Chapter 10
gather head. Richard leads his army to oppose them. The armies front each other at Bosworth Field near Leicester. The night before the battle the ghosts of the many slain during the progress of the Wars of the Roses menace Richard and promise victory to Richmond. In the battle that follows Richard is slain. Richmond takes oath to end the Wars of the Roses by marrying Edward's daughter, so that the two royal houses may at last be joined.
_Richard III_ is the last of the great historical plays about the Wars of the Roses. The subject of the wars had occupied Shakespeare's mind for many months. He had traced them from their beginning in the long ago to their end among the dead at Bosworth. All that bloodiness of misery was due to a forgotten marriage and the chance that Edward III had seven sons, the eldest of whom died before his father. In this great tragic vision Shakespeare saw the wheel come full circle, with that giving of justice which life renders at last, though it may be to the dead, or the mad, or the broken.
Largely, this play deals with the coming of that justice. Much that is most wonderful in the play comes from the faith that blood cruelly or unjustly spilt cries from the ground, and that the human soul, wrought to an ecstasy, has power, as the blood has power, to draw God's hand upon the guilty. But Shakespeare's mind was also occupied with the knowledge that self-confident intellect is terrible and tragical. One of the truths of the play is the very sad one that being certain is in itself a kind of sin, sure to be avenged by life. The obsession of self-confidence betrays person after person, to misery or death. All the heads that lift themselves proudly go bloody to the dust or bow in anguish. Only one man moves by other light than his own. He is the only one who achieves quiet triumph. Nothing in the play is more impressive than the speech in which the intellect that has ended the bloodshed prays humbly that God may bless and help England with peace.
It was said of Napoleon that he was as great as a man can be without virtue. The intellect of Richard III is like that of Napoleon. It is restless, swift, and sure of its power. It is sure, too, that the world stays as it is from something stupid in the milky human feelings. Richard is a "bloody dog" let loose in a sheep-fold. It is a part of the tragedy that he is nobler than the sheep that he destroys. His is the one great intellect in the play. Intellect is always rare. In kings it is very rare. When a great intellect is made bitter by being cased in deformity one has the tragedy of intellect turned upon itself. Had Richard been born without his deformed shoulder he could have known human sympathy, and human intercourse. Without human intercourse he goes gloating, clutching himself, biting his lip, muttering at the twist in his shadow. This warped, starved mind knows himself stronger than the minds near him. It is tragical to be deformed, it is tragical to have an intellect too great for people to understand. But the deformed and bitter intellect would suffer tragedy indeed if he, the one constant Yorkist, were to be ruled by a gentle, half-witted Lancastrian saint like Henry VI, or by Clarence the perjurer, or by the upstart Woodville, a commoner made noble because his sister took the King's fancy, or by the Queen herself, the housewife who caused great Warwick's death, or by one of her sons, who are pert to the man who had spilt his blood to make their father king. The snarling intellect bites rather than suffer that. It is very terrible, but how if he had not bitten? The vision of all this bloodiness is less terrible than that vision of the sheep triumphing, so dear to us moderns--
"Strength by limping sway disabled, And art made tongue-tied by authority, And folly (doctor-like) controlling skill."
As in all Shakespeare's greater plays, a justice brings evil upon the vow breaker. Curses called down in the solemn moment come home to roost when the solemnity is forgotten or thrust aside. Clarence, who broke his oath to the House of Lancaster, is done to death by his brother. Anne, cursing the killer of her husband, curses the woman who shall marry him, is, herself, that woman, and dies wretchedly. Grey, Rivers, Dorset, Buckingham and Hastings make oaths of amity, call down curses on him that breaks them, themselves break them, and die wretchedly. Richard, too wise to make oaths, too strong to curse, dies, as his mother foretells, "by God's just ordinance," when the measure of the blood of his victims becomes too great, and when his victims' curses, after wandering from heart to heart, get them into human bodies and walk the world, executing justice.
All through the play there are warnings against human certainty. Of all the dangerous pronouncements of man that to the fountain, "Fountain, of thy water I will never drink," is one of the most dangerous. There are terrible examples of certainty betrayed. Richard is certain as only fine intellect can be that he will triumph. It is a part of his tragedy that it is not intellect that triumphs in this world, but a stupid, though a righteous something, incapable of understanding intellect. Rivers and Grey are certain that Richard is friendly to them. They are hurried to Pomfret and put to death. Hastings "Knows his state secure," and "goes triumphant." He is rushed out of life at a moment's notice, one hour a lord, giving his opinion at a council, the next a corpse in its grave. Buckingham thinks himself secure. A moment's nicety of conscience sends him flying to death. The little Princes lay down to sleep--
"girdling one another Within their innocent alabaster arms. Their lips were four red roses on a stalk Which in their summer beauty kissed each other"--
when their waking time came they were stamped down under the stones at the stair foot.
The poetry of this play is that of great and high spiritual invention. There is much that stays in the mind as exquisitely said and beautifully felt. But the wonder of the work is in the greatness of the conception. That is truly great, both as poetry and as drama. The big and burning imaginings do not please, they haunt.
The dream of Clarence, the wooing of the Lady Anne, the scene in Baynard's Castle, and the ghost scene in the tents at Bosworth, have been praised and re-praised. They are in Shakespeare's normal mood, neither greater nor less than twenty other scenes in the mature plays. The really grand scene of the calling down of the curses (Act I, sc. iii), when the man's mind, after brooding on this event for months, sees it all, for a glowing hour, as the just God sees it, is the wonderful achievement. Think of this scene, and think of the scenes played nightly now in the English theatres, and ask whether all is well with the nation's soul.
There are many superb Shakespearean openings. No poet in history opens a play with a more magnificent certainty. The opening of this play--
"Now is the winter of our discontent Made glorious summer by this sun of York,"
is one of the most splendid of all. There is no need to pick out fragments from the rest of the play, but the march of the line--
"Your fire-new stamp of honour is scarce current"--
the lines--
"then came wandering by A shadow like an angel, with bright hair Dabbled in blood; and he squeaked out aloud, 'Clarence is come; false, fleeting, perjured Clarence, That stabbed me in the field by Tewkesbury'"--
the exquisitely tender lines--
"And there the little souls of Edward's children Whisper the spirits"--
and the orders of Richard in the last act, for white Surrey to be saddled, ink and paper to be brought, and a bowl of wine to be filled, show that the poet's great confident manner was formed, on all the four sides of its perfection. The years only brought it to a deeper glow.
_The Merchant of Venice._
_Written._ (?)
_Published._ 1600.
_Source of the Plot._ The ancient story of the merciless Jew is told in the _Gesta Romanorum_, and re-told, with delicate grace, by Giovanni Fiorentino, a fourteenth-century Italian writer, in his _Il Pecorone_ (the simpleton), a collection of novels, or, as we should call them, short stories. The story of the three caskets is also told in the _Gesta Romanorum_. Other incidents in the play are taken from other sources, possibly from other plays. It is thought by some that the character of Shylock was suggested by the case of the Spanish Jew, Lopez, who was hanged, perhaps unjustly, for plotting to poison Queen Elizabeth, in 1594. The main source of the dramatic fable is Fiorentino's story.
_The Fable._ Portia, the lady of Belmont, has three caskets, one of gold, one of silver, one of lead. She is vowed to marry the man who, on viewing the caskets, guesses which of them contains her portrait. Various attempting suitors fail to guess rightly.
Bassanio, eager to try the hazard, obtains money from his friend Antonio, to equip him. Antonio borrows the money from the Jew, Shylock, on condition that, should he fail to repay the debt by a fixed day, a pound of his flesh shall be forfeit to the Jew.
Bassanio guesses rightly and weds Portia.
Antonio fails to repay the debt, and is lodged in prison. Bassanio hears of his friend's disaster. Portia bids him fly to Antonio with money enough to pay the debt threefold. Shylock refuses the offer. He clamours for his pound of flesh. The case comes to trial.
At the hearing of the case in the Duke's court, Portia, disguised as a judge, gives sentence, that Shylock may have his pound of flesh; but that if he shed Christian blood in the taking of it, his life will be forfeit. Shylock is confounded further by a charge of endangering a Christian's life. He is fined and humbled. Portia, still in disguise, asks as her fee a ring that she has given to Bassanio. Bassanio, hesitating, at last gives the ring, and returns home without it. Portia's pretended indignation at the loss of the ring ends the last act with comedy.
The play resolves itself into a simple form. It illustrates the clash between the emotional and the intellectual characters, the man of heart and the man of brain. The man of heart, Antonio, is obsessed by a tenderness for his friend. The man of brain is obsessed by a lust to uphold intellect in a thoughtless world that makes intellect bitter in every age. Shylock is a man of intellect, born into a despised race. It is his tragedy that the generous Gentiles about him can be generous to everything except to intellect and Jewish blood. Intellect and Jewish blood are too proud to attempt to understand the Gentiles who cannot understand.
Shylock is a proud man. The Gentiles, who are neither proud nor intellectual, spit upon him and flout him. One of them beguiles his daughter and teaches her to rob him. Another of them signs a mad bond to help an extravagant friend to live in idleness. Bitter, lonely brooding upon these things strengthen the Jew's obsession, till the words, "I can cut out the heart of my enemy," become the message of his entire nature. Half the evils in life come from the partial vision of people in states of obsession. Shylock's obsession grows till he is in the Duke's court, whetting his knife upon his shoe, before what Pistol calls "incision."
Portia has been much praised during two centuries of criticism. She is one of the smiling things created in the large and gentle mood that moved Shakespeare to comedy. The scene in the fifth act, where the two women, coming home from Venice by night, see the candle burning in the hall, as they draw near, is full of a naturalness that makes beauty quick in the heart. Shakespeare enjoyed the writing of this play. The construction of the last two acts shows that his great happy mind was at its happiest in the saving of these creatures of the sun from something real.
_The Taming of the Shrew._
_Written._ (?)
_Published._ 1623.
_Source of the Plot._ The induction and that part of the play which treats of Petruchio and Katharina is based upon a play, published in 1594, under the title _The Taming of A Shrew_, author not known. The other part is based on _The Supposes_ of George Gascoigne, a comedy adapted from Ariosto's _I Suppositi_.
_The Fable._ Christopher Sly, a tinker lying drunk by a tavern, is found by a lord, who causes him to be put to bed and treated, on waking, as a nobleman newly cured of madness. Part of the treatment is the performance of this play before him.
The play has two plots. In one of them, Petruchio woos and tames the shrew Katharina; in the other, Katharina's sister Bianca is wooed by lovers in disguise. The two plots have little connection with each other. That which relates to Petruchio and Katharina is certainly by Shakespeare. The other seems to be by a dull man who did not know his craft as a dramatist.
In the Induction, and in the speech of Biondello (in Act III) Shakespeare enters a mood of memory of the country. In the song at the end of _Love's Labour's Lost_ he showed a matchless sense of country life. That sense, at once robust and sweet, now gives life to a few scenes in the plays. These scenes are mostly in prose; but they have the rightness of poetry. In writing them, he wrought with his daily nature, from something intimately known, or inbred in him, during childhood. Man can only write happily from a perfect understanding. All men can describe with point and colour what they knew as children. These country scenes in Shakespeare are happier than anything else in the plays because they come, not from anything read or heard, but from the large, genial nature made by years of life among the farms and sheep-walks at the western end of the Cotswolds.
_Sly._ Y' are a baggage: the Slys are no rogues; look in the chronicles; we came in with Richard Conqueror. Therefore _paucas pallabris_; let the world slide: _Sessa!_
_Hostess._ You will not pay for the glasses you have burst?
_Sly._ No, not a denier. Go by, Jeronimy: go to thy cold bed, and warm thee.
In the third act, Biondello's description of the appearance of Petruchio's horse has the abundance of the great mind.
" ... possessed with the glanders and like to mose in the chine; troubled with the lampass, infected with the fashions, full of wind-galls, sped with spavins, rayed with the yellows, past cure of the fives, stark spoiled with the staggers, begnawn with the bots, swayed in the back and shoulder-shotten; near legged before and with a half-cheeked bit and a headstall of sheep's leather."
It is something no longer possible in a city theatre. Neither the dramatist nor the audience of to-day knows a horse as the Elizabethan had to know him. The speech sets one wondering at the art of the unknown Elizabethan actor who first spoke hurriedly this speech of strange words full of sibilants.
Shakespeare's share in the play (the scenes in which the shrew and her tamer appear) is farce with ironic philosophical intention. He indicates the tragedy that occurs when a manly spirit is born into a woman's body. Katharina is vexed and plagued by forced submission to a father who cannot see her merit, and by jealousy of a gentle, useless sister. She, who is entirely honest, sees the brainless Bianca, whom no amount of schooling will make even passably honest, preferred before her. Lastly, she is humbled into the state of submissive wifely falsehood by a boor who cares only for his own will, her flesh, and her money. In a page and a half of melancholy claptrap broken Katharina endeavours to persuade us that
"Such duty as the subject owes the prince, Even such a woman oweth to her husband."
Perhaps it is the way of the world. Women betray womanhood as much by mildness as by wiles. Meanwhile, what duty does a man owe to a fine, free, fearless spirit dragged down to his by commercial bargain with a father who is also a fool?
_King Henry IV, Part I._
_Written._ (?)
_Published._ 1598.
_Source of the Plot._ Most of the comic scenes are the fruit of Shakespeare's invention. A very popular play, _The Famous Victories of Henry V_, by an unknown hand, gave him the suggestion for an effective comic scene. In the historical scenes he follows closely the _Chronicles_ of Holinshed.
_The Fable._ The play treats of the rising of Henry Hotspur, Lord Percy, against Henry IV of England, and of the turning of the mind of Henry, Prince of Wales, from low things to things more worthy his birth. It ends with the killing of Hotspur, by the Prince of Wales, on the battlefield at Shrewsbury. Hotspur is an uncommon man, whose uncommonness is unsupported by his father at a critical moment. Henry, Prince of Wales, is a common man, whose commonness props his father, and helps him to conquer. The play is about a son too brilliant to be understood, and a son too common to understand.
The play treats of a period some four years after the killing of King Richard II. It opens at a time when the oaths of Henry Bolingbroke, to do justice, have been broken on all sides, lest the injustice of his assumption of kingship should be recognised and punished by those over whom he usurps power. The King is no longer the just, rather kind, man of affairs who takes power in the earlier, much finer play. He is a swollen, soured, bullying man, with all the ingratitude of a king and all the baseness of one who knows his cause to be wrong. Opposed to him is a passionate, quick-tempered man, ready to speak his mind, on the instant, to any whom he believes to be unjust or false.
This quick-tempered man, Lord Percy, has done the King a signal service. Instead of asking for reward he tries to persuade the King to be just to a man who has suffered wounds and defeat for him. The King calls him a liar for his pains.
Percy, stung to the quick, rebels. Others rebel with him, among them some who are too wise to be profitable on a council of war. War does not call for wisdom, but for swiftness in striking. Percy, who is framed for swiftness in striking, loses half of his slender chance because his friends are too wise to advise desperate measures. Nevertheless, his troops shake the King's troops. The desperate battle of Shrewsbury is very nearly a triumph for him. Then the Prince meets him and kills him. He learns too late that a passionate longing to right the wrong goes down before the rough and stupid something that makes up the bulk of the world. He learns that
"Thought's the slave of life, and life, time's fool; And time, that takes survey of all the world, Must have a stop"--
and dies. The man who kills him says a few trite lines over his body, and leaves the stage talking of Falstaff's bowels.
Prince Henry, afterwards Henry V, has been famous for many years as "Shakespeare's only hero." Shakespeare was too wise to count any man a hero. The ways of fate moved him to vision, not heroism. If we can be sure of anything in that great, simple, gentle, elusive brain, we can be sure that it was quickened by the thought of the sun shining on the just and on the unjust, and shining none the less golden though the soul like clay triumph over the soul like flame. Prince Henry is not a hero, he is not a thinker, he is not even a friend; he is a common man whose incapacity for feeling enables him to change his habits whenever interest bids him. Throughout the first acts he is careless and callous though he is breaking his father's heart and endangering his father's throne. He chooses to live in society as common as himself. He talks continually of guts as though a belly were a kind of wit. Even in the society of his choice his attitude is remote and cold-blooded. There is no good-fellowship in him, no sincerity, no whole-heartedness. He makes a mock of the drawer who gives him his whole little pennyworth of sugar. His jokes upon Falstaff are so little good-natured that he stands upon his princehood whenever the old man would retort upon him. He impresses one as quite common, quite selfish, quite without feeling. When he learns that his behaviour may have lost him his prospective crown he passes a sponge over his past, and fights like a wild cat for the right of not having to work for a living.
There is little great poetry in the play. The magnificent image--
"Baited like eagles having lately bathed"--
the speech of Worcester (in Act V, sc. i) when he comes with a trumpet to speak with the King, and the call of Hotspur to set on battle--
"Sound all the lofty instruments of war, And by that music let us all embrace"--
are all noble.
To many, the play is remarkable because it introduces Sir John Falstaff, the most notable figure in English comedy. Falstaff is that deeply interesting thing, a man who is base because he is wise. Our justest, wisest brain dwelt upon Falstaff longer than upon any other character because he is the world and the flesh, able to endure while Hotspur flames to his death, and the enemies of the devil are betrayed that the devil may have power to betray others.
_The Second Part of King Henry IV._
_Written._ 1597 (?)
_Published._ 1600.
_Source of the Plot._ The play of _The Famous Victories of Henry V_. Holinshed's _Chronicles_.
_The Fable._ Northumberland and the other conspirators against the King learn that Hotspur, their associate, whom they failed to support, has been defeated and killed. The King's forces are now free to act against themselves. Northumberland retires to Scotland. The others under a divided command, make head against the King's troops under John of Lancaster. They are betrayed, taken and put to death. Northumberland, venturing out from Scotland, is defeated. King Henry's position is assured.
His safety comes too late to be pleasant to him. He is dying, and the conduct of his son gives him anxiety. He sees no chance of permanent peace. He counsels his son to begin a war abroad, to distract the attention of his subjects. Having done this, he dies.
Prince Henry begins his reign as Henry V by casting off all his old associates.
The second part of the play of _King Henry IV_ is Shakespeare's ending of the tragedy of _Richard II_. The deposition of Richard was an act of violence, unjust, as violence must be, and offensive, as injustice is, to the power behind life. The blood of the dead king, and of all those killed in fighting for him, calls upon that power, and asks justice of it. Slowly, in many secret ways, the tide sets against the slayer, till he is a worn, old, heart-broken, haunted man, dying with the knowledge that all the bloodshed has been useless, because the power so hardly won will be tossed away by his successor, the youth with "a weak mind and an able body," the "good, shallow young fellow," who "would have made a good pantler," who comes in noisily to his father's death-bed with news of the beastliest of all the treacheries of the reign. Just as the play of _Richard III_ completes the action of the Wars of the Roses, this play completes the action of the killing of the Duke of Gloucester at Calais. The wheel comes full circle, crushing many that looked to be brought high, making friends enemies and enemies friends. Life was never so brooded on since man learned to think, as in this cycle of tragedies. In this fragment of the whole we are shown the two classes in human life, the people of instinct and the people of intellect, being preyed on by two men, one of them greedy for present ease, the other for temporal power. Both men obtain their will. Those who give up everything for one thing often obtain that thing. But it is a law of life that nothing must be paid for with too great a share of the imaginative energy. All excess of the kind is unjust, as violence must be, and offensive, as injustice is, to the power behind life. King Henry IV fails in the hour of his triumph from his manifold failures in life during the struggle for triumph. Falstaff fails in the same way. The prize of life falls to the careless and callous man who has struggled only in two minutes of his life, once, when he played a practical joke upon some thieves, and a second time when he killed Hotspur, the brilliant intellect, the "miracle of men."
Many scenes in this play are great. Shakespeare's instinctive power was as large and as happy as his intellectual power. In this play he indulged it to the full. The Falstaff scenes are all wonderful. That in which the drunken Pistol is driven downstairs is the finest tavern scene ever written. Those placed in Gloucestershire are the perfect poetry of English country life. The talk of old dead Double, who could clap "i' the clout at twelvescore," and is now dead, as we shall all be soon; the casting back of memory to Jane Nightwork, still alive, though she belongs to a time fifty-five years past, when a man, now old, heard the chimes at midnight; the order to sow the headland, Cotswold fashion, with red Lammas wheat; the kindness and charm of the country servants, so beautiful after the drunken townsmen, are like the English country speaking. The earth of England is a good earth and bears good fruit, even the apple of man. These scenes are like an apple-loft in some old barn, where the apples of last year lie sweet in the straw.
All of those scenes seem to have been written easily, out of the fulness of an instinctive power. In the other scenes Shakespeare wrote with intense mental effort after brooding intensely on human destiny--
"how chances mock, And changes fill the cup of alteration With divers liquors,"
and on the truth that--
"There is a history in all men's lives, Figuring the nature of the times deceased; The which observed, a man may prophesy, With a near aim, of the main chance of things As not yet come to life."
There are two scenes of deep tragedy in the play, both awful. Shakespeare never wrote anything more terrible. They are the scene in the fourth act, where John of Lancaster tricks and betrays the rebels, and the scene at the end where the young King cuts his old friends, with a word to the Lord Justice to have them into banishment. The words of Scripture, "Put not your trust in princes," must have rung in Shakespeare's head as he wrote these scenes.
Richard II flung down his warder at Coventry rather than let his friend venture in battle for him. From that act of mercy came his loss of the crown, his death, Mowbray's death, Hotspur's death, the murder of the leaders at Gaultree and the countless killings up and down England. At the end of this play the slaughter stops for a while so that a callous young animal may bring his country into a foreign war to divert men's minds from injustice at home.
At the end of the play there is an epilogue in prose, touching for this reason, that it is one of the few personal addresses that Shakespeare has left to us. In the plays the characters speak with a detachment never relaxed. They belong to the kingdom of vision, not to the mind through which they came. In this epilogue Shakespeare speaks for all time directly to his hearers, whoever they may be.
Who are his hearers? Not the English.
Our prophet is not honoured here. This series of historical plays is one of the most marvellous things ever done by man. The plays of which it is composed have not been played in London, in their great processional pageant of tragedy, within the memory of man.
_King Henry V._
_Written._ 1598 (?)
_Published_, imperfectly, 1600; as we now have it, 1623.
_Source of the Plot._ The play of _The Famous Victories of Henry V_. Holinshed's _Chronicles_. (Possibly) an earlier play, now lost.
_The Fable._ The play describes the determination of Henry V to fight with France, his progress in France, the battle of Agincourt, the articles of peace between the French and English, and the courtship of the King with Katharine, daughter of the French King. It is a chronicle of the coming, seeing, and conquering of the "fellow" "whose face was not worth sun-burning."
The play bears every mark of having been hastily written. Though it belongs to the great period of Shakespeare's creative life, it contains little either of clash of character, or of that much tamer thing, comparison of character. It is a chronicle or procession, eked out with soldiers' squabbles. It seems to have been written to fill a gap in the series of the historical plays. Perhaps the management of the Globe Theatre, where the play was performed, wished to play the series through, from _Richard II_ to _Richard III_, and persuaded Shakespeare to write this play to link _Henry IV_ to _Henry VI_. The lines of the epilogue show that Shakespeare meant the play to give an image of worldly success between the images of failure in the other plays.
The play ought to be seen and judged as a part of the magnificent tragic series. Detached from its place, as it has been, it loses all its value. It is not greatly poetical in itself. It is popular. It is about a popular hero who is as common as those who love him. But in its place it is tremendous. Henry V is the one commonplace man in the eight plays. He alone enjoys success and worldly happiness. He enters Shakespeare's vision to reap what his broken-hearted father sowed. He passes out of Shakespeare's vision to beget the son who dies broken-hearted after bringing all to waste again.
"Hear him but reason in divinity,"
cries the admiring archbishop. Yet this searcher of the spirit woos his bride like a butcher, and jokes among his men like a groom. He has the knack of life that fits human beings for whatever is animal in human affairs.
His best friend, Scroop, plots to kill him, but is detected and put to death. Henry accuses Scroop of cruelty and ingratitude. He forgets those friends whom his own cruelty has betrayed to death and dishonour. Falstaff dies broken-hearted. Bardolph, whose faithfulness redeems his sins, is hanged. Pistol becomes a cutpurse. They were the prince's associates a few months before. He puts them from his life with as little feeling as he shows at Agincourt, when he orders all the prisoners to be killed.
He has a liking for knocks. Courage tempered by stupidity (as in the persons of Fluellen, etc.) is what he loves in a man. He, himself, has plenty of his favourite quality. His love of plainness and bluntness makes him condemn sentiment in his one profound speech--
"All other devils that suggest by treasons Do botch and bungle up damnation With patches, colours, and with forms being fetch'd From glistering semblances of piety."
The scenes between Nym and Pistol, and the account of Falstaff's death, are the last of the great English scenes. This (or the next) was Shakespeare's last English play, for Lear and Cymbeline are British, not English. When he laid down his pen after writing the epilogue to this play he had done more than any English writer to make England sacred in the imaginations of her sons.
_The Merry Wives of Windsor._
_Written._ 1599 (?)
_Published_, in a mutilated form, 1602; in a complete form, 1623.
_Source of the Plot._ A tale in Straparola's _Notti_ (iv. 4). Tarleton's _News out of Purgatorie_. Giovanni Florentino's _Il Pecorone_. Kinde Kit of Kingston's _Westward for Smelts_.
_The Fable._ Falstaff makes love to Mistress Ford, the wife of a Windsor man. Mistress Ford, despising Falstaff, plots with her friend, Mrs. Page, to make him a mock. News of Falstaff's passion is brought to Ford, who, needlessly jealous, resolves to search the house for him.
Falstaff woos Mrs. Ford. She holds him in play till she hears that her husband is coming. Falstaff, alarmed at his approach, bundles into a clothes basket, is carried past the unsuspecting husband, and soused in the river.
He is gulled into the belief that Mrs. Ford expects him again. He goes, is nearly caught by Ford, but escapes, disguised as an old woman, at the cost of a cudgelling.
Still believing in Mrs. Ford's love for him, he keeps a third assignation, this time in Windsor Forest, in the disguise of Herne the hunter. On this occasion he is pinched and scorched by little children disguised as fairies. He learns that Mrs. Ford has tricked him, is mocked by all, and then forgiven.
The play is eked out by other actions. Chief of these is the wooing of Anne Page, Mrs. Page's daughter, by three men--a foreigner, Dr. Caius; an idiot, Master Slender; and the man of her heart, Fenton. There are also scenes between Falstaff, Nym, Bardolph and Pistol, and between Dr. Caius, Sir Hugh Evans, Shallow, Slender, the Host and Mrs. Quickly.
An old tradition says that this play was written in a fortnight by command of Queen Elizabeth. There can be no doubt (_a_) that it was written hurriedly, (_b_) that it nicely suited the Tudor sense of humour. It is the least interesting of the genuine plays. It is almost wholly the work of the abundant instinctive self working in the high spirits that so often come with the excitement of hurry. None of the characters has time for thought. The play is full of external energy. The people bustle and hurry with all their animal natures.
It is the only Shakespearean play which treats exclusively of English country society. As a picture of that society it is true and telling. Country society alters very little. It is the enduring stem on which the cities graft fashions. It is given to few to see English country society so much excited as it is in this play, but drama deals with excessive life. Shakespeare's people are always intensely excited or interested or passionate. Each play tells of the great moments in half-a-dozen lives. The method of this play is the same, though the lives chosen are lower and the interests stupider. Falstaff is interested in cuckoldry, Mrs. Ford in mockery, Ford, Evans and Caius in jealousy and rivalry, Bardolph is going to be a tapster, the others are plying their suits. Even in this his most trivial play, Shakespeare's idea that punishment follows oath-breaking is expressed (whimsically enough) by Falstaff--
"I never prospered since I forswore myself at primero."
His other idea, that obsession is a danger to life, is expressed later in the words--
"See now, how wit may be made a Jack-a-Lent, when 'tis upon ill employment."
There is little poetry in the play. The most poetical passage is the account of Herne the hunter--
"There is an old tale goes, that Herne the Hunter, Some time a keeper here in Windsor Forest, Doth all the winter-time, at still midnight, Walk round about an oak, with great ragg'd horns; And there he blasts the tree, and takes the cattle; And makes milch-kine yield blood, and shakes a chain In a most hideous and dreadful manner."
Modern poets would describe Herne's dress and appearance. The creative poet describes his actions.
It is possible that when this play was written Shakespeare had thoughts of consecrating himself to the writing of purely English plays. There are signs that he had reached a point of achievement that is always a critical point to imaginative men. He had reached the point at which the personality is exhausted. He had worked out his natural instincts, the life known to him, his predilections, his reading. He had found a channel in which his thoughts could express themselves. Writing was no longer so pleasant to him as it had been. He had done an incredible amount of work in a few years. The personality was worn to a husk. It may be that a very little would have kept him on this side of the line, writing imitations of what he had already done. He was at the critical moment which separates the contemplative from the visionary, the good from the excellent, the great from the supreme. All writers, according to their power, come to this point. Very few have the fortune to get beyond it. Shakespeare's mind stood still for a moment, in this play and in the play that followed, before it went on triumphant to the supreme plays.
_As You Like It._
_Written._ (?)
_Published._ 1600 (?)
_Source of the Plot._ Thomas Lodge's novel of _Rosalynde_, Euphues' _Golden Legacie_ (published in 1590) supply the fable. The tale is that tale of Gamelyn, wrongly attributed to Chaucer. The _Practise_ (Saviolo's "Practise") of Vincentio Saviolo, an Italian master of arms, gave hints for Touchstone's account of the lie. The rest of the play seems to have been the fruit of Shakespeare's invention.
_The Fable._ Orlando, basely used by his elder brother Oliver, leaves home, annoys the usurping Duke Frederick, and is advised to leave the country.
Rosalind, child of the rightful Duke, and Celia, the child of Duke Frederick, fly from home together in search of the rightful Duke, who has taken to the wild wood. Rosalind, dressed as a man, gives out that Celia is her sister. They set up as shepherds in Arden.
Orlando joins the rightful Duke in Arden. He is in love with Rosalind. He meets her in the forest, but does not recognise her in her disguise. Oliver, cast out by Frederick, comes to Arden, is reconciled to Orlando, and falls in love with Celia. There are a few passages of the comedy of mistake, due to Rosalind's disguise. In the end, the rightful Duke and Oliver are restored to their possessions. Orlando marries Rosalind; the minor characters are married as their hearts desire, and all ends happily.
The play treats of the gifts of Nature and the ways of Fortune. Orlando, given little, is brought to much. Rosalind and Celia, born to much, are brought to little. The Duke, born to all things, is brought to nothing. The usurping Duke, born to nothing, climbs to much, desires all, and at last renounces all. Oliver, born to much, aims at a little more, loses all, and at last regains all. Touchstone, the worldly wise, marries a fool. Audrey, born a clown, marries a courtier. Phebe, scorning a man, falls in love with a woman.
Jaques, the only wise one, is the only one not moved by Fortune. Life does not interest him; his interest is in his thoughts about life. His vision of life feasts him whatever life does. Passages in the second act, in the subtle seventh scene, corrupt in a most important line, show that in the character of Jaques Shakespeare was expounding a philosophy of art. The philosophy may not have been that by which he, himself, wrought; but it is one set down by him with an extreme subtlety of care, and opposed, as all opinions advanced in drama must be, by an extreme earnestness of opposition.
The wisest of Shakespeare's characters are often detached from the action of the play in which they appear. Jaques holds aloof from the action of this play, though he is perhaps the best-known character in the cast. His thought is the thought of all wise men, that wisdom, being always a little beyond the world, has no worldly machinery by which it can express itself. In this world the place of chorus, interpreter or commentator is not given to the wise man, but to the fool who has degraded the office to a profession. Jaques, the wise man, finds the place occupied by one whose comment is platitude. Wisdom has no place in the social scheme. The fool, he finds, has both office and uniform.
Seeing this, Jaques wishes, as all wise men wish, not to be counted wise but to have as great liberty as the fool to express his thought--
"weed your better judgments Of all opinion that grows rank in them That I am wise. I must have liberty Withal, as large a charter as the wind, To blow on whom I please; for so fools have.
... give me leave To speak my mind, and I will through and through Cleanse the foul body of the infected world, If they will patiently receive my medicine."
He is answered that, having learned of the world's evil by libidinous living, he can only do evil by exposing his knowledge. He replies, finely expressing Shakespeare's invariable artistic practice, that his aim will be at sin, not at particular sinners.
In the middle of his speech Orlando enters, raging for food. It is interesting to see how closely Shakespeare follows Jaques' mind in the presence of the fierce animal want of hunger. He is too much interested to be of help. The Duke ministers to Orlando. Jaques wants to know "of what kind this cock should come of." He speaks banteringly, the Duke speaks kindly. The impression given is that Jaques is heartless. The Duke's thought is "here is one even more wretched than ourselves." Jaques' thought, always more for humanity than for the individual, is a profound vision of the world.
The play is a little picture of the world. The contemplative man who is not of the world, is yet a part of the picture. We are shown a company of delightful people, just escaped from disaster, smilingly taking the biggest of hazards. The wise man, dismissing them to their fates with all the authority of wisdom, gives up his share in the game to listen to a man who has given up his share of the world. Renunciation of the world is attractive to all upon whom the world presses very heavily, or very lightly.
Rosalind and Phebe are of the two kinds of woman who come much into Shakespeare's early and middle plays. Rosalind, like Portia, is a golden woman, a daughter of the sun, smiling-natured, but limited. Phebe, like Rosalind, is black-haired, black-eyed, black-eyebrowed, with the dead-white face that so often goes with cruelty. Shortly after this play was written he began to create types less external and less limited.
_Much Ado about Nothing._
_Written._ (?)
_Published._ 1600.
_Source of the Plot._ The greater part of the fable seems to have been invented by Shakespeare. The Hero and Claudio story is found in the twenty-second novel of Bandello, and in at least three other books (one of them Spenser's _Faerie Queene_). It was also known to the Elizabethans in a play now lost.
_The Fable._ Benedick, a lord of Padua, pledges himself to bachelorhood. Beatrice, a disdainful lady, is scornful of men.
Claudio plans to marry Hero.
Don John, enemy of Claudio, plans to thwart the marriage by letting it appear that Hero is unchaste.
Don Pedro and Claudio make Benedick believe that Beatrice is dying of love for him.
Ursula and Hero make Beatrice believe that Benedick is dying of love for her.
The disdainful couple make friends. Don John thwarts the marriage of Claudio by his tale of Hero's unchastity. Claudio casts off Hero at the altar. Hero swoons, and is conveyed away as dead. Beatrice and Benedick are brought into close alliance by their upholding of Hero's cause.
Proof is obtained that Hero has been falsely accused. She is recovered from her swoon. Claudio marries her. Benedick and Beatrice plight troth.
In this play Shakespeare writes of the power of report, of the thing overheard, to alter human destiny. Antonio's man, listening behind a hedge, overhears Don Pedro telling Claudio that he will woo Hero. The report of his eavesdropping conveys no notion of the truth, and leads, no doubt, to a bitter moment for Hero. Borachio, hiding behind the arras, overhears the truth of the matter. The report of his eavesdropping leads to the casting off of Hero at the altar. Don John and Borachio vow to Claudio that they overheard Don Pedro making love to Hero. The report gives Claudio a bitter moment. Benedick, reporting to the same tune, intensifies his misery.
Benedick, overhearing the report of Beatrice's love for him, changes his mind about marriage. Beatrice, hearing of Benedick's love for her, changes her mind about men. Claudio, hearing Don John's report of Hero, changes his mind about his love. The watch, overhearing Borachio's report of his villainy, are able to change the tragedy to comedy. Leonato, hearing Claudio's report of Hero, is ready to cast off his child. Report is shown to be stronger than any human affection and any acquired quality, except the love of one unmarried woman for another, and that strongest of all earthly things, the fool in authority. The wisdom of Shakespeare is greater and more various than the brains of little men can imagine. It is one of the tragical things, that this great man, who interpreted the ways of fate in glorious, many-coloured vision, should be set aside in our theatres for the mockers and the accusers, whose vision scatters dust upon the brain and sand upon the empty heart.
Though the play is not one of the most passionate of the plays, it belongs to Shakespeare's greatest creative period. It is full of great and wonderful things. The character-drawing is so abundant and precise that those who know how hard it is to convey the illusion of character can only bow down, thankful that such work may be, but ashamed that it no longer is. Every person in the play is passionately alive about something. The energy of the creative mood in Shakespeare filled all these images with a vitality that interests and compels. The wit and point of the dialogue--
_Don Pedro._ I think this is your daughter.
_Leonato._ Her mother hath many times told me so.
_Benedick._ Were you in doubt, sir, that you asked her?
_Leonato._ Signior Benedick, no; for then you were a child;
or (as in the later passage)--
_Beatrice._ I may sit in a corner and cry heigh ho for a husband.
_Don Pedro._ Lady Beatrice, I will get you one.
_Beatrice._ I would rather have one of your father's getting. Hath your Grace ne'er a brother like you? Your father got excellent husbands, if a maid could come by them.
_Don Pedro._ Will you have me, lady?
_Beatrice._ No, my lord, unless I might have another for working days: your Grace is too costly to wear every day--
is plain to all; but it is given to few to see with what admirable, close, constructive art this dialogue is written for the theatre. Of poetry, of understanding passionately put, there is comparatively little. The one great poetical scene is that at the opening of the fifth act. The worst lines of this scene have become proverbial; the best are
"'tis all men's office to speak patience To those that wring under the load of sorrow, But no man's virtue nor sufficiency, To be so moral when he shall endure The like himself."
There is little in the play written thus, but there are many scenes throbbingly alive. The scene in the church shows what power to understand the awakened imagination has. The scene is a quivering eight minutes in as many lives. Shakespeare passes from thrilling soul to thrilling soul with a touch as delicate as it is certain.
Shakespeare's fun is liberally given in the comic scenes. In the last act there is a beautiful example of the effect of lyric to heighten a solemn occasion.
_Twelfth Night._
_Written._ 1600 (?)
_Published_, in the first folio, 1623.
_Source of the Plot._ The story of Orsino, Viola, Olivia and Sebastian is to be found in the "Historie of Apolonius and Silla" as told by Barnabe Riche in the book _Riche his Farewell to Militarie Profession_. Riche took the tale from Bandello's Italian, or from de Belleforest's French translation from it. Three sixteenth-century Italian plays are based on this fable. All of these sources may have been known to Shakespeare.
The sub-plot, and the characters contained in it, seem to be original creations.
_The Fable._ Viola, who thinks that she has lost her brother Sebastian by shipwreck, disguises herself as a boy, and calls herself Cesario. She takes service with the Duke Orsino, who is in love with the lady Olivia. She carries love messages from the Duke to Olivia.
Olivia, who is in mourning for her brother, refuses the Duke's suit, but falls in love with Cesario.
In her house is Malvolio, the steward, who reproves her uncle, Sir Toby Belch, for rioting at night with trivial companions. The trivial companions forge a letter, which causes Malvolio to think that his mistress is in love with him. The thought makes his behaviour so strange that he is locked up as a madman.
Sir Toby Belch finds further solace for life in making his gull, Sir Andrew, challenge Cesario to a duel. The duel is made dangerous by the sudden appearance of Sebastian, who is mistaken for Cesario. He beats Sir Andrew and Sir Toby, and encounters the lady Olivia. Olivia woos him as she has wooed Cesario, but with better fortune.
They are married. The Duke marries Viola. Malvolio is released from prison. Sir Toby marries Maria, Olivia's waiting-woman. Sir Andrew is driven out like a plucked pigeon. Malvolio, unappeased by his release, vows to be revenged for the mock put upon him.
This is the happiest and one of the loveliest of all the Shakespearean plays. It is the best English comedy. The great mind that mixed a tragedy of intellect with a tragedy of stupidity, here mixes mirth with romantic beauty. The play is so mixed with beauty that one can see it played night after night, week after week, without weariness, even in a London theatre.
The play presents images of self-deception, or delusional sentimentality, by means of a romantic fable and a vigorous fable. It shows us three souls suffering from the kind of sickly vanity that feeds on day-dreams. Orsino is in an unreal mood of emotion. Love is an active passion. Orsino is in the clutch of its dangerous passive enemy called sentimentality. He lolls upon a couch to music when he ought to be carrying her glove to battle. Olivia is in an unreal mood of mourning for her brother. Grief is a destroying passion. Olivia makes it a form of self-indulgence, or one sweet the more to attract flies to her. Malvolio is in an unreal mood of self-importance. Long posing at the head of ceremony has given him the faith that ceremony, of which he is the head, is the whole of life. This faith deludes him into a life of day-dreams, common enough among inactive clever people, but dangerous to the indulger, as all things are that distort the mental vision. At the point at which the play begins the day-dream has brought him to the pitch of blindness necessary for effective impact on the wall.
The only cure for the sickly in the mind is reality. Something real has to be felt or experienced. Life that is over-delicate and remote through something unbalanced in the mind is not life but decay. The knife, the bludgeon, the practical joke, and the many-weaponed figure of Sorrow are life's remedies for those who fail to live. We are the earth's children; we have no business in limbo. Living in limbo is like living in the smoke from a crater: highly picturesque, but too near death for safety.
Orsino is cured of sentiment by the sight of Sebastian making love like a man. He rouses to do the like by Viola. Olivia is piqued out of sentiment by coming to know some one who despises her. She falls in love with that person. Malvolio is mocked out of sentiment by the knowledge that other minds have seen his mind. He has not the happiness to be rewarded with love at the end of the play; but he has the alternative of hate, which is as active a passion and as real. All three are roused to activity by the coming of something real into their lives; and all three, in coming to the active state, cease to be interesting and beautiful and pathetic.
Shakespeare's abundant power created beings who look before and after, even while they keep vigorous a passionate present. It is difficult to praise that power. Even those who know how difficult art is find it hard to praise perfect art. Art is not to be praised or blamed, but understood. This play will stand as an example of perfect art till a greater than Shakespeare set a better example further on. It is
"All beauty and without a spot."
The scene of the roisterers, rousing the night-owl in a catch, rouses the heart, as all real creation does, with the thought that life is too wonderful to end. The next, most lovely scene, where the Duke and Viola talk of love that keeps life from ending, and so often brings life down into the dust, assures the heart that even if life ends for us it will go on in others.
"the song we had last night. Mark it, Cesario, it is old and plain; The spinsters and the knitters in the sun And the free maids that weave their thread with bones Do use to chant it: it is silly sooth, And dallies with the innocence of love, Like the old age."
In his best plays Shakespeare used a double construction to express by turn the twofold energy of man, the energy of the animal and of the spirit. The mind that brooded sadly in
"For women are as roses, whose fair flower Being once display'd, doth fall that very hour,"
and in
"She never told her love, But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud, Feed on her damask cheek: she pined in thought,"
belonged to earth, and got a gladness from earth. Within two minutes of the talk of the woman who died of love he showed Contemplation making a rare turkey-cock of the one wise man in his play.
_All's Well that Ends Well._
_Written._ (?)
_Published._ 1623.
_Source of the Plot._ The story of Helena's love for Bertram is found in the _Decamerone_ of Boccaccio (giorn. 3, nov. 9). Shakespeare may have read it in the _Palace of Pleasure_.
_The Fable._ Helena, orphan daughter of a physician, has been brought up, as a dependant, in the house of the Countess of Rousillon. She falls in love with Bertram, the son of the Countess and the King's ward.
Bertram goes to the French Court, on his way to the wars. He finds the King dangerously ill. Helena, hearing of the King's illness, comes to the Court as a physician. She offers to cure the King with one of her father's remedies, on condition that, when cured, he will give her in marriage the man of her choice. The King accepts these conditions; she cures him; she chooses for her husband Bertram.
Bertram, the King's ward, has to do the King's bidding. He grudgingly accepts her; they are married. He leaves her, and goes to the wars in the service of the Duke of Florence, designing to see her no more. Helena withdraws from the Countess's house, and comes to Florence disguised.
Bertram woos Diana, a maid of Florence. Helena impersonates her, receives her unsuspecting husband at night, takes from him a ring, and gives, in exchange, a ring given to her by the King of France. At the end of the war, Bertram, hearing that Helena is dead, returns to France, wearing the ring. The King sees it and challenges it. Bertram can give no just account of how he got it. Helena, quick with child by him, confronts him, with the ring that he left with her at Florence. Diana, the Florentine maid, gives evidence that Helena impersonated her on the night of Bertram's visit at Florence. Bertram accepts Helena as his wife, and the play ends happily.
This play (whenever written) was extensively revised during the ruthless mood that gave birth to _Measure for Measure_. The alterations were made in a mood so much deeper than the mood of its first composition that they make the play uneven. Something, perhaps some trick of health, that made the mind clearer than the imagination, gave to Shakespeare for a short time another (and pitiless) view of human obsessions.
It was a part of his belief that treachery is generally caused by blindness, blindness generally by some obsession of passion. In this play he treats of the removal of an obsession by making plain to the obsessed, by pitiless judicial logic, the ugliness of the treachery it causes.
Bertram is a young man fresh from home. He does not want to marry. He is eager to see the world and to win honour. He has been accustomed to look down on Helena as a poor dependant. He does not like her, and he does not like being ordered. He is suddenly ordered to marry her. He has been trapped by a woman's underhand trick. He sees himself brought into bondage with all the plumes of his youth clipped close. There is no way of escape; he has to marry her; but the King's order cannot quench his rage against the woman who has so snared him. His rage burns inward into a brooding, rankling ill-humour that becomes an obsession. It is one of the tragedies of life that an evil obsession blinds the judgment on more sides than one. The obsessed are always without criticism. A way of destruction may be as narrow as a way of virtue; but all the other ways of destruction run into it. Bertram in blinkers to the good in Helena is blind to the faults in himself and in Parolles his friend. Wilfully, as the sullen do, he thinks himself justified in doing evil because evil has been done to him. Hot blood is running in him. Temptation, never far from youth, is always near the unbalanced. He takes an unworthy confidant, as the obsessed do, and goes in over the ears. His sin is the giving of salutation to sportive blood, it is love, it is "natural rebellion," it is young man's pastime. But looked at coldly and judicially, with the nature of the confidant laid bare, and the lies of the sinner made plain, it is an ugly thing. Passion is sweet enough to seem truth, the only truth. Let the eyes be opened a little, and it will blast the heart with horror. What man thought true is then seen to be this, this thing, this devil of falseness who gives man this kind of friend, makes him tell this kind of lie, and brands him with this kind of shame.
Shakespeare is just to Bertram. The treachery of a woman is often the cause of a man's treachery to womanhood. Helena's obsession of love makes her blind to the results of her actions. She twice puts the man whom she loves into an intolerable position, which nothing but a king can end. The fantasy is not made so real that we can believe in the possibility of happiness between two so married. Helena has been praised as one of the noblest of Shakespeare's women. Shakespeare saw her more clearly than any man who has ever lived. He saw her as a woman who practises a borrowed art, not for art's sake, nor for charity, but, woman fashion, for a selfish end. He saw her put a man into a position of ignominy quite unbearable, and then plot with other women to keep him in that position. Lastly, he saw her beloved all the time by the conventionally minded of both sexes.
The play is full of effective theatrical situations. It contains much fine poetry. Besides the poetry there are startling moments of insight--
"My mother told me just how he would woo As if she sat in's heart...."
"Now, God delay our rebellion! as we are ourselves, What things are we! Merely our own traitors."
"I would gladly have him see his company anatomised, That he might take a measure of his own judgments."
"The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together."
"Our rash faults Make trivial price of serious things we have, Not knowing them until we know their grave: Oft our displeasures, to ourselves unjust, Destroy our friends and after weep their dust."
_Julius Caesar._
_Written._ 1601 (?)
_Produced._ (?)
_Published_, in the first folio, 1623.
_Source of the Plot._ The Lives of Antonius, Brutus and Julius Caesar in Sir Thomas North's _Plutarch_.
A tragedy of Julius Caesar, now lost, was performed by Shakespeare's company in 1594. Shakespeare must have known this play.
_The Fable._ Cassius, fearing that Julius Caesar is about to extinguish all trace of Republican rule in Rome, persuades Brutus and others to plot a change. They decide to murder Caesar.
On the morning chosen for the murder, Caesar is warned by many omens not to stir abroad. He is persuaded to ignore the omens. He goes to the Senate House, and is there killed. Mark Antony, his friend, obtains leave from the murderers to make a public oration over the corpse.
In his speech he so inflames the populace against the murderers that they are compelled to leave Rome.
Joining himself to Octavius, he takes the field against Brutus and Cassius, and helps to defeat them at Philippi.
Cassius is killed by his servant when he sees that all is lost. Brutus, seeing the battle go against him, kills himself.
The modern play climbs to its culmination by a series of interruptions or crises. The modern playwright tries to end his acts at an arresting or splendid moment, artfully delayed, and carefully prepared. He tries to end his play by a gradual knitting together of all the energies of his characters into a situation, happier or more haunting, than any that has preceded it in the course of the action. The art by which this is done, when it is done, is called dramatic construction. There are many kind of dramatic construction. Each age tends to form a new one. Each writer uses many. In art a subject can only be expressed in the form most fitting to it. In the art of the theatre a mistake in the choice of the form, or in the right handling of it when chosen leads infallibly to the irritation of the audience and the failure of the play. When a play is badly constructed the actors cannot so interpret the author's emotion that it will dominate the collective emotion in the audience.
It is often said, by those who ought to know better (it was said to Racine by Frenchmen), that dramatic construction cannot matter, if the passion or spirit with which the author writes, be abundant and sincere. The powder in a cartridge may be abundant and the bullet at the end may be sincerely meant, yet neither will do execution till they are put properly into the proper weapon, rightly aimed, and judgingly fired. So with passion in the arts. Without art, inspiration is breath and a feeding of the wind. In the theatre, inspiration without art is as a sounding brass and as a tinkling cymbal.
It is sometimes maintained in print, by those saddened or maddened by bad modern performances of the plays, that Shakespeare "could not construct," that he is constantly "rambling," "chaotic," or "intolerable," and that he is only played to-day because of his "poetry." Those who maintain these things forget that an Elizabethan play was constructed for a theatre much unlike the modern theatre, and performed in a manner suited to that theatre, but less well suited to the theatre of our times. Shakespeare's plays were constructed closely and carefully to be effective on the Elizabethan stage. On that stage they were highly and nobly effective. On the modern stage, produced in the modern manner, they are less effective. There are many reasons why they should be less effective on the modern stage. During the last thirty years there has been a tendency towards naturalism in the theatre. Modern audiences have learned not to care for poetry on the stage unless it is made "natural" by realistic scenery. Modern audiences are accustomed to the modern forms of dramatic construction, which are unlike the Elizabethan forms. They know that modern playwrights put a strong scene at the end of an act and a great scene at the end of the play. They have learned to expect a play to be arranged in that manner, and to count as ill constructed the play not so arranged. As it is frequently said that the last acts of _Julius Caesar_ make anti-climax and spoil the play, it is necessary to consider Shakespeare's constructive practice in this and in some other plays.
The Greek tragic poets ended the action of their plays in the modern manner, at the great scene, but, unlike us, they delayed the departure of the audience for some minutes more, generally by a chorus of men and women who expounded the moral value of the action in noble verse. The audience came away calmed. If a Greek had constructed _Julius Caesar_, he would have ended the action at the murder. A chorus of senators would then have chanted something noble about the results of pride, the vanity of human glory, and the strangeness of the ways of the gods. A modern writer would have caused the curtain to fall at the murder, for to-day, when the brains are out the play dies and there an end. Shakespeare carries on his play for two acts after Caesar is dead. In _Macbeth_ he constructs the last half of his play in much the same manner.
In both plays he is considering the conception, the doing, and the results of a violent act. In both plays this act is the murder of the head of a State. In neither case is he deeply interested in the victim. Duncan, in _Macbeth_, is a generous gentleman; Caesar, in this play, is a touchy man of affairs whose head is turned. Shakespeare's imagination broods on the fact that the killers were deluded into murder, Macbeth by an envious wife and the belief that Fate meant him to be king, Brutus by an envious friend and the belief that he was saving Rome. In both cases the killers show base personal ingratitude and treachery. In both plays, an avenging justice makes even the scales. The mind of the poet follows them from the moment when the guilty thought is prompted, through the agony and exultation of dreadful acts, to the unhappiness that dogs the treacherous, till Fate's just sword falls in vengeance. His imagination is most keenly stirred just as ours is, by the great event, the murder of the victim: but his subject is not the murder, nor yet the tragical end of a ruler. His subject in both plays is the working of Fate who prompts to murder, uses the murderer, and then destroys him. We are interested in crisis and in topic. The Elizabethans, with a wider vision, could not detach an act from its place in the pageant of history. In a modern play the heroine is put into an unpleasant position, or an evil is exposed, or our faults are made visible and laughable. The point of view is that of the sympathiser, reformer, and moralist looking on from the window near by. The field of vision is restricted and the object brought near. In this great play, as in _Macbeth_, Shakespeare strove to present a violent act and its consequences from the point of view of a great just spirit outside life.
The play is generally considered to be the earliest of the supreme plays. Little more can be said of it at this time than that it is supreme. There is a majesty in the conception that makes it like gathering and breaking storm. The cause of the murder is a great personal treachery inspired by an unselfish idea. Though it seems inevitable, it is a very little thing that makes it possible. Both Caesar's murder and Brutus' downfall are almost prevented. A hand stretches out to save both of them. A little domestic treachery inspired by a selfish idea puts aside the interposing hand in both instances. Caesar will not listen to his wife because he is sure of himself. Brutus will not answer his wife for the same reason. They go on to the magnificent hour which makes the one fine soul in the play a haunted and unhappy soul till he snatches at Death at Philippi.
The verse is calm, like the noble art that shapes the scenes. It is full of majesty. Lines occur in which single unusual words are charged with an incalculable power of meaning.
"Against the Capitol I met a lion, Who glazed upon me and went surly by."
"It is the bright day that brings forth the adder."
Shakespeare's intensest and most solemn thought, the Law that directed the creation of some of his greatest work, is spoken by Brutus--
"Between the acting of a dreadful thing And the first motion, all the interim is Like a phantasma or a hideous dream: The Genius and the mortal instruments Are then in council, and the state of man, Like to a little kingdom, suffers then The nature of an insurrection."
_Hamlet, Prince of Denmark._
_Written._ 1601-2.
_Published_, in an imperfect form, 1603; more perfectly, 1604.
_Source of the Plot._ A play upon the subject of Hamlet, now lost, seems to have been popular in London during the last decades of the sixteenth century. Some think that it was an early work of Shakespeare's. No evidence supports this theory. He probably knew the play, and may have acted in it.
The story is told by Saxo Grammaticus in his _Historia Danica_. Francis de Belleforest printed a version of it in his _Histoires Tragiques_. An English translation from de Belleforest, called the _Hystorie of Hamblet_, was published (or perhaps reprinted) in London in 1608. Shakespeare seems to have known both de Belleforest and the _Hystorie_.
_The Fable._ Claudius, brother to the King of Denmark, conniving with Gertrude the Queen, poisons his brother, and seizes the throne. Soon afterwards he marries Gertrude. At this point the play begins.
Hamlet, son of the murdered king, sick at heart at his mother's hasty re-marriage, and troubled by his love for Ophelia, returns to Denmark. The ghost of his father reveals the manner of the murder to him, and makes him swear to be revenged. The revelation so affects him that the murderers begin to fear him. He cannot bring himself to kill Claudius. In a play he shows them that he knows their guilt.
While speaking with his mother, he discovers and kills a spy hidden behind the arras. The spy is Polonius, father of Laertes and of Ophelia.
Claudius causes Hamlet to sail for England, on the pretext that the killing of Polonius has brought him into danger with the populace. He plans that Hamlet shall be killed on his arrival. Hamlet discovers the treacherous purpose and returns unhurt to Denmark.
During Hamlet's absence at sea, Laertes learns how Polonius was killed and swears to be revenged on Hamlet. Hamlet's return gives him his opportunity.
Claudius suggests that the revenge be taken at a fencing-bout. Laertes shall fence with Hamlet, using a poisoned foil. If this fails, Hamlet shall be given poisoned wine.
In a scuffle during the fencing-bout the fencers change foils. Gertrude, by mistake, drinks the poisoned wine and dies. Laertes, hurt by the poisoned foil, dies. Hamlet, also hurt by the poisoned foil, kills Claudius and dies too.
_Hamlet_ is the most baffling of the great plays. It is the tragedy of a man and an action continually baffled by wisdom. The man is too wise. The dual action, pressing in both cases to complete an event, cannot get past his wisdom into the world. The action in one case is a bad one. It is simply murder. In the other, and more important case, it is, according to our scheme, also a bad one. It is revenge, or, at best, the taking of blood for blood. In the Shakespearean scheme it is not revenge, it is justice, and therefore neither good nor bad but necessary. The situation which causes the tragedy is one very common in Shakespeare's system. Life has been wrenched from her course. Wrenching is necessary to bring her back to her course or to keep her where she is. Hamlet is a man who understands too humanly to wish to wrench either this way or that, and too shrewdly to be himself wrenched by grosser instruments of Fate.
The action consists in the baffling of action. Mostly, it consists in the baffling of life's effort to get back to her course. All through the play there is the uneasiness of something trying to get done, something from outside life trying to get into life, but baffled always because the instrument chosen is, himself, a little outside life, as the wise must be. This baffling of the purpose of the dead leads to a baffling of the living, and, at last, to something like an arrest of life, a deadlock, in which each act, however violent, makes the obscuring of life's purpose greater.
The powers outside life send a poor ghost to Hamlet to prompt him to an act of justice. After baffled hours, often interrupted by cock-crow, he gives his message. Hamlet is charged with the double task of executing judgment and showing mercy. It is a charge given to many people (generally common people) in the system of the plays. It is given to two other men in this play. It is nothing more than the fulfilling of the kingly office, so bloodily seized by Claudius before the opening of the play. At this point, it may be well to consider the society in which the kingly office is to be exercised.
The society is created with Shakespeare's fullest power. It is not an image of the world in little, like the world of the late historical plays. It is an image of the world as intellect is made to feel it. It is a society governed by the enemies of intellect, by the sensual and the worldly, by deadly sinners and the philosophers of bread and cheese. The King is a drunken, incestuous murderer, who fears intellect. The Queen is a false woman, who cannot understand intellect. Polonius is a counsellor who suspects intellect. Ophelia is a doll without intellect. Laertes is a boor who destroys intellect. The courtiers are parasites who flourish on the decay of intellect. Fortinbras, bright and noble, marching to the drum to win a dunghill, gives a colour to the folly. The only friends of the wise man are Horatio, the schoolfellow, and the leader of a cry of players.
The task set by the dead is a simple one. All tasks are simple to the simple-minded. To the delicate and complex mind so much of life is bound up with every act that any violent act involves not only a large personal sacrifice of ideal, but a tearing-up by the roots of half the order of the world. Wisdom is founded upon justice; but justice, to the wise man, is more a scrupulous quality in the mind than the doing of expedient acts upon sinners. Hamlet is neither "weak" nor "unpractical," as so many call him. What he hesitates to do may be necessary, or even just, as the world goes, but it is a defilement of personal ideals, difficult for a wise mind to justify. It is so great a defilement, and a world so composed is so great a defilement, that death seems preferable to action and existence alike.
The play at this point presents a double image of action baffled by wisdom. Hamlet baffles the dealing of the justice of Fate, and also the death plotted for him by his uncle. His weapon, in both cases, is his justice, his precise scrupulousness of mind, the niceness of mental balance which gives to all that he says the double-edge of wisdom. It is the faculty, translated into the finer terms of thought, which the ghost seeks to make real with bloodshed. Justice, in her grosser as in her finer form, is concerned with the finding of the truth. The first half of the play, though it exposes and develops the fable, is a dual image of a search for truth, of a seeking for a certainty that would justify a violent act. The King is probing Hamlet's mind with gross human probes, to find out if he is mad. Hamlet is searching the King's mind with the finest of intellectual probes, to find out if he is guilty. The probe used by him, the fragment of a play within a play, is the work of a man with a knowledge of the impotence of intellect--
"Our wills and fates do so contrary run That our devices still are overthrown"--
and a faith in the omnipotence of intellect--
"Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own."
To this man, five minutes after the lines have exposed the guilty man, comes a chance to kill his uncle. Hamlet "might do it pat" while he is at prayers. The knowledge that the sword will not reach the real man, since damnation comes from within, not from without, arrests his hand. Fate offers an instant for the doing of her purpose. Hamlet puts the instant by, with his baffling slowness, made up of mercy and wisdom. Fate, or the something outside life which demands the King's blood, so that life may go back to her channel, is foiled. The action cannot bring itself to be. A wise human purpose is, for the moment, stronger than the eternal purpose of Nature, the roughly just.
It is a part of this play's ironic teaching that life must not be baffled; but that, when she has been wrenched from her course, she must either be wrenched back to it or kept violently in the channel to which she has been forced.
In _Macbeth_, a not dissimilar play, the life violently altered is kept in the strange channel by a succession of violent acts. In _Hamlet_, when Hamlet's merciful wisdom has decided that the life violently altered shall not be wrenched back, his destroying wisdom decides that she shall not be kept in the strange channel. The King, just in his way, seeks to find out if Hamlet be sane. If Hamlet be sane, he must die. His death will secure the King's position. By his death life will be kept in the strange channel. Polonius, the King's agent, learns that Hamlet is sane and something more. Fate demands violence this way if she may not have it in the other. She offers an instant for the doing of her purpose. Hamlet puts the instant by with his baffling swiftness, which strikes on the instant, when the Queen's honour and his own life depend on it. The first bout in this play of the baffling of action falls to Hamlet. The second bout, in which the King's purpose is again baffled, by the sending of the two courtiers to their death in England, also falls to Hamlet. The bloody purpose from outside life and the bloody purpose from within life are both baffled and kept from being by the two extremes so perfectly balanced in the wise nature.
Extremes in the Shakespearean system are tragical things. In Shakespeare, the pathway of excess leads, not as with Blake, to the palace of wisdom, but to destruction. The two extremes in Hamlet, of slowness and swiftness, set up in life the counter forces which destroy extremes, so that life, the common thing, may continue to be common. The mercy of Hamlet leaves the King free to plot his death. The swiftness of Hamlet gives to the King a hand and sword to work his will.
In other plays, the working of extremes to the punishment dealt by life to all excess is simple and direct. In this play, nothing is simple and direct. Fate's direct workings are baffled by a mind too complex to be active on the common planes. The baffling of Fate's purpose leads to a condition in life like the "slack water" between tides. Laertes, when his father is killed, raises the town and comes raving to the presence to stab the killer. He is baffled by the King's wisdom. Ophelia, "incapable of her own distress," goes mad and drowns herself. The play seems to hesitate and stand still while the energies spilled in the baffling of Fate work and simmer and grow strong, till they combine with Fate in the preparation of an end that shall not be baffled. Even so, "the end men looked for cometh not." The end comes to both actions at once in the squalor of a chance-medley. Fate has her will at last. Life, who was so long baffled, only hesitated. She destroys the man who wrenched her from her course, and the man who would neither wrench her back nor let her stay, and the women who loved these men, and the men who loved them. Revenge and chance together restore life to her course, by a destruction of the lives too beastly, and of the lives too hasty, and of the lives too foolish, and of the life too wise, to be all together on earth at the same time.
It is difficult to praise the poetry of _Hamlet_. Nearly all the play is as familiar by often quotation as the New Testament. The great, wise, and wonderful beauty of the play is a part of the English mind for ever. It is difficult to live for a day anywhere in England (except in a theatre) without hearing or reading a part of _Hamlet_. Lines that are little quoted are the lines to quote here--
"this fell sergeant, death, Is strict in his arrest."
"O proud death! What feast is toward in thine eternal cell, That thou so many princes, at a shot, So bloodily hast struck?"
The last speech, great as the speech at the end of Timon, and noble, like that, with a music beyond the art of voices, is constructed on a similar metrical basis.
"Let four captains Bear Hamlet, like a soldier, to the stage; For he was likely, had he been put on, To have proved most royally: and, for his passage, The soldier's music and the rites of war Speak loudly for him. Take up the bodies: such a sight as this Becomes the field, but here shows much amiss. Go, bid the soldiers shoot."
_Troilus and Cressida._
_Written._ (?)
_Produced._ After publication.
_Published._ 1609.
_Source of the Plot._ Geoffrey Chaucer's poem of _Troilus and Creseide_. John Lydgate's _Troy Boke_. William Caxton's translation of the French book of the _Recuyels of Troy_. George Chapman's translation of Homer's _Iliad_.
Among many other possible sources may be mentioned a now lost play of _Troilus and Cressida_ (produced in 1599) by the poets Thomas Dekker and Henry Chettle.
_The Fable._ The scene is Troy. Cressida is a Trojan woman, whose father, Calchas, has gone over to the Greeks. She is beloved by the youth Troilus. Her uncle, Pandarus, seeks to bring her to accept Troilus. Hector, brother to Troilus, challenges a Greek champion to single combat.
In the Greek camp there is much disaffection. Achilles, the chief Greek champion, conceiving himself wronged, makes a mock of the other leaders. To teach him his place the leaders plan that Ajax shall be chosen in his stead to take up Hector's challenge.
Pandarus succeeds in bringing Cressida to love Troilus.
Calchas, in the Greek camp, sends to Troy for Cressida. She is delivered over to the Greeks. Forgetting Troilus, she entangles one of the Greeks with her wiles.
Ajax takes up Hector's challenge. They fight a friendly bout and then go to feast, where the moody Achilles insults Hector.
The next day, Hector and Troilus come to the field, the one to avenge Achilles' insults, the other to kill the man who has won Cressida. Hector is cruelly and cowardly killed by Achilles. Troilus is left unhurt, cursing.
_Troilus and Cressida_ is the dialogue scenario of a play that was never finished. It seems to have been written before 1603, then laid aside, incomplete, until the mood that inspired it had died. Conflicting evidence makes it doubtful whether it was acted during Shakespeare's life. It was published, under mysterious circumstances, a year or two before he retired to Stratford.
Two or three scenes are finished. The rest is indicated in the crudest dialogue, written so hastily that it is often undramatic and nearly always without wit or beauty. The finished scenes are among the grandest ever conceived by Shakespeare, but the grandeur is that of thought, not of action. They make it plain to us why the play was never completed. The subject is this: a light woman throwing over a boy. The setting, the Trojan war: a light woman overthrowing a city, is so much bigger than the subject that it overshadows it. Another subject arises in the circumstance of the Trojan war. Achilles, the man of action, without honour or imagination, sulks. The wise man, Ulysses, suggests that he be brought from his sulks by mockery. The result of this wise counsel is that Hector, the one bright and noble soul in the play, is killed cruelly and sullenly, by the boor thus mocked.
The two subjects and the setting are not and cannot be brought into unity. Shakespeare's mind wandered from his real subject to brood upon the obsession of Helen that betrayed Troy to the fire, and upon the tragical working of wisdom that brought about an end so foul. Other, and bigger, subjects for plays tempted him from the work. He put it aside before it was half alive. As it stands, it has neither life nor meaning. It oppresses the mind into making gloomy interpretation. Tragedy in its imperfect form cannot but be gloomy. It is nothing but the record of a fatal event. But Shakespearean tragedy is tragedy in its perfect form. It is an exultation of the soul over the husks of life and the winds that blow them. This play, had it ever been finished, would have been like the other tragedies of the great years. That it is not finished is our misfortune.
The finished scenes are full of wisdom--
"Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back, Wherein he puts alms for oblivion, A great-sized monster of ingratitude: Those scraps are good deeds past, which are devour'd As fast as they are made, forgot as soon As done: perseverance, dear my lord, Keeps honour bright: to have done, is to hang Quite out of fashion."
"O, let not virtue seek Remuneration for the thing it was."
"Those wounds heal ill that men do give themselves."
"And sometimes we are devils to ourselves."
Some have thought that this play was written by Shakespeare to ridicule the two poets, Ben Jonson (in the person of Ajax) and John Marston (in the person of Thersites). Those two poets were engaged, with others, in the years 1601-2, in what is called the War of the Theatres, that is, they wrote plays to criticise and mock each other. These plays are often scurrilous and seldom amusing. During the course of the war the two chief combatants came to blows.
It is sad that Shakespeare should be credited with the paltriness of lesser men. His view of his task is expressed in _Timon of Athens_ with the perfect golden clearness of supreme power--
"my free drift Halts not particularly, but moves itself In a wide sea of wax: no levell'd malice Infects one comma in the course I hold; But flies an eagle flight, bold, and forth on, Leaving no tract behind."
He held that view throughout his creative life, as a great poet must. At the time during which this play was written his thought was more rigidly kept to the just survey of life than at any other period. Creative art has been so long inglorious that the practice and ideas of supreme poets have become incomprehensible to the many. This play is a great hint of something never, now, to be made clear. Those who count it a mark of Shakespeare's littleness expose their own.
_Measure for Measure._
_Written._ 1603-4 (?)
_Produced._ (?)
_Published._ 1623.
_Source of the Plot._ The story is founded on an event that is said to have taken place in Ferrara, during the Middle Ages. Shakespeare took it from a collection of novels, the _Hecatomithi_, by Giraldi Cinthio; from the play, _The rare Historie of Promos and Cassandra_, founded on Cinthio's novel, by one George Whetstone, and from Whetstone's prose rendering of the story in his book _The Heptameron of Civil Discourses_.
_The Fable._ The Duke of Vienna, going on a secret mission, leaves his power in the hands of Angelo, a man of strict life.
Angelo enforces old laws against incontinence. He arrests Claudio and sentences him to be beheaded. Claudio's sister, Isabella, pleads with Angelo for her brother's life. Being moved to lust, Angelo tempts Isabella. He offers to spare Claudio if she will submit to him. Claudio begs her to save him thus. She refuses.
The Duke returns to Vienna disguised, hears Isabella's story, and resolves to entrap Angelo. He causes her to make an appointment to that end. He causes Mariana, a maid who has been jilted by Angelo, to personate Isabella, and keep the appointment. Mariana does so.
He contrives to check Angelo's treachery, that would have caused Claudio's death in spite of the submission.
Lastly he reveals himself, exposes Angelo's sin, compels him to marry Mariana, pardons Claudio, and makes Isabella his Duchess.
This play is now seldom performed. It is one of the greatest works of the greatest English mind. It deals justly with the case of the man who sets up a lifeless sentimentality as a defence against a living natural impulse. The spirit of Angelo has avenged itself on Shakespeare by becoming the guardian spirit of the British theatre.
In this play Shakespeare seems to have brooded on the fact that the common prudential virtues are sometimes due, not to virtue, but to some starvation of the nature. Chastity may proceed from a meanness in the mind, from coldness of the emotions, or from cowardice, at least as often as from manly and cleanly thinking. Two kinds of chastity are set at clash here. The one springs from a fire in the personality that causes Isabella to think death better than contamination, and gives her that whiteness of generosity which fills nunneries with living sacrifice; the other comes from the niggardliness that makes Angelo jilt Mariana rather than take her without a dower. Both are obsessions; both exalt a part of life above life itself. Like other obsessions, they come to grief in the presence of something real.
These two characters make the action. The play is concerned with the difficulty of doing justice in a world of animals swayed by rumour. The subject is one that occupied Shakespeare's mind throughout his creative life. Wisdom begins in justice. But how can man be just, without the understanding of God? Who is so faultless that he can sit in judgment on another? Who so wise that he can see into the heart, weigh the act with the temptation and strike the balance?
Sexual sin is the least of the sins in Dante. It is allied to love. It is an image of regeneration. No sin is so common, none is more glibly blamed. It is so easy to cry "treacherous," "base," and "immoral." But who, while the heart beats, can call himself safe from the temptation to this sin? It is mixed up with every generosity. It is a flood in the heart and a blinding wave over the eyes. It is the thorn in the side under the cloak of the beauty of youth. In Shakespeare's vision it is a natural force, incident to youth, as April is incident to the year. The young men live as though life were oil, and youth a bonfire to be burnt. Life is always wasteful. Youth is life's test for manhood. The clown finds in the prison a great company of the tested and rejected, calling through the bars for alms. In spite of all this choice, another victim is picked by tragical chance. Lucio, a butterfly of the brothel, a dirtier soul than Claudio, is spared. Claudio is taken and condemned. The beautiful, vain, high-blooded youth, so quick with life and glad of the sun, is to lie in earth, at the bidding of one less full of April.
Angelo, the man whose want of sympathy condemns Claudio, is in the state of security that precedes so much Shakespearean tragedy. He has received the name of being more than human because (unlike his admirers) he has not shown himself to be considerably less. He has come through youth unsinged. He has not been betrayed by his "gross body's treason." Both he and those about him think that he is proof against temptation to sexual sin. Suddenly his security is swept away. He is betrayed by the subtler temptation that would mean nothing to a grosser man. He is moved by the sight of the beauty of a distressed woman's mind. The sight means nothing to Claudio, and less than nothing to Lucio. The happy animal nature of youthful man has a way of avoiding distressed women. The cleverer man, who has shut himself up in the half life of sentiment, cannot so escape. He is attacked suddenly by the unknown imprisoned side of him as well as by temptation. He falls, and, like all who fall, he falls not to one sin, but to a degradation of the entire man. The sins come linked. "Treason and murder ever kept together." When he is once involved with lust, treachery and murder follow. He is swiftly so stained that when the wise Duke shows him as he is, he shrinks from the picture, with a cry that he may be put out of the way by some swift merciful death so that the horror of the knowledge of himself may end, too.
The play is a marvellous piece of unflinching thought. Like all the greatest of the plays, it is so full of illustration of the main idea that it gives an illusion of an infinity like that of life. It is constructed closely and subtly for the stage. It is more full of the ingenuities of play-writing than any of the plays. The verse and the prose have that smoothness of happy ease which makes one think of Shakespeare not as a poet writing, but as a sun shining.
" ... It deserves with characters of brass A forted residence 'gainst the tooth of time."
The thought of the play is penetrating rather than impassioned. The poetry follows the thought. There are cold lines like Death laying a hand on the blood. The faultless lyric, "Take, O take those lips away" occurs. Some say Fletcher wrote it, some Bacon. "Love talks with better knowledge, and knowledge with dearer love." The music of the great manner rings--
"Merciful Heaven! Thou rather with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt Splitt'st the unwedgeable and gnarled oak, Than the soft myrtle; but man, proud man, Drest in a little brief authority, Most ignorant of what he's most assur'd, His glassy essence, like an angry ape, Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven, As make the angels weep."
The prose accompaniment to what is unrestrained in youth provides a cruel comedy.
_Othello, the Moor of Venice._
_Written._ 1604 (?)
_Published_, in quarto, and in the first folio, 1623.
_Source of the Plot._ The tale appears in _The Hecatomithi_ of G. B. Giraldi Cinthio. Shakespeare follows Cinthio in the main; but a few details suggest that he knew the story in an ampler version.
_The Fable._ Iago, ensign to Othello, the Moor of Venice, is jealous of Cassio, his lieutenant. He plots to oust Cassio from the lieutenancy.
Othello marries Desdemona, and sails with her to the wars in Cyprus. Iago resolves to make use of Desdemona to cause Cassio's downfall.
He procures Cassio's discharge from the lieutenancy by involving him in a drunken brawl. Cassio beseeches Desdemona to intercede with Othello for him. Iago hints to Othello that she has good reason to wish Cassio to be restored. He suggests that Cassio is her lover. Partly by fortune, partly by craft, he succeeds in establishing in Othello's mind the conviction that Desdemona is guilty.
Othello smothers Desdemona, learns, too late, that he has been deceived, and kills himself. Cassio's character is cleared. Iago is led away to torture.
A man's greatest works differ from his lesser works in degree, not in kind. They may be more perfect, but they express similar ideas. "A man grows, he does not become a different man." In this play of _Othello_ the ideas are those that inspire nearly all the plays, that life seeks to preserve a balance, and that obsessions, which upset the balance, betray life to evil.
These ideas are in the earliest work of all, in _Venus and Adonis_. In _Othello_ they are expressed with the variety and power of the great period. The obsession chosen for illustration is that of jealous suspicion. It is displayed at work in a mean mind and in a generous mind. The varying quality of its working makes the action of the play.
As in _The Merchant of Venice_, the chief character is a man of intellect who has been warped out of humanity by the world's injustice. Iago is a man of fine natural intellect who has not been trained in the personal qualities that bring preferment. An educated man is advanced above him, as in life it happens. He broods over the injustice and schemes to be revenged. A groundless suspicion that the Moor has wronged him further, determines him to be revenged upon his employer as well as upon his supplanter. A weak intellect who comes to him for help serves him as a tool. He begins to persuade his employer that the supplanter and the newly-married wife are lovers.
He succeeds in this, through his natural adroitness, the working of chance, and the generosity of Othello, who has too much passion to be anything but blind under passionate influence like love or jealousy. The mean man's want of emotion keeps always the conduct of the vengeance precise and clear. Cassio is disgraced. Roderigo, having been fooled to the top of his bent, is killed. Desdemona is smothered. Othello is ruined.
That working of an invisible judge, which we call Chance, "life's justicer," lays the villainy bare at the instant of its perfection. Emilia, Iago's wife, a common nature, with no more intelligence than a want of illusion, enters a moment too late to stay the slaughter, but too soon for Iago's purpose. She is the one person in the play certain to be loyal to Desdemona. She is the one person in the play who, judging from her feelings, will judge rightly. The finest part of the play is that scene in which her passionate instinct sees through the web woven about Othello by an intellect that has put aside all that is passionate and instinctive.
The influence and importance of the little thing in the great event is marked in this scene as in half-a-dozen other scenes in the greater tragedies. We are all or may at any time become immensely important to the play of the world. Had Emilia come a minute sooner or a minute later the end of the play would have been very different. Desdemona would have lived to repent her marriage at leisure, or she would have gone to her grave branded.
Shakespeare brooded much upon all the tragedies of intellect. In this play, as in _Richard III_ and _The Merchant of Venice_, he brooded upon the power of a warped intellect to destroy generous life. When he created Iago he wrote in a cooler spirit than when he created the earlier characters. Iago is therefore much more perfectly a living being but much less passionately alive than the soul burnt out at Bosworth, or the soul flouted in the Duke's Court. He is drawn with a sharp and wiry line. Like all sinister men, he tells nothing of himself. We see only his intellect. What he is in himself is as mysterious as life. Life is clear, up to a point, but beyond that point it is always baffling. Shakespeare's task was to look at life clearly. Looking at it clearly he was as baffled by what he saw, as we, who only see by his aid. He found in Iago an image like life itself, a power and an activity, prompted by something secret and silent.
Much ink has been wasted about the "duration of time" in this play. The action of the play is one. It matters not if the time be divided into ten or fifty. In London and the University towns where writing is mostly practised, the play is seldom played. It is almost never played as Shakespeare meant it to be played. Those who write about it write after reading it. This is a reading age. Shakespeare's was an active age. That those who care most for his tragedies should be ignorant of the laws under which he worked is our misfortune and our fault and our disgrace.
The point is not insisted on; but some passages in the play suggest that when Shakespeare began to write it he was minded to make the action the falling of a judgment upon Desdemona for her treachery to her father. The treachery caused the old man's death. The too passionate and hasty things always bring death in these plays. Violent delights have violent ends and bring violent ends to others.
The poetry of _Othello_ is nearly as well known as that of _Hamlet_. Many quotations from the play have passed into the speech of the people. A play of intrigue does not give the fullest opportunity for great poetry; but supreme things are spoken throughout the action. Othello's cry--
"It is the very error of the moon. She comes more near the earth than she was wont And drives men mad,"
is one of the most perfect of all the perfect things in the tragedies.
_King Lear._
_Written._ 1605-6.
_Published._ 1608.
_Source of the Plot._ The story of Lear is told in Holinshed's _Chronicles_, in a play by an unknown hand, _The True Chronicle History of King Leir_, and in a few stanzas of the tenth canto of the second Book of Spenser's _Faerie Queene_.
The character of Gloucester seems to have been suggested by the character of a blind king in Sir Philip Sidney's _Arcadia_.
_The Fable._ King Lear, in his old age, determines to give up his kingdom to his three daughters. Before he does so, he tries to assure himself of their love for him. The two elder women, Goneril and Regan, vow that they love him intensely; the youngest, Cordelia, can only tell him that she cares for him as a daughter should. He curses and casts off Cordelia, who is taken to wife by the King of France.
Gloucester, deceived by his bastard Edmund, casts off Edgar his son.
King Lear, thwarted and flouted by Goneril and Regan, goes mad, and wanders away with his Fool. Gloucester, trying to comfort him against the wishes of Goneril and Regan, is betrayed by his bastard Edmund, and blinded. He wanders away with Edgar, who has disguised himself as a madman.
Regan's husband is killed. Seeking to take Edmund in his stead, she rouses the jealousy of Goneril, who has already made advances to him.
Cordelia lands with French troops to repossess Lear of his kingdom. She finds Lear, and comforts him. In an engagement with the sisters' armies, she and Lear are captured.
Edmund's baseness is exposed. He is attainted and struck down. Goneril poisons Regan, and kills herself. Edmund, before he dies, reveals that he has given order for Lear and Cordelia to be killed. His news comes too late to save Cordelia. She is brought in dead. Lear dies over her body.
Albany, Goneril's husband, Kent, Lear's faithful servant, and Edgar, Edmund's slayer, are left to set the kingdom in order.
The play of _King Lear_ is based upon a fable and a fairy story. It illustrates the most terrible forms of treachery, that of child against father, and father against child. It is the most affecting and the grandest of the plays.
The evil which makes the action springs from two sources, both fatal. One is the blindness or fatuity in Lear, which makes him give away his strength and cast out Cordelia. The other, equally deadly, but more cruel in its results, springs from an unrepented treachery, done long before by Gloucester, when he broke his marriage vows to beget Edmund. Memory of the sweetness of that treachery gives to Gloucester a blindness to the boy's nature, just as a sweetness, or ease, in the treachery of giving up the cares of kingship (against oath and the kingdom's good) helps to blind Lear to the natures of his daughters.
The blindness in the one case is sentimental, in the other wilful. Being established, fate makes use of it. One of the chief lessons of the plays is that man is only safe when his mind is perfectly just and calm. Any injustice, trouble or hunger in the mind delivers man to powers who restore calmness and justice by means violent or gentle according to the strength of the disturbing obsession. This play begins at the moment when an established blindness in two men is about to become an instrument of fate for the violent opening of their eyes. The blindness in both cases is against the course of nature. It is unnatural that Lear should give his kingship to women, and that he should curse his youngest child. It is unnatural that Gloucester should make much of a bastard son whom he has hardly seen for nine years. It is deeply unnatural that both Lear and Gloucester should believe evil suddenly of the youngest, best beloved, and most faithful spirits in the play. As the blindness that causes the injustice is great and unnatural, so the working of fate to purge the eyes and restore the balance is violent and unnatural. Every person important to the action is thrust into an unnatural way of life. Goneril and Regan rule their father, commit the most ghastly and beastly cruelty, lust after the same man, and die unnaturally (having betrayed each other), the one by her sister's hand, the other by her own. Lear is driven mad. The King of France is forced to war with his wife's sisters. Edmund betrays his half-brother to ruin and his father to blindness. Cornwall is stabbed by his servant. Edgar kills his half-brother. Gloucester, thrust out blind, dies when he finds that his wronged son loves him. Cordelia, fighting against her own blood, is betrayed to death by one who claims to love her sisters. The honest mild man, Albany, and the honest blunt man, Kent, survive the general ruin. Had Kent been a little milder and Albany a little blunter in the first act, before the fates were given strength, the ruin would not have been. All the unnatural treacherous evil comes to pass, because for a few fatal moments they were true to their natures.
The play is an excessive image of all that was most constant in Shakespeare's mind. Being an excessive image, it contains matter nowhere else given. It is all schemed and controlled with a power that he shows in no other play, not even in _Macbeth_ and _Hamlet_. The ideas of the play occur in many of the plays. Many images, such as the blasted oak, water in fury, servants insolent and servile, old honest men and young girls faithful to death, occur in other plays. That which each play added to the thought of the world is expressed in the single figure of someone caught in a net. Macbeth is a ruthless man so caught. Hamlet is a wise man so caught. Othello is a passionate and Antony a glorious man so caught. All are caught and all are powerless, and all are superb tragic inventions. King Lear is a grander, ironic invention, who hurts far more than any of these because he is a horribly strong man who is powerless. He is so strong that he cannot die. He is so strong that he nearly breaks the net, before the folds kill him.
No image in the world is so fierce with imaginative energy. The stormy soul runs out storming in a night of the soul as mad as the elements. With him goes the invention of the Fool, the horribly faithful fool, like conscience or worldly wisdom, to flick him mad with ironic comment and bitter song.
The verse is as great as the invention. It rises and falls with the passion like music with singing. All the scale of Shakespeare's art is used; the terrible spiritual manner of
"You sulphurous and thought-executing fires, Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,"
as well as the instinctive manner of a prose coloured to the height with all the traditions of country life.
Dramatic genius has the power of understanding half-a-dozen lives at once in tense, swiftly changing situations. This power is shown at its best in the last act of this play. One of the most wonderful and least praised of the inventions in the last scene is that of the dying Edmund. He has been treacherous to nearly every person in the play. His last treachery, indirectly the cause of his ruin, is still in act, the killing of Cordelia and the king. He has been stricken down. "The wheel has come full circle." He has learned too late that
"The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices Make instruments to plague us."
He can hardly hope to live for more than a few minutes. The death of his last two victims cannot benefit him. A word from him would save them. No one else can save them. Yet at the last minute, his one little glimmer of faithfulness keeps the word unspoken. He is silent for Goneril's sake. If he ever cared for any one in the world, except himself, he may have cared a little for Goneril. He thinks of her now. She has gone from him. But she is on his side, and he trusts to her, and acts for her. He waits for some word or token from her. He waits to see her save him or avenge him. The death of Lear will benefit her. It will be to her something saved from the general wreck, something to the good, in the losing bout. An impulse stirs him to speak, but he puts it by. He keeps silent about Lear, till one comes saying that Goneril has killed herself. Still he does not speak. The news pricks the vanity in him. He strokes his plumes with a tender thought for the brightness of the life that made two princesses die for love of him. When he speaks of Lear, it is too late, the little, little instant which alters destiny has passed. Cordelia is dead. No mist stains the stone. She will come no more--
"Never, never, never, never, never."
The heart-breaking scene at the end has been blamed as "too painful for tragedy." Shakespeare's opinion of what is tragic is worth that of all his critics together. He gave to every soul in this play an excessive and terrible vitality. On the excessive terrible soul of Lear he poured such misery that the cracking of the great heart is a thing of joy, a relief so fierce that the audience should go out in exultation singing--
"O, our lives' sweetness! That we the pain of death would hourly die Rather than die at once!"
Tragedy is a looking at fate for a lesson in deportment on life's scaffold. If we find the lesson painful, how shall we face the event?
_Macbeth._
_Written._ 1605-6 (?)
_Published_, in the first folio, 1623.
_Source of the Plot._ Raphael Holinshed tells the story of Macbeth at length in his _Chronicle of Scottish History_. He indicates the character of Lady Macbeth in one line.
When Shakespeare wrote the play, London was full of Scotchmen, brought thither by the accession of James I. Little details of the play may have been gathered in conversation.
_The Fable._ Macbeth, advised by witches that he is to be a king, is persuaded by his wife to kill his sovereign (King Duncan) and seize the crown. King Duncan, coming to Macbeth's castle for a night, is there killed by Macbeth and his lady. Duncan's sons fly to England. Macbeth causes himself to be proclaimed king.
Being king, he tries to assure himself of power by destroying the house of Banquo, of whom the witches prophesied that he should be the father of a line of kings. Banquo is killed; but his son escapes.
The witches warn Macbeth to beware of Macduff.
Macduff escapes to England, but his wife and children are killed by Macbeth's order.
Macduff persuades Duncan's son, Malcolm, to attempt the recovery of the Scottish crown.
Malcolm and Macduff make the attempt. They attack Macbeth and kill him.
Macbeth is one of the seven supreme Shakespearean plays. In the order of composition it is either the fourth or the fifth of the seven. In point of merit it is neither greater nor less than the other six. It is different from them, in that it belongs more wholly to the kingdom of vision.
Like most Shakespearean tragedy, Macbeth is the tragedy of a man betrayed by an obsession. Caesar is betrayed by an obsession of the desire of glory, Antony by passion, Tarquin by lust, Wolsey by worldly greed, Coriolanus and Timon by their nobleness, Angelo by his righteousness, Hamlet by his wisdom. All fail through having some hunger or quality in excess. Macbeth fails because he interprets with his worldly mind things spiritually suggested to him. God sends on many men "strong delusion, that they shall believe a lie." Othello is one such. Many things betray men. One strong means of delusion is the half-true, half-wise, half-spiritual thing, so much harder to kill than the lie direct. The sentimental treacherous things, like women who betray by arousing pity, are the dangerous things because their attack is made in the guise of great things. Tears look like grief, sentiment looks like love; love feels like nobility; spiritualism seems like revelation.
Among these things few are stronger than the words spoken in unworldly states, in trance, in ecstasy, by oracles and diviners, by soothsayers, by the wholly excited people who are also half sane, by whoever obtains a half knowledge of the spirit by destruction of intellectual process.
"to win us to our harm, The instruments of darkness tell us truths, Win us with honest trifles, to betray's In deepest consequence."
Coming weary and excited from battle, on a day so strange that it adds to the strangeness of his mood, Macbeth hears the hags hail him with prophecy. The promise rankles in him. The seed scattered in us by the beings outside life comes to good or evil according to the sun in us. Macbeth, looking on the letter of the prophecy, thinks only of the letter of its fulfilment, till it becomes an obsession with him. Partial fulfilment of the prophecy convinces him that all will be fulfilled. The belief that the veil over the future has been lifted for him gives him the recklessness of one bound in the knots of fate. So often, the thought that the soul is in a trap, playing out something planned of old, makes man take the frantic way, when the smallest belief in life would lead to peace. This thought passes through his mind. Then fear that it is all a contriving of the devils makes him put it manfully from his mind. The talk about the Cawdor whose place he holds is a thrust to him. That Cawdor was a traitor who has been put to death for treachery. The king had an "absolute trust" in him; but there is no judging by appearances. This glimpse of the ugliness of treachery makes Macbeth for an instant free of all temptation to it. Then a word stabs him again to the knowledge that if he take no step the king's young son will be king after Duncan. Why should the boy rule? From this point he goes forward, full of all the devils of indecision, but inclining towards righteousness, till his wife, girding and railing at him with definite aim while all his powers are in mutiny, drives him to the act of murder.
The story of the double treachery of the killing of a king, who is also a guest, is so written that we do not feel horror so much as an unbearable pity for Macbeth's mind. The horror is felt later, when it is made plain that the treachery does not end with that old man on the bed, but proceeds in a spreading growth of murder till the man who fought so knightly at Fife is the haunted awful figure who goes ghastly, killing men, women and little children, till Scotland is like a grave. At the end, the "worthy gentleman," "noble Macbeth," having fallen from depth to depth of degradation, is old, hag-haunted, sick at heart, and weary. He has no friends. He knows himself silently cursed by every one in his kingdom. His queen is haunted. There is a curse upon the pair of them. The birds of murder have come to roost. All that supports him is his trust in his reading of the words of the hags. He knows himself secure.
"And you all know security Is mortal's chiefest enemy,"
He has supped full with horrors. His bloody base mind is all a blur with gore. But he is resolute in evil still. At the end he sees too late that he has been tricked by--
"the equivocation of the fiend That lies like truth."
His queen has killed herself. All the welter of murder has been useless. All that he has done is to damn his soul through the centuries during which the line of Banquo will reign. He dies with a courage that is half fury against the fate that has tricked him.
No play contains greater poetry. There is nothing more intense. The mind of the man was in the kingdom of vision, hearing a new speech and seeing what worldly beings do not see, the rush of the powers, and the fury of elemental passions. No play is so full of an unspeakable splendour of vision--
"his virtues Will plead like angels trumpet-tongued."
"And pity, like a naked new-born babe, Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubin, horsed Upon the sightless couriers of the air."
"Our chimneys were blown down, and, as they say, Lamentings heard i' the air, strange screams of death, And prophesying with accents terrible."
"In the great hand of God I stand."
"A falcon towering in her pride of place Was by a mousing owl hawk'd at and killed. And Duncan's horses--a thing most strange and certain-- Beauteous and swift, the minions of their race, Turn'd wild in nature, broke their stalls, flung out, Contending 'gainst obedience, as they would make War with mankind. 'Tis said they eat each other."
"the time has been That, when the brains were out, the man would die."
All the splendours and powers of this great play have been praised and re-praised. Noble inventions, like the knocking on the door and the mutterings of the hags, have thrilled thousands. One, not less noble, is less noticed. It is in Act IV, sc. i, Macbeth has just questioned the hags for the last time. He calls in Lennox, with the words--
"I did hear The galloping of horse: who was't came by?"
It was the galloping of messengers with the news that Macduff, who is to be the cause of his ruin, has fled to England. An echo of the galloping stays in the brain, as though the hoofs of some horse rode the night, carrying away Macbeth's luck for ever.
_Antony and Cleopatra._
_Written._ 1607-8 (?)
_Published_, in the folio, 1623.
_Source of the Plot._ The life of Antonius in Sir Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's _Lives_.
_The Fable._ Antony, entangled by the wiles of Cleopatra, shakes himself free so that he may attend to the conduct of the world. He makes a pact with the young Caesar, by marrying Caesar's sister Octavia. Soon afterwards, being tempted from his wife by Cleopatra, he falls into wars with Caesar. Being unhappy in his fortune and deserted by his friends, he kills himself. Cleopatra having lost her lover, and fearing to be led in triumph by Caesar, also kills herself.
In this most noble play, Shakespeare applies to a great subject his constant idea, that tragedy springs from the treachery caused by some obsession.
"Strange it is That nature must compel us to lament Our most persisted deeds."
It cannot be said that the play is greater than the other plays of this period. It can be said that it is on a greater scale than any other play. The scene is the Roman world. The men engaged are struggling for the control of all the power of the world. The private action is played out before a grand public setting. The wisdom and the beauty of the poetry answer the greatness of the subject.
Shakespeare's later tragedies, _King Lear_, _Coriolanus_, _Othello_, and this play differ from some of the early tragedies in that the subject is not the man of intellect, hounded down by the man of affairs, as in _Richard II_, _Richard III_, and _Henry IV_, but the man of large and generous nature hounded down by the man of intellect. In all four plays the destruction of the principal character is brought about partly by a blindness in a noble nature, but very largely by a cool, resolute, astute soul who can and does take advantage of the blindness. Edmund, the tribunes, Iago, and (in this play) Octavius Caesar are such souls. All of them profit by the soul they help to destroy. They leave upon the mind the impression that they have a tact for the gaining of profit from human frailty. All of them show the basest ingratitude under a colourable cloak of human excuse.
The obsession of lust is illustrated in half-a-dozen of Shakespeare's plays; but in none of them so fully as here. The results of that obsession in treachery and tragedy brim the great play. Antony is drunken to destruction with a woman like a raging thirst. A fine stroke in the creation of the play sweeps him clear of her and offers him a way of life. He uses the moment to get so far from her that his return to her is a deed of triple treachery to his wife, to Caesar, and to his country. His intoxication with the woman degrades him to the condition of blindness in which the woman-drunken staggers. It is a part of all drunkenness that the drunkard thinks himself a king, though he looks and is a sot. Shakespeare's marvellous illustration of this blindness (in the third act) is seldom praised as it should be. Antony, crushingly defeated, owing to the treachery of all debauched natures, calls upon Octavius to meet him in single combat.
"men's judgments are A parcel of their fortunes, and things outward Do draw the inward quality after them, To suffer all alike."
"when we in our viciousness grow hard, O misery on't--the wise gods seel our eyes; In our own filth drop our clear judgments; make us Adore our errors; laugh at's while we strut To our confusion."
The cruel bungling suicide which leaves him lingering in dishonour is one of the saddest things in the plays. This was Antony who ruled once, this mutterer dying, whom no one loves enough to kill. Once before, in Shakespeare's vision, he came near death, in the proud scene in the senate house, before Caesar's murderers. He was very great and noble then. Now
"The star is fall'n And time is at his period."
"The god Hercules, whom Antony loved,"
has moved away with his hautboys and all comes to dust again.
The minds of most writers would have been exhausted after the creation of four such acts. The splendour of Shakespeare's intellectual energy makes the last act as bright a torch of beauty as the others. The cry--
"We'll bury him; and then, what's brave, what's noble, Let's do it after the high Roman fashion, And make Death proud to take us ... .... we have no friend But resolution and the briefest end,"
begins a song of the welcoming of death, unlike anything in the plays. Shakespeare seldom allows a woman a great, tragical scene. Cleopatra is the only Shakespearean woman who dies heroically upon the stage. Her death scene is not the greatest, nor the most terrible, but it is the most beautiful scene in all the tragedies. The words--
"Finish, good lady; the bright day is done, And we are for the dark,"
and those most marvellous words, written at one golden time, in a gush of the spirit, when the man must have been trembling--
"O eastern star! Peace, peace! Dost thou not see my baby at my breast, That sucks the nurse asleep?"
are among the most beautiful things ever written by man.
_Coriolanus._
_Written._ 1608 (?)
_Published._ 1623.
_Source of the Plot._ The life of Coriolanus in Sir Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's _Lives_.
_The Fable._ Marcius, a noble Roman, of an excessive pride, bitterly opposes the rabble.
In the war against the Volscians he bears himself so nobly that he wins the title of Coriolanus. On his return from the wars he seeks the Consulship, woos the voices of the multitude, is accepted, and then cast by them. For his angry comment on their behaviour the tribunes contrive his banishment from the city.
Being banished, he makes league with the Volscians. He takes command in the Volscian army and invades Roman territory.
Coming as a conqueror to the walls of Rome, his mother and wife persuade him to spare the city. He causes the Volscians to make peace. The Volscians return home dissatisfied.
On his return to the Volscian territory Coriolanus is impeached as a traitor, and stabbed to death by conspirators.
Shakespeare's tragical characters are all destroyed by the excess of some trait in them, whether good or ill matters nothing. Nature cares for type, not for the excessive. Sooner or later she checks the excessive so that the type may be maintained. She is stronger than the excessive, though she may be baser. To Nature, progress, though it be infinitesimal, must be a progress of the whole mass, not a sudden darting out of one quality or one member.
Timon of Athens is betrayed by an excessive generosity. Coriolanus is betrayed by an excessive contempt for the multitude. He is one born into a high tradition of life. He has the courage, the skill in arms, and the talent for affairs that come with high birth in the manly races. He has also the faith in tradition that makes an unlettered upper class narrow and obstructionist. Like the rich in France before the Revolution, he despises the poor. He denies them the right to complain of their hunger. Rather than grant them that right, or the means of urging redress, he would take a short way with them, as was practised here, at Manchester and elsewhere.
"Would the nobility lay aside their ruth, And let me use my sword, I'ld make a quarry With thousands of these quarter'd slaves, as high As I could pick my lance."
Like all conservative, aristocratic men, he sees in the first granting of political power to the people the beginning of revolution.
"It will in time Win power upon and throw forth greater themes For insurrection's arguing."
He regards the people as a necessary, evil-smelling, many-headed beast, good enough, under the leadership of men like himself, to make inferior troops to be spent as the State pleases. It is possible that Napoleon and Bismarck looked upon the mob with similar scorn. The ideas are those of an absolute monarch or super-man. The country squire holds those ideas, though want of power and want of intellect combine to keep him from applying them. The sincerity of the ideas is tested from time to time, in free countries, by general elections.
Much of the pride of Coriolanus springs from a sense of his superiority to others in the gifts of fortune. Much of it comes from the knowledge that he is superior in himself. Leading, as becomes his birth, in the war against the Volscians he shows himself so much superior to others that the campaign is his triumph. He is "the man" whom Napoleon counted "everything in war." The knowledge of his merit is so bright within himself that he is unable to see that it is less bright in others. He is willing to become the head of the State if the post may be given to him as a right due to merit, not as a favour begged. He has no lust for power. But knowing himself to be the best man in Rome, he thinks that his merit is sufficiently great to excuse him from the indignity of sueing for it. The laws of free countries prescribe that he who wishes to be elected must appeal to the electors whether he love them or loathe them. Instead of appealing to them, Coriolanus insults them with such arrogance that they drive him from the city.
He fails as a traitor, because he is too noble to be fiercely revengeful. A lesser man, a Richard III, or an Iago, would have exacted a bloody toll from Rome. Coriolanus cannot bring himself to be stern, in the presence of his old mother and his wife. Something generous and truly aristocratic in him makes him a second time a traitor, this time to his hosts the Volscians. He spares Rome by the sacrifice of those who have given him a shelter and a welcome. Treachery (even from a noble motive) is never forgiven in these plays. It is always avenged, seldom mercifully. The Volscians avenge themselves on Coriolanus by an act of treachery that brings the noble heart under the foot of the traitor.
_Coriolanus_ is one of the greatest of Shakespeare's creations. Much of the glory of the creation is due to Plutarch. There can be no great art without great fable. Great art can only exist where great men brood intensely on something upon which all men brood a little. Without a popular body of fable there can be no unselfish art in any country. Shakespeare's art was selfish till he turned to the great tales in the four most popular books of his time, Holinshed, North's Plutarch, Cinthio, and De Belleforest. Since the newspaper became powerful, topic has supplanted fable, and subject comes to the artist untrimmed and unlit by the vitality of many minds. In reading _Coriolanus_ and the other plays of the great period a man feels that Shakespeare fed his fire with all that was passionate in the thought about him. He appears to be his age focussed. The great man now stands outside his age, like Timon.
_Coriolanus_ is a play of the clash of the aristocratic temper with the world. It contains most of the few speeches in Shakespeare which ring with what seems like a personal bitterness. Hatred of the flunkey mind, and of the servile, insolent mob mind, "false as water," appears in half-a-dozen passages. Some of these passages are ironic inventions, not prompted by Plutarch. The great mind, brooding on the many forms of treachery, found nothing more treacherous than the mob, and nothing more dog-like, for good or evil, than the servant.
Greatness is sometimes shown in very little things. Few things in Shakespeare show better the fulness of his happy power than the following--
(_Corioli. Enter certain Romans with spoils._)
_1st Roman._ This will I carry to Rome.
_2nd Roman._ And I this.
_3rd Roman._ A murrain on't. I took this for silver.
_Timon of Athens._
_Written._ 1606-8 (?)
_Published._ 1623.
_Source of the Plot._ William Paynter's _Palace of Pleasure_. Plutarch's _Life of Antonius_. Lucian's _Dialogue_.
_The Fable._ Timon of Athens, a wealthy, over-generous man, gives to his friends so lavishly that he ruins himself. He finds none grateful for his bounty. In his ruin all his friends desert him. None of them will lend to him or help him. He falls into a loathing of the world and retires to die alone. Alcibiades of Athens, finding a like ingratitude in the State, openly makes war upon it, reduces it to his own terms, and rules it. He finds Timon dead.
_Timon of Athens_ is a play of mixed authorship. Shakespeare's share in it is large and unmistakable; but much of it was written by an unknown poet of whom we can decipher this, that he was a man of genius, a skilled writer for the stage, and of a marked personality. It cannot now be known how the collaboration was arranged. Either the unknown collaborated with Shakespeare, or the unknown wrote the play and Shakespeare revised it.
Ingratitude is one of the commonest forms of treachery. It is the form that leads most quickly to the putting back of the world, because it destroys generosity of mind. It creates in man the bitter and destructive quality of misanthropy, or a destroying passion of revenge. In this play the two authors show the different ways in which the human mind may be turned to those bitter passions.
Apemantus is currish, because others are not. He has wit without charity. Alcibiades makes war on his city because others have not the rough-and-ready large practical justice of men used to knocks. He has a large good humour without idealism. Timon, the great-natured, truly generous man, whose mind is as beneficial as the sun, cannot be currish, nor stoop to the baseness of revenge. Finding men base, he removes himself from them, and ministers with bitter contempt to the baseness that infects them. The flaming out of his anger against whatever is parasitic in life makes the action of the last two acts. The exhibition of the baseness of parasites and of the wrath of a noble mind embittered, is contrived, varied and heightened with intense dramatic energy. The character of Flavius, Timon's steward, his only friend, shows again, as in so many of the plays, Shakespeare's deep sense of the noble generosity in faithful service.
Some think the play gloomy, others that it is autobiography. Shakespeare's completed work is never gloomy. A great mind working with such a glory of energy cannot be gloomy. This generation is gloomy and unimaginative in its conception of art. Shakespeare, reading the story of Timon, saw in him an image of tragic destiny that would flood the heart of even an ingrate with pity. Great poets have something more difficult and more noble to do than to pin their hearts on their sleeves for daws to peck at. Shakespeare wrought the figure of Timon with as grave justice as he wrought Alcibiades. He wrought both from something feeling within himself, as he wrought Cleopatra, and Macbeth, and Sir Toby Belch. They are as much autobiographical, and as little, as the hundred other passionate moods that built up the system of his soul.
The poetry of the play is that of the great late manner--
"will these moss'd trees, That have outlived the eagle, page thy heels, And skip when thou point'st out?"
"Come not to me again: but say to Athens, Timon hath made his everlasting mansion Upon the beached verge of the salt flood: Who, once a day with his embossed froth The turbulent surge shall cover."
The final speech, spoken by Alcibiades after he has read the epitaph, with which Timon goes down to death, like some hurt thing shrinking even from the thought of passers, is one of the most lovely examples of the power and variety of blank verse as a form of dramatic speech.
_Alcib._ (reading) _Pass by and curse thy fill; but pass, and stay not here thy gait._
These well express in thee thy latter spirits: Though thou abhorr'dst in us our human griefs, Scorned'st our brain's flow and those our droplets which From niggard nature fall, yet rich conceit Taught thee to make vast Neptune weep for aye On thy low grave, on faults forgiven. Dead Is noble Timon: of whose memory Hereafter more. Bring me into your city, And I will use the olive with my sword, Make war breed peace, make peace stint war, make each Prescribe to other as each other's leech. Let our drums strike.
_Pericles, Prince of Tyre._
_Written._ 1607-8 (?)
_Published._ 1608.
_Source of the Plot._ The plot is taken from an English prose version of a Latin translation of a fifth century Greek romance. This version was published by Lawrence Twine, in the year 1576, under the name of _The Patterne of Paynfull Adventures_ (etc., etc.). It was reprinted in 1607. An adaptation from the Latin story was made by John Gower for the eighth book of his _Confessio Amantis_. This adaptation was known to the authors of the play.
_The Fable._ Act I. Pericles, Prince of Tyre, comes to Antioch to guess a riddle propounded by the King. If he guess rightly, he will be rewarded by the hand of the Princess in marriage. If he guess wrongly, he will be put to death. The riddle teaches him that the Princess is living incestuously with her father. He flies from Antioch to Tyre, and there takes ship to avoid the King's vengeance. Coming to Tarsus he relieves a famine by gifts of corn.