The plays of Shakespeare marshal themselves in the beyond. They stand in
a place outside of our deduction. Their cosmos is greater than our
philosophy. They are like the forces of nature and the operations of
life in the vivid world about us. We may measure our intellectual growth
by the new horizons we see opening within them. So long as they continue
to live and change, to expand and deepen, to be filled with new harmony
and new suggestion, we may rest content; we are still growing. At the
moment we think we have comprehended them, at the moment we see them as
stationary things, we may be sure something is wrong; we are beginning
to petrify. Our fresh interest in life has been arrested. There is,
therefore, danger in an attempt to "size up" Shakespeare. We cannot help
setting down as a coxcomb any man who has done it to his own
satisfaction. He has pigeon-holed himself. He will not get lost. If you
want him, you can lay your hand on him. He has written an autobiography.
He has "sized up" himself.
In writing about Shakespeare, it is excusable to put off the armor of
criticism, and speak in a fragmentary and inconclusive manner, lest by
giving way to conviction, by encouraging ourselves into positive
beliefs, we hasten the inevitable and grow old before our time.
Perhaps some such apology is needed to introduce the observations on the
character of Romeo which are here thrown together, and the remarks about
the play itself, the acting, and the text.
It is believed by some scholars that in the second quarto edition of
Romeo and Juliet, published in 1599, Shakespeare's revising hand can be
seen, and that the differences between the first and second editions
show the amendments, additions, and corrections with which Shakespeare
saw fit to embellish his work in preparing it for the press. If this
were actually the case; if we could lay the two texts on the table
before us, convinced that one of them was Shakespeare's draft or acting
copy, and the other Shakespeare's finished work; and if, by comparing
the two, we could enter into the workshop and forge of his mind,--it
would seem as if we had at last found an avenue of approach towards this
great personality, this intellect the most powerful that has ever
illumined human life. No other literary inquiry could compare in
interest with such a study as this; for the relation which Shakespeare
himself bore to the plays he created is one of the mysteries and blank
places in history, a gap that staggers the mind and which imagination
cannot overleap.
The student who examines both texts will be apt to conclude that the
second is by no means a revised edition of the first, but that
(according to another theory) the first is a pirated edition of the
play, stolen by the printer, and probably obtained by means of a
reporter who took down the lines as they were spoken on the stage. The
stage directions in the first edition are not properly the stage
directions of a dramatist as to what should be done on the stage, but
seem rather the records of an eye-witness as to what he saw happen on
the stage. The mistakes of the reporter (or the perversions of the
actors) as seen in the first edition generally injure the play; and it
was from this circumstance--the frequency of blotches in the first
edition--that the idea gained currency that the second edition was an
example of Shakespeare's never-failing tact in bettering his own lines.
Perhaps, after all, it would little advance our understanding of the
plays, or solve the essential puzzle,--that they actually had an
author,--if we could follow every stroke of his revising pen. We should
observe, no doubt, refinement of characterization, changes of stage
effect, the addition of flourishes and beauties; but their origin and
true meaning, the secret of their life, would be as safe as it is at
present, as securely lost in the midst of all this demonstration as the
manuscripts themselves were in the destruction of the Globe Theatre.
If we must then abandon the hope of seeing Shakespeare in his workshop,
we may, nevertheless, obtain from the pirated text some notion of the
manner in which Shakespeare was staged in his own day, and of how he
fared at the hands of the early actors. Romeo and Juliet is an
exceptionally difficult play to act, and the difficulties seem to have
been about the same in Shakespeare's time as they are to-day. They are,
in fact, inherent in the structure of the work itself.
As artists advance in life, they develop, by growing familiar with the
conditions of their art, the power of concealing its limitations,--a
faculty in which even the greatest artists are often deficient in their
early years. There is an anecdote of Schumann which somewhat crudely
illustrates this. It is said that in one of his early symphonies he
introduced a passage leading up to a climax, at which the horns were to
take up the aria in triumph. At the rehearsal, when the moment came for
the horns to trumpet forth their message of victory, there was heard a
sort of smothered braying which made everybody laugh. The composer had
arranged his climax so that it fell upon a note which the horns could
not sound except with closed stops. The passage had to be rewritten. The
young painter is frequently found struggling with subjects, with effects
of light, which are almost impossible to render, and which perhaps an
older man would not attempt. It is not surprising to find among the
early works of Shakespeare that some of the characters, however true to
life,--nay, because true to life,--are almost impossible to be
represented on the stage. Certainly Romeo presents us with a character
of the kind.
Shakespeare's knowledge of human nature seems to have antedated his
knowledge of the stage. In imagining the character of Romeo, a character
to fit the plot of the old story, he took little thought for his actors.
In conjuring up the probabilities which would lead a man into such a
course of conduct as Romeo's, Shakespeare had in his mind the
probabilities and facts in real life rather than the probabilities
demanded by the stage.
Romeo must be a man almost wholly made up of emotion, a creature very
young, a lyric poet in the intensity of his sensations, a child in his
helplessness beneath the ever-varying currents and whirlpools of his
feeling. He lives in a walking and frenzied dream, comes in contact with
real life only to injure himself and others, and finally drives with the
collected energy of his being into voluntary shipwreck upon the rocks of
the world.
This man must fall in love at first sight. He must marry clandestinely.
He must be banished for having taken part in a street fight, and must
return to slay himself upon the tomb of his beloved.
Shakespeare, with his passion for realism, devotes several scenes at the
opening of the play to the explanation of Romeo's state of mind. He will
give us a rationalistic account of love at first sight by bringing on
this young poet in a blind chaos of emotion owing to his rejection by a
woman not otherwise connected with the story. It is perfectly true that
this is the best and perhaps the only explanation of love at first
sight. The effect upon Romeo's very boyish, unreal, and almost
unpleasant lovesickness of the rejection (for which we must always
respect Rosaline) is to throw him, and all the unstable elements of
which he is made, into a giddy whirl, which, after a day or two, it will
require only the glance of a pair of eyes to precipitate into the very
elixir of true love.
All this is true, but no audience cares about the episode or requires
the explanation. Indeed, it jars upon the sentimental notion of many
persons to this day, and in many stage versions it is avoided.
These preparatory scenes bring out in a most subtle way the egoism at
the basis of Romeo's character,--the same lyrical egoism that is in all
his language and in all his conduct. When we first see Romeo, he is
already in an uneasy dream. He is wandering, aloof from his friends and
absorbed in himself. On meeting Juliet he passes from his first dream
into a second dream. On learning of the death of Juliet he passes into
still a third and quite different dream,--or stage of dream,--a stage in
which action is necessary, and in which he displays the calculating
intellect of a maniac. The mental abstraction of Romeo continues even
after he has met Juliet. In Capulet's garden, despite the directness of
Juliet, he is still in his reveries. The sacred wonder of the hour turns
all his thoughts, not into love, but into poetry. Juliet's anxieties are
practical. She asks him about his safety, how he came there, how he
expects to escape. He answers in madrigals. His musings are almost
impersonal. The power of the moonlight is over him, and the power of the
scene, of which Juliet is only a part.
"With love's light wings did I o'er-perch these walls;
For stony limits cannot hold love out,
And what love can do that dares love attempt;
Therefore thy kinsmen are no let to me.
* * * * *
Lady, by yonder blessed moon I swear
That tips with silver all these fruit-tree tops--
* * * * *
It is my soul that calls upon my name:
How silver-sweet sound lovers' tongues by night,
Like softest music to attending ears."
These reflections are almost "asides." They ought hardly to be spoken
aloud. They denote that Romeo is still in his trance. They have,
however, another and unfortunate influence: they retard the action of
the play. As we read the play to ourselves, this accompaniment of
lyrical feeling on Romeo's part does not interfere with our enjoyment.
It seems to accentuate the more direct and human strain of Juliet's
love.
But on the stage the actor who plays Romeo requires the very highest
powers. While speaking at a distance from Juliet, and in a constrained
position, he must by his voice and gestures convey these subtlest shades
of feeling, throw these garlands of verse into his talk without
interrupting its naturalness, give all the "asides" in such a manner
that the audience feels they are in place, even as the reader does. It
is no wonder that the rôle of Romeo is one of the most difficult in all
Shakespeare. The demands made upon the stage are almost more than the
stage can meet. The truth to nature is of a kind that the stage is
almost powerless to render.
The character of Romeo cannot hope to be popular. Such pure passion,
such unreasonable giving way, is not easily forgiven in a man. He must
roll on the floor and blubber and kick. There is no getting away from
this. He is not Romeo unless he cries like a baby or a Greek hero. This
is the penalty for being a lyric poet. Had he used his mind more upon
the problems of his love, and less upon its celebration in petalled
phrases, his mind would not have deserted him so lamentably in the hour
of his need. In fact, throughout the play, Romeo, by the exigencies of
the plot, is in fair danger of becoming contemptible. For one instant
only does he rise into respectability,--at the moment of his quarrel
with Tybalt. At this crisis he is stung into life by the death of
Mercutio, and acts like a man. The ranting manner in which it is
customary to give Romeo's words in this passage of the play shows how
far most actors are from understanding the true purport of the lines;
how far from realizing that these few lines are the only opportunity the
actor has of establishing the character of Romeo as a gentleman, a man
of sense and courage, a formidable fellow, not unfit to be the hero of a
play:--
"Alive, in triumph! and Mercutio slain!
Away to heaven, respective lenity,
And fire-ey'd fury be my conduct now!
Now, Tybalt, take the 'villain' back again
That late thou gay'st me;--for Mercutio's soul
Is but a little way above our heads,
Staying for thine to keep him company:
Either thou, or I, or both, must go with him."
The first three lines are spoken by Romeo to himself. They are a
reflection, not a declamation,--a reflection upon which he instantly
acts. He assumes the calmness of a man of his rank who is about to
fight. More than this, Romeo, the man of words and moods, when once
roused, as we shall see later, in a worser cause,--when once pledged to
action,--Romeo shines with a sort of fatalistic spiritual power. He is
now visibly dedicated to this quarrel. We feel sure that he will kill
Tybalt in the encounter. The appeal to the supernatural is in his very
gesture. The audience--nay, Tybalt himself--gazes with awe on this
sudden apparition of Romeo as a man of action.
This highly satisfactory conduct is soon swept away by his behavior on
hearing the news of his banishment. The boy seems to be without much
stamina, after all. He is a pitiable object, and does not deserve the
love of fair lady.
At Mantua the tide of his feelings has turned again, and by one of those
natural reactions which he himself takes note of he wakes up
unaccountably happy, "and all this day an unaccustom'd spirit lifts him
above the ground with cheerful thoughts." It is the lightning before the
thunderbolt.
"Her body sleeps to Capel's monument,
And her immortal part with angels lives.
I saw her laid low in her kindred's vault,
And presently took post to tell it you."
Balthasar makes no attempt to break the news gently. The blow descends
on Romeo when he least expects it. He is not spared. The conduct of
Romeo on hearing of Juliet's death is so close to nature as to be nature
itself, yet it happens to be conduct almost impossible to be given on
the stage. _He does nothing._ He is stunned. He collapses. For fully
five minutes he does not speak, and yet in these five minutes he must
show to the audience that his nature has been shaken to its foundations.
The delirium of miraculously beautiful poetry is broken. His words are
gone. His emotion is paralyzed, but his mind is alert. He seems suddenly
to be grown up,--a man, and not a boy,--and a man of action. "Is it even
so?" is all he says. He orders post-horses, ink and paper, in a few
rapid sentences; it is evident that before speaking at all he has
determined what he will do, and from now on to the end of the play Romeo
is different from his old self, for a new Romeo has appeared. He is in a
state of intense and calm exultation. All his fluctuating emotions have
been stilled or stunned. He gives his orders in staccato. We feel that
he knows what he is going to do, and will certainly accomplish it.
Meanwhile his mind is dominant. It is preternaturally active. His
"asides," which before were lyrical, now become the comments of an acute
intellect. His vivid and microscopic recollection of the apothecary
shop, his philosophical bantering with the apothecary, his sudden
violence to Balthasar at the entrance to the tomb, and his as sudden
friendliness, his words and conflict with Paris, whom he kills
incidentally, absent-mindedly, and, as it were, with his left hand,
without malice and without remorse,--all these things show an intellect
working at high pressure, while the spirit of the man is absorbed in
another and more important matter.
There is a certain state of mind in which the will to do is so soon
followed by the act itself that one may say the act is automatic. The
thought has already begun to be executed even while it is being formed.
This occurs especially where the intent is to do some horrid deed which
requires preparation, firmness of purpose, ingenuity, and, above all,
external calmness.
"Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream.
The genius and the mortal instruments
Are then in council; and the state of man,
Like to a little kingdom, suffers then
The nature of an insurrection."
This is the phase through which Romeo is passing on the way from Mantua
to Verona. His own words give us a picture of him during that ride:--
"What said my man when my betossed soul
Did not attend him as we rode?"
He has come like an arrow, his mind closed to the external world,
himself in the blind clutch of his own deadly purpose, driving on
towards its fulfilment. Only at the end, when he stands before the bier
of Juliet, sure of his will, beyond the reach of hindrance, alone for
the first time,--only then is his spirit released in floods of
eloquence; then does his triumphant purpose break into speech, and his
words soar up like the flames of a great bonfire of precious incense
streaming upward in exultation and in happiness.
The whole course of these last scenes of Romeo's life, which are
scarcely longer than this description of them, is in the highest degree
naturalistic; but the scenes are in the nature of things so difficult to
present on the stage as to be fairly impossible. The very long, the very
minute description of the apothecary's shop, given by a man whose heart
has stopped beating, but whose mind is at work more actively and more
accurately than it has ever worked before, is a thing highly sane as to
its words. It must be done quietly, rapidly, and yet the impression must
be created, which is created upon Balthasar, that Romeo is not in his
right mind. A friend seeing him would cross the street to ask what was
the matter.
The whole character of Romeo, from the beginning, has been imagined with
reference to this self-destroying consummation. From his first speech we
might have suspected that something destructive would come out of this
man.
There is a type of highly organized being, not well fitted for this
world, whose practical activities are drowned in a sea of feeling.
Egoists by their constitution, they become dangerous beings when vexed,
cornered, or thwarted by society. Their fine energies have had no
training in the painful constructive processes of civilization. Their
first instincts, when goaded into activity, are instincts of
destruction. They know no compromise. If they are not to have all, then
no one shall possess anything. Romeo is not suffering in this final
scene. He is experiencing the greatest pleasure of his life. He glories
in his deed. It satisfies his soul. It gives him supreme spiritual
activity. The deed brings widespread desolation, but to this he is
indifferent, for it means the destruction of the prison against which
his desires have always beaten their wings, the destruction of a
material and social universe from which he has always longed to be free.
"O, here
Will I set up my everlasting rest,
And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars
From this world-wearied flesh."
How much of all this psychology may we suppose was rendered apparent to
the motley collection of excitable people who flocked to see the
play--which appears to have been a popular one--in the years 1591-97?
Probably as much as may be gathered by an audience to-day from a
tolerable representation of the piece. The subtler truths of Shakespeare
have always been lost upon the stage. In turning over the first quarto
of Romeo and Juliet, we may see that many such matters were pruned
ruggedly off by the actors. The early audiences, like the popular
audiences of to-day, doubtless regarded action as the first merit of a
play, and the stage managers must have understood this. It is noticeable
that, in the authentic text, the street fight with which this play opens
is a carefully-worked-up scene, which comes to a climax in the entry of
the prince. The reporter gives a few words only to a description of the
scene. No doubt, in Shakespeare's time, the characters spoke very
rapidly or all at once. It is impossible that the longer plays, like
King Lear, should have been finished in an evening, unless the scenes
moved with a hurry of life very different from the declamatory leisure
with which our actors move from scene to scene. To make plain the course
of the story was evidently the chief aim of the stage managers. The
choruses are finger-posts. It is true that the choruses in Shakespeare
are generally so overloaded with curious ornament as to be
incomprehensible except as explanations of things already understood.
The prologue to Romeo and Juliet is a riddle to which the play is the
answer. One might at first suppose that the need of such finger-posts
betrayed a dull audience, but no dull person was ever enlightened by
Shakespeare's choruses. They play variations on the theme. They instruct
only the instructed.
If interest in the course of the story be the first excitement to the
theatre-goer, interest in seeing a picture of contemporary manners is
probably the second. Our chief loss in reading Shakespeare is the loss
of the society he depicts, and which we know only through him. In every
line and scene there must be meanings which have vanished forever with
the conditions on which they comment. A character on the stage has need,
at the feeblest, of only just so much vitality as will remind us of
something we know in real life. The types of Shakespeare which have been
found substantial enough to survive the loss of their originals must
have had an interest for the first audiences, both in nature and in
intensity, very different from their interest to us. The high life
depicted by Shakespeare has disappeared. No one of us has ever known a
Mercutio. Fortunately, the types of society seem to change less in the
lower orders than in the upper classes. England swarms with old women
like Juliet's nurse; and as to these characters in Shakespeare whose
originals still survive, and as to them only, we may feel that we are
near the Elizabethans.
We should undoubtedly suffer some disenchantment by coming in contact
with these coarse and violent people. How much do the pictures of
contemporary England given us by the novelists stand in need of
correction by a visit to the land! How different is the thing from the
abstract! Or, to put the same thought in a more obvious light, how
fantastic are the ideas of the Germans about Shakespeare! How Germanized
does he come forth from their libraries and from their green-rooms!
We in America, with our formal manners, our bloodless complexions, our
perpetual decorum and self-suppression, are about as much in sympathy
with the real element of Shakespeare's plays as a Baptist parson is with
a fox-hunt. Our blood is stirred by the narration, but our constitution
could never stand the reality. As we read we translate all things into
the dialect of our province; or if we must mouth, let us say that we
translate the dialect of the English province into the language of our
empire; but we still translate. Mercutio, on inspection, would turn out
to be not a gentleman,--and indeed he is not; Juliet, to be a most
extraordinary young person; Tybalt, a brute and ruffian, a type from the
plantation; and the only man with whom we should feel at all at ease
would be the County Paris, in whom we should all recognize a perfectly
bred man. "What a man!" we should cry. "Why, he's a man of wax!"
* * * * *