To have any clear idea, however, of what Montaigne did or could do for
Shakspere, we must revise our conception of the poet in the light of the
positive facts of his life and circumstances--a thing made difficult for
us in England through the transcendental direction given to our
Shakspere lore by those who first shaped it sympathetically, to wit,
Coleridge and the Germans. An adoring idea of Shakspere, as a mind of
unapproachable superiority, has thus become so habitual with most of us
that it is difficult to reduce our notion to terms of normal
individuality, of character and mind as we know them in life. When we
read Coleridge, Schlegel, and Gervinus, or even the admirable essay of
Charles Lamb, or the eloquent appreciations of Mr. Swinburne, or such
eulogists as Hazlitt and Knight, we are in a world of abstract aesthetics
or of abstract ethics; we are not within sight of the man Shakspere, who
became an actor for a livelihood in an age when the best actors played
in inn-yards for rude audiences, mostly illiterate and not a little
brutal; then added to his craft of acting the craft of play-patching and
refashioning; who had his partnership share of the pence and sixpences
paid by the mob of noisy London prentices and journeymen and idlers that
filled the booth theatre in which his company performed; who sued his
debtors rigorously when they did not settle-up; worked up old plays or
took a hand in new, according as the needs of his concern and his
fellow-actors dictated; and finally went with his carefully collected
fortune to spend his last years in ease and quiet in the country town in
which he was born. Our sympathetic critics, even when, like Dr.
Furnivall, they know absolutely all the archaeological facts as to
theatrical life in Shakspere's time, do not seem to bring those facts
into vital touch with their aesthetic estimate of his product; they
remain under the spell of Coleridge and Gervinus.[141] Emerson, it is
true, protested at the close of his essay that he "could not marry this
fact," of Shakspere's being a jovial actor and manager, "to his verse;"
but that deliverance has served only as a text for those who have
embraced the fantastic tenet that Shakspere was but the theatrical
agent and representative of Bacon; a delusion of which the vogue may be
partly traced to the lack of psychological solidity in the ordinary
presentment of Shakspere by his admirers. The heresy, of course, merely
leaps over the difficulty, into absolute irrelevance. Emerson was
intellectually to blame in that, seeing as he did the hiatus between the
poet's life and the prevailing conception of his verse, he did not try
to conceive it all anew, but rather resigned himself to the solution
that Shakspere's mind was out of human ken. "A good reader can in a sort
nestle into Plato's brain and think from thence," he said; "but not into
Shakspere's; we are still out of doors." We should indeed remain so for
ever did we not set about patiently picking the locks where the
transcendentalist has dreamily turned away.
It is imperative that we should recommence vigilantly with the concrete
facts, ignoring all the merely aesthetic and metaphysic syntheses. Where
Coleridge and Schlegel more or less ingeniously invite us to acknowledge
a miraculous artistic perfection, where Lamb more movingly gives forth
the intense vibration aroused in his spirit by Shakspere's ripest work,
we must turn back to track down the youth from Stratford; son of a
burgess once prosperous, but destined to sink steadily in the world;
married at eighteen, under pressure of circumstances, with small
prospect of income, to the woman of twenty-five; ill at ease in that
position; and at length, having made friends with a travelling company
of actors, come to London to earn a living in any tolerable way by means
of his moderate education, his "small Latin and less Greek," his knack
of fluent rhyming, and his turn for play-acting. To know him as he began
we must measure him narrowly by his first performances. These are not to
be looked for in even the earliest of his plays, not one of which can be
taken to represent his young and unaided faculty, whether as regards
construction or diction. Collaboration, the natural resort of the modern
dramatist, must have been to some extent forced on him in those years by
the nature of his situation; and after all that has been said by adorers
of the quality of his wit and his verse in such early comedies as
LOVE'S LABOUR LOST and THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA, the critical reader
is apt to be left pretty evenly balanced between the two reflections
that the wit and the versification have indeed at times a certain happy
naturalness of their own, and that nevertheless, if they really be
Shakspere's throughout, the most remarkable thing in the matter is his
later progress. But even apart from such disputable issues, we may
safely say with Mr. Fleay that "there is not a play of his that can be
referred even on the rashest conjecture to a date anterior to 1594,
which does not bear the plainest internal evidence of having been
refashioned at a later time."[142] These plays, then, with all their
evidences of immaturity, of what Mr. Bagehot called "clever
young-mannishness," cannot serve us as safe measures of Shakspere's mind
at the beginning of his career.
But it happens that we have such a measure in performances which, since
they imply no technical arrangement, are of a homogenous literary
substance, and can be shown to be the work of a man brought up in the
Warwickshire dialect,[143] are not even challenged, I believe, by the
adherents of the Baconian faith. The tasks which the greatest of our
poets set himself when near the age of thirty, and to which he
presumably brought all the powers of which he was then conscious, were
the uninspired and pitilessly prolix poems of VENUS AND ADONIS and THE
RAPE OF LUCRECE, the first consisting of some 1,200 lines and the second
of more than 1,800; one a calculated picture of female concupiscence and
the other a still more calculated picture of female chastity: the two
alike abnormally fluent, yet external, unimpassioned, endlessly
descriptive, elaborately unimpressive. Save for the sexual attraction of
the subjects, on the commercial side of which the poet had obviously
reckoned in choosing them, these performances could have no unstudious
readers in our day and few warm admirers in their own, so little sign do
they give of any high poetic faculty save the two which singly go so
often without any determining superiority of mind--inexhaustible flow of
words and endless observation of concrete detail. Of the countless
thrilling felicities of phrase and feeling for which Shakspere is
renowned above all English poets, not one, I think, is to be found in
those three thousand fluently-scanned and smoothly-worded lines: on the
contrary, the wearisome succession of stanzas, stretching the succinct
themes immeasurably beyond all natural fitness and all narrative
interest, might seem to signalise such a lack of artistic judgment as
must preclude all great performance; while the apparent plan of
producing an effect by mere multiplication of words, mere extension of
description without intension of idea, might seem to prove a lack of
capacity for any real depth of passion. They were simply manufactured
poems, consciously constructed for the market, the first designed at the
same time to secure the patronage of the Maecenas of the hour, Lord
Southampton, to whom it was dedicated, and the second produced and
similarly dedicated on the strength of the success of the first. The
point here to be noted is that they gained the poet's ends. They
succeeded as saleable literature, and they gained the Earl's favour.
And the rest of the poet's literary career, from this point forward,
seems to have been no less prudently calculated. Having plenty of
evidence that men could not make a living by poetry, even if they
produced it with facility; and that they could as little count on living
steadily by the sale of plays, he joined with his trade of actor the
business not merely of playwright but of part-sharer in the takings of
the theatre. The presumption from all we know of the commercial side of
the play-making of the times is that, for whatever pieces Shakspere
touched up, collaborated in, or composed for his company, he received a
certain payment once for all;[144] since there was no reason why his
partners should treat his plays differently in this regard from the
plays they bought of other men. Doubtless, when his reputation was made,
the payments would be considerable. But the main source of his income,
or rather of the accumulations with which he bought land and house and
tithes at Stratford, must have been his share in the takings of the
theatre--a share which would doubtless increase as the earlier partners
disappeared. He must have speedily become the principal man in the
firm, combining as he did the work of composer, reviser, and adaptor of
plays with that of actor and working partner. We are thus dealing with a
temperament or mentality not at all obviously original or masterly, not
at all conspicuous at the outset for intellectual depth or seriousness,
not at all obtrusive of its "mission;" but exhibiting simply a gift for
acting, an abundant faculty of rhythmical speech, and a power of minute
observation, joined with a thoroughly practical or commercial handling
of the problem of life, in a calling not usually taken-to by
commercially-minded men. What emerges for us thus far is the conception
of a very plastic intelligence, a good deal led and swayed by immediate
circumstances; but at bottom very sanely related to life, and so
possessing a latent faculty for controlling its destinies; not much
cultured, not profound, not deeply passionate; not particularly
reflective though copious in utterance; a personality which of itself,
if under no pressure of pecuniary need, would not be likely to give the
world any serious sign of mental capacity whatever.
In order, then, that such a man as this should develop into the
Shakspere of the great tragedies and tragic comedies, there must concur
two kinds of life-conditions with those already noted--the fresh
conditions of deeply-moving experience and of deep intellectual
stimulus. Without these, such a mind would no more arrive at the highest
poetic and dramatic capacity than, lacking the spur of necessity or of
some outside call, it would be moved to seek poetic and dramatic
utterance for its own relief. There is no sign here of an innate burden
of thought, bound to be delivered; there is only the sensitive plate or
responsive faculty, capable of giving back with peculiar vividness and
spontaneity every sort of impression which may be made on it. The
faculty, in short, which could produce those 3,000 fluent lines on the
bare data of the stories of Venus and Adonis and Tarquin and Lucrece,
with only the intellectual material of a rakish Stratford lad's
schooling and reading, and the culture coming of a few years'
association with the primitive English stage and its hangers-on, was
capable of broadening and deepening, with vital experience and vital
culture, into the poet of LEAR and MACBETH. But the vital culture must
come to it, like the experience: this was not a man who would go out of
his way to seek the culture. A man so minded, a man who would bear
hardship in order to win knowledge, would not have settled down so
easily into the actor-manager with a good share in the company's
profits. There is almost nothing to show that the young Shakspere read
anything save current plays, tales, and poems. Such a notable book as
North's PLUTARCH, published in 1579, does not seem to have affected his
literary activity till about the year 1600: and even then the subject of
JULIUS CAESAR may have been suggested to him by some other play-maker, as
was the case with his chronicle histories. In his contemporary, Ben
Jonson, we do have the type of the young man bent on getting scholarship
as the best thing possible to him. The bricklayer's apprentice,
unwillingly following the craft of his stepfather, sticking obstinately
all the while to his Horace and his Homer, resolute to keep and to add
to the humanities he had learned in the grammar school, stands out
clearly alongside of the other, far less enthusiastic for knowledge and
letters, but also far more plastically framed, and at the same time far
more clearly alive to the seriousness of the struggle for existence as a
matter of securing the daily bread-and-butter. It may be, indeed--who
knows--that but for that peculiarly early marriage, with its consequent
family responsibilities, Shakspere would have allowed himself a little
more of youthful breathing-time: it may be that it was the existence of
Ann Hathaway and her three children that made him a seeker for pelf
rather than a seeker for knowledge in the years between twenty and
thirty, when the concern for pelf sits lightly on most intellectual men.
The thesis undertaken in LOVE'S LABOUR LOST--that the truly effective
culture is that of life in the world rather than that of secluded
study--perhaps expresses a process of inward and other debate in which
the wish has become father to the thought. Scowled upon by jealous
collegians like Greene for presuming, actor as he was, to write dramas,
he must have asked himself whether there was not something to be gained
from such schooling as theirs.[145] But then he certainly made more than
was needed to keep the Stratford household going; and the clear shallow
flood of VENUS AND ADONIS and the RAPE OF LUCRECE stands for ever to
show how far from tragic consciousness was the young husband and father
when close upon thirty years old. It was in 1596 that his little Hamnet
died at Stratford; and there is nothing to show, says Mr. Fleay,[146]
that Shakspere had ever been there in the interval between his departure
in 1587 and the child's funeral.
But already, it may be, some vital experience had come. Whatever view we
take of the drama of the sonnets, we may so far adopt Mr. Fleay's
remarkable theory[147] as to surmise that the central episode of
faithless love occurred about 1594. If so, here was enough to deepen and
impassion the plastic personality of the rhymer of VENUS AND ADONIS; to
add a new string to the heretofore Mercurial lyre. All the while, too,
he was undergoing the kind of culture and of psychological training
involved in his craft of acting--a culture involving a good deal of
contact with the imaginative literature of the Renaissance, so far as
then translated, and a psychological training of great though little
recognised importance to the dramatist. It seems obvious that the
practice of acting, by a plastic and receptive temperament, capable of
manifold appreciation, must have counted for much in developing the
faculties at once of sympathy and expression. In this respect Shakspere
stood apart from his rivals, with their merely literary training. And in
point of fact, we do find in his plays, year by year, a strengthening
sense of the realities of human nature, despite their frequently
idealistic method of portraiture, the verbalism and factitiousness of
much of their wit, and their conventionality of plot. Above all things,
the man who drew so many fancifully delightful types of womanhood must
have been intensely appreciative of the charm of sex; and it is on that
side that we are to look for his first contacts with the deeper forces
of life. What marks off the Shakspere of thirty-five, in fine, from all
his rivals, is just his peculiarly true and new[148] expression of the
living grace of womanhood, always, it is true, abstracted to the form of
poetry and skilfully purified from the blemishes of the actual, but none
the less convincing and stimulating. We are here in presence at once of
a rare receptive faculty and a rare expressive faculty: the plastic
organism of the first poems touched through and through with a hundred
vibrations of deeper experience; the external and extensive method
gradually ripening into an internal and intensive; the innate facility
of phrase and alertness of attention turned from the physical to the
psychical. But still it is to the psychics of sex, for the most part,
that we are limited. Of the deeps of human nature, male nature, as apart
from the love of woman, the playwright still shows no special
perception, save in the vivid portrait of Shylock, the exasperated Jew.
The figures in which we can easily recognise his hand in the earlier
historical plays are indeed marked by his prevailing sanity of
perception; always they show the play of the seeing eye, the ruling
sense of reality which shaped his life; it is this visible actuality
that best marks them off from the non-Shaksperean figures around them.
And in the wonderful figures of Falstaff and his group we have a
roundness of comic reality to which nothing else in modern literature
thus far could be compared. But still this, the most remarkable of all,
remains comic reality; and, what is more, it is a comic reality of
which, as in the rest of his work, the substratum was pre-Shaksperean.
For it is clear that the figure of Falstaff, as Oldcastle, had been
popularly successful before Shakspere took hold of it:[149] and what he
did here, as elsewhere, with his uninventive mind, in which the faculty
of imagination always rectified and expanded rather than originated
types and actions, was doubtless to give the hues and tones of perfect
life to the half-real inventions of others. This must always be insisted
on as the special psychological characteristic of Shakspere. Excepting
in the doubtful case of LOVE'S LABOUR LOST, he never invented a plot;
his male characters are almost always developments from an already
sketched original; it is in drawing his heroines, where he is most
idealistic, that he seems to have been most independently creative, his
originals here being doubtless the women who had charmed him, set living
in ideal scenes to charm others. And it resulted from this specialty of
structure that the greater reality of his earlier male historic figures,
as compared with those of most of his rivals, is largely a matter of
saner and more felicitous declamation--the play of his great and growing
faculty of expression--since he had no more special knowledge of the
types in hand than had his competitors. It is only when his unequalled
receptive faculty has been acted upon by a peculiarly concentrated and
readily assimilated body of culture, the English translation by Sir
Thomas North of Amyot's French translation of Plutarch's Lives, that we
find Shakspere incontestably superior to his contemporaries in the
virile treatment of virile problems no less than in the sympathetic
rendering of emotional charm and tenderness and the pathos of passion.
The tragedy of ROMEO AND JULIET, with all its burning fervours and
swooning griefs, remains for us a picture of the luxury of woe: it is
truly said of it that it is not fundamentally unhappy. But in JULIUS
CAESAR we have touched a further depth of sadness. For the moving tragedy
of circumstance, of lovers sundered by fate only to be swiftly joined in
exultant death, we have the profounder tragedy of mutually destroying
energies, of grievously miscalculating men, of failure and frustration
dogging the steps of the strenuous and the wise, of destiny searching
out the fatal weakness of the strong. To the poet has now been added the
reader; to the master of the pathos of passion the student of the
tragedy of universal life. It is thus by culture and experience--culture
limited but concentrated, and experience limited but intense--that the
man Shakspere has been intelligibly made into the dramatist Shakspere as
we find him when he comes to his greatest tasks. For the formation of
the supreme artist there was needed alike the purely plastic organism
and the special culture to which it was so uniquely fitted to respond;
culture that came without search, and could be undergone as
spontaneously as the experience of life itself; knowledge that needed no
more wooing than Ann Hathaway, or any dubious angel in the sonnets. In
the English version of Plutarch's LIVES, pressed upon him doubtless by
the play-making plans of other men, Shakspere found the most effectively
concentrated history of ancient humanity that could possibly have
reached him; and he responded to the stimulus with all his energy of
expression because he received it so freely and vitally, in respect
alike of his own plasticity and the fact that the vehicle of the
impression was his mother tongue. It is plain that to the last he made
no secondary study of antiquity. He made blunders which alone might warn
the Baconians off their vain quest: he had no notion of chronology:
finding Cato retrospectively spoken of by Plutarch as one to whose ideal
Coriolanus had risen, he makes a comrade of Coriolanus say it, as if
Cato were a dead celebrity in Coriolanus' day; just as he makes Hector
quote Aristotle in Troy. These clues are not to be put aside with
aesthetic platitudes: they are capital items in our knowledge of the man.
And if even the idolator feels perturbed by their obtrusion, he has but
to reflect that where the trained scholars around Shakspere reproduced
antiquity with greater accuracy in minor things, tithing the mint and
anise and cumin of erudition, they gave us of the central human forces,
which it was their special business to realise, mere hollow and tedious
parodies. Jonson was a scholar whose variety of classic reading might
have constituted him a specialist to-day; but Jonson's ancients are
mostly dead for us, even as are Jonson's moderns, because they are the
expression of a psychic faculty which could neither rightly perceive
reality, nor rightly express what it did perceive. He represents
industry in art without inspiration. The two contrasted pictures, of
Jonson writing out his harangues in prose in order to turn them into
verse, and of Shakspere giving his lines unblotted to the
actors--speaking in verse, in the white heat of his cerebration, as
spontaneously as he breathed--these historic data, which happen to be
among the most perfectly certified that we possess concerning the two
men, give us at once half the secret of one and all the secret of the
other. Jonson had the passion for book knowledge, the patience for hard
study, the faculty for plot-invention; and withal he produced dramatic
work which gives little or no permanent pleasure. Shakspere had none of
these characteristics; and yet, being the organism he was, it only
needed the culture which fortuitously reached him in his own tongue to
make him successively the greatest dramatic master of eloquence, mirth,
charm, tenderness, passion, pathos, pessimism, and philosophic serenity
that literature can show, recognisably so even though his work be almost
constantly hampered by the framework of other men's enterprises, which
he was so singularly content to develop or improve. Hence the critical
importance of following up the culture which evolved him, and above all,
that which finally touched him to his most memorable performance.