WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE, (CONTINUED.)
The Grounds of his Fame. Creation of Character. Imagination and Fancy.
Power of Expression. His Faults. Influence of Elizabeth. Sonnets.
Ireland and Collier. Concordance. Other Writers.
THE GROUNDS OF HIS FAME.
From what has been said, it is manifest that as to his plots and
historical reproductions, Shakspeare has little merit but taste in
selection; and indeed in most cases, had he invented the stories, his
merit would not have been great: what then is the true secret of his power
and of his fame? This question is not difficult to answer.
First, these are due to his wonderful insight into human nature, and the
philosophy of human life: he dissects the human mind in all its
conditions, and by this vivisection he displays its workings as it lives
and throbs; he divines the secret impulses of all ages and
characters--childhood, boyhood, manhood, girlhood, and womanhood; men of
peace, and men of war; clowns, nobles, and kings. His large heart was
sympathetic with all, and even most so with the lowly and suffering; he
shows us to ourselves, and enables us to use that knowledge for our
profit. All the virtues are held up to our imitation and praise, and all
the vices are scourged and rendered odious in our sight. To read
Shakspeare aright is of the nature of honest self-examination, that most
difficult and most necessary of duties.
CREATION OF CHARACTER.--Second: He stands supreme in the creation of
character, which may be considered the distinguishing mark of the highest
literary genius. The men and women whom he has made are not stage-puppets
moved by hidden strings; they are real. We know them as intimately as the
friends and acquaintances who visit us, or the people whom we accost in
our daily walks.
And again, in this varied delineation of character, Shakspeare less than
any other author either obtrudes or repeats himself. Unlike Byron, he is
nowhere his own hero: unlike most modern novelists, he fashions men who,
while they have the generic human resemblance, differ from each other like
those of flesh and blood around us: he has presented a hundred phases of
love, passion, ambition, jealousy, revenge, treachery, and cruelty, and
each distinct from the others of its kind; but lest any character should
degenerate into an allegorical representation of a single virtue or vice,
he has provided it with the other lineaments necessary to produce in it a
rare human identity.
The stock company of most writers is limited, and does arduous duty in
each new play or romance; so that we detect in the comic actor, who is now
convulsing the pit with laughter, the same person who a little while ago
died heroically to slow music in the tragedy. Each character in Shakspeare
plays but one part, and plays it skilfully and well. And who has portrayed
the character of woman like Shakspeare?--the grand sorrow of the
repudiated Catharine, the incorruptible chastity of Isabella, the
cleverness of Portia, the loves of Jessica and of Juliet, the innocent
curiosity of Miranda, the broken heart and crazed brain of the fair
Ophelia.
In this connection also should be noticed his powers of grouping and
composition; which, in the words of one of his biographers, "present to us
pictures from the realms of spirits and from fairyland, which in deep
reflection and in useful maxims, yield nothing to the pages of the
philosophers, and which glow with all the poetic beauty that an
exhaustless fancy could shower upon them."
IMAGINATION AND FANCY.--And this brings us to notice, in the third place,
his rare gifts of imagination and of fancy; those instruments of the
representative faculty by which objects of sense and of mind are held up
to view in new, varied, and vivid lights. Many of his tragedies abound in
imaginative pictures, while there are not in the realm of Fancy's fairy
frostwork more exquisite representations than those found in the _Tempest_
and the _Midsummer Night's Dream_.
POWER OF EXPRESSION.--Fourth, Shakspeare is remarkable for the power and
felicity of his expression. He adapts his language to the persons who use
it, and thus we pass from the pompous grandiloquence of king and herald to
the common English and coarse conceits of clown and nurse and
grave-digger; from the bombastic speech of Glendower and the rhapsodies of
Hotspur to the slang and jests of Falstaff.
But something more is meant by felicity of expression than this. It
applies to the apt words which present pithy bits of household philosophy,
and to the beautiful words which convey the higher sentiments and flights
of fancy; to the simple words couching grand thoughts with such exquisite
aptness that they seem made for each other, so that no other words would
do as well, and to the dainty songs, like those of birds, which fill his
forests and gardens with melody. Thus it is that orators and essayists
give dignity and point to their own periods by quoting Shakspeare.
Such are a few of Shakspeare's high merits, which constitute him the
greatest poet who has ever used the English tongue--poet, moralist, and
philosopher in one.
HIS FAULTS.--If it be necessary to point out his faults, it should be
observed that most of them are those of the age and of his profession. To
both may be charged the vulgarity and lewdness of some of his
representations; which, however, err in this respect far less than the
writings of his contemporaries.
Again: in the short time allowed for the presentation of a play, before a
restless audience, as soon as the plot was fairly shadowed, the hearers
were anxious for the _dénouement_. And so Shakspeare, careless of future
fame, frequently displays a singular disparity between the parts. He has
so much of detail in the first two acts, that in order to preserve the
symmetry, five or six more would be necessary. Thus conclusions are
hurried, when, as works of art, they should be the most elaborated.
He has sometimes been accused of obscurity in expression, which renders
some of his passages difficult to be understood by commentators; but this,
in most cases, is the fault of his editors. The cases are exceptional and
unimportant. His anachronisms and historical inaccuracies have already
been referred to. His greatest admirers will allow that his wit and humor
are very often forced and frequently out of place; but here, too, he
should be leniently judged. These sallies of wit were meant rather to
"tickle the ears of the groundlings" than as just subjects for criticism
by later scholars. We know that old jokes, bad puns, and innuendoes are
needed on the stage at the present day. Shakspeare used them for the same
ephemeral purpose then; and had he sent down corrected versions to
posterity, they would have been purged of these.
INFLUENCE OF ELIZABETH.--Enough has been said to show in what manner
Shakspeare represents his age, and indeed many former periods of English
history. There are numerous passages which display the influence of
Elizabeth. It was at her request that he wrote the _Merry Wives of
Windsor_, in which Falstaff is depicted as a lover: the play of Henry
VIII., criticizing the queen's father, was not produced until after her
death. His pure women, like those of Spenser, are drawn after a queenly
model. It is known that Elizabeth was very susceptible to admiration, but
did not wish to be considered so; and Shakspeare paid the most delicate
and courtly tribute to her vanity, in those exquisite lines from the
_Midsummer Night's Dream_, showing how powerless Cupid was to touch her
heart:
A certain aim he took
At a fair vestal, throned by the west;
And loos'd his love-shaft smartly from his bow,
As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts:
But I might see young Cupid's fiery shaft
Quench'd in the chaste beams of the wat'ry moon;
And _the imperial votaress passed on_,
In maiden meditation, fancy free.
SHAKSPEARE'S SONNETS.--Before his time, the sonnet had been but little
used in England, the principal writers being Surrey, Sir Walter Raleigh,
Sidney, Daniel, and Drayton. Shakspeare left one hundred and fifty-four,
which exhibit rare poetical power, and which are most of them addressed to
a person unknown, perhaps an ideal personage, whose initials are W. H.
Although chiefly addressed to a man, they are of an amatory nature, and
dwell strongly upon human frailty, infidelity, and treachery, from which
he seems to have suffered: the mystery of these poems has never been
penetrated. They were printed in 1609. "Our language," says one of his
editors, "can boast no sonnets altogether worthy of being placed by the
side of Shakspeare's, except the few which Milton poured forth--so severe
and so majestic."
It need hardly be said that Shakspeare has been translated into all modern
languages, in whole or in part. In French, by Victor Hugo and Guizot, Leon
de Wailly and Alfred de Vigny; in German, by Wieland, A. W. Schlegel, and
Bürger; in Italian, by Leoni and Carcano, and in Portuguese by La Silva.
Goethe's Apprenticeship of Wilhelm Meister is a long and profound critique
of Hamlet; and to the Germans he is quite as familiar and intelligible as
to the English.
IRELAND: COLLIER.--The most celebrated forgery of Shakspeare was that by
Samuel Ireland, the son of a Shakspearean scholar, who was an engraver and
dealer in curiosities. He wrote two plays, called _Vortigern_ and _Henry
the Second_, which he said he had discovered; and he forged a deed with
Shakspeare's autograph. By these he imposed upon his father and many
others, but eventually confessed the forgery.
One word should be said concerning the Collier controversy. John Payne
Collier was a lawyer, born in 1789, and is known as the author of an
excellent history of _English Dramatic Poetry to the Time of Shakspeare_
and _Annals of the Stage to the Restoration_. In the year 1849, he came
into possession of a copy of the folio edition of Shakspeare, published in
1632, _full of emendations_, by an early owner of the volume. In 1852 he
published these, and at once great enthusiasm was excited, for and against
the emendations: many thought them of great value, while others even went
so far as to accuse Mr. Collier of having made some of them himself. The
chief value of the work was that it led to new investigations, and has
thus thrown additional light upon the works of Shakspeare.
CONCORDANCE.--The student is referred to a very complete concordance of
Shakspeare, by Mrs. Mary Cowden Clarke, the labor of many years, by which
every line of Shakspeare may be found, and which is thus of incalculable
utility to the Shakspearean scholar.
OTHER DRAMATIC WRITERS OF THE AGE OF SHAKSPEARE.
Ben Jonson, 1573-1637: this great dramatist, who deserves a larger space,
was born in London; his father became a Puritan preacher, but after his
death, his mother's second husband put the boy at brick-making. His spirit
revolted at this, and he ran away, and served as a soldier in the Low
Countries. On his return he killed Gabriel Spencer, a fellow-actor, in a
duel, and was for some time imprisoned. His first play was a comedy
entitled _Every Man in his Humour_, acted in 1598. This was succeeded,
the next year, by _Every Man out of his Humour_. He wrote a great number
of both tragedies and comedies, among which the principal are _Cynthia's
Revels_, _Sejanus_, _Volpone_, _Catiline's Conspiracy_, and _The
Alchemist_. In 1616, he received a pension from the crown of one hundred
marks, which was increased by Charles I., in 1630, to one hundred pounds.
He was the friend of Shakspeare, and had many wit-encounters with him. In
these, Fuller compares Jonson to a great Spanish galleon, "built far
higher in learning, solid and slow in performance," and Shakspeare to an
"English man-of-war, lesser in bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn
with all tides, tack about and take advantage of all winds, by the
quickness of his wit and invention."
Massinger, 1548-1640: born at Salisbury. Is said to have written
thirty-eight plays, of which only eighteen remain. The chief of these is
the _Virgin Martyr_, in which he was assisted by Dekker. The best of the
others are _The City Madam_ and _A New Way to Pay Old Debts_, _The Fatal
Dowry_, _The Unnatural Combat_, and _The Duke of Milan_. _A New Way to Pay
Old Debts_ keeps its place upon the modern stage.
John Ford, born 1586: author of _The Lover's Melancholy_, _Love's
Sacrifice_, _Perkin Warbeck_, and _The Broken Heart_. He was a pathetic
delineator of love, especially of unhappy love. Some of his plots are
unnatural, and abhorrent to a refined taste.
Webster (dates unknown): this author is remarkable for his handling of
gloomy and terrible subjects. His best plays are _The Devil's Law Case_,
_Appius and Virginia_, _The Duchess of Malfy_, and _The White Devil_.
Hazlitt says "his _White Devil_ and _Duchess of Malfy_ come the nearest to
Shakspeare of anything we have upon record."
Francis Beaumont, 1586-1615, and John Fletcher, 1576-1625: joint authors
of plays, numbering fifty-two. A prolific union, in which it is difficult
to determine the exact authorship of each. Among the best plays are _The
Maid's Tragedy_, _Philaster_, and _Cupid's Revenge_. Many of the plots are
licentious, but in monologues they frequently rise to eloquence, and in
descriptions are picturesque and graphic.
Shirley, 1594-1666: delineates fashionable life with success. His best
plays are _The Maid's Revenge_, _The Politician_, and _The Lady of
Pleasure_. The last suggested to Van Brugh his character of Lady Townly,
in _The Provoked Husband_. Lamb says Shirley "was the last of a great
race, all of whom spoke the same language, and had a set of moral feelings
and notions in common. A new language and quite a new turn of tragic and
comic interest came in at the Restoration."
Thomas Dekker, died about 1638: wrote, besides numerous tracts,
twenty-eight plays. The principal are _Old Fortunatus_, _The Honest
Whore_, and _Satiro-Mastix, or, The Humorous Poet Untrussed_. In the last,
he satirized Ben Jonson, with whom he had quarrelled, and who had
ridiculed him in _The Poetaster_. In the Honest Whore are found those
beautiful lines so often quoted:
... the best of men
That e'er wore earth about him was a sufferer;
A soft, meek, patient, humble, tranquil spirit;
The first true gentleman that ever breathed.
Extracts from the plays mentioned may be found in Charles Lamb's
"Specimens of English Dramatic Poets who lived about the time of
Shakspeare."