“Thou hast spoken right; ‘tis true:
The wheel is come full circle; I am here.”
Could anything be put more plainly than the moral lesson in this?
It would be easy to produce examples of fine design from his comedies as
well; as for instance, from “Much Ado about Nothing:” the two who are
made to fall in love with each other, by being each severally assured of
possessing the love of the other, Beatrice and Benedick, are shown
beforehand to have a strong inclination towards each other, manifested
in their continual squabbling after a good-humoured fashion; but not all
this is sufficient to make them heartily in love, until they find out
the nobility of each other’s character in their behaviour about the
calumniated Hero; and the author takes care they shall not be married
without a previous acquaintance with the trick that has been played upon
them. Indeed we think the remark, that Shakspere never leaves any of his
characters the same at the end of a play as he took them up at the
beginning, will be found to be true. They are better or worse, wiser or
more irretrievably foolish. The historical plays would illustrate the
remark as well as any.
But of all the terrible plays we are inclined to think “Timon” the most
terrible, and to doubt whether justice has been done to the finish and
completeness of it. At the same time we are inclined to think that it
was printed (first in the first folio, 1623, seven years after
Shakspere’s death) from a copy, corrected by the author, but not
_written fair_, and containing consequent mistakes. The same account
might belong to others of the plays, but more evidently perhaps belongs
to the “Timon.” The idea of making the generous spendthrift, whose old
idolaters had forsaken him because the idol had no more to give, into
the high-priest of the Temple of Mammon, dispensing the gold which he
hated and despised, that it might be a curse to the race which he had
learned to hate and despise as well; and the way in which Shakspere
discloses the depths of Timon’s wound, by bringing him into comparison
with one who hates men by profession and humour--are as powerful as
anything to be found even in Shakspere.
We are very willing to believe that “Julius Caesar” was one of his
latest plays; for certainly it is the play in which he has represented a
hero in the high and true sense. _Brutus_ is this hero, of course; a
hero because he will do what he sees to be right, independently of
personal feeling or personal advantage. Nor does his attempt fail from
any overweening or blindness, in himself. Had he known that the various
papers thrown in his way, were the concoctions of _Cassius_, he would
not have made the mistake of supposing that the Romans longed for
freedom, and therefore would be ready to defend it. As it was, he
attempted to liberate a people which did not feel its slavery. He failed
for others, but not for himself; for his truth was such that everybody
was true to him. Unlike Jaques with his seven acts of the burlesque of
human life, Brutus says at the last,--
“Countrymen,
My heart doth joy, that yet, in all my life,
I found no man but he was true to me.”
Of course all this is in Plutarch. But it is easy to see with what
relish Shakspere takes it up, setting forth all the aids in himself and
in others which Brutus had to being a hero, and thus making the
representation as credible as possible.
We must heartily confess that no amount of genius alone will make a man
a good man; that genius only shows the right way--drives no man to walk
in it. But there is surely some moral scent in us to let us know whether
a man only cares for good from an artistic point of view, or whether he
admires and loves good. This admiration and love cannot be _prominently_
set forth by any dramatist true to his art; but it must come out over
the whole. His predilections must show themselves in the scope of his
artistic life, in the things and subjects he chooses, and the way in
which he represents them. Notwithstanding Uncle Toby and Maria, who will
venture to say that Sterne was noble or virtuous, when he looks over the
whole that he has written? But in Shakspere there is no suspicion of a
cloven foot. Everywhere he is on the side of virtue and of truth. Many
small arguments, with great cumulative force, might be adduced to this
effect.
For ourselves we cannot easily believe that the calmness of his art
could be so unvarying except he exercised it with a good conscience;
that he could have kept looking out upon the world around him with the
untroubled regard necessary for seeing all things as they are, except
there had been peace in his house at home; that he could have known all
men as he did, and failed to know himself. We can understand the
co-existence of any degree of partial or excited genius with evil ways,
but we cannot understand the existence of such calm and universal
genius, wrought out in his works, except in association with all that is
noblest in human nature. Nor is it other than on the side of the
argument for his rectitude that he never forces rectitude upon the
attention of others. The strong impression left upon our minds is, that
however Shakspere may have strayed in the early portion of his life in
London, he was not only an upright and noble man for the main part, but
a repentant man, and a man whose life was influenced by the truths of
Christianity.
Much is now said about a memorial to Shakspere. The best and only true
memorial is no doubt that described in Milton’s poem on this very
subject: the living and ever-changing monument of human admiration,
expressed in the faces and forms of those absorbed in the reading of his
works. But if the external monument might be such as to foster the
constant reproduction of the inward monument of love and admiration,
then, indeed, it might be well to raise one; and with this object in
view let us venture to propose one mode which we think would favour the
attainment of it.
Let a Gothic hall of the fourteenth century be built; such a hall as
would be more in the imagination of Shakspere than any of the
architecture of his own time. Let all the copies that can be procured of
every early edition of his works, singly or collectively, be stored in
this hall. Let a copy of every other edition ever printed be procured
and deposited. Let every book or treatise that can be found, good, bad,
or indifferent, written about Shakspere or any of his works, be likewise
collected for the Shakspere library. Let a special place be allotted to
the shameless corruptions of his plays that have been produced as
improvements upon them, some of which, to the disgrace of England, still
partially occupy the stage instead of what Shakspere wrote. Let one
department contain every work of whatever sort that tends to direct
elucidation of his meaning, chiefly those of the dramatic writers who
preceded him and closely followed him. Let the windows be filled with
stained glass, representing the popular sports of his own time and the
times of his English histories. Let a small museum be attached,
containing all procurable antiquities that are referred to in his plays,
along with first editions, if possible, of the best books that came out
in his time, and were probably read by him. Let the whole thus as much
as possible represent his time. Let a marble statue in the midst do the
best that English art can accomplish for the representation of the
vanished man; and let copies, if not the originals, of the several
portraits be safely shrined for the occasional beholding of the
multitude. Let the perpetuity of care necessary for this monument be
secured by endowment; and let it be for the use of the public, by means
of a reading-room fitted for the comfort of all who choose to avail
themselves of these facilities for a true acquaintance with our greatest
artist. Let there likewise be a simple and moderately-sized theatre
attached, not for regular, but occasional use; to be employed for the
representation of Shakspere’s plays _only_, and allowed free of expense
for amateur or other representations of them for charitable purposes.
But within a certain cycle of years--if, indeed, it would be too much to
expect that out of the London play-goers a sufficient number would be
found to justify the representation of all the plays of Shakspere once
in the season--let the whole of Shakspere’s plays be acted in the best
manner possible to the managers for the time being.
The very existence of such a theatre would be a noble protest of the
highest kind against the sort of play, chiefly translated and adapted
from the French, which infests our boards, the low tone of which, even
where it is not decidedly immoral, does more harm than any amount of the
rough, honest plain-spokenness of Shakspere, as judged by our more
fastidious, if not always purer manners. The representation of such
plays forms the real ground of objection to theatre-going. We believe
that other objections, which may be equally urged against large
assemblies of any sort, are not really grounded upon such an amount of
objectionable fact as good people often suppose. At all events it is not
against the drama itself, but its concomitants, its avoidable
concomitants, that such objections are, or ought to be, felt and
directed. The dramatic impulse, as well as all other impulses of our
nature, are from the Maker.
A monument like this would help to change a blind enthusiasm and a
_dilettante_-talk into knowledge, reverence, and study; and surely this
would be the true way to honour the memory of the man who appeals to
posterity by no mighty deeds of worldly prowess, but has left behind him
food for heart, brain, and conscience, on which the generations will
feed till the end of time. It would be the one true and natural mode of
perpetuating his fame in kind; helping him to do more of that for which
he was born, and because of which we humbly desire to do him honour, as
the years flow farther away from the time when, at the age of fifty-two,
he left the world a richer legacy of the results of intellectual labour
than any other labourer in literature has ever done. It would be to
raise a monument to his mind more than to his person.
But to honour Shakspere in the best way we must not gaze upon some grand
memorial of his fame, we must not talk largely of his wonderful doings,
we must not even behold the representation of his works on the stage,
invaluable aid as that is to the right understanding of what he has
written; but we must, by close, silent, patient study, enter into an
understanding with the spirit of the departed poet-sage, and thus let
his own words be the necromantic spell that raises the dead, and brings
us into communion with that man who knew what was in men more than any
other mere man ever did. Well was it for Shakspere that he was humble;
else on what a desolate pinnacle of companionless solitude must he have
stood! Where was he to find his peers? To most thoughtful minds it is a
terrible fancy to suppose that there were no greater human being than
themselves. From the terror of such a _truth_ Shakspere’s love for men
preserved him. He did not think about himself so much as he thought
about them. Had he been a self-student alone, or chiefly, could he ever
have written those dramas? We close with the repetition of this truth:
that the love of our kind is the one key to the knowledge of humanity
and of ourselves. And have we not sacred authority for concluding that
he who loves his brother is the more able and the more likely to love
Him who made him and his brother also, and then told them that love is
the fulfilling of the law?