“Wyff, thi wytt is not wurthe a rosche.
Leve woman, turn thi thought.”
And this portion of the general representation ends with these verses,
spoken by Eve:--
“Alas! that ever we wrought this synne.
Oure bodely sustenauns for to wynne,
Ye must delve and I xal spynne,
In care to ledyn oure lyff.”
In connexion with these plays, one of the contemplations most
interesting to us is, the contrast between them and the places in which
they were occasionally represented. For though the scaffolds on which
they were shown were usually erected in market-places or churchyards,
sometimes they rose in the great churches, and the plays were
represented with the aid of ecclesiastics. Here, then, we have the rude
beginnings of the dramatic art, in which the devil is the unfortunate
buffoon, giving occasion to the most exuberant laughter of the
people--here is this rude boyhood, if we may so say, of the one art,
roofed in with the perfection of another, of architecture; a perfection
which now we can only imitate at our best: below, the clumsy contrivance
and the vulgar jest; above, the solemn heaven of uplifted arches, their
mysterious glooms ringing with the delight of the multitude: the play of
children enclosed in the heart of prayer aspiring in stone. But it was
not by any means all laughter; and so much, nearer than architecture is
the drama to the ordinary human heart, that we cannot help thinking
these grotesque representations did far more to arouse the inward life
and conscience of the people than all the glory into which the
out-working spirit of the monks had compelled the stubborn stone to
bourgeon and blossom.
But although, no doubt, there was some kind of growth going on in the
drama even during the dreary fifteenth century, we must not suppose that
it was by any regular and steady progression that it arrived at the
grandeur of the Elizabethan perfection. It was rather as if a dry,
knotty, uncouth, but vigorous plant suddenly opened out its inward life
in a flower of surpassing splendour and loveliness. When the
representation of real historical persons in the miracle-plays gave way
before the introduction of unreal allegorical personages, and the
miracle-play was almost driven from the stage by the “play of morals” as
it was called, there was certainly no great advance made in dramatic
representation. The chief advantage gained was room for more variety;
while in some important respects these plays fell off from the merits of
the preceding kind. Indeed, any attempt to teach morals allegorically
must lack that vivifying fire of faith working in the poorest
representations of a history which the people heartily believed and
loved. Nor when we come to examine the favourite amusement of later
royalty, do we find that the interludes brought forward in the pauses of
the banquets of Henry VIII. have a claim to any refinement upon those
old miracle-plays. They have gained in facility and wit; they have lost
in poetry. They have lost pathos too, and have gathered grossness. In
the comedies which soon appear, there is far more of fun than of art;
and although the historical play had existed for some time, and the
streams of learning from the inns of court had flowed in to swell that
of the drama, it is not before the appearance of Shakspere that we find
any _whole_ of artistic or poetic value. And this brings us to another
branch of the subject, of which it seems to us that the importance has
never been duly acknowledged. We refer to the use, if not invention, of
_blank verse_ in England, and its application to the purposes of the
drama. It seems to us that in any contemplation of Shakspere and his
times, the consideration of these points ought not to be omitted.
We have in the present day one grand master of blank verse, the Poet
Laureate. But where would he have been if Milton had not gone before
him; or if the verse amidst which he works like an informing spirit had
not existed at all? No doubt he might have invented it himself; but how
different would the result have been from the verse which he will now
leave behind him to lie side by side for comparison with that of the
master of the epic! All thanks then to Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey!
who, if, dying on the scaffold at the early age of thirty, he has left
no poetry in itself of much value, yet so wrote that he refined the
poetic usages of the language, and, above all, was the first who ever
made blank verse in English. He used it in translating the second and
fourth books of Virgil’s “Aeneid.” This translation he probably wrote
not long before his execution, which took place in 1547, seventeen years
before the birth of Shakspere. There are passages of excellence in the
work, and very rarely does a verse quite fail. But, as might be
expected, it is somewhat stiff, and, as it were, stunted in sound;
partly from the fact that the lines are too much divided, where
_distinction_ would have been sufficient. It would have been strange,
indeed, if he had at once made a free use of a rhythm which every
boy-poet now thinks he can do what he pleases with, but of which only a
few ever learn the real scope and capabilities. Besides, the difficulty
was increased by the fact that the nearest approach to it in measure was
the heroic couplet, so well known in our language, although scarce one
who has used it has come up to the variousness of its modelling in the
hands of Chaucer, with whose writings Surrey was of course familiar. But
various as is its melody in Chaucer, the fact of there being always an
anticipation of the perfecting of a rhyme at the end of the couplet
would make one accustomed to heroic verse ready to introduce a
rhythmical fall and kind of close at the end of every blank verse in
trying to write that measure for the first time. Still, as we say, there
is good verse in Surrey’s translation. Take the following lines for a
specimen, in which the fault just mentioned is scarcely perceptible.
Mercury is the subject of them.
“His golden wings he knits, which him transport,
With a light wind above the earth and seas;
And then with him his wand he took, whereby
He calls from hell pale ghosts.
* * * * *
“By power whereof he drives the winds away,
And passeth eke amid the troubled clouds,
Till in his flight he ‘gan descry the top
And the steep flanks of rocky Atlas’ hill
That with his crown sustains the welkin up;
Whose head, forgrown with pine, circled alway
With misty clouds, is beaten with wind and storm;
His shoulders spread with snow; and from his chin
The springs descend; his beard frozen with ice.
Here Mercury with equal shining wings
First touched.”
In all comparative criticism justice demands that he who began any mode
should not be compared with those who follow only on the ground of
absolute merit in the productions themselves; for while he may be
inferior in regard to quality, he stands on a height, as the inventor,
to which they, as imitators, can never ascend, although they may climb
other and loftier heights, through the example he has set them. It is
doubtful, however, whether Surrey himself invented this verse, or only
followed the lead of some poet of Italy or Spain; in both which
countries it is said that blank verse had been used before Surrey wrote
English in that measure.
Here then we have the low beginnings of blank verse. It was nearly a
hundred and twenty years before Milton took it up, and, while it served
him well, glorified it; nor are we aware of any poem of worth written in
that measure between. Here, of course, we speak of the epic form of the
verse, which, as being uttered _ore rotundo_, is necessarily of
considerable difference from the form it assumes in the drama.
Let us now glance for a moment at the forms of composition in use for
dramatic purposes before blank verse came into favour with play-writers.
The nature of the verse employed in the miracle-plays will be
sufficiently seen from the short specimens already given. These plays
were made up of carefully measured and varied lines, with correct and
superabundant rhymes, and no marked lack of melody or rhythm. But as far
as we have made acquaintance with the moral and other rhymed plays which
followed, there was a great falling off in these respects. They are in
great measure composed of long, irregular lines, with a kind of
rhythmical progress rather than rhythm in them. They are exceedingly
difficult to read musically, at least to one of our day. Here are a few
verses of the sort, from the dramatic poem, rather than drama, called
somewhat improperly “The Moral Play of God’s Promises,” by John Bale,
who died the year before Shakspere was born. It is the first in
Dodsley’s collection. The verses have some poetic merit. The rhythm will
be allowed to be difficult at least. The verses are arranged in stanzas,
of which we give two. In most plays the verses are arranged in rhyming
couplets only.
_Pater Coelestis._
I have with fearcenesse mankynde oft tymes corrected,
And agayne, I have allured hym by swete promes.
I have sent sore plages, when he hath me neglected,
And then by and by, most comfortable swetnes.
To wynne hym to grace, bothe mercye and ryghteousnes
I have exercysed, yet wyll he not amende.
Shall I now lose hym, or shall I him defende?
In hys most myschefe, most hygh grace will I sende,
To overcome hym by favoure, if it may be.
With hys abusyons no longar wyll I contende,
But now accomplysh my first wyll and decre.
My worde beynge flesh, from hens shall set hym fre,
Hym teachynge a waye of perfyght ryhteousnesse,
That he shall not nede to perysh in hys weaknesse.
To our ears, at least, the older miracle-plays were greatly superior. It
is interesting to find, however, in this apparently popular mode of
“building the rhyme”--certainly not the _lofty_ rhyme, for no such
crumbling foundation could carry any height of superstructure--the
elements of the most popular rhythm of the present day; a rhythm
admitting of any number of syllables in the line, from four up to
twelve, or even more, and demanding only that there shall be not more
than four accented syllables in the line. A song written with any spirit
in this measure has, other things _not_ being quite equal, yet almost a
certainty of becoming more popular than one written in any other
measure. Most of Barry Cornwall’s and Mrs. Heman’s songs are written in
it. Scott’s “Lay of the Last Minstrel,” Coleridge’s “Christabel,”
Byron’s “Siege of Corinth,” Shelley’s “Sensitive Plant,” are examples of
the rhythm. Spenser is the first who has made good use of it. One of the
months in the “Shepherd’s Calendar” is composed in it. We quote a few
lines from this poem, to show at once the kind we mean:--
“No marvel, Thenot, if thou can bear
Cheerfully the winter’s wrathful cheer;
For age and winter accord full nigh;
This chill, that cold; this crooked, that wry;
And as the lowering weather looks down,
So seemest thou like Good Friday to frown:
But my flowering youth is foe to frost;
My ship unwont in storms to be tost.”
We can trace it slightly in Sir Thomas Wyatt, and we think in others who
preceded Spenser. There is no sign of it in Chaucer. But we judge it to
be the essential rhythm of Anglo-Saxon poetry, which will quite
harmonize with, if it cannot explain, the fact of its being the most
popular measure still. Shakspere makes a little use of it in one, if not
in more, of his plays, though it there partakes of the irregular
character of that of the older plays which he is imitating. But we
suspect the clowns of the authorship of some of the rhymes, “speaking
more than was set down for them,” evidently no uncommon offence.
Prose was likewise in use for the drama at an early period.
But we must now regard the application of blank verse to the use of the
drama. And in this part of our subject we owe most to the investigations
of Mr. Collier, than whom no one has done more to merit our gratitude
for such aids. It is universally acknowledged that “Ferrex and Porrex”
was the first drama in blank verse. But it was never represented on the
public stage. It was the joint production of Thomas Sackville,
afterwards Lord Buckhurst and Earl of Dorset, and Thomas Norton, both
gentlemen of the Inner Temple, by the members of which it was played
before the Queen at Whitehall in 1561, three years before Shakspere was
born. As to its merits, the impression left by it upon our minds is such
that, although the verse is decent, and in some respects irreproachable,
we think the time spent in reading it must be all but lost to any but
those who must verify to themselves their literary profession; a
profession which, like all other professions, involves a good deal of
disagreeable duty. We spare our readers all quotation, there being no
occasion to show what blank verse of the commonest description is. But
we beg to be allowed to state that this drama by no means represents the
poetic powers of Thomas Sackville. For although we cannot agree with
Hallam’s general criticism, either for or against Sackville, and
although we admire Spenser, we hope, as much as that writer could have
admired him, we yet venture to say that not only may some of Sackville’s
personifications “fairly be compared with some of the most poetical
passages in Spenser,” but that there is in this kind in Sackville a
strength and simplicity of representation which surpasses that of
Spenser in passages in which the latter probably imitated the former. We
refer to the allegorical personages in Sackville’s “Induction to the
Mirrour of Magistrates,” and in Spenser’s description of the “House of
Pride.”
Mr. Collier judges that the play in blank verse first represented on the
public stage was the “Tamburlaine” of Christopher Marlowe, and that it
was acted before 1587, at which date Shakspere would be twenty-three.
This was followed by other and better plays by the same author. Although
we cannot say much for the dramatic art of Marlowe, he has far surpassed
every one that went before him in dramatic _poetry_. The passages that
might worthily be quoted from Marlowe’s writings for the sake of their
poetry are innumerable, notwithstanding that there are many others which
occupy a border land between poetry and bombast, and are such that it is
to us impossible to say to which class they rather belong. Of course it
is easy for a critic to gain the credit of common-sense at the same time
that he saves himself the trouble of doing what he too frequently shows
himself incapable of doing to any good purpose--we mean _thinking_--by
classing all such passages together as bombastical nonsense; but even in
the matter of poetry and bombast, a wise reader will recognize that
extremes so entirely meet, without being in the least identical, that
they are capable of a sort of chemico-literary admixture, if not of
combination. Goethe himself need not have been ashamed to have written
one or two of the scenes in Marlowe’s “Faust;” not that we mean to imply
that they in the least resemble Goethe’s handiwork. His verse is, for
dramatic purposes, far inferior to Shakspere’s; but it was a great
matter for Shakspere that Marlowe preceded him, and helped to prepare to
his hand the tools and fashions he needed. The provision of blank verse
for Shakspere’s use seems to us worthy of being called providential,
even in a system in which we cannot believe that there is any chance.
For as the stage itself is elevated a few feet above the ordinary level,
because it is the scene of a _representation_, just so the speech of the
drama, dealing not with unreal but with ideal persons, the fool being a
worthy fool, and the villain a worthy villain, needs to be elevated some
tones above that of ordinary life, which is generally flavoured with so
much of the _commonplace_. Now the commonplace has no place at all in
the drama of Shakspere, which fact at once elevates it above the tone of
ordinary life. And so the mode of the speech must be elevated as well;
therefore from prose into blank verse. If we go beyond this, we cease to
be natural for the stage as well as life; and the result is that kind of
composition well enough known in Shakspere’s time, which he ridicules in
the recitations of the player in “Hamlet,” about _Priam_ and _Hecuba_.
We could show the very passages of the play-writer Nash which Shakspere
imitates in these. To use another figure, Shakspere, in the same play,
instructs the players “to hold, as ‘twere, the mirror up to nature.” Now
every one must have felt that somehow there is a difference between the
appearance of any object or group of objects immediately presented to
the eye, and the appearance of the same object or objects in a mirror.
Nature herself is not the same in the mirror held up to her. Everything
changes sides in this representation; and the room which is an ordinary,
well-known, homely room, gains something of the strange and poetic when
regarded in the mirror over the fire. Now for this representation, for
this mirror-reflection on the stage, blank verse is just the suitable
glass to receive the silvering of the genius-mind behind it.
But if Shakspere had had to sit down and make his tools first, and then
quarry his stone and fell his timber for the building of his house,
instead of finding everything ready to his hand for dressing his stone
already hewn, for sawing and carving the timber already in logs and
planks beside him, no doubt his house would have been built; but can we
with any reason suppose that it would have proved such “a lordly
pleasure-house”? Not even Shakspere could do without his poor little
brothers who preceded him, and, like the goblins and gnomes of the
drama, got everything out of the bowels of the dark earth, ready for the
master, whom it would have been a shame to see working in the gloom and
the dust instead of in the open eye of the day. Nor is anything so
helpful to the true development of power as the possibility of free
action for as much of the power as is already operative. This room for
free action was provided by blank verse.
Yet when Shakspere came first upon the scene of dramatic labour, he had
to serve his private apprenticeship, to which the apprenticeship of the
age in the drama, had led up. He had to act first of all. Driven to
London and the drama by an irresistible impulse, when the choice of some
profession was necessary to make him independent of his father, seeing
he was himself, though very young, a married man, the first form in
which the impulse to the drama would naturally show itself in him would
be the desire to act; for the outside relations would first operate. As
to the degree of merit he possessed as an actor we have but scanty means
of judging; for afterwards, in his own plays, he never took the best
characters, having written them for his friend Richard Burbage. Possibly
the dramatic impulse was sufficiently appeased by the writing of the
play, and he desired no further satisfaction from personal
representation; although the amount of study spent upon the higher
department of the art might have been more than sufficient to render him
unrivalled as well in the presentation of his own conceptions. But the
dramatic spring, having once broken the upper surface, would scoop out a
deeper and deeper well for itself to play in, and the actor would soon
begin to work upon the parts he had himself to study for presentation.
It being found that he greatly bettered his own parts, those of others
would be submitted to him, and at length whole plays committed to his
revision, of which kind there may be several in the collection of his
works. If the feather-end of his pen is just traceable in “Titus
Andronicus,” the point of it is much more evident, and to as good
purpose as Beaumont or Fletcher could have used his to, at the best, in
“Pericles, Prince of Tyre.” Nor would it be long before he would submit
one of his own plays for approbation; and then the whole of his dramatic
career lies open before him, with every possible advantage for
perfecting the work, for the undertaking of which he was better
qualified by nature than probably any other man whosoever; for he knew
everything about acting, practically--about the play-house and its
capabilities, about stage necessities, about the personal endowments and
individual qualifications of each of the company--so that, when he was
writing a play, he could distribute the parts before they even appeared
upon paper, and write for each actor with the very living form of the
ideal person present “in his mind’s eye,” and often to his bodily sight;
so that the actual came in aid of the ideal, as it always does if the
ideal be genuine, and the loftiest conceptions proved the truest to
visible nature.
This close relation of Shakspere to the actual leads us to a general and
remarkable fact, which again will lead us back to Shakspere. All the
great writers of Queen Elizabeth’s time were men of affairs; they were
not literary men merely, in the general acceptation of the word at
present. Hooker was a hard-working, sheep-keeping, cradle-rocking pastor
of a country parish. Bacon’s legal duties were innumerable before he
became Lord Keeper and Lord Chancellor. Raleigh was soldier, sailor,
adventurer, courtier, politician, discoverer: indeed, it is to his
imprisonment that we are indebted for much the most ambitious of his
literary undertakings, “The History of the World,” a work which for
simple majesty of subject and style is hardly to be surpassed in prose.
Sidney, at the age of three-and-twenty, received the highest praise for
the management of a secret embassy to the Emperor of Germany; took the
deepest and most active interest in the political affairs of his
country; would have sailed with Sir Francis Drake for South American
discovery; and might probably have been king of poor Poland, if the
queen had not been too selfish or wise to spare him. The whole of his
literary productions was the work of his spare hours. Spenser himself,
who was, except Shakspere, the most purely a literary man of them all,
was at one time Secretary to the Lord Deputy of Ireland, and, later in
life, Sheriff of Cork. Nor is the remark true only of the writers of
Elizabeth’s period, or of the country of England.
It seems to us one of the greatest advantages that can befall a poet, to
be drawn out of his study, and still more out of the chamber of imagery
in his own thoughts, to behold and speculate upon the embodiment of
Divine thoughts and purposes in men and their affairs around him. Now
Shakspere had no public appointment, but he reaped all the advantage
which such could have given him, and more, from the perfection of his
dramatic position. It was not with making plays alone that he had to do;
but, himself an actor, himself in a great measure the owner of more than
one theatre, with a little realm far more difficult to rule than many a
kingdom--a company, namely, of actors--although possibly less difficult
from the fact that they were only men and boys; with the pecuniary
affairs of the management likewise under his supervision--he must have
found, in the relations and necessities of his own profession, not
merely enough of the actual to keep him real in his representations, but
almost sufficient opportunity for his one great study, that of mankind,
independently of social and friendly relations, which in his case were
of the widest and deepest.
But Shakspere had not business relations merely: he was a man of
business. There is a common blunder manifested, both in theory on the
one side, and in practice on the other, which the life of Shakspere sets
full in the light. The theory is, that genius is a sort of abnormal
development of the imagination, to the detriment and loss of the
practical powers, and that a genius is therefore a kind of incapable,
incompetent being, as far as worldly matters are concerned. The most
complete refutation of this notion lies in the fact that the greatest
genius the world has known was a successful man in common affairs. While
his genius grew in strength, fervour, and executive power, his worldly
condition rose as well; he became a man of importance in the eyes of his
townspeople, by whom he would not have been honoured if he had not made
money; and he purchased landed property in his native place with the
results of his management of his theatres.
The practical blunder lies in the notion cherished occasionally by young
people ambitious of literary distinction, that in the pursuit of such
things they must be content with the poverty to which the world dooms
its greatest men; accepting their very poverty as an additional proof of
their own genius. If this means that the poet is not to make money his
object, it means well: no man should. But if it means either that the
world is unkind, or that the poet is not to “gather up the fragments,
that nothing be lost,” it means ill. Shakspere did not make haste to be
rich. He neither blamed, courted, nor neglected the world: he was
friendly with it. He _could_ not have pinched and scraped; but neither
did he waste or neglect his worldly substance, which is God’s gift too.
Many immense fortunes have been made, not by absolute dishonesty, but in
ways to which a man of genius ought to be yet more ashamed than another
to condescend; but it does not therefore follow that if a man of genius
will do honest work he will not make a fair livelihood by it, which for
all good results of intellect and heart is better than a great fortune.
But then Shakspere began with doing what he could. He did not consent to
starve until the world should recognize his genius, or grumble against
the blindness of the nation in not seeing what it was impossible it
should see before it was fairly set forth. He began at once to supply
something which the world wanted; for it wants many an honest thing. He
went on the stage and acted, and so gained power to reveal the genius
which he possessed; and the world, in its possible measure, was not slow
to recognize it. Many a young fellow who has entered life with the one
ambition of being a poet, has failed because he did not perceive that it
is better to be a man than to be a poet, that it is his first duty to
get an honest living by doing some honest work that he can do, and for
which there is a demand, although it may not be the most pleasant
employment. Time would have shown whether he was meant to be a poet or
not; and if he had been no poet he would have been no beggar; and if he
had turned out a poet, it would have been partly in virtue of that
experience of life and truth, gained in his case in the struggle for
bread, without which, gained somehow, a man may be a sweet dreamer, but
can be no strong maker, no poet. In a word, here is _the_ Englishman of
genius, beginning life with nothing, and dying, not rich, but easy and
honoured; and this by doing what no one else could do, writing dramas in
which the outward grandeur or beauty is but an exponent of the inward
worth; hiding pearls for the wise even within the jewelled play of the
variegated bubbles of fancy, which he blew while he wrought, for the
innocent delight of his thoughtless brothers and sisters. Wherever the
rainbow of Shakspere’s genius stands, there lies, indeed, at the foot of
its glorious arch, a golden key, which will open the secret doors of
truth, and admit the humble seeker into the presence of Wisdom, who,
having cried in the streets in vain, sits at home and waits for him who
will come to find her. And Shakspere had cakes and ale, although he was
virtuous.
But what do we know about the character of Shakspere? How can we tell
the inner life of a man who has uttered himself in dramas, in which of
course it is impossible that he should ever speak in his own person? No
doubt he may speak his own sentiments through the mouths of many of his
persons; but how are we to know in what cases he does so?--At least we
may assert, as a self-evident negative, that a passage treating of a
wide question put into the mouth of a person despised and rebuked by the
best characters in the play, is not likely to contain any cautiously
formed and cherished opinion of the dramatist. At first sight this may
seem almost a truism; but we have only to remind our readers that one of
the passages oftenest quoted with admiration, and indeed separately
printed and illuminated, is “The Seven Ages of Man,” a passage full of
inhuman contempt for humanity and unbelief in its destiny, in which not
one of the seven ages is allowed to pass over its poor sad stage without
a sneer; and that this passage is given by Shakspere to the _blasé_
sensualist _Jaques_ in “As You Like it,” a man who, the good and wise
_Duke_ says, has been as vile as it is possible for man to be, so vile
that it would be an additional sin in him to rebuke sin; a man who never
was capable of seeing what is good in any man, and hates men’s vices
_because_ he hates themselves, seeing in them only the reflex of his own
disgust. Shakspere knew better than to say that all the world is a
stage, and all the men and women merely players. He had been a player
himself, but only on the stage: _Jaques_ had been a player where he
ought to have been a true man. The whole of his account of human life is
contradicted and exposed at once by the entrance, the very moment when
he has finished his wicked burlesque, of _Orlando_, the young master,
carrying _Adam_, the old servant, upon his back. The song that
immediately follows, sings true: “Most friendship is feigning, most
loving mere folly.” But between the _all_ of _Jaques_ and the _most_ of
the song, there is just the difference between earth and hell.--Of
course, both from a literary and dramatic point of view, “The Seven
Ages” is perfect.
Now let us make one positive statement to balance the other: that
wherever we find, in the mouth of a noble character, not stock
sentiments of stage virtue, but appreciation of a truth which it needs
deep thought and experience united with love of truth, to discover or
verify for one’s self, especially if the truth be of a sort which most
men will fail not merely to recognize as a truth, but to understand at
all, because the understanding of it depends on the foregoing spiritual
perception--then we think we may receive the passage as an expression of
the inner soul of the writer. He must have seen it before he could have
said it; and to see such a truth is to love it; or rather, love of truth
in the general must have preceded and enabled to the discovery of it.
Such a passage is the speech of the _Duke_, opening the second act of
the play just referred to, “As You Like it.” The lesson it contains is,
that the well-being of a man cannot be secured except he partakes of the
ills of life, “the penalty of Adam.” And it seems to us strange that the
excellent editors of the Cambridge edition, now in the course of
publication--a great boon to all students of Shakspere--should not have
perceived that the original reading, that of the folios, is the right
one,--
“Here feel we _not_ the penalty of Adam?”
which, with the point of interrogation supplied, furnishes the true
meaning of the whole passage; namely, that the penalty of Adam is just
what makes the “wood more free from peril than the envious court,”
teaching each “not to think of himself more highly than he ought to
think.”
But Shakspere, although everywhere felt, is nowhere seen in his plays.
He is too true an artist to show his own face from behind the play of
life with which he fills his stage. What we can find of him there we
must find by regarding the whole, and allowing the spiritual essence of
the whole to find its way to our brain, and thence to our heart. The
student of Shakspere becomes imbued with the idea of his character. It
exhales from his writings. And when we have found the main drift of any
play--the grand rounding of the whole--then by that we may interpret
individual passages. It is alone in their relation to the whole that we
can do them full justice, and in their relation to the whole that we
discover the mind of the master.
But we have another source of more direct enlightenment as to Shakspere
himself. We only say more _direct_, not more certain or extended
enlightenment. We have one collection of poems in which he speaks in his
own person and of himself. Of course we refer to his sonnets. Though
these occupy, with their presentation of himself, such a small relative
space, they yet admirably round and complete, to our eyes, the circle of
his individuality. In them and the plays the common saying--one of the
truest--that extremes meet, is verified. No man is complete in whom
there are no extremes, or in whom those extremes do not meet. Now the
very individuality of Shakspere, judged by his dramas alone, has been
declared nonexistent; while in the sonnets he manifests some of the
deepest phases of a healthy self-consciousness. We do not intend to
enter into the still unsettled question as to whether these sonnets were
addressed to a man or a woman. We have scarcely a doubt left on the
question ourselves, as will be seen from the argument we found on our
conviction. We cannot say we feel much interest in the other question,
_If a man, what man?_ A few placed at the end, arranged as they have
come down to us, are beyond doubt addressed to a woman. But the
difference in tone between these and the others we think very
remarkable. Possibly at the time they were written--most of them early
in his life, as it appears to us, although they were not published till
the year 1609, when he was forty-five years of age, Meres referring to
them in the year 1598, eleven years before, as known “among his private
friends”--he had not known such women as he knew afterwards, and hence
the true devotion of his soul is given to a friend of his own sex.
Gervinus, whose lectures on Shakspere, profound and lofty to a degree
unattempted by any other interpreter, we are glad to find have been done
into a suitable English translation, under the superintendence of the
author himself--Gervinus says somewhere in them that, as Shakspere lived
and wrote, his ideal of womanhood grew nobler and purer. Certainly the
woman to whom the last few of these sonnets are addressed was neither
noble nor pure. We think, in this matter at least, they record one of
his early experiences.
We shall briefly indicate what we find in these sonnets about the man
himself, and shall commence with what is least pleasing and of least
value.
We must confess, then, that, probably soon after he came first to
London, he, then a married man, had an intrigue with a married woman, of
which there are indications that he was afterwards deeply ashamed. One
little incident seems curiously traceable: that he had given her a set
of tablets which his friend had given him; and the sonnet in which he
excuses himself to his friend for having done so, seems to us the only
piece of special pleading, and therefore ungenuine expression, in the
whole. This friend, to whom the rest of the sonnets are addressed, made
the acquaintance of this woman, and both were false to Shakspere. Even
Shakspere could not keep the love of a worthless woman. So much the
better for him; but it is a sad story at best. Yet even in this
environment of evil we see the nobility of the man, and his real self.
The sonnets in which he mourns his friend’s falsehood, forgives him, and
even finds excuses for him, that he may not lose his own love of him,
are, to our minds, amongst the most beautiful, as they are the most
profound. Of these are the 33rd and 34th. Nor does he stop here, but
proceeds in the following, the 35th, to comfort his friend in his grief
for his offence, even accusing himself of offence in having made more
excuse for his fault than the fault needed! But to leave this part of
his history, which, as far as we know, stands alone, and yet cannot with
truth be passed by, any more than the story of the crime of David,
though in this case there is no comparison to be made between the two
further than the primary fact, let us look at the one reality which,
from a spiritual point of view, independently of the literary beauties
of these poems, causes them to stand all but alone in literature. We
mean what has been unavoidably touched upon already, the devotion of his
friendship. We have said this makes the poems stand _all but alone_; for
we ought to be better able to understand these poems of Shakspere, from
the fact that in our day has appeared the only other poem which is like
these, and which casts back a light upon them.
“Yet turn thee to the doubtful shore,
Where thy first form was made a man:
I loved thee, spirit, and love; nor can
The soul of Shakspeare love thee more.”
So sings the Poet of our day, in the loftiest of his poems--“In
Memoriam”--addressing the spirit of his vanished friend. In the midst of
his song arises the thought of _the Poet_ of all time, who loved his
friend too, and would have lost him in a way far worse than death, had
not his love been too strong even for that death, alone ghastly, which
threatened to cut the golden chain that bound them, and part them by the
gulf impassable. Tennyson’s friend had never wronged him; and to the
divineness of Shakspere’s love is added that of forgiveness. Such love
as this between man and man is rare, and therefore to the mind which is
in itself no way rare, incredible, because unintelligible. But though
all the commonest things are very divine, yet divine individuality is
and will be a rare thing at any given period on the earth. Faith, in its
ideal sense, will always be hard to find on the earth. But perhaps this
kind of affection between man and man may, as Coleridge indicates in his
“Table Talk,” have been more common in the reigns of Elizabeth and James
than it is now. There is a certain dread of the demonstrative in the
present day, which may, perhaps, be carried into regions where it is out
of place, and hinder the development of a devotion which must be real,
and grand, and divine, if one man such as Shakspere or Tennyson has ever
felt it. If one has felt it, humanity may claim it. And surely He who is
_the_ Son of man has verified the claim. We believe there are indeed few
of us who know what _to love our neighbour as ourselves_ means; but when
we find a man here and there in the course of centuries who does, we may
take this man as the prophet of coming good for his race, his prophecy
being himself.
But next to the interest of knowing that a man could love so well, comes
the association of this fact with his art. He who could look abroad upon
men, and understand them all--who stood, as it were, in the wide-open
gates of his palace, and admitted with welcome every one who came in
sight--had in the inner places of that palace one chamber in which he
met his friend, and in which his whole soul went forth to understand the
soul of his friend. The man to whom nothing in humanity was common or
unclean; in whom the most remarkable of his artistic morals is
fair-play; who fills our hearts with a saintly love for _Cordelia_ and
an admiration of _Sir John Falstaff_ the lost gentleman, mournful even
in the height of our laughter; who could make an _Autolycus_ and a
_Macbeth_ both human, and an _Ariel_ and a _Puck_ neither human--this is
the man who loved best. And we believe that this depth of capacity for
loving lay at the root of all his knowledge of men and women, and all
his dramatic pre-eminence. The heart is more intelligent than the
intellect. Well says the poet Matthew Raydon, who has hardly left
anything behind him but the lamentation over Sir Philip Sidney in which
the lines occur,--
“He that hath love and judgment too
Sees more than any other do.”
Simply, we believe that this, not this only, but this more than any
other endowment, made Shakspere the artist he was, in providing him all
the material of humanity to work upon, and keeping him to the true
spirit of its use. Love looking forth upon strife, understood it all.
Love is the true revealer of secrets, because it makes one with the
object regarded.
“But,” say some impatient readers, “when shall we have done with
Shakspere? There is no end to this writing about him.” It will be a bad
day for England when we have done with Shakspere; for that will imply,
along with the loss of him, that we are no longer capable of
understanding him. Should that time ever come, Heaven grant the
generation which does not understand him at least the grace to keep its
pens off him, which will by no means follow as a necessary consequence
of the non-intelligence! But the writing about Shakspere which has been
hitherto so plentiful must do good just in proportion as it directs
attention to him and gives aid to the understanding of him. And while
the utterances of to-day pass away, the children of to-morrow are born,
and require a new utterance for their fresh need from those who, having
gone before, have already tasted life and Shakspere, and can give some
little help to further progress than their own, by telling the following
generation what they have found. Suppose that this cry had been raised
last century, after good Dr. Johnson had ceased to produce to the eyes
of men the facts about his own incapacity which he presumed to be
criticisms of Shakspere, where would our aids be now to the
understanding of the dramatist? Our own conviction is, when we reflect
with how much labour we have deepened our knowledge of him, and thereby
found in him _the best_--for the best lies not on the surface for the
careless reader--our own conviction is, that not half has been done that
ought to be done to help young people at least to understand the master
mind of their country. Few among them can ever give the attention or
work to it that we have given; but much may be done with judicious aid.
And a profound knowledge of their greatest writer would do more than
almost anything else to bind together as Englishmen, in a true and
unselfish way, the hearts of the coming generations; for his works are
our country in a convex magic mirror.
When a man finds that every time he reads a book not only does some
obscurity melt away, but deeper depths, which he had not before seen,
dawn upon him, he is not likely to think that the time for ceasing to
write about the book has come. And certainly in Shakspere, as in all
true artistic work, as in nature herself, the depths are not to be
revealed utterly; while every new generation needs a new aid towards
discovering itself and its own thoughts in these forms of the past. And
of all that read about Shakspere there are few whom more than one or two
utterances have reached. The speech or the writing must go forth to find
the soil for the growth of its kernel of truth. We shall, therefore,
with the full consciousness that perhaps more has been already said and
written about Shakspere than about any other writer, yet venture to add
to the mass by a few general remarks.
And first we would remind our readers of the marvel of the combination
in Shakspere of such a high degree of two faculties, one of which is
generally altogether inferior to the other: the faculties of reception
and production. Rarely do we find that great receptive power, brought
into operation either by reading or by observation, is combined with
originality of thought. Some hungers are quite satisfied by taking in
what others have thought and felt and done. By the assimilation of this
food many minds grow and prosper; but other minds feed far more upon
what rises from their own depths; in the answers they are compelled to
provide to the questions that come unsought; in the theories they cannot
help constructing for the inclusion in one whole of the various facts
around them, which seem at first sight to strive with each other like
the atoms of a chaos; in the examination of those impulses of hidden
origin which at one time indicate a height of being far above the
thinker’s present condition, at another a gulf of evil into which he may
possibly fall. But in Shakspere the two powers of beholding and
originating meet like the rejoining halves of a sphere. A man who thinks
his own thoughts much, will often walk through London streets and see
nothing. In the man who observes only, every passing object mirrors
itself in its prominent peculiarities, having a kind of harmony with all
the rest, but arouses no magician from the inner chamber to charm and
chain its image to his purpose. In Shakspere, on the contrary, every
outer form of humanity and nature spoke to that ever-moving,
self-vindicating--we had almost said, and in a sense it would be true,
self-generating--humanity within him. The sound of any action without
him, struck in him just the chord which, in motion in him, would have
produced a similar action. When anything was done, he felt as if he were
doing it--perception and origination conjoining in one consciousness.
But to this gift was united the gift of utterance, or representation.
Many a man both receives and generates who, somehow, cannot represent.
Nothing is more disappointing sometimes than our first experience of the
artistic attempts of a man who has roused our expectations by a social
display of familiarity with, and command over, the subjects of
conversation. Have we not sometimes found that when such a one sought to
give vital or artistic form to these thoughts, so that they might not be
born and die in the same moment upon his lips, but might _exist_, a
poor, weak, faded _simulacrum_ alone was the result? Now Shakspere was a
great talker, who enraptured the listeners, and was himself so rapt in
his speech that he could scarcely come to a close; but when he was alone
with his art, then and then only did he rise to the height of his great
argument, and all the talk was but as the fallen mortar and stony chips
lying about the walls of the great temple of his drama.
But, along with all this wealth of artistic speech, an artistic virtue
of an opposite nature becomes remarkable: his reticence. How often might
he not say fine things, particularly poetic things, when he does not,
because it would not suit the character or the time! How many delicate
points are there not in his plays which we only discover after many
readings, because he will not put a single tone of success into the flow
of natural utterance, to draw our attention to the triumph of the
author, and jar with the all-important reality of his production!
Wherever an author obtrudes his own self-importance, an unreality is the
consequence, of a nature similar to that which we feel in the old moral
plays, when historical and allegorical personages, such as _Julius
Caesar_ and _Charity_, for instance, are introduced at the same time on
the same stage, acting in the same story. Shakspere never points to any
stroke of his own wit or art. We may find it or not: there it is, and no
matter if no one see it!
Much has been disputed about the degree of consciousness of his own art
possessed by Shakspere: whether he did it by a grand yet blind impulse,
or whether he knew what he wanted to do, and knowingly used the means to
arrive at that end. Now we cannot here enter upon the question; but we
would recommend any of our readers who are interested in it not to
attempt to make up their minds upon it before considering a passage in
another of his poems, which may throw some light on the subject for
them. It is the description of a painting, contained in “The Rape of
Lucrece,” towards the end of the poem. Its very minuteness involves the
expression of principles, and reveals that, in relation to an art not
his own, he could hold principles of execution, and indicate perfection
of finish, which, to say the least, must proceed from a general capacity
for art, and therefore might find an equally conscious operation in his
own peculiar province of it. For our own part, we think that his results
are a perfect combination of the results of consciousness and
unconsciousness; consciousness where the arrangements of the play,
outside the region of inspiration, required the care of the wakeful
intellect; unconsciousness where the subject itself bore him aloft on
the wings of its own creative delight.
There is another manifestation of his power which will astonish those
who consider it. It is this: that, while he was able to go down to the
simple and grand realities of human nature, which are all tragic; and
while, therefore, he must rejoice most in such contemplations of human
nature as find fit outlet in a “Hamlet,” a “Lear,” a “Timon,” or an
“Othello,” the tragedies of Doubt, Ingratitude, and Love, he can yet,
when he chooses, float on the very surface of human nature, as in
“Love’s Labour’s Lost,” “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” “The Comedy of
Errors,” “The Taming of the Shrew;” or he can descend half way as it
were, and there remain suspended in the characters and feelings of
ordinary nice people, who, interesting enough to meet in society, have
neither received that development, nor are placed in those
circumstances, which admit of the highest and simplest poetic treatment.
In these he will bring out the ordinary noble or the ordinary vicious.
Of this nature are most of his comedies, in which he gives an ideal
representation of common social life, and steers perfectly clear of what
in such relations and surroundings would be _heroics_. Look how steadily
he keeps the noble-minded youth _Orlando_ in this middle region; and
look how the best comes out at last in the wayward and _recalcitrant_
and _bizarre_, but honest and true natures of _Beatrice_ and _Benedick_;
and this without any untruth to the nature of comedy, although the
circumstances border on the tragic. When he wants to give the deeper
affairs of the heart, he throws the whole at once out of the social
circle with its multiform restraints. As in “Hamlet” the stage on which
the whole is acted is really the heart of _Hamlet_, so he makes his
visible stage as it were, slope off into the misty infinite, with a
grey, starless heaven overhead, and Hades open beneath his feet. Hence
young people brought up in the country understand the tragedies far
sooner than they can comprehend the comedies. It needs acquaintance with
society and social ways to clear up the latter.
The remarks we have made on “Hamlet” by way of illustration, lead us to
point out how Shakspere prepares, in some of his plays, a stage suitable
for all the representation. In “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” the place
which gives tone to the whole is a midnight wood in the first flush and
youthful delight of summer. In “As You Like it” it is a daylight wood in
spring, full of morning freshness, with a cold wind now and then blowing
through the half-clothed boughs. In “The Tempest” it is a solitary
island, circled by the mysterious sea-horizon, over which what may come
who can tell?--a place where the magician may work his will, and have
all nature at the beck of his superior knowledge.
The only writer who would have had a chance of rivalling Shakspere in
his own walk, if he had been born in the same period of English history,
is Chaucer. He has the same gift of individualizing the general, and
idealizing the portrait. But the best of the dramatic writers of
Shakspere’s time, in their desire of dramatic individualization, forget
the modifying multiformity belonging to individual humanity. In their
anxiety to present a _character_, they take, as it were, a human mould,
label it with a certain peculiarity, and then fill in speeches and forms
according to the label. Thus the indications of character, of
peculiarity, so predominate, the whole is so much of one colour, that
the result resembles one of those allegorical personifications in which,
as much as possible, everything human is eliminated except what belongs
to the peculiarity, the personification. How different is it with
Shakspere’s representations! He knows that no human being ever was like
that. He makes his most peculiar characters speak very much like other
people; and it is only over the whole that their peculiarities manifest
themselves with indubitable plainness. The one apparent exception is
_Jaques_, in “As You Like it.” But there we must remember that Shakspere
is representing a man who so chooses to represent himself. He is a man
_in his humour_, or his own peculiar and chosen affectation. _Jaques_ is
the writer of his own part; for with him “all the world’s a stage, and
all the men and women,” himself first, “merely players.” We have his
own presentation of himself, not, first of all, as he is, but as he
chooses to be taken. Of course his real self does come out in it, for no
man can seem altogether other than he is; and besides, the _Duke_, who
sees quite through him, rebukes him in the manner already referred to;
but it is his affectation that gives him the unnatural peculiarity of
his modes and speeches. He wishes them to be such.
There is, then, for every one of Shakspere’s characters the firm ground
of humanity, upon which the weeds, as well as the flowers, glorious or
fantastic, as the case may be, show themselves. His more heroic persons
are the most profoundly human. Nor are his villains unhuman, although
inhuman enough. Compared with Marlowe’s Jew, _Shylock_ is a terrible
_man_ beside a dreary _monster_, and, as far as logic and the _lex
talionis_ go, has the best of the argument. It is the strength of human
nature itself that makes crime strong. Wickedness could have no power of
itself: it lives by the perverted powers of good. And so great is
Shakspere’s sympathy with _Shylock_ even, in the hard and unjust doom
that overtakes him, that he dismisses him with some of the spare
sympathies of the more tender-hearted of his spectators. Nowhere is the
justice of genius more plain than in Shakspere’s utter freedom from
party-spirit, even with regard to his own creations. Each character
shall set itself forth from its own point of view, and only in the
choice and scope of the whole shall the judgment of the poet be beheld.
He never allows his opinion to come out to the damaging of the
individual’s own self-presentation. He knows well that for the worst
something can be said, and that a feeling of justice and his own right
will be strong in the mind of a man who is yet swayed by perfect
selfishness. Therefore the false man is not discoverable in his speech,
not merely because the villain will talk as like a true man as he may,
but because seldom is the villainy clear to the villain’s own mind. It
is impossible for us to determine whether, in their fierce bandying of
the lie, _Bolingbroke_ or _Norfolk_ spoke the truth. Doubtless each
believed the other to be the villain that he called him. And Shakspere
has no desire or need to act the historian in the decision of that
question. He leaves his reader in full sympathy with the perplexity of
_Richard_; as puzzled, in fact, as if he had been present at the
interrupted combat.
If every writer could write up to his own best, we should have far less
to marvel at in Shakspere. It is in great measure the wealth of
Shakspere’s suggestions, giving him abundance of the best to choose
from, that lifts him so high above those who, having felt the
inspiration of a good idea, are forced to go on writing, constructing,
carpentering, with dreary handicraft, before the exhausted faculty has
recovered sufficiently to generate another. And then comes in the
unerring choice of the best of those suggestions. Yet if any one wishes
to see what variety of the same kind of thoughts he could produce, let
him examine the treatment of the same business in different plays; as,
for instance, the way in which instigation to a crime is managed in
“Macbeth,” where _Macbeth_ tempts the two murderers to kill _Banquo_; in
“King John,” when _the King_ tempts _Hubert_ to kill _Arthur_; in “The
Tempest,” when _Antonio_ tempts _Sebastian_ to kill _Alonzo_; in “As You
Like it,” when _Oliver_ instigates _Charles_ to kill _Orlando_; and in
“Hamlet,” where _Claudius_ urges _Laertes_ to the murder of _Hamlet_.
He shows no anxiety about being original. When a man is full of his work
he forgets himself. In his desire to produce a good play he lays hold
upon any material that offers itself. He will even take a bad play and
make a good one of it. One of the most remarkable discoveries to the
student of Shakspere is the hide-bound poverty of some of the stories,
which, informed by his life-power; become forms of strength, richness,
and grace. He does what the _Spirit_ in “Comus” says the music he heard
might do,--
“create a soul
Under the ribs of death;”
and then death is straightway “clothed upon.” And nowhere is the
refining operation of his genius more evident than in the purification
of these stories. Characters and incidents which would have been honey
and nuts to Beaumont and Fletcher are, notwithstanding their dramatic
recommendations, entirely remodelled by him. The fair _Ophelia_ is, in
the old tale, a common woman, and _Hamlet’s_ mistress; while the policy
of the _Lady of Belmont_, who in the old story occupies the place for
which he invented the lovely _Portia_, upon which policy the whole story
turns, is such that it is as unfit to set forth in our pages as it was
unfit for Shakspere’s purposes of art. His noble art refuses to work
upon base matter. He sees at once the capabilities of a tale, but he
will not use it except he may do with it what he pleases.
If we might here offer some assistance to the young student who wants to
help himself, we would suggest that to follow, in a measure, Plutarch’s
fashion of comparison, will be the most helpful guide to the
understanding of the poet. Let the reader take any two characters, and
putting them side by side, look first for differences, and then for
resemblances between them, with the causes of each; or let him make a
wider attempt, and setting two plays one over against the other, compare
or contrast them, and see what will be the result. Let him, for
instance, take the two characters _Hamlet_ and _Brutus_, and compare
their beginnings and endings, the resemblances in their characters, the
differences in their conduct, the likeness and unlikeness of what was
required of them, the circumstances in which action was demanded of
each, the helps or hindrances each had to the working out of the problem
of his life, the way in which each encounters the supernatural, or any
other question that may suggest itself in reading either of the plays,
ending off with the main lesson taught in each; and he will be
astonished to find, if he has not already discovered it, what a rich
mine of intellectual and spiritual wealth is laid open to his delighted
eyes. Perhaps not the least valuable end to be so gained is, that the
young Englishman, who wants to be delivered from any temptation to think
himself the centre around which the universe revolves, will be aided in
his endeavours after honourable humility by looking up to the man who
towers, like Saul, head and shoulders above his brethren, and seeing
that he is humble, may learn to leave it to the pismire to be angry, to
the earwig to be conceited, and to the spider to insist on his own
importance.
But to return to the main course of our observations. The dramas of
Shakspere are so natural, that this, the greatest praise that can be
given them, is the ground of one of the difficulties felt by the young
student in estimating them. The very simplicity of Shakspere’s art seems
to throw him out of any known groove of judgment. When he hears one say,
“_Look at this, and admire_,” he feels inclined to rejoin, “Why, he only
says in the simplest way what the thing must have been. It is as plain
as daylight.” Yes, to the reader; and because Shakspere wrote it. But
there were a thousand wrong ways of doing it: Shakspere took the one
right way. It is he who has made it plain in art, whatever it was before
in nature; and most likely the very simplicity of it in nature was
scarcely observed before he saw it and represented it. And is it not the
glory of art to attain this simplicity? for simplicity is the end of all
things--all manners, all morals, all religion. To say that the thing
could not have been done otherwise, is just to say that you forget the
art in beholding its object, that you forget the mirror because you see
nature reflected in the mirror. Any one can see the moon in Lord Rosse’s
telescope; but who made the reflector? And let the student try to
express anything in prose or in verse, in painting or in modelling, just
as it is. No man knows till he has made many attempts, how hard to reach
is this simplicity of art. And the greater the success, the fewer are
the signs of the labour expended. Simplicity is art’s perfection.
But so natural are all his plays, and the great tragedies to which we
would now refer in particular, amongst the rest, that it may appear to
some, at first sight, that Shakspere could not have constructed them
after any moral plan, could have had no lesson of his own to teach in
them, seeing they bear no marks of individual intent, in that they
depart nowhere from, nature, the construction of the play itself going
straight on like a history. The directness of his plays springs in part
from the fact that it is humanity and not circumstance that Shakspere
respects. Circumstance he uses only for the setting forth of humanity;
and for the plot of circumstance, so much in favour with Ben Jonson, and
others of his contemporaries, he cares nothing. As to their looking too
natural to have any design in them, we are not of those who believe that
it is unlike nature to have a design and a result. If the proof of a
high aim is to be what the critics used to call _poetic justice_, a kind
of justice that one would gladly find more of in grocers’ and
linen-drapers’ shops, but can as well spare from a poem, then we must
say that he has not always a high end: the wicked man is not tortured,
nor is the good man smothered in bank-notes and rose-leaves. Even when
he shows the outward ruin and death that comes upon Macbeth at last, it
is only as an unavoidable little consequence, following in the wake of
the mighty vengeance of nature, even of God, that Macbeth cannot say
_Amen_; that Macbeth can sleep no more; that Macbeth is “cabined
cribbed, confined, bound in to saucy doubts and fears;” that his very
brain is a charnel-house, whence arise the ghosts of his own murders,
till he envies the very dead the rest to which his hand has sent them.
That immediate and eternal vengeance upon crime, and that inner reward
of well-doing, never fail in nature or in Shakspere, appear as such a
matter of course that they hardly look like design either in nature or
in the mirror which he holds up to her. The secret is that, in the
ideal, habit and design are one.
Most authors seem anxious to round off and finish everything in full
sight. Most of Shakspere’s tragedies compel our thoughts to follow their
_persons_ across the bourn. They need, as Jean Paul says, a piece of the
next world painted in to complete the picture, And this is surely
nature: but it need not therefore be no design. What could be done with
Hamlet, but send him into a region where he has some chance of finding
his difficulties solved; where he will know that his reverence for God,
which was the sole stay left him in the flood of human worthlessness,
has not been in vain; that the skies are not “a foul and pestilent
congregation of vapours;” that there are noble women, though his mother
was false and Ophelia weak; and that there are noble men, although his
uncle and Laertes were villains and his old companions traitors? If
Hamlet is not to die, the whole of the play must perish under the
accusation that the hero of it is left at last with only a superadded
misery, a fresh demand for action, namely, to rule a worthless people,
as they seem to him, when action has for him become impossible; that he
has to live on, forsaken even of death, which will not come though the
cup of misery is at the brim.
But a high end may be gained in this world, and the vision into the
world beyond so justified, as in King Lear. The passionate, impulsive,
unreasoning old king certainly must have given his wicked daughters
occasion enough of making the charges to which their avarice urged them.
He had learned very little by his life of kingship. He was but a boy
with grey hair. He had had no inner experiences. And so all the
development of manhood and age has to be crowded into the few remaining
weeks of his life. His own folly and blindness supply the occasion. And
before the few weeks are gone, he has passed through all the stages of a
fever of indignation and wrath, ending in a madness from which love
redeems him; he has learned that a king is nothing if the man is
nothing; that a king ought to care for those who cannot help themselves;
that love has not its origin or grounds in favours flowing from royal
resource and munificence, and yet that love is the one thing worth
living for, which gained, it is time to die. And now that he has the
experience that life can give, has become a child in simplicity of heart
and judgment, he cannot lose his daughter again; who, likewise, has
learned the one thing she needed, as far as her father was concerned, a
little more excusing tenderness. In the same play it cannot be by chance
that at its commencement Gloucester speaks with the utmost carelessness
and _off-hand_ wit about the parentage of his natural son Edmund, but
finds at last that this son is his ruin.
Edgar, the true son, says to Edmund, after having righteously dealt him
his death-wound,--
“The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
Make instruments to scourge us:
The dark and vicious place where thee he got
Cost him his eyes.”