=The Essentials of Shakespearian Comedy.=--The Comedies of Shakespeare,
which form more than a third part of his dramatic work, belong to every
period of his career as a writer, except one. During a few years,
soon after the opening of the seventeenth century, he turned away
from comedy, or rather he was drawn by some irresistible attraction
to explore the tragic depths of life, and for a time its bright or
variegated surface was lost to view. The results of his passionate
inquisition of evil entered into the spirit of his latest plays, which
we might name "romances" rather than "comedies," and hence the study of
Shakespeare's lighter and brighter work cannot be wholly dissociated
from the study of that in which terror and pity are the presiding
powers.
To conceive Shakespearian comedy aright we must disconnect the word
"comedy" from the associations derived from its adjectives "comic"
and "comical"; we must recognize the fact that, though laughter is
one of its incidents, laughter is not its end. Our chief living
master of the carte and tierce of wit, Mr. George Meredith, describes
folly as the natural prey of the comic spirit, "known to it in all
her transformations, in every disguise; and it is with the springing
delight of hawk over heron, hound after fox, that it gives her chase,
never fretting, never tiring, sure of having her, allowing her no
rest." Shakespeare's comedy includes the intellectual delight of
chasing down folly and being in at the death, but this is not its main
purpose. Nor is he eager to assume the part of the indignant moral
satirist. It is not he but Ben Jonson, in the person of Asper, who
announces that "with an armèd and resolvèd hand" he will
"Strip the ragged follies of their time
Naked as at their birth ...
... and with a whip of steel
Print wounding lashes in their iron ribs."
Shakespeare on occasions can wield the whip of steel, but it is
when for a time he parts company with the spirit of comedy. Moral
truth radiates through all the world of his creation, but he does
not suppose that morality is served by being outrageously moral; in
writing comedy he has more faith in sunshine as a sanative agent than
in lightning and tempest. If he is ever contemptuous, it is because
the pitifulness of such a baffled pretender as Parolles, or of such
lean-witted conspirators as Antonio and Sebastian, admits of no other
feeling. From personal satire he, unlike several of his contemporaries,
wholly abstained, unless, indeed, the theory holds good, which finds in
_Troilus and Cressida_ that purge given by the player Shakespeare--so
Kempe tells Burbage in _The Return from Parnassus_--to the pestilent
fellow, Ben Jonson.
Perhaps it is impossible to include under any single general conception
works which differ from each other as widely as _The Comedy of
Errors_, _Measure for Measure_, and _The Tempest_; but if we cannot
seize it as a whole, we may see from a little distance this side and
that of comedy as understood by Shakespeare. Its vital centre is not
an idea, an abstraction, a doctrine, a moral thesis, but something
concrete--persons involved in an action. When philosophical critics
assure us that the theme of _The Merchant of Venice_ is expressed by
the words _Summum jus, summa injuria_, or that it exhibits "man in
relation to money," we admire the motto they discovered in their nut,
and prefer the kernel in our own. The persons and the action are placed
in some region, which is neither wholly one of fantasy nor yet one
encumbered with the dross of actuality. Aery spirits, an earth-born
Caliban, Robingoodfellow, the king and queen of Faery, may make their
incursion into it, yet it is in the truest sense the haunt and home
of "human mortals." The finer spirit of the poet's own age is forever
present, but he makes no laborious effort to imitate life in the lower
sense of reproducing contemporary manners. He turns away from his
own country. Once--by command--Sir John Falstaff makes love to the
laughing bourgeois wives of Windsor; but to comply with the necessity
Shakespeare's comedy descends from verse to prose. Ben Jonson's
invention is at home in Cob's Court and Picthatch, in the aisle of
Paul's, or among the booths of Bartholomew Fair; having disguised the
characters of his first important play under Italian names, he rightly
christened them anew as Londoners. Shakespeare's imagination, throwing
off the burden of the actual, desported itself in the Athenian moonlit
wood and on the yellow sands of the enchanted island, under green
boughs in Arden, in the garden at Belmont, in the palace of Illyria, at
the shepherd's festival in Bohemia.
The action corresponds with the environment. In the great tragedies
Shakespeare may on rare occasions demand certain postulates at the
outset. These having been granted, the plot evolves itself within the
bounds of the credible. In _King Lear_ the opening scene puts some
strain upon our imaginative belief, but Shakespeare received the legend
as it had been handed down to him, and all that follows the opening
scene--though the action is vast and monstrous--obeys an order and
logic which compel our acquiescence. It is not always so, if we refuse
its claims to fancy, in Shakespearian comedy. In a region which borders
on the realm of fantasy we must be prepared to accept many happy
surprises. Our desire for happiness inclines our hearts to a pleasant
credulity; if chance at the right moment intervenes, it comes as our
own embodied hope. When all and every one in Arden wood, save Jaques,
are on their way to wedlock, like couples coming to the ark, we are
not disposed to question the reality of that old religious man upon
the borders of the forest who suddenly converts the usurping Duke, and
turns back the mighty power which he had set on foot. We are grateful
for such hermits and such convertites.
The characters again correspond in comedy with the environment and
with the action. In tragedy character is either from the first fully
formed and four-square, or, if it is developed by events, it develops
in accordance with an internal law. Passion runs its inevitable
course, like a great wave driven of the wind, and breaks with thunder
upon the shoal of death. The human actors disappear; only the general
order of the world and the eternal moral law endure. But in comedy
the individual must be preserved, and must at the close enter into
possession of happy days; if he has erred through folly or vice, his
error has not been mortal; he may in the last scene of the fifth act
swiftly change his moral disposition as he would change his outward
garb. The traitor Proteus is suddenly restored to his better mind, and
Valentine is generous enough to resign to the repentant traitor all his
rights in Silvia. Bertram, who almost to the last entangles himself in
a network of dastardly lies, is rescued from his dishonesty and foolish
pride by a successful trick, and becomes the loyal husband of Helena.
The Duke Orsino transfers his amorous homage from his "fancy's queen"
Olivia to his "fancy's queen" Viola with a most convenient facility.
Angelo discovers his own baseness in the moment when he perceives it
is discovered by the world, and is straightway virtuous enough to
bring the happiness required by a fifth act to the wronged Mariana.
Even Iachimo--the Iago of a comedy--makes sorrowful confession of his
villany, and restores the purloined bracelet and the ill-won ring. Such
transformations as these indicate that even as regards character the
law of comedy is a law of liberty. When it suits Shakespeare's purpose,
the study of character can be profound and veracious; when occasion
requires it, incident becomes all-important, and character yields to
the requirements of the situation.
In truth, while it may be said that in Shakespearian tragedy character
is fate, in Shakespearian comedy, among the contrasts and surprises
which form so abundant a source of its vivacity, not the least
effective contrast is that of character set over, as it were, against
itself, not the least effective surprise is that of character entering
upon new phases under the play of circumstance. The unity and logic of
character may not in reality be impaired, but the unity is realized
in and through diversity. In punning, a word is made to play a double
part; it jostles its other self, and laughter ensues. What is so single
and indivisible as personality? But if John is mistaken for Thomas,
accident seems to triumph over law, and the incongruity arises of a
doubled personal identity--the apparent and the real. Antipholus, of
Syracuse, like the little woman of the nursery rhyme, whose sense of
personality was dependent on the length of her petticoats, is almost
persuaded that he is other than himself. If Viola disguises in doublet
and hose, she secures by anticipation the victory of Sebastian over
Olivia's heart, while in her own heart she endures a woman's hidden
love for the Duke. One man in his brief time on Shakespeare's comic
stage may play many parts. The ascetic scholars of Navarre are
transformed into the most gallant of lovers and the most ingenious of
sonneteers. Katherine the curst becomes more resolute in her wifely
submission than she had been in her virgin _sauvagerie_. Signior
Benedick, who challenged Cupid at the flight, in due time alters to
Benedick, the married man; my dear Lady Disdain, in pity for him, and
a little in pity for herself, has yielded upon great persuasion. If,
as Montaigne teaches us, man is the most variable of animals, perhaps
we learn as important a truth about human nature from Shakespeare's
comedies as from his more profound study of the fatality of character
and passion in the tragedies.
The essentials of Shakespearian comedy at its best are, after all,
simple and obvious enough--a delightful story, conducted, in some
romantic region, by gracious and gallant persons, thwarted or aided
by the mirthful god, Circumstance, and arriving at a fortunate issue.
Such would not serve as a description of the comedies of Ben Jonson.
He is pleased to keep us during the greater part of five laborious
acts in the company of knaves and gulls, and at the close, poetic
justice is satisfied with the detection of folly and a general
retribution descending on evil-doers. Shakespeare, in comedy, is no
such remorseless justicer. Don John, the bastard, is reserved for
punishment, but it shall be upon the morrow, and the punishment shall
be such as the mirthful Benedick may devise. Parolles escapes lightly
with the laughter of Lafeu, and mockery, qualified by a supper, will
not afflict him beyond endurance. Lucio is condemned to marry the
mother of his child, which is so dire an evil that all other forfeits
are remitted. Sir John Falstaff will join the rest by Mistress Page's
country fire in jesting at his own discomfiture. Even Shylock is not
wholly overwhelmed; he shall have godfathers and a godmother at his
baptism, and remain in possession of half his worldly goods. Sebastian
may live and discover that he is morally superior to Caliban, the
thief, and Stephano, the drunkard. Iachimo kneels and receives the free
forgiveness of Posthumus.
But if Shakespeare, in comedy, is niggard of punishment, he is liberal
in rewards. And since almost all the stories he chooses for his
comic stage are stories of love and lovers, what grand reward can
be reserved for the fifth act so fitting as the reward of love? In
the seventeenth century masque amid all its mythological, fantastic,
or humorous diversities, one point, or pivot, of the action remained
fixed--the incidents must give occasion to a dance of the masquers. So
in Shakespearian comedy we may, with almost equal certainty, reckon
upon a marriage, or more marriages than one, in act, or in immediate
prospect, before the curtain closes. Or, if not a marriage, for the
lovers may be wedded lovers at the opening, then, after division, or
separation of husband and wife, what we may call a remarriage, with
misunderstandings cleared up and faults forgiven. When Shakespeare
wrote his earlier plays he was himself young, and his gaze was fixed
upon the future; exultant lovers begin their new life, and the song
of joy is an epithalamium. When he wrote his latest plays, he was no
longer young, and he thought of the blessedness of recovering the
happy past, of knitting anew the strained or broken bonds of life, of
connecting the former and the latter days in natural piety. Youth still
must have its rapture; Florizel must win his royal shepherdess, queen
of curds and cream; the nuptials of Ferdinand and Miranda, "these, our
dear-beloved," must be duly solemnized at Naples; but Shakespeare's
temper is no longer the temper of youth; he is of the company of
Hermione and Prospero, and the music of the close is a grave and
spiritual harmony.
Between the first scene and the last the path in comedy is beset with
obstacles and dangers, past which love must find a way--"the course of
true love never did run smooth." These may be either internal--some
difficulty arising from character, or external--difference of blood or
of rank, the choice of friends, slanderous tongues, rival passions,
the spite of fortune. The resolution of the difficulty must be of a
corresponding kind; temper, or rash determination, must yield to the
predominance of love, or the external obstacles must be removed by
well-directed effort, or by a happy turn of events. The young king
of Navarre and his fellow-students are immured by their ascetic vow
of culture; Isabella is all but ceremonially pledged to the life of
religion; Olivia is secluded by her luxury of sentimental sorrow;
Beatrice, born to be a lover, is at odds with love through her pride
of independence and wilful mirth; Bertram has the young colt's
pleasure in freedom, refuses to be ranged, and suffers from the haughty
blindness of youth, which cannot recognize its own chief need and
highest gain. All such rebels against love will be subdued in good
time. On the other hand, it is her father who has decreed that Hermia
shall be parted from Lysander; both father and mother have rival
designs for marring the destiny of sweet Nan Page; a false friend and
fickle lover separates Valentine and Silvia; a malignant plotter, who
would avenge on all happy creatures the wrong of his own base birth,
strikes down Hero with the blow of slander as she stands before the
altar. But love has on its side gallantry and resource, loyalty and
valour, the good powers of nature and the magic of the moonlit faery
wood; and so, over the mountains and over the waves, love at last finds
out a way.
Love being the central theme of Shakespearian comedy, laughter cannot
be its principal end, and cruel or harsh laughter is almost necessarily
excluded. But the laughter of joy rings out in the earlier and
middle comedies, and a smile, beautiful in its wisdom and serenity,
illuminates the comedies of his closing period. If satire is present,
it is only on rare occasions a satire of manners; it deals rather
with something universal, a satire of the fatuity of self-lovers, of
the power which the human heart has of self-deception, or it is a
genial mockery of the ineptitude of brainless self-importance, or the
little languid lover's amorous endeavours, or the lumbering pace of
heavy-witted ignorance, which cannot catch a common meaning, even by
the tail; at its average rate of progress the idea whisks too swiftly
from the view of such slow gazers.
_The dramatis personæ_ form a large and varied population, ranging
in social rank from the king to the tinker and the bellows-mender.
Princes, dukes, courtiers, pages, dissolute gallants, soldiers,
sailors, shepherds, clowns, city mechanicals, the country justice,
the constable and head-borough, the schoolmaster, the parson, the
faithful old servant, the lively waiting-maid, roysterers, humourists,
light-fingered rogues, foreign fantasticoes, middle-class English
husbands and wives, Welshman, Frenchman, Spaniard, Italian, Jew, noble
and gracious ladies, country wenches, courtesans, childhood, youth,
manhood, old age, the maiden, the wife, the widow--all sorts and
conditions of human mortals occupy the scene, while on this side enters
Caliban, bearing his burden of pine-logs, and Ariel flies overhead upon
the bat's back, on the other, the offended king of faery frowns upon
Titania, and claims his pretty Eastern minion.
The characters are ordinarily ranged, with an excellent effect on
dramatic perspective, in three groups or divisions. The lovers and
their immediate friends or rivals occupy the middle plane. Above them
are persons of influence or authority by virtue of age or rank, on whom
in some measure the fortunes of the lovers depend. Below them are the
humbler aiders and abettors of their designs, or subordinate figures
lightly attached to the central action, yet sometimes playing into the
hands of benevolent Chance, and always ready to diversify the scene,
to enliven the stage, to afford a breathing-space between passages of
high-wrought emotion, to fill an interval with glittering word-play or
unconscious humour, to save romance from shrill intensity or too aerial
ascension by the contact of reality. Shakespeare in comedy was hardly
quite happy until he had found his Duke and his clown; then he had the
space in which he could move at ease; love remains his central theme,
but it is love which rises out of life; his principal figures are
rendered more distinct, are seen more in the round, because they stand
out from a rich and various background.
=Intrigue; and the Treatment of Materials.=--The intrigue of
Shakespeare's comedies is seldom of his own creation. He understood by
"invention" something finer or rarer than the construction of a plot.
The greatest workers in literature--we must perhaps except Dante--have
been the _trouvères_, the finders. To form a being out of the clay, and
to breathe into its nostrils the breath of life is an act of creation
in the finest sense of the word. What is material and mechanical
Shakespeare willingly accepts from others; his range of invention is
almost without limit, but it is invention in the spiritual world. No
sufficient sources have been found for his earliest comedy--_Love's
Labour's Lost_--and for what was perhaps his latest--_The Tempest_; it
does not follow, however, that in these instances he varied from his
customary practice. When Shakespeare dealt with the substantial matter
of history, he remained upon his native soil, until through Plutarch
he discovered Rome. No dramatist of his age is more truly an English
patriot; no other evocation of the past in poem or play is so truly
alive or so truly national as that effected in Shakespeare's series
of chronicle histories; and with his English history he has connected
his robustest piece of comedy--no romance of love, but a comedy of
character, essentially national in its humour, its exultant mirth, its
pathos, the chronicle history of King Falstaff on his tavern throne.
But breathing the air of the English Renaissance, he turned away in his
romantic comedies from his own country to Italy, the land of romance.
Once--in _Cymbeline_--he is a debtor to Holinshed, but Holinshed
has here to summon Boccaccio to his aid. Even _The Merry Wives of
Windsor_, as far as we can trace its sources, is indebted for some of
its laughable adventures to the Italian _novelle_. Twice Shakespeare
borrowed the plots of comedies from tales by contemporary writers
of England,--_As You Like It_ is founded upon Lodge's _Rosalynde_;
_The Winter's Tale_, upon Greene's _Pandosto_. But although Lodge's
story was in part derived from a poem of rough and humble incidents,
characteristically English, it was transformed in his hands into a
much-embroidered amorous pastoral of the Renaissance, and Greene's
_Pandosto_ is equally a product of exotic southern culture.
Boccaccio, Bandello, Cinthio, elder English dramas derived from
Italian sources, Spanish pastoral romance--these furnished the booty
on which Shakespeare laid hands with the right of a conqueror. He
selected, omitted, altered, added, moulding the mass of material with
plastic hands, which are gentle because they are strong. Frequently
he complicates the intrigue; sometimes he entangles a secondary plot
with the primary; sometimes he emends the ethics, or purifies the
atmosphere, or saves some cherished character from dishonour; in
many instances he creates new personages, who are the interpreters
of his own wisdom or humour or gracious temper. Thus in _As You
Like It_, though the loves of Orlando and Rosalind are transposed
from the languid artificial pastoral of Lodge into the spirited
wood-notes of Shakespeare, we look in vain through Lodge's romance
for the sentimental-cynical Jaques, dilettante collector of curious
experiences, for Touchstone, the courtier-clown, with his logic of
nice distinctions, for Audrey, no Dresden-china shepherdess, but
fascinating to her ingenious suitor by virtue of her robust charms and
her flattering inferiority of brain. Again, in _Twelfth Night_ the
character of Malvolio and of the whole group of his tormentors--Sir
Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, Fabian, Feste, Maria--are added to
his originals by Shakespeare. The languorous love-in-idleness of the
Duke Orsino, and Olivia's sadness prepense demanded a contrast, and in
Shakespeare's imagination sprang up this crew of toper and droll and
slender-witted gentlemen, and mischief-loving maid, who seem to take
hands and dance around the solemn figure of that deluded magnifico of
domestics. To cite but one other example, how would _Much Ado about
Nothing_ dwindle if Beatrice and Benedick, its brain of wit and pulse
of gallantry, were to disappear from the scene! But these, and with
them the office-bearing majesty of Dogberry, prince of constables, and
the astute intelligence of goodman Verges ("an old man, sir; but honest
as the skin between his brows") are engrafted by Shakespeare on the
original of Bandello.
=Relation to Predecessors and Contemporaries.=--From his predecessors
and early contemporaries Shakespeare doubtless learnt whatever it was
in their power to teach; at the same time he started forth on ways of
his own. In Lyly he saw how something of the ideality of the masque
could be transferred to comedy; how comedy could escape from the
grosser world of the actual to a realm of courtly classical fantasy;
how action could be suspended to give scope for the play of sparkling
or ingenious dialogue in prose; how dainty song could come to the
aid of speech which threatened to grow tedious; how disguises of sex
could lead to delicate and diverting confusions. But Shakespeare
must have perceived the lack of human interest in Lyly's plays; the
deficiency of action, which often causes the progress of the piece to
languish or to cease; the slight or colourless characterization; the
mechanical artificiality, and monotonous balance of certain elements in
Euphuistic prose. What was sprightly and ingenious in Lyly's dialogue
he preserved; but of Euphuism in the strict sense we find nothing
in Shakespeare's plays, except a passage of mockery, appropriately
introduced where Falstaff in the tavern discourses as a moralizing
father to that well-bred youth, Prince Hal,--"For though the camomile
the more it is trodden on the faster it grows, yet youth the more it is
wasted the sooner it wears." Nor, unless it be the passage describing
Oberon's vision of Cupid aiming his shaft at the fair vestal throned in
the West, does he follow Lyly in mythological allegory, which conceals
and betrays contemporary persons and events.
In the comedies of Robert Greene examples already existed of the
romantic tale of love and lovers handled in dramatic fashion. Amid
the vulgar surroundings of his sorry London life, Greene preserved a
certain purity of idyllic imagination. His comely maidens and loyal
wives, tried and true, had shown how important and how attractive a
part may be borne by women upon the comic stage. He had exhibited with
some skill the art of connecting two intrigues--the primary and the
subordinate. He had placed comic matter side by side with matter which
approximated to tragic. He could pass from verse to prose, and could
mingle with blank verse, sometimes brocaded with ornament but often
fresh and sweet, easy rhymed couplets and such other arrangements of
rhyme as Shakespeare practised in his early plays. But he often erred
through an attempt at Marlowesque magnificence and through the pride
and pomp of pseudo-classical decoration. He lacked that humour of
good sense, directed upon oneself, which warns a writer when he is in
danger of falling into absurdity. His ludicrous scenes do not always
assist the more serious or romantic matter of the play; they are too
much of the nature of an interlude or divertissement. His feeling for
what is laughable was somewhat primitive and crude; a vigorous bout at
quarter-staves, a lusty drubbing, the extravagant pranks of a mediæval
devil, were simple and unfailing receipts to shake the ribs of the
groundlings. If Shakespeare was a pupil of Greene's in comedy, he was
an intelligent pupil, who knew what to remember and what to forget.
Except as regards the form of his verse and prose it cannot be said
that Shakespeare, as a writer of comedy, was ever in a true sense
in discipleship to any master. He found suggestions, and used them,
but he took his own way. The history of his development consists in
great measure in the gradual coalescing of the various faculties from
which poetry may be derived. In his latest comedies intellect and
emotion are fused together; wit has been taken up into moral wisdom;
imagination in its highest reach is united with the simple, primary
feelings of our humanity; gaiety and seriousness interpenetrate each
other; tenderness and pity are alive in the breast of the comic
Muse; the laughter is often the laughter of human sympathy and of a
pathetic joy; if we smile at the quaint forms of the hieroglyph of
life, we know that it has a deep and sacred meaning. From the outset
Shakespeare thought of comedy as a mirror of human life, which should
reflect things sad and serious as well as mirthful, and which by its
magic power should convert pain into pleasure; but the two elements
of Shakespearian comedy exist side by side in the earliest plays;
they are not yet fused into one. In the main, Shakespeare at first
relied upon his nimble brain, and aimed at exciting laughter by comic
surprises, contrasts, and incongruities which lie upon the surface of
things and are the offspring of accident rather than of character. His
delight in wit-combats and word-play is a transference to language of
the same feeling which made him delight in the errors and disguisings
of his persons. There is a laughter which arises from no profounder
cause than titillation; the harlequinade of words, leaping one over the
other, parrying, riposting, and suddenly disappearing under a mask of
invisibility, yet still striking, as it were, out of the shadow, serves
as a titillation of the brain.
=Shakespeare's Development as a Comic Dramatist.=--In his earliest
group of comedies, _Love's Labour's Lost_, _The Comedy of Errors_, _The
Two Gentlemen of Verona_, _A Midsummer Night's Dream_, dating perhaps
from about 1590 to about 1594, Shakespeare experimented in various
directions. We might name the group that of his transformation plays.
The comic surprise, the comic incongruity is that of man suddenly
converted from his true to a false self or from a false self to a
true. Human will is here the sport of nature or the sport of accident.
Nothing is but what is not. The vowed students of Navarre are betrayed
into the very opposite of their assumed selves by the power of nature
and of love. Proteus, the servant of Julia, the comrade of Valentine,
forsakes his mistress and his friend, and is as suddenly reconverted.
The brothers Antipholus and the brothers Dromio are so shuffled
together by the juggler Chance, that we question if any personal
identity will survive and reëmerge at the close. Whether Lysander and
Demetrius will awake the rival lovers of Helena or the rival lovers
of Hermia, or whether Lysander will love Hermia and Demetrius Helena,
depends on the merest luck of fairy-land. But nature and luck are on
the side of love; all will be set right before the end. And because
women lie closer to nature than men, and their affections hold the bent
with the directness and certainty of nature, they are true and constant
to themselves, neither deluding their hearts with pseudo-ideals, nor
changed by the play of circumstances from what they are, but using
their woman's wit and woman's will to attain their proper ends.
_Love's Labour's Lost_ has the air of a young writer's effort to be
original, and to dazzle by unflagging cleverness; whence at times a
tedium of wit. Shakespeare seems to have resolved to owe his plot
to no man, with the result that it is somewhat too much a prepared
vehicle for the exposition of an idea. The little cloister of culture,
where education is to be a fine art removed from nature, is invaded by
woman, and with the entrance of woman enters nature, which has more
of wisdom to impart than all the academies or schools. The denouement
must be as original as the general design; death arrives in the midst
of mirth; there shall be no weddings in the fifth act; love's labour
is lost; or, if not lost, its reward is deferred a twelvemonth; the
scholars turned lovers are still infected with something of unreality
and affectation, exhaling their sentiment in Petrarchan ingenuities,
and one of them, Biron, with his mocking humour, takes life too proudly
and wilfully; the mad girls of France are at heart serious, and they
will test their lovers by a year of genuine probation, then, and not
till then, the marriage bells shall ring. The Spanish fantastico, Don
Adriano, towering in stature, though not in wit, above his minion
page, and the learned schoolmaster Holofernes, much admired of his
companion pedant, the curate, resemble stock figures of Italian
comedy. Affectations of language--the decorated dialect of fashion,
the pedantries of scholarship not too profound--are also departures
from nature, and must submit to the laughter of good sense. Nature may,
indeed, be mended by art, for nature in its first rudiments, as seen in
honest Costard and goodman Dull, is not wholly a thing of beauty and
of joy, but the art which mends nature must be, as the wise Polixenes
afterwards declared, an art that nature makes. _Love's Labour's
Lost_--the _Precieuses ridicules_ of Shakespeare, but with men for the
presenters of preciosity and women as the exponents of good sense--is
a comedy of dialogue rather than of incident. The stage is kept alive
with much tossing about of brains in wit-encounters, with maskings
and disguisings, and with that marred show of the Nine Worthies, a
heroi-comic forerunner of the tedious, brief scene of young Pyramus and
his love Thisbe, in which the hard-handed men of Athens appear before
Duke Theseus.
_The Comedy of Errors_ is a comedy of incident. Here Shakespeare
accepts his plot, his chief characters, and their adventures from
Plautus. But the adventures are complicated by his addition of the
two Dromios, which more than doubles the possibilities of ludicrous
confusion. The fun cannot be too fast or furious; the unexpected
always happens; the discovery is staved off to the fifth act with
infinite skill; the nearer each brother approaches his fellow, the
more impossible it becomes for them to meet. Nowhere has Shakespeare
ravelled and unravelled the threads of an intrigue with such
incomparable dexterity as in this early play. But Shakespeare's
imagination could not rest satisfied with a farce, however laughable or
however skilfully conducted. His vein of lyrical poetry breaks forth in
the love-episode, for the sake of which he created Luciana. And he has
set the entire comic business in a romantic and pathetic framework--the
story of the afflicted old Ægeon and the Ephesian abbess, in whom he
discovers his lost wife. The play opens with grief and the doom of
death impending over an innocent life; it closes, after a cry of true
pathos, with reconciling joy, and the interval is filled with laughter
that peals to a climax. This is not the manner of Plautus; but laughter
with Shakespeare would seem hard and barren--the crackling of thorns
under a pot,--if it were wholly isolated from grief and love and joy.
Shakespeare did not again attempt the comedy of mere incident. In _The
Two Gentlemen of Verona_ he struck into his favourite tune--the comedy
of romance. Among its sources is the Spanish pastoral of Jorge de
Montemayor, but the scene is Italy, the woman-country wooed in this
play before it was wed by the imagination of its poet in _The Merchant
of Venice_. The theme is love, its fidelity and its infidelity--love
with its incalculable surprises, love with its unalterable constancy.
The characters are lightly yet gracefully outlined; there are the
grave and reverend seniors; the contrasted pairs of lovers; the
waiting-woman; and the clownish men-servants, to whom the business of
laughter is intrusted. The persons are somewhat mechanically set over,
one against the other,--Valentine the loyal against the fickle Proteus,
Silvia the sprightly against the tender Julia, Speed the professional
wit against Launce the unconscious humourist, whose filial affections
and amorous desires for the milkmaid, who has more qualities than a
water-spaniel, are only secondary to his devotion to the cur Crab,
a dog, indeed, to whose share some canine errors fall, but endowed
with more qualities than a wilderness of milkmaids. The disguising
of Julia in masculine attire anticipates many such disguisings in
later comedies. It is no frolic masking like that of the girls of
France, but part of the serious-playful romance of a woman's brave and
gentle heart. The blank verse is sweet and regular rather than swift
or powerful in dramatic movement; rhyme is less frequently used than
heretofore; the prose of Launce's soliloquies has a homely directness
and vigour.
In _A Midsummer Night's Dream_ comedy becomes lyrical. Character is
subordinate to incident, but incident here has a dreamlike quality,
which unites itself with the poetry of a fantastic world. It is a
comedy of errors,--the errors of a night,--but the confusions are
not external and material as in the adventures of the brothers
Antipholus; they are inward and psychological; the bewilderment is one
of passions, not of persons. The triumph of the poet lies before all
else in the power which he shows of harmonizing materials seemingly
the most incongruous. The magnificence of Theseus and his Amazonian
bride,--power in the full tide of prosperity,--the crossed and wayward
loves of youths and maidens, the minikin-mighty strifes of fairy-land
and its roguish sports, the artistic pains and illustrious ineptitude
of the crew of hempen homespuns--all these are wrought together in a
dream which we accept with a tranquil and delighted wonder.
The power of the human will is, as it were, suspended in this play
of elfland magic. Before _The Merchant of Venice_ was written,
Shakespeare's feeling for dramatic action and passion had been deepened
and invigorated by his progress in dealing with English history and
probably by the creation of a great tragedy, _Romeo and Juliet_, the
tragedy of love and youth and death. _The Merchant of Venice_ is
Shakespeare's first, and perhaps his most remarkable, example of the
comedy of character. Here we pass from the realm of caprice to that
of human volition. A passive object, the merchant, is placed in the
midst as a prize to be contended for by forces naturally adverse--the
passion of concentrated revenge and the spirit of charity, armed with
the brightest weapons of intelligence. The masculine and the feminine
powers enter upon a single combat, and victory remains with mercy
and love, the "Ewigweibliche." No such figure as that of Shylock had
previously appeared upon the English stage. In his person Shakespeare
not only lays bare the nerve and muscle of a wrestler in the game of
life, but studies the darker and sadder features of a race. He is
no incredible monster like the Barabas of Marlowe, but a man, whose
origins and environment have made him what he is; whom, therefore, we
understand and whom in his very pitilessness we are constrained to
pity. Nor had the English stage hitherto seen any woman so complex in
her various powers of intellect, emotions, will, so single in their
harmonious coöperance, as the noble lady of Belmont. The same energy of
resolve which makes her the armed champion of Antonio had lain hidden
in her loyalty to the arduous conditions of her father's will. The
dramatist in this play postulates our acceptance of certain external
improbabilities; these concessions made, all things are wrought out
in accordance with the laws of life. The spirit of tragedy here is
neighbour to the comic spirit, yet observes the finest decorum. Two
actions--that of the caskets and that of the pound of flesh--work into
each other without a jar and become one. The characters are grouped
with perfect freedom and with an exact, though unobtruded, ordonnance,
for Shakespeare's art had now learnt to conceal itself. The fifth act
of the play is a kind of lovely epilogue, where, after the strained
anxiety of the trial-scene, joy is preserved from its own excess by the
instinct of self-mockery.
It may be that the humbler humorous scenes of the English historical
plays on which he was now engaged drew down the imagination of
Shakespeare as a writer of comedy from romance to realism, and made him
content to work for a little while in rougher material. _The Taming of
the Shrew_, whatever its chronological place may be, is only a spirited
adaptation of an older play, and is chiefly interesting as an example
of Shakespeare's art in transposing, developing, enriching with detail,
the ideas of a predecessor, and as a demonstration of the temper with
which he could kindle a predecessor's _allegro_ into an _allegro con
brio_. With old Sly's son of Burton heath, the village sot, he was
upon his native soil, and he could heighten his original with low-life
reminiscences of Warwickshire taverns. _The Merry Wives of Windsor_
is a direct offshoot from the greater comedy of Falstaff which is
incorporated in the historical plays. The tradition that it was hastily
written by command of Queen Elizabeth, who desired to see "Falstaff in
love," relieves us from the necessity of supposing that Shakespeare
voluntarily degraded his indomitable jester into the flouting-stock of
a bourgeois fabliau, "Well I am your theme: you have the start of me;
I am dejected; ... ignorance itself is a plummet o'er me; use me as
you will." That Shakespeare should throw himself with spirit into his
task was a crime for which he earns our forgiveness by its successful
issue. The merry wives are honest buxom dames, without a grain of real
malice in them. The French physician and the Welsh parson murder the
Queen's English with as happy a valiance as that of Fluellen and the
Princess Katharine in _King Henry V._ Slender is the most delightfully
incompetent of wooers--a Romeo _manqué_ of Windsor, whose amorous
passion waits upon his cousin Shallow's promptings and whose wit is
mislaid with his Book of Riddles. The buck-basket and the old woman of
Brentford are very palpable jokes, which the crassest gentleman-usher
or emptiest-headed maid-in-waiting could not miss. There are the proper
topical allusions to call forth an interchange of smiling mutual
intelligence. Altogether _The Merry Wives_ was a comedy delicate enough
for a queen. For such a play the proper medium was prose; verse is
reserved for the slender love-episode of Fenton and Anne Page, and for
the scenes connected with the fairy disguising.
As the pressure of the English historical plays lightened, Shakespeare
could turn again to Italy and to romance. In _The Merry Wives_ he had
grouped his characters in a circle around a gross old self-lover,
whom it was their business to delude and mock. Perhaps the same
device could be refined upon and turned to romantic uses. Falstaff
had professed love and had been convicted of sordid self-interest.
What it a pair of high-spirited persons, touched with the egotism of
self-sufficingness and wilful wit, and professing a superiority to the
toys of lovers, could be ensnared into that deep mutual passion which
was in truth written for them in the book of fate? But there must be
something deeper here than a jest; such brave union of hearts must be
cemented by a common effort to confront the sorrow of the world. At
this time, perhaps, Shakespeare was concerned with his revision of
_Love's Labour's Lost_. Might not Biron and Rosaline be reincarnated,
and in place of that crude test of a twelve months' visitation of the
speechless sick decreed for Biron, might not an immediate test of
valiant manhood be discovered, and the newer Biron come to the happy
ending of love's labour's won? In Beatrice and Benedick a brilliant
centre was found for the play of _Much Ado about Nothing_. The high
spirits, which gave life to _The Shrew_ and _The Merry Wives_ are here
refined by gallantry and beauty, wit and grace, and by the presence
of injury and pain. The other _dramatis personæ_ gather around the
hero and heroine to beguile them into love; the passion begotten of a
jest is brought forth in sorrow, and sorrow at the close is converted
into joy. With so much of quick and lambent dialogue as Beatrice
and Benedick have to utter, we want no outstanding jester here; his
speech would be an impertinence; but we need a counterfoil to wit in
the unconscious humour of a Dogberry and a Verges; and these worthies
assist effectively in the action of the play; Fate, the sphinx, assumes
an ironic smile; the dulness of a blundering watchman unties a knot
which has foiled the dexterity of the wise.
The comedy which followed _Much Ado about Nothing_ is one of sunshine
and dappled shadow under the greenwood of Arden. Landseer's companion
pictures, "War" and "Peace," find a parallel in Shakespeare's _King
Henry V._ and _As You Like It_, which probably belong to the same year;
and the scene of both the history and the comedy is laid in France.
He would have left untouched a favourite theme of the Renaissance if
he had wholly neglected the pastoral; but Shakespeare felt that the
conventional pastoral alone, with its cruel shepherdess and sighing
swain, however suitable for a piece of poetical tapestry, could not
furnish the life and body and movement demanded by the stage. His
Silvius and Phœbe, Arcadians of the mode and rhetoricians in verse,
are presented with a certain reserved irony; the veritable rustics are
William, whose pretty wit chiefly manifests itself in monosyllabic
answers, and the wench Audrey, whom the gods did not make poetical.
Touchstone, a clown among courtiers, is a courtier among clowns. The
other persons of the comedy are of the high-bred class, in the midst of
which the dramatist's imagination moved with most pleasure, but here
they are transported into a delightful open-air environment, which
breathes a freshness and sweetness into their spirits. "Sweet are
the uses of adversity," and especially of such adversity as that of
Rosalind, which enables her, in her disguise as Ganymede, to assist in
her own wooing and to play the part of a benevolent goddess of destiny
for several pairs of lovers including Orlando and herself. We learn
from a play of Ben Jonson's of the same date that melancholy was a
genteel fashion of the day. Shakespeare, on the suggestion of a current
affectation, created in Jaques a character which was wholly original.
Humourist, sentimentalist, critic, and cynic, he is the self-conscious
seeker for new experiences, the dilettante collector of curiosities to
be labelled in his museum as states of a human soul.
The midsummer of Shakespeare's comedy is reached in _Twelfth Night_.
Was it his effort to resist the invasion of sadder thought which raised
its mirth to the reeling heights of Sir Toby's Illyrian bacchanals?
We dare not venture such a surmise, for the light and warmth are at
flood-tide. The voluptuous love-languors of the Duke and Olivia's
luxury of grief fatten the idle soil for the blossoming of the rose.
The disease of overmuch prosperity in the palaces of Illyria seems set
over against the sanity of adversity in the forest of Arden. Viola, in
her disguises as Cesario, has a harder task than the banished Rosalind;
for instead of assisting at her own wooing, she is required to plead as
an envoy of love against herself. In place of the dilettante egotist
Jaques, who would range through all experiences, we have here the
solemn self-lover, Malvolio, pinnacled in his own sense of importance
and his code of formal propriety, yet toppling from his heights
to so grotesque a fall. Had Shakespeare encountered some starched
Elizabethan Puritan, who looked sourly on the theatre, and thought that
because he was virtuous there should be no more cakes and ale, and
did the dramatist read a humorous lesson to his time on an error more
deep-seated in the human heart than the excesses of a joyous temper?
Was the comic spirit here a swordsman armed with the blade of reason
and good sense? If such was the case, Shakespeare was assuredly no
partisan, and Sir Toby Belch is hardly his ideal representative of a
liberal humanism.
After the play of _Twelfth Night_ we become aware of the first ebb
of summer. It has been suggested that the events shadowed forth in
the _Sonnets_ took some of the joy out of Shakespeare's heart. It has
been suggested that the fall of Essex, involving the disgrace of the
poet's patron Southampton, tended to embitter his spirit. These are
conjectures that cannot be verified. What is certain is, that he turned
toward tragedy, and that his temper in comedy indicates a gathering of
the clouds. The spirit of _All's Well that Ends Well_ is as courageous
as is the title of the play; and there is a need for courage, not of
the gay and sportive kind, but serious and steadfast. The hero is no
gallant Orlando or high-spirited Benedick. He has in him, we must
suppose, the possibilities of noble manhood, but these are obscured by
the errors and the vices of youth. The heroine is no glad-hearted girl
like Rosalind, no scatterer of coruscating jests like Beatrice, but a
woman, clear-sighted, strong-willed, and bent on achieving her purpose.
She, the poor daughter of a physician, is a healer in a world that
stands in need of healing. The bright-winged Cupid of nods and becks
and wreathed smiles has been transformed into Love, the physician.
Helena, honoured and cherished by all who know her aright, is rejected
by the one man on whom her heart is fixed, and whom she rescues from
his baser self with something of that maternal protectiveness, which in
certain instances constitutes the nucleus of wifely love. The Countess
is Shakespeare's creation, and nowhere has he made age more beautiful.
The comic business lies chiefly in the unmasking of the pretender,
Parolles. It is required both by the action and the ethics of the play,
but there is little to afford us pleasure in the humiliation of so
paltry a _miles gloriosus_.
The atmosphere darkens in _Measure for Measure_. In the city of Vienna
corruption boils and bubbles. From the Duke's deputy to the lowest
drudge of vice, society is infected with the festering evil. To deal
with the subtleties of sin, virtue itself must learn crafty ways; mines
must be opposed by countermines. In Claudio the passions of youth,
snatching too eagerly at unlicensed satisfaction, are brought into the
presence of death; and to life, tender and florid, the vast regions of
the grave are full of obscurity and uncertain horror. It is hardly a
scene for the joy of love, though to two strong hearts love may come
in the end as the sequel of a common struggle for justice and moral
reformation. Rather is it a place for the trials and the victory of
virgin chastity. The Duke moves through subterranean passages, guided
by the dark lantern of moral prudence. Isabella illuminates the gloom
with the light of an indignant saintliness. Here it is no pompous
formalist who is humiliated; no common pretender who is detected
and delivered over to laughter; the deadliest ambushes of evil are
attacked; the heart, "deceitful above all things and desperately
wicked," is laid bare. Angelo, the self-deceiver, is exposed not
merely to others, but to himself; he gazes down appalled into the
abyss discovered in his own soul. We have travelled far from the fresh
wild-wood paths of Arden and from the glowing gardens of Illyria.
No problems connected with the plays of Shakespeare are more difficult
of solution than those offered by the satiric drama, in which matter
from the story of Troy is handled in so enigmatic a fashion. Shall
we place _Troilus and Cressida_ hard by _Measure for Measure_, or
date it some six years later, regarding it as a successor in comedy
to the tragic study of the misanthrope in _Timon of Athens_? The
evidence inclines in favour of the earlier date. Is some of the wood,
hay, and stubble of the lost _Troilus and Cressida_ of Dekker and
Chettle imbedded in Shakespeare's play? Is it a satire of humanity or
of contemporary individuals? Was this the "purge" which Shakespeare
administered to Ben Jonson, and, with Jonson disguised as Ajax, and
Marston as Thersites, was the play one of those alarums and excursions
connected with the war of the theatres, in which Marston, Dekker, and
Jonson were the principal combatants?[1949] Is Cressida a malicious
portrait of the deceitful enchantress of the _Sonnets_, and was a
satirical presentment of the heroes of Homer a retort upon the rival
poet, conjectured to be Chapman, the translator of Homer, who had
stolen away the favour of Shakespeare's young friend and patron.
These questions remain unanswered. We can only say that the spirit
of this comedy of disillusion is alien to that of genuine comedy
as conceived by Shakespeare in his happier days. The young love of
Troilus is betrayed by the courtesan born. Achilles is a dull-brained
fellow, barren of wit, who sulks or wantons in his tent; Ajax is a
clumsy elephant; Thersites lives on garbage, and spews his filth;
Pandar is a lecher, incapable except by proxy; to fight on account of
Helen is to set the world at odds for an harlot, yet on her behalf it
is that Hector, knowing the folly of it, dies. Troilus is indeed a
gallant youth, but his passion is a greenhorn's infatuation: let him
be cured of it by surgical incision, however cruel! Shall we say that
_Troilus and Cressida_ and _Measure for Measure_ are connected by a
certain contrast and resemblance? In each the world is bubbling with
corruption. The mighty persons of the earth in the one play are as
ignoble as the mean persons of the other; the confraternity of Mistress
Overdone includes the champions of the world and their renowned
lady-loves; the worldly wisdom of the Duke is lowered and broadened
into the all-embracing but wholly mundane experience of Ulysses; and in
this sorry society it is from worldly wisdom alone that we can hope for
any rescue or deliverance, for here we find no saintly Isabella, but a
Cressida, offering her lips to every solicitor of the Grecian tents.
The spirit of mirth withdrew itself for a time from Shakespeare's art.
He could still write comic scenes, but they were used to deepen the
effects of tragedy. The grave-diggers of _Hamlet_, the porter turning
the key of hell-gate on the night of murder in _Macbeth_, Lear's poor
fool jesting across the storm upon the heath, the clown whose basket
of figs conceals the worm of Nilus--these are humorous figures created
in the service of pity and terror. Shakespeare did not return to comedy
until his perception of the world and human life had been purified by
the tragic _katharsis_. With every faculty of his mind labouring at
its highest, he had pursued a long dramatic inquisition of the evil
that is in the world and in the heart of man. He had not retreated into
any facile creed of pleasant optimism, but boldly explored the face
of night, and night had brought out the stars. Such love as that of
Cordelia, such loyalty as that of Kent, could be fully revealed only
in and through the darkness. Man pleased Shakespeare and woman also,
when he wrote his tragedies, else the players would have had lenten
entertainment; for a drama founded upon misanthropy would have been
unendurable. In _Timon of Athens_ the poet exhibits misanthropy as the
evasion of weakness from the ruins of a self-indulgent optimism, and we
may say that in _Timon of Athens_ he bade farewell to gloom.
Shakespeare's latest comedies--_Pericles_(as far as it is his),
_Cymbeline_, _The Winter's Tale_, _The Tempest_--form a group, which
is distinguished by a special character. The atmosphere is light and
pellucid, like that which follows a thunder-storm. There is a great
and wide serenity abroad; the heavens seem more spacious, and they
bend down to embrace the margins of the land. The healing influences
of nature are felt in the country lanes where Autolycus sings his
tirra-lirra, and the meadows where Perdita follows her sheep, on the
seacoast of Tarsus where Marina bears her basket of flowers, among
the wild Welsh mountains with the gallant sons of Cymbeline, on the
enchanted island full of "sounds and sweet airs that give delight
and hurt not." The life of cities and courts had lost much of its
attraction for one who perhaps was now finding repose and restoration
among the Warwickshire fields. But Shakespeare did not plead, in the
manner of Rousseau, for a reversion to the primitive conditions of
humanity; he could smile at Gonzalo's imaginary commonwealth, where
property has no existence; he saw in Caliban the rudimentary man not
half informed with soul; he had faith in an art which mends nature,
while yet it is an art which nature makes. And nature itself, with
all of human life, seems to hang, dreamlike and yet real, in the
encompassing power of something that is above nature and that means
well, however little we can trace its ways. Dian appears to Pericles in
a vision, guiding him to her temple where joy awaits him; the innocence
of Hermione is vindicated by the oracle of Apollo; Posthumus in prison
is visited by Jupiter, giving him assurance of divine succour--"whom
best I love I cross"; Prospero is aided in his beneficent designs by
ministering elemental spirits. The growing resources of the Jacobean
stage assisted the dramatist in scenic effects, to which he imparted a
beautiful significance. The temper of these latest plays is a temper
of reconciliation; the wrongs of life are present, but for those who
can transcend the baser passions they work for good. Injuries are felt
but are forgiven; broken bonds of affection are reunited; the lost
are restored to hearts that have loved and suffered. "The oldest hath
borne most," says Albany in the closing lines of _King Lear_. The
old are seen in these last romances of Shakespeare as experienced in
suffering, caused by the offence of others or by the errors of their
own hearts; but they have learnt through suffering a certain detachment
from the greed of personal gain, and they lean over the joy of young
hearts, still immersed in the innocent egoism of youth, with a fond
protectiveness. Cymbeline and his recovered sons, Pericles and Marina,
Hermione and Perdita, Prospero and Miranda--it is the same sentiment,
varied and repeated, in each of its exemplars. Certain indications that
Shakespeare was loosening his connection with the theatre are present
in these plays. He could, as in the instance of _Pericles_ and perhaps
in those of _King Henry VIII._ and _The Two Noble Kinsmen_ contribute
fragments to a drama in which, as a whole, he took little interest.
In plays of which he is the sole author, his dramatic energy flags at
times, to be renewed where the subject moved his feelings or charmed
his imagination. The versification is breeze-like in its freedom, but
sometimes the breeze falls away and sometimes it wanders with too vague
an aim. The treatment of time passes from the extreme of romantic
license, as in _The Winter's Tale_, to the strictest observation
of the rule of unity in _The Tempest_. In _Pericles_, the earliest
of these romances, Shakespeare cared only for certain scenes and
situations. In _Cymbeline_, wherever Imogen, the loveliest figure in
his gallery of portraits of women appears, we are certain to receive
his finest workmanship. Hermione and Perdita wholly possessed his
imagination, while a crude sketch sufficed for the jealousy of Leontes.
_The Tempest_, if we set aside the laborious jesting of Antonio and
Sebastian (designed to express the barren brain that often accompanies
a callous heart), is wrought with equal power from the first scene to
the last.
Perhaps the conjecture is well founded that _The Tempest_, with its
masque of wedding blessings, was written for the marriage of Princess
Elizabeth to Frederick, Elector Palatine, in February, 1613. Perhaps
it was Shakespeare's latest play. And it may not be altogether an idle
notion of the poet Campbell, that in Prospero's breaking his magic
staff and dismissing his airy spirits we have the farewell to the stage
of the great enchanter who had summoned Prospero into being.
Shakespeare found poetic comedy in its rudiments; he left it fully
formed. He brought together its various elements and organized them
to fulfil the functions of a single living spirit. He made laughter
wise, and taught seriousness how to be winning and gracious. Through
no ascetic doctrine but by virtue of the spirit of life and beauty he
purified the drama from the dulness of what is gross, and kept its
temper above the seductions of sentimental morals and a nerveless
lubricity. Wit, fancy, grace, constructive dexterity, are found among
his successors. Shakespeare's sane outlook upon life as a whole, his
gentleness of strength in dealing with the passions, his reserve of
power, his moral wisdom, were lost to English comedy when Prospero
abjured his magic and retired to the duties of his Stratford lordship
of the soil.