CHAPTER XII

SHAKESPEARE AND OURSELVES

Shakespeare (and this applies to every individual work) had a history, but has one no longer. He had a history, which was that of his poetical sentiment, of its various changing notes, of the various forms in which it found expression. He had also (we must insist), an individual history which it is difficult to identify united with that of the Elizabethan drama, to which he belongs solely as an actor and provider of theatrical works. The general traits, which, among many differences, he shares with his contemporaries, predecessors and imitators (even when these are more substantial than theatrical imitations, conventions and habits) form part of the history of the Renaissance in general and of the English Renaissance in particular, but do not of themselves constitute the history that was properly speaking his own.

But he no longer has this, because what happened afterwards and what happens in the present, is the history of others, is our history, no longer his. Indeed, the histories of Shakespeare, which have been composed, considered in the light of later times--and they are still being written--have been and are understood, in a first sense, as the history of the criticism of his works; and it is clear that in this case, it is the history of us, his critics, the history of criticism and of philosophy, no longer that of Shakespeare. Or they are understood as the history of the spiritual needs and movements of different periods, which now approach and now recede from Shakespeare, causing either almost complete forgetfulness of his poetry, or causing it to be felt and loved. In this case too, it is the history, not of Shakespeare, but of the culture and the mode of feeling of other times than his. Or they are understood in a third sense, as the history of the literary and artistic works, in which the so-called influence of Shakespeare is more or less discernible; and since this influence would be without interest, if it produced nothing but mere mechanical copies, and on the contrary has interest only because we see it transformed in an original manner by new poets and artists, it is the history of the new poets and artists and no longer that of Shakespeare.

As regards the last statement, it will not be out of place to remark that the accounts which have been given of the representations of his plays are altogether foreign to Shakespeare; because theatrical representations are not, as is believed, "interpretations," but variations, that is to say "creations of new works of art," by means of the actors, who always bring to them their own particular manner of feeling. There is never a _tertium comparationis,_ in the sense of a presumably authentic and objective interpretation, and here the same criterion applies as to music and painting suggested by plays, which are music and painting, and not those plays. Giuseppe Verdi, who for his part composed an _Othello,_ wrote to the painter Morelli, who had conceived a painting of Iago (in a letter of 1881, recently published): "You want a slight figure, with little muscular development, and if I have understood you rightly, one of the cunning, malignant sort ... But if were I an actor and wished to represent Iago, I should prefer a lean, meagre figure, with thin lips, and small eyes close to the nose, like a monkey's, a high retreating forehead, with a deal of development at the back of the head; absent and _nonchalant_ in manner, indifferent to everything, incredulous, sneering, speaking good and evil lightly, with an air of thinking about something quite different from what he says ..." They might have entered into a long discussion as to the two different interpretations, had not Verdi, with his accustomed good sense, hastened to conclude: "But whether Iago be small or big, whether Othello be Venetian or Turk, _execute them as you conceive them_: the result will always be good. But remember _not to think too much about it._"

The insurmountable difference that exists between the most studiously poetic theatrical representation and the original poetry of Shakespeare, is the true reason why, contrary to the general belief in Shakespeare's eminent "theatricality," Goethe considered that "he was not a poet of the theatre and did not think of the stage, which is too narrow for so vast a soul, that the visible world is too narrow for it." Coleridge too held that the plays were not intended for acting, but to be read and contemplated as poems, and added sometimes to say laughingly, that an act of Parliament should be passed to prohibit the representation of Shakespeare on the stage.

Certainly, Lear and Othello, Macbeth and Hamlet, Cordelia and Desdemona are part of our souls, and so they will be in the future, more or less active, like every part of our souls, of our experiences, of our memories. Sometimes they seem inert and almost obliterated, yet they live and affect us; at others they revive and reawaken, linking themselves to our greatest and nearest spiritual interests. This latter was notably the case in the epoch that extends from the "period of genius" at the end of romanticism, from the criticism of Kant to the exhaustion of the Hegelian school. At that time, poets created Werther and Faust, as though they were the brothers of Hamlet, Charlotte and Margaret and Hermengarde, as though sisters of the Shakespearean heroines, and philosophers constructed systems, which seemed to frame the scattered thoughts of Shakespeare, reducing his differences to logical terms, and crowning them with the conclusion that he either did not seek or did not find. At that time persisted even the illusion that the spirit of Shakespeare had transferred itself from the Elizabethan world to the new world of Europe, was poetising and philosophising with the mouths of the new men and directing their sentiments and actions.

Perhaps after that period, love of Shakespeare, if not altogether extinguished, greatly declined. The colossal mass of work of every sort devoted to Shakespeare, cannot be brought up against this judgment, for this mass, in great part due to German, English and American philologists, proves rather the sedulity of modern philology, than a profound spiritual impulse. This was more lively, when Shakespeare was far less investigated, rummaged and hashed up, and was read in editions far less critically correct. How could he be truly loved and really felt in an age which buried dialectic and idealism beneath naturalism and positivism, for the former of which he stood and which he represented in his own way? In this age, the consciousness of the distinction between liberty and passion, good and evil, nobility and vileness, fineness and sensuality, between the lofty and the base in man, became obscured; everything was conceived as differing in quantity, but identical in substance, and was placed in a deterministic relation with the external world. In such an atmosphere artistic work became blind, diseased, gloomy, instinctive; struggling for expression amid the torment of sick senses, no longer amid passionate, moral struggles of the soul; confused writers, half pedantic, half neurasthenic, were taken for and believed themselves to be, the heirs of Shakespeare. Even when one reads some of the most highly praised pages of the critics of the day upon Shakespeare, so abounding in exquisite refinements, a sort of repugnance comes over one, as though a warning that this is not the genuine Shakespeare. He was less subtle, but more profound, less involved, but more complex and more great than they.

This is not a lamentation directed against the age, which is perhaps now drawing to a close and perhaps has no desire to do so, and will continue to develop its own character for a greater or lesser period. It is simply an observation of fact, which belongs to that history, which is not the history of William Shakespeare. He continues to live his own history, in those spirits alone, who are perpetually making anew that history which was truly his, as they read him with an ingenuous mind and a heart that shares in his poetry.