[185]
A brittle glory shineth in this face:
As brittle as the glory is the face.
THE English plays of Shakespeare needed but the completion of one
unimportant interval to possess the unity of a popular chronicle from
Richard the Second to Henry the Eighth, and possess, as they actually
stand, the unity of a common motive in the handling of the various
events and persons which they bring before us. Certain of his historic
dramas, not English, display Shakespeare's mastery in the development
of the heroic nature amid heroic circumstances; and had he chosen, from
English history, to deal with Coeur-de-Lion or Edward the First, the
innate quality of his subject would doubtless have called into play
something of that profound and sombre power which in Julius Caesar and
Macbeth has sounded the depths of mighty character. True, on the whole,
to fact, it is another side of kingship which he has made prominent in
his English histories. The irony [186] of kingship--average human
nature, flung with a wonderfully pathetic effect into the vortex of
great events; tragedy of everyday quality heightened in degree only by
the conspicuous scene which does but make those who play their parts
there conspicuously unfortunate; the utterance of common humanity
straight from the heart, but refined like other common things for
kingly uses by Shakespeare's unfailing eloquence: such, unconsciously
for the most part, though palpably enough to the careful reader, is the
conception under which Shakespeare has arranged the lights and shadows
of the story of the English kings, emphasising merely the light and
shadow inherent in it, and keeping very close to the original
authorities, not simply in the general outline of these dramatic
histories but sometimes in their very expression. Certainly the
history itself, as he found it in Hall, Holinshed, and Stowe, those
somewhat picturesque old chroniclers who had themselves an eye for the
dramatic "effects" of human life, has much of this sentiment already
about it. What he did not find there was the natural prerogative--such
justification, in kingly, that is to say, in exceptional, qualities, of
the exceptional position, as makes it practicable in the result. It is
no Henriade he writes, and no history of the English people, but the
sad fortunes of some English kings as conspicuous examples of the
ordinary human condition. As in a children's [187] story, all princes
are in extremes. Delightful in the sunshine above the wall into which
chance lifts the flower for a season, they can but plead somewhat more
touchingly than others their everyday weakness in the storm. Such is
the motive that gives unity to these unequal and intermittent
contributions toward a slowly evolved dramatic chronicle, which it
would have taken many days to rehearse; a not distant story from real
life still well remembered in its general course, to which people might
listen now and again, as long as they cared, finding human nature at
least wherever their attention struck ground in it.
He begins with John, and allows indeed to the first of these English
kings a kind of greatness, making the development of the play centre in
the counteraction of his natural gifts--that something of heroic force
about him--by a madness which takes the shape of reckless impiety,
forced especially on men's attention by the terrible circumstances of
his end, in the delineation of which Shakespeare triumphs, setting,
with true poetic tact, this incident of the king's death, in all the
horror of a violent one, amid a scene delicately suggestive of what is
perennially peaceful and genial in the outward world. Like the sensual
humours of Falstaff in another play, the presence of the bastard
Faulconbridge, with his physical energy and his unmistakable family
likeness--"those limbs [188] which Sir Robert never holp to make"*
contributes to an almost coarse assertion of the force of nature, of
the somewhat ironic preponderance of nature and circumstance over men's
artificial arrangements, to, the recognition of a certain potent
natural aristocracy, which is far from being always identical with that
more formal, heraldic one. And what is a coarse fact in the case of
Faulconbridge becomes a motive of pathetic appeal in the wan and
babyish Arthur. The magic with which nature models tiny and delicate
children to the likeness of their rough fathers is nowhere more justly
expressed than in the words of King Philip.--
Look here upon thy brother Geoffrey's face
These eyes, these brows were moulded out of his:
This little abstract doth contain that large
Which died in Geoffrey; and the hand of time
Shall draw this brief into as huge a volume.
It was perhaps something of a boyish memory of the shocking end of his
father that had distorted the piety of Henry the Third into
superstitious terror. A frightened soul, himself touched with the
contrary sort of religious madness, doting on all that was alien from
his father's huge ferocity, on the genialities, the soft gilding, of
life, on the genuine interests of art and poetry, to be credited more
than any other person with the deep religious expression of [189]
Westminster Abbey, Henry the Third, picturesque though useless, but
certainly touching, might have furnished Shakespeare, had he filled up
this interval in his series, with precisely the kind of effect he tends
towards in his English plays. But he found it completer still in the
person and story of Richard the Second, a figure--"that sweet lovely
rose"--which haunts Shakespeare's mind, as it seems long to have
haunted the minds of the English people, as the most touching of all
examples of the irony of kingship.
Henry the Fourth--to look for a moment beyond our immediate subject, in
pursuit of Shakespeare's thought--is presented, of course, in general
outline, as an impersonation of "surviving force:" he has a certain
amount of kingcraft also, a real fitness for great opportunity. But
still true to his leading motive, Shakespeare, in King Henry the
Fourth, has left the high-water mark of his poetry in the soliloquy
which represents royalty longing vainly for the toiler's sleep; while
the popularity, the showy heroism, of Henry the Fifth, is used to give
emphatic point to the old earthy commonplace about "wild oats." The
wealth of homely humour in these plays, the fun coming straight home to
all the world, of Fluellen especially in his unconscious interview with
the king, the boisterous earthiness of Falstaff and his companions,
contribute to the same effect. The keynote of [190] Shakespeare's
treatment is indeed expressed by Henry the Fifth himself, the greatest
of Shakespeare's kings.--"Though I speak it to you," he says incognito,
under cover of night, to a common soldier on the field, "I think the
king is but a man, as I am: the violet smells to him as it doth to me:
all his senses have but human conditions; and though his affections be
higher mounted than ours yet when they stoop they stoop with like
wing." And, in truth, the really kingly speeches which Shakespeare
assigns to him, as to other kings weak enough in all but speech, are
but a kind of flowers, worn for, and effective only as personal
embellishment. They combine to one result with the merely outward and
ceremonial ornaments of royalty, its pageantries, flaunting so naively,
so credulously, in Shakespeare, as in that old medieval time. And
then, the force of Hotspur is but transient youth, the common heat of
youth, in him. The character of Henry the Sixth again, roi fainéant,
with La Pucelle* for his counterfoil, lay in the direct course of
Shakespeare's design: he has done much to fix the sentiment of the
"holy Henry." Richard the Third, touched, like John, with an effect of
real heroism, is spoiled like him by something of criminal madness, and
reaches his highest level of tragic expression [191] when circumstances
reduce him to terms of mere human nature.--
A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!