spells into the spungy air,” and “the spell shall sit when the curtain
has fallen.” Shakspeare might, in the consciousness of power, say this.
For this is that which he has—knowingly or unknowingly—done.
Unknowingly? Perhaps—himself borne on by the successively rising waves
of his work. For you see, Talboys, with what prolonged and severe labour
we two have arrived at knowing the reality of the case which now lies
open to us in broad light. We have needed time and pains, and the slow
settling of our understandings, to unwind the threads of delusion in
which we were encoiled and entoiled. If a strange and unexplained power
could undeniably so beguile us—a possibility of which, previously to
this examination, we never have dreamt, how do we warrant that the same
dark, nameless, mysterious power shall not equally blind the “Artificer
of Fraud?” This is matter of proposed investigation and divination,
which let whoever has will, wit, and time, presently undertake.
TALBOYS.
Why, we are doing it, sir. He will be a bold man who treats of
Othello—after Us.
NORTH.
Another question is—What is the Censure of Art on the demonstrated
inconsistency in Othello? I propose, but now deal not with it. Observe
that we have laid open a new and startling inquiry. We have demonstrated
the double time of Othello—the Chronological Fact. That is the first
step set in light—the first required piece of the work—_done_. Beyond
this, we have ploughed a furrow or two, to show and lead further
direction of the work in the wide field. We have touched on the gain to
the work by means of the duplicity—we have proposed to the
self-consciousness of all hearers and readers the psychological fact of
their own unconsciousness of the guile used towards them, or of the
success of the fallacy; and we have asked the solution of the
psychological fact. We have also asked the Criticism of Art on the
government of the time in Othello—supposing the Poet in pride and
audacity of power to have designed that which he has done. Was it High
Art?
TALBOYS.
Ay—was it High Art?
NORTH.
I dare hardly opine. Effect of high and most defying art it has surely;
but you ask again—did he know? I seem to see often that the spirit of
the Scene possessed Shakspeare, and that he fairly forgot the logical
ties which he had encoiled about him. We know the written Play, and we
may, if we are capable, know its power upon ourselves. There _are_ the
Two Times, the Long and the Short; and each exerts upon you its especial
virtue. I can believe that Shakspeare unconsciously did what Necessity
claimed—the impetuous motion on, on, on of the Passion—the long time
asked by the successive events; the forces that swayed him, each in its
turn, its own way.
TALBOYS.
Unconsciously?
NORTH.
Oh heavens! Yes—yes—no—no. Yes—no. No—yes. What you will.
“Willingly my jaws I close,
Leave! oh! leave me to repose.”
TALBOYS.
Consciously or unconsciously?
NORTH.
Talboys, Longfellow, Perpetual Præses of the Seven Feet Club, we want
Troy, Priam, Achilles, Hector, to have been. Perhaps they were—perhaps
they were not. We must be ready for two states of mind—simple belief,
which, is the temper of childhood and youth—recognition of illusion with
self-surrender, which is the attained state of criticism wise and
childlike. At last we voluntarily take on the faith which was in the
goldener age. The child believed; and the man believes. But the child
believes _this_; and the man who perceives how _this_ is a shadow,
believes _that_ beyond. _This_ he believes in play—_that_ in earnest.
The child mixed the two—the tale of the fairies and the hope of
hereafter. Union, my dear Boys, is the faculty of the young, but
division of the old. I speak of Shakspeare at five years of age; not of
Us, whom, ere we can polysyllable men’s names, dominies instruct how to
do old men’s work and to distinguish.
TALBOYS.
My dear sir, I do so love to hear your talkee talkee; but be just ever
so little a little more intelligible to ordinary mortals—
NORTH.
You ask what really happened? The Play bewilders you from
answering—accept it as it rushes along through your soul, reading or
sitting to hear and see. The main and strange fact is, that these
questions of Time, which, reading the Play backwards, force themselves
on us, never occur to us reading straight forwards. Two Necessities lie
upon your soul.
TALBOYS.
Two Necessities, sir?
NORTH.
Two Necessities lie upon your soul. You cannot believe that Othello,
suspecting his Wife, folds his arms night after night about her disrobed
bosom. As little can you believe that in the course of twelve hours the
spirit of infinite love has changed into a dagger-armed slayer. The Two
Times—marvellous as it is to say—take you into alternate possession. The
impetuous motion forwards, in the scenes and in the tenor of action,
which belong to the same Day, you feel; and you ask no questions. When
Othello and Iago speak together, you lose the knowledge of time. You see
power and not form. You feel the aroused Spirit of Jealousy: you see, in
the field of belief, a thought sown and sprung—a thought changed into a
doubt—a doubt into a dread—a dread into the cloud of death. Evidences
press, one after the other—the spirit endures change—you feel
succession—as cause and effect must succeed—you do not compute hours,
days, weeks, months;—yet confess I must, and confess you must, and
confess all the world and his wife must, that the condition is
altogether anomalous—that a time which is at once a day of the Calendar
and a month of the Calendar, does not happen anywhere out of Cyprus.
TALBOYS.
It has arisen just as you say, sir—because Two Necessities pressed. The
Passion must have its torrent, else _you_ will never endure that Othello
shall kill Desdemona. Events must have their concatenation, else—but I
stop at this the incredible anomaly, that for _Othello_ himself you
require the double time! You cannot imagine him embracing his wife,
misdoubted false; as little can you his Love measureless, between
sunrise and sunset turned into Murder.
NORTH.
Even so.
TALBOYS.
My dear sir, what really happened?
NORTH.
Oh! Talboys, Talboys. Well then—_not_ that Othello killed her upon the
first night after the arrival at Cyprus. The Cycle could not have been
so run through.
TALBOYS.
How then in reality did the Weeks pass?
NORTH.
That’s a good one! Why, I was just about to ask you—and ’tis your
indisputable duty to tell me and the anxious world—how.
TALBOYS.
I do not choose to commit myself in such a serious affair.
NORTH.
Suppose the framing of the tale into a Prose Romance. Surely, surely,
surely, no human romancer, compounding the unhappy transactions into a
prose narrative, could, could, could have put the first sowing of doubt,
and the smothering under the pillows, for incidents of one day. He would
have made Othello for a time laugh at the doubt, toss it to the winds.
Iago would have wormed about him a deal slowlier. The course of the
transactions in the Novel would have been much nearer the course of
reality.
TALBOYS.
In Cinthio’s Novel—
NORTH.
Curse Cinthio.
TALBOYS.
My Lord, I bow to your superior politeness.
NORTH.
Confound Chesterfield. My dear friend, Reality has its own reasons—a
Novel its own—and its own a Drama. Every work of art brings its own
conditions, which divide you from the literal representation of human
experience. Ask Painter, Sculptor, and Architect. Every fine art
exercises its own sleights.
TALBOYS.
In the Novel, I guess or admit that they would have been a month at
Cyprus ere Iago had stirred. What hurry? He would have watched his
time—ever and anon would have thrown in a hundred suggestions of which
we know nothing. Let any man, romancer or other, set himself to conceive
the Prose Novel. He cannot, by any possibility, conceive that he should
have been led to make but a day of it. Ergo, the Drama proceeds upon its
own Laws. No representation in art is the literal transcript of
experience.
NORTH.
The question is, what deviations—to what extent—does the particular Art
need? And why? The talked Attic Unity of Time instructs us. But
Sophocles and Shakspeare must have one view of the Stage, in essence.
You must sit out your three or four hours. You must listen and see with
expectation _intended_, like a bow drawn. To which intent Action and
Passion must press on.
TALBOYS.
Compare, sir, the One Day of Othello to the Sixteen Years of Hermione!
There, intensest Passion sustained; here, the unrolling of a romantic
adventure. Each true to the temper imposed on the hearing spectator.
NORTH.
Good. The Novel is not a Transcript—the Play is not a Transcript. Ask
not for a Transcript, for not one of those who could give it you, will.
A _conditioned imitation we desire_ and demand—and we have it in
Othello.
TALBOYS.
And put up we must with Two Times—one for your sympathy with his tempest
of heart—one for the verisimilitude of the transaction.
NORTH.
Think on the facility with which, in the Novel, Iago could have strewn
an atom of arsenic a day on Othello’s platter, to use him to the taste;
and how, in the Play, this representation is impossible. Then, the
original remaining the same, each manner of portraiture _leaves it_, and
each, after _its own Laws_.
TALBOYS.
Did not Shakspeare know as much about the Time which he was himself
making _as we do_, as much and more?
NORTH.
I doubt it. I see no necessity for believing it. We judge him as we
judge ourselves. He came to his Art as it was, and created—improving
it—from that point. An Art grows in all its constituents. The management
of the Time is a constituent in the Art of “feigned history,” as Poetry
is called by Lord Bacon. But I contend that on our Stage, to which
Shakspeare came, the management of Time was in utter neglect—an
undreamed entity; and I claim for the first foundation of any Canon
respective to this matter, acute sifting of all Plays _previous_.
TALBOYS.
Not so very many—
NORTH.
Nor so very few. Shakspeare took up the sprawling, forlorn infant,
dramatic Time. He cradled, rocked, and fed it. The bantling throve, and
crawled vigorously about on all-fours. But since then, thou Tallometer,
imagine the study that _we_ have made. Count not our Epic Poems—not our
Metrical Romances—not our Tragedies. Count our Comedies, and count above
all our Novels. I do not say that you can settle Time in these by the
almanac. They are the less poetical when you can do so; but I say that
we have with wonderful and immense diligence studied the working out of
a Story. Time being here an essential constituent, it cannot be but
that, in our more exact and critical layings-out of the chain of
occurrences, we have arrived at a tutored and jealous respect of Time—to
say nothing of our Aristotelian lessons—totally unlike anything that
existed under Eliza and James, as a general proficiency of the Art—as a
step gained in the National Criticism.
TALBOYS.
Ay, it must be difficult in the extreme for us so to divest ourselves of
our own intellectual habits and proficiency as to take up, and into our
own, the mind of that Age. But, unless we do so, we are unable to judge
what might or might not happen to any one mind of that age; and when we
affirm that Shakspeare must have known what he was doing in regard to
the Time of Othello, we are suffering under the described difficulty or
disability—
NORTH.
Why, Talboys, you are coming, day after day, to talk better and better
sense—take care you do not get too sensible—
TALBOYS.
We must never forget, sir, that the management of the Time was on that
Stage a slighted and trampled element—that what Willy gives us of it is
gratuitous, and what we must be thankful for—and finally, that he did
not distinctly scheme out, in his own conception, the Time of
Othello—very far from it.
NORTH.
I verily believe that if you or I had shown him the Time, tied up as it
is, he would have said, “Let it go hang. They won’t find it out; and, if
they do, let them make the best, the worst, and the most of it. The Play
is a good Play, and I shall spoil it with mending it.” Why, Talboys, if
Queen Elizabeth had required that the Time should be set straight, it
could not have been done. One—two—six changes would not have done it.
The Time is an entangled skein that can only be disentangled by breaking
it. For the fervour of action on the Stage, Iago could not have delayed
the beginning beyond the next day. And yet think of the Moral
Absurdity—to begin—really as if the day after Marriage, to sow Jealousy!
The thing is out of nature the whole diameter of the globe. His project
was “after a time t’ abuse Othello’s ear,” which is according to nature,
and is _de facto_ the impression made—strange to say—from beginning to
end. But the truth is, that the Stage three hours are so soon gone, that
you submit yourself to everything to come within compass. Your
Imagination is bound to the wheels of the Theatre Clock.
TALBOYS.
Yet, in our conversation on Macbeth, you called your discovery an
“astounding discovery”—and it is so. The Duplicity of Time in Othello is
a hundred times more astounding—
NORTH.
And the discovery of it will immortalise my name. I grieve to think that
the Pensive Public is sadly deficient in Imagination. I remember or
invent that she once resisted me, when I said that “Illusion” is one
constituent of Poetry. Illusion, the Pensive Public must be made to
know, is WHEN THE SAME THING IS, AND IS NOT. Pa—God bless him!—makes
believe to be a Lion. He roars, and springs upon his prey. He at once
believes himself to be a Lion, and knows himself to be Pa. Just so with
the Shakspeare Club—many millions strong. The two times at Cyprus _are
there_; the reason for the two times—to wit, probability of the Action,
storm of the Passion—_is there_; and if any wiseacre should ask, “How do
we manage to stand the _known_ together-proceeding of two times?” The
wiseacre is answered—“We don’t stand it—for we know nothing about it. We
are held in a confusion and a delusion about the time.” We have effect
of both—distinct knowledge of neither. We have suggestions to our
Understanding of extended time—we have movements of our Will by
precipitated time.
TALBOYS.
We have—we have—we have. Oh! sir! sir! sir!
NORTH.
Does any man by possibility ask for a scheme and an exposition, by which
it shall be made luminous to the smallest capacity, _how_ we are able
distinctly all along to know, and bear in mind, that the preceding
transactions are accomplished in a day, and at the same time and
therewithal, distinctly all along to know and bear in mind that the same
transactions proceeding before our eyes take about three months to
accomplish? Then, I am obliged—like the musicians, when they are told
that, if they have any music that may not be heard, Othello desires them
to play it—to make answer, “Sir, we have none such.” It is to ask that a
deception shall be not only seemingly but really a truth! Jedediah
Buxton, and Blair the Chronologist, would, “sitting at _this_ play,”
have broken their hearts. You need not. If you ask me—which judiciously
you may—what or how much did the Swan of Avon intend and know of all
this astonishing legerdemain, when he sang thus astonishingly? Was he
the juggler juggled by aërial spirits—as Puck and Ariel? I put my finger
to my lip, and nod on him to do the same; and if I am asked, “Shall a
modern artificer of the Drama, having the same pressure from within and
from without, adopt this resource of evasion?” I can answer, with great
confidence, “He had better look before he leap.” If any spectator, upon
the mere persuasion and power of the Representation, ends with believing
that the seed sown and the harvest reaped are of one day, I believe that
he may yet have the belief of extended time at Cyprus. I should say by
_carrying the one day with him on forwards from day to day_! Or if you
wish this more intelligibly said, that he shall continually _forget_ the
past notices. Once for all, he shall _forget_ that the _first suggestion
was on the day after the arrival_.
TALBOYS.
Inquire, sir, what intelligent auditors, who have not gone into the
study, have thought; for that, after all, is the only testimony that
means anything.
NORTH.
Well, Talboys, suppose that one of them should actually say, “Why, upon
my word, if I am to tell the truth, I did take note that Iago began
‘abusing Othello’s ear’ the day after the arrival. I did, in the course
of the Play, gather up an impression that some good space of time was
passing at Cyprus—and I did, when the murder came, put it down upon the
same day with the sowing of the suspicion, and I was not aware of the
contradiction. In short, now that you put me upon it, I see that I did
that which thousands of us do in thousands of subjects—keep in different
corners of the brain two beliefs—of which, if they had come upon the
same ground, the one must have annihilated the other. But I did not at
the time bring the data together. _I suppose that I had something else
to think of._”
TALBOYS.
Assume, sir, for simplicity’s sake, that Shakspeare knew what he was
doing.
NORTH.
Then the Double Time is to be called—an Imposture.
TALBOYS.
Oh, my dear sir—oh, oh!
NORTH.
A good-natured Juggler, my dear Talboys, has cheated your eyes. You ask
him to show you how he did it. He does the trick slowly—and you see.
“Now, good Conjuror, _do it slowly, and cheat us_.” “I can’t. I cheat
you by doing it quickly. To be cheated, you must _not_ see what I do;
but you must _think_ that you see.” When we inspect the Play in our
closets, the Juggler does his trick slowly. We sit at the Play, and he
does it quick. When you see the trick again done the right way—that is
quick—you cannot conceive how it is that you no longer see that which
you saw when it was done slowly! Again the impression returns of a
magical feat.
TALBOYS.
I doubt, if we saw Othello perfectly acted, whether all our study would
preserve us from the returning imposture.
NORTH.
I will defy any one most skilful theatrical connoisseur, even at the
tenth, or twentieth, or fiftieth Representation, so to have followed the
comings-in and the goings-out, as to satisfy himself to demonstration,
that interval into which a month or a week or a day can be
dropped—_there is none_.
TALBOYS.
When do you purpose publishing this your “astounding Discovery?”
NORTH.
Not till after my death.
TALBOYS.
I shall attend to it.
NORTH.
In comparing Shakspeare and the Attic Three, we seem to ourselves, but
really do not, to exhaust the Criticism of the Drama. Is Mr Sheriff
Alison right, when he said that the method of Shakspeare is justified
only by the genius of Shakspeare? That less genius needs the art of
antiquity? Our own art inclines to a method between the two; and we
should have to account for the theatrical success, during a century or
more, of such Plays as the Fair Penitent, Jane Shore, &c.
TALBOYS.
Why, sir, does Tragedy displace often from our contemplation, Comedy?
Not when we are contemplating Shakspeare. To me his method, in reading
him, appears justified by the omnipotent Art, which, despite
refractoriness, binds together the most refractory times, things,
persons, events _in Unity_.
NORTH.
Most true. We feel, in reading, the self-compactness and
self-completeness of each Play. Thus in Lear—
TALBOYS.
In Lear the ethical ground is the Relation of Parent to Child,
specifically Father and Daughter. If the treatment of that Relation is
full to your satisfaction, that may affect you as a Unity. Full is not
exhaustive; but one part of treatment demands another. Thus the violated
relation requires for its complement the consecrated relation.
NORTH.
In Hamlet?
TALBOYS.
The ethical ground in Hamlet, sir, is the relation of Father and Son,
very peculiarly determined, or specialtied. Observe, sir, how the _like_
relation between Father and Daughter, the _same_ between Father and Son
occurs in Polonius’s House. Here, too, a slain Father—a part of the
specialty. Compare, particularly, the dilatory revenge of Hamlet, and
the dispatchful of Laertes. Again, the relation of Gertrude the Mother
and Hamlet the Son—so many differences! And the strange discords upon
the same relation—my Uncle-Father and Aunt-Mother—the tragic grotesque.
NORTH.
Eh?
TALBOYS.
Then in Lear the House of Gloster counterparts Lear’s. And compare the
ill-disposed Son-in-law Cornwall, and the well-disposed Son-in-law
Albany. The very Fool has a sort of _filial_ relation to
Lear—“Nuncle”—and “come on, my Boy.” At least the relation is in the
same direction—old to young—protecting to dependent—spontaneous love to
grateful, requiting love, and an intimate, fondling familiarity. Compare
in Hamlet, Ophelia’s way of taking her father’s death—madness and
unconscious suicide—the susceptible girl,—and the brother’s to kill the
slayer, “to cut his throat i’ the church”—the energetic youthy man,
_ferox juvenis_—fiery—full of exuberant strength;—all variations of the
grounding thought—relation of Parent and Child.
NORTH.
Of Othello?
TALBOYS.
The moral Unity of Othello can be nothing but the Connubial Relation.
How is this dealt with? Othello and Desdemona deserve one another—both
are excellent—both impassioned, but very differently—both frank, simple,
confiding—both unbounded in love. But they have married against the
father’s wish—privily, and—he dies—so here is from another sacred
quarter an influence thwarting—a law violated, and of which the
violation shall be made good to the uttermost. So somebody remarks that
Brabantio involves the fact in the Nemesis, “She has deceived her
Father, and may thee.” Then the pretended corrupt love of her and Cassio
is a reflection in divers ways of the prevailing relation—for a corrupt
union of man and woman images _ex opposito_ the true union—and then it
comes as the wounding to the death. Again, Rodrigo’s wicked pursuit of
her is an imperfect, false reflection. And then there is the false
relation—in Cassio and Bianca—woven in essentially when Iago, talking to
Cassio of Bianca, makes Othello believe that they are speaking of
Desdemona. Then the married estate of Iago and Emilia is another
image—an actual marriage, and so far the same thing, but an inwardly
unbound wedlock—between heart and heart no tie—and so far not the same
thing—the same with a difference, exactly what Poetry requires. Note
that this image is also participant in the Action, essentially,
penetratively to the core; since hereby Iago gets the handkerchief, and
hereby, too, the knot is resolved by Emilia’s final disclosures and
asseverations sealed by her death. Observe that each husband kills, and
indeed stabs his wife—motives a little different—as heaven and hell.
NORTH.
The method of Shakspeare makes his Drama the more absolute reflection of
our own Life, wherein are to be considered two things——
TALBOYS.
First—if the innermost grounding feeling of all our other feelings is
and must be that of Self—the next, or in close proximity, Sympathy with
our life—then by the overpowering similitude of those Plays to our
lives—of the method of the Plays to the method of our life—that Sympathy
is by Shakspeare seized and possessed as by no other dramatist—the
persuasion of reality being immense and stupendous. Elements of the
method are, the mixture of comic and tragic—the crossing presentment of
different interests—presentment of the same interests from divided
places and times—multiplying of agents, that is number and variety—being
of all ranks, ages, qualities, offices—coming in contact—immixt in
Action and Passion. This frank, liberal, unreserved, spontaneous and
natural method of imitation must ravish our sympathy—and we know that
the Plays of Shakspeare are to us like another world of our own in its
exuberant plenitude—a full second humanity.
NORTH.
Opposed to this is the severe method of the Greek Stage—selecting and
simplifying.
TALBOYS.
Of the modern craftsmen, to my thinking Alfieri has carried the Attic
severity to the utmost; and I am obliged to say, sir, that in them
all—those Greeks and this Italian—the severity oppresses me—I feel the
rule of art—not the free movement of human existence. That I feel
overpoweringly, only in Shakspeare.
NORTH.
Ay.
TALBOYS.
Alfieri says that the constituent Element of Tragedy is Conflict—as of
Duty and Passion—as of conscious Election in the breast of Man and Fate.
NORTH.
He does—does he?
TALBOYS.