The beauty and insight of Shakespeare’s finest portrayals of the comedy
and the tragedy of love were not reached at once. His conception of
love itself was still, at the opening of his career, relatively slight
and superficial; his mastery of technique was equally incomplete. The
early plays accordingly abound with scenes and situations where from
either cause or both the dramatic treatment of love is not yet in the
full sense Shakesperean. It will suffice in this sketch to specify two
types of each.
The young Shakespeare, as is well known, showed a marked leaning to two
apparently incongruous kinds of dramatic device--paradox and symmetry.
In the riotous consciousness of power he loved to take up the challenge
of outrageous situations, to set himself dramaturgical problems, which
he solves by compelling us to admit that the impossible might have
happened in the way he shows. A shrew to be ‘tamed’ into a model wife.
A widow following her murdered father’s coffin, to be wooed, there and
then, and won, by his murderer. A girl of humble birth, in love with
a young noble who scorns her, to set herself, notwithstanding, to win
him, and to succeed. Paradoxical feats like these were foreign to the
profound normality--under whatever romantic disguise--of Shakespeare’s
mature art. Richard and Petruchio and Helen carry into the problems
of love-making the enterprising audacity of the young Shakespeare
in the problems of art. But the audacity of the young Shakespeare
showed itself in another way. His so-called taste for ‘symmetry’ had
nothing in common with the classical canons of balance and order. It
was nearer akin to the boyish humour of mimicry. If he found a pair
of indistinguishable twins producing amusing confusion in a Roman
play, he capped them with a second pair, to produce confusion worse
confounded in the English _Comedy of Errors_. And so with love. Navarre
(in _Love’s Labour’s Lost_) and his three lords, like the four horses
of an antique quadriga, go through the same adventure side by side.
All four have forsworn the sight of women; all four fall in love, not
promiscuously but in order of rank, with the French princess and her
ladies, whose numbers, by good fortune, precisely go round.
But love itself is not, as yet, drawn with any power. Berowne’s
magnificent account of its attributes and effects (IV, iii., mainly
re-written in 1597) is not borne out by any representation of it
in the play. The ‘taffeta phrases’ and ‘silken terms precise,’ the
pointed sallies and punning repartees, full of a hard crackling gaiety,
neither express passion nor suggest, like the joyous quips of the later
Rosalind, that passion is lurking behind. We are spectators of a rather
protracted flirtation, a ‘way of love’ which was to occupy a minimal
place in his later drama. Armado’s dramatically unimportant seduction
of Jaquenetta is likewise a symptom of his ‘apprentice’ phase.
Equally immature is the representation of fickle love in the _Two
Gentlemen_. Proteus is Shakespeare’s only essay in the Don Juan type,
but it falls far short in psychological and dramatic force of his
portrait of the faithful Julia. Proteus’s speeches are often rhetorical
analyses of his situation rather than dramatic expressions of it.
His threat to outrage Sylvia (V, iv. 58) is, as he naively declares,
‘’gainst the nature of love,’ and it clashed no less violently with
Shakespeare’s rendering of the passion elsewhere. Even the apparent
fickleness produced by delusion flourishes only in the magical world
of the young Shakespeare’s Midsummer Dream. The inconstancy of the
Athenian lovers attests only the potency of the faery juice. No doubt
Shakespeare’s denouements, even in some of the maturest comedies, show
his lovers accepting with a singular facility a fate in love other than
that they had chosen. Olivia accepts Sebastian in default of Viola,
and the Duke Viola when Olivia is out of the question. Still less
defensible artistically is Isabel’s renunciation of the convent to
marry the Duke. But these acquiescences, even if they were not touched
with the frequent perfunctoriness of Shakespeare’s finales, are not to
be classed with deliberate inconstancy.
A second mark of unripeness in the conception of love is extravagant
magnanimity. This, like other kinds of unnatural virtue, was a part
of the heritage from mediæval romance, fortified with Roman legend.
The antique exaltation of friendship concurred with the Germanic
absoluteness of faithful devotion, and for the mediæval mind the most
convincing way of attesting this was by the surrender of a mistress.
In the tenth book of the _Decamerone_ Boccaccio collects the most
admired examples of ‘things done generously and magnificently,’ chiefly
in matters of love; one of them is the tale of Tito and Gisippo
(_Decamerone_, X, 8), where, Tito having fallen in love with his
friend’s bride, Gisippo ‘generously’ resigns to him all but the name of
husband. The story, quoted in Sir T. Elyot’s _Governour_ (1531), was
well known in Elizabethan England, and fell in with the fantastical
world of Fletcher’s Romanticism. But the humanity and veracity of the
mature Shakespeare rejected these extravagances as the cognate genius
of the mature Chaucer had done before him. Chaucer lived to mock at the
legendary magnanimity of Griselda, so devoutly related in the _Clerkes
Tale_; and it was only the young Shakespeare who could have made
Valentine’s astounding offer, in the _Two Gentlemen_, to resign ‘all
his rights’ in his bride to the ‘friend’ from whose offer of violence
he has only a moment before rescued her (V, vi. 83).[2]
A second variety of extravagant magnanimity was the recurring situation
of the girl, who, deserted by her lover, follows him in disguise,
takes service as his page, and in that capacity is employed by him
to further his suit to a new mistress. This motive was of the purest
romantic lineage; having first won vogue in Europe through Montemayor’s
_Diana_ (1558, trans. 1588), and in England by Sidney’s _Arcadia_
(1581, publ. 1590). On the London stage it profited by the special
piquancy attaching to the rôles of girls in masculine disguise when
the actors were boys, and its blend of audacious adventure and devoted
self-sacrifice gave the Elizabethan auditor precisely the kind of
composite thrill he loved.
For some forms of sex-confusion Shakespeare throughout his career
retained an unmistakable liking. But the finer instincts of his
ripening art gradually restricted its scope. Viola, in the original
story (Bandello, II, 36) follows a faithless lover; in _Twelfth
Night_, wrecked on the Illyrian coast, she disguises herself merely
for safety, takes service with the Duke as a complete stranger, and
only subsequently falls in love with him. The change indicates with
precision Shakespeare’s attitude at this date (_c._ 1600) to this type
of situation. He was still quite ready to exploit the rather elementary
comedy arising out of sex-confusion--to paint with gusto Viola’s
embarrassments as the object of Olivia’s passion and Sir Andrew’s
challenge, or the brilliant pranks of Rosalind in a like position. But
he would not now approach these situations by the romantic avenue of a
love-sick woman’s pursuit. In his latest plays he shows disrelish even
for the delightful fun evolved from sex-confusion in _Twelfth Night_
and _As you like it_. The adventures of Imogen in disguise are purely
pathetic. Pisanio indeed proposes, and Imogen agrees, to follow her
husband to Italy in disguise; but this opening is significantly not
followed up. (_Cymbeline_, III, iv. 150 f.)
But in the _Two Gentlemen_, the entire motive without curtailment
or qualification is presented in the adventures of Julia. Abandoned
by Proteus, she follows him in disguise, takes service as his page,
and is employed as go-between in his new courtship of Silvia. To the
young Shakespeare the situation was still wholly congenial, and he
availed himself of its opportunities of pathos without reserve, though
with incomplete power. His riper technique, fortified probably by a
closer acquaintance with the spirited and high-bred womanhood of the
Portias and Rosalinds of his time, withdrew his interest, perhaps
his belief, from the risky psychology of Julia’s self-assertion and
self-abnegation. Like other strained situations suggested by ‘golden
tongued romance,’ it fell away before the consolidated experience, the
genial worldliness, the poetized normality, of his riper art.
The case of another devoted pursuer of an unwilling man is more
complicated, and calls for closer examination. _All’s Well That
Ends Well_ has already been referred to as an example of the
paradox-plotting congenial to the young Shakespeare. But Helena’s
passion and her sacrifices for the man whose love she seeks ally her
also with the Julia type. Yet internal evidence leaves no doubt that
this play, though originally written, and therefore planned, in the
early nineties, was revised by Shakespeare at a date not far remote
from that of Hamlet. If the paradox-subject was the apprentice’s eager
choice, the artist at the height of his power did not reject its
challenge. In the original story (_Decamerone_, III, 9) the flavour of
paradox was even more pronounced. Like the other tales of the Third
Day, it describes one who _alcuna cosa molto da lui desiderata con
industria acquistasse_. Giletta of Narbonne succeeds in effect by sheer
audacity and enterprise; and Boccaccio’s readers doubtless enjoyed
this inversion of the usual rôles, where a masterful girl captures a
reluctant man. Shakespeare’s earlier version was probably the lost
_Love’s Labour’s Won_ mentioned by Meres, and the title emphasizes the
element of resolute and unhesitating pursuit which marks the original,
and was probably more pronounced in the earlier than in the revised
play.
For it is plain that precisely the resolute pursuit of a resisting
man was uncongenial to Shakespeare’s riper art, because unnatural
in the type of high-bred and refined womanhood whose ways in love
reflected his ideal of healthy love-making. Helena, as the heroine and
predominant figure of the play, had to be of the sisterhood of Portia
and Rosalind and Beatrice and Viola. But if the plot forbad this?
And clearly, the most hazardous incident of all (the substitution of
Helen for Diana) could not be eliminated without breaking up the plot
altogether. Why then take up the old play at all? Plainly there must
have been in the fundamental theme something which Shakespeare was
unwilling to lose as well as something that he would have wished away.
This something that attracted him was evidently Helen’s clear-sighted
resolution in itself; in this she is, in fact, a true sister of
Portia and Rosalind, though her seriousness is not, like theirs,
irradiated with laughter. Could she be visibly endowed with this grace
of clear sight and will, yet at the same time be rather drawn on by
circumstances to the final conquest of Bertram than herself the active
agent in it? Somewhat thus must the problem have presented itself to
Shakespeare. Did he completely solve it? I think not. But we can to
some extent follow his procedure.
Strength and delicacy are from the first blended in Helen. Her famous
lines (I, i. 231):
Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie
Which we ascribe to heaven.
strike the keynote of her resolute temper. Yet her love, a maiden’s
idolatry, is content without possession; with her, ‘Dian’ is ‘both
herself and love’ (I, iii. 218). If she forms plans for showing her
merit and thus commending herself in Bertram’s eyes, she takes no step
herself; it is the Countess who, having discovered her love, welcomes
her prospective daughter-in-law and sends her with all proper convoy to
court to ‘cure the king.’ Her choosing of Bertram (II, iii. 109) is an
offer of life-long service, not the appropriation of a well-won prize.
And when Bertram bluntly declares that he ‘cannot love her nor will
strive to do it,’ she proposes, turning to the king, to withdraw her
whole claim:
That you are well restored, my lord, I’m glad;
Let the rest go.
The crucial situation, however, for her (and for Shakespeare) begins
only with Bertram’s definite departure, and scornful intimation of the
conditions on which he will be her husband. Giletta, on receiving the
corresponding message, had made up her mind at once what to do; had
arranged her affairs and set out on the _soi-disant_ pilgrimage to
Florence, where Beltramo she knows will be found. Helena’s procedure
is less clear. Two distinct courses were open to her. She might, like
Giletta, make direct for Bertram at Florence, under the pretext of
going on a pilgrimage. Or she might finally surrender the pursuit of
a husband who had decisively shown he did not love her, as she had
already proposed to do when he had only declared that he did not. The
second was unquestionably more in keeping with Helen’s character. But
the first was more in keeping with the plot. It might well be that
Shakespeare’s Helen would hesitate between the two. But it is in any
case probable that Shakespeare hesitated, and that the marks of his
hesitation have not been effaced from the text.
On reading Bertram’s letter she is, like Imogen when she reads
Posthumus’s, for the moment overwhelmed. ‘This is a dreadful sentence.’
She hardly speaks, and gives no hint to the Countess of her thoughts.
But when she is alone she breaks out in the great passionate monologue
of renunciation (III, ii. 102 f.)....
No, come thou home, Rousillon,
Whence honour but of danger wins a scar,
As oft it loses all: I will be gone;
My being here it is that holds thee hence:
Shall I stay here to do’t? no, no, although
The air of paradise did fan the house,
And angels office’d all: I will be gone....
This can only imply, since she is alone, that she sincerely proposes to
give up all claim to her nominal husband.
Nevertheless, in Scene iv., the Countess is seen reading a letter from
Helen which declares that she has gone as a pilgrim to Saint Jaques,
in Florence. She begs the Countess, it is true, to summon Bertram home
to live there in peace while she in the far land does penance for her
‘ambitious love.’ Was this a subterfuge, like Giletta’s, or was it her
sincere intention as we should infer from the previous monologue? If it
is the first, Helena comes nearer to the crafty duplicity of Giletta
than anywhere else in the play, and this towards the Countess who
has just indignantly renounced her stubborn son, and taken Helena to
her heart as her sole child (III, ii. 71). But if it is the second,
we cannot but ask why then, if Helena means _bona fide_ to avoid
Bertram and leave him free, she chooses for her pilgrimage precisely
the one place in the world in which she knows he will be found? And
this awkward question remains un-answered, notwithstanding the evident
effort to allow us to believe in Helena’s innocent good faith. Giletta,
on arriving at Florence, takes up her abode at an inn, ‘eager to hear
news of her lord.’ Helena arrives, apparently concerned only to learn
the way to St. Jacques, and where the pilgrims bound thither found
lodging. Then Bertram is mentioned; she learns that he is known, and
has made advances to Diana; presently he passes by, and now at length
Helen deliberately and unhesitatingly takes measures to fulfil his
‘impossible’ conditions.
Helena’s conduct appears, then, to fluctuate, without clear
explanation, between resolute pursuit and dignified renunciation.
There can be no doubt that the former type of procedure represents the
earlier, the latter the riper, mind of Shakespeare, in the treatment
of love. The letter to the Countess, of III, iv., is, like all his
verse-letters, early work; the great preceding monologue is in the
richly imaginative phrase and daringly yet harmoniously moulded verse
of the Hamlet period. He set out to fit a character based upon a nobler
type of love into a plot based upon a grosser; and even he could not
effect this without some straining of the stuff, and here and there a
palpable rent.