Part 2

When we come to examine the construction of Shakespeare's plays, we shall find that it is as decisively along rationalistic lines as the atmosphere which permeates them. Gods and ghosts fleet across his stage, but they have no perceptible influence upon the order or drift of events in Shakespeare's world. The center round which Shakespeare makes the universe revolve is--man! This represents a radical departure from theology. The change from the contemplation of God to the study of man is the Renaissance in a nut-shell.

Shakespeare, as the great Renaissance poet, lifted this world into the importance which the next world had usurped, and urged men to reclaim the prerogatives which they had, in fear and servility, deeded away to their gods.

Study, for instance, Romeo and Juliet, and it will be seen that the entire story, beginning with the rosy dawn in which love and youth met, to the noon-day storm which swept the unhappy lovers to their graves, is conceived, created and presented without the remotest reference to a divine providence as a factor in human affairs. Everything happens in a natural way, and from natural causes. Romeo's rashness and Juliet's impatience leave room for no mysteries as to their fate. There may be, or there may not be, a God, but to explain this tragedy it is not necessary either to postulate or to deny his existence. Shakespeare steers clear of the occult powers that are supposed to preside over human destiny, and never once does he cross their paths or enter the circle of their influence. Consider, for example, the conduct of his Romeo and Juliet in the presence of death. Much is made of the death bed scene in religious literature. People are supposed to turn their thoughts heavenward in that hour, and to show anxiety about their souls. It is then, we are told, that a sense of the world to come takes irresistible possession of the mind. The last words of the dying are recalled to show how, upon the brink of the grave, as the earthly sun is sinking, the heavenly lights begin to appear. But Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet confront death without any thought of a future reunion, which is very remarkable considering their youth and their fondness for one another. It almost betrays a deliberate effort on the part of Shakespeare to prevent these ardent lovers, dying ere the budding rose of love had opened, to even dream of a life beyond where they may forever live and love. Nothing could be a clearer indication of Shakespeare's intellectual freedom from both the phraseology and method of theology. Romeo knows of no other paradise than his Juliet, while to the latter, where Romeo is, there is heaven. This is frank, honest, free, but it is not how the Mohammedan, the Christian or the Jewish religions expect the dying to express themselves. Romeo's address to death ignores all revealed religions:

Come, unsavory guide!

Thou desperate pilot, now at once run on

The dashing rocks, thy seasick weary bark!

Here's to my love! * * * Thus with a kiss I die.

Surely this is not the language of the believer. Nor has Romeo any illusions about death:

Oh here

Will I set up my everlasting rest;

And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars

From this world-wearied flesh.

And to think that Romeo had a Catholic priest for a friend! But it shows how clean Shakespeare's mind was from "such fantasies * * * more than cool reason ever comprehends." *

And when Romeo takes his farewell of Juliet, his thought is equally free from fancies:

Eyes, look your last!

Arms, take your last embrace! and lips, O you,

The doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss,

A dateless bargain to engrossing death.

Nothing could be more un-Catholic and un-Protestant than this parting of Shakespeare's best lovers. Juliet, who has often knelt before the priest, dies without one appeal to religion for comfort or support. She has no faith, now, in the hour of her greatest need, in prayer, crucifix, Bible or church. "Go, get thee hence," she cries to the friar when he approaches to minister to her in her crushing sorrow. She follows Romeo without uttering one word about God, or the future. In the same spirit, "The rest is silence," murmurs Hamlet as he sinks to the ground, and we may announce with considerable assurance that the words are Shakespeare's as much as they are Hamlet's. **

But the naturalism of the poet as opposed to the supernaturalism of the religion of his day is further brought out by the free and uninterrupted operation in his plays of the law of action and reaction, of cause and consequence. It is no angel of heaven, as we read of in Scripture, that exalts or strikes down the people in Shakespeare's world; but by their own acts they rise or fall. Intemperance brings Timon of Athens to the dust; folly ruins Othello; insolence cuts Corialanus' career short; ambition and superstition strangle Macbeth; hypocrisy subjects Angello to the contempt of his fellows; hatred and revenge blight the life of Shylock. Heaven plays no part on Shakespeare's stage. Man reaps as he sows, and no gods are necessary to enforce cause and effect. If Nature's laws defy the power of man, do they bend or break when gods command? Pride, shame, intemperance, greed, hate--these can never lead to happiness, all the gods to the contrary. Nor can all the powers of heaven and hell turn self-restraint, moderation, justice, contentment, courage, love and peace, into demons of hell. Nature is sound; Nature is all-sufficient, and in Shakespeare Nature occupies the stage so completely as to leave neither room nor necessity for any other power.

* Midsummer's Night's Dream.

** We are neither recommending nor condemning Shakespeare's attitude toward the question of another life, but simply endeavoring to represent it.

Nothing is so certain and so effective in Shakespeare as his criticism of the ways of Providence. When Othello, for instance, awakens to a sense of his irreparable loss--when the pity of Desdemona's death, like the incoming tide of the sea, sweeps over him and takes his breath away, he gasps out these significant words with his eyes searching the abysses of space over his head: "Methinks there should now be a huge eclipse of sun and moon, and the affrighted earth should yawn at altercation." He can not understand how "any God" could look down with unmoistened eyes upon such a tragedy. What does God do with his powers if he will not interfere to save men such as Othello from committing ignorantly so heinous a crime? Again he stammers out, "Are there no stones in heaven but what serve for the thunder?" Is God only a spectacular being? Is all he can do to thunder in the clouds and dazzle with his lightning? Where is the God of help? Is he real? Does he exist?

To make effective this indifference or helplessness of the gods, Shakespeare contrasts their stolid unconcern with human sympathy. Emelia, the wife of the man who poisoned Othello's mind, breaks into a heart-rending lamentation when she learns of the death of her innocent mistress, which shames the silent and tearless gods:

I'll kill myself for grief,

she sobs as she sees stretched at her feet the victim of human folly and crime. How eloquent, and how melting are these words! She does not care to live if she can not protect innocence and virtue, beauty and goodness against hate and envy. And this from a woman whose character was not above reproach! How admirable is the seething passion in her human soul compared with the dumbness of the almighty gods!

By the mouth of another frail woman Shakespeare passes the same criticism upon the current conceptions of divine providence. When young Juliet learns that Romeo has killed her cousin, for which rash act he has been banished for life, thus blighting her dearest hopes, she cries:

Can Heaven be so envious?

Later on, when her own parents persecute her and drive her to a desperate experiment with death, and all for the purpose of wresting a little happiness out of life, she exclaims:

Is there no pity sitting in the clouds?

Finally, when all her hopes are turned to ashes, and she realizes the bitterness of her fate, she sobs:

"Alack, alack that Heaven should practice such stratagems upon so soft a subject as myself."

This is a strong criticism of the popular fancy of a "Father in Heaven" who broods over his children as a hen over her young. Unlike the preachers of the conventional faiths, Shakespeare sought to divest people's minds of dreams and fairy stories, that they may learn to cope with reality. This is the answer to the charge that the critic takes away people's comfort when he takes away their "religion." On the contrary, he helps them to replace the shadow with the substance. Men will do more for themselves and their world if they realize that if they do not, no other power will. Man becomes a god when the place is vacated by the idols.

But if there is still any uncertainty about Shakespeare's religious philosophy, we recommend the careful perusal of the scene in Macbeth between Macduff, Malcolm and Rosse. The latter has just informed Macduff that the tyrant has put his entire household to death:

Macduff.--My children, too?

Rosse.--Wife, children, servants, all that could be found.

Macduff.--My wife killed too?

Rosse.--I have said.

Macduff.--All my pretty ones? Did you say all? * * *

All? What, all my pretty chickens, and their dam, at one

fell swoop?

Then follow these significant words of the bereaved and wronged husband:

Did Heaven look on,

And would not take their part?

No wonder the sentiment expressed in the above was considered blasphemous by early Christian critics of Shakespeare. To a believer in God's right to do as He pleases, and in man's duty to bow humbly and uncomplainingly to the hand that smites him, the question which Macduff asks is both impious and wicked, for he openly upbraids Providence for its non-interference, if he does not categorically deny its existence. It is not probable that an honest adherent or even respecter of the current religious teaching of his day could have penned so bold a protest against the popular faith. "Where," Shakespeare seems to ask, "is the Heavenly Father whose tender mercies are over all his children?" What does God do for man? In what sense would a mother and her children, foully murdered, have been worse off, if there had been no Providence? And in what way were they benefited by the existence of a Heavenly Father?

In this same play, the poet has once more described his ideal man, and there is more of the pagan about him than of the Christian. Living in a community which regarded faith as the greatest of virtues, without which no amount of moral excellence could avail anything, Shakespeare draws a picture of his saint which is the very antithesis of Christian ideals. Malcolm asks for the respect of his fellows for his character, not for his religion.

Never was forsworn;

Scarcely have coveted what was mine own;

At no time broke my faith; would not betray

The devil to his fellow; and delight

No less in truth, than life.

The concluding line--_and delight no less in truth than life_--we have no hesitation in pronouncing as the most beautiful sentiment in Shakespeare. Malcolm says not a word about his Christian beliefs, without which "no one can be saved." Once more we call attention to the fact that there are in Shakespeare, as there are in Voltaire, nearly all the terms of church and creed, but the underlying philosophy of the poet is, if we may depend upon the above extracts and examples, unequivocally rationalistic. Shakespeare was a freethinker, in that he interrogates the popular faith about God, and the hereafter, and suggests an order of the universe which is the very negation of the supernatural. His indifference to the fundamentals of the Christian faith, then, is not due to the fact that he is not a preacher, as Gervinius suggests, nor because he preferred "nothing" to Christianity, as Santayana concludes, or because of his "tender and delicate reserve about holy things," as Charles Knight, one of the most enthusiastic admirers of Shakespeare suggests, but to his utter want of intellectual sympathy with the religious thought of his day, and to the fact that he had worked out a religion of his own, based on the natural virtues--an ethical religion of Humanity, with its commandments written, not on parchments, but in the blood of the race.

There is undoubtedly a religious atmosphere in Shakespeare, but it is the religion of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful; without dogma and without miracle, and as comprehensive, as true to nature, and as closely in harmony with the rationalistic interpretation of the universe as his own drama. Has not Goethe, in defining his own religion, defined also that of Shakespeare? "Man is born," writes Goethe, "not to solve the problem of the universe, but to find out where the problem begins, and then to restrain himself _within the limits of the comprehensible_." This is precisely what the great Englishman, whom Goethe so sincerely admired, did. He "restrained himself within the limits of the comprehensible," which is a beautiful way of saying that he was practical and not speculative, scientific in spirit and method, and not theological. He abstained from the unprofitable pursuit of the gods, whom the Bible says in one place, "no man can find out by searching," and devoted himself to the study of man and his world. This is the religion of sense. There is everything in Shakespeare about man, and every bit of it is serious; but there is nothing of any consequence in Shakespeare about God or gods. It is a matter of regret to the theologian that the great poet should have permitted the secular interests of life to engage his exclusive thought, but we rejoice in the fact that Shakespeare could not be tempted into the dusty and winding paths of theology which lead nowhere.

As truthfully as the great Voltaire, the glorious Shakespeare, poet, philosopher, historian, could say of the founders of isms, and the inventor and maker of gods, "they have troubled the earth, and I have consoled it."