Chapter IX — Motives and Development of Shakespeare’s Poetry
I The “Comedy of Love”
What we have hitherto described as the sentiment of Shakespeare corresponds to the Shakespeare carven in the general consciousness, that which is Shakespeare in an eminent degree, almost, we might say, a symbol of his greater self, the poet of the great tragedies (Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet) and of the tragic portions of those that are less intense and less perfect. But the work that bears his name is far more varied in tones and personalities and in order to prepare the way for the passage of more particular characteristics, we must distinguish (and here the students of Shakespeare have always been industrious) the various configurations and degrees, or sources of inspiration of the poet, and make of them groups, which may then be arranged in a series of relations, an ideal succession.
On casting the eye over the rich extent of his works, the attention is at once drawn to certain of them, whose fresh, smiling colours indicate that their principal and proper theme is love. Not the love that becomes joined to other graver passions and unified with them, forms a complex, as in the Othello, or in Antony and Cleopatra, thus acquiring a profoundly tragic quality, but love and love alone, love considered in itself. These passions then are to be found rather in the comedy of love than in the tragedies or dramas: in love, regarded certainly with affectionate sympathy, but also with curiosity, instinct with softness and tenderness, indeed, one might almost say, with the superiority of an expert mind and thus with delicate irony. The mind that accompanies this amorous heart, observes the caprices and illusions, recognising their inevitability and their necessity, but yet knowing them for what they are, imaginings, however irresistible and delicious they be, caprices, though noble and beautiful, weaknesses, deserving of indulgence and of gentle treatment, because human, and belonging to man as he passes through the happy and stormy season of youth. This mode of experiencing love is something that manifests itself only episodically in the Greek, Latin and medieval poets. With them we find love represented, sometimes as a pleasant, a sensual strife, or as a furious blind passion, fearless of death, or as a spiritual cult of lofty and superhuman beauty. Sometimes indeed, as in the comedy of Menander and its long suite of descendants and posterity among the Latins and the Italians, it gives rise to a general and rather cold psychological simplification, in which love is not found to differ much from any other passion or desire, such as avarice, courage or greed. In the form we have described, it belongs entirely to the mode of feeling of the Renaissance, to one of those attitudes which the anti-ascetic and realistic view of human affairs developed and bequeathed in a perfected form to modern times. Here we must again note the similarity between Shakespeare and Ariosto, for both painted the eternal comedy of love in the same manner.
That love is sincere, yet deceives and is deceived; it imagines itself to be firm and constant, and turns out to be fragile and fleeting; it claims to be founded upon a dispassionate judgment of the mind and upon luminous moral choice, whereas, on the contrary, it is guided in an altogether irrational manner by impressions and fancies, fluctuating with these. Sometimes, too, it is represented as repugnance and aversion, whereas it is really irresistible attraction; it is content to suppress itself with deliberate humbleness before works and thoughts that are more austere, but reappears on the first occasion, more vehement, tenacious and indomitable than ever.
“In his men, as in his women,” says Heine, with his accustomed grace, when talking of the Shakespearean comedy, “passion is altogether without that fearful seriousness, that fatalistic necessity, which it manifests in the tragedies. Love does in truth wear there, as ever, a bandage over his eyes and bears a quiver full of darts. But these darts are rather winged than sharpened to a deadly point, and the little god sometimes stealthily and maliciously peeps out, removing the bandage. Their flames too rather shine than burn; but they are always flames, and in the comedies of Shakespeare, love always preserves the character of truth.” Of truth, and for this reason, none of these comedies descends altogether to the level of farce, not even those that most nearly approach it, such as Love’s Labour Lost, The Taming of the Shrew, nor even The Comedy of Errors, where some element of human truth always leads us back to the seriousness of art. Still less is there satire there, intellectual and angular satire, constructor of types, exaggerates in the interest of polemic; always we find there suavity of outline, the soft veil of poetry. Even in the most feeble, as The Two Gentlemen of Verona, we enjoy the fresh love scenes, mingled with the saltatory course of the narrative, the abundant dialogues, the misunderstandings and the verbal witticisms. Even in those that are developed in a somewhat mechanical and superficial manner, which we should now describe as being à thèse, there is vivacity, joking, festivity, and an eloquence so flowery (for instance in the scene where Biron defends the rights of youth and of love) that it has almost lyrical quality.
In this last comedy there is a king and his three gentlemen, who, in order to devote themselves to study and to attain to fame and immortality, have sworn to one another that they will not see a woman for three years. All three of them fail of this and fall in love almost as soon as the Princess of France arrives with her three ladies. These ladies, when they have received the most solemn declarations of love from the four of them, each one faithless to himself, punish them in their turn for their levity by condemning them to wait for a certain period, before receiving a reply to their offers. Thus it was that Angelica, in the Italian poems of chivalry, succeeded in setting the hearts of the most obdurate cavaliers aflame with love, even of those who held severest discourse. She made them all follow the queen of love, whom no mortal could resist.
In the Taming of the Shrew, Petruchio the male, who knows what he wants and wants his own ease and comfort, hits immediately upon the right line of conduct, a line that is, however, altogether spiritual, because based upon psychological knowledge and volitional resolve. He espouses the terrible Catherine and reduces her to lamblike obedience, afraid of her husband, no longer able not only to say, but even to think, anything save what he has forced her to think. Yet who can tell that she does not love him who maltreats and tyrannises over her?
In Twelfth Night, we behold the Duke vainly sighing for the beautiful widow Olivia, and the love that suddenly blossoms in her for the intermediary sent by the Duke, a woman dressed as a man; while the steward Malvolio, the Puritan, the pedantic Malvolio, is urged on to the most ridiculous acts, by hope and the illusion of being loved. Finally, fortune in this case making the single beloved into two, a man and a woman (in a more modest but identical manner to that in the adventure of Fiordispina with Bradamante and Ricciardetto) brings about a happy ending for all.
In All’s Welly the Countess of Roussillon, receives the discovery that poor Helena, the orphan child of the family doctor, is in love with her son, rather with benevolence than with hostility and reflects:
“Even so it was with me when I was young:
If we are nature’s, these are ours;...
By our remembrance of days foregone,
Such were our faults though then we thought them none.”
The amorous couples of princesses, exiles or fugitives, and of exile and fugitive gentlemen, wander about the forest of Arden, in As You Like It, alternating and mingling with the couples of rustic lovers.
Perhaps the best example of this “comedy of love” is the fencing of the two unconscious lovers, Beatrice and Benedick, in Much Ado About Nothing. This young couple seek one another only to measure weapons, to sneer and to fence, with the fine-pointed swords of biting jest and disdain, they believe themselves to be antipathetic, disbelieve one another; yet the simplest little intrigue of their friends suffices to reveal each to each as whole-heartedly loving and desiring the adversary. The union of the two is sealed, when they find themselves united in the same sentiment to defend their friend, who has been calumniated and rejected, thus discovering that their perpetual following of one another to engage in strife, had not concealed the struggle, which implies affinity of sex, but the spiritual affinity of two generous hearts.
Benedick. And, I pray thee now, tell me for which of my bad faults didst thou first fall in love with me?...
And the other, speaking with tenderness and ceasing to carry on the pinpricking:
“Suffer love,—a good epithet!
I do suffer love indeed, for I love thee against my will.”
A light touch permeates the treatment of these characters and suffices to animate them and make them act. The dramatic or indeed tragic situations, which at times arise, are treated as it were with the implied consciousness of their slight gravity and danger, which shall soon be evident and dispel all the apprehensions of those who doubt. They sometimes consist of nothing but an external action or occurrence, suited to the theatre, and more frequently a decorative background. Parallelism of personages and symmetry of events also abound in these plays, suitable to the merry teaching that pervades them.
The quintessence of all these comedies (as we may say of Hamlet in respect of the great tragedies) is the Midsummer Night’s Dream. Here the quick ardours, the inconstancies, the caprices, the illusions, the delusions, every sort of love folly, become embodied and weave a world of their own, as living and as real as that of those who are visited by these affections, tormented or rendered ecstatic, raised on high or hurled downward by them, in such a way that everything is equally real or equally fantastic, as you may please to call it. The sense of dream, of a dream-reality, persists and prevents our feeling the chilly sense of allegory or of apology. The little drama seems born of a smile, so delicate, refined and ethereal it is. Graceful and delicate to a degree is also the setting of the dream, the celebration of the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta and the theatrical performance of the artisans, for these are not merely ridiculous in their clumsiness; they are also childlike and ingenuous, arousing a sort of gay pity: we do not laugh at them: we smile. Oberon and Titania are at variance owing to reciprocal wrongs, and trouble has arisen in the world. Puck obeys the command of Oberon and sets to work, teasing, punishing and correcting. But in performing this duty of punishing and correcting, he too makes mistakes, and the love intrigue becomes more complicated and active. Here we find a resemblance to the rapid passage into opposite states and the strange complications that arose in Italian knightly romances, as the result of drinking the water from one of two opposite fountains whereof one filled the heart with amorous desires, the other turned first ardours to ice. In Titania, who embraces the Ass’s head and raves about him, caressing and looking upon him as a graceful and gracious creature, the comedy creates a symbol so ample and so efficacious as rightly to have become proverbial. Puck meanwhile, astonished at the effect upon men of the subtle intoxication that he has been himself distributing, exclaims in his surprise “Lord, what fools these mortals be!”; and Lysander, one of the madmen who are constantly passing from one love to another, from one thing to its opposite, is nevertheless perfectly convinced that
“The will of man is by his reason sway’d;
And reason says you are the worthier maid.”
Yet the individual reality of the figures appears through this exquisite version of the eternal comedy, as though to remind us that they really belong to life. Helena follows the man she loves, but who does not love her, like a lapdog, which, the more it is beaten, the more it runs round and round its master; she trembles at the outbreak of furious jealousy in her little friend Hermia, who threatens to put out her eyes, believing her to be capable of it, when she remembers the time when they were at school together:
“O, when she’s angry, she is keen and shrewd!
She was a vixen when she went to school:
And though she be but little she is fierce.”
When we read Romeo and Juliet, after the Dream, we seem not to have left that poetical environment, to which Mercutio expressly recalls us, with his fantastic embroidery around Queen Mab, above all, when we consider the style, the rhyming and the general physiognomy of the little story. All have inclined to suave and gentle speech and metaphor, when speaking of Romeo and Juliet. For Schlegel it was scented with “the perfumes of springtide, the song of the nightingales, the freshness of a newly budded rose.” Hegel too found himself face to face with that rose: “sweet rose in the valley of the world, torn asunder by the rude tempest and the hurricane.” Coleridge too speaks of that sense of spring: “The spring with its odours, its flowers and its fleetingness.” All have looked upon it as the poem of youthful love and have remarked that the play reaches its acme in the two love scenes in the garden at night, and in the departure after the nuptial night, in which some have seen the renovation of the traditional forms of love poetry, “the epithalamium,” “the dawn.” This play is not only closely connected with the Dream, but also with the other comedies of love; Romeo passes there with like rapidity, indeed suddenness to the personages of those comedies from love of Rosalind to love of Juliet. At the first sight of Juliet he is conquered and believes that he then loves for the first time:
“Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight!
For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night.”
Saintly Friar Laurence, a mixture of astonishment, of being scandalised and of good nature, sometimes almost plays there the part of Puck. When he learns that Romeo no longer loves Rosalind, about whom he had been so crazy; he says:
“So soon forsaken! Young men’s love there lies
Not truly in their hearts, but in their eyes.
Jesu Maria!”
When Juliet enters her cell, the friar remarks with admiration her lightsome tread, which will never wear out the pavement, and reflects that a lover “may bestride the gossamer that idles in the wanton summer air, and yet not fall; so light is vanity.” Is it tragedy or comedy? It is another situation of the eternal comedy: the love of two young people, almost children, which surmounts all social obstacles, including the hardest of all, family hatred and party feud, and goes on its way, careless of these obstacles and as though they had no importance for their hearts, no existence in reality. And in truth those obstacles seem to yield before their advance, or rather their winged flight, like soft clouds. Certainly, those obstacles reappear solidly enough later on, asserting their value and taking their revenge, so much so, that the young lovers are obliged to separate and Romeo goes into exile. But it will be only for a little while, for Friar Laurence has promised to interest himself in their affairs, to obtain the pardon of the Prince, to reconcile the parents and the other relations, and to obtain sanction for their secret marriage. And if nothing of all this happens, if the subtle previsions and the acuteness of Friar Laurence turn out to be fallacious, if a sequence of misunderstandings makes them lose their way and take a wrong turning, if the two young lovers perish, it is the result of chance, and the sentiment that arises from it is one of compassion, of compassion not divorced from envy, a sorrow, which, as Hegel said, is “a dolorous reconciliation and an unhappy beatitude in unhappiness.” This too then is tragedy, but tragedy in a minor key, what one might call the tragedy of a comedy.
“A greater power than we can contradict
Hath thwarted our intents.”
But that power is not the mysterious power, something between destiny and providence and moral necessity, which weighs upon the great tragedies; rather is it Chance, which Friar Laurence hardly succeeds in dignifying with the words of religion:
“So hath willed it God.”
There is a metaphor which is repeated in the terrible accents of King Lear, and which is itself able to reveal the difference between the two tragedies. Romeo, whose life has been spared and who has been sent into exile, thinks that what has been done for him, is torture rather than pardon, because Paradise is only where Juliet lives:
“And every cat, and dog,
And little mouse, every unworthy thing,
Live here in heaven, and may look on her;
But Romeo may not!”
Juliet, who is preparing to drink the medicine that may be poisonous, is the shy and timid young girl of Leopardi’s Amore e Morte, who “feels her hair stand on end at the very name of death,” but when she has fallen in love “dares meditate at length on steel and on poison.” The very sepulchral cave shines, and Romeo after having stabbed Paris at the feet of Juliet, whom he believes to be dead, feels that he is a companion in misfortune and wishes to bury him there “In a triumphant grave.”
“A grave, O no, a lantern, slaughtered youth,
For here lies Juliet, and her beauty makes
This vault a feasting presence full of light.”
Such words of admiration for love and for the youthful lovers are found in other poets, for instance in Dante’s words for Beatrice: “Death, I hold thee very sweet: Thou must ever after be a noble thing, since thou hast been in my lady.”
If we find love in rather piteous guise in Romeo and Juliet, comedy reappears in the wise Portia, bound to the promise of allowing, her fate to be decided by means of a guess, because although she submits to selection by chance, she has already chosen in her heart, not among the dukes and princes of the various nationalities, indeed of various continents, who are competing for her hand, but a youthful Venetian, something between a student and a soldier, half an adventurer, but courteous and pleasing in address, who has contrived to please, not only mistress, but maid, which shows, in this agreement of feminine choice, where feminine taste really lies. “By my troth, Nerissa, my little body is a-weary of this great world” (she sighs, with gentle coquettishness toward herself), perhaps with that languor, which is the desire of loving and of being loved, the budding of love; weary, as those amorous souls feel, weary, who vibrate with an exquisite sensibility. And indeed she is most sensible to music and to the spectacles of nature; and the music that she hears in the night causes her to stay and listen to it, and it seems to her far sweeter than when heard in the daytime. Nocturnal moonlight gives her the impression of a day that is ailing, of a rather pallid day when the sun is hidden.
In the Merchant of Venice, there is also the couple of Jessica and Lorenzo, those two lovers who do not feel the want of moral idealisation, nor, one would be inclined to say, any solicitude for the esteem of others. The man steals without scruple from the old Jew his daughter and his jewels, and the girl has not even a slight feeling of pity for the father, both alike plunged in the happy egotism of their pleasure. Jessica is unperturbed, sustaining and exchanging epigrams with her husband and the salacious jesting and somewhat insolent familiarity of the servant Lancellotto, though abandoning herself all the time to ecstasy, a sensual ecstasy, for she too is sensible to music and attains by means of it to a melancholy of the only sort that she is capable of experiencing, namely, the sensual.
There is malice, almost mockery, though tempered with other elements, in the portrayal of these loves of the daughter of Shylock. But in those of Troilus and Cressida, we meet at once with sarcasm, a bitter sarcasm. The same background, the doings of the Trojan war, which in other comedies has the superficial charm of a decoration, is here also a decoration, but treated with sarcasm and bitterness. Thersites fills the part of the cynic among the Greek warriors, in the relations between Troilus and Cressida, as does Pandarus in Troy. The hastening of the last scenes should be noted, the large amount of fighting, the tumult: the world is dancing as in a puppet show, while the story of Troilus and Cressida is drawing to its close, amid the imprecations of the nauseated Troilus and the grotesquely burlesque lamentations of Pandarus. Another great artist of the Renaissance comes to mind, in relation to this play: not Ariosto, but Rabelais. The theme is still, however, the comedy of love, but a comedy bordering on the faunesque, the immoral, the baser instinct, upon lust and feminine faithlessness. Pandarus is ever the go-between; he laughs and enjoys himself, for he is an expert at this sort of business, a battle-stained warrior, as it were, bearing traces of that long amorous warfare, if not in his soul, in his old bones; he is the living destruction of love, of the credulous, sensual cupidity of man and of the non-credulous, frivolous vanity of woman. His too is the obsession of love-making: he is unable to extricate himself from it, taking an almost devilish delight in involving those who have recourse to him. Troilus does not displease Cressida, on the contrary, he pleases her greatly, yet she fences with him, because she is already in full possession of feminine wisdom and philosophy. She knows that women are admired, sighed after and desired as angels, while being courted, but once they have said yes, all is over. She knows that the true pleasure lies in the doing, in the act and not in the fact, in the becoming, not in the become. She knows that in yielding, she is committing a folly, by breaking the law, which is known to her, but she puts everything she now undertakes upon Pandarus: “Well, uncle, what folly I commit, I dedicate to you.” How different is her union with her lover, to that of Romeo and Juliet! There is an ironic-comic solemnity in the rite performed by the pander uncle and in the oaths of constancy and loyalty, which all three of them exchange, while the uncle intones: “Say amen,” and the two reply, “Amen,” and are then pushed into the nuptial chamber by the profane priest. How different too is “the dawn,” their separation in the morning!
“But that the busy day,
Waked by the lark, hath raised the ribald crows
And dreaming night will hide our joys no longer,
I would not from thee.”
Whereupon the uncle begins to utter improper epigrams and plays upon words, which the impatient Cressida repays, by sending him to the devil. Cressida begins the new intrigue with Diomede, as soon as she is face to face with him alone, in spite of this scene and the numerous oaths that preceded and followed it. She is perfectly aware that she is betraying her love for Troilus and that she has no excuse for doing so. She gives to Diomede the gift of Troilus and when he asks her to whom it belongs, she replies:
“’Twas one that lov’d me better than you will,
But now you have it, take it.”
Here we find consciousness of her own feminine levity, looked upon not merely as a natural force dragging her after it, but almost as a right, as the exercise of a mission or vocation. Cressida can even be sentimental, as she abandons herself to another!
“Troilus farewell, one eye yet looks on thee;
But with my heart the other eye doth see.
Ah! poor our sex!”
Troilus is meanwhile indignant, not from a sense of injured morality, for that sort of love does not admit of such a thing: he is mad with masculine jealousy. “Was Cressida here?”... and further on: “Nothing at all, unless that they were she...”
The figures of Ferdinand and Miranda bring us back to love, youthful and pure, all the more pure, because it reveals itself, not in the midst of a great court or city, but in a desert island. The young man comes there ship-wrecked, cut off from the world that once was his, born as it were anew; the maiden has been brought up in solitude. Yet her love is awakened at first sight, in the beautiful phrase of Marlowe, which Shakespeare was so fond of quoting: “Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?” It is love, law of beings as of things, which returns eternally new and fresh as the dawn, making his Goddess appear to the youth, her God to the maiden, each to each as beings without their equal upon earth:
“I might call him
A thing divine, for nothing natural
I ever saw so noble.” “Most sure, the goddess,
On whom these airs attend,” says Ferdinand.
The choice is soon made, firm, resolute and determined. When Prospero tells her that there are men in the world, compared with whom, the youth she admires would seem a monster, Miranda replies:
“My affections
Are then most humble; I have no ambition
To see a goodlier man.”
All noble things that can be imagined surround and elevate their loves: misfortune, compassion, chaste desire, virginal respect. These things, though infinitely repeated in the world’s history seem new, as the two live through them, “surprised withal,” surprised and ravished at the mystery, which in them is celebrated once more.