are mere imitations of his manner. But, on the other hand, the obvious
mimicry of the _Midsummer Night's Dream_ in Gower's prologue to the
third act is commonplace and clumsy enough:
"Now sleep yslaked hath the rout;
No din but snores the house about.
. . . . . . .
The cat, with eyne of burning coal,
Now couches fore the mouse's hole;
And crickets sing at the oven's mouth,
E'er the blither for their drouth."
Compare this with Puck's:
"Now the wasted brands do glow,
Whilst the screech-owl, screeching loud," &c.
An awkwardly introduced pantomime interrupts the prologue, which is
tediously renewed; then suddenly, like a voice from another world,
a rich, full tone breaks in upon the feeble drivel, and we hear
Shakespeare's own voice in unmistakable and royal power:
"Thou God of this great vast, rebuke these surges,
Which wash both heaven and hell; and thou, that hast
Upon the winds command, bind them in brass,
Having called them from the deep! Oh, still
Thy deafening, dreadful thunders; gently quench
Thy nimble, sulphurous flashes!--Oh, how, Lychorida,
How does my queen?--Thou stormest venomously:
Wilt thou spit all thyself? The seaman's whistle
Is as a whisper in the ears of death,
Unheard."...
The nurse brings the tiny new-born babe, saying:
"Here is a thing too young for such a place,
Who, if it had conceit, would die, as I
Am like to do: take in your arms this piece
Of your dead queen.
_Pericles_. How, how Lychorida!
_Lychorida_. Patience, good sir; do not assist the storm.
Here's all that is left living of your queen,
A little daughter: for the sake of it,
Be manly and take comfort."
The sailors enter, and, after a brief, masterly conversation,
full of the raging storm and the struggle to save the ship, they
superstitiously demand that the queen, who has but this instant drawn
her last breath, should be thrown overboard. The king is compelled to
yield, and turning a last look upon her, says:
"A terrible childbed hast thou had, my dear;
No light, no fire: the unfriendly elements
Forgot thee utterly; nor have I time
To give thee hallowed to thy grave, but straight
Must cast thee, scarcely coffined, in the ooze;
Where, for a monument upon thy bones,
And e'er-remaining lamps, the belching whale
And humming water must o'erwhelm thy corse,
Lying with simple shells."
He gives orders to change the course of the ship and make for Tarsus,
because "the babe cannot hold out to Tyrus." There is so mighty a
breath of storm and raging seas, such rolling of thunder and flashing
of lightning in these scenes, that nothing in English poetry, not
excepting Shakespeare's _Tempest_ itself, nor Byron's and Shelley's
descriptions of Nature, can surpass it. The storm blows and howls,
hisses and screams, till the sound of the boatswain's whistle is lost
in the raging of the elements. These scenes are famous and beloved
among that seafaring folk for whom they were written, and who know the
subject-matter so well.
The effect is tremendously heightened by the struggles of human passion
amidst the fury of the elements. The tender and strong grief expressed
in Pericles' subdued lament for Thaisa is not drowned by the storm; it
sounds a clear, spiritual note of contrast with the raging of the sea.
And how touching is Pericles' greeting to his new-born child:
"Now, mild may be thy life!
For a more blustrous birth had never babe:
Quiet and gentle thy conditions, for
Thou art the rudeliest welcomed to this world
That ever was prince's child. Happy what follows!
Thou hast as chiding a nativity
As fire, air, water, earth, and heaven can make,
To herald thee from the womb." ...
Although Wilkins' tale follows the course of the play very faithfully,
there are but two points in which the resemblance between them extends
to a similarity of wording. The first of these occurs in the second
act, which was Wilkins' own work, and the second here. In his tale
Wilkins says:
"Poor inch of nature! Thou art as rudely welcome to the
world as ever princess' babe was, and hast as chiding a
nativity as fire, air, earth, and water can afford thee."
Even more striking than the identity of words is the exclamation "Poor
inch of nature!" It is so entirely Shakespearian that we are tempted to
believe it must have been accidentally omitted in the manuscripts from
which the first edition was printed.
It is not until the birth of Marina in the third act that Shakespeare
really takes the play in hand. Why? Because it is only now that it
begins to have any interest for him. It is the development of this
character, this tender image of youthful charm and noble purity, which
attracts him to the task.
How Shakespearian is the scene in which Marina is found strewing
flowers on the grave of her dead nurse just before Dionyza sends
her away to be murdered; it foreshadows two scenes in plays which
are shortly to follow--the two brothers laying flowers on the
supposed corpse of Fidelio in _Cymbeline_ and Perdita, disguised as a
shepherdess, distributing all kinds of blossoms to the two strangers
and her guests in _The Winter's Tale_.
Marina says
(Act iv. sc. I):
"No, I will rob Tellus of her weed
To strew thy green with flowers: the yellows, blues,
The purple violets, and marigolds,
Shall as a carpet hang upon thy grave
While summer-days do last.--Ay me! poor maid,
Born in a tempest, when my mother died,
This world to me is like a lasting storm,
Whirring me from my friends."
The words are simple, and not especially remarkable in themselves, but
they are of the greatest importance as symptoms. They are the first
mild tones escaping from an instrument which has long yielded only
harsh and jarring sounds. There is nothing like them in the dramas of
Shakespeare's despairing mood.
When, weary and sad, he consented to re-write parts of this _Pericles_,
it was that he might embody the feeling by which he is now possessed.
Pericles is a romantic Ulysses, a far-travelled, sorely tried,
much-enduring man, who has, little by little, lost all that was dear
to him. When first we meet him, he is threatened with death because he
has correctly solved a horrible riddle of life. How symbolic this! and
he is thus made cautious and introspective, restless and depressed.
There is a touch of melancholy about him from the first, accompanied
by an indifference to danger; later, when his distrust of men has been
aroused, this characteristic despondency becomes intensified, and gives
an appearance of depth of thought and feeling. His sensitive nature,
brave enough in the midst of storm and shipwreck, sinks deeper and
deeper into a depression which becomes almost melancholia. Feeling
solitary and forsaken, he allows no one to approach him, pays no heed
when he is spoken to, but sits, silent and stern, brooding over his
griefs (Act iv. sc. I). Then Marina comes into his life. When she is
first brought on board, she tries to attract his attention by her
sweet, modest play and song; then she speaks to him, but is rebuffed,
even angrily repulsed, until the gentle narrative of the circumstances
of her birth and the misfortunes which have pursued her arrests the
king's attention. The restoration of his daughter produces a sudden
change from anguished melancholy to subdued happiness.
So, as a poet, had Shakespeare of late withdrawn from the world, and
in just such a manner he looked upon men and their sympathy until the
appearance of Marina and her sisters in his poetry.
It is probable that Shakespeare wrote the part of Pericles for Burbage,
but there is much of himself in it. The two men had more in common
than one would be apt to suppose from the only too well-known story of
their rivalry on a certain intimate occasion. It is just such trivial
anecdotes as this that make their way and are remembered.
Shakespeare has spiritualised Pericles; Marina, in his hands, is a
glorified being, who is scarcely grown up before her charm and rare
qualities rouse envy and hatred. We first see her strewing flowers
on a grave, and immediately after this we listen to her attempt to
disarm the man who has undertaken to murder her. She proves herself as
innocent as the Queen Dagmar of the ancient ballad. She "never spake
bad word nor did ill turn to any living creature." She never killed a
mouse or hurt a fly; once she trod upon a worm against her will and
wept for it. No human creature could be cast in gentler mould, and
truth and nobility unite with this mildness to shed, as it were, a halo
round her.
When, after rebuffing and rejecting her, Pericles has gradually
softened towards Marina, he asks her where she was born and who
provided the rich raiment she is wearing. She replies that if she were
to tell the story of her life none would believe her, and she prefers
to remain silent. Pericles urges her:
"Prithee, speak:
Falseness cannot come from thee; for thou look'st
Modest as Justice, and thou seem'st a palace
For the crowned Truth to dwell in; I will believe thee.
. . . . . . . . .
Tell thy story;
If thine considered prove the thousandth part
Of my endurance, thou art a man, and I
Have suffered like a girl: yet thou dost look
Like Patience gazing on kings' graves, and smiling
Extremity out of act."
All this rich imagery brings Marina before us with the nobility of
character which is so fitly expressed in her outward seeming. It is
Pericles himself who feels like a buried prince, and it is he who
has need of her patient sympathy, that the violence of his grief may
be softened by her smile. It is all very dramatically effective. The
old Greek tragedies frequently relied on these scenes of recovery
and recognition, and they never failed to produce their effect. The
dialogue here is softly subdued, it is no painting in strong burning
colours that we are shown, but a delicately blended pastel. In order to
gain an insight into Shakespeare's humour at the time _As You Like It_
and _Twelfth Night_ were written, the reader was asked to think of a
day on which he felt especially well and strong and sensible that all
his bodily organs were in a healthy condition,--one of those days in
which there is a festive feeling in the sunshine, a gentle caress in
the air.
To enter into his mood in a similar manner now you would need to recall
some day of convalescence, when health is just returning after a long
and severe illness. You are still so weak that you shrink from any
exertion, and, though no longer ill, you are as yet far from being
well; your walk is unsteady, and the grasp of your hand is weak. But
the senses are keener than usual, and in little much is seen; one gleam
of sunshine in the room has more power to cheer and enliven than a
whole landscape bathed in sunshine at another time. The twitter of a
bird in the garden, just a few chirps, has more meaning than a whole
chorus of nightingales by moonlight at other moments. A single pink
in a glass gives as much pleasure as a whole conservatory of exotic
plants. You are grateful for a trifle, touched by friendliness, and
easily moved to admiration. He who has but just returned to life has an
appreciative spirit.
As Shakespeare, with the greater susceptibility of genius, was more
keenly alive to the joyousness of youth, so more intensely than others
he felt the quiet, half-sad pleasures of convalescence.
Wishing to accentuate the sublime innocence of Marina's nature, he
submits it to the grimmest test, and gives it the blackest foil one
could well imagine. The gently nurtured girl is sold by pirates to a
brothel, and the delineation of the inmates of the house, and Marina's
bearing towards them and their customers, occupies the greater part of
the fourth act.
As we have already said, we can see no reason why Fleay should
reject these scenes as non-Shakespearian. When this critic (whose
reputation has suffered by his arbitrariness and inconsistency) does
not venture to ascribe them to Wilkins, and yet will not admit them to
be Shakespeare's, he is in reality pandering to the narrow-mindedness
of the clergyman, who insists that any art which is to be recognised
shall only be allowed to overstep the bounds of propriety in a
humorously jocose manner. These scenes, so bluntly true to nature
in the vile picture they set before us, are limned in just that
Caravaggio colouring which distinstinguished Shakespeare's work during
the period which is now about to close. Marina's utterances, the best
he has put into her mouth, are animated by a sublimity which recalls
Jesus' answers to his persecutors. Finally, the whole _personnel_ is
exactly that of _Measure for Measure,_ whose genuineness no one has
ever disputed. There is also an occasional resemblance of situation.
Isabella, in her robes of spotless purity, offers precisely the same
contrast to the world of pimps and panders who riot through the play
that Marina does here to the woman of the brothel and her servants.
After all that he had suffered, it was hardly possible Shakespeare
would relapse into the romantic, mediæval worship of woman as woman.
But his natural rectitude of spirit soon led him to make exceptions
from the general condemnation which he was inclined for a time to pass
upon the sex; and now that his soul's health was returning to him, he
felt drawn, after having dwelt solely upon women of the merely sensual
type, to place a halo round the head of the young girl, and so he
brings her with unspotted innocence out of the most terrible situations.
When she sees that she is locked into the house, she says:
"Alack, that Leonine was so slack, so slow!
He should have struck, not spoke; or that these pirates,
Not enough barbarous, had but o'erboard thrown me
For to seek my mother!
_Bawd_. Why lament you, pretty one?
_Marina_. That I am pretty.
_Bawd_. Come, the gods have done their part in you.
_Marina_. I accuse them not.
_Bawd_. You are 'light into my hands, where you are like to live.
_Marina_. The more my fault
To 'scape his hands where I was like to die.
. . . Are you a woman?
_Bawd._ What would you have me be, an I be not a woman?
_Marina._ An honest woman, or not a woman."
The governor Lysimachus seeks the house, and is left alone with Marina.
He begins:
"Now, pretty one, how long have you been at this trade?
_Marina_. What trade, sir?
_Lysimachus_. Why, I cannot name't but I shall offend.
_Marina_. I cannot be offended with my trade. Please you to
name it.
_Lysimachus_. How long have you been of this profession?
_Marina_. E'er since I can remember.
_Lysimachus_. Did you go to't so young? Were you a gamester
at five or at seven?
_Marina_. Earlier too, sir, if now I be one.
_Lysimachus_. Why, the house you dwell in proclaims you to
be a creature of sale.
_Marina_. Do you know this house to be a place of such
resort, and will come into't? I hear say you are of
honourable parts, and are the governor of this place.
_Lysimachus_. Why, hath your principal made known unto you
who I am?
_Marina_. Who is my principal?
_Lysimachus_. Why, your herb-woman; she that sets seeds and
roots of shame and iniquity. Oh, you have heard something of
my power, and so stand aloof for more serious wooing. . . .
Come, bring me to some private place: come, come.
_Marina_. If you were born to honour, show it now; If put
upon you, make the judgment good That thought you worthy of
it."
Lysimachus is arrested by her words and his purpose changed. He gives
her gold, bids her persevere in the ways of purity, and prays the gods
will strengthen her. She succeeds in obtaining her freedom and in
supporting herself by her talents. The lasting impression she had made
on the governor in her degradation is proved by his sending for her to
charm King Pericles' melancholy, and later he aspires to her hand.
The scenes quoted do not give an intellectual equivalent for all that
has been dared in order to produce them, but they bear witness to the
desire Shakespeare felt of painting youthful womanly purity shining
whitely in a very snake-pit of vice, and the spirit in which it is
accomplished is that of both Shakespeare and the Renaissance.
At a somewhat earlier period such a subject would have assumed, in
England, the form of a _Morality_, an allegorical religious play, in
which the steadfastness of the virtuous woman would have triumphed over
_Vice_. At a somewhat later period, in France, it would have been a
Christian drama, in which heathen wickedness and incredulity were put
to confusion by the youthful believer. Shakespeare carries it back to
the days of Diana; his virtue and vice are alike heathen, owning no
connection with church or creed.
Thirty-seven years later, during the minority of Louis XIV., Pierre
Corneille made use of a very similar subject in his but little-known
tragedy, _Théodore, Vierge et Martyre_. The scene is laid in the same
place in which _Pericles_ begins, in Antioch during the reign of
Diocletian.
Marcella, the wicked wife of the governor of the province, determines
that her daughter Flavia shall marry the object of her passion,
Placidus. He, however, has no thought but for the Princess Theodora, a
descendant of the old Syrian kings. Theodora is a Christian, and these
are the times of Christian persecution. In order to revenge herself
upon the young girl and estrange Placidus from her, Marcella causes her
to be confined in just such another house as that into which Marina was
sold.
The dramatic interest would naturally lie in the development of
Theodora's feelings when, she finds herself abandoned to her fate. But
the chaste young girl will not, and cannot, express in words the horror
she must feel; and in any case the laws of propriety would not allow
her to do so on the French stage. Corneille avoided the difficulty by
exchanging action for narrative. Various false or incomplete accounts
of what has taken place keep the audience in anxious expectation.
Placidus is told that Theodora's sentence has been commuted to one of
simple banishment. He breathes again. Then he hears that Theodora has
actually been taken to the house; that Didymus, her Christian admirer,
bribed the soldiers to allow him to enter first, and that shortly
afterwards he returned, covering his face with his cloak as though
ashamed. He is furious. The third announcement informs him that it was
Theodora who came out disguised in Didymus's clothes. Placidus' rage
now gives way to agonising jealousy. He believes that Theodora has
yielded willingly to Didymus, and he suffers tortures. Finally we learn
the truth. Didymus himself tells how he rescued Theodora unharmed; he
is a Christian, and expects to die. "Live thou without jealousy," he
says to Placidus; "I can endure the death penalty." "Alas!" answers
Placidus, "how can I be other than jealous, knowing that this glorious
creature owes more than life to thee. Thou hast given thy life to
save her honour; how can I but envy thy happiness!" Both Theodora and
Didymus are martyred, and the pagan lover, who did nothing to help his
love, is left alone with his shame.
The sole contrast intended here is between the noble qualities
developed by the Christian faith and that baseness which was considered
inseparable from heathendom.
Two things arrest our attention in this comparison: firstly, the
superiority of the English drama, which openly represents all things
on the stage, even such subjects as are only passingly alluded to by
society; and, secondly, the marked difference in the spirit of that Old
England of the Renaissance from the all-pervading Christianism of the
early classic period in "most Christian" France.
The calm dignity of Marina's innocence has none of that taint of the
confessional which was plainly obnoxious to Shakespeare, and which
neither the mediæval plays before him, nor Corneille and Calderon
after, could escape. Corneille's Theodora is a saint by profession and
a martyr from choice. She gives herself up to her enemies at the end
of the play, because she has been assured by supernatural revelation
that she will not again be imprisoned in the house from which she
has just escaped. Shakespeare's Marina, the tenderly and carefully
outlined sketch of the type which is presently to wholly possess his
imagination, is purely human in her innate nobility of nature.
It is deeply interesting to trace in this sombre yet fantastically
romantic play of _Pericles_ the germs of all his succeeding works.
Marina and her mother, long lost and late recovered by a sorrowing
king, are the preliminary studies for Perdita and Hermione in _A
Winter's Tale_. Perdita, as her name tells us, is lost and is
living, ignorant of her parentage, in a strange country. Marina's
flower-strewing suggests Perdita's distribution of blossoms,
accompanied by words which reveal a profound understanding of
flower-nature, and Hermione is recovered by Leontes as is Thaisa by
Pericles.
The wicked stepmother in _Cymbeline_ corresponds to the wicked
foster-mother in _Pericles_. She hates Imogen as Dionyza hates Marina.
Pisanio is supposed to have murdered her as Leonine is believed to have
slain Marina, and Cymbeline recovers both sons and daughter as Pericles
his wife and child.
The tendency to substitute some easy process of explanation, such as
melodramatic music or supernatural revelation, in the place of severe
dramatic technique, which appears at this time, betrays a certain
weariness of the demands of the art. Diana appears to the slumbering
Pericles as Jupiter does to Posthumus in _Cymbeline_.
But it is for _The Tempest_ that _Pericles_ more especially prepares
us. The attitude of the melancholy prince towards his daughter seems
to foreshadow that of the noble Prospero towards his child Miranda.
Prospero is also living in exile from his home. But it is Cerimon who
approaches more nearly in character to Prospero. Note his great speech:
"I held it ever,
Virtue and cunning were endowments greater
Than nobleness and richer: careless heirs
May the two latter darken and expend;
But immortality attends the former,
Making a man a god. 'Tis known I ever
Have studied physic, through which secret art,
By turning o'er authorities, I have,
Together with my practice, made familiar
To me and to my aid the blest infusions
That dwell in vegetives, in metals, stones;
And I can speak of the disturbances
That Nature works, and of her cures; which doth give me
A more content in course of true delight
Than to be thirsty after tottering honour
Or tie my treasure up in silken bags,
To please the fool and death" (Act iii. sc. 2).
The position in which Thaisa and Pericles stand in the second act
towards the angry father, who has in reality no serious objection to
their union, closely resembles that of Ferdinand and Miranda before
the feigned wrath of Prospero. Most notable of all is the preliminary
sketch we find in _Pericles_ of the tempest which ushers in the play of
that name. Over and above the resemblance between the storm scenes, we
have Marina's description of the hurricane during which she was born
(_Pericles_, Act iv. sc. I), and Ariel's description of the shipwreck
(_Tempest_, Act i. sc. 2).
Many other slight touches prove a relationship between the two plays.
In _The Tempest_ (Act ii. sc. I), as in _Pericles_ (Act v. sc. I), we
have soothing slumbrous music and, mention of harpies (_Tempest_, Act
iii. sc. 3, and _Pericles_, Act iv. sc. 3). The words "virgin knot," so
charmingly used by Marina:
"If fires be hot, knives sharp, or waters deep,
Untied I still my virgin knot will keep" (Act iv. sc. 2),
are also employed by Prospero in reference to Miranda in _The Tempest_
(Act iv. sc. I); and it will be observed that these are the only two
instances in which they occur in Shakespeare.
Thus the germs of all his latest works lie in this unjustly neglected
and despised play, which has suffered under a double disadvantage:
it is not entirely Shakespeare's work, and in such portions of it
as are his own there exist, in the dark shadow cast by her hideous
surroundings about Marina, traces of that gloomy mood from which he
was but just emerging. But for all that, whether we look upon it as a
contribution to Shakespeare's biography or as a poem, this beautiful
and remarkable fragment, _Pericles_, is a work of the greatest
interest.[3]
[1] The complete title runs thus:--"The late, and much admired
Play, called Pericles, Prince of Tyre, with the true Relation of the
whole History, adventures, and fortunes of the said Prince: As also,
The no lesse strange and worthy accidents, in the Birth and Life of
his Daughter MARIANA. As it hath been diuers and sundry times acted
by his Maiesties Seruants, at the Globe on the Bancside. By William
Shakespeare. Imprinted at London for Henry Gosson, and are to be sold
at the Signe of the Sunne in Paternoster Row. 1609."
[2]The Triar Table determines their order thus:--
Troilus and Cressida 1606-7
Antony and Cleopatra 1606-7
Coriolanus 1607-8
Timon of Athens. 1607-8
[3] Delius: _Ueber Shakespeare's Pericles, Prince of Tyre.
Jahrbuch der deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft_, iii. 175-205; F.
G. Fleay: _On the Play of Pericles. The New Shakspere Society's
Transactions_, 1874, 195-254; Swinburne: _A Study of Shakespeare_, p.
206; Gervinus: _Shakespeare_, vol. i. 187, and Elze: _Shakespeare_, p.
409, still believe _Pericles_ to be a work of Shakespeare's youth.
XVI
_FRANCIS BEAUMONT AND JOHN FLETCHER_
It was a comparatively easy task to distinguish Shakespeare's part in
_Timon of Athens_ and _Pericles_, for it consisted of all that was
important in either play. The identity of the men who collaborated
with him seems to have been decided by pure chance, and is of little
interest to us now-a-days. It is a different matter, however, in the
case of two other dramas of this period which have been associated with
Shakespeare's name--_The Two Noble Kinsmen_ and _Henry VIII_.--for
his part in them is unimportant, in one almost imperceptible, in
fact. Their real author was a young man just coming into notice, who
afterwards became one of the most famous dramatists of the day, and can
hardly have been indifferent to Shakespeare. The question, therefore,
of their mutual relations and the origin of their collaboration is one
of the greatest interest.
A drama entitled _Philaster_ had been played at the Globe Theatre., in
1608 with extraordinary success. It was the joint work of two young
men, Francis Beaumont, aged 22, and John Fletcher, aged 28. The play
made their reputation, and they found themselves famous from the moment
of its representation. A would-be amusing, but in reality rather dull
play of Fletcher's, _The Woman-Hater_, had been put on the stage in
1606-7. It contained some good comic parts, but nothing that gave
promise of the poet's later works.
After this triumph with _Philaster_, the two friends produced in 1609
or 1611 their masterpiece, _The Maid's Tragedy_, and their scarcely
less admired _A King and no King_. This joint activity continued
until the death of Beaumont in 1615. During the remaining ten years
of his life Fletcher wrote alone, with the single exception of a play
produced in collaboration with Rowley, and attained to a fame which
probably eclipsed Shakespeare's in these last years of his life, as
it certainly did immediately after his death. Dryden remarks, in his
well-known _Essay of Dramatic Poetry_ (1668), "Their plays are now the
most pleasant and frequent entertainments of the stage, two of them
being acted through the year for one of Shakespeare's or Jonson's."
This statement seems somewhat exaggerated if we compare it with the
entries in Pepys' Diary; still, we know that Shakespeare's fame was
completely eclipsed towards the end of the century by that of Ben
Jonson. Samuel Butler not only prefers the latter, but speaks as though
his superiority was universally admitted.[1]
The two new poets were neither learned proletaires, like Peele,
Greene, and Marlowe, nor of the middle classes, like Shakespeare and
Ben Jonson, but were both of good family. Fletcher's father was a
high-placed ecclesiastic, much experienced in the courts of Elizabeth
and James, and Beaumont was the son of a Justice of Common Pleas,
and related to families of some standing. One great source of their
popularity lay in the fact that they were thus enabled to reproduce to
perfection the manners of the fine gentleman, his general dissipation,
and his quick repartee.
Francis Beaumont was born somewhere about the year 1586, at Grace
Dieu in Leicestershire. His family numbered among those of the
legal aristocracy, and many of its members were noted for poetical
propensities and abilities; there were no fewer than three poets by
name of Beaumont living at the time of Francis' death. The future
dramatist was entered at ten years of age as a gentleman-commoner at
Broadgate Hall, Oxford. He early left the university for London, where
he was made a member of the Inner Temple. His legal studies appear
to have sat lightly upon him, and he seems to have devoted himself
principally to the composition of those plays and masques which were so
frequently performed by the various legal colleges of those days. In
1613 he wrote the masque which was performed by the legal institutions
of the Inner Temple and Gray's Inn in honour of the Princess
Elizabeth's marriage with the Elector-Palatine.
It seems to have been a mutual enthusiasm for Jonson's _Volpone_
(1605) which brought Beaumont and Fletcher together, and united them
in a brotherly friendship and fellowship in work of which history
affords few parallels. Aubrey, to whom we are indebted for a number of
anecdotes about Shakespeare, gives the following vivid picture of their
life: "They lived together on the Bankside, not far from the playhouse;
both batchelors lay together, had one wench in the house between them,
which they did so admire; the same cloathes and cloake, etc., between
them."
The two friends soon set to work, and appear to have planned out the
dramas together, each finally working out the scenes most suited to
his talents. An anecdote related by Winstanley seems to indicate such
a method. One day while they were thus apportioning their parts in
a tavern they frequented, a man standing at the door overheard the
exclamation, "I will undertake to kill the king;" suspecting some
treasonable conspiracy, he gave information, with the result that both
poets were arrested. In support of the veracity of this anecdote,
George Darley observes that a similar incident occurs in Fletcher's
_Woman-Hater_ (Act v. sc. 2). Great bitterness is certainly expressed
in this play on the subject of informers; witness the very unflattering
sketch of their ways and manners in the third scene of the second act.
In whatsoever fashion _The Two Noble Kinsmen_ may have originally been
written, the joint-authors must have finally revised it in company and
obliterated to the best of their ability the distinguishing marks of
their very different styles. Otherwise it would not offer, now that we
are in possession of works executed by each separately, the present
difficulty of apportioning to each the honour due to him.
There was no lack of difference, especially of a metrical nature,
about their styles. As far as we can judge, Beaumont's was the gift
for tragedy; he had less wit and less skill than Fletcher, but he
was more genuinely inspired, richer in feeling, and more daring in
invention than his brother poet. His noble head is encircled by a halo
of sadness, for, like Marlowe and Shelley, two of England's greatest
poets, he died before he had completed his thirtieth year.
Beaumont was a devoted admirer of Ben Jonson, and a constant frequenter
of that "Mermaid Tavern" whose literary and social gatherings have been
celebrated in his poetical epistle to the object of his admiration.
His passionate regard for the author of _Volpone_ is shown in a poem
addressed to him upon the subject, in which he exalts Jonson's art
and the charm of his comedy above all that any other poet (thereby
including Shakespeare) had ever produced for the English stage.
Jonson replies with his ode "To Mr. Francis Beaumont," in which he
reciprocates the admiring attention by a declaration of the warmest
affection, and expresses himself "not worth the least indulgent thought
thy pen drops forth," assuring his friend that he envies him his
greater talent. According to Dryden, Jonson submitted everything he
wrote to Beaumont's criticism as long as the young man was alive, and
even gave him his manuscripts to correct.
While Beaumont's name is thus associated with Jonson, Fletcher's forms
a constellation in conjunction with that of Shakespeare.
John Fletcher was born in December 1579, at Rye in Sussex, and was
therefore fifteen years younger than the great poet with whom he is
said to have collaborated more than once. His father, the Dean of
Peterborough, was successively promoted through the bishoprics of
Bristol and Worcester to that of London. He was a handsome, eloquent
man, with a luxurious temperament, inclined to display and pleasure of
all kinds. Every inch a courtier, all his thoughts were concentrated
upon gaining, retaining, or recovering the royal favour.
One episode of his life of an impressively dramatic and historic
interest, calculated to make the strongest impression on the
imagination of an embryo tragic poet, must have been often related by
him to his young son. Dr. Richard Fletcher was the divine appointed by
Government to attend on Mary Stuart at the time of her execution, and
was therefore both spectator and participator in the closing scene of
the Scottish Cleopatra's life.
When he approached the Queen in the great hall hung with black, and
invited her, as he was in duty bound to do, to unite with him in
prayer, she turned her back upon him.
"Madam," he began with a low obeisance, "the Queen's most excellent
majesty. Madam, the Queen's most excellent majesty." Thrice he
commenced his sentence, wanting words to pursue it. When he repeated
the words a fourth time she cut him short.
"Mr. Dean," she said, "I am a Catholic, and must die a Catholic. It is
useless to attempt to move me, and your prayers will avail me little."
"Change your opinion, madam," he cried, his tongue being loosed at
last. "Repent of your sins, settle your faith in Christ, by Him to be
saved."
"Trouble not yourself further, Mr. Dean," she answered. "I am settled
in my own faith, for which I mean to shed my blood."
"I am sorry, madam," said Shrewsbury, "to see you so addicted to
Popery!"[2]
Slowly and carefully her ladies removed her veil so as not to disturb
the arrangement of her hair. They took off her long black robe, and
she stood then in a skirt of scarlet velvet; they removed the black
bodice, and revealed one of scarlet silk. Sobbing, they drew on her
scarlet sleeves and placed scarlet slippers upon her feet. It was
like a transformation scene in a theatre when the proud woman stood
suddenly dressed in scarlet in the black funeral hall. When her women
wept and wailed she said to them, "_Ne criez pas vous, j'ai promis
pour vous. Adieu, au revoir_," and praying in a loud voice, "_In te
Domine confido_," she laid her head upon the block. It was impossible
that Richard Fletcher should ever forget the inflexible resolution and
indomitable courage displayed by the great actress, nor was he likely
to forget the terrible mingling of horror with pure burlesque in the
final scene. In his agitation, the executioner missed his aim, and a
weak blow fell upon the handkerchief with which the Queen's eyes were
bound, inflicting a slight wound upon her cheek. The second blow left
the severed head hanging by a piece of skin, which the executioner
cut as he drew back the axe. Then Dr. Fletcher witnessed a second
transformation, as marvellous as any ever produced by a magician's
wand: the great mass of thick false hair fell from the head. The Queen
who had knelt before the block possessed all the ripened charm and
dignified beauty of maturity; the head held up by the executioner
to the gaze of the little company was that of a grey, wrinkled, old
woman.[3] Could anything in the world have given young Fletcher a
keener insight into the horrors of tragic catastrophe, the solemnity
of death, and the blending of the terrible with the utterly grotesque
which life's most supreme moments occasionally produce? It must
have acted like a call and incitement to the creation of tragic and
burlesque theatrical effect.
John Fletcher was educated at Cambridge, and probably came to London
shortly before Beaumont, to try his fortune as a dramatic writer.
His first success was with _Philaster, or Love lies Bleeding_, in
1608. Shakespeare must have witnessed its triumphant performance with
strangely mingled feelings, for it could but strike him as being in
many ways an echo of his own work. In so far as he is wrongfully
deprived of his throne, Prince Philaster occupies much the same
position as Hamlet, and several of his speeches to the king are
markedly in the style of the Danish Prince of Shakespeare's play. Thus,
in the opening scene of the first act:
"_King_. Sure he's possess'd.
_Philaster_. Yes, with my father's spirit: It's true, O king!
A dangerous spirit. Now he tells me, king,
I was a king's heir, bids me be a king;
And whispers to me, these are all my subjects.
'Tis strange he will not let me sleep, but dives
Into my fancy, and there gives me shapes that kneel
And do me service, cry me 'King.'
But I'll oppose him, he's a factious spirit,
And will undo me. Noble sir, your hand,
I am your servant.
_King_. Away, I do not like this," &c.
The king, however, has nothing to fear from Philaster, for the prince
loves and is beloved by the monarch's daughter, Arethusa, whom her
father intends to wed to that arrogant braggart, Prince Pharamond of
Spain. Philaster, all unknown to himself, is beloved by Euphrasia, the
daughter of the courtier Cleon. Disguised as a page she enters the
prince's service under the name of Bellario, and displays a devotion
which no trial can shake, not even that of carrying love-letters
between Philaster and Arethusa, nor of being transferred to the service
of the latter that she may be at hand in case of need. Euphrasia's
situation and feelings resemble those of Viola in _Twelfth Night_, but
the comedy of Shakespeare's play here becomes serious and romantic
tragedy. _Philaster_ must have reminded Shakespeare yet more forcibly
of another of his plays, and one to which the second half of the title,
_i.e., Love lies Bleeding_, would have been applicable, for in the
course of the piece Philaster and Arethusa are brought into a situation
which is a counterpart of that of Othello and Desdemona.
It happens in the following manner. The princess treats Pharamond with
as much coldness as she dares, allowing her betrothed none of the
privileges which he may claim after marriage. Pharamond, who naïvely
confides to the audience that his temperament will not stand such
treatment, is sympathised with by an exceedingly accommodating court
lady. Her name is Megra; she is one of those wanton fair ones whom
Fletcher excelled in portraying, and is closely akin to the Chloe of
his charming play _The Faithful Shepherd_, The time and place of this
assignation being betrayed, the king, enraged at the insult offered
to his daughter, breaks in upon them and overwhelms Megra with cruel
and coarse abuse. She, on her part, threatens that if her name is
publicly disgraced, she will reveal all she knows of a much too tender
friendship between the princess and a handsome page lately taken into
her service.
The king, finding that Bellario is actually attendant upon Arethusa,
believes the slander and insists upon his instant dismissal. The
courtiers, who, in common with the people, love Philaster and look
to him to dethrone the king and rule in his stead, have watched this
obstacle of his passion for the princess with no great favour. They
hasten to report the rumour to him. Dion, Euphrasia-Bellario's own
father, mendaciously asserts that he has surprised the lovers together.
No use is made of this incident, nor of any of the opportunities
offered by Euphrasia's disguise, which remains a secret even from the
audience until the last scene of the play. Philaster in a jealous
frenzy draws his sword upon Bellario and drives him away. The page
instinctively guesses that Philaster is caught in the meshes of some
intrigue, but does not divine its nature. Her parting words might have
been addressed by Desdemona to Othello:
"But through these tears,
Shed at my hopeless parting, I can see
A world of treason practised upon you,
And her, and me."
Just as Desdemona, suspecting nothing, warmly pleads Cassio's cause
with Othello, so Arethusa laments to Philaster that she has been forced
to dismiss his cherished messenger of love:
"O cruel!
Are you hard-hearted too? Who shall now tell you
How much I loved you? Who shall swear it to you,
And weep the tears I send? Who shall now bring you
Letters, rings, bracelets? lose his health in service?
Wake tedious nights in stories of your praise?" (Act iii. sc. 2).
Philaster suffers the same agonies as the Moor of Venice, but being of
a naturally gentle disposition, he only answers her in terms hardly
to be surpassed for mournful and pathetic beauty. Later, coming upon
the princess and her page, who have met by chance in a wood, he is so
carried away by jealousy that he draws his sword first upon Arethusa
and then upon Bellario. The page takes the blow without a murmur, and
goes willingly to prison in place of Philaster for the attempt upon the
princess's life. The devotion of Desdemona is thus reproduced in both
these maidens, and finds in both a striking expression. All comes right
eventually. A revolution places Philaster upon the throne, the women
who love him recover from their wounds, and the discovery of Bellario's
sex puts an end to all scandal. Philaster marries his beloved, and she,
even more magnanimous than the queen in De Musset's _Carmosine_, closes
the play with an invitation to Bellario-Euphrasia to share their life:
"Come, live with me;
Live free as I do. She that loves my lord,
Cursed be the wife that hates her."
In spite of its many echoes from his own plays, Shakespeare cannot
have failed to appreciate the talent displayed in this drama. The
gentleness and charm of the women in the works of both young poets must
have appealed to him, offering as they did so marked a contrast to
those of Chapman and Marlowe, neither of whom had any appreciation of
womanliness or power to depict it. The best of Chapman's tragedies can
have contained little that would attract Shakespeare. _The Conspiracy
and Tragedy of Charles Duke of Byron, Marshall of France_, was rather a
ten-act epic than a drama. His comedies, too, even _Eastward Hoe_, with
its wonderful picture of the London of the day to which Ben Jonson and
Marston contributed their share, must have repelled him by a realism
which he always avoided in his own work. Beaumont and Fletcher laid
their scenes in Sicily, or rather in some imaginary country, whose
abstract poetry, more in accordance with the Romance nation's manner of
representing men and their passions, cannot have been unsympathetic to
Shakespeare, especially at this period of his life.
_A King and no King_, the play which in all probability immediately
succeeded _Philaster_, contains the same merits and defects as the
latter, and here also Shakespeare might find reminiscences of his own
work. When the king's mother kneels before her son, and is raised
by him (Act iii. sc. I), we are reminded of Volumnia kneeling to
Coriolanus, and we feel that the same scene was in the mind of the two
young poets. The comic character of the play is one Bessus, a soldier
by profession, and an arrant coward in spite of his captaincy. He is
a braggart, liar, and, if occasion offers, a pander, being equally
diverting in all these capacities. Considerable humour is displayed in
the elaboration of his character, but the mighty figure of Falstaff
is plainly discernible in the background. The authors even go to the
length of appropriating some distinctly Falstaffian expressions. A
fencing-master says of Bessus (Act iv. sc. 3):
"It showed discretion, the better part of valour."[4]
In _Philaster_ we were shown a strong passion consumed by groundless
jealousy. In _A King and no King_ we have a still stronger passion,
that of the young Arbaces for Princess Panthea, leading to confusion
and disaster. Throughout the whole play Arbaces never doubts for a
moment that they are brother and sister. The secret of his birth is
not discovered until the last scene, just as Bellario's sex is not
made known until the end of _Philaster_. Spaconia discovers that King
Tigranes, who is as her very life to her, is in love with Panthea;
whereupon she assumes much the same position towards him that Euphrasia
did towards her love. But there is profounder study of character in the
new play. Arbaces, a mixture of vanity and boastfulness with really
excellent qualities, makes an extremely complex personality, though
not an unnatural or unsympathetic one, and we are given a study of
complicated passion in no way inferior to that in Racine's _Phèdre_,
the instinct of love violently and irresistibly aroused, but constantly
met by the fear and horror of incest. The subject is treated with great
pathos and power of language.[5]
In 1609-10 Fletcher reached the zenith of his fame as sole author and
as collaborator with Beaumont. That sweet and fresh pastoral play
_The Faithful Shepherdess_, Fletcher's unassisted work, must have
been written before the spring of 1610, for Sir William Skipworth, to
whom, amongst others, it is dedicated, died in the May of that year.
The theme was peculiarly suited to the fresh and delicate grace of
Fletcher's lyrical gift, and here again Shakespeare may have perceived
a distinct imitation of his _Midsummer Night's Dream_. Here also the
lovers are metamorphosed, and Perigot embraces Amaryllis in the form
of Amoret, believing her to be his love; he also wounds Amoret as
Philaster wounds Arethusa. A still earlier version of the play may
be found in Spenser's _Shepherds Calendar_. Darley has observed that
Fletcher imitated several lines from the same source, and among them,
oddly enough, some which had been appropriated by Spenser from Chaucer,
whose verses greatly surpass either of the later poets in charm. In
_The Faithful Shepherdess_, for example, we have (v. 5):
"Sort all your shepherds from the lazy clowns
That feed their heifers in the budded brooms."
In Spenser's _Shepherds Calendar_ it stands:
"So loytering live you, little herd grooms,
Keeping your beasts in the budded brooms."
But in Chaucer's _House of Fame_ we find the following verse (iii. 133):
"And many a floite and litlyng home
And pipis made of grenè corne
As have these litel herdè-groomes
That kepen bestis in the bromes."
Fletcher's principal source, however, was, as the title tells us,
Guarini's _Pastor Fido_.
_The Faithful Shepherdess_ is a charming idyl, too airy and delicate
to have an immediate success with his own generation, but it may be
read with pleasure to this day, and has secured lasting fame to its
author. Ben Jonson's later but also admirable pastoral play, _The Sad
Shepherd_, is the English poem of that period which most resembles it.
Immediately after the production of this little tragi-comedy,
Fletcher offered to the Globe Theatre the most remarkable work
which had resulted from the combined labours of himself and Francis
Beaumont--_The Maid's Tragedy_.
The first act opens with the preparations for a wedding festivity.
The king has commanded the worthy and distinguished Lord Amintor to
break off his engagement to the gentle and devoted Aspasia and to
marry Evadne, the beautiful sister of his dearest friend and comrade,
the great general Melantius. Amintor, to whom the king's command is
sacred, and who is, moreover, strongly attracted by Evadne, breaks with
Aspasia, dear as she is to him. We witness Aspasia's deep grief, the
outburst of rage on the part of her father (the cowardly Calianax), and
the performance of the masque on the eve of the wedding, in which some
of the poets' sweetest lyrics are to be found.
The second act represents the wedding-night. The disrobing of the bride
by her friends, and all the fun and banter attendant on the occasion,
form the introduction. Then follows, between bridegroom and bride,
the first great scene of the play, as boldly dramatic as any written
by Shakespeare before or Webster after this date. Amintor approaches
Evadne with tender words, she gently repulses him. He strives to disarm
what he supposes to be her bashfulness, but she tells him calmly and
coldly that she will never be his. Still he does not understand, and
now urges her with impatient desire. Then she rises, like a serpent
about to sting, and coldly hisses that she is, and will continue to
be, the king's mistress, that the marriage has merely been arranged by
him as a screen for his relations with her. The fury and thirst for
revenge which seizes Amintor when he realises this outrage gives way to
a desperate comprehension that it is the king who has dishonoured him;
to a subject the person of the king is inviolable.
The third act opens with an audacious visit from the king on the
following morning. With cool patronage he asks Amintor if the night
has given him satisfaction. Amintor replies composedly, and answers
the king's more particular inquiries quite in the style of the happy
husband. It is now the king's turn to be disconcerted. He sends for
Evadne and violently accuses her of treachery, against which she,
of course, passionately protests. The king, beside himself with
rage, sends for Amintor; he is furiously attacked by Evadne for his
falsehoods, and the king brutally explains the situation and the part
the husband is expected to play. This double scene is written in a
masterly fashion, with a strong sense of dramatic effect, but the rest
of the act is worthess, being chiefly composed of dialogues between
Amintor and Melantius, who learns the truth about his sister from his
friend. The two are perpetually drawing upon each other and sheathing
their swords again; firstly, because Melantius will not believe in his
sister's shame; secondly, because Amintor will not allow Melantius to
seek any revenge which will reveal his dishonour. It all reads like a
weak imitation of the Spanish dramatists before Calderon.
The fourth act presents another series of effective scenes. The brother
accuses the sister of her infamy, and when she coldly denies everything
he threatens her with his sword, until she vows that she will take
bloody vengeance on the cruel and vicious king who has brought about
her degradation. Then the suddenly converted Evadne falls upon her
knees and implores her husband's forgiveness, which he, seeing how
bitterly she repents the life she has been living, accords. This is
followed by a particularly well-imagined scene, in which the ridiculous
old Calianax, who hates Melantius, denounces him to the king for his
attempt to persuade him, Calianax, to give up the city he held for the
monarch. In spite of its truth, Melantius listens to the accusation
quite imperturbably, and succeeds in giving it the appearance of being
merely the ramblings of an old dotard.
In the fifth act is a skilfully prepared Judith scene--the second
great scene of the play. Evadne goes to the king's chamber, passing
through the anteroom, which resounds with the profligate jests of
the courtiers. The authors linger with a certain voluptuous cruelty
over the scene between the king, who does not awake from his sleep
until his hands have been tied to the bed, and the woman who has been
his mistress, and who now tortures him with scathing words before
she murders him. The remaining scenes are marred by their excessive
sensationalism. Aspasia, disguised as her brother, seeks Amintor,
from whom she can no longer be separated. He receives her with warm
cordiality, but she taunts, strikes, and even kicks him, wishing to
attain, if possible, the happiness of dying by his hand. He finally
loses patience and draws his sword upon her, seeing too late that it
is his beloved whom he has slain. Evadne now appears, red-handed and
glowing with love, but Amintor repulses her with horror, she is stained
with that greatest of all crimes, regicide. She kills herself in
despair, and Amintor also dies by his own hand.
Aspasia is the perpetually slighted young woman who appears, always
resigned and gentle, in all Beaumont and Fletcher's plays. The
old coward Calianax is another of their standing characters. The
brotherhood between Melantius and Amintor possesses, in spite of
its occasional artificiality, some interest for us, as does the
corresponding friendship in the _Two Noble Kinsmen_, from the fact
that the mutual relations between the authors evidently served as
the prototype in both cases. Evadne's character, if not completely
intelligible, is entirely _hors ligne_, and most admirably suited to
dramatic treatment. The play indeed is a model of everything which
dramatic and theatrical treatment requires, and was well calculated to
impress an audience for whom Shakespeare's art was too refined.
We cannot, therefore, be surprised that the friend and fellow-craftsman
of the two poets, who was the first to publish a collected edition
of their works after their death, should write the following words
without fear of contradiction: "But to mention them is to throw a cloud
upon all former names and benight posterity; this book being, without
flattery, the greatest monument of the scene that time and humanity
have produced, and must live, not only the crown and sole reputation of
our own, but the stain of all other nations and languages" (Shirley's
address to the reader).
[1] See Richard Garnett: _The Age of Dryden_, p. 249
[2] Froude: _History of England_, vol. xii. p. 254.
[3] J. St. Loe Strachey: _Beaumont and Fletcher_, vol. i. p. xv.
[4] It is Falstaff who says in the _First Part of Henry
IV_. (Act v. sc. 4), "The better part of valour is discretion." This
parallel has been overlooked both in Ingleby's _Shakespeare's Century
of Praise_ and in Furnivall's _Fresh Allusions to Shakespeare_.
[5]
"Know I have lost
The only difference betwixt man and beast,
My reason.
PANTHEA.
Heaven forbid!
ARBACES.
Nay, it is gone,
And I am left as far without a bound
As the wide ocean that obeys the winds;
Each sudden passion throws me where it lists,
And overwhelms all that oppose my will.
I have beheld thee with a lustful eye;
My heart is set on wickedness, to act
Such sins with thee as I have been afraid
To think of....
I have lived
To conquer men, and now am overthrown
Only by words, brother and sister. Where
Have those words dwelling? I will find 'em out
And utterly destroy'em; but they are
Not to be grasped
Accursed man!
Thou bought'st thy reason at too dear a rate;
For thou hast all thy actions bounded in
With curious rules, where every beast is free;
What is there that acknowledges a kindred
But wretched man? Who ever saw the bull
Fearfully leave the heifer that he liked
Because they had one dam?"
XVII
_SHAKESPEARE AND FLETCHER--THE TWO NOBLE KINSMEN AND HENRY VIII_.
In the year 1684 a drama was published for the first time under the
following title:
"_The Two Noble Kinsmen_; presented at the Blackfriars, by the
King's Maiesties Servants, with great applause. Written by the
memorable Worthies of their time Mr. _John Fletcher_ and Mr. _William
Shakespeare_, Gent: Printed at _London_ by _Tho. Cotes_ for _John
Waterson_, and are to be sold at the signe of the _Crown_ in Paul's
Churchyard."
This play was not included in the First Folio edition of Beaumont and
Fletcher (1647), but it appeared in the second (1679). Even supposing
the editors of the First Folio edition of Shakespeare's works to have
entertained no doubt of his share in it, it would probably remain in
Fletcher's possession until his death in 1625, and would therefore be
inaccessible to them.
The play is of no particular value; it is far inferior to Fletcher's
best work, and not to be compared with any of Shakespeare's completed
dramas. Nevertheless, many eminent critics of this century have found
distinct traces in this play of the styles of both greater and lesser
poet.
Like that of _Troilus and Cressida_, the theme found its way from the
pages of an old-world poet, Statius' _Thebaide_ in this case, into
those of Boccaccio, and through him it came to Chaucer. Under the form
given it by the latter it proved the foundation of several dramas of
the reigns of Elizabeth and James.[1] Most of the essential details of
_The Two Noble Kinsmen_ may be found in Boccaccio's _La Teseide._
It is a tale of two devoted friends, both suddenly seized by a romantic
passion for a woman whom they have watched walking in a garden from
the window of the tower in which they are held prisoners of war. Their
friendship is shattered, each claiming the exclusive right to the
affections of this lady, who is the Duke's sister Emilia. One of the
friends is set at liberty upon the express condition of his quitting
the country for ever. His irresistible longing for the fair one,
however, draws him back to live disguised in her neighbourhood. The
second friend escapes from prison, and meeting the first, engages him
in a duel, which is interrupted by Duke Theseus. They explain their
position to him, and their passion for his sister. The Duke arranges a
formal tournament between the suitors; Emilia's hand is to reward the
victor, and the vanquished is to suffer death. The conqueror, however,
is fatally injured by a fall from his horse, and it is the defeated man
who marries the princess.
There can be no reasonable question of the traces of Fletcher's
hand in this play, for in it we find not only his easily recognised
metrical style, but many features peculiar to his poorer work--the
lax composition which permits of two plots running side by side with
no connection between them, a tendency to merely theatrical effect
and entirely motiveless action, contrived to surprise the audience at
the cost of psychology, and finally his conception of virtue and vice
in the relations between man and woman. To Fletcher, chastity meant
entire abstinence, and side by side with this "chastity" he places, and
delineates with relish, an immodest and purely sensual passion. Thus
Emilia talks of her "chastity," and the jailer's daughter alludes to
her passion for Palamon in terms which are repulsively shameless. When
Shakespeare's women love, they are neither chaste in this fashion nor
passionate in this fashion. They are sympathetically and reverentially
drawn as loving only one man and loving him faithfully, whereas the
affections of Fletcher's heroines veer round as suddenly as we saw
Evadne's veer in _The Maids Tragedy_. Therefore it is possible for him
to portray such women as Emilia, who during the tournament loves first
one and then the other of her suitors as his chances of victory are
in the ascendant. That it contains many reminiscences of Shakespeare
is no argument against Fletcher's responsibility for the greater part
of the play, but quite the contrary; we have already seen how many of
these traces are to be found even among his best works. In the _Two
Noble Kinsmen_ we find echoes from _The Midsummer Night's Dream,_ from
_Julius Cæsar_ (the quarrel between Brutus and Cassio), and, above all,
a tasteless and offensive imitation of Ophelia's madness, when the
jailer's daughter goes crazy for fear while seeking Palamon in the wood
at night, and in her raving and singing later in the play. Shakespeare
never repeated without excelling, and certainly never parodied himself
in this fashion.[2]
Shakespeare evidently had no part in the planning of the play. There
is no originality in it, and if we do obtain a glimpse of some sort of
life's philosophy, it is certainly not his. Swinburne's surmise that
the play was sketched by Shakespeare and completed by Fletcher, can
therefore hardly be correct. Among other arguments, we may mention that
the part in which, according to Swinburne's own opinion, Shakespeare's
hand is most traceable, is the conclusion, which is hardly likely to
have been written first.
Can any part of the play be ascribed to Shakespeare? Gardiner and
Delius believe not, and the Danish critics a few years ago shared the
same scarcely justifiable opinion. Bierfreund is uninfluenced by the
fact that many of the most eminent English critics hold a contrary
view, but such a circumstance should impose the very closest study of
the play on the part of foreign critics. In my case this has led me to
the conclusion that although the drama was planned and the greater part
executed by Fletcher, he had Shakespeare's assistance in finishing the
work. We can hardly imagine that Shakespeare vouchsafed his help from
any motive but that of interest in, and a friendly feeling for, the
younger poet, who had submitted his work to him and appealed for his
assistance.
It would but weary the reader to go through the work from beginning to
end to show how the seal of Shakespeare's style is stamped upon it.
The traces of his pen are most frequent in the opening act; the appeal
of the first queen to Theseus ("We are three queens," &c.), in the
introductory scene, for example. These lines possess all the rhythm
peculiar to the productions of the last years of the poet's life; and
how boldly figurative and genuinely Shakespearian in expression is the
same queen's fanciful expression:
"Dowagers, take hands;
Let us be widows to our woes; delay
Commends us to a famishing hope."
Theseus' last speech in this act (the summing up of the situation and
circumstances) reminds us of Hamlet's monologue, "The whips and scorns
of life, the oppressors' wrongs," &c., and "Ulysses' beauty, wit, high
birth," &c.
"Since I have known frights, fury, friends' behests,
Love's provocations, zeal, a mistress' task,
Desire of liberty, a fever, madness."...
Mere imitations must not be confounded with Shakespeare's own style,
however. The passage in which Emilia speaks of the ardent and tender
friendship that united her to her dead friend, Flavina, which in
England has been mistakenly admired as Shakespeare's work, is in
reality a poor copy of the passage in the _Midsummer Night's Dream_
(Act iii. sc. 2) where Helena describes the love between herself and
Hermia. The unhealthy affection here set forth bears Fletcher's stamp
upon it, and is made particularly unpleasant by the use Emilia makes of
the word "innocent."
We are again sensible of Shakespeare's touch in the monologue spoken by
the jailer's daughter, which constitutes the second scene of the third
act. Note the picturesque expression, "In me has grief slain fear,"
and many others. From the moment she goes out of her mind down to the
last word she utters, Shakespeare has neither part nor lot in those
speeches whose uncouth imitation of his style must have been singularly
offensive to him.
The greater part of the first scene of the fifth act is undoubtedly
Shakespeare's. Theseus' first speech is superb, and Arcite's address
to the knights and invocation of Mars is delightful. The lines at the
close of the play have also a Shakespearian ring about them, especially
the words so much admired by Swinburne:
"That nought could buy
Dear love but loss of dear love."
But there is no deeper, no intellectual interest for us in all this.
Shakespeare had nothing to do with the psychology, or rather want of
it, in this play.[3]
Had he any greater share in _Henry VIII_.? The play was first published
in the Folio edition of 1623, where it closes the series of Historical
Plays. The first four acts are founded on Holinshed's Chronicle, and
the last upon Fox's _Acts and Monuments of the Church_, commonly known
as the _Book of Martyrs_. The authors were also directly or indirectly
indebted to a book which at that date only existed in manuscript,
George Cavendish's _Relics of Cardinal Wolsey_, which had been largely
drawn upon by Holinshed and Hall. The earliest reference to a play
of Henry VIII. may be found in the Stationers' Hall Registry for the
12th of February 1604-5, where the "Enterlude for K. Henry VIII."
is entered; but this refers to Rowley's worthless and fanatically
Protestant play "_When you see mee you know mee._" The next mention of
such a drama occurs in the well-known oft-quoted letters concerning the
burning of the Globe Theatre on the 29th of June 1613. In an epistle
from Thomas Larkin to Sir Thomas Pickering, dated "This last of June
1613," we read: "No longer since than yesterday, while Burbege's
company were acting at the Globe the play of Henry VIII., and there
shooting off certain chambers in way of triumph, the fire catched and
there burnt so furiously, as it consumed the whole house, all in less
than two hours, the people having enough to do to save themselves."
Also Sir Henry Wotton in a letter to his nephews, dated the 6th of July
1613, writes: "Now let matters of state sleep, I will entertain you at
the present with what happened at the Bankside. The king's players had
a new play, called All is True, representing some principal pieces of
the reign of Henry VIII., which was set forth with many extraordinary
circumstances of pomp and majesty, even to the matting of the stage;
the knights of the Order, with their Georges and Garter, the guards
with their embroidered coats and the like; sufficient, in Truth, within
a while to make greatness very familiar if not ridiculous. Now King
Henry making a masque at the Cardinal Wolsey's House, and certain
canons being shot off at his entrance, some of the paper, or other
stuff wherewith one of them was stopped, did light on the thatch, where
being thought at first but an idle smoak, and their eyes more attentive
to the show, it kindled inwardly and ran round like a train, consuming
within less than an hour the whole House to the very grounds."
The emphatic and thrice repeated assertion of the prologue that all
that is about to be represented is _the truth_, taken in conjunction
with other details, proves that the play described is our _Henry
VIII_., and at that date, therefore, a new work.
Although never very highly esteemed, it was not until somewhere about
the year 1850 that it was ever doubted that _Henry VIII_. was entirely
written by Shakespeare. It would now be impossible to find any one
holding such an opinion; some of the most competent critics, indeed,
maintain that Shakespeare had nothing whatever to do with it.[4]
That keen observer, Emerson, alluding to _Henry VIII_. in his book
_Representative Men_ draws attention to the two entirely different
rhythms of its verse--one that is Shakespearian, and another much
inferior. Almost simultaneously, Spedding published an article in the
_Gentleman's Magazine_ for August 1856 (afterwards reprinted under
the title "Who Wrote Shakespeare's Henry VIII?"), in which he points
out these differing rhythms, affirming one of them to be Fletcher's.
Furnivall and Fleay declared themselves of the same opinion in 1874. To
understand this criticism, the reader must bear in mind the following
simple evolution of English five-footed iambics. The language does
not possess what Scandinavians call feminine rhymes, alternating and
contrasting with the masculine. The first attempt to break the monotony
of the blank verse simply consisted in the addition of an extra
syllable to the original ten--_double ending_. The proportion of these
lengthened lines in Shakespeare's _Henry V._ is 18 in 100. Ben Jonson
long adhered to the old regular construction, but finally yielded to
the newer fashion. Fletcher constantly used the eleven-syllabled lines,
employing them indeed so regularly and consciously that he is betrayed
into a certain monotoneous mannerism. Instance the following from _The
Wild Goose Chase_:
"I would I were a woman, sir, to fit you,
As there be such, no doubt, may engine you too,
May with a countermine blow up your valour.
But in good faith, sir, we are both too honest;
And the plague is, we cannot be persuaded;
For look you, if we thought it were a glory
To be the last of all your lovely ladies."...
This will also show that Fletcher did not, as a rule, allow the idea to
overlap from one line to the next.
In Shakespeare's later works the proportion of eleven-syllabled lines
is 33 in 100; in Massinger it is 40, and in Fletcher 50 to 80, or even
more. Again, Shakespeare made use, with ever-increasing frequency, of
_enjambement_ or "run on" lines. This style is particularly noticeable
in the passionate dramas of his bitter period, and the growing habit of
employing them led to the more and more frequent appearance of lines
ending with an adverb, article, or preposition (light and weaking
endings). There may be a hundred such in his later plays; there are,
for instance, 130 in _Cymbeline_. This feature became an extravagance
with his successors. Massinger, whose dramas are considerably shorter
than Shakespeare's, has from 150 to 170 of these weak endings in each
play.
In comparison with Shakespeare's work there is an effeminate ring about
Fletcher's verse, and his was the Corinthian, if Shakespeare's was the
Ionic style. Separate and unalloyed, it would be impossible to mistake
them, but it is a very different matter when they are blended together
in one and the same work as in _Henry VIII_. And here again the problem
offered by the _Two Noble Kinsmen_ presents itself. Did Shakespeare
leave the play unfinished, and was it completed by Fletcher after his
death? or did he help Fletcher by writing or re-writing certain scenes
of his play? The first supposition is an utter impossibility, as far as
I am concerned. The planning of the drama was not Shakespeare's; never
in his life did anything so shapeless come from his pen. Is any part of
the play due to him? In spite of the verdicts of Furnivall and Symons,
I think so. In the first place, we are not justified in ignoring the
testimony borne by Heminge and Condell in the First Folio edition. We
have always hitherto taken for granted that they were better qualified
to judge of the authenticity of a play than we of the present day; not
one of the plays accepted by them has since been rejected by posterity,
and we need a very good reason for making an exception of _Henry VIII_.
The sole pretext we can offer is the weakness of the whole play,
including those portions of which we are in doubt. But this weakness
cannot in any way be considered as decisive. Here, working with another
man, Shakespeare did not put forth his full strength, exercise all
his powers, nor give free play to his imagination. Of this, _Henry
VIII_. is not the only example. Moreover, there are strong points of
resemblance between those parts of the play which the majority of
English critics ascribe to him and works of the same period which were
unmistakably his and his alone.
So far back as 1765, Samuel Johnson, who never doubted that the whole
play was due to Shakespeare, remarked that the poet's genius seemed
to rise and set with Queen Katharine, and that any one might have
invented and written the rest. In 1850 James Spedding, moved thereto by
some suggestive criticism by Tennyson, came to the conclusion already
mentioned, that only certain parts were written by Shakespeare, and
that the remainder was due to Fletcher. This opinion was confirmed by
Samuel Hickson, who remarked that he had arrived at the same decision
three or four years previously, and even with the same results as far
as the separate scenes were concerned. This theory was, after a careful
examination of the metrical structure, still further corroborated by
Fleay.
That the general scheme of the drama was not due to Shakespeare is
self-evident. Spedding observed how utterly ineffective the play is
as a whole, how the interest collapses instead of increasing, and how
the sympathy aroused in the audience is in steady opposition to the
actual development of events. The centre of interest in the first act
is undeniably Queen Katharine, and, although the deference due to
so recent a king as Elizabeth's father forbade too plain speaking,
the audience is clearly given to understand that the monarch's
passion for Anne Boleyn was really at the bottom of his conscientious
scruples concerning the wedlock in which he had lived for twenty
years. Notwithstanding this, the spectators are expected to feel joy
and satisfaction when Anne is solemnly crowned queen, and actual
triumph when she gives birth to a daughter. In the last act we have
the impeachment of Archbishop Cranmer, his acquittal by the king, and
his appointment to the godfathership of Elizabeth, all of which has
no connection whatever with the real action of the play. Wolsey, one
of the two chief characters, the evil principle in opposition to the
good Queen Katharine, disappears before her, not even surviving the
close of the third act. The whole play, in fact, resolves itself into
a succession of spectacular effects, processions, songs, dances, and
music. We are shown a great assembly of the State Council in connection
with Buckingham's trial; a great festival in Wolsey's palace, with
masquerade and dance; the great trial scene, with England's queen at
the bar; a great coronation scene, with canopy, crown jewels, and
flourish of trumpets; the dying Katharine's vision of dancing angels,
with golden vizards and palm branches in their hands; and lastly, the
great christening scene in the palace, with another procession of
canopy, trumpets, and heralds.
An invisible writing inscribes on every page the words _Written to
order_. In all probability it was a hurriedly written piece, hastily
put together for performance at the court gaieties in honour of the
Princess Elizabeth's marriage. It was for those festivities that
Beaumont's little play, _The Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray's
Inn,_ and Shakespeare's own masterpiece, _The Tempest_, were written.
Shakespeare's part in _Henry VIII_ is limited to Act i. sc. I and
2, Act ii. sc. 3 and sc. 4, Act iii. sc. 2 as far as Wolsey's first
monologue, "What should this mean," and Act v. sc. 1 and 4.
This play cannot be classed with Shakespeare's other historical dramas,
for, as we have already observed, its events were of too recent
occurrence to allow of a strictly veracious treatment. How was it
possible to tell the truth about Henry VIII., that coarse and cruel
Bluebeard, with his six wives? Did he not inaugurate the Reformation,
and was he not the father of Queen Elizabeth? As little could the
material interests which furthered the Reformation be represented
on the stage, or the various religious and political aspects of the
Reformation itself. Fettered and bound as he was by a hundred different
considerations, Shakespeare acquitted himself of his difficult task
with tact and skill. When Henry, immediately after his encounter
with the beauteous court lady, began, after all those years, to
feel scruples on the score of his marriage with his brother's wife,
Shakespeare, without making him a hypocrite, allows us to perceive how
the new passion acted as a spur to his conscience. The character of
Wolsey is founded upon the Chronicle, and the clever parvenu's bold,
unscrupulous, yet withal self-controlled nature, is indicated by a few
light touches. Fletcher has spoiled the character by the introduction
of the badly-written monologues uttered by Wolsey after his fall. We
recognise the voice of the clergyman's son in their feeble, pastoral
strain. The picture of Anne Boleyn, delicately outlined by Shakespeare,
was also put out of drawing later in the play by Fletcher. All the
light of the piece, however, is concentrated around the figure of the
repudiated Catholic queen, Katharine of Arragon, for in her (as he
found her character in the Chronicle) Shakespeare recognised a variant
of his present all-absorbing type--the noble and neglected woman. She
closely resembles the misjudged Queen Hermione, so unjustly separated
from her husband and thrown into prison in the _Winter's Tale_. As in
_Cymbeline_ Imogen still loves Posthumus although he has cast her off,
so Katharine continues to love the man who has wronged her.
Shakespeare has hardly put a word into the mouth of the Queen which
may not be found in the Chronicle, but he has created a character of
mingled charm and distinction, a union of Castilian pride with extreme
simplicity, of inflexible resolution with gentlest resignation, and of
a quick temper with a sincere piety, through which the temper sometimes
shows. He has drawn with a caressing touch the figure of a queen
neither beautiful nor brilliant, but true--true to the core, proud of
her birth and queenly rank, but softer than wax in the hands of her
royal lord, whom she loves after twenty-four years of married life as
dearly as on her wedding-day. Her letters show how devoted and lovable
she was, and in them she addresses Henry as "Your Grace, my husband, my
Henry," and signs herself "Your humble wife and true servant." In those
scenes in which it has fallen to Fletcher's lot to represent the Queen,
he has adhered faithfully to Shakespeare's conception of her, which
was virtually that of the Chronicle. Even in the hour of her death,
Katharine does not forget to rebuke and punish the messenger who has
failed in due respect by omitting to kneel; but she forgives her enemy
the Cardinal and sends the King this last greeting:
"Remember me
In all humility unto his highness:
Say his long trouble now is passing
Out of the world: tell him in death I bless'd him,
For so I will.--Mine eyes grow dim."
Her stately dignity resembles that of Hermione, but she differs
from the latter in her pride of race and piety. Hermione is neither
pious nor proud; neither was Shakespeare. We find a little proof of
his detestation of sectarianism even in the pompous play of _Henry
VIII_. In the third scene of the fifth act the porter exclaims of the
inquisitive multitude crowding to watch the christening procession:
"There are the youths that thunder at the playhouse
and fight for bitten apples; that no audience but the
Tribulation of Tower Hill or the limbs of Limehouse, their
dear brothers, are able to endure."
Limehouse was an artisan house in London; there also the foreigners
settled, and it resounded with the strife of religious sects. It is
amusing to note how Shakespeare contrived to have a fling at his
detested _groundlings_ and his Puritan enemies at one and the same time.
As we all know, the drama closes with Cranmer's lengthy and flattering
prediction of the greatness of Elizabeth and James, which is marred
by the monotony of Fletcher's worst mannerisms. Shakespeare clearly
had no share in this tirade, which makes all the more strange the part
it has played in the discussions which have been carried on with so little
psychology relative to Shakespeare's religious and denominational
standpoint. How many times has the prophecy that under Elizabeth "God
shall be truly known" been quoted in support of the great poet's firmly
Protestant convictions? Yet the line was evidently never written by
him, and not a single turn of thought in the whole of this lengthy
speech owns any suggestion of his pathos and style. It is only here and
there in the play that we obtain a glimpse of Shakespeare, and then he
is fettered and hampered by collaboration with another man and by an
uncongenial task, to which only a great exertion of his genius could
here and there impart any dramatic interest.
[1] A careful study of the plot may be found in Theodor
Bierfreund's book: _Palamon og Arcite_, 1891.
[2] A similar opinion is skilfully maintained by Bierfreund,
but I cannot agree with his main contention that Shakespeare had no
part in this play whatever.
[3] Compare Hickson, Fleay, and Furnivall upon the subject of
_The Two Noble Kinsmen_. _New Shakspere Society's Transactions_, 1874.
R. Boyle maintains that he can trace Massinger's hand in the play.
[4] In his prefatory treatise to the _Leopold Shakspere_
(136 quarto pages), F. J. Furnivall has dealt with this play as being
in part Shakespeare's. Now he is of a different opinion, and in a
copy of the book presented by him to me, he has written on the margin
against _Henry VIII_. "Not Shakspere's." Arthur Symons, who edits
and prefaces the play in the Irving edition, told me that he now
inclines, on account of its metrical structure, to the belief that
Shakespeare had no share in it. P. A. Daniels, the erudite editor of
so many Shakespearian quartos, said that he had arrived at no decision
respecting its authorship, and characteristically added that the
identity was a matter of indifference to him so long as the play was
good. This is not the psychological standpoint.
XVIII
_CYMBELINE--THE THEME--THE POINT OF DEPARTURE--THE MORAL--THE IDYLL
--IMOGEN--SHAKESPEARE AND GOETHE--SHAKESPEARE AND CALDERON_
In _Cymbeline_ Shakespeare is once more sole master of his material,
and he works it up into such a many-coloured web as no loom but his
can produce. Here, too, we find a certain off-hand carelessness of
technique. The exposition is perfunctory; the preliminaries of the
action are conveyed to us in a scene of pure narrative. The comic
passages are, as a rule, weak, the mirth-moving device being for one of
the other characters to ridicule or parody in asides the utterances of
the coarse and vain Prince Cloten. In the middle of the play (iii. 3),
a poorly-written monologue gives us a sort of supplementary exposition,
necessary to the understanding of the plot. Finally, the dramatic knot
is loosed by means of a _deus ex machinâ_, Jupiter, "upon his eagle
back'd," appearing to the sleeping Posthumus, and leaving with him an
oracular "label," in which, as though to bear witness to the poet's
"small Latin" the deity childishly derives _mulier_ from _mollis
aer_, or "tender air." But, in spite of all this, Shakespeare is here
once more at the height of his poetic greatness; the convalescent has
recovered all his strength. He has thrown his whole soul into the
creation of his heroine, and has so enchased this Imogen, this pearl
among women, that all her excellences show to the best advantage, and
the setting is not unworthy of the jewel.
As in Cleopatra and Cressida we had woman determined solely by her
sex, so in Imogen we have an embodiment of the highest possible
characteristics of womanhood--untainted health of soul, unshaken
fortitude, constancy that withstands all trials, inexhaustible
forbearance, unclouded intelligence, love that never wavers, and
unquenchable radiance of spirit. She, like Marina, is cast into the
snake-pit of the world. She is slandered, and not, like Desdemona, at
second or third hand, but by the very man who boasts of her favours
and supports his boast with seemingly incontrovertible proofs. Like
Cordelia, she is misjudged; but whereas Cordelia is merely driven
from her father's presence along with the man of her choice, Imogen
is doomed to death by her cruelly-deceived husband, whom alone she
adores; and through it all she preserves her love for him unweakened
and unchanged.
Strange--very strange! In Imogen we find the fullest, deepest love that
Shakespeare has ever placed in a woman's breast, and that although
_Cymbeline_ follows close upon plays which were filled to the brim
with contempt for womankind. He believed, then, in such love, so
impassioned, so immovable, so humble--believed in it now? He had, then,
observed or encountered such a love--encountered it at this point of
his life?
Even a poet has scant enough opportunities of observing love. Love is
a rare thing, much rarer than the world pretends, and when it exists,
it is apt to be sparing of words. Did he simply fall back on his own
experiences, his own inward sensations, his knowledge of his own
heart, and, transposing his feelings from the major to the minor key,
place them on a woman's lips? Or did he love at this moment, and was
he himself thus beloved at the end of the fifth decade of his life?
The probability is, doubtless, that he wrote from some quite fresh
experience, though it does not follow that the experience was actually
his own. It is not often that women love men of his mental habit and
stature with such intensity of passion. The rule will always be that
a Molière shall find himself cast aside for some Comte de Guiche,
a Shakespeare for some Earl of Pembroke. Thus we cannot with any
certainty conclude that he himself was the object of the passion which
had revived his faith in a woman's power of complete and unconditional
absorption in love for one man, and for him alone. In the first place,
had the experience been his own, he would scarcely have left London so
soon. Yet the probability is that he must just about this time have
gained some clear and personal insight into an ideal love. In the
public sphere, too, it is not unlikely that Arabella Stuart's undaunted
passion for Lord William Seymour, so cruelly punished by King James,
may have afforded the model for Imogen's devotion to Leonatus Posthumus
in defiance of the will of King Cymbeline.
_Cymbeline_ was first printed in the Folio of 1623. The earliest
mention of it occurs in the _Booke of Plaies and Notes thereof_ kept
by the above-mentioned astrologer and magician, Dr. Simon Forman. He
was present, he says, at a performance of _A Winters Tale_ on May
15, 1611, and at the same time he sketches the plot of _Cymbeline_,
but unfortunately does not give the date of the performance. In all
probability it was quite recent; the play was no doubt written in the
course of 1610, while the fate of Arabella Stuart was still fresh in
the poet's mind. Forman died in September 1611.
In depth and variety of colouring, in richness of matter, profundity
of thought, and heedlessness of conventional canons, _Cymbeline_ has
few rivals among Shakespeare's plays. Fascinating as it is, however,
this tragi-comedy has never been very popular on the stage. The great
public, indeed, has neither studied nor understood it.
In none of his works has Shakespeare played greater havoc with
chronology. He jumbles up the ages with superb indifference. The period
purports to be that of Augustus, yet we are introduced to English,
French, and Italian cavaliers, and hear them talk of pistol-shooting
and playing bowls and cards. The list of characters ends thus--"Lords,
ladies, Roman senators, tribunes, apparitions, a soothsayer, a Dutch
gentleman, a Spanish gentleman, musicians, officers, captains,
soldiers, messengers, and other attendants." Was there ever such a
farrago?
What did Shakespeare mean by this play? is the question that now
confronts us. My readers are aware that I never, in the first instance,
try to answer this question directly. The fundamental point is, What
impelled him to write? how did he arrive at the theme? When that is
answered, the rest follows almost as a matter of course.
Where, then, is the starting-point of this seeming tangle? We find it
on resolving the material of the play into its component parts.
There are three easily distinguishable elements in the action.
In his great storehouse of English history, Holinshed, Shakespeare
found some account of a King Kymbeline or Cimbeline, who is said to
have been educated at Rome, and there knighted by the Emperor Augustus,
under whom he served in several campaigns. He is stated to have stood
so high in the Emperor's favour that "he was at liberty to pay his
tribute or not" as he chose. He reigned thirty-five years, was buried
in London, and left two sons, Guiderius and Arviragus. The name Imogen
occurs in Holinshed's story of Brutus and Locrine. In the tragedy of
_Locrine_, dating from 1595, Imogen is mentioned as the wife of Brutus.
Although Cymbeline, says Holinshed, is declared by most authorities to
have lived at unbroken peace with Rome, yet some Roman writers affirm
that the Britons having refused to pay tribute when Augustus came to
the throne, that Emperor, in the tenth year after the death of Julius
Cæsar, "made prouision to passe with an armie ouer into Britaine." He
is said, however, to have altered his mind; so that the Roman descent
upon Britain under Caius Lucius is an invention of the poet's.
In Boccaccio's _Decameron_, again (Book II. Novel 9), Shakespare found
the story of the faithful Ginevra, of which this is the substance:--At
a tavern in Paris, a company of Italian merchants, after supper one
evening, fall to discussing their wives. Three of them have but a
poor opinion of their ladies' virtue, but one, Bernabo Lomellini of
Genoa, maintains that his wife would resist any possible temptation,
however long he had been absent from her. A certain Ambrogiuolo lays a
heavy wager with him on the point, and betakes himself to Genoa, but
finds Bernabo's confidence fully justified. He hits upon the scheme
of concealing himself in a chest which is conveyed into the lady's
bedroom. In the middle of the night he raises the lid. "He crept
quietly forth, and stood in the room, where a candle was burning. By
its light, he carefully examined the furnishing of the apartment, the
pictures, and other objects of note, and fixed them in his memory.
Then he approached the bed, and when he saw that both she and a little
child who lay beside her were sleeping soundly, he uncovered her and
beheld that her beauty in nowise consisted in her attire. But he could
not discover any mark whereby to convince her husband, save one which
she had under the left breast; it was a birth-mark around which there
grew certain yellow hairs." Then he takes from one of her chests a
purse and a night-gown, together with certain rings and belts, and
conceals them in his own hiding-place. He hastens back to Paris,
summons the merchants together, and boasts of having won the wager.
The description of the room makes little impression on Bernabo, who
remarks that all this he may have learnt by bribing a chambermaid; but
when the birth-mark is described, he feels as though a dagger had been
plunged into his heart. He despatches a servant with a letter to his
wife, requesting her to meet him at a country-house some twenty miles
from Genoa, and at the same time orders the servant to murder her on
the way. The lady receives the letter with great joy, and next morning
takes horse to ride with the servant to the country house. Loathing his
task, the man consents to spare her, gives her a suit of male attire,
and suffers her to escape, bringing his master false tidings of her
death, and producing her clothes in witness of it. Ginevra, dressed as
a man, enters the service of a Spanish nobleman, and accompanies him
to Alexandria, whither he goes to convey to the Sultan a present of
certain rare falcons. The Sultan notices the pretty youth in his train,
and makes him (or rather her) his favourite. In the market-place of
Acre she chances upon a booth in the Venetian bazaar where Ambrogiuolo
has displayed for sale, among other wares, the purse and belt he stole
from her. On her inquiring where he got them, he replies that they
were given him by his mistress, the Lady Ginevra. She persuades him
to come to Alexandria, manages to bring her husband thither also,
and makes them both appear before the Sultan. The truth is brought
to light and the liar shamed; but he does not escape so easily as
Iachimo in the play. He who had falsely boasted of a lady's favour,
and thereby brought her to ruin, is, with true mediæval consistency,
allotted the punishment he deserves: "Wherefore the Sultan commanded
that Ambrogiuolo should be led forth to a high place in the city, and
should there be bound to a stake in the full glare of the sunshine,
and smeared all over with honey, and should not be set free till his
body fell to pieces by its own decay. So that he was not alone stung
to death in unspeakable torments by flies, wasps, and hornets, which
greatly abound in that country, but also devoured to the last particle
of his flesh. His white bones, held together by the sinews alone, stood
there unremoved for a long time, a terror and a warning to all."
These two tales--of the wars between Rome and heathen Britain, and of
the slander, peril, and rescue of Ginevra--were in themselves totally
unconnected. Shakespeare welded them by making Ginevra, whom he calls
Imogen, a daughter of King Cymbeline by his first marriage, and
therefore next in succession to the crown of Britain.
There remains a third element in the play--the story of Belarius, his
banishment, his flight with the king's sons, his solitary life in the
forest with the two youths, the coming of Imogen, and so forth. All
this is the fruit of Shakespeare's free invention, slightly stimulated,
perhaps, by a story in the _Decameron_ (Book II. Novel 8). It is in
this invented portion, studied in its relation of complement and
contrast to the rest, that we shall find an unmistakable index to the
moods, sentiments, and ideas under the influence of which he chose this
subject and shaped it to his ends.
I conceive the situation in this wise: the mood he has been living
through, the mood which has left its freshest impress on his mind, is
one in which life in human society seems unendurable, and especially
life in a large town and at a court. Never before had he felt so
keenly and indignantly what a court really is. Stupidity, coarseness,
weakness, and falsehood flourish in courts, and carry all before them.
Cymbeline is stupid and weak, Cloten is stupid and coarse, the queen is
false.
Here the best men are banished, like Belarius and Posthumus; here the
best woman is foully wronged, like Imogen. Here the high-born murderess
sits in the seat of the mighty--the queen herself deals in poisons, and
demands deadly "compounds" of her physicians. Corruption reaches its
height at courts; but in great towns as a whole, wherever multitudes of
men are gathered together, it is impossible even for the best to keep
himself above reproach. The weapons used against him--lies, slanders,
and perfidy--force him to employ whatever means he can in self-defence.
Let us then turn our backs on the town, and seek an idyllic existence
in the country, in the lonely woodland places.
This note recurs persistently in all the works of Shakespeare's latest
period. Timon longed to escape from Athens and make the solitudes
echo with his invectives. Here Belarius and the king's two sons live
secluded in a romantic wilderness; and we shall presently find Florizel
and Perdita surrounded by the autumnal beauty of a rustic festival, and
Prospero dwelling with Miranda on a lovely uninhabited island.
When Shakespeare, in early years, had conjured up visions of a
fantastic life in sylvan solitudes, it was simply because it amused
him to place his Rosalinds and Celias in surroundings worthy of their
exquisiteness, ideal Ardennes, or perhaps we should say ideal Forests
of Arden like that in which, as a boy, he had learnt to read the
secrets of Nature. In these regions, exempt from the cares of the
working-day world, young men and maidens passed their days together
in happy idleness, pensive or blithesome, laughing or loving. The
forest was simply a republic created by Nature herself for a witty
and amorous _élite_ of the most brilliant cavaliers and ladies he had
known, or rather had bodied forth in his own image that he might live
in the company of his peers. The air resounded with songs and sighs and
kisses, with wordplays and laughter. It was a dreamland, a paradise of
dainty lovers.
How differently does he now conceive of the solitude of the country! It
has become to him the one thing in life, the refuge, the sanctuary. It
means for him an atmosphere of purity, the home of spiritual health,
the stronghold of innocence, the one safe retreat for whoso would flee
from the pestilence of falsehood and perfidy that rages in courts and
cities.
There no one can escape it. But now, we must observe, Shakespeare no
longer regards this contagion of untruth and unfaith with the eyes of a
Timon. He now looks down from higher and clearer altitudes.
It is true that no one can keep his life wholly free from falsehood,
deceit, and violence towards others. But neither falsehood nor deceit,
nor even violence is always and inevitably a crime; it is often a
necessity, a legitimate weapon, a right. At bottom, Shakespeare had
always held that there were no such things as unconditional duties
and absolute prohibitions. He had never, for example, questioned
Hamlet's right to kill the king, scarcely even his right to run his
sword through Polonius. Nevertheless he had hitherto been unable to
conquer a feeling of indignation and disgust when he saw around him
nothing but breaches of the simplest moral laws. Now, on the other
hand, the dim divinations of his earlier years crystallised in his
mind into a coherent body of thought to this effect: no commandment
is unconditional; it is not in the observance or non-observance of
an external fiat that the merit of an action, to say nothing of a
character, consists; everything depends upon the volitional substance
into which the individual, as a responsible agent, transmutes the
formal imperative at the moment of decision.
In other words, Shakespeare now sees clearly that the ethics of
intention are the only true, the only possible ethics.
Imogen says (iv. 2):
"If I do lie, and do
No harm by it, though the gods hear, I hope
They'll pardon it."
Pisanio says
in his soliloquy (iii. 5):
"Thou bidd'st me to my loss: for, true to thee,
Were to prove false, which I will never be
To him that is most true."
And he hits the nail on the head when he characterises himself in these
words (iv. 3):
"Wherein I am false, I am honest; not true, to be true."
That is to say, he lies and deceives because he cannot help it; but
his character is none the worse, nay, all the better on that account.
He disobeys his master, and thereby merits his gratitude; he hoodwinks
Cloten, and therein he does well.
In the same way, all the nobler characters fly in the face of accepted
moral laws. Imogen disobeys her father and braves his wrath, and even
his curse, because she will not renounce the husband of her choice. So,
too, she afterwards deceives the young men in the forest by appearing
in male attire and under an assumed name--untruthfully, and yet with a
higher truth, calling herself Fidele, the faithful one. So, too, the
upright Belarius robs the king of both his sons, but thereby saves
them for him and for the country; and during their whole boyhood he
puts them off, for their own good, with false accounts of things. So,
too, the honest physician deceives the queen, whose wickedness he has
divined, by giving her an opiate in place of a poison, and thereby
baffling her attempt at murder. So, too, Guiderius acts rightly in
taking the law into his own hands, and answering Cloten's insults by
killing him at sight and cutting off his head. He thus, without knowing
it, prevents the brutish idiot's intended violence to Imogen.
Thus all the good characters commit acts of deception, violence, and
falsehood, or even live their whole life under false colours, without
in the least derogating from their moral worth. They touch evil without
defilement, even if they suffer and now and then feel themselves
insecure in their strained relations to truth and right.
Beyond all doubt, it must have been actual and intimate experience
that first darkened Shakespeare's view of life, and then opened his
eyes again to its brighter aspects. But it is the idea which he here
indirectly expresses that seems to have played the essential and
decisive part in uplifting his spirit above the mood of mere hatred
and contempt for humanity: the realisation that the quality of a given
act depends rather on the agent than on the act itself. Although it
be true, for example; that falsehood and deceit encounter us on every
hand, it does not necessarily follow that human nature is utterly
corrupt. Neither deceit nor any other course of action in conflict
with moral law is absolutely and unconditionally wrong. The majority,
indeed, of those who speak falsely and act unlawfully are an ignoble
crew; but even the best, the noblest, may systematically transgress the
moral law and be good and noble still. This is the meaning of moral
self-government; the only true morality consists in following out our
own ends, by our own means, and on our own responsibility. The only
real and binding laws are those which we lay down for ourselves, and it
is the breach of these laws alone that degrades us.
Seen from this point of view, the world puts on a less gloomy aspect.
The poet is no longer impelled by a spiritual necessity to bring down
his curtain to the notes of the trump of doom, to make all voyages end
in shipwreck, all dramas issue in annihilation, or even to leaven the
tragedy of life with consistent scorn and execration for humanity at
large.
In his present frame of mind there is a touch of weary tolerance.
He no longer cares to dwell upon the harsh realities of life; he
seeks distraction in dreaming. And he dreams of retribution, of the
suppression of the utterly vile (the queen dies, Cloten is killed), of
letting mercy season justice in the treatment of certain human beasts
of prey (Iachimo), and of preserving a little circle, a chosen few,
whom neither the errors into which passion has led them, nor the acts
of deceit and violence they have committed in self-defence, render
unworthy of our sympathies. Life on earth is still worth living so long
as there are women like Imogen and men like her brothers. She, indeed,
is an ideal, and they creatures of romance; but their existence is a
condition-precedent of poetry.
It is to this fertilising mist of feeling, this productive trend of
thought, that the play owes its origin.
Shakespeare has so far taken heart again that he can give us something
more and something better than poetical fragments or plays which, like
his recent ones, produce a powerful but harsh effect. He will once more
unroll a large, various, and many-coloured panorama.
The action of _Cymbeline,_ like that of _Lear_, is only nominally
located in pre-Christian England. There is not the slightest attempt
at representation of the period, and the barbarism depicted is
mediæval rather than antique. For the rest, the starting-point of
_Cymbeline_ vaguely resembles that of _Lear_. Cymbeline is causelessly
estranged from Imogen, as Lear is from Cordelia; there is something in
Cymbeline's weakness and folly that recalls the unreason of Lear. But
in the older play everything is tragically designed and in the great
manner, whereas here the whole action is devised with a happy end in
view.
The consort of this pitiful king is a crafty and ambitious woman, who,
by alternately flattering and defying him, has got him entirely under
her thumb. She says herself (i. 2):--
"I never do him wrong
But he does buy my injuries to be friends,
Pays dear for my offences."
In other words, she knows that she can always find her profit in a
scene of reconciliation. Her object is to make Imogen the wife of
Cloten, her son by a former marriage, and thus to secure for him the
succession to the throne. This scheme of hers is the original source
of all the misfortunes which overwhelm the heroine. For Imogen loves
Posthumus, in spite of his poverty a paragon among men, and cannot be
induced to renounce the husband she has chosen. Therefore the play
opens with the banishment of Posthumus.
The characters and incidents of Shakespeare's own invention give
perspective to the play, the underplot forming a parallel to the main
action, as the story of Gloucester and his cruel son forms a parallel
to that of Lear and his heartless daughters. Belarius, a soldier and
statesman, has twenty years ago fallen into unmerited disgrace with
Cymbeline, who, listening to the voice of calumny, has outlawed him
with the same unreasoning passion with which he now sends Posthumus
into exile. In revenge for this wrong, Belarius has carried off
Cymbeline's two sons, who have ever since lived with him in a lonely
place among the mountains, believing him to be their father. To them
comes Imogen in her hour of need, disguised as a boy, and is received
with the utmost warmth and tenderness by the brothers, who do not know
her, and whom she does not know. One of them, Guiderius, kills Cloten,
who insulted and challenged him. Both the young men take up arms to
meet the Roman invaders, and, together with Belarius and Posthumus,
they save their father's kingdom.
Gervinus has acutely and justly remarked that the fundamental contrast
expressed in their story, as in Cymbeline's political situation, in
Imogen's relation to Posthumus and Pisanio's relation to them both,
is precisely the dual contrast expressed in the English words _true_
and _false_--_true_ meaning at once "veracious" and "faithful" (ideas
which, in the play, shade off into each other), while _false,_ in like
manner, means both "mendacious" and "faithless."
Life at court is beset with treacherous quicksands. The king is stupid,
passionate, perpetually misguided; the queen is a wily murderess;
and between them stands her son, Cloten, one of Shakespeare's most
original figures, a true creation of genius, without a rival in all
the poet's long gallery of fools and dullards. His stupid inefficiency
and undisguised malignity have nothing in common with his mother's
hypocritical and supple craft; he takes after her in worthlessness
alone.
For the sake of an inartistic stage effect, Shakespeare has endowed
him with a bodily frame indistinguishable from that of the handsome
Posthumus, leaving it to his head alone to express the world-wide
difference between them. But how admirably has the poet characterised
the dolt and boor by making him shoot forth his words with an explosive
stammer! With profound humour and delicate observation, he has endowed
him with the loftiest notions of his own dignity, and given him no
shadow of doubt as to his rights. There are no bounds to his vanity,
his coarseness, his bestiality. If words could do it, not a word of his
but would wound others to the quick. And not only his words, but his
intents are of the most malignant; he would outrage Imogen at Milford
Haven and "spurn her home" to her father. His stupidity, fortunately,
renders him less dangerous, and with delicate art Shakespeare has
managed to make him from first to last produce a comic effect, thereby
softening the painful impression of the portraiture. We take pleasure
in him as in Caliban, whom he foreshadows, and who had the same designs
upon Miranda as he upon Imogen. We might even describe Caliban as
Cloten developed into a type, a symbol.
It is such personages as these that compose the world which Belarius
depicts to Guiderius and Arviragus (iii. 3), when the two youths repine
against the inactivity of their lonely forest life, and yearn to plunge
into the social turmoil and "drink delight of battle with their peers:"
"How you speak!
Did you but know the city's usuries,
And felt them knowingly: the art o' the court,
As hard to leave as keep; whose top to climb
Is certain falling, or so slippery, that
The fear's as bad as falling: the toil o' the war,
A pain that only seems to seek out danger
I' the name of fame and honour; which dies i' the search,
And hath as oft a slanderous epitaph.
As record of fair act; nay, many times
Doth ill deserve by doing well; what's worse,
Must court'sy at the censure.--O boys! this story
The world may read in me."
Amid these surroundings two personages have grown up whom Shakespeare
would have us regard as beings of a loftier order.
He has taken all possible pains, from the very first scene of the play,
to inspire the spectator with the highest conception of Posthumus. One
nobleman speaks of him to another in terms such as, in bygone days, the
poet had applied to Henry Percy:
"He liv'd in court
(Which rare it is to do) most prais'd, most lov'd;
A sample to the youngest, to the more mature
A glass that feated them; and to the graver
A child that guided dotards."
A little farther on, Iachimo says of him to Imogen (i. 6):
"He sits 'mongst men like a descended god;
He hath a kind of honour sets him off
More than a mortal seeming;"
and finally, at the close of the play (v. 5), "He was the best of all,
amongst the rar'st of good ones"--an appreciation which it is a pity
Iachimo did not arrive at a little sooner, as it might have prevented
him from committing his villainies. Shakespeare throws into relief the
dignity and repose of Posthumus, and his selfpossession when the king
denounces and banishes him. We see that he obeys because he regards
it as unavoidable, though he has set at naught the king's will in
relation to Imogen. In the compulsory haste of his leave-taking, he
shows himself penetrated with a sense of his inferiority to her, and
appeals to us by the way in which he tempers the loftiness of his
bearing towards the outer world with a graceful humility towards his
wife. It is rather surprising that he never for a moment seems to think
of carrying Imogen with him into exile. This passivity is probably
explained by her reluctance to take any step not absolutely forced upon
her, that should render more difficult an eventual reconciliation. He
will wait for better times, and long and hope for them.
As he is on the point of departure, Cloten forces himself upon
him, insults and challenges him. He remains unruffled, ignores the
challenge, contemptuously turns his back upon the oaf, and calmly
leaves him to entertain the courtiers with boasts of his own valour and
the cowardice of Posthumus, well knowing that no one will believe him.
The character, then, is well sketched out. But his mediæval fable
compelled Shakespeare to introduce traits which, in the light of
our humaner age, seem inconsistent and inadmissible. No man with
any decency of feeling would in our days make such a wager as his;
no man would give a stranger, and one, moreover, who is to all
appearance a vain and quite unscrupulous woman-hunter, the warmest
and most insistent letter of recommendation to his wife; and still
less would any one give the same man an unwritten license to employ
every means in his power to shake her virtue, simply in order to enjoy
his discomfiture when all his arts shall have failed. And even if we
could forgive or excuse such conduct in Posthumus, we cannot possibly
extend our tolerance to his easy credulity when Iachimo boasts of his
conquest, his insane fury against Imogen, and the base falsehood of
the letter he sends her in order to facilitate Pisanio's murderous
task. Even in the worst of cases we do not admit a man's right to have
a woman assassinated because she has forgotten her love for him. They
thought otherwise in the days of the Renaissance; they did not look so
closely into the plots of the old _novelle_, and were content, in the
domain of romance, with traditional views of right and duty.
Nevertheless, Shakespeare has done what he could to mitigate the
painful impression produced by Posthumus's conduct. Long before he
knows that Iachimo has deceived him, he repents of his cruel deed,
bitterly deplores that Pisanio has (as he thinks) obeyed him, and
speaks in the warmest terms of Imogen's worth. He says, for instance
(v. 4):
"For Imogen's dear life take mine; and though
'Tis not so dear, yet 'tis a life."
He imposes upon himself the sternest penance. He comes to England with
the Roman army, and then, nameless and disguised as a peasant, fights
against the invaders. Together with Belarius and the king's sons, he is
instrumental in staying the flight of the Britons, freeing Cymbeline,
who has already been taken prisoner, winning the battle, and saving
the kingdom. This done, he once more assumes his Roman garb, and seeks
death at the hands of his countrymen, whose saviour he has been. He is
taken prisoner and brought before the king, when all is cleared up.
From the moment he sets foot on English ground, there is in his course
of action a more high-pitched and overstrained idealism than we are apt
to find in Shakespeare's heroes--a craving for self-imposed expiation.
Still the character fails to strike us as the perfect whole the poet
would fain make of it. Posthumus impresses us, not as a favourite of
the gods, but as a man whose penitence is as unbridled and excessive as
his blind passion.
Far other is the case of Imogen. In her perfection is indeed attained.
She is the noblest and most adorable womanly figure Shakespeare has
ever drawn, and at the same time the most various. He has drawn
spiritual women before her--Desdemona, Cordelia--but the secret
of their being could be expressed in two words. He has also drawn
brilliant women--Beatrice, Rosalind--whereas Imogen is not brilliant
at all. Nevertheless she is designed and depicted as incomparable
among her sex--"she is alone the Arabian bird." We see her in the most
various situations, and she is equal to them all. We see her exposed to
trial after trial, each harder than the last, and she emerges from them
all, not only scatheless, but with her rare and enchanting qualities
thrown into ever stronger relief.
At the very outset she gives proof of perfect self-command in her
relation to her weak and passionate father, her false and venomous
stepmother. The treasure of tenderness that fills her soul betrays
itself in her parting from Posthumus, in her passionate regret that she
could not give him one kiss more, and in the fervour with which she
reproaches Pisanio for having left the shore before his master's ship
had quite sunk below the horizon. During his absence her thoughts are
unceasingly fixed on him. She repels with firmness the advances of her
clownish wooer, Cloten. Brought face to face with Iachimo, she first
receives him graciously, then sees through him at once when he begins
to speak ill of Posthumus, and finally treats him with princely dignity
when he has excused his offensive speeches as nothing but an ill-timed
jest.
Next comes the bedroom scene, in which she falls asleep, and Iachimo,
as she slumbers, paints for us her exquisite purity. Then we have
her disdainful dismissal of Cloten; her reception of the letter from
Posthumus; her calm confronting (as it seems) of certain death; her
exquisite communion with her brothers; her death-like sleep and
horror-struck awakening beside the body which she takes to be her
husband's; her denunciations of Pisanio as the supposed murderer;
and, finally, the moment of reunion--all scenes which are pearls of
Shakespeare's art, the rarest jewels in his diadem, never outshone in
the poetry of any nation.
He depicts her as born for happiness, but early inured to suffering,
and therefore calm and collected. When Posthumus is banished, she
acquiesces in the separation; she will live in the memory of her love.
Every one commiserates her; herself, she scarcely complains. She wishes
no evil to her enemies; at the end, when the detestable queen is dead,
she laments her father's bereavement, little dreaming that nothing but
the death of the murderess could have saved her father's life.
Only one relation in life can stir her to passionate utterance--her
relation to Posthumus. When she takes leave of him she says (i. 2):
"You must be gone;
And I shall here abide the hourly shot
Of angry eyes; not comforted to live,
But that there is this jewel in the world,
That I may see again."
And to his farewell she replies:
"Nay, stay a little.
Were you but riding forth to air yourself,
Such parting were too petty."
When he is gone she cries:
"There cannot be a pinch in death
More sharp than this is."
Her father's upbraidings leave her cold:
"I am senseless of your wrath'; a touch more rare
Subdues all pangs, all fears."
To his
continued reproaches she only replies with a rapturous eulogy of
Posthumus:
"He is
A man worth any woman; overbuys me
Almost the sum he pays."
And her passion deepens after her husband's departure. She envies the
handkerchief he has kissed; she laments that she could not watch his
receding ship; she would have "broke her eye-strings" to see the last
of it. He has been torn away from her while she had yet "most pretty
things to say;" how she would think of him and beg him to think of her
at three fixed hours of every day; and she would have made him swear
not to forget her for any "she of Italy." He was gone before she could
give him the parting kiss which she had set "betwixt two charming
words."
She is devoid of ambition. She would willingly exchange her royal
station for idyllic happiness in a country retreat such as that for
which Shakespeare is now longing. When Posthumus has left her she
exclaims (i. 2):
"Would I were
A neatherd's daughter, and my Leonatus
Our neighbour shepherd's son!"
In other words, she sighs for the lot in life which we shall find in
_The Winters Tale_ apportioned to Prince Florizel and Princess Perdita.
In the same spirit she reflects before the coming of Iachimo (i. 7):
"Blessed be those,
How mean soe'er, that have their honest wills,
Which seasons comfort."
And then when Iachimo ("little Iago") slanders Posthumus to her, as he
will presently slander her to Posthumus, how different is her conduct
from her husband's! She has turned pale at his entrance, at Pisanio's
mere announcement of a nobleman from Rome with letters from her lord.
To Iachimo's first whispers of Posthumus's infidelity, she merely
answers:
"My lord, I fear,
Has forgot Britain."
But when Iachimo proceeds to draw a gloating picture of her husband's
debaucheries, and offers himself as an instrument for her revenge upon
the faithless one, she replies with the exclamation:
"What, ho, Pisanio!"
She summons her servant; she has seen all she wants of this Italian.
Even when she says nothing she fills the scene, as when, having gone
to rest, she lies in bed reading, dismisses her attendant, closes the
book and falls asleep. How wonderfully has Shakespeare brought home to
us the atmosphere of purity in this sleeping-chamber by means of the
passionate words he places in the mouth of Iachimo (ii. 2):