they were nearer in spirit to Shakespeare’s art; and as they
insisted on the importance of the effect of the whole rather than on
the importance of the leading character, they were nearer, in their
old-fashioned way, to the secret of dramatic art in general.
_Qua_ work of art, the work of art cannot be interpreted; there is
nothing to interpret; we can only criticize it according to standards,
in comparison to other works of art; and for “interpretation” the chief
task is the presentation of relevant historical facts which the reader
is not assumed to know. Mr. Robertson points out, very pertinently, how
critics have failed in their “interpretation” of _Hamlet_ by ignoring
what ought to be very obvious: that _Hamlet_ is a stratification, that
it represents the efforts of a series of men, each making what he could
out of the work of his predecessors. The _Hamlet_ of Shakespeare will
appear to us very differently if, instead of treating the whole action
of the play as due to Shakespeare’s design, we perceive his _Hamlet_ to
be superposed upon much cruder material which persists even in the final
form.
We know that there was an older play by Thomas Kyd, that extraordinary
dramatic (if not poetic) genius who was in all probability the author of
two plays so dissimilar as the _Spanish Tragedy_ and _Arden of
Feversham_; and what this play was like we can guess from three clues:
from the _Spanish Tragedy_ itself, from the tale of Belleforest upon
which Kyd’s _Hamlet_ must have been based, and from a version acted in
Germany in Shakespeare’s lifetime which bears strong evidence of having
been adapted from the earlier, not from the later, play. From these
three sources it is clear that in the earlier play the motive was a
revenge-motive simply; that the action or delay is caused, as in the
_Spanish Tragedy_, solely by the difficulty of assassinating a monarch
surrounded by guards; and that the “madness” of Hamlet was feigned in
order to escape suspicion, and successfully. In the final play of
Shakespeare, on the other hand, there is a motive which is more
important than that of revenge, and which explicitly “blunts” the
latter; the delay in revenge is unexplained on grounds of necessity or
expediency; and the effect of the “madness” is not to lull but to arouse
the king’s suspicion. The alteration is not complete enough, however, to
be convincing. Furthermore, there are verbal parallels so close to the
_Spanish Tragedy_ as to leave no doubt that in places Shakespeare was
merely _revising_ the text of Kyd. And finally there are unexplained
scenes—the Polonius-Laertes and the Polonius-Reynaldo scenes—for which
there is little excuse; these scenes are not in the verse style of Kyd,
and not beyond doubt in the style of Shakespeare. These Mr. Robertson
believes to be scenes in the original play of Kyd reworked by a third
hand, perhaps Chapman, before Shakespeare touched the play. And he
concludes, with very strong show of reason, that the original play of
Kyd was, like certain other revenge plays, in two parts of five acts
each. The upshot of Mr. Robertson’s examination is, we believe,
irrefragable: that Shakespeare’s _Hamlet_, so far as it is
Shakespeare’s, is a play dealing with the effect of a mother’s guilt
upon her son, and that Shakespeare was unable to impose this motive
successfully upon the “intractable” material of the old play.
Of the intractability there can be no doubt. So far from being
Shakespeare’s masterpiece, the play is most certainly an artistic
failure. In several ways the play is puzzling, and disquieting as is
none of the others. Of all the plays it is the longest and is possibly
the one on which Shakespeare spent most pains; and yet he has left in it
superfluous and inconsistent scenes which even hasty revision should
have noticed. The versification is variable. Lines like
Look, the morn, in russet mantle clad,
Walks o’er the dew of yon high eastern hill,
are of the Shakespeare of _Romeo and Juliet_. The lines in Act V. sc.
ii.,
Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting
That would not let me sleep ...
Up from my cabin,
My sea-gown scarf’d about me, in the dark
Grop’d I to find out them: had my desire;
Finger’d their packet;
are of his quite mature. Both workmanship and thought are in an unstable
condition. We are surely justified in attributing the play, with that
other profoundly interesting play of “intractable” material and
astonishing versification, _Measure for Measure_, to a period of crisis,
after which follow the tragic successes which culminate in _Coriolanus_.
_Coriolanus_ may be not as “interesting” as _Hamlet_, but it is, with
_Antony and Cleopatra_, Shakespeare’s most assured artistic success. And
probably more people have thought _Hamlet_ a work of art because they
found it interesting, than have found it interesting because it is a
work of art. It is the “Mona Lisa” of literature.
The grounds of _Hamlet’s_ failure are not immediately obvious. Mr.
Robertson is undoubtedly correct in concluding that the essential
emotion of the play is the feeling of a son towards a guilty mother:
[Hamlet’s] tone is that of one who has suffered tortures on the
score of his mother’s degradation.... The guilt of a mother is an
almost intolerable motive for drama, but it had to be maintained and
emphasized to supply a psychological solution, or rather a hint of
one.
This, however, is by no means the whole story. It is not merely the
“guilt of a mother” that cannot be handled as Shakespeare handled the
suspicion of Othello, the infatuation of Antony, or the pride of
Coriolanus. The subject might conceivably have expanded into a tragedy
like these, intelligible, self-complete, in the sunlight. _Hamlet_, like
the sonnets, is full of some stuff that the writer could not drag to
light, contemplate, or manipulate into art. And when we search for this
feeling, we find it, as in the sonnets, very difficult to localize. You
cannot point to it in the speeches; indeed, if you examine the two
famous soliloquies you see the versification of Shakespeare, but a
content which might be claimed by another, perhaps by the author of the
_Revenge of Bussy d’Ambois_, Act V. sc. i. We find Shakespeare’s
_Hamlet_ not in the action, not in any quotations that we might select,
so much as in an unmistakable tone which is unmistakably not in the
earlier play.
The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an
“objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation,
a chain of events which shall be the formula of that _particular_
emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in
sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. If you
examine any of Shakespeare’s more successful tragedies, you will find
this exact equivalence; you will find that the state of mind of Lady
Macbeth walking in her sleep has been communicated to you by a skilful
accumulation of imagined sensory impressions; the words of Macbeth on
hearing of his wife’s death strike us as if, given the sequence of
events, these words were automatically released by the last event in the
series. The artistic “inevitability” lies in this complete adequacy of
the external to the emotion; and this is precisely what is deficient in
_Hamlet_. Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is
inexpressible, because it is in _excess_ of the facts as they appear.
And the supposed identity of Hamlet with his author is genuine to this
point: that Hamlet’s bafflement at the absence of objective equivalent
to his feelings is a prolongation of the bafflement of his creator in
the face of his artistic problem. Hamlet is up against the difficulty
that his disgust is occasioned by his mother, but that his mother is not
an adequate equivalent for it; his disgust envelops and exceeds her. It
is thus a feeling which he cannot understand; he cannot objectify it,
and it therefore remains to poison life and obstruct action. None of the
possible actions can satisfy it; and nothing that Shakespeare can do
with the plot can express Hamlet for him. And it must be noticed that
the very nature of the _données_ of the problem precludes objective
equivalence. To have heightened the criminality of Gertrude would have
been to provide the formula for a totally different emotion in Hamlet;
it is just _because_ her character is so negative and insignificant that
she arouses in Hamlet the feeling which she is incapable of
representing.
The “madness” of Hamlet lay to Shakespeare’s hand; in the earlier play a
simple ruse, and to the end, we may presume, understood as a ruse by the
audience. For Shakespeare it is less than madness and more than feigned.
The levity of Hamlet, his repetition of phrase, his puns, are not part
of a deliberate plan of dissimulation, but a form of emotional relief.
In the character Hamlet it is the buffoonery of an emotion which can
find no outlet in action; in the dramatist it is the buffoonery of an
emotion which he cannot express in art. The intense feeling, ecstatic or
terrible, without an object or exceeding its object, is something which
every person of sensibility has known; it is doubtless a study to
pathologists. It often occurs in adolescence: the ordinary person puts
these feelings to sleep, or trims down his feeling to fit the business
world; the artist keeps it alive by his ability to intensify the world
to his emotions. The Hamlet of Laforgue is an adolescent; the Hamlet of
Shakespeare is not, he has not that explanation and excuse. We must
simply admit that here Shakespeare tackled a problem which proved too
much for him. Why he attempted it at all is an insoluble puzzle; under
compulsion of what experience he attempted to express the inexpressibly
horrible, we cannot ever know. We need a great many facts in his
biography; and we should like to know whether, and when, and after or at
the same time as what personal experience, he read Montaigne, II. xii.,
_Apologie de Raimond Sebond_. We should have, finally, to know something
which is by hypothesis unknowable, for we assume it to be an experience
which, in the manner indicated, exceeded the facts. We should have to
understand things which Shakespeare did not understand himself.
Ben Jonson
The reputation of Jonson has been of the most deadly kind that can be
compelled upon the memory of a great poet. To be universally accepted;
to be damned by the praise that quenches all desire to read the book; to
be afflicted by the imputation of the virtues which excite the least
pleasure; and to be read only by historians and antiquaries—this is the
most perfect conspiracy of approval. For some generations the reputation
of Jonson has been carried rather as a liability than as an asset in the
balance-sheet of English literature. No critic has succeeded in making
him appear pleasurable or even interesting. Swinburne’s book on Jonson
satisfies no curiosity and stimulates no thought. For the critical study
in the “Men of Letters Series” by Mr. Gregory Smith there is a place; it
satisfies curiosity, it supplies many just observations, it provides
valuable matter on the neglected masques; it only fails to remodel the
image of Jonson which is settled in our minds. Probably the fault lies
with several generations of our poets. It is not that the value of
poetry is only its value to living poets for their own work; but
appreciation is akin to creation, and true enjoyment of poetry is
related to the stirring of suggestion, the stimulus that a poet feels in
his enjoyment of other poetry. Jonson has provided no creative stimulus
for a very long time; consequently we must look back as far as
Dryden—precisely, a poetic practitioner who learned from Jonson—before
we find a living criticism of Jonson’s work.
Yet there are possibilities for Jonson even now. We have no difficulty
in seeing what brought him to this pass; how, in contrast, not with
Shakespeare, but with Marlowe, Webster, Donne, Beaumont, and Fletcher,
he has been paid out with reputation instead of enjoyment. He is no less
a poet than these men, but his poetry is of the surface. Poetry of the
surface cannot be understood without study; for to deal with the surface
of life, as Jonson dealt with it, is to deal so deliberately that we too
must be deliberate, in order to understand. Shakespeare, and smaller men
also, are in the end more difficult, but they offer something at the
start to encourage the student or to satisfy those who want nothing
more; they are suggestive, evocative, a phrase, a voice; they offer
poetry in detail as well as in design. So does Dante offer something, a
phrase everywhere (_tu se’ ombra ed ombra vedi_) even to readers who
have no Italian; and Dante and Shakespeare have poetry of design as well
as of detail. But the polished veneer of Jonson reflects only the lazy
reader’s fatuity; unconscious does not respond to unconscious; no swarms
of inarticulate feelings are aroused. The immediate appeal of Jonson is
to the mind; his emotional tone is not in the single verse, but in the
design of the whole. But not many people are capable of discovering for
themselves the beauty which is only found after labour; and Jonson’s
industrious readers have been those whose interest was historical and
curious, and those who have thought that in discovering the historical
and curious interest they had discovered the artistic value as well.
When we say that Jonson requires study, we do not mean study of his
classical scholarship or of seventeenth-century manners. We mean
intelligent saturation in his work as a whole; we mean that in order to
enjoy him at all, we must get to the centre of his work and his
temperament, and that we must see him unbiased by time, as a
contemporary. And to see him as a contemporary does not so much require
the power of putting ourselves into seventeenth-century London as it
requires the power of setting Jonson in our London: a more difficult
triumph of divination.
It is generally conceded that Jonson failed as a tragic dramatist; and
it is usually agreed that he failed because his genius was for satiric
comedy and because of the weight of pedantic learning with which he
burdened his two tragic failures. The second point marks an obvious
error of detail; the first is too crude a statement to be accepted; to
say that he failed because his genius was unsuited to tragedy is to tell
us nothing at all. Jonson did not write a good tragedy, but we can see
no reason why he should not have written one. If two plays so different
as _The Tempest_ and _The Silent Woman_ are both comedies, surely the
category of tragedy could be made wide enough to include something
possible for Jonson to have done. But the classification of tragedy and
comedy, while it may be sufficient to mark the distinction in a dramatic
literature of more rigid form and treatment—it may distinguish
Aristophanes from Euripides—is not adequate to a drama of such
variations as the Elizabethans. Tragedy is a crude classification for
plays so different in their tone as _Macbeth_, _The Jew of Malta_, and
_The Witch of Edmonton_; and it does not help us much to say that _The
Merchant of Venice_ and _The Alchemist_ are comedies. Jonson had his own
scale, his own instrument. The merit which _Catiline_ possesses is the
same merit that is exhibited more triumphantly in _Volpone_; _Catiline_
fails, not because it is too laboured and conscious, but because it is
not conscious enough; because Jonson in this play was not alert to his
own idiom, not clear in his mind as to what his temperament wanted him
to do. In _Catiline_ Jonson conforms, or attempts to conform, to
conventions; not to the conventions of antiquity, which he had
exquisitely under control, but to the conventions of tragico-historical
drama of his time. It is not the Latin erudition that sinks _Catiline_,
but the application of that erudition to a form which was not the proper
vehicle for the mind which had amassed the erudition.
If you look at _Catiline_—that dreary Pyrrhic victory of tragedy—you
find two passages to be successful: Act II. scene i, the dialogue of the
political ladies, and the Prologue of Sylla’s ghost. These two passages
are genial. The soliloquy of the ghost is a characteristic Jonson
success in content and in versification—
Dost thou not feel me, Rome? not yet! is night
So heavy on thee, and my weight so light?
Can Sylla’s ghost arise within thy walls,
Less threatening than an earthquake, the quick falls
Of thee and thine? Shake not the frighted heads
Of thy steep towers, or shrink to their first beds?
Or as their ruin the large Tyber fills,
Make that swell up, and drown thy seven proud hills?...
This is the learned, but also the creative, Jonson. Without concerning
himself with the character of Sulla, and in lines of invective, Jonson
makes Sylla’s ghost, while the words are spoken, a living and terrible
force. The words fall with as determined beat as if they were the will
of the morose Dictator himself. You may say: merely invective; but mere
invective, even if as superior to the clumsy fisticuffs of Marston and
Hall as Jonson’s verse is superior to theirs, would not create a living
figure as Jonson has done in this long tirade. And you may say:
rhetoric; but if we are to call it “rhetoric” we must subject that term
to a closer dissection than any to which it is accustomed. What Jonson
has done here is not merely a fine speech. It is the careful, precise
filling in of a strong and simple outline, and at no point does it
overflow the outline; it is far more careful and precise in its
obedience to this outline than are many of the speeches in
_Tamburlaine_. The outline is not Sulla, for Sulla has nothing to do
with it, but “Sylla’s ghost.” The words may not be suitable to an
historical Sulla, or to anybody in history, but they are a perfect
expression for “Sylla’s ghost.” You cannot say they are rhetorical
“because people do not talk like that,” you cannot call them “verbiage”;
they do not exhibit prolixity or redundancy or the other vices in the
rhetoric books; there is a definite artistic emotion which demands
expression at that length. The words themselves are mostly simple words,
the syntax is natural, the language austere rather than adorned. Turning
then to the induction of _The Poetaster_, we find another success of the
same kind—
Light, I salute thee, but with wounded nerves....
Men may not talk in that way, but the spirit of envy does, and in the
words of Jonson envy is a real and living person. It is not human life
that informs envy and Sylla’s ghost, but it is energy of which human
life is only another variety.
Returning to _Catiline_, we find that the best scene in the body of the
play is one which cannot be squeezed into a tragic frame, and which
appears to belong to satiric comedy. The scene between Fulvia and Galla
and Sempronia is a living scene in a wilderness of oratory. And as it
recalls other scenes—there is a suggestion of the college of ladies in
_The Silent Woman_—it looks like a comedy scene. And it appears to be
satire.
They shall all give and pay well, that come here,
If they will have it; and that, jewels, pearl,
Plate, or round sums to buy these. I’m not taken
With a cob-swan or a high-mounting bull,
As foolish Leda and Europa were;
But the bright gold, with Danaë. For such price
I would endure a rough, harsh Jupiter,
Or ten such thundering gamesters, and refrain
To laugh at ’em, till they are gone, with my much suffering.
This scene is no more comedy than it is tragedy, and the “satire” is
merely a medium for the essential emotion. Jonson’s drama is only
incidentally satire, because it is only incidentally a criticism upon
the actual world. It is not satire in the way in which the work of Swift
or the work of Molière may be called satire: that is, it does not find
its source in any precise emotional attitude or precise intellectual
criticism of the actual world. It is satire perhaps as the work of
Rabelais is satire; certainly not more so. The important thing is that
if fiction can be divided into creative fiction and critical fiction,
Jonson’s is creative. That he was a great critic, our first great
critic, does not affect this assertion. Every creator is also a critic;
Jonson was a conscious critic, but he was also conscious in his
creations. Certainly, one sense in which the term “critical” may be
applied to fiction is a sense in which the term might be used of a
method antithetical to Jonson’s. It is the method of _Education
Sentimentale_. The characters of Jonson, of Shakespeare, perhaps of all
the greatest drama, are drawn in positive and simple outlines. They may
be filled in, and by Shakespeare they are filled in, by much detail or
many shifting aspects; but a clear and sharp and simple form remains
through these—though it would be hard to say in what the clarity and
sharpness and simplicity of Hamlet consists. But Frédéric Moreau is not
made in that way. He is constructed partly by negative definition, built
up by a great number of observations. We cannot isolate him from the
environment in which we find him; it may be an environment which is or
can be much universalized; nevertheless it, and the figure in it,
consist of very many observed particular facts, the actual world.
Without this world the figure dissolves. The ruling faculty is a
critical perception, a commentary upon experienced feeling and
sensation. If this is true of Flaubert, it is true in a higher degree of
Molière than of Jonson. The broad farcical lines of Molière may seem to
be the same drawing as Jonson’s. But Molière—say in Alceste or Monsieur
Jourdain—is criticizing the actual; the reference to the actual world is
more direct. And having a more tenuous reference, the work of Jonson is
much less directly satirical.
This leads us to the question of Humours. Largely on the evidence of the
two Humour plays, it is sometimes assumed that Jonson is occupied with
types; typical exaggerations, or exaggerations of type. The Humour
definition, the expressed intention of Jonson, may be satisfactory for
these two plays. _Every Man in his Humour_ is the first mature work of
Jonson, and the student of Jonson must study it; but it is not the play
in which Jonson found his genius: it is the last of his plays to read
first. If one reads _Volpone_, and after that re-reads the _Jew of
Malta_; then returns to Jonson and reads _Bartholomew Fair_, _The
Alchemist_, _Epicœne_ and _The Devil is an Ass_, and finally _Catiline_,
it is possible to arrive at a fair opinion of the poet and the
dramatist.
The Humour, even at the beginning, is not a type, as in Marston’s
satire, but a simplified and somewhat distorted individual with a
typical mania. In the later work, the Humour definition quite fails to
account for the total effect produced. The characters of Shakespeare are
such as might exist in different circumstances than those in which
Shakespeare sets them. The latter appear to be those which extract from
the characters the most intense and interesting realization; but that
realization has not exhausted their possibilities. Volpone’s life, on
the other hand, is bounded by the scene in which it is played; in fact,
the life is the life of the scene and is derivatively the life of
Volpone; the life of the character is inseparable from the life of the
drama. This is not dependence upon a background, or upon a substratum of
fact. The emotional effect is single and simple. Whereas in Shakespeare
the effect is due to the way in which the characters _act upon_ one
another, in Jonson it is given by the way in which the characters _fit
in_ with each other. The artistic result of _Volpone_ is not due to any
effect that Volpone, Mosca, Corvino, Corbaccio, Voltore have upon each
other, but simply to their combination into a whole. And these figures
are not personifications of passions; separately, they have not even
that reality, they are constituents. It is a similar indication of
Jonson’s method that you can hardly pick out a line of Jonson’s and say
confidently that it is great poetry; but there are many extended
passages to which you cannot deny that honour.