Part 6

Imagine this saturnine and self-involved man obliged to consort daily with Sir Toby, who brings his hand to the buttery-bar before breakfast, and who hates going to bed "as an unfilled can," unless no more drink is forthcoming; an irascible fellow, too, and all the more tindery because continually dry. He has Sir Andrew Aguecheek for a boon companion, who says of himself that sometimes he has no more wit than a Christian, or than an ordinary man. When he is not in liquor he is fuddled with inanity, and chirps and skips about, deluding himself with the notion that Olivia will receive his addresses. Sir Toby, to borrow money of him, fosters the notion, and flatters his poor tricks. Then there is that picador of a clown, who plants in Malvolio's thin skin a perfect quickset of barbed quips, and sends him lowering around the mansion which these roisterers have turned into a tavern. The other servant, Fabian, has a grudge against him for interfering with a bear-baiting he was interested in; for Malvolio was one of those Puritans who frowned upon that sport, as Macaulay said, not because it worried the bear but because it amused the men. The steward was right when he informed this precious set that they were idle, shallow things, and he was not of their element. No doubt he is the best man of the lot. But he interrupts their carousing at midnight in such a sour and lofty way that we are entertained to hear their drunken chaffing, and we call to Maria for another stoup, though they have had too much already; but a fresh exposition of dryness always sets in when such a virtue as Malvolio's tries to wither us. However, he becomes the object of their animosity, and they work in his distemper to make him ridiculous.

There is no humor in seeing Malvolio fall so easily a prey to their device. When a man becomes the cause of his own mortification, it is simply comic. But the intrigue becomes humorous when his vice shows disgust at theirs, and theirs becomes indignant at his, and they are delighted to see it well ventilated. For so do we revenge ourselves upon each other, using not our strength which would be tragic, but our weaknesses. Then impartial justice is obliged to smile to see these counterplots of folly further its great plan. What economy it is to have individuals so contrived that they can baffle, mortify, and school each other without importing the constable! We are self-acting arrangements to relieve the universe from tax and keep its hilarity replenished. In this genial manner "the whirligig of time brings in his revenges." Even if we do not lie in wait for each other, the knowledge of mutual frailties gives our whole life a sub-taste of humor; and that leaves respect upon the tongue.

Sebastian says to the clown: "I prithee vent thy folly somewhere else." Mankind makes the clown's answer: "Vent my folly! He has heard that word of some great man, and now applies it to a fool. Vent my folly! I am afraid this great lubberly world will prove a cockney." No fear of that, my "corrupter of words;" so long as perfect discretion is unknown upon the earth, we are all cosmopolites of infirmity and speak the great language of smiles.

But the play does not let Malvolio drop softly on his feet. There is a faint grudge provoked by the ill-tempered quality of his conceit, and Shakspeare indicates this trait of our nature. The clown, who remembers how the steward used to twit Olivia's contentment at his sallies, and to deprecate it in a lofty way, now mimics his phrases and manner to sting him with a last fluttering dart. Malvolio's pride is already too deeply wounded, for he has indeed been "notoriously abused." There is no relenting in such a man on account of the fun, for that is a crime in the eyes of a Puritan, to be punished for God's sake. His temper acquires sombreness from his belief that total depravity is a good doctrine if you can only live up to it. But when this crime of fun is perpetrated against the anointed self-esteem of the Puritan himself, it is plain he will be revenged on the whole pack of them unless they proceed to make a sop of deference to touch his hurt with, and a pipe out of his own egotism for sounding a truce.

Shakspeare delighted to mark the transition of a virtue to a vice; that elusive moment, as of a point of passage from one species to another, discovered and put into a flash from the light of humor. Malvolio's grave and self-respecting temperament is an excellence. No decent man thinks meanly of himself, and the indecent ones cannot afford the disparagement. The pretence of it is a warning to us to expect mischief, a notice put up, "This is a private way; dangerous passing." Whatever gift a man has becomes a divine permission for self-consideration. Modesty is the humanity of a great mind, a vapor which the sun instinctively gathers to make itself tolerable. For instance, the profits of the Globe and Curtain Theatres helped Shakspeare to his orchards and house in Stratford, but his poverty in the matter of conceit furnished and made the New Place habitable. The neighbor gossips did not have his "greatness thrust upon them." Precisely because he was virtuous there were cakes and ale, and his jests, no doubt, were spicy in the mouth too. This man who travailed in secret with his glorious brood had nothing in his manner to record

"Those daily, nightly drippings in the dark Of the heart's blood."

Macbeth, Hamlet, and Lear were not known to be in town. These mighty shapes, silently content to wait till a world's worship matched them, forbore to bully the villagers. In time whole nations were mustered in, so that his manifold greatness could be met on an equal footing. But their gentle peer left posterity to beat the drum for this service.

But all men pardon that occasional frankness of egotism which is like lifting a window for clear light to pass through, so that we recognize that a commander is in the street.

Now, Malvolio's sobriety, his contempt for guzzling and roaring of catches, his measured deportment, his nice and cleanly ways are commendable results of his self-opinion, and cannot yield any advantage to low fellows for roughing him until the decent pace of his austerity becomes a strut. One of the characters in a late novel says, "When I see people strut enough to be cut up into bantam-cocks, I stand dormant with wonder, and says no more." This tendency of Nature to a peacock is discovered in the very act, at the moment of production, by this lens of a smile with which we arm our eye. Malvolio is like the fanatical England of the Commonwealth, which was flouted and dishonored by the Aguecheeks and Belches of King Charles II., those inevitable conspirers against immoderate and arrogant sobriety. They are sure to come. "Nay, I'll come," says Fabian, "if I lose a scruple of this sport, let me be boiled to death with melancholy." Yes, the niggard fellow shall "come by some notable shame." Says Sir Toby, "To anger him, we'll have the bear again;" which England did to her heart's content; but the discredit must be shared by the epoch which strove to strut in the sad conceit that gladness was the sin against the Holy Ghost.

TROILUS AND CRESSIDA (AJAX).

It is evident that large portions of this play are not by Shakspeare's hand. It was first attributed to him and published in 1608. But there is an entry in Henslowe's Diary, April 7, 1599, of a sum money lent to "Mr. Dickers and Harey Cheatell, in earneste of their boocke called Troyeles and Creassedaye." This play of Dekker and Chettle was probably the original which Shakspeare adopted in order to improve. Mr. Fleay, however, attributes to Shakspeare a first form of this play as early as 1597. The improvements are as palpable as the original defects. The play did not receive the benefit of a thorough recasting, and was published under Shakspeare's name with large portions of the crude, absurd, and indecent original matter unchanged.

When Troilus says,--

"Helen must needs be fair, When with your blood you daily paint her thus;"

and when Ulysses replies to the complaint of Achilles that his deeds are forgotten,--

"Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back, Wherein he puts alms for oblivion; A great-sized monster of ingratitudes: 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 honor bright: to have done, is to hang Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail In monumental mockery. Take the instant way; For honor travels in a strait so narrow, Where one but goes abreast; keep then the path, For emulation hath a thousand sons, That one by one pursue. If you give way, Or hedge aside from the direct forthright, Like to an enter'd tide, they all rush by, And leave you hindmost. For time is like a fashionable host, That slightly shakes his parting guest by the hand, And with his arms outstretch'd, as he would fly, Grasps in the comer: welcome ever smiles, And farewell goes out sighing,"--

we need no help in recognizing the pen of Shakspeare. This is the speech that holds embedded the world's household line,

"One touch of nature makes the whole world kin."

But we should need sore helping to discover a touch of nature's style in the lines of Troilus replying to the question, "Why stay we, then?"--

"To make a recordation to my soul Of every syllable that here was spoke. But if I tell how these two did co-act, Shall I not lie in publishing a truth? Sith yet there is a credence in my heart, An esperance so obstinately strong, That doth invert th' attest of eyes and ears; As if those organs had deceptious functions, Created only to calumniate."

In the same fashion, the Prologue seems written by a pen whose feather was in a constant ruffling. It talks of "princes orgulous," a word nowhere used by Shakspeare, and one which he would have rallied: the six gates of Troy have

"Massy staples And corresponsive and fulfilling bolts."

And Hector well earns the epithet which has sprung from his name when he cries,--

"Stand, stand, thou Greek! thou art a goodly mark:-- No! wilt thou not?--I like thy armor well; I'll frush it, and unlock the rivets all, But I'll be master of it. Wilt thou not, beast, abide? Why then, fly on, I'll hunt thee for thy hide."

Numerous passages like this have the tone which unmistakably remands them to the original play.

But who can help feeling the joyous and tender mood of Shakspeare reproduced by the worshipping lines of Troilus to Cressida?--

"Oh that I thought it could be in a woman (As, if it can, I will presume in you), To feed for aye her lamp and flame of love; To keep her constancy in plight and youth, Outliving beauty's outward, with a mind That doth renew swifter than blood decays! Or, that persuasion could but thus convince me, That my integrity and truth to you Might be affronted with the match and weight Of such a winnow'd purity in love! How were I then uplifted! but, alas! I am as true as truth's simplicity, And simpler than the infancy of truth."

What a pure flame mounts up from each altar of these consecrated lines to show the detestable uncleanness of some scenes which are left over from the original play! When the wanton Cressida sweeps the chaste fire from those altars and leaves them standing cold in his heart, Shakspeare cries,--

"O Cressid! Let all untruths stand by thy stained name, And they'll seem glorious."

Some of the sentences spoken by Ulysses have become fixed in the English consciousness; the rings of robust reflection have grown around and appropriated them, so that the material is quotable in every market and is applied to modern conveniences. The famous speech that charges the Greek factions to their neglect of "degree, priority, and place,"--

"Oh, when degree is shaked, Which is the ladder to all high designs, The enterprise is sick!"--

contains a truth as applicable to a democracy as to that Shakspearian age which reared the defeaters of the Armada, and sent Drake and Hawkins round the world.

What cause, in want of time or other inconvenience, left this uncultivated play to be ascribed to Shakspeare is past conjecture. In many respects it is like the modern burlesque, and may be regarded as a remote ancestor of the rollicking English fun which brings out the latent absurdities in ancient and mediæval chivalry. There is, for instance, a play called "The Field of the Cloth of Gold," which makes ridiculous the pomp of the courts of Kings Henry VIII. and Francis I., and represents the famous tournament as a tilt upon hobby-horses ending in a milling match with bottle-holders and all the pugilistic cant. There are plenty of blond women who appear to be out of employment at present on purpose to lend a zest to this drollery, and everybody seems to welcome with democratic delight the slur upon obsolete solemnities, and the insinuation that the surviving ones are no more imposing. With all the devices of the modern theatre, such a play manages to be vastly more ludicrous than Troilus and Cressida, but it does not start with such a cutting motive, and it is in the matter of morality simply neutral. But the play attributed to Shakspeare is one prolonged assault upon the foibles and indecencies of greatness, upon the trivial pretexts that mar and vulgarize an epoch of heroism. The period of the Trojan war is borrowed, and the characters of Homer's Iliad, to throw into a salient light what was after all the real occasion of the famous siege. Paris went to Greece, as Troilus says,--

"And, for an old aunt, whom the Greeks held captive, He brought a Grecian queen, whose youth and freshness Wrinkles Apollo's, and makes pale the morning. Why keep we her? The Grecians keep our aunt. Is she worth keeping? why, she is a pearl, Whose price hath launch'd above a thousand ships, And turn'd crown'd kings to merchants."

Several scholars dissatisfied with this reputed motive of the siege, and of Homer's Iliad, take refuge in a theory of light-worship, and of a conflict between the Orient and the Occident, the Dawn and the Dark, such as no doubt underlies many of the ancient myths whose names bear allusion to such phenomena. These commentators torture the names and incidents of the Iliad to clear it of the stigma of having no motive-power beyond the stealing of a light wife, and a re-delivery of her to a complacent husband who makes no inquiries. Ten years of siege and battle, of domestic broil and murder, of Odyssean adventures by sea and land, that Helen may be transferred, warm from the arms of Priam, back to the condoning embrace of Menelaus! Truly, when the ugly thing stands thus stripped of its Homeric mantle, we hurry to demand that it shall be decently clothed in travesty.

After the Prologue announces that expectation is "tickling skittish spirits on one and other side," the scene soon opens with the indecent Pandarus trifling with the famous epic names, as he taps them lightly with his battledore to keep up his little game, which is to get Troilus thoroughly involved with Cressida: "An her hair were not somewhat darker than Helen's (well, go to), there were no more comparison between the women;" then the puppy says, "I will not dispraise your sister Cassandra's wit." Think of the jaunty go-between thus estimating the terrible prophetess of the Agamemnon, while he is only whetting Troilus's passion for Cressida, and devising means to bring them together. For this is meant to travesty the rape of Helen, which was the motive of the siege. The play begins by making incontinence a very important business, and thus ridiculous. As Thersites says, "All the argument is a cuckold, and war and lechery confound all."

Subsequently Cressida, at a wink from the Greek Diomedes, passes out of the keeping of her Trojan lover, thus making the politics as light as her love. And the scenes where Pandarus lickerishly plans the assignation, and rallies Cressida afterwards, are so purposely broad that every pretence of sentiment is emptied out of the play; the vulgarity becomes so conspicuous that the fighting itself is infected with it and runs into parody. The reader need only turn to the interjectional soliloquies of Thersites, which supply to every mock-heroic incident a very free translation, to perceive that there was an intention in the co-laborers upon this play to make all such famous court-manners and their quarrels seem ridiculous.

Thersites is Shakspeare himself in a cynic masquerade, that he may watch the whole game and be privy to the monstrous immorality. Achilles hangs back from fighting the Trojans, not in anger at the slight of Agamemnon, but rather because he has a secret understanding with one of Priam's daughters. Instead of maintaining consistent political attitudes, almost everybody is carrying on some private transaction of this kind, and the great heroes scramble like boys in a shower of comfits. Pandarus, the disgraceful old uncle of Cressida, who brought her and Troilus together in the same spirit which gave Helen to Paris, and back again coolly to her proper husband, is left at the close of the play to bewail the whole bad issue of the Homeric morals: "A goodly medicine for mine aching bones! O world, world, world! Thus is the poor agent despised. O traitors and bawds, how earnestly are you set a' work, and how ill requited!"

In the second scene, the heroes swagger across the stage one by one coming from the field, while Pandarus stands by and talks of each in a way to make of them diminutive patterns of militia colonels. Æneas, Antenor, Hector, Paris: "There's a brave man, niece;" "It does a man's heart good." That's Antenor, "And he's a man good enough;" but where is Troilus? "If he see me, you shall see him nod at me;" but see Hector, and, oh, "What hacks are on his helmet!--there be hacks!" His niece says, "Be those with swords?" "Swords? any thing:--an the devil come to him, it's all one, by God's lid;" but there's Troilus; look, niece, there's a man, "and his helm more hacked than Hector's." "Had I a sister were a Grace, or a daughter a Goddess, he should take his choice. Paris is dirt to him." Eh, Cressid, don't you take? So all these scenes pass with a mischievous innuendo pushed forward by the lackey sentences: "I warrant, Helen, to change, would give an eye to boot." Thus it runs on like a nautical melodrama, or the rattling chaff of "Tom and Jerry," a stream on which the moral disgust of Thersites swims in full view.

When Ajax appears, we are made aware in the first place, that he does not know his letters. He flies into a rage with Thersites because he refuses to read to him the proclamation of Hector's challenge, and they fling the vilest Billingsgate at each other, varied with fisticuffs. They try to outdo each other at a game of epithets. If one says, "Thou mongrel, beef-witted lord," the other says, "Toad-stool." "Porcupine," says one in a way to wither. "Scurvy-valiant ass," retorts the other. So in a later scene these phrases of invective remind us of Shakspeare: "Damnable box of envy;" "thou full dish of fool;" "thou idle, immaterial skein of sleeve silk;" "green sarcenet flap for a sore eye." This, flung at Patroclus, convinces us that the plain of Troy has shrunken to a dog-pit, and we give odds on Thersites. "To be a mule, a cat, a lizard, an owl, or a herring without a roe, I would not care; but to be Menelaus,--I would conspire against destiny. I care not to be the louse of a lazar, so I were not Menelaus."

There is a long scene in which the prominent Trojans discuss the policy of returning Helen and getting entirely out of the scrape. Hector says, "Let her go,--any ten Trojans' lives are as dear to us as she; she is not worth what she doth cost the holding." This profit-and-loss view of the case is despised by the rest, especially by Troilus, who is the only consistent person in the play, and who is nobly contrived to keep alive for us the tradition of honor and manhood. Now Cassandra enters to bully like a fish-woman, with arms akimbo:

"Our fire-brand brother, Paris, burns us all. Cry, Trojans, cry! A Helen, and a woe: Cry, cry! Troy burns, or else let Helen go."

Troilus flatly says that she is mad. Finally, Hector, though confessing that by every moral law Helen ought to be restored to her husband, thinks it better to hold on to her because she is a spur to valor, and their reputations depend upon preventing the Greeks from carrying their point. It is a discussion of shopkeepers who are aspiring to be actors and couch their speech in high-stepping hexameters.

Pandarus sings to Helen such a bit of frippery that we expect to see them both begin to hop from one foot to the other in the style of the burlesque, as they deliver the chorus of "Oh! oh! ha! ha! hey ho!"

There never was such deliberate absurdity as the fighting in this play. The original draught of it was certainly left untouched by Shakspeare, probably to keep the laugh sustained. It is all done in the vein of Bombastes. "Now, they are clapper-clawing one another," says Thersites; "I'll go look on." Diomedes enters, followed by Troilus, who bids him stand; for, if he took to the river Styx, Troilus would jump in after him. "Stand, forsooth," says Diomedes; "don't flatter yourself I was flying: no, my worthy Trojan, I was only extricating myself from the multitude to get at you,--so come on." They come on, and go off fighting. Pretty soon Diomedes enters with the horse of Troilus, under the pantomimic illusion that he has slain its master. He despatches the horse with a note to Cressida, his new mistress, late the mistress of the late Troilus. But Troilus was no more dead than Falstaff was embowelled; he enters in a fine fume, looking up his horse. There is Ajax bellowing to come to close quarters with him, and Diomedes in the rear bawling in imitation of Ajax, but ironically, because he thinks that Troilus fell by his hand. It is a very unexpected accommodation when Troilus appears, and the three go out fighting. Not a drop of blood is spilt as yet, for these are pasteboard warriors with wind for blood. But now comes Hector meeting Achilles, who goes into a perilous bluster as if the Trojan's last moments had arrived in his person. "Have at thee, Hector." "Very well," says Hector, "why don't you begin?" "Well, no, on the whole, I won't," replies Achilles; "my arms are out of practice, luckily for you; you may go unscathed this time." No sooner has Hector gone, than Achilles slips off to collect a party of his Myrmidons whom he engages to waylay Hector and overcome him by force of numbers. They find him resting with his helmet off, and they butcher him; Achilles crying, "Here he is, that's your man!" Then a retreat is sounded on both sides, as if for fear that some one would get hurt. The whole play breaks up abruptly, and nothing is finished. It seems like a tale told by an idiot, "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." The sincere lover, Troilus, meeting Pandarus somewhere amid these punchinello combats, invokes ignominy and shame upon the pander's life, and invites posterity to use his name as a designation of a vile profession. Thus we return upon the track of the play's motive, and feel competent to enjoy, without hindrance, the humor and irony which saturate the scenes. Let us notice the character of Ajax, which is scratched all over by Shakspeare's pen.