Chapter 9
First, we may lay down the proposition that it is not times of national misery and poverty, not times of insecurity and fear, not times of weak convictions and cynicism, that produce a wealth of either great poets or great art. There is not one distinguished literary or artistic period of any country at which the national spirit was not full of the animation, enterprise, and confidence of a general well-being, or at which it was not possessed by high ideas and strong aims or strong convictions. I am speaking in broad summary. Whatever qualifications may be made for unique phenomena, this statement in the main is true. At such periods the mental vitality of a community is high; the air is charged with intellectual and artistic electricity, and great talents everywhere become the receivers and gathering-points of those electric currents. Hence poets, artists, and other creators appear simultaneously in clusters; production is abundant both in matter and in kind. At such times there is nothing withdrawn or particularly refined about the creations which pour forth. There is no room for the dilettante or _petit maitre_, and not much for the professional critic; it is the age of strong men; writing, painting, sculpture are full of vigour, inspiration, earnestness.
It was so at Athens in that glorious age of Pericles and the succeeding generation, the age of the great tragedians, of Thucydides, of Aristophanes and of Phidias. It was so--though with men of less original genius--in the Augustan Rome of Virgil, Horace and Livy. It was so in the rich and ardent cities of Renaissance Italy, where Da Vinci, Raphael, Michel Angelo, and Titian flourished in the same space of thirty years. It was so in the France of Louis Quatorze, when Corneille, Racine, Moliere, Pascal, and numbers of others of hardly smaller note, were writing side by side. And it was so in the times of great Elizabeth. According to Emerson there is a mental zymosis or contagion prevailing in society at such epochs. Some one has said that "No member of either house of the British Parliament will be ranked among the orators whom Lord North did not see or who did not see Lord North." If so, the cause will be found to lie in the encouragement which noble oratory then received, whereas at a later day it has "fallen into abatement and low price."
The age of Elizabeth was one of material prosperity and comfort. It was, in the main, well with men's bodies and well with their minds. They possessed not only the leisure, not only the means, but also the disposition to enjoy. It is not for the artist in any field to scorn the material prosperity of the community in which he works. After all, as history will show, it is that prosperity which makes him possible. "Plain living and high thinking" is good for himself; it is good for a nation; but plain living does not mean poverty, squalor or starvation, while high thinking cannot be done without leisure and resource. You cannot build glorious Gothic cathedrals or order sublime Madonnas out of nothing.
Elizabethan England lived in comfort. It lived also in the security of at least internal peace. The Civil Wars, which had unsettled men of all ranks and distracted their thoughts and energies, were over. Those thoughts and energies now sought another outlet. On the whole it was also an age of tolerance. England had not entered upon its phase of Puritan bigotry, nor on its licentious Anti-Puritan vengeance. Religion was in less degree a battle-ground. There were, of course, hostilities of Protestants, Catholics, and Brownists, but the two hundred and odd sects of the twentieth century were still far off, and men's time and intellectual energies--of which there is but a limited amount--were not wasted in futile discussion of sectarian minutiae.
At ease in mind, body and estate, it was natural that the age should be one of frank enjoyment--enjoyment of all that gladdens mind or eye or ear, enjoyment of rich clothes, fine houses, shows, pageantries, music, song, stories, and plays. In the revels which Scott in his _Kenilworth_ makes Leicester prepare for the reception of Elizabeth, he is drawing upon his study of the times. Above all entertainments the play was the thing, and whether performed before the mixed auditory of the new theatres of Shoreditch or on the Southwark side, or before the Benchers of the Inns of Court, or before the Queen's Majesty herself, the drama received a welcome compared with which its appreciation in our midst is as cold as it is stinted.
And yet all this might have produced in literature and art nothing but pomp and show, or amusement more or less vulgar. In the theatre it might have ended in farce or melodrama. But happily, along with prosperity and the feeling for enjoyment, conditions were at work which made for the keenest activity of mind and every form of intellectual expansion. It would be to enlarge upon a trite theme indeed, if one dwelt upon the enterprise and discovery of bold spirits like Francis Drake, and upon the eager curiosity, the ready imagination, the universal open-mindedness, which ran through the nation, as new worlds were opened or looked for in the western or southern seas.
More important, all-important in truth, was the avid mastery of new knowledge which had followed the Renaissance and the invention of printing. The ancient writers of Greece and Rome were all recovered, and were being greedily absorbed. Old thoughts, ideas, fancies, knowledge--long buried and shamefully forgotten--had become new again. The curiosity which followed the voyages of Drake or Raleigh to America, followed also the explorations of the scholar in the ever-opening seas of ancient literature. The age became one of wide and plenteous reading. Moreover men read then, as they ought to read, for the matter. They tore the heart out of books, from Homer to Seneca; they were greedy for the substance, the thoughts, the imaginations, the fancies. If they could not read the originals, they insisted on the translations. Nor did they stay at the classics. They devoured books in Italian and French. Never has England been so cosmopolitan, at least so European, in its absorption of ideas and knowledge. It is only since the icebound Puritan days that England has become insular, self-contained, in part hugely conceited, and in part absurdly diffident, concerning itself. The best work of Byron and Shelley aimed at breaking down this attitude, and if we are again growing out of our insularity--which is open to much doubt--it is in no small measure due to writers of their kind.
I do not offer all these commonplaces as information. I offer them simply as reminders, and as a necessary introduction to the remark which I have next to make--that the enlightenment, the education, above all the spirit, derived from this wealth of reading were precisely that sort of enlightenment and education and spirit which make for splendid poetry. The learning of the day was in no wise scientific in the narrower modern sense. It was not of the material and utilitarian, still less of the sordid, kind. The age was the least Philistine of all epochs of English history. We were not yet a nation of shopkeepers. It is inevitable that nowadays an immense proportion of our study and reading should run to social and economic questions, to applied sciences, to the investigation of germs and gases, political problems, electric forces, and manures. There is, I have often maintained, no necessary antagonism whatever between these intellectual pursuits and the pursuit of art and literature. One should be but the complement of the other. Goethe and Shelley could combine the love of both science and poetry. If the physicist and the artistic creator quarrel, then each is blind in one mental eye.
Be that as it may, the fact for us just now is that the reading and learning of those spacious Elizabethan days were such that, with the brightening of the intellect, there was no dimming of the imagination. On the contrary, the effect of the recovery and the spread of all the rich, warm, many-coloured creations of the world's best minds, was to steep the English nation in enthusiasm for great lyrics, great dramas, any great production which carried with it the warmth and brightness and exhilarating breath of noble poetry.
There was no weakening of character in this, no loss of practical efficiency. A Sidney or a Raleigh could fight as well as turn a verse; a Shakespeare could prove as sound a man of business as he was a poet. Elizabethan men were all-round men, like the best men in Periclean Athens.
Moreover, the recovered classics imparted not only enthusiasm, but standards. An ambitious writer of the Elizabethan age must do his best to live up to Homer and Plato, to Virgil and Catullus, just as he must live up to Petrarch.
And one thing more. When Spenser or Shakespeare or their contemporaries took up their pens, there was ready to their use the magnificent Elizabethan English tongue--a store inexhaustibly rich, and all the richer for being free from huge piles of needless rubbish, called vocabulary, which modern times have heaped into the long-suffering dictionary. The speech of the English Bible, which rightly seems to us so inimitably noble in its simplicity, was but the contemporary speech of educated England. Fine expressive words had not yet been soiled with all ignoble use. They had not been debauched by slang or vulgarized by affectation. The Elizabethan language possessed the noble solid grandeur of a statue of Phidias or Angelo. At its best now it is apt to pose like the enervated Apollo Belvedere or an over-refined production of Canova. Says that vigorous writer, Lowell: "In reading Hakluyt's Voyages, we are almost startled now and then to find that even common sailors could not tell the story of their wanderings without rising to an almost Odyssean strain, and habitually used a diction that we should be glad to buy back from desuetude at any cost."
Here, then, is an epoch of history, prosperous, high-spirited, tolerant, enterprising, joyous, alert for knowledge, enamoured of high fancies and imagination. Here also is a language of ample scope and noble powers. And into the midst of a London like this there comes up from Stratford, we know not how, a man marvellously dowered with all those supreme gifts which I have endeavoured to describe.
Towards the making of Shakespeare, Nature has contributed her utmost. For the full encouragement of his genius the environment is most apt. It remains briefly to see what experience did for him, or what he did for himself. What was his preparation?
His origin was lowly, and, as with Robert Burns, we may be glad of it. He thus saw intimately certain sides of life and conditions of men which otherwise he might never have touched so closely. He learned to know all their strange and naive humours, their ignorance and muddlement. From them he realised those strong and elemental passions which finer folk attenuate or disguise. He acquired a stock of sinewy and home-coming Saxon phrase, which often stood him in good stead, and which forms no small factor in his vast eloquence. He is manifestly a man who forgot nothing. In after days he mingled with wits and players, with poets and peers, but, while ever acquiring diction of wider range and choicer degree, he kept always ready to hand the language of peasant and clown. No man ever enjoyed more full instruction in the speech, the thoughts, or the manners, of all degrees of men.
Of women toward the social summits he perhaps never knew so much, but he had not studied their humbler sisters in vain, and beneath all the width of ruff and opulence of silk, he knew well enough what primal feelings lurked, what affections, what jealousies, what caprices of the eternal feminine. As for the mere externals of their behaviour, he had abundant opportunities of noting them.
When modern readers censure Shakespeare for dubious things which he makes his gentlewomen say and do, they are apt to forget how surprising were the canons of behaviour and decorum for gentlewomen under good Queen Bess. For my part I am prepared in all such cases to give their keen-eyed and marvellous contemporary the benefit of the doubt. He would not represent ladies as any coarser than they were.
Of his education, in the narrower sense, we can really make sure of little; but, like that of Burns, it was indisputably far more liberal than the devotees of miracle are wishful to suppose. To-day no competent inquirer doubts that, with the grammar-school at Stratford opening its doors free to the son of John Shakespeare, burgess and alderman, the opportunity was grasped by that struggling but ambitious person. Nor is it doubted that there, under some Holofernes or Sir Hugh Evans, the boy learned his Lyly's grammar, and read his share of Latin authors--his Terence, Ovid, and Seneca, together with Baptista "the old Mantuan." In French he assuredly did more than dabble, if his _Henry V_ be taken as any proof. The other day Mr. Churton Collins essayed to prove, by an array of quotations, that he was tolerably read in Greek. For my own part I confess that I find, in the passages of AEschylus cited with passages of Shakespeare, no more than happy coincidences in the thinking of two kindred original minds. Yet some Greek at least he had. Our witness is Ben Jonson. Rare Ben was himself a monument of learning, and to him the ordinary mortal's modicum was but a trifle. When he observes "and though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek," we should do well to take him as meaning precisely what he says. If he had meant "no Latin and no Greek," he would have written it so; the line would have scanned as easily, and the desired point would have been made still more effective. Add to these studies of Shakespeare his early study in the Bible; early familiarity with that book, apart from all questions of character and religion, will always shoot a rich woof of word and thought through all the warp of writing.
Remember that Shakespeare at school was not distracted by hours of mathematics and other agreeable but alien pursuits. Remember also--what is so strangely forgotten--that he was a genius, whose capacious mind would grasp and retain with unique facility. Remember that at school there are boys and boys, and that, while some of them waste time in laboriously endeavouring to assimilate the shells of knowledge along with the oysters, others instinctively use their powers of secretion to better purpose. Remember also that in Elizabethan times school-boy study was a far more strenuous matter than it is in these degenerate days, and that it was not chiefly directed towards examinations.
Be assured that Shakespeare's school education was as good as your own; or, if you are not convinced of that, be at least assured that an illiterate man never did, and never will, write even tolerable poetry.
It may seem as if I were acting the traitor to my own profession when I rejoice that Shakespeare was never turned into what is technically called a learned man. He was something better, he was an educated man. You do not need erudition to be a creator of great works of imagination, whether it be erudition concerning Latin syntax or concerning the Origin of the Concept or concerning the life-history of the worm. What you chiefly require to know is the human heart; and the best books for that knowledge are human beings. Learning is after all but the milch-cow of education. If Shakespeare had been as learned as Ben Jonson, or the so-called University Wits, he might perchance have come to view mankind too much through the medium of books, as Jonson himself did, instead of through his own keen natural orbs of vision.
His soul proud science never taught to stray Far as the Solar walk or Milky Way.
No! but he had soared otherwise to the Solar walk and the Galaxy, he had gladdened at the sight of the sun flattering all Nature with his sovereign eye, and he had felt the full sense of the nocturnal heavens, thick inlaid with patines of bright gold. A learned man, says Bagehot, may study butterflies till he forgets that they are beautiful. On the other hand, it is only fair to say that he need forget nothing of the kind. So a man may study Aristotle till he forgets that Aristotle derived his psychology from men and not men from Aristotle.
The real scandalum to Greene and the scholar playwrights was not that Shakespeare was illiterate, but that, not having studied by Cam or Isis, he had no business to be literate. He was an "upstart crow," and what right had he to be "as well able to bumbast out a blank verse as the best of you?" The attitude was perhaps natural to jealous rivals, but it should never have been used to show that Shakespeare was destitute of a decent school education. Perhaps the most regrettable outcome of this notion is that Milton should have written the amazing line which tells how Shakespeare
Warbled his native woodnotes wild.
Like the famous description of the crab as the little red fish which walks backwards, it contains only three demonstrable errors. Shakespeare does not warble, his notes are not woodnotes, and they are not wild.
He was, moreover, a man of the sort whose education--even book education--never ceases. At a later date in London he manifestly absorbed numerous translations. He knew his way about his Golding's Ovid and North's Plutarch. Before he attempted those splendid poetical exercises the _Venus and Adonis_, the _Lucrece_, and the early sonnets, he had studied, like every one else, the models for sonneteers and lyrists which came from Italy and France, from Petrarch or Du Bellay. It is clear that he was familiar with the Essays of Montaigne. Earlier English literature was no sealed book to him. He also read his own contemporaries. Hence his _Lucrece_ is part Ovid, part Chaucer, part Daniel or Watson; his _Venus and Adonis_ is part Ovid, part Lodge.
Better still than reading is conversation, the rubbing of wits and furbishing of knowledge amid well-informed and bright-minded company. Tradition tells us that Shakespeare was a member of that brilliant coterie of the Mermaid Tavern, where rare Ben presided, as glorious John presided at a later day in his favoured Coffee-house. Fuller describes the wit-combats between Shakespeare and his learned confrere, and there is no reason to doubt that the nimble man-of-war and the heavy galleon fought many a bout. Of that coterie Beaumont writes to Jonson:--
What things have we seen Done at the Mermaid! Heard words that have been So nimble and so full of subtle flame, As if that every one from whence they came Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest.
The classical quotation, the apt allusion, would fly freely in that society. The matter of books new and old would be talked of and discussed. For the purpose of Shakespeare, here was learning to be picked up of the most telling sort. For, let us repeat, reading was then pursued on high levels, and intellectual curiosity was eager. And let us remember always that Shakespeare must have possessed an astonishing instinct for seizing the essentials, which he shaped for himself "in the quick forge and working-house of thought."
Also among the actors into whose company he was perpetually thrown there were men who had, as we should call it, toured through England and Scotland, and sometimes abroad to France, Germany, or Denmark. Scores of his acquaintances must have travelled in Italy, even if they did not return _diavoli incarnati_. Each man brought back description, information, story, which the vivid imagination of Shakespeare, as he listened, turned into abiding picture; and this, after he had chosen his theme from Cinthio or Bandello or elsewhere, he would employ for the background in his Verona or his Venice. How powerfully this can be done by the imagination of genius is well exemplified in _Wilhelm Tell_, which, from its opening verses of _Es laechelt der See_, carries in it the whole sense of Swiss landscape and Swiss air, although Schiller had never set foot in Switzerland.
Over and above all this, a man whose heart and whose interests are alike engaged in a particular profession, be he physician, or inventor, or artist, and who is ambitious to excel and prosper in that profession, will be for ever alert to every hint or lesson which will make for success. Shakespeare was from his heart a playwright; he was at the same time a shrewd business man as partner in a theatre. Not only did he love his work with all the passion of a creator, he was also concerned to outvie his professional rivals. The plays of the Globe must be better than the plays of the Fortune. He therefore studied existing dramas, in order to surpass them, if possible, at every point. He began by recasting or improving the plays of feebler writers, and so learned to distinguish what was effective from what was not. He then went on in the effort--an easy effort it proved to him--to transcend the plays of writers of strength; to transcend them in construction, in characterisation, in intellectual matter, in humour, and in diction; and this means that his aim was, by compulsion, high.
The standard already set was a lofty one. Marlowe's mighty line was not easy to surpass. There is nothing which provokes the best efforts of genius so powerfully as formidable predecessors and rivals. It is as with the forest trees; if some grow tall, the rest will struggle to grow taller, so that they may escape from the shade into the sun. The University Wits and scholar poets, who had "climbed to the height of Seneca his style," deserve no little thanks for the making of our Shakespeare. If his pieces were to be performed before the Queen's Majesty, or the King's Majesty, and all that cultivated court, or if they were to receive the applause of the learned Benchers of Gray's Inn, they must attain a distinguished level both of living interest and of admirable poetry. Shakespeare's precursors had rendered this high perfection indispensable.
Let me insist also on another consideration, too often overlooked. The Elizabethan stage was without scenery. The bare boards, a curtain at the back, a table and inkstand to represent a court of justice, two or three ragged foils to disgrace the name of Agincourt, and the imagination of the audience did the rest. All the gorgeousness of the modern _mise-en-scene_; all the painting, mechanical contrivances, and elaborate furnishing, were wanting. There was none of that modern realism, which consists in driving a real train across a painted country or eating real sandwiches under a property tree. To a great extent all this elaborate staging has been the death of dramatic art. Among the Elizabethans, the interest depended solely on the action and the acting, on the piece and its language. All these must be excellent. They were not yet considered inferior to those of optical effect. The Elizabethans listened with their minds, not solely with their eyes.
Thus, from his teaching at school, from his wide reading, from bright and varied conversation, from assiduous exercise, Shakespeare derived perpetual education. If, as Bacon declares, "reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man," then Shakespeare was trebly well equipped.