Chapter 9
In the face of that vast philosophy, it seems an irrelevance to reason, as some do, that in the earlier scene in which Gonzalo expounds his Utopia of incivilisation, Shakspere so arranges the dialogue as to express his own ridicule of the conception. The interlocutors, it will be remembered, are Sebastian and Antonio, two of the villains of the piece, and Alonso, the wrecked usurper. The kind Gonzalo talks of the ideal community to distract Alonso's troubled thoughts; Sebastian and Antonio jeer at him; and Alonso finally cries, "Pr'ythee, no more, thou dost talk nothing to me." Herr Gervinus is quite sure that this was meant to state Shakspere's prophetic derision for all communisms and socialisms and peace congresses, Shakspere being the fore-ordained oracle of the political gospel of his German commentators, on the principle of "Gott mit uns." And it may well have been that Shakspere, looking on the society of his age, had no faith in any Utopia, and that he humorously put what he felt to be a valid criticism of Montaigne's in the mouth of a surly rascal--he has done as much elsewhere. But he was surely the last man to have missed seeing that Montaigne's Utopia was no more Montaigne's personal political counsel to his age than AS YOU LIKE IT was his own; and, as regards the main purpose of Montaigne's essay, which was to show that civilisation was no unmixed gain as contrasted with some forms of barbarism, the author of CYMBELINE was hardly the man to repugn it, even if he amused himself by putting forward Caliban[196] as the real "cannibal," in contrast to Montaigne's. He had given his impression of certain aspects of civilisation in HAMLET, Measure for Measure, and KING LEAR. As his closing plays show, however, he had reached the knowledge that for the general as for the private wrong, the sane man must cease to cherish indignation. That teaching, which he could not didactically impose, for such a world as his, on the old tragedy of revenge which he recoloured with Montaigne's thought, he found didactically enough set down in the essay on Diversion:[197]
"Revenge is a sweet pleasing passion, of a great and natural impression: I perceive it well, albeit I have made no trial of it. To divert of late a young prince from it, I told him not he was to offer the one side of his cheek to him who had struck him on the other in regard of charity; nor displayed I unto him the tragical events poesy bestoweth upon that passion. There I left him and strove to make him taste the beauty of a contrary image; the honour, the favour, and the goodwill he should acquire by gentleness and goodness; I diverted him to ambition."
And now it is didactically uttered by the wronged magician in the drama:--
"Though with their high wrongs I am struck to the quick, Yet with my nobler reason, 'gainst my fury Do I take part; the rarer action is In virtue than in vengeance...."
The principle now pervades the whole of Prospero's society; even the cursed and cursing Caliban is recognised[198] as a necessary member of it:--
"We cannot miss him; he does make our fire, Fetch in our wood; and serves in offices That profit us."
It is surely not unwarrantable to pronounce, then, finally, that the poet who thus watchfully lit his action from the two sides of passion and sympathy was in the end at one with his "guide, philosopher, and friend," who in that time of universal strife and separateness could of his own accord renew the spirit of Socrates, and say:[199] "I esteem all men my compatriots, and embrace a Pole even as a Frenchman, subordinating this national tie to the common and universal." Here, too, was not Montaigne the first of the moderns?
[1] Preface to Eng. trans. of Simrock on _The Plots of Shakespere's Plays_, 1850.
[2] _Lady Politick Would-be._ All our English writers, I mean such as are happy in the Italian, Will deign to steal out of this author [_Pastor Fido_] mainly Almost as much as from Montaignie; He has so modern and facile a vein, Fitting the time, and catching the court ear.
--Act iii. sc. 2.
[3] _London and Westminster Review_, July, 1838, p. 321.
[4] Article in _Journal des Débats_, 7 November, 1846, reprinted in _L'Angleterre au Seizième Siècle_, ed. 1879, p. 136.
[5] _Montaigne_ (Série des _Grands Ecrivains Français_), 1895, p. 105.
[6] _Molière et Shakspere._
[7] _Shakspere and Classical Antiquity_, Eng. tr. p. 297.
[8] See this point discussed in the _Free Review_ of July, 1895: and compare the lately published essay of Mr. John Corbin, on _The Elizabethan Hamlet_, (Elkin Matthews, 1895).
[9] _Hamlet_, Act V, scene 2.
[10] Book I, Essay 33.
[11] _Advice_ in Florio.
[12] B. III, Ch. 8. _Of the art of conferring._
[13] B. III, Ch. 12.
[14] Act II, Sc. 1, 144.
[15] Book I, ch. II, _end_.
[16] Book I, ch. 23.
[17] _Ibid._
[18] Some slip of the pen seems to have occurred in this confused line. The original _Et male consultis pretium est: prudentia fallax_--is sufficiently close to Shakspere's phrase.
[19] "O heaven! a beast that wants discourse of reason" (Act I, Scene 2.)
[20] Act II, Sc. 2.
[21] Act IV, Scene 2.
[22] Act IV, Scene 4.
[23] See Furniss's Variorum edition of _Hamlet, in loc._
[24] B. I, Chap. 19; Edit. Firmin-Didot, vol. i, p. 68.
[25] B. II, Chap. 4; Ed. cited, p. 382.
[26] B. II, Chap. 12; _Ibid_, p. 459.
[27] B. II, Chap. 33.
[28] _Shakespere and Montaigne_, 1884, p. 88.
[29] B. III, Chap. 12.
[30] Act III, Scene 3.
[31] B. I, ch. 22.
[32] Act II, Scene 2.
[33] _Othello_, Act II, Scene 3.
[34] B. I, ch. 40, "That the taste of goods or evils doth greatly depend on the opinion we have of them."
[35] B. I, ch. 50.
[36] B. I, ch. 22.
[37] B. III, ch. 10.
[38] Act V, Scene 4.
[39] On reverting to Mr. Feis's book I find that in 1884 he had noted this and others of the above parallels, which I had not observed when writing on the subject in 1883. In view of some other parallels and clues drawn by him, our agreements leave me a little uneasy. He decides, for instance (p. 93) that Hamlet's phrase "foul as Vulcan's stithy" is a "sly thrust at Florio" who in his preface calls himself "Montaigne's Vulcan"; that the Queen's phrase "thunders in the index" is a reference to "the Index of the Holy See and its thunders"; and that Hamlet's lines "Why let the stricken deer go weep" are clearly a satire against Montaigne, "who fights shy of action." Mr. Feis's book contains so many propositions of this order that it is difficult to feel sure that he is ever judicious. Still, I find myself in agreement with him on some four or five points of textual coincidence in the two authors.
[40] Act I, Scene 4.
[41] B. II, Chap. 33.
[42] It is further relevant to note that in the essay _Of Drunkenness_ (ii. 2) Montaigne observes that "drunkenness amongst others appeareth to me a gross and brutish vice," that "the worst estate of man is where he loseth the knowledge and government of himself," and that "the grossest and rudest nation that liveth amongst us at this day, is only that which keepeth it in credit." The reference is to Germany: but Shakspere in _Othello_ (Act II, Sc. 3) makes Iago pronounce the English harder drinkers than either the Danes or the Hollanders; and the lines:
"This heavy-headed revel, east and west, Makes us traduced and taxed of other nations; They clepe us drunkards, and with swinish phrase, Soil our addition."
might also be reminiscent of Montaigne, though of course there is nothing peculiar in such a coincidence.
[43] B. III, Chap. 7.
[44] B. III, Chap. 4.
[45] B. III, Chap. 10.
[46] B. III, Chap. 2.
[47] B. III, Chap. 13.
[48] B. I, Chap. 38.
[49] B. III, Chap. 4.
[50] B. I, Chap. 40.
[51] B. II, Chap. 8.
[52] B. II, Chap. 18.
[53] _De Officus_ i, 4: _cf._ 30.
[54] 1534, 1558, 1583, 1600. See also the compilation entitled _A Treatise of Morall Philosophie_ by W. Baudwin, 4th enlargement by T. Paulfreyman. 1600, pp. 44-46, where there is a closely parallel passage from Zeno as well as that of Cicero.
[55] Mr. Feis makes this attribution.
[56] B. II, Chap. 1.
[57] This may fairly be argued, perhaps, even of the somewhat close parallel, noted by Mr. Feis, between Laertes' lines (I, 3):
"For nature, crescent, does not grow alone In thews and bulk, but as this temple waxes The inward service of the mind and soul Grows wide withal,"
and Florio's rendering of an extract from Lucretius in the _Apology_
"The mind is with the body bred, we do behold. It jointly grows with it, it waxeth old."
Only the slight coincidence of the use of the (then familiar) verb "wax" in both passages could suggest imitation in the case of such a well-worn commonplace.
[58] See some cited at the close of this essay in another connection.
[59] B. II, Chap. 12.
[60] Act IV, Scene 3.
[61] "_Le monde est un branloire perenne_" (Book III, Essay 2). Florio translates that particular sentence: "The world runs all on wheels" a bad rendering.
[62] B. III, Chap. 3.
[63] B. II, Chap. 17.
[64] It may fairly be laid down as practically certain, from what we know of the habit of circulating works in manuscript at that period, and from what Florio tells us in his preface, that translations of some of the essays had been passed about before Florio's folio was printed. [65] _Varia Historia_, XII, 23.
[66] The story certainly had a wide vogue, being found in Aristotle, _Eudemian Ethics_, iii, 1, and in Nicolas of Damascus; while Strabo (vii, ii. § 1) gives it further currency by contradicting it as regards the Cimbri.
[67] B. II, Chap. 5.
[68] B. II, Chap. 3.
[69] Richard III, I, 4; V, 3.
[70] _The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy_, 1893, p. 80-5.
[71] Actus III, 865-866.
[72] Actus IV, 1526-7.
[73] This in turn is an echo from the Greek. See note in Doering's edition.
[74] See Boswell's edition of Malone's Shakspere, _in loc._
[75] Yet again, in Marston's _Insatiate Countess_, the commentators have noticed the same sentiment.
"Death, From whose stern cave none tracks a backward path."
It was in fact a poetic commonplace.
[76] Act 5, Scene 6.
[77] Act v, sc. 1.
[78] I, 22.
[79] 2 _H. IV_, iv. 3
[80] ii, 2
[81] ii, 10.
[82] So far as I remember, the idea of suicide as a desertion of one's post without the deity's permission is first found, in English literature, in Sidney, and he would find it in Montaigne's essay on the _Custom of the Isle of Cea_ (edit. Firmin-Didot, i. 367).
[83] When this is compared with the shorter speech of similar drift in the anonymous play of _Edward III._ ("To die is all as common as to live" etc., Act iv., sc. 4) it will be seen that the querying form as well as the elaboration constitutes a special resemblance between the speech in Shakspere and the passages in Montaigne
[84] _APOLOGY OF RAYMOND SEBONDE._
[85] ii, 6, _Of Exercise or Practice_.
[86] _Apology._
[87] _Ibid._, near end.
[88] _On Isis and Osiris_, c. 26.
[89] Canto v.
[90] Canto xxxii.
[91] It would seem to be from those early monkish legends that the mediæval Inferno was built up. The torture of cold was the northern contribution to the scheme. Compare Warton, _History of English Poetry_, sec. 49, and Wright's _Saint Patrick's Purgatory_, 1844, p. 18.
[92] _Paradise Lost_, B. II, 587-603.
[93] Edit. Firmin-Didot. i, 597-598.
[94] _Ibid._ p. 621.
[95] Act iv, sc. 5.
[96] iii, 3.
[97] B. v, cc. 8, 9, 10. _Cf._ vi, 2, 3.
[98] B. v, cc. 22-25.
[99] ii, 32.
[100] The arguments of Dr. Karl Elze, in his _Essays on Shakspere_ (Eng. tr., p. 15), to show that the _Tempest_ was written about 1604, seem to me to possess no weight whatever. He goes so far as to assume that the speech of Prospero in which Shakspere transmutes four lines of the Earl of Stirling's _Darius_ must have been written immediately after the publication of that work. The argument is (1) that Shakspere must have seen _Darius_ when it came out, and (2) that he would imitate the passage then or never.
[101] Act v, sc. 3.
[102] i, 31.
[103] ii, 13.
[104] Act i, sc. 2.
[105] Act iv, sc. 3.
[106] i, 2.
[107] _Hippolytus_, 615 (607).
[108] See the Prologue to _Every Man in His Humour_, first ed., preserved by Gifford.
[109] The 29th.
[110] See his _Characteristics of English Poets_, 2nd. ed. p. 222.
[111] The most elaborate and energetic attempt to prove Shakspere classically learned is that made in the _Critital Observations on Shakspere_ (1746) of the Rev. John Upton, a man of great erudition and much random acuteness (shown particularly in bold attempts to excise interpolations from the Gospels), but as devoid of the higher critical wisdom as was Bentley, whom he congenially criticised. To a reader of to-day, his arguments from Shakspere's diction and syntax are peculiarly unconvincing.
[112] It may not be out of place here to say a word for Farmer in passing, as against the strictures of M. Stapfer, who, after recognising the general pertinence of his remarks, proceeds to say (_Shakspere and Classical Antiquity_, Eng. trans, p. 83) that Farmer "fell into the egregious folly of speaking in a strain of impertinent conceit: it is as if the little man for little he must assuredly have been--was eaten up with vanity." This is in its way as unjust as the abuse of Knight. M. Stapfer has misunderstood Farmer's tone, which is one of banter against, not Shakspere, but those critics who blunderingly ascribed to him a wide and close knowledge of the classics. Towards Shakspere, Farmer was admiringly appreciative--and in the preface to the second edition of his essay he wrote: "Shakspere wanted not the stilts of languages to raise him above all other men."
[113] Ch. iv, of vol. cited.
[114] _The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy_, pp. 66-67.
[115] _Hercules Furens_, ad fin. (1324-1329.).
[116] _Hippolytus_, Act. II, 715-718 (723-726.)
[117] _Choephori_, 63-65.
[118] Carm. lxxxviii, _In Gellium_. See the note in Doering's edition.
[119] _Gerusalemme_, xviii, 8.
[120] _The Insatiate Countess_, published in 1613.
[121] _Hamlet_, Act iv, sc. 3.
[122] _Agamemnon_, 152-153.
[123] ii, 3 (near beginning.)
[124] _Hercules Furens_, Act. V. 1261-2.
[125] Act iv, Sc. 3.
[126] _Hercules Furens_, 1258-61.
[127] _Macbeth_, Act v, Sc. 2.
[128] _Ibid._ Act iv, Sc. 2.
[129] _Ibid._ Act i, sc. 7.
[130] B. ii, ch. 10.
[131] Tschischwitz, _Shakspere-Forschungen_, i. 1868, S. 52.
[132] "Es ist ubrigens nicht zu bedauern dass Shakspere Brunos Komodie nicht durchweg zum Muster genommen, den sie enthält so masslose Obscönitaten, dass Shakspere an seinen stärksten Stellen daneben fast jungfräulich erscheint" (Work cited, S. 52).
[133] Work cited, S. 57. I follow Dr. Tschischwitz's translation, so far as syntax permits.
[134] Act i, Sc. 4.
[135] Work cited, Sc. 59.
[136] See Frith's _Life of Giordano Bruno_, 1889, pp. 121-128.
[137] Act v. Sc. 1.
[138] Cited by Noack, art. _Bruno_, in _Philosophie-geschichtliches Lexikon_.
[139] Act i, Sc. 2.
[140] Work cited, p. 90.
[141] It would be unjust to omit to acknowledge that Dr. Furnivall seeks to frame an inductive notion of Shakspere, even when rejecting good evidence and proceeding on deductive lines; that in the works of Professor Dowden on Shakspere there is always an effort towards a judicial method, though he refuses to take some of the most necessary steps; and that the work of Mr. Appleton Morgan, President of the New York Shakspere Society, entitled _Shakspere in Fact and Criticism_ (New York, 1888), is certainly not open to the criticism I have passed. Mr. Morgan's essentially rationalistic attitude is indicated in a sentence of his preface: "My own idea has been that William Shakspere was a man of like passions with ourselves, whose moods and veins were influenced, just as are ours, by his surroundings, employments, vocations ... and that, great as he was, and oceanic as was his genius, we can read him all the better because he was, after all, a man...." In recognising the good sense of Mr. Morgan's general attitude, I must not be understood to endorse his rejection of the "metrical tests" of Mr. Fleay and other English critics. These seem to me to be about the most important English contribution to the scientific comprehension of Shakspere. On the other hand, it may be said that the naturalistic conception of Shakspere as an organism in an environment was first closely approached in the present century by French critics, as Guizot and Chasles (Taine's picture of the Elizabethan theatre, adopted by Green, having been founded on a study by Chasles); that the naturalistic comprehension of _Hamlet_, as an incoherent whole resulting from the putting of new cloth into an old garment, was first reached by the German Rümelin (_Shakspere Studien_); and that the structural anomalies of _Hamlet_ as an acting play were first clearly put by the German Benedix (_Die Shakspereomanie_) these two critics thus making amends for much vain discussion of _Hamlet_ by their countrymen before and since; while the naturalistic conception of the man Shakspere is being best developed at present in America. The admirable work of Messrs. Clarke and Wright and Fleay in the analysis of the text and the revelation of its non-Shaksperean elements, seems to make little impression on English culture; while such a luminous manual as Mr. Barrett Wendell's _William Shakspere: a Study in Elizabethan Literature_ (New York, 1894), with its freshness of outlook and appreciation, points to decided progress in rational Shakspere-study in the States, though, like the _Shakspere Primer_ of Professor Dowden, it is not consistently scientific throughout.
[142] _Life of Shakspere_, 1886, p. 128.
[143] See Mr. Appleton Morgan's _Shakspere's Venus and Adonis: a Study in Warwickshire Dialect_.
[144] Professor Dowden notes in his _Shakspere Primer_ (p. 12) that before 1600 the prices paid for plays, by Henslowe, the theatrical lessee, vary from £4 to £8, and not till later did it rise as high as £20 for a play by a popular dramatist.
[145] Compare the 78th Sonnet, which ends;--
But thou art all my art, and dost advance As high as learning my rude ignorance.
[146] _Life of Shakspere_, pp. 29, 128.
[147] See it in his _Life of Shakspere_, pp. 120-124. Mr. Fleay's theory, though perhaps the best "documented" of all, has received little attention in comparison with Mr. Tyler's, which has the attraction of fuller detail.
[148] Only in Chaucer (_e.g._, _The Book of the Duchess_) do we find before his time the successful expression of the same perception; and Chaucer counted for almost nothing in Elizabethan letters.
[149] See Fleay's _Life of Shakspere_, pp. 130-1.
[150] Cp. the _Essays_, ii, 17: iii, 2. (Edit. cited, vol. ii, pp. 40, 231.)
[151] _Essays_, i, 25; _cf._ i, 48. (Edit. cited, vol. i, pp. 304, 429.)
[152] ii, 4. (Edit. cited, i, 380.)
[153] ii, 10. (Edit. cited, i, 429.)
[154] _Pensées Diverses._ Less satisfying is the further _pensée_ in the same collection:--"Les quatre grand poëtes, Platon, _Malebranche_, _Shaftesbury_, Montaigne."
[155] Edition cited, i, 622-623.
[156] _Port Royal_, 4ième édit., ii. 400, _note_.
[157] B. iii, Chap. 13.
[158] "In the midst of our compassion, we feel within I know not what bitter sweet touch of malign pleasure in seeing others suffer." (Comp. La Rochefoucauld, _Pensée_ 104.)
[159] B. iii, Chap. 1.
[160] i, Chap. 38.
[161] _L'Angleterre au Seizième Siècle_, p. 133.
[162] This seems to be the ideal implied in the criticisms even of Mr. Lowell and Mr. Dowden.
[163] _Hamlet: ein Tendenzdrama Sheakspere's_ [_sic_ throughout book] _gegen die skeptische und cosmopolitische Weltanschanung des Michael de Montaigne_, von G. F. Stedefeld, Kreisgerichtsrath, Berlin. 1871.
[164] B. i, Chap. 26.
[165] It is not disputed that the plot existed beforehand in Whetstone's _Promos and Cassandra_; and there was probably an intermediate drama.
[166] Edit. Firmin-Didot, i, 590.
[167] _Oxford Essays_, p. 279. Sterling, from his Christian-Carlylese point of view, declared of Montaigne that "All that we find in him of Christianity would be suitable to apes and dogs rather than to rational and moral beings" (_London and Westminster Review_, July, 1838, p. 340.)
[168] Sainte-Beuve has noted how in the essay on Prayer he added many safeguarding clauses in the later editions.
[169] See Mr. Spedding's essay, so entitled, in the _Cornhill Magazine_, August, 1880.
[170] Art. cited, _end_.
[171] Note cited by Mr. Spedding. Cp. Introd. to _Leopold_ Shakspere p. lxxxvii.
[172] Lear once (iii. 4) says he will pray; but his religion goes no further.
[173] See the passage cited above in section iii in connection with _Measure for Measure_.
[174] Act iv, Sc. 2.
[175] Act i, Sc. 2.
[176] B. i, Chap. 20.
[177] B. i, Chap. 30.
[178] Edit. Firmin-Didot, i, 202.
[179] _Ibid._, pp. 477-478.
[180] _Here_, it may be said, there is a trace of the influence of Bruno's philosophy; and it may well be that Shakspere did not spontaneously strike out the thought for himself. But I am not aware that any parallel passage has been cited.
[181] Fleay's _Life_, pp. 138, &c.
[182] B. i, Chap. 42.
[183] B. ii, Chap. 12. (Edit. cited, i. 501.)
[184] _Midsummer Nights Dream_, Act ii. Sc. 2.
[185] See his Conversations with Drummond of Hawthornden
[186] Halliwell-Phillipps, _Outlines of the Life of Shakspere_, 5th ed., p. 175.
[187] I find even Mr. Appleton Morgan creating a needless difficulty on this head. In his _Shakspere in Fact and Criticism_, already cited, he writes (p. 316): "I find him ... living and dying so utterly unsuspicious that he had done anything of which his children might care to hear, that he never even troubled himself to preserve the manuscript of or the literary property in a single one of the plays which had raised him to affluence." As I have already pointed out, there is no reason to suppose that Shakspere could retain the ownership of his plays any more than did the other writers who supplied his theatre. They belonged to the partnership. Besides, he could not possibly have published as _his_ the existing mass, so largely made up of other men's work. His fellow-players did so without scruple after his death, being simply bent on making money.
[188] Sonnet 110. Compare the next.
[189] B. ii, Chap. 10.
[190] B. i, Chap. 38.
[191] This may be presumed to have been written between 1603 and 1609, the date of the publication of the Sonnets. As Mr. Minto argues, "the only sonnet of really indisputable date is the 107th, containing the reference to the death of Elizabeth" (_Characteristics_, as cited, p. 220). As the first 126 sonnets make a series, it is reasonable to take those remaining as of later date.
[192] It more particularly echoes, however, two passages in the nineteenth essay: "There is no evil in life for him that hath well conceived, how the privation of life is no evil. To know how to die, doth free us from all subjection and constraint." "No man did ever prepare himself to quit the world more simply and fully ... than I am fully assured I shall do. The deadest deaths are the best"
[193] ii, 12.
[194] iii, 11.
[195] iii, 4.
[196] In all probability this character existed in the previous play, the name being originally, as was suggested last century by Dr. Farmer, a mere variant of "Canibal."
[197] iii, 4.
[198] Act ii, Sc. 2.
[199] iii, 9.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR.