SHAKESPEARE
Our study has perhaps already made it evident that Shakespeare's tragedies
were in many ways the product of a rapid and complex evolution. At the same
time it is clear that, until Shakespeare, Elizabethan tragedy with all its
genius and innovations had failed to attain finality of art, or to mark out
any sure pathway thither. It was still in its formative period when he
created out of it something new and immortal, and its development continued
after his death mainly in response to forces not of his initiating. For the
past two centuries, to a constantly increasing body of spectators and
readers, his tragedies have had a life entirely unconnected with the works
of his contemporaries, an existence that has dominated our theatres and our
conceptions of tragedy, and become a part of the daily living and the
permanent ideals of the race. It is therefore necessary to separate his
plays from the mass of tragedies, and to review them for a moment as the
creations of a genius that was the chief creator as well as the glory of
English tragedy.
Two points of view that have been largely maintained in nineteenth century
criticism of Shakespeare may, however, be neglected in our summary. His
plays have been viewed as the reflection of his personal experiences and
emotions; and his return to tragic themes about 1600 and his occupation
with them for the next eight years have been connected with a supposed
period of spiritual depression in his own life. Again, the generalization
of experience and the abundant wisdom of his tragedies have been viewed as
the result of a conscious and rather systematic philosophy of life. Much
might be said for these attitudes of criticism. Any attempt to describe the
plays in terms of our emotions as readers is likely to result in the
attribution of those emotions to the author, an interesting process of
analogy and one hardly to be disproved. Any attempt to survey his work as a
whole and to relate its parts is likely to result in the systemization of
his message and philosophy. But for students of the growth of his dramatic
art under the peculiar conditions of the reigns of Elizabeth and James,
these nineteenth century points of view involve dangerous critical
anachronisms. Shakespeare does not seem to have been a lyric Shelley or
Byron, making poetry out of his changing moods, or a Tennyson or Browning
generalizing life in the persons of his men and women. There seems no
reason for separating him from his companion poets and playwrights. Like
them he was in the first place telling a story for the stage; like them he
found in these plays opportunity for the expression of his knowledge of
human motives in the guise of beautiful verse; and like them, when he chose
tragic themes, he became absorbed in the presentation of the tragic facts
and problems of life. Our attempt to determine his relations to them is not
to discover indebtedness large or minute, but rather by the safest approach
to arrive at a right appreciation of his genius and its transcendent
contribution to tragedy.
For the purpose of our survey we may have the four great tragedies chiefly
in mind. The early tragedies are manifestly the products of an experimental
period and the precursors of the latter plays; and the three Roman
histories have a subordinate and contributory rather than an essential and
preeminent part in his achievement in tragedy. Whatever can be said of the
four great tragedies applies in its essentials to all.
All these plays taken together illustrate the extraordinary amalgamation of
the medieval and classical inheritances that English tragedy had received
as a birthright. No play escapes from its narrative sources, and some are
bound closely by them; yet the choice of sources often indicates the
influence of the Senecan formula, sensational externals giving opportunity
for an introspective analysis of emotional crises, notably in the stories
of crime, revenge, and retribution. Their enormous variety of incident,
their mingling of the comic and the tragic, their admission of physical
horrors, deaths, and spectacles mark the survival of the medieval
tradition, while the aphoristic and heightened style, the ghosts and the
soliloquies are derivatives from Seneca. The freedom of the medieval stage
to the presentation of all sorts of matters accounts in part for their
splendid comprehensiveness, while classical theory is partly responsible
for their restriction to momentous events and supernormal persons. Their
structure remains epic and popular, but progress toward dramatic unity
seems conditioned by the Senecan five-act scheme. The medieval idea of the
pagan deity Fortune is preserved; and conceptions of good and evil, like
those of the morality, stand side by side with classical conceptions of the
struggle between the individual and fate. The union of these diverse
elements has become too close for disentanglement. "Macbeth," based upon
Holinshed's chronicle, comes nearest in conception and treatment to
classical tragedy; "Antony and Cleopatra" in structure and method reverts
the nearest to medieval models.
More distinct contemporary influences reappear similarly amalgamated and
transformed. In "Hamlet" we have a play closely related to those of a
particular species; but in the other plays of Shakespeare's maturity
nothing like close relationship can be found to the great examples of
Marlowe, to the peculiar type introduced by Kyd and developed by Marston,
or to the contemporary efforts of Chapman and Jonson. Any one play
doubtless responded to a tangle of influences not now to be separated.
Current popular plays, practices on the stage, the personalities of the
actors, Shakespeare's own preceding plays, contemporary non-dramatic
literature, current events such as the Essex rebellion or the Gunpowder
Plot, and hosts of other influences were at work directing the development
of an old story into a tragedy. Taking the plays as a body, some of the
more important of these limiting and directing influences still remain
discernible in the transformed result.
All the tragedies but "Othello" and "Romeo and Juliet," only partial
exceptions, relate the falls of princes and the revolutions of kingdoms.
These stories of princes are of the same kind as in other Elizabethan
tragedy. In a setting of court and camp they place sensational crimes, and
trace the accompaniments and consequences. Their themes are revenge,
madness, tyranny, conspiracy, lust, adultery, and jealousy. They abound in
villany, intrigue, and slaughter. They avoid Senecan atrocities and the
abnormal phases of lust; but the tearing out of Gloster's eyes recalls the
horrors of the early plays; while revenge, conspiracy, and villany are as
prominent as in the contemporary tragedies of Marston, Jonson, and Chapman.
Three of the stories include ghosts, while in "Macbeth" the weird sisters
offer an opportunity for a most original treatment of the supernatural.
Comedy is always combined with tragedy, and the medieval tradition and the
popular taste for an emotional contrast receive artistic vindication in the
grotesqueness of "Hamlet" and "Lear." Each plot, like those of Marlowe's
plays, centres about a great personality and illustrates a temperament
dominated by passion. It traces the course of folly, mistake, or sin to the
wages of death as in "Lear," "Othello," and "Antony and Cleopatra"; or it
begins with a murder and records its progeny of crime and death as in
"Julius Caesar," "Hamlet," and "Macbeth."
Shakespeare's choice of stories was clearly determined by the Elizabethan
conception of tragedy and by the current tastes of the theatre. And by
these stories his imagination was directed and limited. However absorbed he
became in character or ethics, he never neglected the plot or the theatre.
Consequently the great revelation of tragic fact which he gave to posterity
was limited by these stories of crime and hampered by their improbabilities
and stage effects. The tragedy of ambition is limited to the story of a
murderer who sees a ghost; and the tragedy of ingratitude is joined to a
relation of senile folly, crime, and the humors of Tom of Bedlam. Even his
interpretation of human motives suffers, for the bloodthirstiness of Hamlet
and the perverse reticence of Cordelia belong to the old plots as much as
to the characters. Yet Shakespeare's greatness of mind no less than his
responsiveness to contemporary taste appears in his very choice of
material. Whether he took the oft-told tragedies of Caesar, Brutus, Antony
and Cleopatra, or the old plays of Hamlet and Lear, or the neglected themes
of Othello and Macbeth, he chose always stories of great dramatic interest
and those that presented the range and vicissitudes of human passion. His
attraction for each story was evidently in the emotional conflict that made
each protagonist a great acting part and also a fascinating study of human
motive.
Moreover, in his general treatment of this material there is a uniformity
that gives some hint of a Shakespearean definition of tragedy. In each play
a man of great attainments is presented as involved in a moral conflict
that results in his death. This conflict is two-fold, internal between
opposing desires, and external against some persons of the counter-actions.
Conflicting forces contend for mastery in the hero's breast, and from their
confusion he drives on to action that is disastrous. The unusual powers,
the best potentialities, of his nature are opposed and thwarted by the
forces of chance and circumstance beyond his control; by the force of evil,
whether in his own breast or represented by the crime and intrigue of
others; and still further, by a defect or deficiency in his own
personality. The force of chance, equivalent to the Greek Fate, plays a
part in all tragic story and drama; the power of evil without or within was
the counter-force in medieval drama, and was the theme most powerfully
dwelt upon by Shakespeare's immediate contemporaries. The fateful power of
incompatibility of temperament with conditions of life seems to have been
Shakespeare's own conception.
In Sophocles, arrogance and audacity are accounted evil; in Marlowe and
Chapman, it is intensity of desire that drives to disaster; but in
Shakespeare the melancholy and reflective temper of Hamlet and the generous
and credulous magnanimity of Othello are the allies of untoward
circumstance and designing villany in bringing suffering to the good and
failure to the potent. The greatness of Shakespeare's conception, however,
results from the massing of all these combatants against the hero. The
conflict thus gains in the comprehensiveness of its presentation of life;
and human nature in the face of such odds becomes magnificent even in
failure. Hero wars with villain; human intrepidity and wisdom with chance
and destiny; conscience with sin; greatness of purpose with crippling
defects of temperament.
Such a conception of tragedy involves a recognition of the blindness of
chance that cannot be squared with any theory of poetic justice or
theological view of the rewards due to virtue. But it also involves a
recognition of moral law that results in the punishment of its violators.
The villains never escape as they do in comedy. The wages of sin are always
death, though the reward of virtue is not happiness. The vastness of evil
in the world, its malignant influence, its temporary triumphs are conceived
in a manner not different from that of contemporary thought. The doctrines
of total depravity and of moral responsibility go side by side as in
medieval drama, theology, and psychology. In the depiction of the waste of
effort, the expense of spirit, the crippling of greatness by weakness, the
ineffectually of virtue, Shakespeare gave a far more comprehensive and a
far more penetrating representation of tragic fact than the world had yet
known, but without professing any solution of its mysteries.
Such a conception gives unity to the action of each play, but not always a
unity that governs details of structure. The structure of a tragedy cannot
be described in terms of a system, for the dramatic presentation of each
play differs from the others and conforms to the story it relates. There
are many survivals of the early epic lawlessness, as in "Antony and
Cleopatra" and "Lear"; and in no play is the main action kept entirely free
from intruding incongruities. Neither act nor scene receives much regard as
an integral unit of structure. The most noticeable structural division is
due to an event of extraordinary importance reached somewhere in the middle
of the play. This point, to which the terms climax or crisis are sometimes
applicable, brings to an end one important development of the action, and
thus divides the play into two parts. Caesar's murder, Duncan's murder,
Lear's madness complete one course of tragic incident and introduce us to
another.
The effectiveness of Shakespeare's construction, however, was not due to a
formulation of system or rule but to his intuition and experience. His
sense of what parts of a narrative should be acted and what parts not, had
developed beyond that of most of his contemporaries. In comparison with his
own earlier plays the tragedies contain little, whether comic, spectacular,
or essential to the main tragic action, which had not a manifest value on
the stage. His ability to create great dramatic situations was also at its
height, and the great scenes are prepared for and emphasized by what
precedes, so that they gain all the effect possible from the dramatic
construction. Thus, the appearance of the ghost, the play within the play,
the funeral of Ophelia, and the final slaughter are given a value in the
mere narration of the story for which there is no parallel in the many
other treatments of similar stories. Of far more importance is his use of
the developments of character as the determining factors of the progress of
the dramatic narrative. The rapidity with which the first two acts of
"Macbeth" hurry us to the murder of Duncan, the tremendous climactic
pressure of the first three acts of "Lear," are extraordinary examples of
his power to compel incidents to reveal the course of motive convincingly.
In each play the order of incidents becomes a logical development from the
characters of the actors; each deed, thought, or speech has its sequence.
There are no tricks, no surprises, no sudden conversions of character. Once
admit the premises, a person of a certain temperament, facing a certain
situation, and subject to a certain accident, mistake, or folly, and we
cannot escape the conclusion. The dramatic necessities of character are
never violated. From the clear exposition of the first scene, the progress
is inevitable to the end.
The persons of the plays spring from the old stories, and by these the
study of their motives is in many ways limited. It is limited again by the
types and conditions of stage-land. The bloody tyrant, the hesitating
avenger, the Machiavellian villain come hence. The acts which they commit,
their moods, motives, their very language depend in part on the
representatives of these types that had long been familiar to the audiences
of the theatres. Yet the host of individual personalities are the result
of a most profound and fresh observation of an almost boundless range of
life. That interest in characterization which distinguishes the early drama
and finds its main illustration in Shakespeare's own practice in the
preceding decade here comes to its culmination. Not only the main actor,
but the most conventional part, the most absurd business, the merest
supernumerary, receives its touch of truth. And something more than truth
to life or knowledge of motive is manifest. The great characters are cast
in large moulds. They represent the courses of the master passions.
Smallness of horizon, triviality of design, feebleness of mind or body are
absent. Momentous crises that try men's souls are the real subjects of the
tragedies. The accidents of dress, or manner, or time, or race, the
incidents of action, are forgotten as revenge, jealousy, irresolution, and
lust seize their splendid prey. The greatness of human nature, the power of
the human will, the responsibility of the individual remain. There is no
belittling of reason even when it breaks under the crash of the storm. Iago
is no mere stage villain, though he has all the characteristics of the
type; nor is he merely a transcript from life, though he has all the
variety and plausibility of a human being. He is the embodiment of our
countless evil impulses, the incarnation of depravity. So with all the
others. They are human in their truth; they are magnificent idealizations
in the range and value of their manifold suggestiveness; they leave the
stage to become the habitants of our imaginations, contributing to our
reflections their embodiments of good and evil, folly and reason,
resolution and doubt.
They speak a language all their own, though with resemblances to their
kinsmen in the other Elizabethan tragedies. The blank verse, far more
flexible than in the early plays, presents a triumphant union of the
conflicting tendencies toward decoration and naturalness observed in the
other dramatists; and it is freely mingled with hardly less masterly prose.
Marvelous in comparison with preceding verse is its extreme condensation in
spite of its opulence of figures and aphorisms. Although crowded with
thought and image, it is nevertheless, in its response to the varying
persons and moods, superbly dramatic. A critic who is both a poet and a
philosopher[21] objects to Macbeth's dagger "unmannerly breech'd with gore"
as violent and crude in comparison with the historical reminiscences with
which Homer might have made Achilles describe the weapon. But recall the
scene. Macbeth has murdered the grooms and rushes from the chamber to
confront the fearful suspicions of Duncan's sons and friends. Surely, his
false and frenzied excuses must be over-fanciful, violent, and crude.
"Here lay Duncan,
His silver skin laced with his golden blood,
And his gash'd stabs look'd like a breach in nature
For ruin's wasteful entrance: there, the murderers,
Steep'd in the colours of their trade, their daggers
Unmannerly breech'd with gore."
Such a style, however, does not readily give up opportunities for aphorism
or beauty for the sake of absolute truth to situation or character. Still
less does it mimic actual speech. It does give a potency to the stories,
otherwise hardly conceivable; and it adds to truth of character the
allurement of music and picture, and the idealization of a magnified
suggestiveness. A father has reason to curse his daughter--gesture and
incoherent words might correctly represent life; a plain sentence of
Ibsen's might convey the tragedy of the situation--but it is the
extravagant and terrible imprecation of Lear that has for centuries made
men's imaginations shudder. Style such as this the drama will never
recover. We shall sooner find another Shakespeare to blend its diverse
elements than a host of dramatists, like the Elizabethans, fascinated by a
newly discovered world of poetry and daringly adventurous in search of
melody of verse, wealth of aphorism, luxury of fantasy, and truth to
character.
The effect of Shakespeare's tragedies on spectator or reader is so complex
as to defy analysis. Incidental wisdom, effective scene, immortal story all
contribute; but the main sources of their abiding impressiveness have
surely been the characterization and the poetic style. If we must continue
to seek for a katharsis, do not they supply it? The great tragedies are
full of disaster, wrong, and suffering. The world they reveal is not the
abode of happiness, but of darkness and remorse. Though the bad are
punished, the good are not rewarded. Sweetness and innocence suffer and
perish along with foulness and malevolence. The noblest spirits are
broken; the wages of mortal effort are failure. There are many "breaches in
nature for ruin's wasteful entrance." Nor does the life hereafter offer a
promise of compensation. Death ends all,--that is the great catastrophe
toward which human endeavor precipitates itself. This is not Shakespeare's
view of life, but it is his view of the tragedy of life, and its effect
upon us is gloomy, overpowering, heartrending. But everywhere this tragedy
of life is revealed in verse infinitely appealing to intellectual analysis
and to imaginative exhilaration. Everywhere there are men and women, not
dead but living, representative of much that is most intensely and
universally interesting in life, and the permanent guests of our
reflection. The old ethical adage that it does not so much matter what men
do as what they are has a particular truth when applied to the people of
Shakespeare. That they do this or that, love, murder, die, is in the story;
what they are remains the possession of humanity. Our horror at the
successful villany of Iago finds a certain relief in the intellectual
pleasure and admiration at the creator's achievement; it accomplishes a
certain purification in its application to the Iago in ourselves. Still
more do the persons who most excite our sympathy survive the intolerable
emotions that first greet their misfortunes. When we read "Othello" we feel
an overwhelming pity, a fierce resentment, but we would not erase from our
possession the memory of Desdemona and her Moor. The misery and wrong and
death go to make up in our reflection the beings whom we love and cherish.
It is Lear's fivefold "never" that completes for us the loveliness of
Cordelia.
A comparison of the tragedies with the masterpieces of other national
dramas might disclose their faults but would not diminish their glories.
Faults in plenty there surely are, whether judgment be taken of classicists
or realists, or of the best standards of the Elizabethans. There are many
quibbles or fantasies of diction that might be criticised, many bits of
dialogue or stage spectacle that might be omitted without detracting from
the total impressiveness. How many minor inconsistencies of plot or
characterization might be corrected. How complicated and bewildering is
"Hamlet" in comparison with the simpler harmony of "Antigone." How involved
and cumbrous, and how undignified in its appeal to the emotions, is much of
"Antony and Cleopatra" in comparison with "Phedre." How impossible and
fantastic is much of "Lear" in comparison with "Ghosts." But Shakespeare's
defects and deficiencies belong to his time and to his methods. They are
inseparable, indeed, from the very means on which depend his consummate
results. Not in response to literary tradition, but to the public theatre;
not by a refined but by a daring art; not by simplicity and unity, but by
complexity and opulence of effect; not by devotion to creed or science or
fact, but by the idealization and sublimation of man's emotional nature,
did Shakespeare give to his dramas their imperishable wealth of life.
FOOTNOTES:
[21] George Santayana, _Reason in Art_, p. 113.