Shakespeare's dramas--not all of them indeed, but those which were
written after he reached what may be called his mastership--are in the
highest sense of term Works of Art, and as such embody to the full the
principles set forth in the preceding section. In this general survey
of his workmanship, I propose to consider, first, his Dramatic
Architecture or Composition.
I have remarked in a previous chapter,[9] that in Shakespeare's time,
and for several ages before, the Drama was a national passion in England,
nearly all classes of people being pervaded by it. And yet, strange to
say, this passion, notwithstanding the great frequency and variety of
dramatic exhibitions, never came to any sound fruitage of Art, till
the work fell into Shakespeare's hands. Moreover the tide of patriotic
feeling, or the passion of nationality, which had for centuries been
growing in strength, intelligence, and manliness, was then at its
height, the people of all sorts being possessed with a hearty, honest
English enthusiasm and national pride. And this passion was
inextricably bound up with traditions of the past and with the ancient
currents of the national life. Therewithal this deep, settled
reverence for what was then "Old England," while it naturally drew
into the mind the treasured riches of many foregoing ages, was at the
same time strangely combined with a very bold and daring spirit of
progress and improvement. Men seem indeed to have been all the more
open to healthy innovation for being thus firmly rooted in the ground
of prescription. The public mind received what was new the more freely
because it loved the old. So that hope and anticipation walked with
the bolder pace, inasmuch as memory and retrospection were still their
cherished companions. In a word, men's tenacity of the past gave them
the larger and brighter vision of the future. Because they had no
mind to forsake the law of their fathers, or to follow the leading of
"sages undevoutly free," therefore they were able to legislate the
better for their children, and felt the less of danger in true freedom
of thought.
[9] Page 120 of this volume.
It was natural, perhaps inevitable, that those two passions thus
coexisting should somehow work together, and at least endeavour to
produce a joint result. And so it was in fact. Historical plays, or
things purporting to be such, were highly popular: the public taste
evidently favoured, not to say demanded them; and some of
Shakespeare's earliest essays were undoubtedly in that line. There are
many clear evidences to this point. For instance, Thomas Nash, in his
_Pierce Penniless_, 1592, speaks of certain plays "wherein our
forefathers' valiant acts, that have been long buried in rusty brass
and worm-eaten books, are revived, and they themselves raised from the
grave of oblivion, and brought to plead their aged honours in open
presence." And again: "How would it have joyed brave Talbot, the
terror of the French, to think that, after he had lain two hundred
years in the tomb, he should triumph again on the stage; and have his
bones new-embalmed with the tears of ten thousand spectators at
least,--at several times,--who, in the tragedian that represents his
person, behold him fresh-bleeding!" From these passages it is clear
that historical plays on English subjects were strong in the public
interest and patronage. And I have no doubt that the second passage
quoted refers to Shakespeare's First Part of _King Henry the Sixth_.
And it might well be that the popular mind should take special delight
in entertainments where, to the common interest of dramatic
exhibitions was added the further charm of national feeling and
recollection, and where a large patriotism, "looking before and
after," would find itself at home.
The Historical Drama, then, grew up simultaneously with Comedy and
Tragedy, and established itself as a coördinate branch of the Gothic
Drama in England. Now this circumstance could not be without great
influence in determining the whole scope and character of the English
Drama in all its varieties. The natural effect was to make them all
more or less historical in method and grain. For the process
generated, and could not fail to generate, corresponding modes and
habits of thought in dramatic composition; and these would needs go
with the writers into whatever branch of the Drama they might take in
hand. Because modes and habits of thought are not things that men can
put off and on for different subjects and occasions. What they learn
to practise in one field of labour transfers itself with them, whether
they will or no, to other fields. Their way of viewing things, nay,
their very faculties of vision, catch the temper and drift of what
they work in; which drift and temper cleave to them in spite of
themselves, and unconsciously shape all their movements of thought; so
that, change their matter as they may, their mind still keeps the
same. Accordingly, even when Shakespeare does not deal specifically
with the persons and events of history; when he fetches his incidents
and characters from the realms of imagination; still his workmanship
is historical in its spirit and method; proceeding according to the
_laws_, even while departing from the _matter_, of history; so that we
have pure creations formed upon the principles, and in the order and
manner, of historical dramas.
The practical consequences of all this were both manifold and strongly
marked. The Drama thus cut itself loose and swung clean away from the
narrow circle of myths and legends, where the ancients had fixed it,
and ranged at large in all the freedom and variety of historical
representation. It took on all the compass, amplitude, and
expansiveness of the Homeric Epos. The stereotyped sameness and
confinement of the Greek stage were necessarily discarded, and the
utmost breadth of matter and scope, compatible with clearness of
survey, became the recognized freehold of Dramatic Art.[10]
[10] At this time the Drama was recognized throughout Europe as
the poetic form most suitable to modern times and races. As it
occupied the _place_ of the epic poem, and did not merely, like
the ancient drama, stand _side by side_ with it, so, along with
the office of replacing it, it inherited also the task of
showing itself capable of managing, like the epopee, any matter
however extended. The materials presented to it were not common
property, like the many well-known myths of antiquity, handed
down in a ready-made poetical form; but they were those
rudiments formed in the religious dramas, those Mysteries
founded on vast actions, and those historical subjects, which
required a whole cycle of pieces for the mastering of the huge
matter. The things of the world had become complicated and
manifold: the variety of men, their nature, their passions,
their situations, their mutually-contending powers, would not
submit, in dramatic representation, to be limited to a simple
catastrophe: a wider horizon must be drawn; the actions must be
represented throughout their course; the springs of action must
be more deeply searched. Thus Art was put to the work of setting
forth the utmost fulness of matter in a corresponding form,
which, however, according to Aristotle's law, must not be
extended so far as to preclude an easy survey.--GERVINUS.
So that, as I have before observed, the English Drama was, in the
largest sense, a national growth, and not the work of any individual.
Neither was it a sudden growth, as indeed nothing truly national ever
can be: like the English State, it was the slow, gradual, silent
production of centuries,--the result of the thoughts of many minds in
many ages. The whole platform, and all that relates to the formal
construction of the work, were fixed before Shakespeare put his hand
to it: what remained for him to do, and what he was supremely gifted
for doing, was to rear a grand and beautiful fabric on the basis and
out of the materials already prepared. And where I like best to
contemplate the Poet is, not in the isolation of those powers which
lift him so far above all others, but as having the mind of the
nation, with its great past and greater present, to back him up. And
it seems to me, his greatness consisted very much in that, as he had
the gift, so he surrendered himself to the high task, of reproducing
in artistic immortality the beatings of old England's mighty heart. He
therefore did not go, nor needed he, to books to learn what others had
done: he just sucked in without stint, and to the full measure of his
angelic capacity, the wisdom and the poetry that lived on the lips,
and in the thoughts, feelings, sentiments, and manners of the people.
What he thus sucked in, he purged from its drossy mixtures,
replenished with fresh vitality, and gave it back clothed in the grace and
strength of his own clear spirit. He told the nation better--O how
much better!--than any other could, just what it wanted to hear,--the
very things which its heart was swelling with; only it found not
elsewhere a tongue to voice them, nor an imagination to body them
forth.[11]
[11] The times, far from being a hindrance to a great poet,
were, indeed, from fortunate local and national conditions, the
most propitious that modern times could offer. In a few points
they might be prejudicial to Shakespeare's poetry, but on the
whole he had cause to bless his happy star. The conflict with
scholastic philosophy and religious fanaticism was not indeed
over; yet Shakespeare came at a precious moment of mental
freedom, _after_ the struggle with Popery, and _before_ that
with the Puritans. He could thus in his poetry give to the age
the basis of a natural mode of feeling, thought, and life, upon
which Art prospers in its purest form. In many respects the age
itself was in this favourable to the Poet. It maintained a happy
medium between crudeness and a vitiated taste: life was not
insipid and colourless, as it is nowadays: men still ventured to
appear what they were; there was still poetry in reality. Our
German poets, in an age of rouge and powder, of hoops and wigs,
of stiff manners, rigid proprieties, narrow society, and cold
impulses, had indescribable trouble in struggling out of this
dulness and deformity, which they had first to conquer in
themselves before they could discern and approve what was
better. In Shakespeare's time, nature was still alive: the age
was just halting on the threshold of these distorted views of
false civilization; and if our Poet had to combat against the
first approaches of the disease, he was yet sound and free from
it himself. He had the immense advantage of being at one with
his age, and not at odds with it. When he sought materials for
his poetry, he did not need, like our painters, to dive into
past worlds, restore lost creeds, worship fallen gods, and
imitate foreign works of art: from his national soil he drew the
power which makes his poetry unrivalled. The age favoured him
from another side also. He appeared at that auspicious period
when the Drama had in England already obtained acceptance and,
love; when the sympathy of the people was most alive; and when,
on the other hand, the public were not yet corrupted with
oversensibility. He took that in hand which most actively
engaged the spirit of the people; and he carried it through
progressive steps to a consummation beyond which there was
nothing possible but retrogression.--GERVINUS.
Thus the time and the man were just suited to each other; and it was
in his direct, fearless, whole-hearted sympathy with the soul of the
time that the man both lost himself and found his power: which is
doubtless one reason why we see so little of him in what he wrote. So
that the work could not possibly have been done anywhere but in
England,--the England of Spenser and Raleigh and Bacon; nor could it
have been done there and then by any man but Shakespeare. In his hand
what had long been a national passion became emphatically a National
Institution: how full of life, is shown in that it has ever since
refused to die. And it seems well worth the while to bring this
clearly into view, inasmuch as it serves to remove the subject upon
deeper and broader principles of criticism than have commonly stood
uppermost in the minds of the Poet's critics.
Properly speaking, then, it was the mind and soul of old England that
made the English Drama as we have it in Shakespeare: her life, genius,
culture, spirit, character, built up the work, and built themselves
into the work, at once infusing the soul and determining the form. Of
course, therefore, they ordered and shaped the thing to suit their own
purpose, or so as to express freely and fitly their proper force and
virtue; and they did this in wise ignorance, or in noble disregard, of
antecedent examples, and of all formal and conventional rules. In
other words, they were the _life_ of the thing; and that life
organized its body, as it needs must do, according to its innate and
essential laws.[12]
[12]
A Poet!--He hath put his heart to school,
Nor dares to move unpropp'd upon the staff
Which Art hath lodg'd within his hand,--must laugh
By precept only, and shed tears by rule.
Thy Art be Nature! the live current quaff,
And let the groveller sip his stagnant pool,
In fear that else, when Critics grave and cool
Have kill'd him, Scorn should write his epitaph.
How doth the Meadow-flower its bloom unfold?
Because the lovely little flower is free
Down to its root, and in that freedom bold;
And so the grandeur of the Forest-tree
Comes not by casting in a formal mould,
But from its _own_ divine vitality.