What I have called the norm of love must thus rank high among the
determining forces of his mature drama. Obscured and disguised at
the outset by crude conceptions and immature technique, it gradually
grew clear, and provided the background of passion, faith, and truth
out of which, aided by misunderstandings, pleasant or grave, his most
delightful comedy and his most poignant tragedy were evolved. And other
types of love--whether they made for comedy or for tragedy, held a
relatively slight place in his work. In particular he concerns himself
only in a quite exceptional or incidental way either with the high
comedy of love or with guilty passion.
His comedy of love outside the norm for the most part resembles
burlesque. In other words, the ‘ways of love’ which he treats as
comic material are not plausible or subtle approximations to romantic
passion, but ludicrously absurd counterfeits of it. The fun is
brilliant, but it does not strike deep; it provokes the loud laugh
rather than the ‘slim feasting smile.’ It commonly springs from some
grotesque infatuation; as when, in Bottom and Titania, human grossness
and fairy fantasticality are brought together for the eternal joy
of gods and men. Ridicule of such infatuations was soon to find its
peculiar home in the Humour comedy of the later nineties, in the
prosaic satirical air of which the romantic or normal love had no
place at all. It is hardly an accident that the plays in which this
Shakesperean comedy of grotesque infatuation in love runs riot were
produced when the Humour comedy was at the height of its vogue, or that
they bear clear traces of its influence. _Twelfth Night_ is far from
being as a whole a Comedy of Humours. Viola’s maiden passion is touched
with a charm wholly alien to it. The Duke, with his opal and taffeta
mind, a self-pleasing artist in emotion, who feeds his languid passion
on music, and does his wooing by proxy, is perhaps Shakespeare’s only
serious study of love as a humour. Of still more laughable futility
is the love-making of Malvolio, with his smiles and yellow stockings,
and Sir Andrew, who gets no further than learning an assortment of
fine words for an interview that never comes off--a comic counterpart
to Iago’s miserable dupe, Roderigo. _The Merry Wives_ also shows the
influence of the Humour comedy. Slender is a true ‘country-gull,’
nowhere more obviously than in his wooing, or preparations to woo,
sweet Anne Page. The adventures of Falstaff in pursuit of Mrs. Ford and
Mrs. Page are brilliantly executed examples of a kind of comic effect
which Shakespeare’s riper art elsewhere disdained. Officially required
to represent ‘Falstaff in love,’ he turned the laugh against the lover
by representing his ill-luck in pursuing the only ‘way of love’ he knew.
V
Finally, as Shakespeare recognized for purposes of comedy certain
types of love-making alien to the ideal norm, so too, more rarely,
for the purposes of tragedy. Ideal love, as has been seen, occurs
constantly in the tragedies even where it does not directly affect or
participate in the tragic issues; as with France and Cordelia, Brutus
and Portia, Richard II and his queen, Coriolanus and Virgilia. But the
more penetrating sense of evil which becomes apparent in his tragic
period contributed to draw more prominently into the sphere of his art
the disastrous aspects of the relations between men and women. That he
refrained from exploiting in drama the more sinister forms of passion,
we have seen. But in some of his ripest and greatest work he drew love
with implications and under conditions, which sharply mark it off from
the ‘marriage of true minds.’ It is unstable, or lawless, or grounded
on illusion; and thus not merely succumbs easily to assault from
without, but directly breeds and fosters tragic ruin within. Even the
union of Othello and Desdemona, in every other respect a ‘marriage of
true minds’ which reaches for a moment (ii. 1) incomparable intensity
and beauty, is rendered fatally precarious by their ignorance of each
other.
Love, like everything else which grows in Hamlet’s Denmark, is touched
with insidious disease. Ophelia is wonderfully imagined in keeping with
the tragic atmosphere, an exquisite but fragile flower of the unweeded
garden where evil things run to seed and good things wither. And her
love, wholly un-Shakesperean as it is, and therefore irritating to
many readers, bears within it the seed of tragedy both for Hamlet and
herself. It is ‘a power girt round with weakness.’ She never falters
in faithful devotion to him; but the ‘sweet bells,’ her father has
told her, are ‘jangled,’ and she consents both to be the instrument
of the king and Polonius’s ‘lawful espial’ (which may, please heaven,
restore him), and to deny his access and return his gifts. She stands
alone among Shakesperean heroines in renouncing her love at a father’s
bidding. We seem to approach for once the heroic renunciations of love
in the name of principle or country which impress us in Corneille
and Racine--in _Polyeucte_ or _Bérénice_. But no halo of sublime
self-sacrifice surrounds Ophelia’s renunciation, for her or for us.
It is merely a piteous surrender, which breaks her heart, overthrows
her delicately poised reason, and removes one of the last supports of
Hamlet’s trust in goodness.
On the other hand, Shakespeare occasionally found his tragic love in
violent and lawless passion. We need not dwell on episodic incidents
like the rivalry in the love of Edmund which crowns and closes
the criminal careers of Goneril and Regan. In this case there was
little scope for the undoing of soul which is the habitual theme of
Shakesperean tragedy. But in _Measure for Measure_ an inrush of sensual
passion instantly shatters the imposing but loosely built edifice of
Angelo’s morality, and though the play was meant for comedy, and the
tragic point is thus (rather clumsily) blunted or broken off, the
spiritual undoing of him is discernible enough. Without a thought of
resistance he proceeds to act out the whole merciless catalogue of
vices which the poet of sonnet cxxix saw attending upon lust.[3] At the
same time it is clear that Isabel, with her cold austerity, is an even
greater anomaly among Shakespeare’s women. Their purity is not that of
a negative abstinence, but of whole-hearted devotion to the man they
love.
In Cressida he drew a kind of tragic love as lawless as Angelo’s and
as sensual, but insidious and seductive instead of violent. Compared
with the profligate women of Restoration Comedy she has a certain
girlish air of grace and innocence. If she betrays Troilus for Diomede
it is with a sigh and a half wistful glance back at the deserted
lover: ‘Troilus, farewell! one eye yet looks on thee’ (V, ii. 107).
Though classed by the Folio editors--hesitatingly it would seem--with
the Tragedies, this play seems to set at nought the whole scheme of
Shakesperean tragedy. Neither Troilus nor Cressida has the grandeur
without which ruin is not sublime; and their love has not the heroic
intensity of those (like Heine’s _Asra_) _welche sterben wenn sie
lieben_. The only imposing figures are those of the great captains of
the Greek and Trojan camps, who are but slightly concerned with their
love. Nevertheless, the whole effect of the play is tragic, or falls
short of tragedy only because the gloom is more unrelieved. There
are no colossal disasters, plots, crimes, or suffering, nor yet the
stormy splendour which agony beats out of the souls of Othello, Hamlet,
Antony, or Lear, and which leaves us at the close rather exultant
than depressed. This tragedy is purely depressing because it strikes
less deep; the harms do not rend and shatter, but secretly undermine
and insidiously frustrate. Cressida is a symbol of the love which may
kindle valour for a moment, but in the end saps heroism and romance at
once, and which strikes the magnificent champions of Homeric story
themselves with a futility more tragic than death, the futility hinted
savagely in the Horatian _Troiani cunnus teterrima belli Causa_, and
superbly in Faustus’s great apologue to ‘the face that launched the
thousand ships.’
In _Antony and Cleopatra_, on the other hand, a type of love not in
its origin loftier or purer than that of Troilus and Cressida is
seen dominating two souls of magnificent compass and daemonic force.
Antony is held by his serpent of old Nile in the grip of a passion
which insolently tramples on moral and institutional bonds, private
and public alike; which brings the lovers to ruin and to death; and
which yet invests their fall with a splendour beside which the triumph
of their conqueror appears cold and mean. There is no conflict, no
weighing of love and empire, as great alternatives, against each other,
in the manner of Corneille; nor does Shakespeare take sides with
either; he neither reprobates Antony, like Plutarch, for sacrificing
duty to love, nor glorifies him, like the author of the Restoration
drama, _All for Love, or the World Well Lost_; still less does he seek
to strike a balance between these views. He is no ethical theorist
trying exactly to measure right or wrong, but a great poet whose
comprehensive soul had room, together, for many kinds of excellence
incompatible in the experience of ordinary men. That Antony’s passion
for Cleopatra not only ruins his colossal power in the state but
saps his mental and moral strength is made as mercilessly clear in
Shakespeare as in Plutarch. He is ‘the noble ruin of her magic.’ But it
is equally clear that this passion enlarges and enriches his emotional
life; in a sense other than that intended by the sober Enobarbus,
A diminution in our captain’s brain
Restores his heart; (III, xiii, 198)
and enlarged feeling opens up new regions of imagination and lifts him
to unapproached heights of poetry, as in the unarming-scene with Eros
(IV, xiv.) and the farewell speeches to Cleopatra (‘I am dying, Egypt,
dying,’ IV, xv.). And Cleopatra too, in the ‘infinite variety’ of her
moods, has momentary flickerings of genuine devotion of which she was
before incapable. Momentary only, it is true; the egoist, the actress,
the coquette, are only fitfully overcome; in her dying speech itself
the accent of them all is heard. The ‘baser elements’ are not expelled,
but the nobler ‘fire and air’ to which she dreams that she is resolved,
gleam for a fitful instant in her cry ‘Husband, I come,’ to yield a
moment later to jealous alarm lest Lear should have Antony’s kiss, and
vindictive satisfaction at having outwitted Cæsar.
* * * * *
Shakespeare’s poetry takes account of so vast a number of other things,
of so many other ways of living and aspects of life, that we hardly
think even of the author of _Romeo and Juliet_ as in any special
sense the poet of Love. Nor is he, if we mean by this that he thinks
or speaks of Love in the transcendent way of Dante, or Lucretius, or
Spenser, or Shelley. Love with them is part of the vital frame of the
universe. Lucretius (in spite of his atomist creed) saw it pervading
‘all that moves below the gliding stars, the sea and its ships, the
earth and its flocks and flowers.’ Dante saw it as the force which
not only draws men and women together, but ‘moves the Sun and the
other stars.’ Spenser saw it as ‘the Lord of all the world by right,
that rules all creatures by his powerful saw.’ Shelley saw it as the
sustaining force blindly woven through the web of Being. For such
heights of poetic metaphysic we do not look in Shakespeare. He is one
of the greatest of poets, and his poetry has less almost than any
other the semblance of myth and dream; its staple is the humanity we
know, its basis the ground we tread; what we call the prose world,
far from being excluded, is genially taken in. And precisely where
he is greatest, in the sublime ruin of the tragedies, love between
the sexes has on the whole a subordinate place, and is there most
often fraught, as we have seen, with disaster and frustration. So it
seemed to Keats when he turned from ‘golden-tongued Romance’ to ‘burn
through’ the strife of ‘damnation with impassioned clay’ in _King
Lear_. Shakespeare certainly did not, so far as we can judge, regard
sexual love (like some moderns) as either the clue to human life or as
in any way related to the structure of the universe. But if, instead
of these abstract questions, we ask whether any poet has united in a
like degree veracious appreciation of love in its existing conditions
with apprehension of all its ideal possibilities, we shall not dispute
Shakespeare’s place among the foremost of the poets of love.