years into a few days, heightened the effect of strict and

firm cohesion which the play produces.

There are some inaccuracies in the text as we have it. At the close of

the play there is a passage, to account for which we must almost assume

that part of a vitiated text, adapted to some special performance,

has been interpolated. In the full rush of the catastrophe, when

only Othello's last speeches are wanting, Lodovico volunteers some

information as to what has happened, which is not only superfluous for

the spectator, but quite out of the general style and tone of the play:

"_Lodovico_. Sir, you shall understand what hath befall'n,

Which, as I think, you know not. Here is a letter,

Found in the pocket of the slain Roderigo;

And here another: the one of them imports

The death of Cassio to be undertook

By Roderigo.

_Othello_. O villain!

_Cassio_. Most heathenish and most gross!

_Lod_. Now, here's another discontented paper,

Found in his pocket too," &c., &c.

These speeches, and yet a third, are all aimed at making Othello

understand how shamefully he has been deceived; but they are nerveless

and feeble and detract from the effect of the scene. This passage ought

to be expunged; it is not Shakespeare's, and it forms a little stain on

his flawless work of art.

For flawless it is. I not only find several of Shakespeare's greatest

qualities united in this work, but I see hardly a fault in it.

It is the only one of Shakespeare's tragedies which does not treat of

national events, but is a family tragedy,--what was later known as

_tragédie domestique or bourgeoise_. But the treatment is anything but

bourgeois; the style is of the very grandest. One gets the best idea of

the distance between it and the _tragédie bourgeoise_ of later times on

comparing with it Schiller's _Kabale und Liebe_, which is in many ways

an imitation of _Othello_.

We see here a great man who is at the same time a great child; a noble

though impetuous nature, as unsuspicious as it is unworldly. We see a

young woman, all gentleness and nobility of heart, who lives only for

him she has chosen, and who dies with solicitude for her murderer on

her lips. And we see these two elect natures ruined by the simplicity

which makes them an easy prey to wickedness.

A great work _Othello_ undoubtedly is, but it is a monograph. It

lacks the breadth which Shakespeare's plays as a rule possess. It is

a sharply limited study of a single and very special form of passion,

the growth of suspicion in the mind of a lover with African blood

and temperament--a great example of the power of wickedness over

unsuspecting nobility. Taken all in all, this is a restricted subject,

which becomes monumental only by the grandeur of its treatment.

No other drama of Shakespeare's had been so much of a monograph. He

assuredly felt this, and with the impulse of the great artist to make

his new work a complement and contrast to the immediately preceding

one, he now sought and found the subject for that one of his tragedies

which is least of all a monograph, which grew into nothing less than

the universal tragedy--all the great woes of human life concentrated in

one mighty symbol.

He turned from _Othello_ to _Lear_.

[1] The development of this passage exactly corresponds to

Spinoza's classic definition of jealousy, written seventy years later.

See _Ethices, Pars III., Propositio XXXV., Scholium_: "Præterea hoc

odium erga rem amatam majus erit pro ratione Lætitiæ, qua Zelotypus

ex reciproco rei amatæ. Amore solebat affici, et etiam pro ratione

affectus, quo erga illum, quem sibi rem amatam jungere imaginatur,

affectus erat. Nam si eum oderat, eo ipso rem amatam odio habebit,

quia ipsam id, quod ipse odio habet, Lætitia afficere imaginatur; et

etiam ex eo, quod rei amatæ imaginem imagini ejus, quem odit, jungere

cogitur, quæ ratio plerumque locum habet in Amore erga fœminam; qui

enim imaginatur mulierem, quam amat, alteri sese prostituere, non solum

ex eo, quod ipsius appetitus coercetur, contristabitur, sed etiam quia

rei amatæ maginem pudendis et excrementis alterius jungere cogitur,

eandem aversatur."

XXV

_KING LEAR--THE FEELING UNDERLYING IT--THE CHRONICLE--SIDNEY'S ARCADIA

AND THE OLD PLAY_

In _King Lear_, Shakespeare's vision sounded the abyss of horror to its

very depths, and his spirit showed neither fear, nor giddiness, nor

faintness at the sight.

On the threshold of this work, a feeling of awe comes over one, as

on the threshold of the Sistine Chapel, with its ceiling-frescoes by

Michael Angelo--only that the suffering here is far more intense, the

wail wilder, the harmonies of beauty more definitely shattered by the

discords of despair.

_Othello_ was a noble piece of chamber-music--simple and easily

apprehended, powerfully affecting though it be. This work, on the other

hand, is the symphony of an enormous orchestra--all earth's instruments

sound in it, and every instrument has many stops.

_King Lear_ is the greatest task Shakespeare ever set himself, the most

extensive and the most imposing;--all the suffering and horror that can

arise from the relation between a father and his children expressed in

five acts of moderate length.

No modern mind has dared to face such a subject; nor could any one have

grappled with it. Shakespeare did so without even a trace of effort, by

virtue of the overpowering mastery which he now, in the meridian of his

genius, had attained over the whole of human life. He handles his theme

with the easy vigour that belongs to spiritual health, though we have

here scene upon scene of such intense pathos that we seem to hear the

sobs of suffering humanity accompanying the action, much as one hears

by the sea-shore the steady plash and sob of the waves.

Under what conditions did Shakespeare take hold of this subject? The

drama tells plainly enough. He stood at the turning-point of human

life; he had lived about forty-two years; ten years of life still

lay before him, but of these certainly not more than seven were

intellectually productive. He now brought that which makes life worse

than death face to face with that which makes life worth living--the

very breath of our lungs and Cordelia-like solace of our suffering--and

swept them both forward to a catastrophe that appals us like the ruin

of a world.

In what frame of mind did Shakespeare set himself to this work? What

was seething in his brain, what was moaning in his breast, at the time

he chanced upon this subject? The drama tells plainly enough. Of all

the different forms of cruelty, coarseness, and baseness with which

life had brought him into contact, of all the vices and infamies that

embitter the existence of the nobler sort of men, one vice now seemed

to him the worst--stood out before him as the most abominable and

revolting of all--one of which he himself, no doubt, had again and

again been the victim--to wit, ingratitude. He saw no baseness more

widespread or more indulgently regarded.

Who can doubt that he, immoderately enriched by nature, he whose very

existence was, like that of Shelley's cloud, a constant giving, an

eternal beneficence, a perpetual bringing of "fresh showers to the

thirsting flowers"--who can doubt that such a giver on the grandest

scale must again and again have been rewarded with the blackest

ingratitude? We see, for instance, how _Hamlet_, so far his greatest

work, was received with instant attack, with what Swinburne has aptly

called "the jeers, howls, hoots and hisses of which a careful ear may

catch some far, faint echo even yet--the fearful and furtive yelp from

beneath of the masked and writhing poeticule."[1] His life passed in

the theatre. We can very well guess, where we do not know, how comrades

to whom he gave example and assistance; stage poets, who envied while

they admired him; actors whom he trained and who found in him a

spiritual father; the older men whom he aided, the young men whom he

befriended--how all these would now fall away from him, now fall upon

him; and each new instance of ingratitude was a shock to his spiritual

life. For years he kept silence, suppressed his indignation, locked it

up in his own breast. But he hated and despised ingratitude above all

vices, because it at once impoverished and belittled his soul.

His was certainly not one of those artist natures that are free-handed

with money when they have it, and confer benefits with good-natured

carelessness. He was a competent, energetic business man, who spared

and saved in order to gain an independence and restore the fallen

fortunes of his family. But none the less he was evidently a good

comrade in practical, a benefactor in intellectual, life. And he felt

that ingratitude impoverished and degraded him, by making it hard for

him to be helpful again, and to give forth with both hands out of

the royal treasure of his nature, when he had been disappointed and

deceived so often, even by those for whom he had done most and in whom

he believed most. He felt that if there were any baseness which could

drive its victim to despair, to madness, it was the vice of black

ingratitude.

In such a frame of mind he finds, one day, when he is as usual turning

over the leaves of his Holinshed, the story of King Lear, the great

giver. In the same temper he reads the old play on the subject, dating

from 1593-4, and entitled _Chronicle History of King Leir_. Here he

found what he needed, the half-worked clay out of which he could model

figures and groups. Here, in this superficially dramatised chronicle

of appalling ingratitude, was the very theme for him to develop. So he

took it to his heart and brooded over it till it quickened and came to

life.

We can determine without difficulty the period during which Shakespeare

was working at _King Lear_. Were it not clear from other reasons that

the play cannot have been written before 1603, we should know it from

the fact that in this year was published Harsnet's _Declaration of

Popish Impostures_, from which he took the names of some of the fiends

mentioned by Edgar (iii. 4). And it cannot have been produced later

than 1606, for on the 26th December of that year it was acted before

King James. This we know from its being entered in the Stationers'

Register on the 26th of November 1607, with the addition "as yt was

played before the kinges maiestie at Whitehall vppon Sainct Stephens

night at Christmas last." But we can get still nearer than this

to the time of its composition. When Gloucester (i. 2) speaks of

"these late eclipses," he is doubtless alluding to the eclipse of

the sun in October 1605. And the immediately following remarks about

"machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all ruinous disorders"

prevailing at the time, refer in all probability to the great Gunpowder

Plot of November 1605.

Thus it was towards the end of 1605 that Shakespeare began to work at

_King Lear_.

The story was old and well known. It was told for the first time in

Latin by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his _Historia Britonum,_ for the first

time in English by Layamon in his _Brut_ about 1205. It came originally

from Wales and bears a distinctly Celtic impress, which Shakespeare,

with his fine feeling for all national peculiarities, has succeeded in

retaining and intensifying.

He found all the main features of the story in Holinshed. According to

this authority, Leir, son of Baldud, rules in Britain "at what time

Joash reigned as yet in Juda." His three daughters are named Gonorilla,

Regan, and Cordeilla. He asks them how great is their love for him, and

they answer as in the tragedy. Cordeilla, repudiated and disinherited,

marries one of the princes of Gaul. When the two elder daughters have

shamefully ill-treated Leir, he flees to Cordeilla. She and her husband

raise an army, sail to England, defeat the armies of the two sisters,

and reinstate Leir on his throne. He reigns for two more years; then

Cordeilla succeeds to the throne--and this happens "in the yeere of

the world 3155, before the bylding of Rome 54, Uzia then reigning in

Juda and Jeroboam over Israell." She rules the kingdom for five years.

Then her husband dies, and her sisters' sons rise in rebellion against

her, lay waste a great part of the country, take her prisoner, and keep

her strictly guarded. This so enrages Cordeilla, who is of a masculine

spirit, that she takes her own life.

The material Shakespeare found in this tradition did not suffice him.

The thoughts and imaginings which the story set astir within him led

him to seek for a supplement to the action in the tale of Gloucester

and his sons, which he took from Sir Philip Sidney's _Arcadia_, a

book not yet twenty years old. With the story of the great giver, who

is recompensed with ingratitude by his wicked daughters after he has

banished his good daughter, he entwined the story of the righteous

duke, who, deceived by slander, repudiates his good son, and is hurled

by the bad one into the depths of misery, until at last his eyes are

torn out of his head.

According to Sidney, some princes are overtaken by a storm in the

kingdom of Galacia. They take refuge in a cave, where they find an

old blind man and a youth, whom the old man in vain entreats to lead

him to the top of a rock, from which he may throw himself down, and

thus put an end to his life. The old man had formerly been Prince of

Paphlagonia, but the "hard-hearted ungratefulness" of his illegitimate

son had deprived him not only of his kingdom but of his eyesight.

This bastard had previously had a fatal influence over his father. By

his permission the Prince had given orders to his servants to take

his legitimate son out into a wood and there kill him. The young man,

however, escaped, went into foreign military service, and distinguished

himself; but when he heard of the evils that had befallen his father,

he hastened back to be a support to his hapless age, and is now heaping

coals of fire upon his head. The old man begs the foreign princes to

make his story known, that it may bring honour to the pious son,--the

only reward he can expect.

The old drama of _King Leir_ had kept strictly to Holinshed's

chronicle. It is instructive reading for any one who is trying to

mete out the compass of Shakespeare's genius. A childish work, in

which the rough outlines of the principal action, as we know them

from Shakespeare, are superficially reproduced, it compares with

Shakespeare's tragedy as the melody of Schiller's "An die Freude,"

played with one finger, compares with Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. And

even this comparison does rather too much honour to the old drama, in

which the melody is barely suggested.

[1] Swinburne: _A Study of Shakespeare_, p. 164.

XXVI

_KING LEAR--THE TRAGEDY OF A WORLD-CATASTROPHE_

I imagine that Shakespeare must, as a rule, have worked early in the

morning. The division of the day at that time would necessitate this.

But it can scarcely have been in bright morning hours, scarcely in the

daytime, that he conceived _King Lear_. No; it must have been on a

night of storm and terror, one of those nights when a man, sitting at

his desk at home, thinks of the wretches who are wandering in houseless

poverty through the darkness, the blustering wind, and the soaking

rain--when the rushing of the storm over the house-tops and its howling

in the chimneys sound in his ears like shrieks of agony, the wail of

all the misery of earth.

For in _King Lear,_ and _King Lear_ alone, we feel that what we in our

day know by the awkward name of the social problem, in other words,

the problem of extreme wretchedness and want, existed already for

Shakespeare. On such a night he says with Lear (iii. 4):--

"Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are,

That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,

How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,

Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend you

From seasons such as these?"

And he makes the King add:--

"O! I have ta'en

Too little care of this. Take physic, pomp;

Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,

That thou may'st shake the superflux to them,

And show the heavens more just."

On such a night was _Lear_ conceived. Shakespeare, sitting at his

writing-table, heard the voices of the King, the Fool, Edgar, and Kent

on the heath, interwoven with each other, contrapuntally answering

each to each, as in a fugue; and it was for the sake of the general

effect, in all its sublimity, that he wrote large portions of the

tragedy which, in themselves, cannot have interested him. The whole

introduction, for instance, deficient as it is in any reasonable

motive for the King's behaviour, he took, with his usual sovereign

indifference in unessential matters, from the old play.

With Shakespeare we always find that each work is connected with the

preceding one, as ring is linked with ring in a chain. In the story

of Gloucester the theme of _Othello_ is taken up again and varied.

The trusting Gloucester is spiritually poisoned by Edmund, exactly

as Othello's mind is poisoned by Iago's lies. Edmund calumniates his

brother Edgar, shows forged letters from him, wounds himself in a

make-believe defence of his father's life against him--in short, upsets

Gloucester's balance just as Iago did Othello's. And he employs the

very same means as Schiller's Franz Moor employs, two centuries later,

to blacken his brother Karl in their old father's estimation. _Die

Räuber_ is a sort of imitation of this part of _King Lear_; even the

father's final blindness is copied.

Shakespeare moves all this away back into primeval times, into the

grey days of heathendom; and he welds the two originally independent

stories together with such incomparable artistic dexterity that their

interaction serves to bring out more forcibly the fundamental idea

and feeling of the play. He skilfully contrives that Gloucester's

compassion for Lear shall provide Edmund with means to bring about his

father's utter ruin, and he ingeninously invents the double passion of

Regan and Goneril for Edmund, which leads the two sisters to destroy

each other. He fills the tame little play of the earlier writer with

horrors such as he had not presented since his youthful days in _Titus

Andronicus_, not even shrinking from the tearing out of Gloster's eyes

on the stage. He means to show pitilessly what life is. "You see how

this world goes," says Lear in the play.

Shakespeare has nowhere else shown evil and good in such immediate

opposition--bad and good human beings in such direct conflict with each

other; and nowhere else has he so deliberately shunned the customary

and conventional issue of the struggle--the triumph of the good. In

the catastrophe, blind and callous Fate blots out the good and the bad

together.

Everything centres in the protagonist, poor old, stupid, great Lear,

King every inch of him, and every inch human. Lear's is a passionate

nature, irritably nervous, all too ready to act on the first impulse.

At heart he is so lovable that he arouses the unalterable devotion of

the best among those who surround him; and he is so framed to command

and so accustomed to rule, that he misses every moment that power

which, in an access of caprice, he has renounced. For a brief space

at the beginning of the play the old man stands erect; then he begins

to bend. And the weaker he grows the heavier load is heaped upon him,

till at last, overburdened, he sinks. He wanders off, groping his way,

with his crushing fate upon his back. Then the light of his mind is

extinguished; madness seizes him.

And Shakespeare takes this theme of madness and sets it for three

voices--divides it between Edgar, who is mad to serve a purpose,

but speaks the language of real insanity; the Fool, who is mad

by profession, and masks the soundest practical wisdom under the

appearance of insanity; and the King, who is bewildered and infected by

Edgar's insane talk--the King, who is mad with misery and suffering.

As already remarked, it is evident from the indifference with which

Shakespeare takes up the old material to make a beginning and set the

play going, that all he really cared about was the essential pathos of

the theme, the deep seriousness of the fundamental emotion. The opening

scenes are of course incredible. It is only in fairy-tales that a

king divides the provinces of his kingdom among his daughters, on the

principle that she gets the largest share who can assure him that she

loves him most; and only a childish audience could find it conceivable

that old Gloucester should instantly believe the most improbable

calumnies against a son whose fine character he knew. Shakespeare's

individuality does not make itself felt in such parts as these; but it

certainly does in the view of life, its course and character, which

bursts upon Lear when he goes mad, and which manifests itself here

and there all through the play. And Shakespeare's intellect has now

attained such mastery, every passion is rendered with such irresistible

power, that the play, in spite of its fantastic, unreal basis, produces

an effect of absolute _truth_.

"_Lear_. A man may see how this world goes with no eyes.

Look with thine ears: see how yond justice rails upon yond

simple thief. Hark, in thine ear: change places; and,

handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?--Thou

hast seen a farmer's dog bark at a beggar?

"_Gloster_. Ay, sir.

"_Lear_. And the creature run from the cur? There thou

might'st behold the great image of authority: a dog's obey'd

in office."

And then follow outbursts to the effect that the punisher is generally

worse than the punished; the beadle flogs the loose woman, but the

rascally beadle is as lustful as she. The idea here answers to that in

_Measure for Measure_: the beadle should flog himself, not the woman.

And then come complaints that the rich are exempt from punishment:

dress Sin in armour of goldplate, and the lance of Justice will shiver

against it. Finally, he concentrates his indictment of life in the

words:--

"When we are born, we cry that we are come

To this great stage of fools."

We hear a refrain from _Hamlet_ running through all this. But Hamlet's

criticism of life is here taken up by many voices; it sounds louder,

and awakens echo upon echo.

The Fool, the best of Shakespeare's Fools, made more conspicuous

by coming after the insignificant Clown in _Othello_, is such an

echo--mordantly witty, marvellously ingenious. He is the protest of

sound common-sense against the foolishness of which Lear has been

guilty, but a protest that is pure humour; he never complains, least of

all on his own account. Yet all his foolery produces a tragic effect.

And the words spoken by one of the knights, "Since my young lady's

going into France, sir, the fool hath much pined away," atone for all

his sharp speeches to Lear. Amongst Shakespeare's other master-strokes

in this play must be reckoned that of exalting the traditional clown,

the buffoon, into so high a sphere that he becomes a tragic element of

the first order.

In no other play of Shakespeare's has the Fool so many proverbial words

of wisdom. Indeed, the whole piece teems with such words: Lear's "'Ay'

and 'no,' too, was no good divinity;" Edgar's "Ripeness is all;" Kent's

"To be acknowledged, madam, is o'erpaid."

Whilst the elder daughters have inherited and over-developed Lear's

bad qualities, Cordelia has fallen heir to his goodness of heart; but

he has also transmitted to her a certain obstinacy and pride, but for

which the conflict would not have arisen. His first question to her,

and her answer to it, are equally wanting in tact. But as the action

proceeds, we find that her obstinacy has melted away; her whole being

is goodness and charm.

How touching is the passage where Cordelia finds her brainsick sire,

and tends him until, by aid of the healing art, and sleep, and music,

he slowly regains his health. Everything is beautiful here, from the

first kiss to the last word. Lear is borne sleeping on to the stage.

The doctor orders music to sound, and Cordelia says (iv. 7):--

"_Cor_. O my dear father! Restoration hang

Thy medicine on my lips, and let this kiss

Repair those violent harms, that my two sisters

Have in thy reverence made!

_Kent_. Kind and dear princess!

_Cor_. Had you not been their father, these white flakes

Had challeng'd pity of them. Was this a face

To be oppos'd against the warring winds?

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Mine enemy's dog,

Though he had bit me, should have stood that night

Against my fire."

He awakes, and Cordelia says to him:--

_Cor_. How does my royal lord? How fares your majesty?

_Lear_. You do me wrong to take me out o' the grave.

Thou art a soul in bliss; but I am bound

Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears

Do scald like molten lead."

Then he comes to himself, asks where he has been, and where he is; is

surprised that it is "fair daylight;" remembers what he has suffered:--

"_Cor_. O look upon me, sir,

And hold your hands in benediction o'er me.--

No, sir, you must not kneel."

Notice this last line. It has its history. In the old drama of _King

Leir_ this kneeling was made a more prominent feature. There the King

and his faithful Perillus (so Kent was called in the old play) are

wandering about, perishing with hunger and thirst, when they fall

in with the King of Gaul and Cordelia, who are spying out the land

disguised as peasants. The daughter recognises her father, and gives

the starving man food and drink; then, when he is satisfied, he tells

her his story in deep anguish of spirit:--

"_Leir_. O no men's children are vnkind but mine.

_Cordelia_. Condemne not all, because of others crime,

But looke, deare father, looke, behold and see

Thy louing daughter speaketh vnto thee.

(_She kneeles_).

_Leir_. O, stand thou vp, it is my part to kneele,

And aske forgiueness for my former faults.

(_He kneeles_)."

The scene is beautiful, and there is true filial feeling in it, but it

would be impossible on the stage, where two persons kneeling to each

other cannot but produce a comic effect. The incident, indeed, actually

occurs in some of Molière's and Holberg's comedies. Shakespeare

understood how to preserve and utilise this (with all other traits of

any value in his predecessor's work) in such a manner that only its

delicacy remains, while its external awkwardness disappears. Lear says

to Cordelia, when they have fallen into the hands of their enemies:--

"Come, let's away to prison:

We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage:

_When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down

And ask of thee forgiveness._ So we'll live,

And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh

At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues

Talk of court news."

The old play ends naïvely and innocently with the triumph of the good.

The King of Gaul and Cordelia conduct Leir home again, tell the wicked

daughters sharp truths to their faces, and thereupon totally rout their

armies. Leir thanks and rewards all who have been faithful to him, and

passes the remainder of his days in agreeable leisure under the care of

his daughter and son-in-law.

Shakespeare does not take such a bright view of life. According to

him, Cordelia's army is defeated, and the old King and his daughter

are thrown into prison. But no past and no present adversity can crush

Lear's spirit now. In spite of everything, in spite of the loss of

power, of self-reliance, and for a time of reason, in spite of defeat

in the decisive battle, he is as happy as an old man can be. He has his

lost daughter again. Age had already isolated him. In the peace that a

prison affords he will live not much more lonely than great age is of

necessity, shut in with the object, now the sole object, of his love.

It seems for a moment as though Shakespeare would say: "Happy is that

man, even though he may be in prison, who in the last years of his life

has the darling of his heart beside him."

But this is not the conclusion to which Shakespeare leads us. Edmund

commands that Cordelia shall be hanged in prison, and the murderer

executes his order.

The tragedy does not culminate till Lear enters with Cordelia dead in

his arms. After a wild outburst of grief, he asks for a looking-glass

to see if she still breathes, and in the pause that ensues Kent says:--

"Is this the promised end?"

And Edgar:--

"Or image of that horror?"

Lear is given a feather. He utters a cry of joy--it moves--she is

alive! Then he sees that he has been mistaken. Curses follow, and after

them this exquisite touch of characterisation:--

"Her voice was ever soft,

Gentle, and low, an excellent thing in woman."

Then the disguised Kent makes himself known, and Lear learns that the

two criminal daughters are dead. But his capacity for receiving new

impressions is almost gone. He can feel nothing but Cordelia's death:

"And my poor fool is hang'd! No, no, no life!" He faints and dies.

"_Kent_ Vex not his ghost: O let him pass! He hates him

That would upon the rack of this tough world

Stretch him out longer."

That this old man should lose his youngest daughter--this is the

catastrophe which Shakespeare has made so great that it is with reason

Kent asks: "Is this the promised end? Is this the end of the world?" In

the loss of this daughter he loses all; and the abyss that opens seems

wide enough and deep enough to engulph a world.

The loss of a Cordelia--that is the great catastrophe. We all lose, or

live under the dread of losing, our Cordelia. The loss of the dearest

and the best, of that which alone makes life worth living--that is the

tragedy of life. Hence the question: Is this the end of the world? Yes

it is. Each of us has only his world and lives with the threat of its

destruction hanging over him. And in the year 1606 Shakespeare was in

no mood to write other than dramas on the doom of worlds.

For the end of all things seems to have come when we see the ruin

of the moral world--when he who is noble and trustful like Lear is

rewarded with ingratitude and hate; when he who is honest and brave

like Kent is punished with dishonour; when he who is merciful like

Gloucester, taking the suffering and injured under his roof, has the

loss of his eyes for his reward; when he who is noble and faithful

like Edgar must wander about in the semblance of a maniac, with a

rag round his loins; when, finally, she who is the living emblem of

womanly dignity and of filial tenderness towards an old father who

has become as it were her child--when she meets her death before

his eyes at the hands of assassins! What avails it that the guilty

slaughter and poison, each other afterwards? None the less is this the

titanic tragedy of human life; there rings forth from it a chorus of

passionate, jeering, wildly yearning, and desperately wailing voices.

Sitting by his fire at night, Shakespeare heard them in the roar of

the storm against the window-pane, in the howling of the wind in the

chimneys--heard all these terrible voices contrapunctually inwoven one

with another as in a fugue, and heard in them the torture-shriek of

suffering humanity.

XXVII

_ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA--WHAT ATTRACTED SHAKESPEARE TO THE SUBJECT_

If it is the last titanic tragedy of human life that has now been

written, what is there more to add? There is nothing left to write.

Shakespeare may lay down his pen.

So it would seem to us. But what is the actual course of events? what

do we see? That for years to come, work follows work in uninterrupted

succession. It is with Shakespeare as with all other great, prolific

geniuses; time and again we think, "Now he has done his best, now

he has reached his zenith, now he has touched the limit of his

power, exhausted his treasury, made his crowning effort, his highest

bid,"--when behold! he takes up a new work the day after he has let go

the old; takes it up as if nothing had happened, unexhausted, unwearied

by the tremendous task he has accomplished, fresh as if he had just

arisen from repose, indefatigable as though he were only now setting

forth with his name and fame yet to be won.

_King Lear_ makes a sensation among Shakespeare's impressionable

audience; crowds flock to the theatre to see it; the book is quickly

sold out--two quarto editions in 1608; all minds are occupied with it;

they have not nearly exhausted its treasures of profundity, of wit,

of practical wisdom, of poetry--Shakespeare alone no longer gives a

moment's thought to it; he has left it behind and is deep in his next

work.

A world-catastrophe! He has no mind now to write of anything else. What

is sounding in his ears, what is filling his thoughts, is the crash of

a world falling to ruin.

For this music he seeks out a new text. He has not far to seek; he has

found it already. Since the time when he wrote _Julius Cæsar_, Plutarch

has never been out of his hands. In his first Roman drama he depicted

the fall of the world-republic; but in that world, as a whole, fresh,

strong forces were still at work. Cæsar's spirit dominated it. We heard

more of his greatness than we saw of it; but we could infer his true

significance from the effects of his disappearance from the scene. And

the republic still lived in spirits proud like Brutus, or strong like

Cassius, and did not expire with them. By Brutus's side stood Cato's

daughter, delicate but steadfast, the tenderest and bravest of wives.

In short, there were still many sound elements in the body politic. The

republic fell by historical necessity, but there was no decadence of

mind, no degeneracy, no ruin.

But Shakespeare read on in his Plutarch and came to the life of Marcus

Antonius. This he read first out of curiosity, then with attention,

then with eager emotion. For here, here was the real downfall of

the Roman world. Not till now did he hear the final, fatal crash

of the old world-republic. The might of Rome, stern and austere,

shivered at the touch of Eastern voluptuousness. Everything sank,

everything fell--character and will, dominions and principalities,

men and women. Everything was worm-eaten, serpent-bitten, poisoned

by sensuality--everything tottered and collapsed. Defeat in Asia,

defeat in Europe, defeat in Africa, on the Egyptian coast; then

self-abandonment and suicide.

Again a poisoning-story like that of _Macbeth_. In Macbeth's case

the virus was ambition, in Antony's it was sensuality. But the story

of Antony, with its far-reaching effects, was a very much weightier

and more interesting subject than the story of the little barbarian

Scottish king. Macbeth was spiritually poisoned by his wife, a woman

ambitious to bloodthirstiness, an abnormal woman, more masculine than

her husband, almost a virago. She speaks of dashing out the brains of

babes as of one of those venial offences which one may commit on an

emergency rather than break one's word, and she undertakes without a

tremor to smear the faces of the murdered King's servants with his

blood. What is Lady Macbeth to us? What's Hecuba to us? And what was

this Hecuba now to Shakespeare!

In a very different and more personal way did he feel himself attracted

by Cleopatra. She poisons slowly, half-involuntarily, and in wholly

feminine fashion, the faculty of rule, the generalship, the courage,

the greatness of Antony, ruler of half the world--and her, Cleopatra,

he, Shakespeare, knew. He knew her as we all know her, the woman of

women, quintessentiated Eve, or rather Eve and the serpent in one--"My

serpent of old Nile," as Antony calls her. Cleopatra--the name meant

beauty and fascination--it meant alluring sensuality combined with

finished culture--it meant ruthless squandering of human life and

happiness and the noblest powers. Here, indeed, was the woman who

could intoxicate and undo a man, even the greatest; uplift him to

such happiness as he had never known before, and then plunge him into

perdition, and along with him that half of the world which it was his

to rule.

Who knows! If he himself, William Shakespeare, had met her, who knows

if he would have escaped with his life? And had he not met her? Was

it not she whom in bygone days he had met and loved, and by whom he

had been beloved and betrayed? It moved him strongly to find Cleopatra

described as so dark, so tawny. His thoughts dwelt upon this. He too

had stood in close relation to a dark, ensnaring woman--one whom in

bitter moments he had been tempted to call a gipsy; "a right gipsy,"

as Cleopatra is called in this play, by those who are afraid of her or

angry with her. She of whom he never thought without emotion, his black

enchantress, his life's angel and fiend, whom he had hated and adored

at the same time, whom he had despised even while he sued for her

favour--what was she but a new incarnation of that dangerous, ensnaring

serpent of the Nile! And how nearly had his whole inner world collapsed

like a soap-bubble in his association with, and separation from, her!

That would indeed have been the ruin of a world! How he had revelled

and writhed, exulted and complained in those days! played ducks and

drakes with his life, squandered his days and nights! Now he was a

maturer man, a gentleman, a landed proprietor and tithe-farmer; but

in him still lived the artist-Bohemian, fitted to mate with the gipsy

queen.

Three times in Shakespeare (_Romeo and Juliet_, ii. 4, and _Antony and

Cleopatra_, i. 1, and iv. 12) Cleopatra is slightingly called _gipsy_,

probably from the word's resemblance in sound to _Egyptian_. But there

was a certain significance in this word-play; for the high-mindedness

of the princess and the fickleness of the gipsy were mysteriously

combined in her nature. And how well he knew this combination! The

model for the great Egyptian queen stood living before his eyes. With

the same palette which he had used not many years before to sketch

the "dark lady" of the Sonnets, he could now paint this monumental

historical portrait.

This figure charmed him, attracted him strongly. He came fresh from

Cordelia. He had built up that whole titanic tragedy of _King Lear_

as a pedestal for her. And what is Cordelia? The ideal which one's

imagination reads on a young girl's white brow, and which the young

girl herself hardly understands, much less realises. She was the ray

of white light--the great, clear symbol of the purity and nobility of

heart which were expressed in her very name. He believed in her; he

had looked into her innocent eyes, whose expression inspired him with

the idea of her character; he had chanced upon that obstinate, almost

ungracious truthfulness in young women, which seems to augur a treasure

of real feeling behind it; but he had not known or associated with

Cordelia in daily life.

Cleopatra, on the contrary, O Cleopatra! He passed in succession before

his eyes the most feminine, and therefore the most dangerous, women

he had known since he gained a footing in London, and he gave her the

grace of the one, the caprices of the other, the teasing humour of a

third, a fourth's instability; but deep in his heart he was thinking of

one only, who had been to him all women in one, a mistress in the art

of love and of awakening love, inciting to it as no other incited, and

faithlessly betraying as no other betrayed--true and false, daring and

frail, actress and lover without peer!

There were several earlier English dramas on the subject of Antony and

Cleopatra, but only one or two of them are worth mentioning. There was

Daniel's _Cleopatra_ of 1594 founded partly on Plutarch's Lives of

Antonius and Pompeius, partly on a French book called the "History of

the Three Triumvirates." Then there was a play entitled _The Tragedie

of Antonie_, translated from the French by the Countess of Pembroke,

the mother of Shakespeare's friend, in the year 1595. Shakespeare

does not seem to have been indebted to either of these works, nor to

any of the numerous Italian plays on the subject. He had none of them

before him when he sat down to write his drama, which appears to have

been acted for the first time shortly before the 20th of May 1608, on

which day it is entered in the Stationers' Register as "a booke called

_Anthony and Cleopatra_" by Edward Blount, one of the publishers who

afterwards brought out the First Folio. It is probable, therefore, that

the play was written during the course of the year 1607.

The only source, probably, from which Shakespeare drew, and from

which he drew largely, was the Life of Marcus Antonius, in North's

translation of Plutarch. It was on the basis of what he read there that

he planned and executed his work, even where, as in the first act, he

writes without in every point adhering to Plutarch. The farther the

drama progresses the more closely does he keep to Plutarch's narrative,

ingeniously and carefully making use of every touch, great or small,

that appears to him characteristic. It is evident, indeed, that

several traits are included merely because they are true, or rather

because Shakespeare thinks they are true. At times he introduces quite

unnecessary personages, like Dolabella, simply because he will not put

into the mouth of another the message which Plutarch assigns to him;

and it is very seldom that he permits himself even the most trifling

alteration.

Shakespeare ennobled the character of Antony to a certain extent.

Plutarch depicts him as a Hercules in stature, and inclined to ape the

demigod by certain affectations of dress; a hearty, rough soldier,

given to praising himself and making game of others, but capable, too,

of enduring banter as well as praise. His inclination to prodigality

and luxurious living made him rapacious, but he was ignorant of most

of the infamies that were committed in his name. There was no craft in

his nature, but he was brutal, recklessly profligate, and devoid of all

sense of decency. A popular, light-hearted, free-handed general, who

sat far too many hours at table--indifferent whether it were with his

own soldiers or with princes--who showed himself drunken on the public

street, and would "sleepe out his drunkennesse" in the light of day,

degraded himself by the lowest debauchery, exhausted whole treasuries

on his journeys, travelled with priceless gold and silver plate for

his table, had chariots drawn by lions, gave away tens of thousands of

pounds in a single gift; but in defeat and misfortune rose to his full

height as the inspiriting leader who uncomplainingly renounced all his

own comforts and kept up the courage of his men. Calamity always raised

him above himself--a sufficient proof that, in spite of everything,

he was not without a strain of greatness. There was something of the

stage-king in him, something of the Murat, a touch of Skobeloff, and

a suggestion of the mediæval knight. What could be less antique than

his twice challenging Octavius to single combat? And in the end, when

misfortune overwhelmed him, and those on whom he had showered benefits

ungratefully forsook him, there was something in him that recalled

Timon of Athens nursing his melancholy and his bitterness. He himself

recognised the affinity.

Women, according to Plutarch, were Antony's bane. After a youth in

which many women had had a share, he married Fulvia, the widow of

the notorious tribune, Clodius. She acquired the mastery over him,

and bent him to all her wishes, so that from her hand he passed into

Cleopatra's, ready broken-in to feminine dominion.

According to Plutarch, moreover, Antony was endowed with a considerable

flexibility of character. He was fond of disguising himself, of playing

practical jokes. Once, for instance, on returning from a campaign,

he, dressed as a slave, delivered to his wife, Fulvia, a letter

telling of his own death, and then suddenly embraced her as she stood

terror-struck. This was only one of many manifestations of his power

of self-metamorphosis. Sometimes he would seem nerveless, sometimes

iron-nerved; sometimes effeminate, sometimes brave to foolhardiness;

now avid of honour, now devoid of honour; now revengeful, now

magnanimous. This undulant diversity and changeableness in Antony

fascinated Shakespeare. Yet he did not accept the character exactly

as he found it in Plutarch. He threw into relief the brighter sides

of it, building upon the foundation of Antony's inborn magnificence,

the superb prodigality of his nature, his kingly generosity, and that

reckless determination to enjoy the passing moment, which is a not

uncommon attribute both of great rulers and great artists.

There was a crevice in this antique figure through which Shakespeare's

soul could creep in. He had no difficulty in imagining himself into

Antony's moods; he was able to play him just as, in his capacity

of actor, he could play a part that was quite in his line. Antony

possessed that power of metamorphosis which is the essence of the

artist nature. He was at one and the same time a master in the art of

dissimulation--see his funeral oration in _Julius Cæsar_, and in this

play the manner in which he takes Octavia to wife--and an open, honest

character; he was in a way faithful, felt closely bound to his mistress

and to his comrades-in-arms, and was yet alarmingly unstable. In other

words, his was an artist-nature.

Among his many contradictory qualities two stood out preeminent: the

bent towards action and the bent towards enjoyment. Octavius says in

the play that these two propensities are equally strong in him, and

this is perhaps just about the truth. If, with his immense bodily

strength, he had been still more voluptuously inclined, he would have

become what in later history Augustus the Strong became, and Cleopatra

would have been his Aurora von Königsmarck. If energy had been more

strongly developed in him, then generalship and love of drink and

dissipation would have combined in him much as they did in Alexander

the Great, and Antony in Alexandria would have presented a parallel to

Alexander in Babylon. The scales hung evenly balanced for a long time,

until Antony met his fate in Cleopatra.

Shakespeare has endowed them both with extreme personal beauty, though

neither of them is young. Antony's followers see in him a Mars, in her

a Venus. Even the gruff Enobarbus (ii. 2) declares that when he saw her

for the first time, she "o'erpictured that Venus where we see the fancy

outwork nature." She is the enchantress whom, according to Antony,

"everything becomes"--chiding, laughing, weeping, as well as repose.

She is "a wonderful piece of work." Antony can never leave her, for, as

Enobarbus says (ii. 2; compare Sonnet lvi.):--

"Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale

Her infinite variety. Other women cloy

The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry

Where most she satisfies; for vilest things

Become themselves in her."

What matters it that Shakespeare pictures her to himself dark as an

African (she was in reality of the purest Greek blood), or that she,

with some exaggeration, calls herself old? She can afford to jest on

the subject of her complexion as on that of her age:--

"Think on me

That am with Phœbus amorous pinches black,

And wrinkled deep in time."

She is what Antony calls her when he (viii. 2) exclaims in ecstasy, "O

thou day o' the world!"

In person and carriage Antony is as if created for her. It is not only

Cleopatra's passion that speaks when she says of Antony (v. 2)

"I dream'd there was an Emperor Antony ...

His face was as the heavens ..."

And to the beauty of his face answers that of his voice:--

"Propertied

As all the tuned spheres, and that to friends;

But when he meant to quail and shake the orb,

He was as rattling thunder."

She prizes his rich, generous nature:--

"For his bounty,

There was no winter in't; and autumn 'twas,

That grew the more by reaping:

. . . . . . .

In his livery

Walk'd crowns and crownets; realms and islands were

As plates dropped from his pocket."

And just as Enobarbus maintained that Cleopatra was more beautiful

than that pictured Venus in which imagination had surpassed nature,

Cleopatra, in her exaltation after Antony's death, maintains that his

glorious humanity surpassed what fancy can invent:--

"_Cleopatra_. Think you there was or might be such a man

As this I dreamt of?

_Dolabella._ Gentle madam, no.

_Cleopatra_. You lie, up to the hearing of the gods.

But, if there be, or ever were, one such,

It's past the size of dreaming: nature wants stuff

To vie strange forms with fancy; yet, to imagine

An Antony, were nature's piece 'gainst fancy,

Condemning shadows quite."

Not of an Antony should we speak thus now-a-days, but of a Napoleon in

the world of action, of a Michael Angelo, a Beethoven, or a Shakespeare

in the world of art.

But the figure of Antony had to be one which made such a

transfiguration possible in order that it might be worthy to stand by

the side of hers who is the queen of beauty, the very genius of love.

Pascal says in his _Pensées_: "Si le nez de Cléopâtre eût été plus

court, toute la face de la terre aurait changé." But her nose was,

as the old coins show us, exactly what it ought to have been; and in

Shakespeare we feel that she is not only beauty itself, but charm,

except in one single scene, where the news of Antony's marriage

throws her into a paroxysm of unbeautiful rage. Her charm is of the

sense-intoxicating kind, and she has, by study and art, developed those

powers of attraction which she possessed from the outset, till she has

become inexhaustible in inventiveness and variety. She is the woman who

has passed from hand to hand, from her husband and brother to Pompey,

from Pompey to the great Cæsar, from Cæsar to countless others. She is

the courtesan by temperament, but none the less does she possess the

genius for a single, undivided love. She, like Antony, is complex, and

being a woman, she is more so than he. _Vir duplex, femina triplex._

From the beginning and almost to the end of the tragedy she plays the

part of the great coquette. What she says and does is for long only the

outcome of the coquette's desire and power to captivate by incalculable

caprices. She asks where Antony is, and sends for him (i. 2). He comes.

She exclaims: "We will not look upon him," and goes. Presently his

absence irks her, and again she sends a messenger to remind him of her

and keep him in play (i. 3)--

"If you find him sad,

Say I am dancing; if in mirth, report

That I am sudden sick ..."

He learns of his wife's death. She would have been beside herself if

he had shown grief, but he speaks with coldness of the loss, and she

attacks him because of this:--

"Where be the sacred vials thou shouldst fill

With sorrowful water? Now I see, I see

In Fulvia's death how mine received shall be."

This incalculability, this capriciousness of hers extends to the

smallest matters. She invites Mardian to play a game of billiards with

her (an amusing anachronism), and, finding him ready, she turns him off

with: "I'll none now."

But all this mutability does not exclude in her the most real, most

passionate love for Antony. The best proof of its strength is the way

in which she speaks of him when he is absent (i. 5):--

"O Charmian!

Where think'st thou he is now? Stands he, or sits he?

Or does he walk? or is he on his horse?

O happy horse, to bear the weight of Antony!

Do bravely, horse, for wott'st thou whom thou mov'st?

The demi-Atlas of this earth, the arm

And burgonet of men."

So it is but the truth she is speaking when she tells with what

immovable certainty and trust, with what absolute assurance for the

future, love filled both her and Antony when they saw each other for

the first time (i. 3):--

"No going then;

Eternity was in our lips and eyes,

Bliss in our brows' bent; none our parts so poor,

But was a race of heaven."

Nor is it irony when Enobarbus, in reply to Antony's complaint (i. 2),

"She is cunning past man's thought," makes answer, "Alack, sir, no; her

passions are made of nothing but the finest part of pure love." This is

literally true--only that the love is not pure in the sense of being

sublimated or unegoistic, but in the sense of being quintessential

erotic emotion, chemically free from all the other elements usually

combined with it.

And outward circumstances harmonise with the character and vehemence

of this passion. He lays the kingdoms of the East at her feet; with

reckless prodigality, she lavishes the wealth of Africa on the

festivals she holds in his honour.

XXVIII

_THE DARK LADY AS A MODEL--THE FALL OF THE REPUBLIC A WORLD-CATASTROPHE_

Assuming that it was Shakespeare's design in _Antony and Cleopatra_, as

in _King Lear_, to evoke the conception of a world-catastrophe, we see

that he could not in this play, as in _Macbeth_ or _Othello_, focus the

entire action around the leading characters alone. He could not even

make the other characters completely subordinate to them; that would

have rendered it impossible for him to give the impression of majestic

breadth, of an action embracing half of the then known world, which he

wanted for the sake of the concluding effect.

He required in the group of figures surrounding Octavius Cæsar,

and in the groups round Lepidus, Ventidius, and Sextus Pompeius, a

counterpoise to Antony's group. He required the placid beauty and

Roman rectitude of Octavia as a contrast to the volatile, intoxicating

Egyptian. He required Enobarbus to serve as a sort of chorus and

introduce an occasional touch of irony amid the highflown passion of

the play. In short, he required a throng of personages, and (in order

to make us feel that the action was not taking place in some narrow

precinct in a corner of Europe, but upon the stage of the world)

he required a constant coming and going, sending and receiving of

messengers, whose communications are awaited with anxiety, heard with

bated breath, and not infrequently alter at one blow the situation of

the chief characters.

The ambition which characterised Antony's past is what determines his

relation to this great world; the love which has now taken such entire

possession of him determines his relation to the Egyptian queen, and

the consequent loss of all that his ambition had won for him. Whilst

in a tragedy like Goethe's _Clavigo_, ambition plays the part of the

tempter, and love is conceived as the good, the legitimate power, here

it is love that is reprehensible, ambition that is proclaimed to be the

great man's vocation and duty.

Thus Antony says (i. 2):

"These strong Egyptian fetters I must break,

Or lose myself in dotage."

We saw that one element of Shakespeare's artist-nature was of use to

him in his modelling of the figure of Antony. He himself had ultimately

broken his fetters, or rather life had broken them for him; but as he

wrote this great drama, he lived through again those years in which he

himself had felt and spoken as he now made Antony feel and speak:

"A thousand groans, but thinking on thy face,

One on another's neck, do witness bear,

Thy black is fairest in my judgment's place."

--(_Sonnet_ cxxxi.)

Day after day that woman now stood before him as his model who had been

his life's Cleopatra--she to whom he had written of "lust in action":

"Mad in pursuit, and in possession so;

Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;

A bliss in proof,--and prov'd, a very woe."

--(_Sonnet_ cxxix.)

He had seen in her an irresistible and degrading Delilah, the Delilah

whom De Vigny centuries later anathematised in a famous couplet.[1] He

had bewailed, as Antony does now, that his beloved had belonged to many:

"If eyes, corrupt by over-partial looks,

Be anchor'd in the bay where all men ride,

. . . . . .

Why should my heart think that a several plot

Which my heart knows the wide world's common place?''

--(_Sonnet_ cxxxvii.)

He had, like Antony, suffered agonies from the coquetry she would

lavish on any one she wanted to win. He had then burst forth in

complaint, as Antony in the drama breaks out into frenzy:

"Tell me thou lov'st elsewhere; but in my sight,

Dear heart, forbear to glance thine eye aside:

What need'st thou wound with cunning, when thy might

Is more than my o'er-pressed defence can 'bide?"

--(_Sonnet_ cxxxix.)

Now he no longer upbraided her; now he crowned her with a queenly

diadem, and placed her, living, breathing, and in the largest sense

true to nature, on that stage which was his world.

As in _Othello_ he had made the lover-hero about as old as he was

himself at the time he wrote the play, so now it interested him to

represent this stately and splendid lover who was nolonger young. In

the Sonnets he had already dwelt upon his age. He says, for instance,

in Sonnet cxxxviii.:

"When my love swears that she is made of truth,

I do believe her, though I know she lies,

That she might think me some untutor'd youth,

Unlearned in the world's false subtleties.

Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,

Although she knows my days are past the best,

Simply I credit her false-speaking tongue."

When Antony and Cleopatra perished with each other, she was in her

thirty-ninth, he in his fifty-fourth year. She was thus almost three

times as old as Juliet, he more than double the age of Romeo. This

correspondence with his own age pleases Shakespeare's fancy, and the

fact that time has had no power to sear or wither this pair seems to

hold them still farther aloof from the ordinary lot of humanity. The

traces years have left upon the two have only given them a deeper

beauty. All that they themselves in sadness, or others in spite, say

to the contrary, signifies nothing. The contrast between their age in

years and that which their beauty and passion make for them merely

enhances and adds piquancy to the situation. It is in sheer malice that

Pompey exclaims (ii. I):

"But all the charms of love,

Salt Cleopatra, soften thy _waned_ lip!"

This means no more than her own description of herself as "wrinkled."

And it is on purpose to give the idea of Antony's age, of which in

Plutarch there is no indication, that Shakespeare makes him dwell on

the mixed colour of his own hair. He says (iii. 9):

"My very hairs do mutiny; for the white

Reprove the brown for rashness, and they them

For fear and doting."

In the moment of despair he uses the expression (iii. II): "To the boy

Cæsar send this grizzled head." And again, after the last victory,

he recurs to the idea in a tone of triumph. Exultingly he addresses

Cleopatra (iv. 8):

"What, girl! though grey

Do something mingle with our younger brown, yet ha' we

A brain that nourishes our nerves, and can

Get goal for goal of youth."

With a sure hand Shakespeare has depicted in Antony the mature man's

fear of letting a moment pass unutilised: the vehement desire to enjoy

before the hour strikes when all enjoyment must cease. Thus Antony says

in one of his first speeches (i. I):

"Now, for the love of Love and her soft hours....

There's not a minute of our lives should stretch

Without some pleasure now."

Then he feels the necessity of breaking his bonds. He makes Fulvia's

death serve his purpose of gaining Cleopatra's consent to his

departure; but even then he is not free. In order to bring out

the contrast between Octavius the statesman and Antony the lover,

Shakespeare emphasises the fact that Octavius has reports of the

political situation brought to him every hour, whilst Antony receives

no other daily communication than the regularly arriving letters from

Cleopatra which foment the longing that draws him back to Egypt.

As a means of allaying the storm and gaining peace to love his queen

at leisure, he agrees to marry his opponent's sister, knowing that,

when it suits him, he will neglect and repudiate her. Then vengeance

overtakes him for having so contemptuously thrown away the empire over

more than a third of the civilised world--vengeance for having said as

he embraced Cleopatra (i. I):

"Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch

Of the ranged empire fall! Here is my space."

Rome melts through his fingers. Rome proclaims him a foe to her empire,

and declares war against him. And he loses his power, his renown, his

whole position, in the defeat which he so contemptibly brings upon

himself at Actium. In Cleopatra flight was excusable. Her flight in the

drama (which follows Plutarch and tradition) is due to cowardice; in

reality it was prompted by tactical, judicious motives. But Antony was

in honour bound to stay. He follows her in the tragedy (as in reality)

from brainless, contemptible incapacity to remain when she has gone;

leaving an army of 112,000 men and a fleet of 450 ships in the lurch,

without leader or commander. Nine days did his troops await his return,

rejecting every proposal of the enemy, incapable of believing in the

desertion and flight of the general they admired and trusted. When at

last they could no longer resist the conviction that he had sunk his

soldier's honour in shame, they went over to Octavius.

After this everything turns on the mutual relation of Antony and

Cleopatra, and Shakespeare has admirably depicted its ecstasies and its

revulsions. Never before had they loved each other so wildly and so

rapturously. Now it is not only he who openly calls her "Thou day o'

the world!" She answers him with the cry, "Lord of lords! O infinite

virtue!" (iv. 8).

Yet never before has their mutual distrust been so deep. She, who was

at no time really great except in the arts of love and coquetry, has

always felt distrustful of him, and yet never distrustful enough; for

though she was prepared for a great deal, his marriage with Octavia

overwhelmed her. He, knowing her past, knowing how often she has thrown

herself away, and understanding her temperament, believes her false

to him even when she is innocent, even when, as with Desdemona, only

the vaguest of appearances are against her. In the end we sea Antony

develop into an Othello.

Here and there we come upon something in his character which seems

to indicate that Shakespeare had been lately occupied with Macbeth.

Cleopatra stimulates Antony's voluptuousness, his sensuality, as Lady

Macbeth spurred on her husband's ambition; and Antony fights his last

battle with Macbeth's Berserk fury, facing with savage bravery what he

knows to be invincibly superior force. But in his emotional life after

the disaster of Actium it is Othello whom he more nearly resembles. He

causes Octavius's messenger, Thyreus, to be whipped, simply because

Cleopatra at parting has allowed him to kiss her hand. When some of her

ships take to flight, he immediately believes in an alliance between

her and the enemy, and heaps the coarsest invectives upon her, almost

worse than those with which Othello overwhelms Desdemona. And in his

monologue (iv. 10) he raves groundlessly like Othello:

"Betray'd I am.

O this false soul of Egypt! this grave charm,--

Whose eye beck'd forth my wars, and call'd them home,

Whose bosom was my crownet, my chief end,--

Like a right gipsy, hath, at fast and loose,

Beguil'd me to the very heart of loss."

They both, though faithless to the rest of the world, meant to be

true to each other, but in the hour of trial they place no trust in

each other's faithfulness. And all these strong emotions have shaken

Antony's judgment. The braver he becomes in his misfortune, the more

incapable is he of seeing things as they really are. Enobarbus closes

the third act most felicitously with the words:

"I see still

A diminution in our captain's brain

Restores his heart: when valour preys on reason

It eats the sword it fights with."

To tranquillise Antony's jealous frenzy, Cleopatra, who always finds

readiest aid in a lie, sends him the false tidings of her death. In

grief over her loss, he falls on his sword and mortally wounds himself.

He is carried to her, and dies. She bursts forth:

"Noblest of men, woo't die?

Hast thou no care of me? shall I abide

In this dull world, which in thy absence is

No better than a sty?--O! see, my women,

The crown o' the earth doth melt."

In Shakespeare, however, her first thought is not of dying herself.

She endeavours to come to a compromise with Octavius, hands over to

him an inventory of her treasures, and tries to trick him out of the

larger half. It is only when she has ascertained that nothing, neither

admiration for her beauty nor pity for her misfortunes, moves his cold

sagacity, and that he is determined to exhibit her humiliation to the

populace of Rome as one of the spectacles of his triumph, that she lets

the worm of Nilus give her her death.

In these passages the poet has placed Cleopatra's behaviour in a much

more unfavourable light than the Greek historian, whom he follows as

far as details are concerned; and he has evidently done so wittingly

and purposely, in order to complete his home-thrust at the type of

woman whose dangerousness he has embodied in her. In Plutarch all

these negotiations with Octavius were a feint to deceive the vigilance

with which he thought to prevent her from killing herself. Suicide

is her one thought, and he has baulked her in her first attempt. She

pretends to cling to her treasures only to delude him into the belief

that she still clings to life, and her heroic imposture is successful.

Shakespeare, for whom she is ever the quintessence of the she-animal

in woman, disparages her intentionally by suppressing the historical

explanation of her behavior.[2].

The English critic, Arthur Symons, writes: "_Antony and Cleopatra_ is

the most wonderful, I think, of all Shakespeare's plays, and it is

so mainly because the figure of Cleopatra is the most wonderful of

Shakespeare's women. And not of Shakespeare's women only, but perhaps

the most wonderful of women."

This is carrying enthusiasm almost too far. But thus much is true:

the great attraction of this masterpiece lies in the unique figure of

Cleopatra, elaborated as it is with all Shakespeare's human experience

and artistic enthusiasm. But the greatness of the world-historic

drama proceeds from the genius with which he has entwined the private

relations of the two lovers with the course of history and the fate

of empires. Just as Antony's ruin results from his connection with

Cleopatra, so does the fall of the Roman Republic result from the

contact of the simple hardihood of the West with the luxury of the

East. Antony is Rome, Cleopatra is the Orient. When he perishes, a prey

to the voluptuousness of the East, it seems as though Roman greatness

and the Roman Republic expired with him.

Not Cæsar's ambition, not Cæsar's assassination, but this crumbling

to pieces of Roman greatness fourteen years later brings home to us

the ultimate fall of the old world-republic, and impresses us with

that sense of _universal annihilation_ which in this play, as in _King

Lear_, Shakespeare aims at begetting.

This is no tragedy of a domestic, limited nature like the conclusion

of _Othello_; there is no young Fortinbras here, as in _Hamlet_,

giving the promise of brighter and better times to come; the victory

of Octavius brings glory to no one and promises nothing. No; the

final picture is that which Shakespeare was bent on painting from the

moment he felt himself attracted by this great theme--the picture of a

world-catastrophe.

[1]

"Toujours ce compagnon dont le cœur n'est pas sûr,

La Femme--enfant malade et douze fois impur."

[2] Goethe has a marked imitation of Shakespeare's Cleopatra

in the Adelheid of Götz von Berlichingen. And he has placed Weislingen

between Adelheid and Maria as Antony stands between Cleopatra and

Octavia bound to the former and marrying the latter.

BOOK THIRD

I

_DISCORD AND SCORN_

Out of tune--out of tune!

Out of tune the instrument whereon so many enthralling melodies had

been played--glad and gay, plaintive or resentful, full of love and

full of sorrow. Out of tune the mind which had felt so keenly, thought

so deeply, spoken so temperately, and stood so firmly "midst passion's

whirlpool, storm, and whirlwind." His life's philosophy has become a

disgust of life, his melancholy seeks the darkest side of all things,

his mirth is grown to bitter scorn, and his wit is without shame.

There was a time when all before his eyes was green--vernally green,

life's own lush, unfaded colour. This was followed by a period of

gloom, during which he watched the shadows of life spread over the

bright and beautiful, blotting out their colours. Now it is black, and

worse than black; he sees the base mire cover the earth with its filth,

and heeds how it fills the air with its stench.

Shakespeare had come to the end of his first great circumnavigation

of life and human nature: an immense disillusionment was the result.

Expectation and disappointment, yearning and content, life's gladness

and holiday-making, battle mood and triumph, inspired wrath and

desperate vehemence--all that once had thrilled him is now fused and

lost in contempt.

Disdain has become a persistent mood, and scorn of mankind flows with

the blood in his veins. Scorn for princes and people; for heroes, who

are but fellow-brawlers and braggarts after all; and for artists, who

are but flatterers and parasites seeking possible patrons. Scorn for

old age, in whose venerableness he sees only the unction or hypocrisy

of an old twaddler. Scorn for youth, wherein he sees but profligacy,

slackness, and gullibility, while all enthusiasts are impostors,

and all idealists fools. Men are either coarse and unprincipled, or

so weakly sentimental as to be under a woman's thumb; and woman's

distinguishing qualities are feebleness, voluptuousness, fickleness,

and falsehood; a fool he who trusts himself to them or lets his actions

depend upon them.

This mood has been growing on Shakespeare for some time. We have

felt it grow. It shows first in _Hamlet_, but is harmless as yet in

comparison with the scathing bitterness of later times. There is a

breath, a whisper, in the "Frailty, thy name is Woman!" addressed to

Hamlet's mother. Ophelia is rather futile than specially weak; she is

never false, still less faithless. Even the inconstant Queen Gertrude

can scarcely be called false. There was malignity and temper in that

challenge of moral hypocrisy, _Measure for Measure_, and enough

earnestness to overpower the comic, although not sufficient bitterness

to make the peaceful conclusion impossible. The tragedy of _Macbeth_

was brought to a consoling end; the powers of good triumphed at the

last.

There was only one malign character in _Othello_, evil indeed, but

solitary. Othello, Desdemona, Emilia, &c., are all good at heart.

There is no bitterness in _Lear_, no scorn of mankind, but sympathy

and a wonderful compassion pervading and dominating all. Shakespeare

has divided his own Ego among the characters of this play, in order to

share with them the miseries and suffering of life on this earth; he

has not gathered himself up to judge and despise.

It is from thenceforward that the undertone of contempt first begins to

be felt. A period of some years follows, in which his being narrows and

concentrates itself upon an abhorrence of human nature, accompanied, so

far as we can judge, by a correspondingly enormous self-esteem. It is

as though he had for a moment felt such a scorn for his surroundings

of court and people, friends and rivals, men and women, as had nearly

driven him wild.

We see the germs of it in _Antony and Cleopatra_. What a fool is this

Antony, who puts his reputation and a world-wide dominion in jeopardy

in order to be near a cold-blooded coquette, who has passed from hand

to hand, and whose caprice puts on all the colours of the rainbow. We

find it in full bloom in _Troilus and Cressida_. What a simpleton this

Troilus, who, credulous as a child, devotes himself body and soul to a

Cressida; a typical classic she, treachery in woman's form, as false

and flighty as foam upon the waves, whose fickleness has become a

by-word.

Shakespeare has now reached that point of departure where man feels

the need of stripping woman of the glamour with which romantic naïveté

and sensual attraction have surrounded her, and finds a gratification

in seeing merely the sex in her. Sympathy with love, and a conception

of woman as an object worthy of love, goes the way of all other

sympathies and illusions at this stage. "All is vanity," says Kohélet,

and Shakespeare with him. As in all artist souls, there was in his

a peculiar blending of enthusiast and cynic. He has now parted with

enthusiasm for a time, and cynicism is paramount.

Such an all-pervading change in the disposition and temper of a great

personality was not without its reasons, possibly its one first cause.

We can trace its workings without divining its origin, but we may seek

to orient ourselves with regard to its conditions. Leverier came to the

conclusion in 1846 that the disturbances in the path of Uranus were

caused by something behind the planet which neither he nor anybody

else had ever seen. He indicated its probable position, and three

weeks afterwards Galle found Neptune on the very spot. Unfortunately,

Shakespeare's history is so very obscure, and such fruitless search in

every direction has been made after fresh documents, that we have no

great hope of finding any new light.

We can but glance around the horizon of his life, and note how English

circumstances and conditions grouped themselves about him. Material

for cheering or depressing reflections can be found at all times, but

the mind is not always equally prone to assimilate the cheering or

depressing. Certain it is that Shakespeare has now elected to seek out

and dwell upon the ugly and sorrowful, the unclean and the repulsive.

His melancholy finds its nourishment therein, and his bitterness has

learned to suck poison from every noxious plant which borders his path

through life. His contempt of mankind and his weariness of existence

swell and grow with each experience, and in the events and conditions

of those years there was surely matter enough for abhorrence, rancour,

and scorn.

II

_THE COURT--THE KING'S FAVOURITES AND RALEIGH_

Under the circumstances Shakespeare could do nothing but keep as

close to King and Court as possible, even though the King's dreary,

and the Court's profligate qualities grew year by year. James aspired

to a comparison with Solomon for wisdom; he certainly resembled him

in prodigality, and Henry III. of France in his susceptibility to

manly beauty. His passion for his various favourites recalls that of

Edward II. for Gaveston in Marlowe's drama. He was, says a chronicle

of the time, as susceptible as any schoolgirl to handsome features

and well-formed limbs in a man. The parallels his contemporaries drew

between him and his predecessor on this score did not work out to

his advantage. Elizabeth, they said, who was unmarried, loved only

individuals of the opposite sex, all eminent men, whom, even then, she

never allowed to rule her. James, on the contrary, was married, and yet

entertained a passion for one _mignon_ after another, giving the most

exalted positions in the country to these men, who were worthless and

arrogant, and by whom he was entirely led. In our day Swinburne has

characterised James as combining with "northern virulence and pedantry

... a savour of the worst qualities of the worst Italians of the worst

period of Italian decadence." Was he, in truth, of Scotch descent

on both sides? His exterior recalled little of his mother's charms,

and still less those of the handsome Darnley. His contemporaries

doubted. They neither believed that Darnley's jealousy was groundless,

nor the modern embellishment that the Italian singer and private

secretary's ugly face made any tender feeling on Mary Stuart's side

quite impossible. The Scottish Solomon was invariably alluded to by

the outspoken, jest-loving Henry IV. of France as "Solomon, the son of

David" (Rizzio).

The general enthusiasm which greeted King James on his accession

speedily gave way to a very decided unpopularity. Again and again, upon

a score of different points, did he offend English national pride,

sense of justice, and decency.

The lively Queen, who romped through the court festivities, and spent

her days in dressing herself out for masquerades, had her favourites,

much as the King had his. At one time, indeed, the same family served

them both. The Queen set her affection on the elder brother, the Earl

of Pembroke, and the King bestowed his upon the younger, whom he

made Earl of Montgomery and Knight of the Garter. Whether he did not

find the harmony of disposition for which he had looked, or whether

the impression Montgomery made upon him was displaced by another

and stronger, certain it is that no later than 1603 he was already

violently infatuated with a youth of twenty, who afterwards became the

most powerful man in Great Britain.

This was a young Scot, Robert Carr, who first attracted the King's

attention by breaking his leg in a tourney at which James was present.

He had as a lad been one of the King's pages at home in Scotland, had

since pursued his fortunes in France, and was now in service with Lord

Hay. The King gave special orders that he should be nursed at the

castle, sent his own doctor to him, visited him frequently during his

illness, and made him Knight and Gentleman of the Bedchamber as soon as

he was convalescent. He kept him constantly about his person, and even

took the trouble to teach him Latin. Step by step the young man was

advanced until he stood among the foremost ranks of the country.

It was his nationality which specially offended the people, for

Scottish adventurers swarmed about the King, and the Scots were still

regarded as stranger-folk in England. The new title of Great Britain

had also caused great discontent. Was the glorious name of England

no longer to distinguish them? Scotch moneys were made current on

English soil, and English ships were compelled to carry the cross of

St. Andrew, with that of St. George upon their flags. Englishmen found

themselves slighted, and were fearful that the Scot would creep into

English lordships and English ladies' beds, as a contemporary writing

expresses it. The conflicts in Parliament concerning the extension

of national privileges to the Scotch were incessant. Bacon undertook

the King's cause, and discreet and biblical objections were made that

things would fall out as they did with Lot and Abraham. Families

combined together, or were set at variance among themselves; and it

grew to a case of, "Go you to the right? I go to the left."

In 1607 James observed that he intended to "give England the labour

and the sweat, Scotland the fruit and the sweet;" and it was a

notorious fact, that where his passions were concerned, the Scotch were

persistently preferred to the English.

James, having meanwhile found it necessary to provide his favourite

with estates, procured them in the following manner. When Raleigh

came to grief, he had secured the revenues of his estate, Sherborne,

to Lady Raleigh, and his son as heir to it after his death. A few

months later the King's lawyers discovered a technical error in the

deed of conveyance which rendered it invalid. Raleigh wrote from his

prison to Salisbury, entreating the King not to deprive his family

of their subsistence for the sake of a copyist's blunder. The King

made many promises, and assured Raleigh that a new and correct deed

should be drawn up. The imprisoned hero had begun, at about this time,

to entertain renewed hope of freedom, for he believed that Christian

IV., then on a visit to England, 1606, would intercede for him. But

when Lady Raleigh, under this impression, threw herself on her knees

before James at Hampton Court, the King passed her by without a word.

From the year 1607 the King had resolved upon seizing Sherborne for

his favourite. In 1608 Raleigh was required to prove right and title

thereunto, and he possessed only the faulty document. At Christmastide,

taking her two little sons by the hand, Lady Raleigh cast herself a

second time before James, and implored him for a new and accurate deed.

The only reply she obtained was a broad Scotch, "I maun hae the lond--I

maun hae it for Carr." It is said that the high-spirited woman lost all

patience upon this, and springing to her feet called upon God to punish

the despoiler of her property. Raleigh, on the 2nd of January 1609,

tried the more politic method of writing to Carr, entreating him not to

aspire to the possession of Sherborne. He received no answer, and upon

the 10th of the same month the estate was handed over to the favourite

as a gift. It is to be regretted that Raleigh, who had never concealed

his opinion of the King's favourites, should have lowered himself by

writing to Carr as "one whom I know not, but by honourable fame."

Lady Raleigh accepted a sum of money in compensation, which bore no

relation to the real value of Sherborne, and Raleigh was left in the

Tower. It is a highly characteristic feature that he remained there

year after year until he succeeded (in 1616) in arousing his kingly

gaoler's cupidity afresh. In the hope of his finding the anticipated

gold-mines in Guiana his prison doors were opened for a while

(1616-17), and his failure to discover them was made a pretext for his

execution.[1]

[1] "Sir Walter Raleigh was freed out of the Tower the last

week, and goes up and down, seeing sights and places built or bettered

since his imprisonment,"--Letter from John Chamberlain to Sir Dudley

Carleton, 27th March 1616 ("The Court and Times of James the First").

Gardiner's "History of England," ii. 43; Gosse, "Raleigh," 172.

III

_THE KING'S THEOLOGY AND IMPECUNIOSITY--HIS DISPUTES WITH THE HOUSE OF

COMMONS_

The King's interest in parsons and theological discussions was not a

whit inferior to his passion for his favourites. He constantly gave

public expression to a superstition which diverted even contemporary

culture. It is jestingly alluded to in a letter from Sir Edward Hoby to

Sir Thomas Edmondes, dated Nov. 19, 1605. "His Majesty in his speech

observed one principal point, that most of all his best fortunes had

happened unto him upon the Tuesday; and particularly he repeated his

deliverance from Gowry [the brothers Ruthven] and this [Gunpowder

Plot], in which he noted precisely that both fell upon the fifth day of

the month: and therefore concluded that he made choice that the next

sitting of Parliament might begin upon a Tuesday." If James supported

the claims of the clergy, it was less on religious grounds than because

his own kingly power was thereby strengthened, and he disseminated, to

the best of his ability, the doctrine that all questions must finally

be referred to his personal wisdom and insight. Relations between the

temporal and the spiritual jurisdictions were already strained. The

secular judges frequently objected that the Spiritual Court entered

into certain lawsuits before making sure that the case appertained

to them. The clergy resisted, asserting that the two courts were

independent of one another, and that their spiritual prerogatives

emanated direct from the Crown. In 1605 the Archbishop of Canterbury

complained of the secular judges to the King, and they, in their turn,

appealed to Parliament. Fuller, a member of Parliament, and one of the

principal advocates of the Puritan party, defended two of the accused

who had been shamefully mishandled by the Spiritual Court (the High

Commission), and he denied this "Popish authority," as he called it,

any right to impose fines or inflict imprisonment. For these reckless

utterances he was sent to gaol, and kept there until he retracted. The

question of the supremacy of temporal jurisdiction over the spiritual

began to ferment in the public mind. The King held by the latter,

because it exercised an authority which Parliament was powerless to

control, while Lord Chief Justice Coke stood by the former. On the

latter giving vent, however, to the opinion, in the King's presence,

that the sovereign was bound to respect the law of the land, and to

remember that spiritual jurisdiction was extraneous, James clenched

angry fists in his face, and would have struck him, had not Coke,

alarmed, fallen on his knees and entreated pardon.

The King's ardent orthodoxy prompted him next to appear as a

theological polemist. A certain professor of theology at Leyden,

Conrad Vorstius by name, had, according to James's ideas, been guilty

of heresy. It was of so slight a nature that, in spite of the rigid

orthodoxy of the greater part of the Dutch theologians, it had raised

no protest in Holland, since statesmen, nobles, and merchants were all

agreed upon tolerance in matters of religion. James, however, made such

a vindictive assault upon them, that, for fear of forfeiting their

English alliance, they were compelled to give Vorstius his dismissal.

At the precise moment of James's full polemical heat against Vorstius,

two unlucky Englishmen, Edward Wrightman and Bartholomew Legate, were

convicted of holding heretical opinions. The latter admitted that he

was an Aryan, and had not prayed to Jesus for many years. James was

fire and flame. Elizabeth had burnt two heretics. Why shouldn't he?

Public opinion saw no cruelty, but merely righteousness in such a

proceeding, and they were both accordingly burned alive in March 1612.

It was one of the clerkly James's customs to issue proclamations. Among

the first of these was a warning issued against the encroachments of

the Jesuits, advising them of a date by which they must have decamped

from his kingdom and country. Another very forcibly recommended

unanimity of religion--that is to say, complete uniformity of ceremony.

A bold priest, Burgess by name, preached a sermon in the King's

presence, soon after this, on the insignificance of ceremonies. They

resembled, he said, the glass of the Roman Senator, which was not

worth a man's life or subsistence. Augustus, having been invited to a

feast by this Senator, was greeted on his arrival by terrible cries. A

slave, who had broken some costly glass, was about to be thrown into

the fishpond. The Emperor bade them defer the punishment until he had

inquired of his host whether he had glass worth a man's life. Upon the

Senator answering that he possessed glass worth a province, Augustus

asked to see it, and smashing it into fragments, remarked, "Better

that it should all perish than that one man should die." "I leave the

application to your Majesty."

The proclamations continued undiminished, however, and it became a

favourite amusement of James to issue edicts forbidding lawful trades.

This was the cause of much discontent, and appeal was made to the

Lord Chief Justice. In 1610 two questions were, laid before Coke:

whether the King could prohibit the erection of new houses in London

by proclamation (a naïve notification had been issued with a view

to preventing the "overdevelopment" of the capital), or forbid the

manufacture of starch (in allusion to a manifesto limiting the uses

of wheat to purposes of food). The answer was, returned that the King

had neither power to create offences by proclamation, nor make trades,

which did not legally subject themselves to judicial control, liable to

punishment by the Star Chamber. After this ensued a temporary respite

from edicts levying fines or threatening imprisonment.

The dissensions between King and People became so violent that they

soon led to a complete rupture between James and the House of Commons,

which would not submit to his highhanded levying and collecting of

taxes in order to squander the money on his own pleasures and caprices.

James, who required £500,000 to pay his debts, was made to endure

a speech in Parliament concerning the prodigality of himself and

favourites. An insulting rumour added that it had been said in the

House that the King must pack all the Scots in his household back to

the country whence they came. James, losing all patience, prorogued

Parliament, and finally dissolved it in February 1611.

This was the beginning of a conflict between the Crown and the People

which lasted throughout James's lifetime, causing the Great Revolution

under his son, and being only finally extinguished seventy-eight years

afterwards by the offer from both Houses of the Crown to William of

Orange.

It was to no purpose that the King's revenues were increased year by

year, by illegal taxation too: nothing sufficed. In February 1611 he

divided £34,000 among six favourites, five of whom were Scotch. In the

March of the same year he made Carr Viscount Rochester and a peer of

England. For the first time in English history a Scot took his seat

in the House of Lords, and a Scot, moreover, who had done his best to

inflame the King against the Commons.

To relieve its pecuniary distress the Court hit upon the expedient

of selling baronetcies. Every knight or squire possessed of money

or estates to the value of a hundred a year could become a baronet,

provided he were willing to disburse £1080 (a sum sufficient to support

thirty infantry-men in Ireland for three years) in three yearly

payments to the State coffers. This contrivance brought no very great

relief, however. Either the extravagance was too reckless, or the

seekers after titles were not sufficiently numerous.

Things had gone so far in 1614, that, in spite of the hitherto

unheard-of sale of Crown property, James was at his wits' end for

want of money. He owed £680,000, not to mention a yearly deficit of

£200,000. The garrisons in Holland were on the point of mutinying for

their pay, and the fleet was in much the same condition. Fortresses

were falling into ruins for want of repair, and English Ambassadors

abroad were fruitlessly writing home for money. It was once more

decided to summon Parliament. In spite of the most shameless packing,

however, the Commons came in with a strong Opposition; and they had

much to complain of. The King, among other things, had given Lord

Harrington the exclusive right of coining copper money, in return for

his having lent him £300,000 at his daughter's wedding. He had also

granted a monopoly of the manufacture of glass, and had given the sole

right of trade with France to a single company.

The Upper House declined to meet the Lower on a common ground of

procedure, and when Bishop Neile, one of the greatest sycophants

the royal influence possessed in the Lords, permitted himself some

offensive strictures on the Commons, such a storm broke loose among

the latter that one member (an aristocrat), abused the courtiers as

"spaniels" towards the King and "wolves" towards the people, and

another went so far as to warn the Scotch favourites that the Sicilian

Vespers might find a parallel in England.

James, who, in a lengthy peroration, had attempted to influence the

Commons in his favour, saw that he had nothing to hope from them and

dissolved Parliament in the following year.

In order to free him from debt, and to contrive, if possible, some

means of supplying the sums swallowed up by the Government and Court,

a scheme was devised of inducing private citizens to send money to the

King, apparently of their own free will. The bishops inaugurated it by

offering James their Church plate and other valuables. This example

was followed by all who hoped or expected favours from the court; and

a great number of people sent money to the Treasury at Whitehall. Thus

the idea obtained that James should issue a summons for all England

to follow this example. It seemed, at first, as if this self-taxation

would bring in a good round sum. The King asked the city for a loan of

£100,000, and it replied (very differently to the response it had made

to Elizabeth) that they would rather give £10,000 than lend £100,000.

In the course of little over a month £34,000 came in, but with that the

stream ceased. Government wrote fruitlessly to all the counties and

their officials, &c., to renew the summons. The sheriffs unanimously

replied that if the King were to summon Parliament he would experience

no difficulty in getting money. During two whole months only £500 came

in. Fresh appeals were made and renewed pressure attempted without

obtaining the desired results.

The luckless Raleigh, who had heard of these things in his prison,

but was without adequate information from the outside world, wrote a

pamphlet on the prerogatives of Parliament, full of good advice to the

King, whom he assumed to be personally guiltless of the abuses his

ministers practised in his name. He naïvely looked for his freedom in

return for the tract, which naturally was suppressed.

The notorious Peckham case was another cause of popular ill-humour. In

the course of this trial, a man who had been greatly exasperated by

clerical and official demeanour, and had expressed himself indiscreetly

thereon, was subjected to repeated torture on the pretext of a sermon

which had never been preached or printed, but which an examination of

his house had brought to light. Bacon degraded himself by urging on the

executioners at the rack--a form of torture which had been abolished

in common law, but was still considered legitimately applicable in

political cases.

That James was personally cruel is shown, amongst other things, by

his frequent pardons on the scaffold. He kept such men as Cobham,

Grey, and Markham waiting two hours with the axe hanging over their

heads, undergoing all the tortures of death, before they were informed

that their execution had been deferred. The times, however, were as

cruel as he. Through all the published letters of that period runs

incessant mention of hanging, racking, breaking on the wheel, half

hanging, and executions, without the least emotion being expressed.

Any death gave invariable rise to suspicions of poison. Even when the

King lost his eldest son, it was stubbornly believed that he had rid

himself of him from jealousy of his popularity. As every death was

attributed to foul play, so every disease or sickness was assigned

to witchcraft. Sorcerers and witches were condemned and despised,

but believed in, nevertheless, even by such men as Philip Sidney's

friend, Fulk Greville, Lord Brook and Chancellor of the Exchequer under

James. He obviously fully credits the witchcraft of which he speaks so

disdainfully in his work, "Five Years of King James's Government."

IV

_THE CUSTOMS OF THE COURT_

The tone of the Court was vicious throughout. Relations between the

sexes were much looser than would have been expected under a king who,

in general, troubled himself little about women. We find a description

in Sir Dudley Carleton's letters of a bridal adventure, which ended

in the King going in night-gear to awaken the bride next morning and

remaining with her some time, "in or upon the bed, chuse which you will

believe." James spoke of the Queen in public notices as "Our dearest

bedfellow." In the half-imbecile, half-obscene correspondence between

James and Carr's successor, Buckingham, the latter signs himself, "Your

dog," while James addresses him as "Dog Steenie." The King even calls

the solemn Cecil, "little beagle;" and the Queen, writing to Buckingham

to beg him intercede with the King for Raleigh's life, addresses him as

"my kind dog."

With personal dignity, all decency also was set aside. Even the elder

Disraeli, James's principal admirer and apologist, acknowledges that

the morals of the Court were appalling, and that these courtiers,

who passed their days in absolute idleness and preposterous luxury,

were stained by infamous vices. He quotes Drayton's lines from the

"Mooncalf," descriptive of a lady and gentleman of this circle--

"He's too much woman, and she's too much man."

Neither does he deny the contemporary Arthur Wilson's account of many

young girls of good family, who, reduced to poverty by their parents'

luxurious lives, looked upon their beauty as so much capital. They came

up to London in order to put themselves up for sale, obtained large

pensions for life, and ultimately married prominent and wealthy men.

They were considered sensible, well-bred women, and were even looked

upon as _esprits forts_. The conversation of the men was so profligate,

that the following sentiment, less decently expressed, must have been

frequently heard: "I would rather that one should believe I possessed

a lady's favours, though I did not, than really possess them when none

knew thereof."