The norm of love lent itself both to comic and to tragic situation, but
only within somewhat narrow limits. The richness, depth and constancy
of the passion precluded a whole world of comic effects. It precluded
the comedy of the coquette and the prude, of the affected gallant
and the cynical roué, of the calf-lover and the doting husband; the
comedy of the fantastic tricks played by love under the obsession of
pride, self-interest, meticulous scruple, or superstition. Into this
field Shakespeare made brilliant incursions, but it hardly engaged his
rarest powers, and to large parts of it his ‘universal’ genius remained
strange. We have only to recall, among a crowd of other examples,
Moreto’s Diana (_El Desden con el Desden_), Molière’s Alceste and
Célimène, Congreve’s Millamant, in Shakespeare’s century; or, in the
modern novel, a long line of figures from Jane Austen to _The Egoist_
and Ibsen’s _Love’s Comedy_--to recognize that Shakespeare, with all
the beauty, wit and charm of his work, touched only the fringes of the
Comedy of love.
The normal love, not being itself ridiculous, could thus yield material
for the comic spirit only through some fact or situation external to
it. It may be brought before us only in ludicrous parody. We laugh
at the ‘true love’ of Pyramus and Thisbe in the ‘tedious brief’ play
of the Athenian artisans, or at that of Phœbe and Silvius, because
Shakespeare is chaffing the literary pastoral of his day. Hamlet’s
love, itself moving, even tragic, becomes a source of comedy in the
solemn analysis of Polonius. Or again, the source of fun lies in the
wit and humour of the lovers themselves. Some of them, like Rosalind
and Beatrice, virtually create and sustain the wit-fraught atmosphere
of the play single-handed. But Shakespeare habitually heightens this
source of fun by some piquancy of situation--almost always one arising
from delusion, particularly through confusion of identity. It is a
mark of the easy-going habits of his art in comedy that he never threw
aside this rather elementary device, though subjecting it, no doubt, to
successive refinements which become palpable enough when we pass from
the _Two Gentlemen_ to _Cymbeline_. But his genius made perennially
delightful even the crude forms of confusion which create grotesque
infatuations like those of Titania, Malvolio, Phœbe, Olivia. More
refined, and yet more delightful, are the confusions which bring true
and destined lovers together, like the arch make-believe courtship
with which Rosalind’s wit amuses and consoles her womanhood, and that
other which liberates the natural congeniality of Beatrice and Benedict
from their ‘merry war.’ In cases like these, Shakespeare’s humour has
the richer and finer effluence which derives from a hidden ground of
passion or tears. Rosalind’s wit is that of a woman many fathoms deep
in love; Beatrice’s ears tingle with remorse at the tale of Benedick’s
secret attachment; Viola’s gallant bravado to Olivia conceals her own
unspoken maiden love. And Portia crowns her home-coming to her husband
and her splendid service to his friend with the madcap jest of the
rings. Such jesting is in Shakespeare a part of the language of love;
and like its serious or lyrical speech, is addressed with predilection
to love’s object.
Again, the normal love offered in itself equally little promise of
tragedy. No deformed or morbid passion, but the healthy and natural
self-fulfilment of man and woman, calling heart and wit and senses
alike into vigorous play, it provided equally little hold for the
criminal erotics in which most of Shakespeare’s contemporaries sought
the tragic thrill, and for the bitter disenchantment and emotional
decay which generate the subtle tragedy of _Anna Karénina_ or _Modern
Love_. Tragic these healthy lovers of themselves will never become;
they have to be led into the realm of pity and fear, as into that of
laughter and mirth, by the incitement or the onthrust of alien forces.
Here, too, Shakespeare’s habitual instrument is delusion; only now it
is not the delusion which deftly entangles and pleasantly infatuates,
but that which horribly perplexes and rends apart. The blindness,
of Claudio, of Othello, of Posthumus, of Leontes, is provoked by
circumstances of very various cogency, but in each case it wrecks a
love relation in which we are allowed to see no flaw. The situation
of innocent, slandered, heart-stricken womanhood clearly appealed
strongly to him, and against his wont he repeated it again and again.
Even after leaving the stage, he was allured by the likeness of the
story of Henry VIII’s slandered queen to his Hermione, to reopen the
magic ‘book’ he had ‘drowned.’ He was no sentimentalist; his pathos is
never morbid; but it is in imagining souls of texture fine and pure
enough to be wrought upon to the most piteous extreme by slander from
the man they love, that Shakespeare found most of his loveliest and
most authentically Shakesperean characters of women. Hermione and Hero,
Desdemona and Imogen, are to his graver art what Rosalind and Beatrice
and Portia are to his comedy.
But while the tragic issue is directly provoked by the alien
intervention, it is clear that almost all its tragic quality springs,
not from the operations of Iachimo or Iago, but from the wonderful
presentment of the love they wreck. Shakespeare’s supreme command of
pity springs from his exalted faith in love. The poet of the Sonnets is
implicit in the poet of _Othello_. And the dramas themselves abound in
lyric outbursts, often hardly called for by the situation, in which his
ideal of wedded love is uttered with the poignant insight of one who
was probably far from having achieved or observed it himself. One need
but think of France’s reply to Burgundy (_King Lear_, I, i. 241):
Love’s not love
When it is mingled with regards that stand
Aloof from the entire point.
Or of Imogen, blind to all but the path of light and air that divides
her from Milford Haven:
I see before me, man; nor here, nor here,
Nor what ensues, but have a fog in them,
That I cannot look through.
Even Adriana, in the _Comedy of Errors_, expresses the unity of married
love with an intensity which we expect neither from this bustling
_bourgeoise_ nor in this early play:
For know, my love, as easy mayst thou fall
A drop of water in the breaking gulf
And take unmingled thence that drop again
Without addition or diminishing,
As take from me thyself and not me too; (II, ii. 127.)
an utterance which in its simple pathos anticipates the agonized cry of
Othello--the most thrilling expression in Shakespeare of the meaning of
wedded unity:
But there, where I have garnered up my heart,
Where either I must live, or bear no life,
The fountain from the which my current runs,
Or else dries up: to be discarded thence!
The husband in these cases, it is true, neither forgives nor condones,
and Shakespeare (unlike Heywood) gives no hint that he would have
dissented from the traditional ethics on which Othello and Posthumus
and Leontes acted, had their wives in fact been guilty. The wives, on
the other hand, encounter the husband’s unjust suspicions, or brutal
slanders, without a thought of revenge or reprisal. Desdemona, Imogen,
Hermione, alike beautifully fulfil the ideal of love presented in the
great sonnet:
Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
In one drama only did he represent ideal love brought to a tragic
doom without a hint of inner severance. The wedded unity of Romeo and
Juliet is absolute from their first meeting to their last embrace; it
encounters only the blind onset of outer and irrelevant events; nothing
touches their rapturous faith in one another. This earliest of the
authentic tragedies thus represents, in comparison with its successors,
only an elementary order of tragic experience; set beside _Othello_,
it appears to be not a tragedy of love, but love’s triumphal hymn. Yet
it is only in this sense immature. If Shakespeare had not yet fathomed
the depths of human misery, he understood completely the exaltation of
passion, and _Romeo and Juliet_, though it gives few glimpses beyond
the horizons of his early world, remains the consummate flower of his
poetry of ideal love.