Chapter 13

Luders’ essay three parts of a century ago showed conclusively that Holinshed’s and Shakespeare’s Prince of Wales, as we see him in the play of _Henry IV._, wild and dissolute with ignoble companions, is a legend which is disproved by documentary history, but Shakespeare’s Prince is nevertheless dramatically true. Johnson says, ‘He is great without effort, and brave without tumult. The trifler is roused into a hero, and the hero again reposes in the trifler. The character is great, original, and just.’ Johnson’s criticism is true. There is no interruption or strain in the passage from one self to the other self: they are both in fact the same self. It is something of a shock that the King should cast off Falstaff, but if a man is appointed to command it is necessary that he should at once take up his proper position. I remember the promotion of a subordinate to a responsible post. His manner changed the next day. He had the courage to ring his bell and give orders to his senior under whom he had been serving.

He became one of the most efficient administrators I ever knew. On the other hand, nearly at the same time another subordinate was promoted who was timid and continued his habits of familiarity with his colleagues. His department fell into disorder and he was dismissed.

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_As You Like It_.—Lady Anne Blunt in her admirable books, _A Pilgrimage to Nejd_ and _The Bedouin Tribes of the Euphrates_, notices that the true Arab sheykh of the desert, when a traveller seeks his hospitality, asks no questions until food and drink have been offered, and even then is in no hurry. So also the Duke:

‘Welcome, fall to: I will not trouble you As yet, to question you about your fortunes.’

Curiosity about personal matters is ignoble.

Rosalind’s love for Orlando is born of pity. ‘If I be foiled, there is but one shamed that was never gracious; if killed, but one dead that is willing to be so: I shall do my friends no wrong, for I have none to lament me; the world no injury, for in it I have nothing; only in the world I fill up a place, which may be better supplied when I have made it empty.’

It is a proof of Orlando’s gentle breeding that he instantly yields to courtesy:

‘Speak you so gently? Pardon me, I pray you.’

Orlando says to Jaques: ‘I will chide no breather in the world, but myself, against whom I know most faults.’ This is characteristic of Shakespeare, and is in the spirit of the Gospels.

The difficulty in this play is not Oliver’s sudden love for Celia, although Shakespeare seems to have felt that it was a little too rapid, for Orlando asks Oliver, ‘Is’t possible that on so little acquaintance you should like her?’ It is rather Celia’s prompt response which takes us aback. It looks too much like ‘any woman to any man.’ It may be said in excuse that Celia had heard the piteous story of his conversion, how he had become ‘a wretched ragged man o’ergrown with hair,’ and what is more to the point, she had heard of Orlando’s noble kindness to him. It is odd that Shakespeare does not adopt from Lodge’s novel Oliver’s rescue of Celia from a band of ruffians. Johnson says, ‘To Celia much may be forgiven for the heroism of her friendship.’ She forsook not only her father—she had reason not to care much about him—but she forsook the _court_ for Rosalind.

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_Much Ado about Nothing_.—Why should Don Pedro offer to take Claudio’s place in the wooing of Hero and why should Claudio consent?

Borachio says, ‘Hear me call Margaret, Hero; hear Margaret call me Claudio.’

When Borachio recounts to Conrad what he had done, he makes no mention of his personation of Claudio—‘Know, that I have to-night wooed Margaret, the lady Hero’s gentlewoman, by the name of Hero; she leans me out at her mistress’s chamber-window, bids me a thousand times good night.’

Theobald remarks that if Claudio saw another man with the woman supposed to be Hero and heard her call him Claudio, Claudio would merely suppose that Hero was deceived. Theobald proposes to substitute ‘Borachio’ for ‘Claudio’ in the line just quoted. Borachio had just asked Don John to tell Don Pedro and Claudio that Hero loved him, Borachio. But if Theobald’s emendation be received, difficulties still remain. Margaret must have been persuaded to answer to the name of Hero. After Borachio’s arrest he tells us that Margaret wore Hero’s garments. But Shakespeare, deserting Spenser, from whom this mystification appears to be borrowed, gives no reason which induced Margaret to play this part.

Where was Hero on that night? Borachio promises Don John that ‘he will so fashion the matter, that Hero shall be absent.’ Claudio asks Hero

‘What man was he talk’d with you yesternight Out at your window betwixt twelve and one?’

She does not reply, as we should think she would, that she was not sleeping in that room, although Benedick asks Beatrice,

‘Lady, were you her bedfellow last night?’

and Beatrice replies,

‘No, truly not; although until last night, I have this twelvemonth been her bedfellow.’

Claudio is despicable, and his marriage with Hero is a foul, black spot in the play. Observe that in the first scene he asks Don Pedro,

‘Hath Leonato any son, my lord?’

and Don Pedro, understanding the drift of the question, replies:

‘No child but Hero, she’s his only heir.’

What a mean, damnable excuse he makes.

‘Yet sinn’d I not, But in mistaking.’

Beatrice with sure eye discerns the scoundrel. ‘Kill Claudio.’ Not Don Pedro, not even Don John, although she had heard Benedick denounce him as the author of the villainy.

Beatrice and the Friar never doubt Hero’s innocence. The Friar declares that

‘In her eye there hath appear’d a fire To burn the errors that these princes hold Against her maiden truth.’

What an amplitude there is in Beatrice! What a sweep it is to bring into what we already know of her such divine faith in her friend! This light-hearted girl suddenly becomes sublime.

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_Hamlet_.—Coleridge’s remark that the two former appearances of the Ghost increase its objectivity when it appears to Hamlet is subtle and true. Observe that the Ghost is visible to Hamlet, Marcellus, Bernardo and Horatio, but not to the Queen.

There is in Coleridge an activity of intellect which is so fascinating that we do not stay to inquire whether the result is in accordance with the facts. He says that _tædium vitæ_ as in the case of Hamlet is due to ‘unchecked appetency of the ideal.’ Was the appetency of the ideal strong in Hamlet? The ideal exalts our interest in earthly things.

‘Now might I do it pat, now he is praying.’ Johnson says that this speech, in which Hamlet contrives damnation for the man he would punish, is too horrible to be read or to be uttered; whereupon Coleridge remarks that Hamlet’s postponement of revenge till it should bring damnation to soul as well as body ‘was merely the excuse Hamlet made to himself for not taking advantage of this particular and favourable moment for doing justice upon his guilty uncle, at the urgent instance of the spirit of his father.’ I doubt if this is a complete explanation. Would it strike the audience as the motive? Men of Hamlet’s mould not only speak but feel extravagantly. Incapacity for prompt action is accompanied with more intense emotion than that which is felt by him who acts at once. Hamlet meditates on revenge instead of executing it, and his desire, by brooding, becomes diabolic.

Generalisations like those of Polonius are obtained from observation during youth and middle age. In old age the creation of generalisations ceases and we fall back on our acquired stock. They remain true, but the application fails. We must be increasingly careful in the use of these ancient abstractions, and more intent on the consideration of the instance before us. The temptation to drag it under what we already know is great and must be resisted. Proverbs and wise saws are more suitable to common life than to intricate relationships. They are inapplicable to deep passion and spiritual matters.

Johnson notes that the Ghost’s visits are a failure so far as Hamlet’s resolution is concerned.

Hamlet says,

‘O! from this time forth, My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!’

but they remained thoughts. The play is to be the thing to decide him, but when it is over and he has the clearest proofs, he does not act, but consents to leave Denmark and returns by accident. Had he obeyed the Ghost’s promptings and killed the King at the end of the play in the third act, Polonius, Ophelia, the Queen, Laertes, and Hamlet himself might have been saved.

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_Troilus and Cressida_ is an inexplicable play. It is a justification of those critics who obstinately, but without external evidence, refuse to believe that much which is attributed to Shakespeare really belongs to him. It is absolutely impossible that the man who put these words into the mouth of Achilles:

‘I have a woman’s longing, An appetite that I am sick withal, To see great Hector in his weeds of peace; To talk with him, and to behold his visage, Even to my full of view.’

could have adapted from the _Recuyell_ the shocking ignominy of the ninth scene in the fifth act in which Achilles calls on his myrmidons to slay Hector unarmed, and then triumphs in these lines:

‘My half-supp’d sword, that frankly would have fed, Pleas’d with this dainty bit, thus goes to bed. [_Sheathes his sword_. Come, tie his body to my horse’s tail; Along the field I will the Trojan trail.’

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_Measure for Measure_ as a play is hateful to me, although there are passages in it as truly Shakespeare as anything to be found in all his works. The chief objection to it is that justice, to use Coleridge’s word, is ‘baffled.’ There are other objections almost as great. From beginning to end almost everybody is base, foolish, or uninteresting. The Duke’s temporary withdrawal is stupid and contemptible, considering that he is the governor of the state; the condemnation of Claudio is wildly unnatural; the substitution of Mariana loathsome; the treachery of Angelo in not reprieving Claudio inconceivable, notwithstanding what we already know of the deputy’s hypocrisy and villainy. The lowest depth of scoundrelism is reached when, face to face with Mariana and publicly at the city gate before the Duke and all the company assembled, he excuses himself from marrying her because

‘her reputation was disvalued In levity.’

And yet he is let off scot-free, and Mariana marries him! Isabella’s apology,

‘I partly think, A due sincerity govern’d his deeds, Till he did look on me,’

might be sufficient for an outbreak of his lust but not for his lying, and Mariana’s is still worse:

‘Best men are moulded out of faults.’

Not out of such faults as Angelo’s are the best men moulded.

The punishment inflicted on the poor wretch Lucio is horrible.

_Lucio_. ‘I beseech your highness, do not marry me to a whore! . . . Marrying a punk, my lord, is pressing to death, whipping and hanging.

_Duke_. Slandering a prince deserves it.’

This is a foul line. I should like to discover documentary proof that it is not Shakespeare’s, but the gag of some actor desirous of pleasing court folk!

The _Promos and Cassandra_ from which _Measure for Measure_ is taken is certainly worse, for Promos (Angelo) is made to marry Cassandra (Isabella) and after the marriage is to die, but Cassandra, ‘tyed in the greatest bondes of affection to her husband, becomes an earnest suter for his life.’

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_Henry VIII._—The scene in which Katherine appears before the court is perhaps the finest in the play. To what noble use is her Spanish pride turned! The last line of the following quotation from Katherine’s reply to Wolsey is infinite:

‘For it is you Have blown this coal betwixt my lord and me, Which God’s dew quench.’

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_Othello_ is pure tragedy, for the judgment which falls on Othello and Desdemona, although it is disproportionate to the character or life of either, is necessary from the beginning. Brabantio was not wholly without justification in thinking the marriage unnatural, and Desdemona’s desertion of him without a word was unfeeling. The depth of the tragedy is increased by his death.

‘Poor Desdemon I am glad thy father’s dead. Thy match was mortal to him.’

Iago feels the necessity of obtaining motives for his conduct. He tries to find them in the supposed infidelity of his wife with Othello and in his supersession by Cassio. Neither is sufficient, but he partly believes in them, and they partly serve their purpose.

Coleridge says Othello was not jealous: he lacked the suspicion that is essential to jealousy. Perhaps so, but in that case we want a name for the passion which rushes to belief of that which it prays may be false. The very intensity of love, so far from inducing careful examination of slander against the divinity I worship, prevents reflection by anxiety; by terror lest the love should be disturbed. Iago’s evidence, thinks Coleridge, was so strong that Othello could not have done otherwise; but would he have acted in war on evidence equally weak?

How mad Iago is with all his cunning! What a fool! Had he been anything but the maddest fool, he would have seen that in the end his plans must break down. Intellect? Yes, of a kind he had it pre-eminently, but intellect becomes folly when it is inhuman.

‘Farewell the plumed troop, and the big wars.’

Shakespeare might have made Othello the more eager to plunge into the big wars, but Desdemona is so inwoven with him that the whole fabric goes to ruin when she is torn out.

Othello ‘falls in a trance’ after his outburst at the beginning of the fourth act. He is a Moor. In the background also lies Brabantio’s prophecy. Venice cannot do without him, but he cannot hold a Venetian woman.

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_King Lear_.—There are passages in _King Lear_ which are enough to make us wish we had never been born. They are almost an impeachment of the Ruler of the Universe, and yet—there is Cordelia. Whence did she come? She is as much His handiwork as Regan, and in all our conclusions about Him we must take her into account.

Lear does not go mad. He is mad from the beginning, but his madness is in abeyance. Look at the style of his curses on Goneril.

Coleridge’s criticism is exact: ‘Lear’s self-supportless leaning for all pleasure on another’s breast.’ If a man desires not to go mad or not to be soured into oil of vitriol, let him watch the doors of his heart; let him never solicit any expression of love.

Cordelia’s ‘nothing, my lord,’ as Coleridge says, is partly irrepressible disgust at her sisters’ hypocrisy. There was also, as France admits, ‘a tardiness in nature’ in Cordelia. She was her father’s favourite, but what sort of a life must she have lived with such a father before the time at which the play opens? We ought not to be surprised that she refuses to be demonstrative. She reacts against his exaggeration.

I cannot read the blinding of Gloucester. The only excuse that can be offered, not good for much, is that Shakespeare found the story in the _Arcadia_, and that in his day horrors on the stage were not so repulsive as they are to us. Cordelia’s death taken from Holinshed is almost as bad. It is not involved in the tragedy like the death of Ophelia or of Desdemona.

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_All’s Well that Ends Well_.—Johnson comments, ‘I cannot reconcile my heart to Bertram; a man noble without generosity, and young without truth; who married Helena as a coward, and leaves her as a profligate: when she is dead by his unkindness, sneaks home to a second marriage, is accused by a woman whom he has wronged, defends himself by falsehood, and is dismissed to happiness.’ This is just. Bertram is atrocious. With Helena before him he says,

‘If she, my liege, can make me know this clearly, I’ll love her dearly, ever, ever dearly.’

Did he require a deposition on oath in presence of a magistrate? He deserved a scourging in the market place.

Coleridge calls Helena one of Shakespeare’s loveliest women. I cannot agree. She secures her husband’s embraces under a false pretence. How a woman could consent to lie in the arms of a man who had cast her off, and who believed when he was enjoying her that she was a mistress whom he preferred is beyond my comprehension. It is so in Boccaccio, but that is no excuse. Devotion to a man who is indifferent or who hates, is tragically possible, but in its greatest intensity would hardly permit such humiliation.

The play is bad altogether. What was the necessity for suggesting Bertram’s second marriage? There is nowhere any trace of Shakespeare’s depth. The difficulties of the text are singular, and seem to mark this drama as one different from the rest.

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_Macbeth_.—Johnson’s remark that the events are so great that they overpower the persons and prevent nice discrimination of character is partly true.

Coleridge notices that Lady Macbeth was a person of high rank, living much alone. A darkly meditative mind left in solitude can conceive without being startled the most awful designs. The same imagination in Lady Macbeth which brooded over the plot against Duncan’s life drove her to delirium and suicide.

Shakespeare transfers the most perilous stuff in him to Macbeth. The function smothered in surmise; the reflection on the emptiness of life—tale told by an idiot—Shakespeare empties it into this murderous traitor. He makes him the _prey_ of that which is mixed in the composition of the best.

The witches do not strike us as miraculous. They are not supernatural, but extensions of the natural.

It is an apology for emendation that one of the most celebrated passages in the play is based on conjecture (confirmed by what follows) and on analogy.

‘I dare do all that may become a man; Who dares _no_ [Folio] more is none.’

‘No’—corrected by Rowe to ‘do.’

In _Measure for Measure_ we have

‘Be that you are, That is, a woman; if you be more, you’re none.’

Note the terrible, gasping brevity of the dialogue between Lady Macbeth and her husband after the murder:

_Lady M._ ‘Did not you speak?

_M._ When?

_Lady M._ Now.

_M._ As I descended?

_Lady M._ Ay.’

Macbeth’s speech beginning just before he hears of Lady Macbeth’s death, and ending after he hears of it, should be interpreted and spoken as follows. He had just said he ‘will laugh a siege to scorn.’ Then a cry of women within.

‘What is that noise?

_Seyton_. It is the cry of women, my good lord.

[_Exit_.

_Macbeth_ (musing). I have almost forgot the taste of fears. The time has been, my senses would have cool’d To hear a night-shriek; and my fell of hair Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir As life were in ’t: I have supp’d full with horrors; Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts, Cannot once start me.

_Re-enter Seyton_.

Wherefore was that cry?

_Seyton_. The queen, my lord, is dead.

_Macbeth_ (with a touch of impatience). She should have died hereafter: There would have been a time for such a word.’

He makes no inquiry about his wife, but goes on with his reverie, which does not specially refer to her.

‘To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time, And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.’

The ‘_petty_ pace,’ coming from Macbeth! The ‘out, out, brief candle,’ should be spoken in the same musing tone.

Johnson says of a learned apology by Heath for a line in _Macbeth_ which is defective in metre: ‘This is one of the effects of literature in minds not naturally perspicacious’—a criticism which might be extended to much Shakespearean comment.

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_Cymbeline_.—The wager is loathsome. If any man with whom we were acquainted had laid it, should we not scorn and brand him? It was a crime to mention Imogen’s name in such society as that which met at Philario’s house. The only excuse is Boccaccio, but what shall we say of Iachimo’s interview with Imogen, invented by Shakespeare! After his beastly experiment upon her, he excuses himself:

‘I have spoke this, to know if your affiance Were deeply rooted.’

She begs him to prolong his visit! The apology is worse than the original insult.

The royal behaviour, or what Shakespeare means us to take for royal behaviour, in the two youths is overdone and sometimes repulsive.

Arviragus goes out of his way to put his love for Imogen higher than that for his supposed father, Belarius, who is present.

‘The bier at door, And a demand who is’t shall die, I’d say My father, not this youth.’

Yet the point of the scene is the nobility of blood in these youths!

Lucius, who had protected Imogen, hopes she will plead for his life, and she turns on him:

‘No, no; alack! There’s other work in hand: I see a thing Bitter to me as death: your life, good master, Must shuffle for itself.’

In the fifth act Posthumus believes his wife to be guilty, and yet breaks out into strains like these:

‘So I’ll die, For thee, O Imogen! even for whom my life Is every breath a death. . . . For Imogen’s dear life take mine; and though ’Tis not so dear, yet ’tis a life; you coin’d it.’

Shakespeare surely ought to have made Posthumus revert to perfect faith. He ought to have borrowed something from his own Beatrice. Posthumus wishes Imogen saved, because, if her life had been spared, she might have repented.

Iachimo is impossible, simple blackness, worse than Iago. He is unactable, for some motivation is necessary.

Shakespeare’s genius is so immense that it overpowers us, and we must be on our guard lest it should twist our instinct for what is true and right. The errors of a fool are not dangerous, but those of a Shakespeare, Goethe, or Byron it is almost impossible to resist.

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_Twelfth Night_.—The play is two plays in one without much connection. The Viola play is improbable. Why did Shakespeare omit that part of the story which tells us that Silla (Viola) had seen the Duke when he was shipwrecked on Cyprus where she lived, and had fallen in love with him? In the play, hearing of the Duke, she discloses a design to make her ‘own occasion mellow.’

Malvolio shut up as mad—

_Clown_. ‘What is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild-fowl?

_Malvolio_. That the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird.

_Clown_. What thinkest thou of his opinion?

_Malvolio_. I think nobly of the soul, and no way approve his opinion.’

Malvolio was a gentleman, but he was more. Shakespeare may go a little too far with the yellow stockings and cross-gartering, but the liability to deception by a supposed profession of love is a divine weakness, not inconsistent with true nobility of intellect and with sagacity. There is no reason to suppose he was often deceived in worldly matters. Maria is a bad sort of clever barmaid, and was not unwilling to marry the drunken Sir Toby. When I last saw _Twelfth Night_ acted, the whole of the latter part of the fifth act was omitted, for the purpose, apparently, of strengthening the representation of Malvolio as a comic fool whose silly brain is turned by conceit. It was shocking, but the manager knew his audience.

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