Book Second
I
Introduction — The England of Elizabeth in Shakespeare’s Youth
Everything had flourished in the England of Elizabeth while Shakespeare was young. The sense of belonging to a people which, with great memories and achievements behind it, was now making a decisive and irresistible new departure—the consciousness of living in an age when the glorious culture of antiquity was being resuscitated, and when great personalities were vindicating for England a lofty and assured position, alike in the practical and in the intellectual departments of life—these feelings mingled in his breast with the vernal glow of youth itself. He saw the star of his fatherland ascending, with his own star in its train.
It seemed to him as though men and women had in that day richer abilities, a more daring spirit, and fuller powers of enjoyment than they had possessed in former times. They had more fire in their blood, more insatiable longings, a keener appetite for adventure, than the men and women of the past. They knew how to rule with courage and wisdom, like the Queen and Lord Burghley; how to live nobly and fight gloriously, to love with passion and sing with enthusiasm, like the beautiful hero of the younger generation, Sir Philip Sidney, who found an early Achilles-death. They were bent on enjoying existence with all their senses, comprehending it with all their powers, revelling in wealth and splendour, in beauty and wit; or they set forth to voyage round the world, to see its marvels, conquer its treasures, give their names to new countries, and display the flag of England on unknown seas.
Statesmanship and generalship were represented among them by the men who, in these years, had humbled Spain, rescued Holland, held Scotland in awe. They were sound and vigorous natures. Although they all had the literary proclivities of the Renaissance, they were before everything practical men, keen observers of the signs of the times, firm and wary in adversity, in prosperity prudent and temperate.
Shakespeare had seen Spenser’s faithful friend, Sir Walter Raleigh, next to himself and Francis Bacon the most brilliant and interesting Englishman of his day, after covering himself with renown as a soldier, a viking, and a discoverer, win the favour of Elizabeth as a courtier, and the admiration of the people as a hero and poet. Shakespeare no doubt laid to heart these lines in his elegy on Sidney:—
“England doth hold thy limbs, that bred the same;
Flanders thy valour, where it last was tried;
The camp thy sorrow, where thy body died:
Thy friends thy want; the world thy virtues’ fame.”
For Raleigh, too, was a poet, as well as an orator and historian. “We picture him to ourselves,” says Macaulay, “sometimes reviewing the Queen’s guard, sometimes giving chase to a Spanish galleon, then answering the chiefs of the country party in the House of Commons, then again murmuring one of his sweet lovesongs too near the ears of her Highness’s maids of honour, and soon after poring over the Talmud, or collating Polybius with Livy.”1
And Shakespeare had seen the young Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, who in 1577, when only ten years old, had made a sensation at court by wearing his hat in the Queen’s presence and denying her request for a kiss; at the age of eighteen win renown for himself as a cavalry general under Leicester in the Netherlands, and at the age of twenty depose Raleigh from the highest place in Elizabeth’s favour. He played “cards or one game or another with her... till birds’ sing in the morning.” She shut herself up with him in the daytime, while the Venetian and French ambassadors, who had already learnt to wait at locked doors in the time of his step-father, Leicester, jested with each other in the anteroom as to whether mounting guard in this fashion ought to be called tener la mula or tenir la chandelle. And Essex demanded that Raleigh should be sacrificed to his youthful devotion. As captain of the guard, Raleigh had to stand at the door with a drawn sword, in his brown and orange uniform, while the handsome youth whispered to the spinster Queen of fifty-four things which set her heart beating. He made all the mischief he could between her and Raleigh. She assured him that he had no reason to “disdain” a man like that. But Essex asked her—so he himself writes—“Whether he could have comfort to give himself over to the service of a mistress that was in awe of such a man;” “and,” he continues, “I think he, standing at the door, might very well hear the worst I spoke of him.”
This impetuosity characterised Essex throughout his career; but he soon developed great qualities, of which his first appearances gave no promise; and when Shakespeare made his acquaintance, probably in the year 1590, his personality must have been extremely winning. Himself a poet, he no doubt knew how to value A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and its author. In all probability, Shakespeare even at this time found a protector in the young nobleman, and afterwards made acquaintance through him with his kinsman Southampton, six years younger than himself. Essex had already distinguished himself as a soldier. In May 1589 he had been the first Englishman to wade ashore upon the coast of Portugal, and in the lines before Lisbon he had challenged any of the Spanish garrison to single combat in honour of his queen and mistress. In July 1591 he joined the standard of Henry of Navarre with an auxiliary force of 4000 men; he shared all the hardships of the common soldiers; during the siege of Rouen he challenged the leader of the enemy’s forces to single combat; and then by his incapacity he dissipated all the results of the campaign. His army melted away to almost nothing.
He was at home during the following years, when Shakespeare probably came to know him well, and to appreciate his chivalrous nature, his courage and talent, his love of poetry and science, and his helpfulness towards men of ability, such as Francis Bacon and others. He therefore, no doubt, followed with more than the ordinary patriotic interest the expedition of the English fleet to Cadiz in 1596, in which the two old antagonists, Raleigh and Essex, were to fight side by side. Raleigh here won a brilliant victory over the great galleons of the Spanish fleet, burning them all except two, which he captured; while on the following day, when a severe wound in the leg prevented Raleigh from taking part in the action, Essex, at the head of his troops, stormed and sacked the town of Cadiz. In his despatches to Elizabeth, Raleigh praised Essex for this exploit. He became the hero of the day; his name was in every mouth, and he was even eulogised from the pulpit of St. Paul’s.
It was indeed a great age. England’s world-wide power was founded at the expense of defeated and humiliated Spain; England’s world-wide commerce and industry came into existence. Before Elizabeth came to the throne, Antwerp had been the metropolis of commerce; during her reign, London took that position. The London Exchange was opened in 1571; and twenty years later, English merchants all the world over had appropriated to themselves the commerce which had formerly been almost entirely in the hands of the Hanseatic Towns. London urchins hung about the wharves of the Thames, listening to the marvels related by seamen who had made the voyage round the Cape of Good Hope to Hindostan. Sunburnt, scarred, and bearded men haunted the taverns; they had crossed the ocean, lived in the Bermuda Islands, and brought negroes and Red Indians and great monkeys home with them. They told tales of the golden Eldorado, and of real and imaginary perils in distant quarters of the globe.
This peaceful development of commerce and industry had taken place simultaneously with the development of naval and military power. And the scientific and poetical culture of England advanced with equal strides. While mariners had brought home tidings of many an unknown shore, scholars also had made voyages of discovery in Greek and Roman letters; and while they praised and translated authors unheard of before, dilettanti brought forward and interpreted Italian and Spanish poets who served as models of invention and delicacy. The world, which had hitherto been a little place, had suddenly grown vast; the horizon, which had been narrow, widened out all of a sudden, and every mind was filled with hopes for the days to come.
It had been a vernal season, and it was a vernal mood that had uttered itself in the songs of the many poets. In our days, when the English language is read by hundreds of millions, the poets of England may be quickly counted. In those days the country possessed something like three hundred lyric and dramatic poets, who, with potent productivity, wrote for a reading public no larger than that of Denmark to-day; for of the six millions of the population, four millions could not read. But the talent for writing verses was as widespread among the Englishmen of that time as the talent for playing the piano among German ladies of to-day. The power of action and the gift of song did not exclude each other.
But the blossoming springtide had been short, as springtide always is.
II
Elizabeth’s Old Age
At the dawn of the new century the national mood had already altered.
Elizabeth herself was no longer the same. There had always been a dark side to her nature, but it had passed almost unnoticed in the splendour which national prosperity, distinguished men, great achievements and fortunate events had shed around her person. Now things were changed.
She had always been excessively vain; but her coquettish pretences to youth and beauty reached their height after her sixtieth year. We have seen how, when she was sixty, Raleigh, from his prison, addressed a letter to Sir Robert Cecil, intended for her eyes, in which he sought to regain her favour by comparing her to Venus and Diana. When she was sixty-seven, Essex’s sister, in a supplication for her brother’s life, wrote of that brother’s devotion to “her beauties,” which did not merit so hard a punishment, and of her “excellent beauties and perfections,” which “ought to feel more compassion.” In the same year the Queen took part, masked, in a dance at Lord Herbert’s marriage; and she always looked for expressions of flattering astonishment at the youthfulness of her appearance.
When she was sixty-eight, Lord Mountjoy wrote to her of her “faire eyes,” and begged permission to “fill his eyes with their onely deere and desired object.” This was the style which every one had to adopt who should have the least prospect of gaining, preserving, or regaining her favour.
In 1601 Lord Pembroke, then twenty-one years old, writes to Cecil (or, in other words, to Elizabeth, in her sixty-eighth year) imploring permission once more to approach the Queen, “whose incomparable beauty was the onely sonne of my little world.”
When Sir Roger Aston, about this time, was despatched with letters from James of Scotland to the Queen, he was not allowed to deliver them in person, but was introduced into an ante-chamber from which, through open door-curtains, he could see Elizabeth dancing alone to the music of a little violin,—the object being that he should tell his master how youthful she still was, and how small the likelihood of his succeeding to her crown for many a long day.1 One can readily understand, then, how she stormed with wrath when Bishop Rudd, so early as 1596, quoted in a sermon Kohélet’s verses as to the pains of age, with unmistakable reference to her.
She was bent on being flattered without ceasing and obeyed without demur. In her lust of rule, she knew no greater pleasure than when one of her favourites made a suggestion opposed to one of hers, and then abandoned it. Leicester had employed this means of confirming himself in her favour, and had bequeathed it to his successors. So strong was her craving to enjoy incessantly the sensation of her autocracy, that she would intrigue to set her courtiers up in arms against each other, and would favour first one group and then the other, taking pleasure in their feuds and cabals. In her later years her court was one of the most corrupt in the world. The only means of prospering in it were those set forth in Roger Ascham’s distich:
“Cog, lie, flatter and face
Four ways in court, to win men grace.”
The two main parties were those of Cecil and Essex. Whoever gained the favour of one of these great lords, be his merits what they might, was opposed by the other party with every weapon in their power.
In some respects, however, Elizabeth in her later years had made progress in the art of government. So weak had been her faith in the warlike capabilities of her country, and so potent, on the other hand, her avarice, that she had neglected to make preparation for the war with Spain, and had left her gallant seamen inadequately equipped; but after the victory over the Spanish Armada she ungrudgingly devoted all the resources of her treasury to the war, which survived her and extended well into the following century. This war had forced Elizabeth to take a side in the internal religious dissensions of the country. She was the head of the Church, regarded ecclesiastical affairs as subject to her personal control, and, so far as she was able, would suffer no discussion of religious questions in the House of Commons. Like her contemporary Henri Quatre of France, she was in her heart entirely indifferent to religion, had a certain general belief in God, but thought all dogmas mere cobwebs of the brain, and held one rite neither better nor worse than another. They both regarded religious differences exclusively from the political point of view. Henry ended by becoming a Catholic and assuring his former co-religionists freedom of conscience. Elizabeth was of necessity a Protestant, but tolerance was an unknown doctrine in England. It was an established principle that every subject must accept the religion of the State.
Authoritarian to her inmost fibre, Elizabeth had a strong bent towards Catholicism. The circumstances of her life had placed her in opposition to the Papal power, but she was fond of describing herself to foreign ambassadors as a Catholic in all points except subjection to the Pope. She did not even make any secret of her contempt for Protestantism, whose head she was, and whose support she could not for a moment dispense with. She felt it a humiliation to be regarded as a co-religionist of the French, Scotch, or Dutch heretics. She looked down upon the Anglican Bishops whom she had herself appointed, and they, in their worldliness, deserved her scorn. But still deeper was her detestation of all sectarianism within the limits of her Church, and especially of Puritanism in all its forms. If she did not in the first years of her reign indulge in open persecution of the Puritans, it was only because she was as yet dependent on their support; but as soon as she felt herself firmly seated on her throne, she established, in spite of the stiff-necked opposition of Parliament, the jurisdiction of the Bishops on all matters of ecclesiastical politics, and suffered Puritan writers to be condemned to death or lifelong imprisonment for free but quite innocent expressions of opinion regarding the relation of the State to religion.
Her greatness had mainly reposed upon the insight she had shown in the choice of her counsellors and commanders. But the most distinguished of those who had shed glory on her throne died one after the other in the last decade of the century. The first to die was Walsingham, one of her most disinterested servants, whom she had repaid with black ingratitude. He had done her great and loyal services, and had saved her life at the time of the last conspiracy, which led to the execution of Mary Stuart. Then she lost such notable members of her Council as Lord Hunsdon and Sir Francis Knowles; then Lord Burghley himself, the true ruler of England during her reign; and finally, Sir Francis Drake, the great naval hero of the war with Spain. She felt herself lonely and deserted. She no longer took any pleasure in the position of power to which England had attained under her rule. In spite of all she could do to conceal it, she began to feel the oppression of age, and to see how little real affection those men felt for her who were always posing in the light of adorers. She was the last of her line, and the thought of her successor was so intolerable to her, that she deferred his final nomination until she lay on her death-bed. But it availed her nothing; she knew very well that her ministers and courtiers, during the last years of her life, were in constant and secret communication with James of Scotland. They would kneel in the dust as she passed with exclamations of enchantment at her youthful appearance, and then rise, brush the dust from their knees, and write to James that the Queen looked ghastly and could not possibly last long. They did all they possibly could to conceal from her their Scotch intrigues; but she divined what went on behind her back, even if she did not realise the extent to which it was carried, or know definitely which of her most trusted servants were shrinking from nothing that could assure them the favour of James. For example, she did not suspect Robert Cecil of the double game he was carrying on, at the very time when he was doing his best to drive Essex to desperation and secure his punishment for an act of disobedience scarcely more heinous in the Queen’s eyes than his own underhand dealings. But she felt herself isolated in the midst of a crowd of courtiers impatiently awaiting the new era that was to dawn after her death. She realised that the men who still flattered her had never been attached to her for her own sake, and she specially resented the fact that they no longer seemed even to fear her.
One result of this deep dejection was that she gave her tyrannical tendencies a freer course than before, and became less and less inclined to forbearance or mercy towards those who had once been dear to her but had fallen into disgrace.
She had always taken it very ill when one of her favourites showed any inclination towards matrimony, and they had therefore always been forced to marry secretly, though that did not in the end save them from her displeasure. Now her despotism rose to such a pitch that she wanted to control the marriages even of those courtiers who had never enjoyed her favour.
One of the things which Shakespeare doubtless took most to heart at the end of the old century and beginning of the new was the hard fate which overtook his distinguished and highly valued patron Southampton. This nobleman had fallen in love with Essex’s cousin, the Lady Elizabeth Vernon. The Queen forbade him to marry her, but he would not relinquish his bride. He was hot-headed and high-spirited. Young as he was, he had boarded and taken a Spanish ship of war in the course of the expedition commanded by his friend Essex. Once, in the palace itself, when Southampton, Raleigh, and another courtier had been laughing and making a noise over a game of primero, the captain of the guard, Ambrose Willoughby, called them to order because the Queen had gone early to bed; whereupon Southampton struck this high official in the face and actually had a bout of fisticuffs with him. Such being his character, we cannot wonder that he contracted a private marriage in spite of the prohibition (August 1598). Elizabeth sent him to pass his honeymoon in the Tower, and thenceforth viewed him with high disfavour.
His close relationship to Essex led to a new outburst of the Queen’s displeasure. When Essex took command of the army in Ireland in 1599, he appointed Southampton his General of Horse; but simply out of resentment for Southampton’s disobedience in the matter of his marriage, the Queen forced Essex to rescind the appointment.
One must bear in mind, among other things, this attitude of the Queen towards Shakespeare’s first patron in order to understand the evident coolness of his feeling towards Elizabeth. He did not, for example, join in the threnodies of the other English poets on her death, and even after Chettle had expressly urged him,2 refrained from writing a single line in her praise. He probably read her character much as Froude did in our own day.
Froude admits that she was “supremely brave,” and was turned aside from her purposes by no care for her own life, though she was “perpetually a mark for assassination.” He admits, too, that she lived simply, worked hard, and ruled her household with economy. “But her vanity was as insatiable as it was commonplace.... Her entire nature was saturated with artifice. Except when speaking some round untruths, Elizabeth never could be simple. Her letters and her speeches were as fantastic as her dress, and her meaning as involved as her policy. She was unnatural even in her prayers, and she carried her affectations into the presence of the Almighty.... Obligations of honour were not only occasionally forgotten by her, but she did not seem to understand what honour meant.”3
At the point we have now reached in Shakespeare’s life, the event occurred which, of all external circumstances of his time, seems to have made the deepest impression upon his mind: the ill-starred rebellion of Essex and Southampton, the execution of the former, and the latter’s condemnation to imprisonment for life.
2
“Nor doth the silver-tongued Melicert
Drop from his honied muse one sable teare
To mourne her death that graced his desert,
And to his laies opend her Royall eare.
Shepheard, remember our Elizabeth,
And sing her Rape, done by that Tarquin, Death.”
III
Elizabeth, Essex, and Bacon
In order rightly to understand these events a short retrospect is necessary.
We have seen how Essex in 1587 ousted Raleigh from the Queen’s favour. From the very first he united with the insinuating tone of the adorer the domineering attitude of the established favourite. This was new to her, and for a considerable time obviously impressed more than it irritated her.
Here is an instance, from the early days of their relationship. Essex’s sister, Penelope, had, against her will, been married to Lord Rich. She was adored by Sir Philip Sidney, who sang of her as his Stella, and their mutual passion was an open secret. The Maiden Queen, who was always very strict as to the moral purity of those around her, during a visit which she paid with Essex to the Earl of Warwick at North Hall in 1587, took offence at the presence of Lady Rich, and insisted that she should leave the house. Essex declared that the Queen subjected him and his sister to this insult “only to please that knave Raleigh,” and left the house at midnight along with Lady Rich. He wanted to join the army in the Netherlands, but the Queen, finding that she could not do without him, had him brought back again.
At the time of the Armada, therefore, the Queen kept him at court, much against his own will. Nor would he have been allowed to take part in the war of 1589 if he had not secretly made his escape from England, leaving behind him a letter to the Queen and Council to the effect that “he would return alive at no one’s bidding.” An angry letter from Elizabeth forced him, however, to come back after he had distinguished himself before Lisbon. They were then reconciled, but the practical-minded Queen immediately demanded of him the repayment of a sum of £3000 which she had lent him, so that he was forced to sell his mansion of Keyston. He received in return “the farm of sweet wines,” a very lucrative monopoly, the withdrawal of which many years afterwards led to the boiling over of his discontent.
We have seen how his secret marriage in 1590 enraged the Queen, who at once vented her wrath upon his bride. Presently, however, he was once more in favour, and in the middle of the French campaign of 1591, Elizabeth recalled him to England for a week, which was passed in all sorts of festivities. She wept when he returned to the army, and laid upon him an injunction, to which he paid very little heed, that he must on no account incur any personal danger.
During the subsequent four years which Essex passed in England, occupied with his plans of ambition, it became clear to him that Burghley’s son, Sir Robert Cecil, was the chief obstacle to his advancement. All of those, therefore, who for one reason or another hated the house of Cecil, cast in their lot with Essex. Thus it happened that Cecil’s cousin, Francis Bacon, who had in vain besought first the father and then the son for some profitable office, became a close personal adherent of Essex. It was necessary to make choice of one party or the other if you were to hope for any preferment. In the years 1593 and 1594, accordingly, we find Essex again and again importuning Elizabeth for offices for Bacon. She had no very great confidence in Bacon, and bore him a grudge, moreover, because he had incautiously spoken in Parliament against a Government measure; so that Essex, to his great annoyance and disgust, met with a refusal to all his applications. As a consolation to his client, he made him a present of land to the value of not less than £1800. That was the price for which Bacon sold the property; Essex had believed it to be worth more.1 This gift, we see, was nearly twice as large as that which Southampton is reported to have made to Shakespeare (see above, p. 152).
Henceforward Bacon is to be regarded as an attentive and officious adherent of Essex, while Essex makes it a point of honour to obtain for him every recognition, preferment, and advantage. Again and again Bacon places his pen at the disposal of Essex. There are extant three long letters from Essex to his young cousin Lord Rutland, dated 1596, giving him excellent advice as to how to reap most profit from his first Continental tour, on which he was then setting out. In many passages of these letters we recognise Bacon’s ideas, and in some his style, his acknowledged writings containing almost identical parallels. The probability is that in these, as in many subsequent instances, Bacon supplied Essex with the ideas and the first draft of the letters. Well knowing that the Queen’s dissatisfaction with Essex arose chiefly from his desire for military glory and the popularity which follows in its train—well knowing, too, that Essex’s enemies at court were always representing this ambition to the Queen as a hindrance to the peace with Spain, which nevertheless must one day be concluded—Bacon thought it a good move for his protector to display unequivocally his care for the occupations of peace, the acquisition of useful knowledge, and other unmilitary advantages, in letters which, although private, were likely enough to come into her Majesty’s hands.
Francis Bacon’s brother, Anthony, about the same time attached himself closely (and more faithfully) to Essex. Through him the Earl established communications with all the foreign courts, so that for a time his knowledge of European affairs rivalled that of the Foreign Ministry itself.
The zeal which Essex had displayed in unravelling Doctor Roderigo Lopez’s suspected plot against Elizabeth (see above, p. 191) had placed him very high in her renewed favour. His heroic exploits at Cadiz ought to have strengthened his position; but his adversary, Robert Cecil, had during his absence acquired new power, and the rapacious Elizabeth complained of the smallness of the booty (it amounted to £13,000). As a matter of fact, Essex alone had wanted to follow up the advantage gained, and to seize the Indian fleet, which was allowed to escape: he had been out-voted in the council of war.
In order to overcome this new resentment on the Queen’s part, Bacon, who regarded his fate as bound up in that of the Earl, wrote a letter to Essex (dated October 4, 1596), full of good advice with respect to the attitude he ought to adopt towards Elizabeth, especially in order to disabuse her mind of the idea that his disposition was ungovernable—advice which Bacon himself, with his courtier temperament, might easily enough have followed, but which was too hard for the downright Essex, who had no sooner made humble submission than his pride again brought arrogant expressions to his lips.
At the close of the year 1596 Bacon’s protector was accused by his client’s mother, Lady Bacon, of misconduct with one of the ladies of the court. He denied the charge, but confessed to “similar errors.”
In 1597 Essex, who had been longing for a new command, undertook an expedition to the Azores with twenty ships and 6000 men—an enterprise which, largely owing to his inexperience and unfortunate leadership, was entirely unsuccessful. On his return he was very coldly received by the Queen, especially on the ground that towards the end of the expedition he had behaved ill to Raleigh, his colleague in command. In order to make his peace with Elizabeth, he sent her insinuating letters; but he was mortally offended when the eminent services of the old Lord Howard were rewarded by the appointment of Lord High Admiral. As the victor of Cadiz, he regarded himself as the one possible man for this distinction, which gave Howard precedence over him. He bemoaned his fate, however, to such purpose that he soon after secured the appointment of Earl Marshal of England, which in turn gave him precedence over Howard. He received a very valuable present—worth £7000—and for the first and last time induced the Queen to grant an audience to his mother, Lady Lettice, whose marriage with Leicester, twenty-three years before, was not yet forgiven, although in 1589, at the age of forty-nine, she had married a third husband, Sir Christopher Blount.
But Essex was not long at peace with the Queen and Court. In 1598 he was accused of illicit relations with no fewer than four ladies of the court (Elizabeth Southwell, Elizabeth Brydges, Mrs. Russell, and Lady Mary Howard), and the charge seems to have been well founded. At the same time violent dissensions broke out as to whether an attempt should or should not be made to bring the war with Spain to a close. Essex carried the day, and it was continued. It was at this time that he wrote a pamphlet defending himself warmly from the charge of desiring war at any price. It was not published until 1602, under the title: An apology of the Earle of Essex against those which jealously and maliciously tax him to be the hinderer of the peace and quiet of his country.
To the Queen’s birthday of this year (November 17, 1598) belongs an anecdote which shows what ingenuity Essex displayed in annoying his rival. As was the custom of the day, the leading courtiers tilted at the ring in honour of her Majesty, and each knight was required to appear in some disguise. It was known, however, that Sir Walter Raleigh would ride in his own uniform of orange-tawny medley, trimmed with black budge of lamb’s wool. Essex, to vex him, came to the lists with a body-guard of two thousand retainers all dressed in orange-tawny, so that Raleigh and his men seemed only an insignificant division of Essex’s splendid retinue.2
No later than June or July 1598 there occurred a new scene between Essex and the Queen in the Council, the most unpleasant and grotesque passage which had yet taken place between them. The occasion was trifling, being nothing more than the choice of an official to be despatched to Ireland. Essex was in the habit of permitting himself every liberty towards Elizabeth; and it was now, or soon after, that, as Raleigh relates, he told her “that her conditions were as crooked as her carcase.” Certain it is that, on this occasion, he turned his back to her with an expression of contempt. She retorted by giving him a box on the ear and bidding him “Go and be hanged.” He laid his hand upon his sword-hilt, declared that he would not have suffered such an insult from Henry the Eighth himself, and held aloof from the court for months.
Not till October was Essex forgiven, and even then with no heartiness or sincerity. The Irish rebellion, however, had to be put down, so a truce was called to all trivial quarrels. O’Neil, Earl of Tyrone, had got together an army, as he had often done before, and the whole island was in revolt. Public opinion, for no sufficient reason, pointed to Essex as the only man who could deal with the rebels. He, on his part, was by no means eager to accept the mission. It was of the utmost importance for every courtier, and especially for the head of a party, not to be out of the Queen’s sight more than was imperatively necessary. There was every reason to fear that his enemies of the opposite party would avail themselves of his absence in order so to blacken him in the eyes of his omnipotent mistress that he would never regain her favour. Elizabeth, at this juncture, like Louis XIV. in the following century, was monarch and constitution in one. Her displeasure meant ruin, her favour was the only source of prosperity. Therefore Essex did all he could to secure permission to return from the front whenever he pleased, in order to report personally to the Queen; and it was therefore that, in the following year, when he was forbidden to leave his post, he threw caution to the winds, and defied the prohibition. He knew that he was lost unless he could speak to Elizabeth face to face.
In March 1599 Essex took the command of the English troops; he was to suppress the rebellion and grant Tyrone his life only on condition of his complete surrender. But instead of carrying out his orders, which were to attack the rebels in their stronghold, Ulster, Essex remained for long inactive, and at last marched into Munster. One of his subordinate officers, Sir Henry Harington, suffered a disgraceful defeat, partly through his own incompetence, partly through the cowardice of his officers and men. He was tried by court-martial in Dublin, and he himself, and every tenth man of his command, were shot. The summer slipped away, and in its course the 16,000 men with whom Essex had come to Ireland were reduced by sickness and desertion to a quarter of their original number. Under these circumstances, Essex again deferred his march upon Ulster, so that the Queen, who was excessively displeased, expressly forbade him to return from Ireland without her permission.
When at last, in the beginning of September 1599, he confronted with his shrunken forces Tyrone’s unbreathed army, which had taken up a strong position to await the coming of the English, he abandoned his plan of attack, invited Tyrone to a parley, had half an hour’s conversation with him on the 6th of September, and concluded a fourteen weeks’ armistice, to be renewed every six weeks until the 1st of May. According to his own account, he promised Tyrone that this treaty should not be placed in writing, lest it should fall into the hands of the Spaniards and be used against him.
This was certainly not what Elizabeth had expected of the Irish campaign, which had opened with such a flourish of trumpets, and we cannot wonder that her anger was fierce and deep-seated. No sooner had she received the intelligence, than she forbade the conclusion of any treaty whatsoever.
Convinced that his enemies now had the entire ear of the Queen, Essex sought safety in once more disobeying Elizabeth’s express command. With a train of only six followers, which in the indictment against him afterwards grew into a body of 200 picked men, he crossed to England to attempt his own justification, rode direct to Nonsuch Palace, where Elizabeth then was, forced all the doors, and, travel-stained as he was, threw himself on his knees before the Queen, whom he surprised in her bed-chamber, with her hair undressed, at ten o’clock in the morning of the 28th of September.
It is a strong proof of the power which his personality still retained over Elizabeth, that at the first moment she felt nothing but pleasure in seeing him. As soon as he had changed his clothes, he was admitted to an audience, which lasted an hour and a half. As yet all seemed well. He dined at the Queen’s table and told her about Ireland and its people. But in the evening he was “commanded to keep his chamber” until the lords of the Council should have spoken with him; and a few days later he was confined to York House, with his friend the Lord Keeper, however, for his gaoler.
He presently fell ill, when it appeared that the Queen had by no means forgotten her former tenderness for him. In the middle of December she sent eight physicians to consult as to his case. They despaired of his life, but he recovered.
While matters thus looked very black for Essex, his nearest friends also were, of course, in disgrace. In a letter from Rowland Whyte to Sir Robert Sidney (dated October 11, 1599), we find the following significant statement: “My Lord Southhampton, and Lord Rutland come not to the court; the one doth but very seldome; they pass away the Tyme in London merely in going to Plaies euery day.”3 Southampton had married a cousin of Essex, and Rutland a daughter of Lady Essex by her first marriage with Sir Philip Sidney; so that both were in the same boat with their more distinguished kinsman.
On the 5th of June 1600, Essex was brought to trial—not before the Star Chamber, but, by particular favour, before a special court, consisting of four earls, two barons, and four judges, which assembled at the Lord Keeper’s residence, York House, the general public being excluded. The procedure was mainly dictated by the Queen’s wish to justify the arrest of Essex in the face of public opinion, which idolised him and regarded him as a martyr.
IV
The Fate of Essex and Southampton
The indictment did not press too severely upon Essex, did not as yet seek to discover treasonable motives for his inactivity in Ireland, but simply dwelt upon his disobedience to the Queen’s commands, and the dangerous and dishonourable agreement with Tyrone. Francis Bacon had not been allotted any part in the proceedings; but on his writing to the Queen and expressing his desire to serve her in this conjuncture, he was assigned the quite subordinate task of calling Essex to account for his indiscretion in accepting the dedication, in unbefitting terms, of a political pamphlet written by a certain Dr. Hayward. Bacon exceeded his instructions by dwelling at length on certain passionate expressions in a letter from Essex to the Lord Keeper, in which he had spoken of the hardness of the Queen’s heart and compared her princely wrath to a tempest. A man who was less nervously anxious to retain the Queen’s favour would have declined this commission on the ground of his close relations with Essex; Bacon begged for it, went farther than it required him to go, and is scarcely to be believed when he afterwards, in his Apology, represents himself as actuated by the wish ultimately to be of service to Essex with the Queen. Still, he evidently had not ceased to regard a reconciliation between Elizabeth and Essex as the most probable result, and he may perhaps have done his best in private conversations to soften the Queen’s resentment.
The sentence passed by the Lord Keeper was the not very severe one that Essex should, in the meantime, be deprived of all his offices, and remain a prisoner in Essex House “till it shall please her Majesty to release both this and all the rest.”
Bacon, who still did not think Essex irretrievably lost, now tried, in a carefully worded letter to him, to explain his attitude, and at once received from his magnanimous friend a forgiveness which was scarcely deserved. Bacon declared that, next to the interests of the Queen and the country, those of Essex always lay nearest his heart; and he now composed two documents: first, a very judicious letter, which Essex was partly to re-write and then to send to the Queen, and next a fictitious letter, a masterpiece of diplomacy, purporting to have been written by his brother, Anthony Bacon, Essex’s faithful adherent, to Essex himself. This letter, and Essex’s reply to it, which prove to admiration Bacon’s talent for reproducing the styles of two such different men, were to be copied by them respectively, and to be brought to the knowledge of the Queen, on whom they would no doubt produce the desired impression. With Machiavellian subtlety, these letters are carefully framed so as to place Francis Bacon himself in the light which should most appeal to the Queen: Essex is represented as regarding him as entirely won over to her side, and Anthony expresses the hope that she will show him the favour he has deserved “for that he hath done and suffered.”
Bacon did not succeed in inducing Elizabeth to restore Essex to his former position in her favour. In August, a couple of months after the date of the sentence, he was placed at full liberty; but access to Elizabeth’s person was denied him, and he was bidden to regard himself as still in disgrace. The consequence was that few now came about him except the members of his own family. Add to this, that he was over head and ears in debt, and that his monopoly of sweet wines, which had been his chief source of income, and on the renewal of which his financial rescue depended, ran out in the following month.
He wavered between fear and hope, and was forever “shifting from sorrow and repentance to rage and rebellion so suddenly, as well proveth him devoid of good reason as of right mind.” At one moment he is appealing to the Queen with the deepest humility in flattering letters, and at the next he is speaking of her—so his friend Sir John Harington reports—as “became no man who had mens sana in corpore sano.”
Then came the catastrophe. His sources of income were cut off, and his hope of the Queen’s relenting was broken. He was convinced—without reason, as it appears—that his enemies at court, who had deprived him of his wealth, had now laid a plot to deprive him of his life as well. He imagined, too, that Sir Robert Cecil was weaving intrigues to bring about the nomination of the Infanta of Spain as Elizabeth’s successor; and in his desperation he began to nurse the illusion that it was as necessary for the welfare of the state as for his own that he should gain forcible access to the Queen and secure the banishment from court of her present advisers. In his dread of being once more placed under arrest, and this time sent to the Tower, he determined, in February 1601, to carry out a plan he had been hatching, for taking the court by storm.
Southampton had at this time allowed the malcontents to make his residence, Drury House, their meeting-place for discussing the situation. Here the general plan was laid that they should seize upon Whitehall and that Essex should force his way into the Queen’s presence; the time was to depend upon the arrival of the Scotch envoy. On the 5th of February, four or five of the Earl’s friends presented themselves at the Globe Theatre, and promised the players eleven shillings more than they usually received if, on the 7th, they would perform the play of the deposition and death of King Richard II. (see above, p. 148). In the meantime, Essex had, in the beginning of February, assembled his adherents in his own residence, Essex House, and this induced the Government, which had heard with uneasiness of so large a concourse of people, to summon Essex before the Council. He received the summons on the 7th of February 1601, excused himself on the ground of indisposition, and at once called his friends together. On the same evening three hundred men were gathered at his house, although no real plan had as yet been determined upon. He informed them that his life was threatened by Cobham and Raleigh. On the morning of the 8th of February, the Lord Keeper with three other noblemen, commissioned by the Queen to inquire into what was going on, appeared at Essex House, and demanded to see the Earl. They told him that any complaints he might have to make to the Queen should receive attention, but that in the first place he must order his adherents to disperse.
Essex made only confused replies: his life was threatened, he was to be murdered in his bed, he had been treacherously dealt with, and so forth. In the meantime shouts arose from the crowd of his retainers, “Away, my lord; they abuse you, they betray you, they undo you; you lose time!” Essex led the noblemen into his house amid cries from his armed friends of “Kill them, kill them!” and “Shut them up! Keep them as pledges, cast the great seal out at the window!” He had them locked up in his library as prisoners or hostages. Then he came out again, and, amid cries of “To Court! to Court!” his party rushed through the gates. At the last moment, Essex learned that the Court was prepared, the watch was doubled, and every access to Whitehall was barred. They were therefore forced to attempt, in the first place, to stir up an insurrection in the city. But in order to pass through the streets horses were needed; they were sent for, but there was delay in procuring them. So impatient was every one by this time, that instead of awaiting their arrival, several hundred men, headed by Essex, Southampton, Rutland, Blount, and other gentlemen, but without any real leader or effective plan of action, set off for the city. Essex nowhere made any speech to the populace, but merely shouted, as though beside himself, that an attempt had been made to murder him. A good many people, indeed, appeared to join him, but none of them were armed, and they were in reality no more than onlookers. In the meantime, the Government despatched high officials on horseback to different quarters of the town to proclaim Essex a traitor; whereupon many of his following deserted him. Troops, too, were despatched against him, so that he, with the remainder of his band, with difficulty made their way by water back to Essex House, which was immediately besieged and fired upon. In the evening Essex and Southampton opened negotiations, and about ten o’clock surrendered with their little force, on the understanding that they should be courteously treated and accorded an honourable trial. The prisoners were taken to the Tower.
Francis Bacon now again plays a part, and this time a decisive one, in Essex’s history. There was no need for him to take any share in the trial; and even if his office had imposed it upon him, he ought in common decency to have refrained. He was neither Attorney-General nor Solicitor, but only one of the “Learned Counsel.” The very fact of his close friendship with Essex, however, made the Government anxious that he should appear in the case. He was at once advocate and witness, and was not summoned as one of the learned counsel, but expressly as “friend to the accused.”
On the 19th February, Essex and Southampton were brought before a court consisting of twenty-five peers and nine judges. Already, on the 17th, Thomas Leigh, a captain in Essex’s Irish army, for trying to gain access to the palace on the 8th February, had been beheaded in the Tower. Now that Essex’s cause was irreparably lost, Bacon had no other thought than to make himself useful to the party in power and prove his devotion to the Queen. The purport of his first speech against Essex was to prove that the plan of exciting an insurrection in the city, which was in reality an inspiration of the moment, had been the result of three months’ deliberation. He represented as false and hypocritical Essex’s assurance that he was driven to action by dread of the machinations of powerful enemies. He compared Essex to Cain, the first murderer, who also sought excuses for his deed, and to Pisistratus, who wounded himself and ran through the streets of Athens, crying that an attempt had been made upon his life. The Earl of Essex, he said, in reality had no enemies.
Essex rejoined that he could “call forth Mr. Bacon against Mr. Bacon.” Bacon, “being a daily courtier,” had promised to plead his cause with the Queen. He had with great address composed a letter to her, to be signed by Essex. He had also written another letter in his brother Anthony’s name, and an answer to it from Essex, both of which he was to show to the Queen; and in these “he laid down the grounds of my discontent, and the reasons I pretend against mine enemies, pleading as orderly for me as I could do myself.”
This rejoinder told sensibly against Bacon, and drove him in his reply to launch against his benefactor a new and much more malignant and dangerous comparison. He likened him to a renowned contemporary, also a nobleman and a rebel, the Duke of Guise: “It was not the company you carried with you, but the assistance you hoped for in the City which you trusted unto. The Duke of Guise thrust himself into the streets of Paris on the day of the Barricados in his doublet and hose, attended only with eight gentlemen, and found that help in the city which (thanks be to God) you failed of here. And what followed? The King was forced to put himself into a pilgrim’s weeds, and in that disguise to steal away to scape their fury.”
In view of Essex’s persistent denial that he had aspired to the throne or sought to do the Queen any injury, this parallel was a terrible one for him.
Both he and Southampton were found guilty and condemned to death.
The trial of Shakespeare’s protector, Southampton, and his signed confession, have a special interest for us. In a private letter from John Chamberlain, dated the 24th February, we read: “The Earl of Southampton spake very well (but methought somewhat too much, as well, as the other), and as a man that would fain live, pleaded hard to acquit himself; but all in vain, for it could not be: whereupon he descended to entreaty and moved great commiseration, and though he were generally well liked, yet methought he was somewhat too low and submiss, and seemed too loath to die before a proud enemy.”
Southampton, in his own confession, admits that immediately after his arrival in Ireland, he became aware of Essex’s letter to King James of Scotland, urging that, for his own sake, he ought not to permit the government of England to remain in the hands of his and Essex’s common enemies, proposing that he should, at a fitting opportunity, assemble an army, and promising that Essex, in so far as his duty to her Majesty permitted, should support the King with his Irish troops. James replied evasively, and nothing came of the plan, in which Southampton soon regretted that he had taken share. After losing his post in Ireland, he went to the Netherlands, and had no other desire than to regain the favour of the Queen, when Essex, his kinsman and friend, summoned him to London and requested his support in the plan he had formed for seeking access to her Majesty. With a heavy heart, he had consented, and engaged in the enterprise, not from any treachery or disrespect towards her Majesty, but solely on account of his affection for Essex. He repents and abhors his action, and promises on his knees to consecrate to the Queen’s service every day that remains to him, if she will but spare his life.
Southampton impresses us as a man of fiery but yielding character, entirely under the influence of a stronger personality; but he is never betrayed into a single unworthy word with respect to his kinsman and friend, whose cause he of course knew to be hopeless. His sentence was commuted to imprisonment for life.
Essex himself, at the end, endured with less resolution the cruel ordeal to which he was subjected. Finding himself condemned to death, and knowing that many of his closest friends had confessed to the Drury House discussions and designs, he lost all balance during the last days of his life, entirely forgot his dignity, and overwhelmed those around him, his sister, his friends, his secretary, and himself, with a torrent of reproaches.
In the meantime his enemies were not idle. Even Raleigh, on whose proud nature one is sorry, to find such a stain, impelled, of course, not only by their old enmity, but by Essex’s recent assertions that he was plotting against his life, wrote to Cecil, in his uneasiness lest Essex should be pardoned, and urged him “not to relent,” but to see that the sentence was carried out.
Elizabeth had first signed the death-warrant, and then recalled it. On the 24th February she signed it a second time, and on the 25th February 1601, Essex’s head was severed by three blows of the axe.
The populace could not be persuaded of their favourite’s guilt. They loathed his executioner, and detested those men who, like Bacon and Raleigh, had, by their malice, contributed to his downfall.
In order to justify itself, the Government issued an official Declaration touching the Treasons of the late Earl of Essex and his complices, in the composition of which Bacon bore a large part. It is very untrustworthy. James Spedding, indeed, one of Bacon’s best biographers, has tried to reconcile it with the facts; but he has not succeeded in explaining away the damnatory circumstance that everything is omitted which tended at the trial to establish Essex’s intention to use no violence, and to prove how entirely unpremeditated was the attempt to raise an insurrection in the city. Where passages of this nature occur in the records, all of which are preserved, we find the letters om, (meaning, of course, “to be omitted”) written in the margin, sometimes in Bacon’s hand, sometimes in that of the Attorney-General, Coke.1.
Bacon, with his brilliant intellectual equipment and his consciousness of his great powers, is not to be set down as simply a bad man. But his heart was cold, and he had no greatness of soul. He was absorbed, to a quite unworthy degree, in the pursuit of worldly prosperity. Always deeply in debt, he coveted above everything fine houses and gardens, massive plate, great revenues, and, as essential preliminaries, high offices and employments, titles and distinctions, which he might well have left to men of meaner worth. He passed half his life in the character of an office-seeker, met with one humiliating refusal after another, and returned humble thanks for the gracious denial. Once and once only, in his early days in Parliament, did he display some independence and rectitude; but when he saw that it gave offence in the highest places, he repented as bitterly as though he had been guilty of a sin against all political morality, and besought her Majesty’s forgiveness in terms that might have befitted a detected thief. With the like baseness and pusillanimity he now turned against Essex. He had often cited the maxim, which even Cicero criticised in the De Amicitia: “Love as if you should hereafter hate, and hate as if you should hereafter love.” He had never loved Essex otherwise. His excuse, if there can be any, for seeking advancement at all costs, must be found in the fact that he had the highest conception of his own value to science, and thought that it would be to the honour and advantage of learning that he, its high-priest, should be highly placed.
If we examine Essex’s portrait, with its regular beauty, its air of distinction and gentleness, the high forehead, the curly hair, and the carefully combed long light beard, we can readily understand that such a man, surrounded by a halo of adventurous renown, must become the idol of the populace, and that the military incompetence which he had twice displayed should not greatly affect the high esteem in which the people held him. He was in reality as little of a statesman as of a general; he was simply a free-speaking, passionate man, innocent of diplomacy, a brave soldier without an idea of tactics. He misunderstood his influence over Elizabeth, and did not realise that the Queen, while she felt the charm of his personality, contemned his political counsels. There was a good deal of the poet in his composition; he wrote pretty sonnets, was a patron of writers no less than of fighters, showed himself generous to profusion towards his friends and clients, and found, perhaps, his sincerest and most convinced admirers among the authors and poets of the day. Innumerable are the books which are dedicated to him.
There is no doubt that after his melancholy death, a marked decline was apparent in the Queen’s courage and spirits. The legend, however, that it was the fact of his execution which she took so much to heart, is scarcely to be believed, and the story about Essex’s ring, which was conveyed to her too late, is unquestionably a fable. It is certain, on the other hand—for the Duc de Biron, the envoy of Henri IV., had no motive for telling a falsehood—that on the 12th September 1601, after a conversation about Essex in which she jested over her departed favourite, Elizabeth opened a box and took out of it Essex’s skull, which she showed to Biron. Ten months later, this favourite of the French king—whose name Shakespeare had borrowed for the hero of his first comedy—met with the very fate of Essex, and for a similar crime.
Bacon, no doubt, mourned Essex’s disappearance even less than did the Queen. After Elizabeth’s death, however, when the friends of Essex stood in the highest favour with the new King, he was shameless enough to send a letter to Southampton (who, though not yet released from the Tower, was already regarded as a power in the land), in which, after having expressed his fear of being met with distrust, he concludes thus: “It is as true as a thing that God knoweth, that this great change hath wrought in me no other change towards your Lordship than this, that I may safely be now that which I was truly before.”
The circumstances of Essex’s condemnation were of course not known in the London of those days so minutely as we now know them. But we see, as already indicated, that public opinion turned vehemently against Bacon, regarding and despising him as the traitor to his lord who, more than any one else, had brought about his unhappy end. We see that Raleigh, in spite of his greatness, now became one of the most unpopular men in England; and we observe that, notwithstanding all that was done to disparage him in the general regard, Essex’s memory continued to be idolised by the great mass of the people.
If we now inquire in what relation Shakespeare stood to these events which so absorbed the English people, it seems more than probable that he, who had so recently been so intimately associated with Southampton, and cannot therefore have been very far from Essex, followed the accused with his sympathy, felt a lively resentment towards their enemies, and took their fate much to heart. And when we observe that just at this juncture a revolution occurs in Shakespeare’s hitherto cheerful habit of mind, and that he begins to take ever gloomier views of human nature and of life, we cannot but recognise the probability that grief for the fate which had overtaken Essex, Southampton, and their fellows, was one of the sources of his growing melancholy.
V
The Dedication of the Sonnets
We naturally looked for one source of his henceforth deepening melancholy in outward events, in the political drama which reached its crisis and catastrophe in 1601; but it is still more imperative that we should look into his private and personal experiences for the ultimate cause of the revolution in his soul. We must inquire what light his works throw upon his private circumstances and state of mind at this period.
Now, we find among Shakespeare’s works one which, more than any other, enables us to look into his inmost soul—I mean his Sonnets. It is to these remarkable poems that we must mainly address ourselves for the information we require. Public events may, indeed, cast a certain measure of light or shadow over a man’s inward world of thought and feeling; but they are never the efficient factors in determining the happiness or melancholy of his fundamental mood. If he has personal reasons for feeling that fate is against him, the utmost serenity in the political atmosphere will not dissipate his gloom; and, conversely, if a deep joy abides within him, and he has personal reasons for feeling himself favoured by fortune, then public discontent will be powerless to disturb the harmony in his soul. But his depression will, of course, be doubly severe if public events and private experiences combine to cast a gloom over his mind.
Shakespeare’s “sugred Sonnets” are first mentioned in the well-known passage in Meres’s Palladis Tamia (1598), where they are spoken of as passing from hand to hand “among his private friends.” In the following year the two important Sonnets now numbered cxxxviii. and cxliv. were printed (with readings subsequently revised) in a collection of poems named The Passionate Pilgrim, dishonestly published, and falsely attributed to Shakespeare, by a bookseller named Jaggard. For the next ten years we find no mention of Sonnets by Shakespeare, until, in 1609, a bookseller named Thomas Thorpe issued a quarto book entitled Shakespeares Sonnets. Neuer before Imprinted—an edition which the poet himself certainly cannot have revised for the press, but which may possibly have been printed from an authentic manuscript.
To this first edition is prefixed a dedication, written by the bookseller in the most contorted style, which has given rise to theories and conjectures without number. It runs as follows:—
TO. THE. ONLIE. BEGETTER. OF
THESE. INSVING. SONNETS.
MR. W. H. ALL. HAPPINESSE.
AND. THAT. ETERNITIE.
PROMISED.
BY.
OVR. EVER-LIVING. POET.
WISHETH.
THE. WELL-WISHING.
ADVENTVRER. IN.
SETTING.
FORTH.
T. T.
The meaning of the signature is clear enough, since “A booke called Shakespeare’s Sonnets” was entered in the Stationers’ Register on May 20, 1609, under the name of Thomas Thorpe. On the other hand, throughout this century and the last, there has been no end to the discussion as to what is meant by “onlie begetter” (only producer, or only procurer, or only inspirer?); and numberless have been the attempts to identify the “Mr. W. H.” who is so designated. While the far-fetched expression “begetter” has been subjected to equally far-fetched interpretations, the most impossible guesses have been hazarded as to the initials W. H., and the most incredible conjectures put forward as to the person to whom the Sonnets are addressed.
Strange as it may seem, it is nevertheless the fact, that during the first eighty years of the eighteenth century the Sonnets were taken as being all addressed to one woman, all written in honour of Shakespeare’s mistress. It was not till 1780 that Malone and his friends declared that more than one hundred of the poems were addressed to a man. This view of the matter, however, did not even then command general assent, and so late as 1797 Chalmers seriously maintained that all the Sonnets were addressed to Queen Elizabeth, who was also, he believed, the inspirer of Spenser’s famous Amoretti, in reality addressed to the lady who afterwards became his wife. Not until the beginning of this century did people in general understand, what Shakespeare’s contemporaries can certainly never have doubted, that the first hundred and twenty-six Sonnets are directed to a young man.
It now followed almost of necessity that this young man should be identified with the “Mr. W. H.” who is described as the “onlie begetter” of the poems. The second group, indeed, is addressed to a woman; but the first group is much the larger, and follows immediately upon the dedication.
Some have taken the word “begetter” to signify the man who procured the manuscript for the bookseller, and have conjectured that the initials are those of William Hathaway, a brother-in-law of Shakespeare’s (Neil, Elze). Dr. Farmer last century advanced the claims of William Hart, the poet’s nephew, who, as was afterwards discovered, was not born until 1600. The mere fact that, by a whim or oversight of which there are many other examples in the first edition, the word “hues,” in Sonnet xx., is printed in italics with a capital and spelt Hews, led Tyrwhitt to assume the existence of an otherwise unknown Mr. William Hughes, to whom he supposed the Sonnets to have been addressed. People have even been found to maintain that “Mr. W. H.” referred to Shakespeare himself, some taking the “H.” to be a mere misprint for “S.,” others holding that the initials meant “Mr. William Himself” (Barnstorff).
Serious and competent critics for a long time inclined to the opinion that the “W. H.” was a transposition of “H. W.,” and represented none other than Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, whose close relation to the poet had long been known, and to whom his two narrative poems had been dedicated. This theory was held by Drake and Gervinus. But so early as 1832, Boaden advanced some objections to this view. He urged that Southampton never possessed the personal beauty incessantly dwelt upon in these poems. Finally, the Sonnets fit neither his age, nor his character, nor his history, full of movement, activity, and adverse fortune, to which no smallest allusion appears.
There is not the slightest doubt that these poems are addressed to a patron of rank; but our knowledge of the history of Shakespeare is so inconsiderable, that with regard to his patrons at the court, we have nothing to judge from but the dedications of Venus and of Lucrece to Southampton, and the dedication of the First Folio to Lords Pembroke and Montgomery, in which reference is made to the favour they had always shown these plays and their author, while he was alive. Bright and Boaden had already, in 1819 and 1832 respectively, advanced the opinion that Pembroke was the hero of the Sonnets. This view was shared by almost every one (Charles Armitage, Brown Hallan, Massey, Henry Brown, Minto, W. M. Rossetti), and towards the end of the nineteenth century this opinion could be considered as having established itself, since it was concurred in by the chief Shakespeare students (Dowden), and seemed to have obtained its final confirmation in the penetrating criticisms of Thomas Tyler (1890). All the above-mentioned authors agree about the fact, that there is only one person whose age, history, appearance, virtues, and vices accord in every respect with those of the young man to whom the Sonnets are addressed, just as his initials agree with those of the “Mr. W. H.” to whom they are dedicated, and that is the young William Herbert, who in 1601 became Earl of Pembroke. Born on April 8, 1580, he came to London in the autumn of 1597 or spring of 1598, and very soon, in all probability, made the acquaintance of Shakespeare, whose patron, as the first folio edition of the dramas prove, he remained until the poet’s death.
The way by which we arrive at William Herbert is this: The Sonnets cxxxv. and cxxxvi. as well as cxliii. contain plays on the word will, and the name Will, obscure as they are, they show that the friend whom the Sonnets glorify had the same Christian name as Shakespeare. This was true of Pembroke, but not of Southampton, whose Christian name was Henry. Shakespeare’s Sonnets are not isolated poems. Though we are not certain whether the order of the Sonnets in the original edition is the sequence chosen by the poet himself, still it is evident that they stand in an intimate relation to each other, a thought or motive suggested in one being developed more at length in the next or one of the subsequent Sonnets. The grouping does not seem to be arbitrary; at any rate, it is so far careful that all attempts to alter it have only rendered the poems more obscure. The first seventeen Sonnets, for example, form a closely interwoven group; in all of them, the friend is exhorted not to die unmarried, but to leave the world an heir to his beauty, which must otherwise fade and perish with him. Sonnets c.-cxxvi., which are inseparably connected, turn on the reunion of two friends after a coldness or misunderstanding has for a time severed them. Finally, Sonnets cxxvii.-clii. are all addressed, not to a friend, but to a mistress, the Dark Lady whose relation to the two friends has already formed the subject of earlier Sonnets.
Sonnet cxliv.—one of the most interesting, inasmuch it depicts in straightforward terms the poet’s situation between friend and mistress—had already appeared, as above mentioned, in The Passionate Pilgrim (1599). It characterises the friend as the poet’s “better angel,” the mistress as his “worser spirit,” and expresses the painful suspicion that the friend is entangled in the Dark Lady’s toils—
“I guess one angel in another’s hell;”
so that both at once are lost to him, he through her and she through him.
But precisely the same theme is treated in Sonnet xl., which turns on the fact that the friend has robbed Shakespeare of his “love.” These two Sonnets must thus be of the same date; and from Sonnet xxxiii., which relates to the same circumstances, we see that the friendship had existed only a very short time when it was overshadowed by the intrigue between the friend and the mistress:—
“But out, alack! he was but one hour mine.”
At what time, then, did the friendship begin? The date may be determined with some confidence, even apart from the question as to who the friend was. We know that Shakespeare must have written sonnets before 1598, since Meres published in that year his often-quoted words about the “sugred Sonnets”; but we cannot possibly determine which Sonnets these were, or whether we possess them at all, since those which passed from hand to hand “among his private friends” may very possibly have disappeared. If they are included in our collection, we may take them to be those in which we find frequent parallels to lines in Venus and Adonis and the early plays, though these coincidences are by no means sufficient, as some of the German critics1 would have us believe, finally to establish the date of the Sonnets in which they occur. However, they vary greatly in quality, and may have been written at different periods. The first group, with its reiterated appeal (seventeen times repeated) to the friend, to leave the world a living copy of his beauty, is unquestionably the least valuable. The personal feelings of the poet do not come much into play here, and though these poems may have been addressed to William Herbert in 1598, it is not impossible, taking into account the many analogies in thought and mode of expression to be found in them and in Venus and Adonis and Romeo and Juliet, that they were produced several years before, and in this case, addressed to Southampton. Thomas Tyler believed he had satisfactorily established the date of one important group by showing that a passage in Meres’s book had influenced the conception and expression of one of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. It cannot reasonably be doubted that Shakespeare saw Palladis Tamia; the author perhaps sent him a copy; and in any case he could not but have read with interest the warm and sincere commendation there bestowed upon himself. Now there occurs in Meres’s book a passage in which, after quoting Ovid’s
“Jamque opus exegi, quod nec Jovis ira, nec ignis,
Nec poterit ferrum, nec edax abolere vetustas,”
and Horace’s
“Exegi momentum aere perennius,”
the critic goes on to apply these words to his contemporaries Sir Philip Sidney, Spenser, Daniel, Drayton, Shakespeare, and Warner, and then winds up with a Latin eulogy of the same writers, composed by himself, partly in prose and partly in verse. But on reading attentively Shakespeare’s Sonnet lv., whose resemblance to the well-known lines of Horace must have struck every reader, we find several expressions from this passage in Palladis Tamia, and even from the lines written by Meres himself, reappearing in it. The Sonnet must thus have been written at earliest in the end of 1598—Meres’s book was entered in the Stationers’ Register in September—and possibly not till the beginning of 1599. Since, then, the following Sonnet (lvi.), which must date from about the same time, speaks of the friendship as newly formed—
“Let this sad interim like the ocean be
Which parts the shores, where two contracted new
Come daily to the banks”—
we may confidently assign to the year 1598 the first contract of amity between the poet and his friend. However, all this is by no means conclusive. Shakespeare may have known Horace from other sources than Meres, and the quotation from Ovid, together with the expressions used by Meres, he certainly had encountered in Golding’s translation of the Metamorphoses, with which he was familiar.
The historical allusions in Sonnets c.-cxxvi., which form a continuous poem, are not, indeed, by any means clear or easy to interpret; but Sonnet civ. dates the whole group definitely enough, in the statement that three years have elapsed since the first meeting of the friends:—
“Three winters cold
Have from the forests shook three summers’ pride;
Three beauteous springs to yellow autumn turn’d
In process of the seasons have I seen;
Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burn’d,
Since first I saw you fresh, which yet are green.”
Thus we must assign this important group to the year 1601; and this being so, it must also appear probable that the line—
“The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured “—
alludes to the fact that Elizabeth (for whom, in the mode of the day, the moon was the accepted symbol) had come unharmed through the dangers of Essex’s rebellion—the more so as the beautiful lines—
“Now with the drops of this most balmy time
My love looks fresh “—
show that the poem was written in the spring. It would be unreasonable to infer from this allusion any ill-will on the poet’s part towards Essex and his comrades. Still less can we follow Tyler, when, by the aid of a complex scaffolding of hypotheses built up, in German rather than in English fashion, around Sonnets cxxiv. and cxxv., he laboriously works up to the air-drawn conjecture that Shakespeare is here expressing himself offensively towards his former patron Southampton, now a prisoner in the Tower, and even that Southampton is aimed at in the line about those “who have lived for crime.” Equally baseless, of course, is the corollary which would find in Sonnet cxxv. Shakespeare’s defence against an accusation of faithlessness towards the man to whom he had written, seven years earlier, in the dedication of Lucrece, “The love I dedicate Your Lordship is without end.” Nor It is absurd to construct a whole repulsive and fantastic romance on the basis of a single obscure phrase.
Turning now from the poems to the person to whom they are believed to have been addressed, this is what we learn of him:—
William Herbert, son of Henry Herbert and his third wife, the celebrated Mary Sidney, had for his tutor as a boy the poet Samuel Daniel; entered at Oxford in 1593, where he remained for two years; received permission in April 1597, when he was seventeen years old, to live in London, but, as we gather from letters of the period, does not seem to have come up to town until the spring of 1598.
In August 1597, negotiations were conducted by letter between his parents and Lord Burghley with a view to his marriage with Burghley’s grand-daughter Bridget Vere, a daughter of the Earl of Oxford. It is true that she was only thirteen, but William Herbert was quite prepared to enter upon the engagement. He was to travel abroad before the marriage. Although his mother, the Countess of Pembroke, perhaps divining her son’s too in flammable nature, and therefore wanting to see him married betimes, was much in favour of this project, and although the Earl of Oxford was pleased with the young man and praised his “many good partes,” difficulties arose of which we have no record, and the plan came to nothing.
In London, young Herbert lived at Baynard’s Castle, close to the Blackfriars Theatre, and may thus have been brought in contact with the players. It is more probable, however, that so brilliant a woman as “Sidney’s sister, Pembroke’s mother,” should have aroused his interest in Shakespeare; and in that case the poet, in all probability, made the acquaintance of this distinguished and discerning patroness of art and artists as early as 1598. Herbert’s father, who died soon afterwards, was already an invalid.
It appears that in August 1599 Herbert “followed the camp” at the annual musters, attending her Majesty with two hundred horse, and “swaggering it among the men of war.”
He is from the first described as a bad courtier. Rowland Whyte writes of him at this time: “He was much blamed for his cold and weeke Maner of pursuing her Majesties favour, having had soe good steps to lead him unto it. There is want of Spirit and Courage laid to his charge, and that he is a melancholy young man.” We may gather from this what fiery devotion every handsome and well-born young man was expected to pay to the elderly Queen. Soon after, however, it appears from a letter from his father to Elizabeth that she must have expressed herself highly satisfied with the young man, and we also learn that he was “exceedingly beloued at Court of all Men.” He appears to have been very handsome, and to have possessed all the fascination which so often belongs to an amiable mauvais sujet. Clarendon says of him, in the first book of his History of the Rebellion, that “he was immoderately given up to women,” and that “he indulged himself in pleasures of all kind, almost in all excesses.” Clarendon remarks, however, what is of particular interest for us, that the young Pembroke possessed a good deal of self-control: “He retained such a power and jurisdiction over his very appetite, that he was not so much transported with beauty and outward allurements as with those advantages of the mind as manifested an extraordinary wit, and spirit, and knowledge, and administered great pleasure in the conversation. To these he sacrificed himself, his precious time, and much of his fortune.”
In November 1599, Herbert had an hour’s private audience with Elizabeth. Whyte, who relates this, remarks that he now stands high in the Queen’s favour, “but he greatly wants advise.” He passed the rest of the winter in the country, suffering from an illness which seems to have taken the form of ague, with incessant headaches.
Tyler is inclined, not without reason, to assign Sonnets xc.-xcvi. to this period. Shakespeare’s complaints of his friend’s “desertion” may refer to his life at Court; the expressions in Sonnet xci. as to horses, hawks, and hounds, perhaps point to the young man’s absorption in sport. The following Sonnets dwell unequivocally upon discreditable rumours as to the friend’s life and conduct. Here appears the above-quoted (p. 172) line:—
“Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.”
Here occurs the couplet:—
“How like Eve’s apple doth thy beauty grow,
If thy sweet virtue answer not thy show!”
And, in spite of all the loving forbearance which the poet manifests towards his friend, he seems to imply that the ugly rumours were not unfounded:—
“How sweet and lovely dost thou make the shame,
Which, like a canker in the fragrant rose,
Doth spot the beauty of thy budding name!
O, in what sweets dost thou thy sins enclose!
That tongue that tells the story of thy days,
(Making lascivious comments on thy sport,)
Cannot dispraise but in a kind of praise;
Naming thy name blesses an ill report.
There was an improvement in the health of Herbert’s father during the year 1600, yet Lord and Lady Pembroke were absent from London all summer, remaining at their country seat, Wilton. In the month of May, Herbert, accompanied by Sir Charles Danvers, went to Gravesend to pay his respects to Lady Rich and Lady Southampton. This visit proves clearly that there was not, as Tyler’s above-mentioned interpretation of certain Sonnets would lead us to assume, any coolness between Herbert and the houses of Essex and Southampton. It is also worth noting that his companion on this excursion was so intimately associated with the chiefs of the malcontent party, that in the following year he had to pay with his life for his share in the rebellion.
In the accounts of a splendid and very much talked-of wedding, between a Lord Herbert and one of the Queen’s ladies, which took place at Blackfriars in June 1600, we for the first time come upon William Herbert’s name in company with that of the lady who seems to be the heroine of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. The bride, Mrs. Ann Russell, was conducted to church by William Herbert and Lord Cobham. After supper there was a masque, in which eight splendidly dressed ladies executed a new and unusual dance. Among these are mentioned Mrs. Fitton, and two of the ladies-in-waiting whose names had shortly before been coupled with that of Essex (Mrs. Southwell and Mrs. Bess Russell). Each had “a skirt of Cloth of Siluer, a Mantell of Carnacion Taffete cast vnder the Arme, and their Haire loose about their Shoulders, curiously knotted and interlaced.” The leader of this double quadrille was Mrs. Fitton. She approached the Queen and “woed her to dawnce; her Majestie asked what she was; ‘Affection,’ she said. ‘Affection!’ said the Queen, ‘affection is false.’ Yet her Majestie rose and dawnced.”
Later in the year Whyte remarks in his letters that Herbert shows no “disposition to marry”; and we find him in September and October 1600 vigorously training at Greenwich for a Court tournament.
On January 19, 1601, his father’s death made William Herbert Earl of Pembroke. Very soon afterwards (the matter is mentioned in a letter from Robert Cecil so early as February 5) he got into deep disgrace over a love affair—evidently that which forms the subject of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. He had for some time carried on a secret intrigue with the aforesaid Mary Fitton, a maid-of-honour who stood high in the Queen’s good graces; and the secret now came to light. “Mistress Fitton,” writes Cecil, “is proved with child, and the Earl of Pembroke, being examined, confesseth a fact, but utterly renounceth all marriage. I fear they will both dwell in the Tower awhile, for the Queen hath vowed to send them thither.” In another contemporary letter it is stated that “in that tyme when that Mres Fytton was in great fauor... and duringe the time yt the Earle of Pembrooke fauord her, she would put off her head tire and tucke vp her clothes and take a large white cloake, and march as though she had bene a man to meete the said Earle out of the Courte.”
Mary Fitton gave birth to a still-born son; Pembroke lay for a month in the Fleet Prison, and was banished from Court. He shortly afterwards applied through Cecil for leave to travel abroad. The Queen’s displeasure, he says, is “a hell” to him; he hopes the Queen will not carry her resentment so far as to bind him to the country which has now become “hateful to him of all others.” The permission to travel seems to have been given and then revoked. In the middle of June he writes that imploring letter to Cecil in which the reference to “her whose Incomparable beauty was the onely sonne of my little world,” was designed to touch Elizabeth’s hard heart; for Pembroke, it is plain, had now realised that what had offended her Majesty was not so much his intrigue with Mary Fitton as the fact of his having overlooked her own much higher perfections. But the compliments came too late. Elizabeth, as we have already seen in the case of Essex, knew how to make the objects of her resentment suffer in that most sensitive point—the pocket. The “patent of the Forest of Dean,” which had been held by the late Lord Pembroke, expired with him, and the son expected, according to use and wont, to have it renewed in his favour; but it was assigned to Pembroke’s rival, Sir Edward Winter, and not until seven years later, under James, did Pembroke recover it.
Pembroke continued in disgrace, his renewed applications for permission to travel were persistently refused, and he was ordered to regard himself as banished from Court, and to “keep house in the country.” It is this overshadowing of Pembroke’s fortunes in 1601 which explains the temporary breaking-off of his relations with Shakespeare in London, indicated by the “Envoy” with which Sonnet cxxvi. ends the series addressed to the Friend.
The close and affectionate relation between them was no doubt revived under James. This appears clearly enough from the Dedication of the First Folio. Let us now cast a rapid glance over the remainder of Pembroke’s career.
His father’s death placed him in possession of a large fortune, but the irregularity of his life left him seldom free from money embarrassments. In 1604 he married Lady Mary, the seventh daughter of Lord Talbot, and the marriage was celebrated with a tournament. His wife brought him a large property, but it was thought at the time that he paid very dear for it in having to take her into the bargain. The marriage was far from happy.
Pembroke shared the love of literature which had distinguished his mother and his uncle, Sir Philip Sidney. According to Aubrey, he was “the greatest Mæcenas to learned men of any peer of his time or since.” Among his “learned” friends were the poets Donne, and Daniel, and Massinger, who was the son of his father’s steward. Ben Jonson composed a eulogistic epigram in his honour, as well he might, for every New Year Pembroke sent Ben £20 to buy books with. Inigo Jones is said to have visited Italy at his expense, and was frequently employed by him. Davison’s Poetical Rhapsody and numerous other books are dedicated to him. Chapman, who was among his intimates, inscribed a sonnet to him at the close of his translation of the Iliad. This fact is of particular interest to us, because Chapman (as Professor Minto succeeded in establishing) is clearly the rival poet who paid court to Pembroke, won his goodwill and admiration, and thereby aroused jealousy and melancholy self-criticism in Shakespeare’s breast, as we read in Sonnets lxxviii.-lxxxvi.2.
It is especially on Sonnet lxxxvi. that Minto bases his identification of the rival poet with Chapman. The very opening line, referring to the “proud full sail of his great verse,” suggests at once the fourteen-syllable measure in which Chapman translated the Iliad. Chapman was full of a passionate enthusiasm for the art of poetry, which he lost no opportunity of glorifying; and he laid claim to supernatural inspiration. In the Dedication to his poem The Shadow of the Night (1594), he speaks with severe contempt of the presumption of those who “think Skill so mightily pierced with their loves that she should prostitutely show them her secrets, when she will scarcely be looked upon by others but with invocation, fasting, watching—yea, not without having drops of their souls, like a heavenly familiar. Hence Shakespeare’s lines—
“Was it his spirit, by spirits taught to writ
Above a mortal pitch that struck me dead?”
and the expression—
“He, nor that affable familiar ghost
Which nightly gulls him with intelligence.”
After the accession of James, Pembroke immediately took a high position at the new Court. Before the year 1603 was out, he was a Knight of the Garter, and had entertained the King at Wilton. He rose from one high post to another, until in 1615 he became Lord Chamberlain; but he continued to the last the dissipated life of his youth. He devoted large sums of money to the exploration and colonisation of America. Places were named after him in the Bermudas and Virginia. In 1614, morever, he became a member of the East India Company.
He opposed the Spanish Alliance, and was no friend to the King’s foreign policy. He is thought to have instigated in some measure the attack on the Mexico fleet for which Raleigh paid so dear. He was an opponent of Bacon as Lord Chancellor, and in 1621 advocated an inquiry into the charges of corruption which were brought against him; but afterwards, like Southampton, displayed great moderation, and spoke strongly against the proposal to deprive Bacon of his peerage.
He stood by the King’s deathbed in March 1625, had a serious illness in 1626, and died in April 1630 “of an apoplexy after a full and cheerful supper.” Donne in 1660 published some poems.
VI
The “Dark Lady” of the Sonnets — Mary Fitton
In speaking of Love’s Labours Lost, I remarked that it was not difficult to distinguish the original text of the comedy from the portions added and altered during the revision of 1598; and I cited (p. 38) several instances in which the distinction was clear. Especial emphasis was laid on the fact that Biron’s (or, as the context shows, Biron-Shakespeare’s) rapturous panegyrics of love in the fourth act belong to the later date.
At another place (p. 83) it was pointed out that the two Rosalines of Love’s Labour’s Lost (end of the third act) and of Romeo and Juliet (ii. 4) were in all probability drawn from the same model, since she is in both places described as a blonde with black eyes. In the original text of Love’s Labour’s Lost (Act iii.) she is expressly called—
“A whitely wanton with a velvet brow,
With two pitch balls stuck in her face for eyes.”
All the more surprising must it seem that during the revision the poet quite obviously had before his eyes another model, repeatedly described as “black,” whose dark complexion indeed, so uncommon and un-English that it was apt to be thought ugly, is insisted upon as strongly as that of the “Dark Lady” in the Sonnets. Immediately before Biron bursts forth into his great hymn to Eros, in which Shakespeare so clearly makes him his mouthpiece, the King banters him as to the murky hue of the object of his adoration:—
“King. By heaven, thy love is black as ebony.
Biron. Is ebony like her? O wood divine!
A wife of such wood were felicity.
O! who can give an oath? where is a book?
That I may swear beauty doth beauty lack,
If that she learn not of her eye to look:
No face is fair, that is not full so black.
King. O paradox! Black is the badge of hell,
The hue of dungeons, and the scowl of night;
And beauty’s crest becomes the heavens well.”
Biron’s answer to this is highly remarkable; for it is exactly what Shakespeare himself says, in Sonnet cxxvii., to the advantage of his dark beauty:—
“Biron. Devils soonest tempt, resembling spirits of light.
O! if in black my lady’s brows be deck’d,
It mourns, that painting, and usurping hair,
Should ravish doters with a false aspect;
And therefore is she born to make black fair.
Her favour turns the fashion of the days;
For native blood is counted painting now,
And therefore red, that would avoid dispraise,
Paints itself black, to imitate her brow.”
The Sonnet runs thus:—
“In the old age black was not counted fair,
Or if it were, it bore not beauty’s name;
But now is black beauty’s successive heir,
And beauty slander’d with a bastard shame;
For since each hand hath put on nature’s power,
Fairing the foul with art’s false borrow’d face,
Sweet beauty hath no name, no holy bower,
But is profan’d, if not lives in disgrace.
Therefore my mistress’ eyes are raven black,
Her eyes so suited, and they mourners seem
At such, who, not born fair, no beauty lack,
Slandering creation with a false esteem:
Yet so they mourn, becoming of their woe,
That every tongue says, beauty should look so.”
It appears, then, that the dark beauty in Love’s Labour’s Lost must also have had a living model; and when we observe that the revision, as the title-page tells us, took place when the comedy was to be presented before her Highness at Christmas 1597, and further, that the dark Rosaline in the play is maid-of-honour to a princess who is called, in words strongly suggesting a passing compliment to the Queen, “a gracious moon”—we can scarcely avoid the conclusion that the beautiful brunette must have been one of the Queen’s ladies, and that the whole end of the fourth act was addressed to her over the heads of the uninitiated spectators. Who she was, moreover, we can now conjecture with tolerable security. We know quite well which of the Queen’s ladies brought Pembroke into disgrace, and we are no less certain that the lady who enthralled Pembroke was the black-eyed brunette whom Shakespeare, in his own words, loved to “distraction” and to “madding fever.”
On the monument of Mary Fitton’s mother in Gawsworth Church, in Cheshire, a highly coloured bust of Mary Fitton herself1 led Tyler to assert that she must have been a marked brunette. It is true that the bust cannot give us a very accurate idea of her appearance in the year 1600, since it was executed in 1626, when she was forty-eight; but the complexion is dark, the high-piled hair and the large eyes black. That it does not suggest a beautiful original is a point in favour of its identity with the Dark Lady as described in Sonnet cxli.:—
“In faith, I do not love thee with mine eyes,
For they in thee a thousand errors note;
But ’tis my heart that loves what they despise,
Who in despite of view is pleas’d to dote.
Nor are mine ears with thy tongue’s tune delighted;
Nor tender feeling to base touches prone,
Nor taste, nor smell, desire to be invited
To any sensual feast with thee alone:
But my five wits nor my five senses can
Dissuade one foolish heart from serving thee,
Who leaves unsway’d the likeness of a man,
Thy proud heart’s slave and vassal wretch to be:
Only my plague thus far I count my gain,
That she that makes me sin awards me pain.”
The Rev. W. A. Harrison has discovered a family tree from which it appears that Mary Fitton, born June 24, 1578, became a maid-of-honour to Elizabeth in 1595, at the age of seventeen. Thus she was nineteen years old when, at the Court festivities of 1597, Shakespeare’s company acted Love’s Labour’s Lost, with the panegyric of the dark beauty, Rosaline. She must have made the acquaintance of the poet and player, then thirty-three years old, at earlier Court entertainments. Who can doubt that it was she, with her high position and daring spirit, who made the first advances?
That the Dark Lady did not live with Shakespeare appears clearly enough in the Sonnets—for instance, in Sonnet cxliv. (“but being both from me”). It may be gathered from Sonnet cli., with the expressions “triumphant prize,” “proud of this pride,” that she was greatly his superior in rank and station, so that her conquest for some time filled him with a sense of triumph. Tyler even believes that there is an actual allusion to her name in Sonnet cli., which, as a whole, abounds in such daring equivoques as would be impossible in modern poetry.
It was thought surprising that in Sonnet clii., in which Shakespeare calls himself forsworn because he loves his lady although married to another, he also states expressly that she too is married, calling her “twice forsworn,” since she has not only broken her “bed-vow,” but broken her “new faith” to Shakespeare himself. It seemed difficult to reconcile this with the fact that Mrs. Fitton (“Mistress” in those days being applicable to unmarried no less than to married women) was always called by her father’s name. She was married in 1607 to a certain William Polwheele, with whom she appears to have had a love-intrigue before the wedding. After the death of her husband she was married a second time to John Lougher.
However, it must now be pointed out that a work, published in 1897, which for the first time gave a trustworthy account of Mary Fitton’s life, has rendered it excessively improbable that she should be identical with the Dark Lady of the Sonnets. The title of the work is: Gossip from a Muniment-Room, being Passages in the lives of Anne and Mary Fitton, 1574-1618; it is published by Lady Newdigate-Newdegate, who is married to a descendant of the elder sister, Anne Fitton, and it contains many interesting letters to this lady, with other communications from the family-archives. Here it is proved—in spite of Tyler’s attempted contradiction—that the two well-preserved portraits of Mary Fitton at Arbury show that she was not dark at all, but had a light complexion, brown hair, and grey eyes.
From Mary Fitton herself there is only a brief note contained in the collection, but her name is often mentioned in the letters. They prove, that at the beginning of her career as maid-of-honour to the Queen, she had an admirer in the elderly court-functionary, Sir William Knollys, inspector of the household, who later, under King James, became a very potent personality as Lord Knollys; and it was evidently arranged between them that they would marry as soon as Sir William should become a widower. Their relations were not severed until the Pembroke scandal came out. Sir William married another lady after the death of his wife. This relation appeared to support the belief that Mary Fitton was Shakespeare’s lady, as far as it gave a clue to the expression thy bed vow broke, and in so far as Knollys’ Christian name William seemed to explain the two first lines in Sonnet cxxxv.: You have your will (or William) and William (or will) a second time and William (or will) into the bargain. It had long been admitted that the two last of these Wills referred to Pembroke and Shakespeare. And it was suggested that a third Will was hidden in the first. In 1881 Dowden wrote: “As we know that the lady had a husband, it may be possible that he too bore the name of William.” As against the unmistakable evidence of the portraits, however, it is impossible to attribute any weight to this circumstance. Moreover, the name of Shakespeare is never mentioned in the recently-published papers of the Fitton family. Of course the silence in itself is not conclusive. Mary Fitton may have known Shakespeare intimately without her relatives being aware of the fact. Besides, we know, from the dedication, which the clown of the Shakespearian troupe, the well known William Kemp, in 1600, addressed to her in his little book “Nine Daies Wonder,” that she had certain relations with the company. This dedication runs as follows: Mistress Anne (supposed to be Mary) Fitton, Mayde of Honour of the most sacred Mayde Royal Queene Elisabeth. But I confess, that Mary’s grey eyes decide the matter for me.
However, even if it be unreasonable to identify Mary Fitton with the Dark Lady of the Sonnets, after the publication of the Fitton family papers, this does not exclude the possibility that Pembroke may have been Shakespeare’s rival. If Essex, as above mentioned, was obliged to acknowledge that he had had intrigues with four of the ladies of the court at the same time, Pembroke may well have had intimate relations with two of them at Once.
The Dark Lady must have been a woman in the extremest sense of the word, a daughter of Eve, alluring, ensnaring, greedy of conquest, mendacious and faithless, born to deal out rapture and torment with both hands, the very woman to set in vibration every chord in a poet’s soul.
There can be no reasonable doubt that in the early days of his relation with the well-born mistress, Shakespeare felt himself a favourite of fortune, intoxicated with love and happiness, exalted above his station, honoured and enriched. She must at first have been to him what Maria Fiammetta, the natural daughter of a king, was to Boccaccio. She must have brought a breath from a higher world, an aroma of aristocratic womanhood, into his life. He must have admired her wit, her presence of mind and her daring, her capricious fancy and her quickness of retort. He must have studied, enjoyed, and adored in her—and that in the closest intimacy—the well-bred ease, the sportive coquetry, the security, elegance, and gaiety of the emancipated lady. Who can tell how much of her personality has been transferred to his brilliant young Beatrices and Rosalinds?
First and foremost he must have owed to her the rapture of feeling his vitality intensified—a main element in the happiness which, in the first years of their communion, finds expression in the sparkling love-comedies we have just reviewed. Let it not be objected that the Sonnets do not dwell upon this happiness. The Sonnets date from the period of storm and stress, when he had ascertained what at first, no doubt, he had but vaguely suspected, that his mistress had ensnared his friend; and in composing them he no doubt antedated many of the passionate and distracted unoods which overwhelmed him at the crisis, when he not only realised the fact of their intrigue, but saw it dragged to the light of day. He then felt as though, doubly betrayed, he had irrevocably lost them both. Thus the picture of his mistress drawn in the Sonnets shows her, not as she appeared to him in earlier years, but as he saw her during this later period.
Yet he also depicts moments, and even hours, when his whole nature must have been lapped in tenderness and harmony. The scene, for instance, so melodiously portrayed in Sonnet cxxviii. is steeped in an atmosphere of happy love—the scene in which, seated at the virginals, the lady, whom the poet addresses as “my music,” lets her delicate aristocratic fingers wander over the keys, enchanting with their concord the listener who longs to press her fingers and her lips to his. He envies the keys that “kiss the tender inward of her hand,” and concludes:—
“Since saucy jacks so happy are in this,
Give them thy fingers, me thy lips to kiss.”
It is only natural, however, that the morbidly passionate, complaining, and accusing Sonnets should be in the majority.
Again and again he reverts to her faithlessness and laxity of conduct. In Sonnet cxxxvii. he speaks of his love as “anchored in the bay where all men ride.” Sonnet cxxxviii. begins:—
“When my love swears that she is made of truth,
I do believe her, though I know she lies.”
And in Sonnet clii. he reproaches himself with having sworn a host of false oaths in swearing to her good qualities:—
“But why of two oaths’ breach do I accuse thee,
When I break twenty? I am perjur’d most;
For all my vows are oaths but to misuse thee,
And all my honest faith in thee is lost:
For I have sworn deep oaths of thy deep kindness,
Oaths of thy love, thy truth, thy constancy;
And, to enlighten thee, gave eyes to blindness,
Or made them swear against the thing they see.”
In Sonnet cxxxix. he depicts her as carrying her thirst for admiration to such a pitch of wantonness that even in his presence she could not refrain from coquetting on every hand:—
“Tell me thou lov’st elsewhere; but in my sight,
Dear heart, forbear to glance thine eye aside:
What need’st thou wound with cunning, when thy might
Is more than my o’erpress’d defence can ’bide?”
She cruelly abuses her witchery over him. She is as tyrannical, he says in Sonnet cxxxi., “as those whose beauties proudly make them cruel,” well-knowing that to his “dear-doting heart” she is “the finest and most precious jewel.” There is actual magic in the power she exerts over him. He does not understand it himself, and exclaims in Sonnet cl.:—
“Whence hast thou this becoming of things ill,
That in the very refuse of thy deeds
There is such strength and warrantise of skill,
That in my mind thy worst all best exceeds?”
No French poet of the eighteen-thirties, not even Musset himself self, has given more passionate utterance than Shakespeare to the fever and agony and distraction of love. See, for instance, Sonnet cxlvii.:—
“My love is as a fever, longing still
For that which longer nurseth the disease:
Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,
The uncertain-sickly appetite to please.
My reason, the physician to my love,
Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,
Hath left me, and I desperate now approve
Desire is death, which physic did except.
Past cure I am, now reason is past care,
And frantic-mad with evermore unrest:
My thoughts and my discourse as madmen’s are,
At random from the truth vainly express’d;
For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,
Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.”
He depicts himself as a lover frenzied with passion. His eyes are dimmed with vigils and with tears. He no longer understands either himself or the world: “If that is fair whereon his false eyes dote, What means the world to say it is not so?” If it is not fair, then his love proves that a lover’s eye is less trustworthy than that of the indifferent world (Sonnet cxlviii.).
And yet he well knows the seat of the witchery by which she holds him in thrall. It lies in the glow and expression of her exquisite “raven black” eyes (Sonnets cxxvii. and cxxxix.). He loves her soulful eyes, which, knowing the torments her disdain inflicts upon him—
“Have put on black, and loving mourners be,
Looking with pretty ruth upon my pain.”
—Sonnet cxxxii.
Young as she is, her nature is all compounded of passion and will; she is ungovernable in her caprices, born for conquest and for self-surrender.
While we can guess that towards Shakespeare she made the first advances, we know that she did so in the case of his friend. In more than one sonnet she is expressly spoken of as “wooing him.”[2] In Sonnet cxliii. Shakespeare uses an image which, in all its homeliness, is exceedingly graphic:—
“Lo! as a careful housewife runs to catch
One of her feather’d creatures broke away,
Sets down her babe, and makes all swift dispatch
In pursuit of the thing she would have stay;
Whilst her neglected child holds her in chase,
Cries to catch her whose busy care is bent
To follow that which flies before her face,
Not prizing her poor infant’s discontent:
So runn’st thou after that which flies from thee,
Whilst I, thy babe, chase thee afar behind;
But if thou catch thy hope, turn back to me,
And play the mother’s part, kiss me, be kind:
So will I pray that thou may’st have thy Will,
If thou turn back, and my loud crying still.”
The tenderness of feeling here apparent is characteristic of the poet’s whole attitude of mind in this dual relation. Even when he cannot acquit his friend of all guilt, even when he mournfully upbraids him with having robbed the poor man of his one lamb, his chief concern is always lest any estrangement should arise between his friend and himself. See, for instance, the exquisitely melodious Sonnet xl.:—
“Take all my loves, my love, yea, take them all:
What hast thou then more than thou hadst before?
No love, my love, that thou may’st true love call:
All mine was thine before thou had’st this more.
.........
I do forgive thy robbery, gentle thief,
Although thou steal thee all my poverty.”
The same tone of sentiment runs through the moving Sonnet xlii., which begins:—
“That thou hast her, it is not all my grief,
And yet it may be said, I loved her dearly;
That she hath thee, is of my wailing chief,
A loss in love that touches me more nearly.”
It closes with this somewhat vapid conceit:—
“But here’s the joy: my friend and I are one;
Sweet flattery! then she loves but me alone.”
All these expressions, taken together, point not only to the enormous value which Shakespeare attached to the young Pembroke’s friendship, but also to the sensual and spiritual attraction which, in spite of everything, his fickle mistress continued to possess for him.
It is not impossible that a passage in Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (1614) may contain a satirical allusion to the relation portrayed in the Sonnets (published in 1609). In act v. sc. 3 there is presented a puppet-show setting forth “The ancient modern history of Hero and Leander, otherwise called the Touchstone of true Love, with as true a trial of Friendship between Damon and Pythias, two faithful friends o’ the Bankside.” Hero is “a wench o’ the Bankside,” and Leander swims across the Thames to her. Damon and Pythias meet at her lodging, and abuse each other most violently when they find that they have but one love, only to finish up as the best friends in the world.2
VII
Platonism — Shakespeare’s and Michael Angelo’s Sonnets — The Technique of the Sonnets
The fact that the person to whom Shakespeare’s Sonnets are dedicated is simply entitled “Mr. W. H.” long served to divert attention from William Herbert, as it was thought that it would have been an impossible impertinence thus to address, without his title, a nobleman like the Earl of Pembroke. To us it is clear that this form of address was adopted precisely in order that Pembroke might not be exhibited to the great public as the hero of the conflict darkly adumbrated in the Sonnets. They were not, indeed, written quite without an eye to publication, as is proved by the poet’s promises that they are to immortalise the memory of his friend’s beauty. But it was not Shakespeare himself who gave them to the press, and bookseller Thorpe must have known very well that Lord Pembroke would not care to see himself unequivocally designated as the lover of the Dark Lady and the poet’s favoured rival, especially as that dramatic episode of his youth ended in a manner which it can scarcely have been pleasant to recall.
A weighty work, A Life of Shakespeare, published in the year 1898, by Mr. Sidney Lee, has, however, thoroughly shaken the theories of those who held Pembroke to be the person to whom the Sonnets were dedicated, and the youth who inspired so many of them. Mr. Lee, who—rather arbitrarily—declines to attach any importance to the mention of Pembroke’s name, and the appeal to his relations with Shakespeare in the folio edition, takes it for granted that Southampton was the one literary patron to whom Shakespeare expressed his gratitude, and he concludes that he alone is the hero of the Sonnets. As Mr. Lee supposes that most of them were written between the spring of 1593 and the autumn of 1594, Southampton would have been young enough to be mentioned as in the poems. As to the dedication of the Sonnets, Sidney Lee declares that it would have been an impossible breach of decorum to designate a man of such high rank and importance as Pembroke was in the year 1609 as “Mr. W. H.” In his youthful days, even before he had a right to the title, he was always called Lord Herbert. In 1616 Thorpe dedicated a book to him in these respectful, nay servile terms: To the right honourable William, Earle of Pembroke, Lord Chamberlaine to his Majestie, one of his most honorable Privie Counsell, and Knight of the Garter, etc.
Sidney Lee interprets the word begetter as procurer merely, and thinks that Thorpe, in the dedication, simply meant to express his gratitude to a man who had procured one of the manuscripts of the Sonnets, then circulating, and had given it to him. And as a dedication of the poems of the Jesuit Robert Southwell (of 1606), was signed with the letters W. H., indicating another pirate-editor, William Hall, Sidney Lee concludes that it was the latter, who three years later had laid hold of the manuscript of the Sonnets for Thorpe, and that Thorpe had accordingly placed his enterprise under his patronage. In a domain where all is obscure it is difficult to uphold a definite opinion in the face of an opponent so much more learned than myself. Yet I cannot but feel that there is in the wording of the dedication something quite incompatible with the idea that Thorpe addresses himself to a friend and colleague, and Sidney Lee meets this objection only with the remark that Thorpe was notably careless in the use of language. Besides, it is suggestive, that in the three existing dedications by Thorpe, other than that to W. H., the first is addressed to Florio, the two others to the Earl of Pembroke, consequently to real protectors of rank, while the one, which he nine years before addressed to the editor, Edward Blount, who published the manuscript of Marlowe’s translation of Lucan for him, is drawn up in a very different and much more intimate way. It is addressed to his “kind and true friend,” and gives the friend in question a few hints “as to how to fit himself” for this unaccustomed part of patron. The distance from this to the dedication of the Sonnets is great.
What Sidney Lee attempts to prove by his researches and conjectures is, that the man, who figures in the Sonnets as the protector of the poet, was Southampton, and not Pembroke. The name of the youth is not of the first importance, nor does it signify greatly whether the woman celebrated and attacked in the Sonnets bore the name of Mary Fitton or another. However, the main point is, that in common with a number of previous authors, who have thoroughly studied the contemporaneous literature of Europe, and more especially the sonnet-poetry of Italy, France and England, such as Delius and Elze in Germany, and Henrik Schück in Sweden, Lee, relying on the numerous traits that these poems share with other sonnet-cycles of their period, stamps the whole argument of the text as fiction, and denies their autobiographical character. Scarcely any writer before him has so boldly endeavoured to limit Shakespeare’s originality in the domain of sonnet-poetry.
In the first place Lee points out, that the whole body of sixteenth-century sonnets was so dependent firstly on Petrarch, then on such French writers as Ronsard, du Bellay and Desportes, that even the finest of them, the sonnets of Spenser, Sidney, Watson, Lodge, Drayton and Daniel may be characterised as imitative studies, if not simply as a mosaic of plagiarisms. Hereupon he tries to show Shakespeare’s dependence on his predecessors. Shakespeare picked up, without scruple, ideas and expressions from the sonnets published by Daniel, Drayton, Watson, Barnabe Barnes, Constable and Sidney; he did this as deliberately and imperturbably as in his comedies he manipulated dramas and novels by contemporary and older poets. To Drayton especially is Shakespeare indebted. As all the Englishmen imitated the Frenchmen, Shakespeare has a false air of having been directly influenced by Ronsard, de Baif and Desportes, though he scarcely knew these poets in their own language.
The Danish translator of the Sonnets, Adolf Hansen, had already pointed out numerous impersonal traits. Some of the poorer Sonnets with their forced and complicated metaphors so obviously bear the impress of the spirit of the age, that it is quite impossible to regard them as characteristic of Shakespeare, and some few Sonnets are such complete imitations, that they cannot be accepted as confessions. Sonnets xviii. and xix. work out the same idea as Daniel’s Delia, and Sonnets lv. and lxxxi. treat the very same subject as the sixty-ninth Sonnet in Spenser’s Amoretti. Finally the story of the friends, one of whom deprives the other of his mistress, is to be found in Lyly’s Euphues.
Sidney Lee maintains that when in Sonnets xxiv. and cxxii. Shakespeare propounds that the image of his friend is engraved in the depths of his heart, or that his brain is a better memorandum-book, as to the friend, than the book with which the latter has presented him, he is merely struggling with conceits of Ronsard’s. When in Sonnets xliv, and xlv. he speaks about man as compounded of the elements, earth, air, fire and water, he appropriates motives from Spenser and Barnes. Sonnets xlvi. and xlvii., on the debate of the eye and the heart, are written in terms borrowed from the twentieth Sonnet in Watson’s Tears of Fancy. Where he proclaims his assurance of the immortality of his verse, and the consequent eternity of his friend’s fame, he does not speak from conviction, he only treats a motive, which, following the example of Pindar, Horace and Ovid, the Frenchmen Desportes and Ronsard, and after them such English sonneteers as Spenser, Drayton and Daniel had played upon. Not even when he writes that his lady is beautiful, though dark, and consequently unlovely, is he original; for Sidney had already used a similar phrase. And when he changes his mind, and in the dark eyes and dark complexion of his lady professes to read the blackness of her soul, he is even less original, for at that period the sonnet of invective was the standard variant of the sonnet of amorous eulogy. Nothing is more common than to find the sonneteer grossly abusing his mistress. Ronsard called his a tigress, a murderess, a Medusa; Barnabe Barnes describes his as a tyrant, a Gorgon, a rock; the transition from tenderness to reproach was so frequent, that it was even parodied by Gabriel Harvey. Following many other critics Sidney Lee finally points out that no weight can be attached to the fact, that in Sonnets xxii., lxii., lxxiii., and cxxxviii., Shakespeare speaks of himself as old, for this, too, was a standing conceit of the sonnet-poets of that time. Daniel in Delia (23) when he was only twenty-nine speaks as if his life were finished. Richard Barnfield, only twenty years old, invites the boy Ganymedes to contemplate his silver hair, his wrinkled skin, the deep furrows of his face, all this in imitation of Petrarch.
Lee admits, however, that the group of Sonnets, most interesting to the reader, the most mature as to ideas and style, cannot be considered to date from the poet’s thirtieth year; he even thinks that Shakespeare continued to write Sonnets until 1603, and propounds—regardless of the wording of the poem—that Sonnet cvii. was written in that year, on the occasion of the death of Queen Elizabeth. That the word “moon” here means Elizabeth is obvious. But that the expression
“The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured”
can mean the final eclipse of the moon is incredible. That the moon has passed through her eclipse, means, I take it, that she is shining brightly again, and thus the interpretation put forth above, of a hint at the frustrated conspiracy of Essex, is far more reasonable. But then this Sonnet, as well as those kindred to it in spirit and tone, point, not to the year 1603, but to 1601.
Yet here details are of minor importance. We take our stand on a fundamental conception of poetic production. All art, even that of the greater artists, begins with imitation; no poet avoids influences, and up to the present time no poet has hesitated to appropriate from predecessors all that might be of use to him. Even nowadays, when the appreciation of the duty of originality is so infinitely stronger than in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, it is easy to point out appropriations of foreign thoughts and turns of phrase among excellent poets, and it would be possible to enumerate a great variety of common traits among the lyrical poets of Europe. The range of subjects fit for lyrical poetry is not so very great, to be sure. As men, lyrists have after all many emotions and conditions in common. In the mode of expression alone—especially when ideas have to be expressed in an identical form of fourteen lines—is it possible for the poet to manifest his true originality.
No intelligent critic would think of looking to lyrical poems as to biographical sources, in the rough meaning of the term. The poetical is rarely identical with the personal ego. But on the other hand it cannot be too strongly insisted upon that books (I mean great, inspired books, such as are read for hundreds of years) are never engendered by other books, but by life. Nobody, who has a drop of artist’s blood in his veins, can imagine that a poet of the rank of Shakespeare can have written sonnets by the score only as exercises or metrical experiments, without any bearing on his life, its passions and its crises. The formula for good epic poetry is surely this: that it must always be founded on real life, even if rarely or never an exact copy of it. Lyrical poetry, in which the poet speaks in his own name, and especially of himself, must necessarily, if first-rate, be rooted in what the poet has felt so strongly that it has made him break into song.
The learned critics of Shakespeare’s Sonnets regard them merely as metrical tours de force, penned in cold blood on subjects prescribed by fashion and convention. They look upon fancy as upon a spider, which spins chimera in all sorts of typical and artificial figures out of itself. It seems more natural to look upon it as a plant, extracting nourishment from the only soil in which it could thrive, namely, the observations and experiences of the poet.
The great modern poets, whose lives lie open before us, have betrayed to us how fancy springs out of impressions of real life, transforming them and making them unrecognisable by its mysterious workings. In several cases we are able to discern the dispersed elements, which in due time crystallise in the poem. Discerning criticism has opened our eyes to the intermixture of these elements in the magic caldron of fancy, while inferior criticism goes astray in a trivial search after possible models. In spite of German scholars and their exertions, we know nothing about whom Goethe had in his mind when he painted Clärchen, nor is this fact of any importance; but this is certain, that the whole poetical life-work of Goethe is founded upon experience. When Max Klinger one evening returned home from having seen a performance of Goethe’s Faust, he said: What most impressed me was that it was the life of Goethe.
As, knowing the life and experiences of the great modern poet, we are now generally able to trace how these are worked upon and transformed in his works, it is reasonable to suppose that in olden times poets were moved by the same causes, and acted in the same way, at least those of them who have been efficient. When we know of the adventures and emotions of the modern poet, and are able to trace them in the production of his free fancy; when it is possible, where they are unknown to us, to evolve the hidden personality of the poet, and—as every capable critic has experienced—to have our conjectures finally borne out by facts revealed by the contemporary author, then we cannot feel it to be impossible, that in the case of an older poet, we might also be successful in determining when he speaks earnestly from his heart, and in tracing his feelings and experiences through his works, especially when these are lyrical, and their mode of expression passionate and emotional.
Any one who holds fast to the by no means fantastic theory, that there is a certain connection between the life and the works of Shakespeare, will be but little moved by successive attempts to deny the Sonnets any autobiographical value, because of the conventional traits and frequent imitations to be pointed out in them.
The modern reader who takes up the Sonnets with no special knowledge of the Renaissance, its tone of feeling, its relation to Greek antiquity, its conventions and its poetic style, finds nothing in them more surprising than the language of love in which the poet addresses his young friend, the positively erotic passion for a masculine personality which here finds utterance. The friend is currently addressed as “my love.” Sometimes it is stated in so many words that in the eyes of his admirer the friend combines the charms of man and woman; for instance, in Sonnet xx.:—
“A woman’s face, with Nature’s own hand painted,
Hast thou, the master mistress of my passion.”
This Sonnet ends with a playful lament that the friend had not been born of the opposite sex; yet such is the warmth of expression in other Sonnets that one very well understands how the critics of last century supposed them to be addressed to a woman.1
This tone, however, is a characteristic fashion of the age. And here, again, it has been insisted that love for a beautiful youth, which the study of Plato had presented to the men of the Renaissance in its most attractive light, was a standing theme among English poets of that age, who, moreover, as in Shakespeare’s case, were wont to praise the beauty of their friend above that of their mistress. The woman, as in this case, often enters as a disturbing element into the relation. It was an accepted part of the convention that the poet as above noted should represent himself as withered and wrinkled, whatever his real age might be; Shakespeare does so again and again, though he was at most thirty-seven. Finally, it was quite in accordance with use and wont that the fair youth should be exhorted to marry, so that his beauty might not die with him. Shakespeare had already placed such exhortations in the mouth of the Goddess of Love in Venus and Adonis.
All this is true, and yet there is no reasonable ground for doubting that the Sonnets stand in pretty close relation to actual facts.
The age, indeed, determines the tone, the colouring, of the expressions in which friendship clothes itself. In Germany and Denmark, at the end of the eighteenth century, friendship was a sentimental enthusiasm, just as in England and Italy during the sixteenth century it took the form of platonic love. We can clearly discern, however, that the different methods of expression answered to corresponding shades of difference in the emotion itself. The men of the Renaissance gave themselves up to an adoration of friendship and of their friend which is now unknown, except in circles where a perverted sexuality prevails. Montaigne’s friendship for Estienne de la Boétie, and Languet’s passionate tenderness for the youthful Philip Sidney, are cases in point. The observations concerning friendship in Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici, 1642 (pp. 98, 99), accord entirely with that of Shakespeare: “I love my friend more than myself, and yet I think that I do not love him enough. In a few months my manifold doubled passion will make me believe that I have not at all loved him before. When I am away from him, I am dead, until I meet him again. When I am together with him, I am not content, but always long for a closer connection with him. United souls are not contented, but wish for being truly identical with each other; and this being impossible, their yearnings are endless and must increase without any possibility of being gratified.” But the most remarkable example of a frenzied friendship in Renaissance culture and poetry is undoubtedly to be found in Michael Angelo’s letters and sonnets.
Michael Angelo’s relation to Messer Tommaso de’ Cavalieri presents the most interesting parallel to the attitude which Shakespeare adopted towards William Herbert. We find the same expressions of passionate love from the older to the younger man; but here it is still more unquestionably certain that we have not to do with mere poetical figures of speech, since the letters are not a whit less ardent and enthusiastic than the sonnets. The expressions in the sonnets are sometimes so warm that Michael Angelo’s nephew, in his edition of them, altered the word Signiore into Signora, and these poems, like Shakespeare’s, were for some time supposed to have been addressed to a woman.2
On January 1, 1533, Michael Angelo, then fifty-seven years old, writes from Florence to Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, a youth of noble Roman family, who afterwards became his favourite pupil: “If I do not possess the art of navigating the sea of your potent genius, that genius will nevertheless excuse me, and neither despise my inequality, nor demand of me that which I have it not in me to give; since that which stands alone in everything can in nothing find its counterpart. Wherefore your lordship, the only light in our age vouchsafed to this worlds having no equal or peer, cannot find satisfaction in the work of any other hand. If, therefore, this or that in the works which I hope and promise to execute should happen to please you, I should call that work, not good, but fortunate. And if I should ever feel assured that—as has been reported to me—I have given your lordship satisfaction in one thing or another, I will make a gift to you of my present and of all that the future may bring me; and it will be a great pain to me to be unable to recall the past, in order to serve you so much the longer, instead of having only the future, which cannot be long, since I am all too old. There is nothing more left for me to say. Read my heart and not my letter, for my pen cannot approach the expression of my good will.”3
Cavalieri writes to Michael Angelo that he regards himself as born anew since he has come to know the Master; who replies, “I for my part should regard myself as not born, born dead, or deserted by heaven and earth, if your letters had not brought me the persuasion that your lordship accepts with favour certain of my works.” And in a letter of the following summer to Sebastian del Piombo, he sends a greeting to Messer Tommaso, with the words: “I believe I should instantly fall down dead if he were no longer in my thoughts.”4
Michael Angelo plays upon his friend’s surname as Shakespeare plays upon his friend’s Christian name. These are the last lines of the thirty-first sonnet:—
“Se vint’ e pres’ i’ debb’ esser beato,
Meraviglia non è se, nud’ e solo,
Resto prigion d’un Cavalier armato.”
“If only chains and bands can make me blest,
No marvel if alone and bare I go
An armed knight’s captive and slave confessed.”
(J. A. Symonds.)
In other sonnets the tone is no less passionate than Shakespeare’s —take, for example, the twenty-second:—
“More tenderly perchance than is my due,
Your spirit sees into my heart, where rise
The flames of holy worship, nor denies
The grace reserved for those who humbly sue.
Oh blessed day when you at last are mine!
Let time stand still, and let noon’s chariot stay;
Fixed be that moment on the dial of heaven!
That I may clasp and keep, by grace divine—
Clasp in these yearning arms and keep for aye
My heart’s loved lord to me desertless given.”5
(J. A. Symonds.)
In comparison with Cavalieri, Michael Angelo could with justice call himself old. Some critics, on the other hand, have seen in the fact that Shakespeare was not really old at the time when the Sonnets were written, a proof of their conventional and unreal character. But this is to overlook the relativity of the term. As compared with a youth of eighteen, Shakespeare was in effect old, with his sixteen additional years and all his experience of life. And if we are right in assigning Sonnets lxiii. and lxxiii. to the year 1600 or 1601, Shakespeare had then reached the age of thirty-seven, an age at which (among his contemporaries) Drayton in his Idea dwells quite in the same spirit upon the wrinkles of age in his face, and at which, as Tyler has very aptly pointed out, Byron in his swan-song uses expressions about himself which might have been copied from Shakespeare’s seventy-third Sonnet. Shakespeare says:—
“That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.”
Byron thus expresses himself:—
“My days are in the yellow leaf,6
The flowers and fruits of love are gone,
The worm, the canker and the grief
Are mine alone.”
In Shakespeare we read:—
“In me thou seest the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consum’d with that which it was nourish’d by.”
Byron’s words are:—
“The fire that on my bosom preys
Is lone as some volcanic isle;
No torch is kindled at its blaze—
A funeral pile”
Thus both poets liken themselves, at this comparatively early age, to the wintry woods with their yellowing leaves, and without blossom, fruit, or the song of birds; and both compare the fire which still glows in their soul to a solitary flame which finds no nourishment from without. The ashes of my youth become its death-bed, says Shakespeare. They are a funeral pile, says Byron.
Nor is it possible to conclude, as Schück does, from the conventional style of the first seventeen Sonnets—for instance, from their almost verbal identity with a passage in Sidney’s Arcadia—that they are quite devoid of relation to the poet’s own life.
In short, the elements of temporary fashion and convention which appear in the Sonnets in no way prove that they were not genuine expressions of the poet’s actual feelings.
They lay bare to us a side of his character which does not appear in the plays. We see in him an emotional nature with a passionate bent towards self-surrender in love and idolatry, and with a corresponding, though less excessive, yearning to be loved.
We learn from the Sonnets to what a degree Shakespeare was oppressed and tormented by his sense of the contempt in which the actor’s calling was held. The scorn of ancient Rome for the mountebank, the horror of ancient Judea for whoever disguised himself in the garments of the other sex, and finally the age-old hatred of Christianity for theatres and all the temptations that follow in their train—all these habits of thought had been handed down from generation to generation, and, as Puritanism grew in strength and gained the upper hand, had begotten a contemptuous tone of public opinion under which so sensitive a nature as Shakespeare’s could not but suffer keenly. He was not regarded as a poet who now and then acted, but as an actor who now and then wrote plays. It was a pain to him to feel that he belonged to a caste which had no civic status. Hence his complaint, in Sonnet xxix., of being “in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes.” Hence, in Sonnet xxxvi., his assurance to his friend that he will not obtrude on others the fact of their friendship:—
“I may not evermore acknowledge thee,
Lest my bewailèd guilt should do thee shame:
Nor thou with public kindness honour me,
Unless thou take that honour from thy name:
But do not so; I love thee in such sort,
As, thou being mine, mine is thy good report.”
The bitter complaint in Sonnet lxxii. seems rather to refer to the writer’s situation as a dramatist:—
“For I am shamed by that which I bring forth,
And so should you, to love things nothing worth.”
The melancholy which fills Sonnet cx. is occasioned by the writer’s profession and his nature as a poet and artist:—
“Alas! ’tis true, I have gone here and there,
And made myself a motley to the view;
Gor’d mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear,
Made old offences of affections new:
Most true it is, that I have look’d on truth
Askance and strangely; but, by all above,
These blenches gave my heart another youth,
And worse essays prov’d thee my best of love.”
Hence, finally, his reproach to Fortune, in Sonnet cxi., that she did not “better for his life provide Than public means which public manners breeds”:—
“Thence comes it that my name receives a brand;
And almost thence my nature is subdu’d
To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand.”
We must bear in mind this continual writhing under the prejudice against his calling and his art, and this indignation at the injustice of the attitude adopted towards them by a great part of the middle classes, if we would understand the high pressure of Shakespeare’s feelings towards the noble youth who had approached him full of the art-loving traditions of the aristocracy, and the burning enthusiasm of the young for intellectual superiority. William Herbert, with his beauty and his personal charm, must have come to him like a very angel of light, a messenger from a higher world than that in which his lot was cast. He was a living witness to the fact that Shakespeare was not condemned to seek the applause of the multitude alone, but could win the favour of the noblest in the land, and was not excluded from a deep and almost passionate friendship which placed him on an equal footing with the bearer of an ancient name. Pembroke’s great beauty no doubt made a deep impression upon the beauty-lover in Shakespeare’s soul. It is very probable, too, that the young aristocrat, according to the fashion of the times, made the poet his debtor for solider benefactions than mere friendship; and Shakespeare must thus have felt doubly painful the situation in which he was placed by the intrigue between his mistress and his friend.7.
In any case, the affection with which Pembroke inspired Shakespeare—the passionate attachment, leading even to jealousy of other poets admired by the young nobleman—had not only a vividness, but an erotic fervour such as we never find in our century manifested between man and man. Note such an expression as this in Sonnet cx.:—
“Then give me welcome, next my heaven the best,
Even to thy pure and most most loving breast.”
This exactly corresponds to Michael Angelo’s recently-quoted desire to “clasp in his yearning arms his heart’s loved lord.” Or observe such a line as this in Sonnet lxxv.:—
“So are you to my thoughts as food to life.”
We have here an exact counterpart to the following expressions in a letter from Michael Angelo to Cavalieri, dated July 1533: “I would far rather forget the food on which I live, which wretchedly sustains the body alone, than your name, which sustains both body and soul, filling both with such happiness that I can feel neither care nor fear of death while I have it in my memory.”8
The passionate fervour of this friendship on the Platonic model is accompanied in Shakespeare, as in Michael Angelo, by a submissiveness on the part of the elder friend towards the younger, which, in these two supreme geniuses, affects the modern reader painfully. Each had put off every shred of pride in relation to his idolised young friend. How strange it seems to find Shakespeare calling himself young Herbert’s “slave,” and assuring him that his time, more precious than that of any other man then living, is of no value, so that his friend may let him wait or summon him to his side as his caprice and fancy dictate. In Sonnet lviii. he speaks of “that God who made me first your slave.” Sonnet lvii. runs thus:—
“Being your slave, what should I do but tend
Upon the hours and times of your desire?
I have no precious time at all to spend,
Nor services to do, till you require.
Nor dare I chide the world-without-end hour,
Whilst I, my sovereign, watch the clock for you,
Nor think the bitterness of absence sour,
When you have bid your servant once adieu;
Nor dare I question with my jealous thought,
Where you may be, or your affairs suppose;
But, like a sad slave, stay and think of nought,
Save, where you are how happy you make those.”
Just as Michael Angelo spoke to Cavalieri of his works as though they were scarcely worth his friend’s notice, so does Shakespeare sometimes speak of his verses. In Sonnet xxxii. he begs his friends to “re-survey” them when he is dead:—
“And though they be outstripp’d by every pen,
Reserve them for my love, not for their rhyme,
Exceeded by the height of happier men.”
This humility becomes quite despicable when a breach is threatened between the friends. Shakespeare then repeatedly promises so to blacken himself that his friend shall reap, not shame, but honour, from his faithlessness. In Sonnet lxxxviii.:—
“With mine own weakness being best acquainted,
Upon thy part I can set down a story
Of faults concealed wherein I am attainted,
That thou, in losing me, shalt win much glory.”
Sonnet lxxxix. is still more strongly worded:—
“Thou canst not, love, disgrace me half so ill,
To set a form upon desirèd change,
As I’ll myself disgrace: knowing thy will,
I will acquaintance strangle, and look strange;
Be absent from thy walks; and in my tongue
Thy sweet-belovèd name no more shall dwell,
Lest I (too much profane) should do it wrong,
And haply of our old acquaintance tell.
For thee, against myself I’ll vow debate,
For I must ne’er love him whom thou dost hate.”
We are positively surprised when, in a single passage, in Sonnet lxii., we come upon a forcible expression of self-love; but it does not extend beyond the first half of the Sonnet; in the second half this self-love is already regarded as a sin, and Shakespeare humbly effaces himself before his friend. All the more gladly does the reader welcome the few Sonnets (lv. and lxxxi.) in which the poet confidently predicts the immortality of these his utterances. It is true that Shakespeare is here greatly influenced by antiquity and by the fashion of his age; and it is simply as records of his friend’s beauty and amiability that his verses are to be preserved through all ages to come. But no poet without a sound and vigorous self-confidence could have written either these lines in Sonnet lv.:—
“Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme”—
or these others in Sonnet lxxxi.:—
“Your monument shall be my gentle verse,
Which eyes not yet created shall o’erread;
And tongues to be your being shall rehearse,
When all the breathers of this world are dead.”
Yet, as we see, the first and last thought is always that of the friend, his beauty, worth, and fame. And as he will live in the future, so he has lived in the past. Shakespeare cannot conceive existence without him. In Sonnets which have no direct connection with each other (lix., cvi., cxxiii.) he returns again and again to that strange thought of a perpetual cycle or recurrence of events, which runs through the whole of the world’s history, from the Pythagoreans and Kohélet to Friedrich Nietzsche. In view of such high-pitched idolatry, we can well understand that the friend’s faithlessness, or, if you will, the mistress’s conquest of the friend, and the sudden severance of the bond in 1601, must have made a deep impression upon Shakespeare’s sensitive soul. The catastrophe left its mark upon him for many a long day.
And at the same time another and purely personal mortification was added to his troubles. Shakespeare’s name was just then involved in a degrading scandal of one sort or another. He says so expressly in Sonnet cxii.:—
“Your love and pity doth the impression fill
Which vulgar scandal stamped upon my brow.”
He here avers that he cares very little “to know his shames or praises” from the tongues of others, and that his friend’s judgment is all in all to him; but in Sonnet cxxi., where he goes more closely into the matter, he confesses that some “frailty” in him has given rise to these malignant rumours, and we see that for this frailty his “sportive blood” was to blame. He does not deny the accusation, but asks—
“Why should others’ false adulterate eyes
Give salutation to my sportive blood?
Or on my frailties why are frailer spies,
Which in their wills count bad what I think good?”
The details of this scandal are unknown to us. We can only conclude that it referred to Shakespeare’s alleged relation to some woman, or implication in some amorous adventure. In discussing this point, Tyler has aptly cited two passages in contemporary writings, though of course without absolutely proving that they have any bearing on the matter. The first is the above-quoted anecdote in John Manningham’s Diary for March 13, 1601 (New Style, 1602), as to Shakespeare’s forestalling Burbadge in the graces of a citizen’s wife, and announcing himself as “William the Conqueror “—an anecdote which seems to have been widely current at the time, and no doubt arose from more or less recent events. The second passage occurs in The Returne from Pernassus, dating from December 1601, in which (iv. 3) Burbadge and Kemp are introduced, and these words are placed in the mouth of Kemp: “O that Ben Ionson is a pestilent fellow, he brought vp Horace giuing the Poets a pill, but our fellow Shakespeare hath giuen him a purge that made him beray his credit.” The allusion is evidently to the feud between Ben Jonson on the one hand and Marston and Dekker on the other, which culminated in 1601 with the appearance of Ben Jonson’s Poetaster, in which Horace serves as the poet’s mouthpiece. Dekker and Marston retorted in the same year with Satiromastix, or the Untrussing of the Humorous Poet. As Shakespeare took no direct part in this quarrel, we can only conjecture what is meant by the above allusion. Mr. Richard Simpson has suggested that King William Rufus, in whose reign the action of Satiromastix takes place, and who “presides over the untrussing of the humorous poet,” may be intended for William Shakespeare. Rufus, in the play, is by no means a model of chastity, and carries off Walter Terrill’s bride very much as “William the Conqueror” in Manningham’s anecdote carries off “Richard the Third’s” mistress. Simpson thinks it probable that the spectators would have little difficulty in recognising the William the Conqueror of the anecdote in the William Rufus of the play, whose nickname, indeed, might be taken as referring to Shakespeare’s complexion. If we accept this interpretation, we find in Satiromastix a further proof of the notoriety of the anecdote. Whether it be this scandal or another of the same kind to which the Sonnets refer, Shakespeare seems to have taken greatly to heart the besmirching of his name.
It remains that we should glance at the form of the Sonnets and say a word as to their poetic value.
As regards the form, the first and most obvious remark is that, in spite of their name, these poems are not in reality sonnets at all, and have, indeed, nothing in common with the sonnet except their fourteen lines. In the structure of his so-called Sonnets Shakespeare simply followed the tradition and convention of his country.
Sir Thomas Wyatt, the leading figure in the earlier English school of lyrists, travelled in Italy in the year 1527, familiarised himself with the forms and style of Italian poetry, and introduced the sonnet into English literature. A somewhat younger poet, Henry, Earl of Surrey, soon followed in his footsteps; he, too, travelled in Italy, and cultivated the same poetic models. Not until after the death of both poets were their sonnets published in the collection known as Tottel’s Miscellany (1557). Neither of the poets succeeded in keeping to the Petrarchan model—an octave and a sestett. Wyatt, it is true, usually preserves the octave, but breaks up the sestett and finishes with a couplet. Surrey departs still more widely from his model’s strict and difficult form: his “Sonnet” consists, like Shakespeare’s after him, of three quatrains and a couplet, the rhymes of which are in nowise interwoven. Sidney, again, preserved the octave, but broke up the sestett. Spenser attempted a new rhyme-scheme, interweaving the second and third quatrain, but keeping to the final couplet. Daniel, who is Shakespeare’s immediate predecessor and master, returns to Surrey’s really formless form. The chief defect in Shakespeare’s Sonnets as a metrical whole consists in the appended couplet, which hardly ever keeps up to the level of the beginning, hardly ever presents any picture to the eye, but is, as a rule, merely reflective, and often brings the burst of feeling which animates the poem to a feeble, or at any rate more rhetorical than poetic, issue.
In actual poetic value the Sonnets are extremely uneven. The first group as we have already pointed out (p. 270) stands lowest in the scale, necessarily expressing but little of the poet’s personal feeling.
The last two Sonnets in the collection (cliii. and cliv.), dealing with a conventional theme borrowed from the antique, are likewise entirely impersonal. W. Hertzberg, having been put on the track by Herr von Friesen, in 1878 discovered the Greek original of these two Sonnets in the ninth book of the Palatine Anthology.9. The poem which Shakespeare has adapted, and in Sonnet cliv. almost translated, was written by the Byzantine scholar Marianus, probably in the fifth century after Christ; it was published in Latin, among other epigrams, at Basle in 1529, was retranslated several times before the end of the sixteenth century, and must have become known to Shakespeare in one or other of these different forms.
Next in order stand the Sonnets of merely conventional inspiration, those in which the eye and heart go to law with each other, or in which the poet plays upon his own name and his friend’s. These cannot possibly claim any high poetic value.
But the poems thus set apart form but a small minority of the collection. In all the others the waves of feeling run high, and it may be said in general that the deeper the sentiment and the stronger the emotion they express, the more admirable is their force of diction and their marvellous melody. There are Sonnets whose musical quality is unsurpassed by any of the songs introduced into the plays, or even by the most famous and beautiful speeches in the plays themselves. The free and lax form he had adopted was of evident advantage to Shakespeare. The triple and quadruple rhymes, which in Italian involve scarcely any difficulty or constraint, would have proved very hampering in English. As a matter of fact, Shakespeare has been able to follow out every inspiration unimpeded by the shackles of an elaborate rhyme-scheme, and has achieved a rare combination of terseness and harmony in the expression of sorrow, melancholy, anguish, and resignation. Nothing can be more melodious than the opening of Sonnet xl., quoted above, or these lines from Sonnet lxxxvi.:—
“Was it the proud full sail of his great verse,
Bound for the prize of all-too-precious you,
That did my ripe thoughts in my brain inhearse,
Making their tomb the womb wherein they grew?”
And how moving is the earnestness of Sonnet cxvi., on faith in love:—
“Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixèd mark,
That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.”
Shakespeare’s Sonnets are for the general reader the most inaccessible of his works, but they are also the most difficult to tear oneself away from. “With this key Shakespeare unlocked his heart,” says Wordsworth; and some people are repelled from them by the Menschliches, or, as they think, Allzumenschliches, which is there revealed. They at any rate hold Shakespeare diminished by his openness. Browning, for example, thus retorts upon Wordsworth:—
“‘With this same key
Shakespeare unlocked his heart’ once more!
Did Shakespeare? If so, the less Shakespeare he.”
The reader who can reconcile himself to the fact that great geniuses are not necessarily models of correctness will pass a very different judgment. He will follow with eager interest the experiences which rent and harrowed Shakespeare’s soul. He will rejoice in the insight afforded by these poems, which the crowd ignores, into the tempestuous emotional life of one of the greatest of men. Here, and here alone, we see Shakespeare himself, as distinct from his poetical creations, loving, admiring, longing, yearning, adoring, disappointed, humiliated, tortured. Here alone does he enter the confessional. Here more than anywhere else can we, who at a distance of three centuries do homage to the poet’s art, feel ourselves in intimate communion, not only with the poet, but with the man.
5
“Accio ch’i’ abbi, e non già per mie merto,
desiato mio dolce signiore
Per sempre nell’ indegnie e pronte braccia.”
VIII
Julius Cæsar — Its Fundamental Defect
It is afternoon, a little before three o’clock. Whole fleets of wherries are crossing the Thames, picking their way among the swans and the other boats, to land their passengers on the south bank of the river. Skiff after skiff puts forth from the Blackfriars stair, full of theatre-goers who have delayed a little too long over their dinner and are afraid of being too late; for the flag waving over the Globe Theatre announces that there is a play to-day. The bills upon the street-posts have informed the public that Shakespeare’s Julius Cæsar is to be presented, and the play draws a full house. People pay their sixpences and enter; the balconies and the pit are filled. Distinguished and specially favoured spectators take their seats on the stage behind the curtain. Then sound the first, the second, and the third trumpet-blasts, the curtain parts in the middle, and reveals a stage entirely hung with black.
Enter the tribunes Flavius and Marullus; they scold the rabble and drive them home because they are loafing about on a week-day without their working-clothes and tools—in contravention of a London police regulation which the public finds so natural that they (and the poet) can conceive it as in force in ancient Rome. At first the audience is somewhat restless. The groundlings talk in undertones as they light their pipes. But the Second Citizen speaks the name of Cæsar. There are cries of “Hush! hush!” and the progress of the play is followed with eager attention.
It was received with applause, and soon became very popular. Of this we have contemporary evidence. Leonard Digges, in the poem quoted above (p. 233), vaunts its scenic attractiveness at the expense of Ben Jonson’s Roman plays:—
“So have I seene, when Cesar would appeare,
And on the Stage at halfe-sword parley were
Brutus and Cassius: oh how the Audience
Were ravish’d, with what new wonder they went thence,
When some new day they would not brooke a line
Of tedious (though well laboured) Catiline.”
The learned rejoiced in the breath of air from ancient Rome which met them in these scenes, and the populace was entertained and fascinated by the striking events and heroic characters of the drama. A quatrain in John Weever’s Mirror of Martyrs, or The Life and Death of Sir Iohn Oldcastle Knight, Lord Cobham, tells how
“The many-headed multitude were drawne
By Brutus speech, that Cæsar was ambitious,
When eloquent Mark Antonie had showne
His vertues, who but Brutus then was vicious?”
There were, indeed, numerous plays on the subject of Julius Cæsar—they are mentioned in Gosson’s Schoole of Abuse, 1579, in The Third Blast of Retraite from Plaies, 1580, in Henslowe’s Diary, 1594 and 1602, in The Mirrour of Policie, 1598, &c.—but Weever’s words do not apply to any of those which have come down to us. It can therefore scarcely be doubted that they refer to Shakespeare’s drama; and as the poem appeared in 1601, it affords us almost decisive evidence as to the date of Julius Cæsar. In all probability, it was in the same year that the play was written and produced. Weever, indeed, says in his dedication that his poem was “some two yeares agoe made fit for print;” but even if this be true, the lines above quoted may quite well have been inserted later. There are several reasons for believing that Julius Cæsar can scarcely have been produced earlier than 1601. The years 1599 and 1600 are already so full of work that we can scarcely assign to them this great tragedy as well; and internal evidence indicates that the play must have been written about the same time as Hamlet, to which its style offers so many striking resemblances.
The immediate success of the play is proved by this fact, among others, that it at once called forth a rival production on the same theme. Henslow notes in his diary that in May 1602, on behalf of Lord Nottingham’s company, he paid five pounds for a drama called Cæsar’s Fall to the poets Munday, Drayton, Webster, Middleton, and another. It was evidently written to order. And as Julius Cæsar, in its novelty, was unusually successful, so, too, we find it still reckoned one of Shakespeare’s greatest and profoundest plays, unlike the English “Histories” in standing alone and self-sufficient, characteristically composed, forming a rounded whole in spite of its apparent scission at the death of Cæsar, and exhibiting a remarkable insight into Roman character and the life of antiquity.
What attracted Shakespeare to this theme? And, first and foremost, what is the theme? The play is called Julius Cæsar, but it was obviously not Cæsar himself that attracted Shakespeare. The true hero of the piece is Brutus; he it is who has aroused the poet’s fullest interest. We must explain to ourselves the why and wherefore.
The answer is to be found in the point of time at which the play was written. It was that eventful year when Shakespeare’s earliest friends among the great, Essex and Southampton, had set on foot their foolhardy conspiracy against Elizabeth, and when their attempted insurrection had ended in the death of the one, the imprisonment of the other. He had seen how proud and nobly-disposed characters might easily be seduced into political error, and tempted to rebellion, on the plea of independence. It is true that there was little enough resemblance of detail between the mere palace-revolution designed by Essex, which should free him from his subjection to the Queen’s incalculable caprices, and the attempt of the Roman patricians to liberate an aristocratic republic, by assassination, from the yoke of a newly-founded despotism. The point of resemblance lay in the mere fact of the imprudent and ill-starred attempt to effect a subversion of public order.
Add to this the fact that Shakespeare, in the present stage of his career, displays a certain preference for characters who, in spite of noble qualities, have fortune against them and are unable to bring their projects to a successful issue. While he himself was still fighting for his position, Henry V., the man of practical genius, the born victor and conqueror, had been his ideal; now that he stood on firm ground, and was soon to reach the height of his reputation, he seems to have turned with a sort of melancholy predilection to characters like Brutus and Hamlet, who, in spite of the highest endowments, proved unequal to the tasks proposed to them.1. They appealed to him as profound dreamers and high-minded idealists. He found something of their nature, too, in his own.
A good score of years earlier, in 1579, North’s version of Plutarch’s parallel biographies had been published, not translated from the original, but from the French translation of Amyot. In this book Shakespeare found his material.
His method of using this material differs considerably from his treatment of his other authorities. From a chronicler like Holinshed he, as a rule, takes nothing but the course of events, the outline of the leading personages and such anecdotes as suit his purpose. From novelists like Bandello or Cinthio he takes the main lines of the action, but relies almost entirely on his own invention for the characters and the dialogue. From the earlier plays, which he adapts or re-casts, such as The Taming of a Shrew, King John, The Famous Victories of Henry V., and King Leir (the original Hamlet is unfortunately not preserved), he transfers into his own work every scene and speech that is worth anything; but in the cases in which we can make the comparison, there is little enough that he finds available. Here, on the other hand, we find a curious and instructive example of his method of work when he most faithfully followed his original. We realise that the more developed the art and the more competent the psychology of the writer before him, the more closely did Shakespeare tread in his footsteps.
Here for the first time he found himself in touch with a wholly civilised spirit—not seldom childlike in his antique simplicity, but still no mean artist. Jean Paul, with some exaggeration, yet not quite extravagantly, has called Plutarch the biographical Shakespeare of world-history.
The whole drama of Julius Cæsar may be read in Plutarch. Shakespeare had before him three Lives—those of Cæsar, Brutus, and Mark Antony. Read them consecutively, and you find in them every detail of Julius Cæsar.
Let us take some examples from the first act of the play. It begins with the tribunes’ jealousy of the favour in which Cæsar stands with the common people; and everything down to the minutest trait is taken from Plutarch. The same with what follows: Mark Antony’s repeated offer of the crown to Cæsar at the feast of the Lupercal, and his unwilling refusal of it. So too with Cæsar’s suspicions of Cassius; Cæsar’s speech on his second entrance—
“Let me have men about me that are fat,
Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep o’ nights:
Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;
He thinks too much; such men are dangerous,”—
occurs word for word in Plutarch; the anecdote, indeed, made such an impression on him that he has repeated it three times in different Lives. We find, furthermore, in the Greek historian, how Cassius gradually involves Brutus in the conspiracy; how papers exhorting Brutus to action are thrown into his house; the deliberations as to whether Antony is to die along with Cæsar, and Brutus’s mistaken judgment of Antony’s character; Portia’s complaint at being excluded from her husband’s confidence; the proof of courage which she gives by plunging a knife into her thigh; all the omens and prodigies that precede the murder; the sacrificial ox without a heart; the fiery warriors fighting in the clouds; Calphurnia’s warning dream; Cæsar’s determination not to go to the Senate on the Ides of March; Decius [Decimus] Brutus’s endeavour to change his purpose; the fruitless efforts of Artemidorus to restrain him from facing the danger, &c., &c. It is all in Plutarch, point for point.
Here and there we find small and subtle divergences from the original, which may be traced now to Shakespeare’s temperament, now to his view of life, and again to his design in the play. Plutarch, for example, has not Shakespeare’s contempt for the populace, and does not make them so senselessly fickle. Then, again, he gives no hint for Brutus’s soliloquy before taking the final resolution (II. I). For the rest, wherever it is possible, Shakespeare employs the very words of North’s translation. Nay, more, he accepts the characters, such as Brutus, Portia, Cassius, just as they stand in Plutarch. His Brutus is absolutely the same as Plutarch’s; his Cassius is a man of somewhat deeper character.
In dealing with the great figure of Cæsar, which gives the play its name, Shakespeare follows faithfully the detached, anecdotic indications of Plutarch; but he, strangely enough, seems altogether to miss the remarkable impression we receive from Plutarch of Cæsar’s character, which, for the rest, the Greek historian himself was not in a position fully to understand. We must not forget the fact, of which Shakespeare of course knew nothing, that Plutarch, who was born a century after Cæsar’s death, at a time when the independence of Greece was only a memory, and the once glorious Hellas was part of a Roman province, wrote his comparative biographies to remind haughty Rome that Greece had a great man to oppose to each of her greatest sons. Plutarch was saturated with the thought that conquered Greece was Rome’s lord and master in every department of the intellectual life. He delivered Greek lectures in Rome and could not speak Latin, while every Roman spoke Greek to him and understood it as well as his native tongue. Significantly enough, Roman literature and poetry do not exist for Plutarch, though he incessantly cites Greek authors and poets. He never mentions Virgil or Ovid. He wrote about his great Romans as an enlightened and unprejudiced Pole might in our days write about great Russians. He, in whose eyes the old republics shone transfigured, was not specially fitted to appreciate Cæsar’s greatness.
Shakespeare, having so arranged his drama that Brutus should be its tragic hero, had to concentrate his art on placing him in the foreground, and making him fill the scene. The difficulty was not to let his lack of political insight (in the case of Antony), or of practical sense (in his quarrel with Cassius), detract from the impression of his superiority. He had to be the centre and pivot of everything, and therefore Cæsar was diminished and belittled to such a degree, unfortunately, that this matchless genius in war and statesmanship has become a miserable caricature.
We find in other places clear indications that Shakespeare knew very well what this man was and was worth. Edward’s young son, in Richard III., speaks with enthusiasm of Cæsar as that conqueror whom death has not conquered; Horatio, in the almost contemporary Hamlet, speaks of “mightiest Julius” and his death; and Cleopatra, in Antony and Cleopatra, is proud of having been the mistress of Cæsar. It is true that in As You Like It the playful Rosalind uses the expression, “Cæsar’s thrasonical brag,” with reference to the famous Veni, vidi, vici, but in an entirely jocose context and acceptation.
But here! here Cæsar has become in effect no little of a braggart, and is compounded, on the whole, of anything but attractive characteristics. He produces the impression of an invalid. His liability to the “falling sickness,” is emphasised. He is deaf of one ear. He has no longer his old strength. He faints when the crown is offered to him. He envies Cassius because he is a stronger swimmer. He is as superstitious as an old woman. He rejoices in flattery, talks pompously and arrogantly, boasts of his firmness and is for ever wavering. He acts incautiously and unintelligently, and does not realise what threatens him, while every one else sees it clearly.
Shakespeare dared not, says Gervinus, arouse too great interest in Cæsar; he had to throw into relief everything about him that could account for the conspiracy; and, moreover, he had Plutarch’s distinct statement that Cæsar’s character had greatly deteriorated shortly before his death. Hudson practically agrees with this, holding that Shakespeare wished to present Cæsar as he appeared in the eyes of the conspirators, so that “they too might have fair and equal judgment at our hands;” admitting, for the rest, that “Cæsar was literally too great to be seen by them,” and that “Cæsar is far from being himself in these scenes; hardly one of the speeches put in his mouth can be regarded as historically characteristic.” Thus Hudson arrives at the astonishing result that “there is an undertone of irony at work in the ordering and tempering of this composition,” explaining that, “when such a shallow idealist as Brutus is made to overtop and outshine the greatest practical genius the world ever saw,” we are bound to assume that the intention is ironical.
This is the emptiest cobweb-spinning. There is no trace of irony in the representation of Brutus. Nor can we fall back upon the argument that Cæsar, after his death, becomes the chief personage of the drama, and as a corpse, as a memory, as a spirit, strikes down his murderers. How can so small a man cast so great a shadow! Shakespeare, of course, intended to show Cæsar as triumphing after his death. He has changed Brutus’s evil genius, which appears to him in the camp and at Philippi, into Cæsar’s ghost; but this ghost is not sufficient to rehabilitate Cæsar in our estimation.
Nor is it true that Cæsar’s greatness would have impaired the unity of the piece. Its poetic value, on the contrary, suffers from his pettiness. The play might have been immeasurably richer and deeper than it is, had Shakespeare been inspired by a feeling of Cæsar’s greatness.
Elsewhere in Shakespeare one marvels at what he has made out of poor and meagre material. Here, history was so enormously rich, that his poetry has become poor and meagre in comparison with it.
Just as Shakespeare (if the portions of the first part of Henry VI. which deal with La Pucelle are by him) represented Jeanne d’Arc with no sense for the lofty and simple poetry that breathed around her figure—national prejudice and old superstition blinding him—so he approached the characterisation of Cæsar with far too light a heart, and with imperfect knowledge and care. As he had made Jeanne d’Arc a witch, so he makes Cæsar a braggart. Cæsar!
If, like the schoolboys of later generations, he had been given Cæsar’s Gallic War to read in his childhood, this would not have been possible to him. Is it conceivable that, in what he had heard about the Commentaries, he had naïvely seized upon and misinterpreted the fact that Cæsar always speaks of himself in the third person, and calls himself by his name?
Let us compare for a moment this posing self-worshipper of Shakespeare’s with the picture of Cæsar which the poet might easily have formed from his Plutarch alone, thus explaining Cæsar’s rise to the height of autocracy on which he stands at the beginning of the play, and at the same time the gradual piling up of the hatred to which he succumbed. On the very second page of the life of Cæsar he must have read the anecdote of how Cæsar, when quite a young man, on his way back from Bithynia, was taken prisoner by Cilician pirates. They demanded a ransom of twenty talents (about £4000). He answered that they clearly did not know who their prisoner was, promised them fifty talents, sent his attendants to different towns to raise this sum, and remained with only a friend and two servants among these notoriously bloodthirsty bandits. He displayed the greatest contempt for them, and freely ordered them about; he made them keep perfectly quiet when he wanted to sleep; for the thirty-eight days he remained among them he treated them as a prince might his bodyguard. He went through his gymnastic exercises, and wrote poems and orations in the fullest security. He often assured them that he would certainly have them hanged, or rather crucified. When the ransom arrived from Miletus, the first use he made of his liberty was to fit out some ships, attack the pirates, take them all prisoners, and seize upon their booty. Then he carried them before the Prætor of Asia, Junius, whose business it was to punish them. Junius, out of avarice, replied that he would take time to reflect what should be done with the prisoners; whereupon Cæsar returned to Pergamos, where he had left them in prison, and kept his word by having them all crucified.
What has become of this masterfulness, this grace, and this iron will, in Shakespeare’s Cæsar?
“I fear him not:
Yet if my name were liable to fear,
I do not know the man I should avoid
So soon as that spare Cassius.
......
I rather tell thee what is to be fear’d
Than what I fear, for always I am Cæsar.”
It is well that he himself makes haste to say so, otherwise one would scarcely believe it. And does one believe it, after all?
As Shakespeare conceives the situation, the Republic which Cæsar overthrew might have continued to exist but for him, and it was a criminal act on his part to destroy it.
But the old aristocratic Republic had already fallen to pieces when Cæsar welded its fragments into a new monarchy. Sheer lawlessness reigned in Rome. The populace was such as even the rabble of our own great cities can give no conception of: not the brainless mob, for the most part tame, only now and then going wild through mere stupidity, which in Shakespeare listens to the orations over Cæsar’s body and tears Cinna to pieces; but a populace whose innumerable hordes consisted mainly of slaves, together with the thousands of foreigners from all the three continents, Phrygians from Asia, Negroes from Africa, Iberians and Celts from Spain and France, who flocked together in the capital of the world. To the immense bands of house-slaves and field-slaves, there were added thousands of runaway slaves who had committed theft or murder at home, lived by robbery on the way, and now lay hid in the purlieus of the city. But besides foreigners with no means of support and slaves without bread, there were swarms of freedmen, entirely corrupted by their servile condition, for whom freedom, whether combined with helpless poverty or with new-made riches, meant only the freedom to do harm. Then there were troops of gladiators, as indifferent to the lives of others as to their own, and entirely at the beck and call of whoever would pay them. It was from ruffians of this class that a man like Clodius had recruited the armed gangs who surrounded him, divided like regular soldiers into decuries and centuries under duly appointed commanders. These bands fought battles in the Forum with other bands of gladiators or of herdsmen from the wild regions of Picenum or Lombardy, whom the Senate imported for its own protection. There was practically no street police or fire-brigade. When public disasters happened, such as floods or conflagrations, people regarded them as portents and consulted the augurs. The magistrates were no longer obeyed; consuls and tribunes were attacked, and sometimes even killed. In the Senate the orators covered each other with abuse, in the Forum they spat in each other’s faces. Regular battles took place on the Campus Martius at every election, and no man of position ever appeared in the streets without a bodyguard of gladiators and slaves. “If we try to conceive to ourselves,” wrote Mommsen in 1857, “a London with the slave population of New Orleans, with the police of Constantinople, with the non-industrial character of the modern Rome, and agitated by politics after the fashion of the Paris of 1848, we shall acquire an approximate idea of the republican glory, the departure of which Cicero and his associates in their sulky letters deplore.”2
Compare with this picture Shakespeare’s conception of an ambitious Cæsar striving to introduce monarchy into a well-ordered republican state!
What enchanted every one, even his enemies, who came in contact with Cæsar, was his good-breeding, his politeness, the charm of his personality. These characteristics made a doubly strong impression upon those who, like Cicero, were accustomed to the arrogance and coarseness of Pompey, so-called the Great. However busy he might be, Cæsar had always time to think of his friends and to jest with them. His letters are gay and amiable. In Shakespeare, when he is not familiar, he is pompous.
For the space of twenty-five years, Cæsar, as a politician, had by every means in his power opposed the aristocratic party in Rome. He had early resolved to make himself, without the employment of force, the master of the then known world, assured as he was that the Republic would fall to pieces of its own accord. Not until his prætorship in Spain had he displayed ability as a soldier and administrator outside the every-day round of political life. Then suddenly, when everything seems to be prospering with him, he breaks away from it all, leaves Rome, and passes into Gaul. At the age of forty-four, he enters upon his military career, and becomes perhaps the greatest commander known to history, an unrivalled conqueror and organiser, revealing, in middle life, a whole host of unsuspected and admirable qualities. Shakespeare conveys no idea of the wealth and many-sidedness of his gifts. He makes him belaud himself with unceasing solemnity (II. 2):—
“Cæsar shall forth: the things that threaten’d me
Ne’er look’d but on my back; when they shall see
The face of Cæsar, they are vanishèd.”
Cæsar had nothing of the stolid pomposity and severity which Shakespeare attributes to him. He united the rapid decision of the general with the man of the world’s elegance and lofty indifference to trifles. He liked his soldiers to wear glittering weapons and to adorn themselves. “What does it matter,” he said, “though they use perfumes? They fight none the worse for that.” And soldiers who under other leaders did not surpass the average became invincible under him.
He, who in Rome had been the glass of fashion, was so careless of his comfort in the field that he often slept under the open sky, and ate rancid oil without so much as a grimace; but richly-decked tables always stood in his tents, and all the golden youth, for whom Gaul was at that time what America became in the days of the first discoverers, made their way from Rome to his camp. It was the most wonderful camp ever seen, crowded with men of elegance and learning, young writers and poets, wits and thinkers, who, in the midst of the greatest and most imminent dangers, busied themselves with literature, and sent regular reports of their meetings and conversations to Cicero, the acknowledged arbiter of the literary world of Rome. During the brief space of Cæsar’s expedition into Britain, he writes two letters to Cicero. Their relation, in its different phases, in some ways reminds us of the relation between Frederick the Great and Voltaire. What a paltry picture does Shakespeare draw of Cicero as a mere pedant!—
“Cassius. Did Cicero say anything?
“Casca. Ay, he spoke Greek.
“Cassius. To what effect?
“Casca. Nay, an I tell you that, I’ll ne’er look you in the face again: but those that understood him smiled at one another, and shook their heads; but, for mine own part, it was Greek to me.”
Amid labours of every sort, his life always in danger, incessantly fighting with warlike enemies, whom he beats in battle after battle, Cæsar writes his grammatical works and his Commentaries. His dedication to Cicero of his work De Analogia is a homage to literature no less than to him: “You have discovered all the treasures of eloquence and been the first to employ them.... You have achieved the crown of all honours, a triumph the greatest generals may envy; for it is a nobler thing to remove the barriers of the intellectual life than to extend the boundaries of the Empire.” These are the words of the man who has just beaten the Helvetii, conquered France and Belgium, made the first expedition into Britain, and so effectually repelled the German hordes that they were for long innocuous to the Rome which they had threatened with destruction.
How little does this Cæsar resemble the pompous and highflown puppet of Shakespeare:—
“Danger knows full well
That Cæsar is more dangerous than he.
We are two lions litter’d in one day,
And I the elder and more terrible.”
Cæsar could be cruel at times. In his wars, he never shrank from taking such revenges as should strike terror into his enemies. He had the whole senate of the Veneti beheaded. He cut the right hand off every one who had borne arms against him at Uxellodunum. He kept the gallant Vercingetorix five years in prison, only to exhibit him in chains at his triumph and then to have him executed.
Yet, where severity was unnecessary, he was tolerance and mildness itself. Cicero, during the civil war, went over to the camp of Pompey, and after the defeat of that party sought and received forgiveness. When he afterwards wrote a book in honour of Cæsar’s mortal enemy Cato, who killed himself so as not to have to obey the dictator, and thereby became the hero of all the republicans, Cæsar wrote to Cicero: “In reading your book, I feel as though I myself had become more eloquent.” And yet in his eyes Cato was only an uncultured personage and a fanatic for an obsolete order of things. When a slave, out of tenderness for his master, refused to hand Cato his sword wherewith to kill himself, Cato gave him such a furious blow in the face that his hand was dyed with blood. Such a trait must have spoiled for Cæsar the impressiveness of this suicide.
Cæsar was not content with forgiving almost all who had borne arms against him at Pharsalia; he gave many of them, and among the rest Brutus and Cassius, an ample share of his power. He tried to protect Brutus before the battle and heaped honours upon him after it. Again and again Brutus came forward in opposition to Cæsar, and even, in his conscientious quixotism, took part against him with Pompey, although Pompey had had his father assassinated. Cæsar forgave him this and everything else; he was never tired of forgiving him. He had, it appears, transferred to Brutus the love of his youth for Brutus’s mother Servilia, Cato’s sister, who had been passionately and faithfully devoted to Cæsar. Voltaire, in his Mort de César, makes Cæsar hand to Brutus a letter just received from the dying Servilia, in which she begs Cæsar to watch well over their son. Plutarch relates that on one occasion, at the time of Catiline’s conspiracy, a letter was brought to Cæsar in the Senate. Cato, seeing him rise and go apart to read it, gave open utterance to the suspicion that it was a missive from the conspirators. Cæsar laughingly handed him the letter, which contained declarations of love from his sister; whereupon Cato, enraged, burst out with the epithet “Drunkard!”—the direst term of abuse a Roman could employ. (Ben Jonson has introduced this anecdote in his Catiline, v. 6.)
Brutus inherited his uncle Cato’s hatred for Cæsar. A certain brutality was united with a noble stoicism in these two last Roman republicans of the time of the Republic’s downfall. The rawness of antique Rome survived in Cato’s nature, and Brutus, in his conduct towards the towns of the Asiatic provinces, was nothing but a bloodthirsty usurer, who, in the name of a man of straw (Scaptius) extorted from them his exorbitant interests with threats of fire and sword. He had lent to the inhabitants of the town of Salamis a sum of money at 48 per cent. On their failure to pay, he kept their Senate so closely besieged by a squadron of cavalry that five senators died of starvation. Shakespeare, in his ignorance, attributes no such vices to Brutus, but makes him simple and great, at Cæsar’s expense.
Cæsar as opposed to Cato—and afterwards as opposed to Brutus—is the many-sided genius who loves life and action and power, in contradistinction to the narrow Puritan who hates such emancipated spirits, partly on principle, partly from instinct.
What a strange misunderstanding that Shakespeare—himself a lover of beauty, intent on a life of activity, enjoyment, and satisfied ambition, who always stood to Puritanism in the same hostile relation in which Cæsar stood—should out of ignorance take the side of Puritanism in this case, and so disqualify himself from extracting from the rich mine of Cæsar’s character all the gold contained in it. In Shakespeare’s Cæsar we find nothing of the magnanimity and sincerity of the real man. He never assumed a hypocritical reverence towards the past, not even on questions of grammar. He grasped at power and seized it, but did not, as in Shakespeare, pretend to reject it. Shakespeare has let him keep the pride which he in fact displayed, but has made it unbeautiful, and eked it out with hypocrisy.
This further trait, too, in Cæsar’s character Shakespeare has failed to understand. When at last, after having conquered on every side, in Africa as in Asia, in Spain as in Egypt, he held in his hands the sovereign power which had been the object of his twenty years’ struggle, it had lost its attraction for him. Knowing that he was misunderstood and hated by those whose respect he prized the most, he found himself compelled to make use of men whom he despised, and contempt for humanity took possession of his mind. He saw nothing around him but greed and treachery. Power had lost all its sweetness for him, life itself was no longer worth living, worth preserving. Hence his answer when he was besought to take measures against his would-be assassins: “Rather die once than tremble always!” and he went to the Senate on the 15th of March without arms and without a guard. In the tragedy, the motives which ultimately lure him thither are the hope of a title and a crown, and the fear of being esteemed a coward.
Those foolish persons who attribute Shakespeare’s works to Francis Bacon argue, amongst other things, that such an insight into Roman antiquity as is manifested in Julius Cæsar could be attained by no one who did not possess Bacon’s learning. On the contrary, this play is obviously written by a man whose learning was in no sense on a level with his genius, so that its faults, no less than its merits, afford a proof, however superfluous, that Shakespeare himself was the author of Shakespeare’s works. Bunglers in criticism never realise to what an extent genius can supply the place of book-learning, and how vastly greater is its importance. But, on the other hand, one is bound to declare unequivocally that there are certain domains in which no amount of genius can compensate for reconstructive insight and study of recorded fact, and where even the greatest genius falls short when it tries to create out of its own head, or upon a scanty basis of knowledge.
Such a domain is that of historical drama, when it deals with periods and personalities in regard to which recorded fact surpasses all possible imagination. Where history is stranger and more poetic than any poetry, more tragic than any antique tragedy, there the poet requires many-sided insight in order to rise to the occasion. It was because of Shakespeare’s lack of historical and classical culture that the incomparable grandeur of the figure of Cæsar left him unmoved. He depressed and debased that figure to make room for the development of the central character in his drama—to wit, Marcus Brutus, whom, following Plutarch’s idealising example, he depicted as a stoic of almost flawless nobility.
IX
Julius Cæsar — The Merits of the Drama — Brutus
None but a naïve republican like Swinburne can believe that it was by reason of any republican enthusiasm in Shakespeare’s soul that Brutus became the leading character. He had assuredly no systematic political conviction, and manifests at other times the most loyal and monarchical habit of mind.
Brutus was already in Plutarch the protagonist of the Cæsar tragedy, and Shakespeare followed the course of history as represented by Plutarch, under the deep impression that an impolitic revolt, like that of Essex and his companions, can by no means stem the current of the time, and that practical errors revenge themselves quite as severely as moral sins—nay, much more so. The psychologist was now awakened in him, and he found it a fascinating task to analyse and present a man who finds a mission imposed upon him for which he is by nature unfitted. It is no longer outward conflicts like that in Romeo and Juliet between the lovers and their surroundings, or in Richard III., between Richard and the world at large, that fascinate him in this new stage of his development, but the inner processes and crises of the spiritual life.
Brutus has lived among his books and fed his mind upon Platonic philosophy; therefore he is more occupied with the abstract political idea of republican freedom, and the abstract moral conception of the shame of enduring a despotism, than with the actual political facts before his eyes, or the meaning of the changes which are going on around him. This man is vehemently urged by Cassius to place himself at the head of a conspiracy against his fatherly benefactor and friend. The demand throws his whole nature into a ferment, disturbs its harmony, and brings it for ever out of equilibrium.
On Hamlet also, who is at the same time springing to life in Shakespeare’s mind, the spirit of his murdered father imposes the duty of becoming an assassin, and the claim acts as a stimulus, a spur to his intellectual faculties, but as a solvent to his character; so close is the resemblance between the situation of Brutus, with his conflicting duties, and the inward strife which we are soon to find in Hamlet.
Brutus is at war with himself, and therefore forgets to show others attention and the outward signs of friendship. His comrades summon him to action, but he hears no answering summons from within. As Hamlet breaks out into the well known words:—
“The time is out of joint:—O, cursed spite
That ever I was born to set it right!”
so also Brutus shrinks with horror from his task. He says (I. 2):—
“Brutus had rather be a villager
Than to repute himself a son of Rome
Under these hard conditions as this time
Is like to lay upon us.”
His noble nature is racked by these doubts and uncertainties.
From the moment Cassius has spoken to him, he is sleepless. The rugged Macbeth becomes sleepless after he has killed the King—“Macbeth has murdered sleep.” Brutus, with his delicate, reflective nature, bent on obeying only the dictates of duty, is calm after the murder, but sleepless before it. His preoccupation with the idea has altered his whole manner of being; his wife does not know him again. She tells how he can neither converse nor sleep, but strides up and down with his arms folded, sighing and lost in thought, does not answer her questions, and, when she repeats them, waves her off with rough impatience.
It is not only his gratitude to Cæsar that keeps Brutus in torment; it is especially his uncertainty as to what Cæsar’s intentions really are. Brutus sees him, indeed, idolised by the people and endowed with supreme power; but as yet Cæsar has never abused it. He concurs with Cassius’s view that when Cæsar declined the crown he in reality hankered after it; but, after all, they have nothing to go upon but his supposed desire:—
“To speak truth of Cæsar,
I have not known when his affections sway’d
More than his reason. But ’tis a common proof
That lowliness is young ambition’s ladder.”
If Cæsar is to be slain, then, it is not for what he has done, but for what he may do in the future. Is it permissible to commit a murder upon such grounds?
In Hamlet we find this variant of the difficulty: Is it certain that the king murdered Hamlet’s father? May not the ghost have been a hallucination, or the devil himself?
Brutus feels the weakness of his basis of action the more clearly the more he leans towards the murder as a political duty. And Shakespeare has not hesitated to attribute to him, high-minded as he is, that doctrine of expediency, so questionable in the eyes of many, which declares that a necessary end sanctifies impure means. Two separate times, once when he is by himself, and once in addressing the conspirators, he recommends political hypocrisy as judicious and serviceable. In the soliloquy he says (II. I):—
“And, since the quarrel
Will bear no colour for the thing he is,
Fashion it thus: that what he is, augmented,
Would run to these and these extremities.”
To the conspirators his words are:—
“And let our hearts, as subtle masters do,
Stir up their servants to an act of rage,
And after seem to chide ’em.”
That is to say, the murder is to be carried out with as much decency as possible, and the murderers are afterwards to pretend that they deplore it.
As soon as the murder is resolved upon, however, Brutus, assured of the purity of his motives, stands proud and almost unconcerned in the midst of the conspirators. Far too unconcerned, indeed; for though he has not shrunk in principle from the doctrine that one cannot will the end without willing the means, he yet shrinks, upright and unpractical as he is, from employing means which seem to him either too base or too unscrupulous. He will not even suffer the conspirators to be bound by oath: “Swear priests and cowards and men cautelous.” They are to trust each other without the assurance of an oath, and to keep their secret unsworn. And when it is proposed that Antony shall be killed along with Cæsar, a necessary step, to which, as a politician, he was bound to consent, he rejects it, in Shakespeare as in Plutarch, out of humanity: “Our course will seem too bloody, Caius Cassius.” He feels that his will is as clear as day, and suffers at the thought of employing the methods of night and darkness:
“O Conspiracy!
Sham’st thou to show thy dangerous brow by night,
When evils are most free? O, then, by day
Where wilt thou find a cavern dark enough
To mask thy monstrous visage?”
Brutus is anxious that a cause which is to be furthered by assassination should achieve success without secrecy and without violence. Goethe has said: “Only the man of reflection has a conscience.” The man of action cannot have one while he is acting. To plunge into action is to place oneself at the mercy of one’s nature and of external powers. One acts rightly or wrongly, but always upon instinct—often stupidly, sometimes, it may be, brilliantly, never with full consciousness. Action implies the in considerateness of instinct, or egoism, or genius; Brutus, on the other hand, is bent on acting with every consideration.
Kreyssig, and after him Dowden, have called Brutus a Girondin, in opposition to his brother-in-law, Cassius, a sort of Jacobin in antique dress. The comparison is just only in regard to the lesser or greater inclination to the employment of violent means; it halts when we reflect that Brutus lives in the rarefied air of abstractions, face to face with ideas and principles, while Cassius lives in the world of facts; for the Jacobins were quite as stiff-necked theorists as any Girondin. Brutus, in Shakespeare, is a strict moralist, excessively cautious lest any stain should mar the purity of his character, while Cassius does not in the least aspire to moral flawlessness. He is frankly envious of Cæsar, and openly avows that he hates him; yet he is not base; for envy and hatred are in his case swallowed up by political passion, strenuous and consistent. And, unlike Brutus, he is a good observer, looking right through men’s words and actions into their souls. But as Brutus is the man whose name, birth, and position as Cæsar’s intimate friend, point him out to be the head of the conspiracy, he is always able to enforce his impolitic and short-sighted will.
When we find that Hamlet, who is so full of doubts, never for a moment doubts his right to kill the king, we must remember that Shakespeare had just exhausted this theme in his characterisation of Brutus.
Brutus is the ideal whom Shakespeare, like all men of the better sort, cherished in his soul—the man whose pride it is before everything to keep his hands clean and his mind high and free, even at the cost of failure in his undertakings and the wreck of his tranquillity and of his fortunes.
He does not care to impose an oath upon the others; he is too proud. If they want to betray him, let them! These others, it is true, may be moved by their hatred of the great man, and eager to quench their malice in his blood; he, for his part, admires him, and will sacrifice, not butcher him. The others fear the consequences of suffering Antony to address the people; but Brutus has explained to the people his reasons for the murder, so Antony may now eulogise Cæsar as much as he pleases. Did not Cæsar deserve eulogy? Does not he himself desire that Cæsar shall lie honoured, though punished, in his grave? He is too proud to keep a watch upon Antony, who has approached him in friendly fashion, though at the same time in the character of Cæsar’s friend; therefore he leaves the Forum before Antony begins his speech. Such moods are familiar to many. Many another has acted in this apparently unwise way, proudly reckless of consequences, moved by the dislike of the magnanimous man for all that savours of base cautiousness. Many a one, for example, has told the truth where it was stupid to do so, or has let slip an opportunity of revenge because he despised his enemy too much to seek compensation for his injuries, though he thereby neglected to render him innocuous for the future. An intense realisation of the necessity for confidence, or, on the other hand, of the untrustworthiness of friends and the contemptibleness of enemies, may easily lead one to despise every measure of prudence.
It was upon the basis of an intense feeling of this nature that Shakespeare created Brutus. With the addition of humour and a touch of genius he would be Hamlet, and he becomes Hamlet. With the addition of despairing bitterness and misanthropy he would be Timon, and he becomes Timon. Here he is the man of uncompromising character and principle, who is too proud to be prudent and too bad an observer to be practical; and this man is so situated that not only the life and death of another and of himself, but the welfare of the State, and even, as it appears, that of the whole civilised world, depend upon the resolution at which he arrives.
At Brutus’s side Shakespeare places the figure which forms his female counterpart, the kindred spirit who has become one with him, his cousin and wife, Cato’s daughter married to Cato’s disciple. He has here, and here alone, given us a picture of the ideal marriage as he conceived it.
In the scene between Brutus and Portia the poet takes up afresh a motive which he has handled once before—the anxious wife beseeching her husband to initiate her into his great designs. It first appears in Henry IV., Part I., where Lady Percy implores her Harry to let her share his counsels. (See above, p. 189) The description which she gives of Hotspur’s manner and conduct exactly corresponds to Portia’s description of the transformation which has taken place in Brutus. Both husbands, indeed, are nursing a similar project. But Lady Percy learns nothing. Her Harry no doubt loves her, loves her now and then, between two skirmishes, briskly and gaily; but there is no sentiment in his love for her, and he never dreams of any spiritual communion between them.
When Portia, in this case, begs her husband to tell her what is weighing on his mind, he at first, indeed, replies with evasions about his health; but on her vehemently declaring that she feels herself degraded by this lack of confidence (Shakespeare has but slightly softened the antique frankness of the words which Plutarch places in her mouth), Brutus answers her with warmth and beauty. And when (again as in Plutarch) she tells of the proof she has given of her steadfastness by thrusting a knife into her thigh and never complaining of the “voluntary wound,” he bursts forth with the words which Plutarch places in his mouth:—
“O ye gods,
Render me worthy of this noble wife,”
and promises to tell her everything.
Neither Shakespeare nor Plutarch, however, regards his facile communicativeness as a mark of prudence. For it is not Portia’s fault that it does not betray everything. When it comes to the point, she can neither hold her tongue nor control herself. She betrays her anxiety and uneasiness to the boy Lucius, and herself exclaims:—
“I have a man’s mind, but a woman’s might.
How hard it is for women to keep counsel!”
This reflection is obviously not Portia’s, but an utterance of Shakespeare’s own philosophy of life, which he has not cared to keep to himself. In Plutarch she even falls down as though dead, and the news of her death surprises Brutus just before the time appointed for the murder of Cæsar, so that he needs all his self-control to save himself from breaking down.
From the character with which Shakespeare has thus endowed Brutus spring the two great scenes which carry the play.
The first is the marvellously-constructed scene, the turning-point of the tragedy, in which Antony, speaking with Brutus’s consent over the body of Cæsar, stirs up the Romans against the murderers of the great imperator.
Even Brutus’s own speech Shakespeare has moulded with the rarest art. Plutarch relates that when Brutus wrote Greek he cultivated a “compendious” and laconic style, of which the historian adduces a string of examples. He wrote to the Samians: “Your councels be long, your doings be slow; consider the end.” And in another epistle: “The Xanthians, despising my good wil, haue made a graue of dispaire; and the Patareians, that put themselves into my protection, have lost no iot of their liberty: and therefore whilst you haue libertie, either chuse the iudgement of the Patareians or the fortune of the Xanthians.” See now, what Shakespeare has made out of these indications:—
“Romans, countrymen, and lovers! hear me for my cause, and be silent, that you may hear: believe me for mine honour, and have respect to mine honour, that you may believe.... If there be any in this assembly, any dear friend of Cæsar’s, to him I say, that Brutus’ love to Cæsar was no less than his. If, then, that friend demand, why Brutus rose against Cæsar, this is my answer:—Not that I loved Cæsar less, but that I loved Rome more.”
And so on, in this style of laconic antithesis. Shakespeare has made a deliberate effort to assign to Brutus the diction he had cultivated, and, with his inspired faculty of divination, has, as it were, reanimated it:—
“As Cæsar loved me, I weep for him; as he was fortunate, I rejoice at it; as he was valiant, I honour him: but, as he was ambitious, I slew him.”
With ingenious and yet noble art the speech culminates in the question, “Who is here so vile that will not love his country! If any, speak; for him have I offended.” And when the crowd answers, “None, Brutus, none,” he chimes in with the serene assurance, “Then none have I offended.”
The still more admirable oration of Antony is in the first place remarkable for the calculated difference of style which it displays. Here we have no antitheses, no literary eloquence; but a vernacular eloquence of the most powerful demagogic type. Antony takes up the thread just where Brutus has dropped it, expressly assures his hearers at the outset that this is to be a speech over Cæsar’s bier, but not to his glory, and emphasises to the point of monotony the fact that Brutus and the other conspirators are all, all honourable men. Then the eloquence gradually works up, subtle and potent, in its adroit crescendo, and yet in truth exalted by something which is not subtlety: glowing enthusiasm for Cæsar, scathing indignation against his assassins. The contempt and anger are at first masked, out of consideration for the mood of the populace, which has for the moment been won over by Brutus; then the mask is raised a little, then a little more and a little more, until, with a wild gesture, it is torn off and thrown aside.
Here again Shakespeare has utilised in a masterly fashion the hints he found in Plutarch, scanty as they were:—
“Afterwards, when Cæsar’s body was brought into the market-place, Antonius, making his funeral oration in praise of the dead, according to the auncient custome of Rome, and perceiuing that his words moued the common people to compassion: he framed his eloquence to make their harts yerne the more.”
Mark what Shakespeare has made of this::—
“Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears:
I come to bury Cæsar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them,
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Cæsar. The noble Brutus
Hath told you, Cæsar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Cæsar answered it.
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest,
(For Brutus is an honourable man,
So are they all, all honourable men),
Come I to speak in Cæsar’s funeral.
He was my friend, faithful and just to me:
But Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.”
Then Antony goes on to insinuate doubts as to Cæsar’s ambition, and tells how he rejected the kingly diadem, rejected it three times. Was this ambition? Thereupon he suggests that Cæsar, after all, was once beloved, and that there is no reason why he should not be mourned. Then with a sudden outburst:—
“O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason!—Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Cæsar,
And I must pause till it come back to me.”
Next comes an appeal to their pity for this greatest of men, whose word but yesterday might have stood against the world, and who now lies so low that the poorest will not do him reverence. It would be wrong to make his speech inflammatory, a wrong towards Brutus and Cassius “who—as you know—are honourable men” (mark the jibe in the parenthetic phrase); no, he will rather do wrong to the dead and to himself. But here he holds a parchment—he assuredly will not read it—but if the people came to know its contents they would kiss dead Cæsar’s wounds, and dip their handkerchiefs in his sacred blood. And then, when cries for the reading of the will mingle with curses upon the murderers, he stubbornly refuses to read it. Instead of doing so, he displays to them Cæsar’s cloak with all the rents in it.
What Plutarch says here is:—
“To conclude his Oration, he unfolded before the whole assembly the bloudy garments of the dead, thrust through in many places with their swords, and called the malefactors cruell and cursed murtherers.”
Out of these few words Shakespeare has made this miracle of invective:—
“You all do know this mantle! I remember
The first time ever Cæsar put it on:
’Twas on a summer’s evening, in his tent,
That day he overcame the Nervii.
Look! in this place ran Cassius’ dagger through:
See, what a rent the envious Casca made:
Through this, the well-beloved Brutus stabb’d;
And, as he pluck’d his cursed steel away,
Mark how the blood of Cæsar followed it,
As rushing out of doors, to be resolv’d
If Brutus so unkindly knock’d, or no;
For Brutus, as you know, was Cæsar’s angel.
Judge, O you gods, how dearly Cæsar lov’d him!
This was the most unkindest cut of all;
For when the noble Cæsar saw him stab,
Ingratitude, more strong than traitors’ arms,
Quite vanquish’d him: then burst his mighty heart;
And, in his mantle muffling up his face,
Even at the base of Pompey’s statua,
Which all the while ran blood, great Cæsar fell.
O, what a fall was there, my countrymen!
Then I, and you, and all of us fell down,
Whilst bloody treason flourish’d over us.
O! now you weep; and, I perceive, you feel
The dint of pity: these are gracious drops.
Kind souls! what, weep you, when you but behold
Our Cæsar’s vesture wounded? Look you here,
Here is himself, marr’d, as you see, with traitors.”
He uncovers Cæsar’s body; and not till then does he read the will, overwhelming the populace with gifts and benefactions. This climax is of Shakespeare’s own invention.
No wonder that even Voltaire was so struck with the beauty of this scene, that for its sake he translated the first three acts of the play. At the end of his own Mort de César, too, he introduced a feeble imitation of the scene; and he had it in his mind when, in his Discours sur la Tragédie, dedicated to Bolingbroke, he expressed so much enthusiasm and envy for the freedom of the English stage.
In the last two acts, Brutus is overtaken by the recoil of his deed. He consented to the murder out of noble, disinterested and patriotic motives; nevertheless he is struck down by its consequences, and pays for it with his happiness and his life. The declining action of the last two acts is—as is usual with Shakespeare—less effective and fascinating than the rising action which fills the first three; but it has one significant, profound, and brilliantly constructed and executed scene—the quarrel and reconciliation between Brutus and Cassius in the fourth act, which leads up to the appearance of Cæsar’s ghost.
This scene is significant because it gives a many-sided picture of the two leading characters—the sternly upright Brutus, who is shocked at the means employed by Cassius to raise the money without which their campaign cannot be carried on, and Cassius, a politician entirely indifferent to moral scruples, but equally unconcerned as to his own personal advantage. The scene is profound because it presents to us the necessary consequences of the law-defying, rebellious act: cruelty, unscrupulous policy, and lax tolerance of dishonourable conduct in subordinates, when the bonds of authority and discipline have once been burst. The scene is brilliantly constructed because, with its quick play of passion and its rising discord, which at last passes over into a cordial and even tender reconciliation, it is dramatic in the highest sense of the word.
The fact that Brutus was in Shakespeare’s own mind the true hero of the tragedy appears in the clearest light when we find him ending the play with the eulogy which Plutarch, in his life of Brutus, places in the mouth of Antony; I mean the famous words:—
“This was the noblest Roman of them all:
All the conspirators, save only he,
Did that they did in envy of great Cæsar;
He only, in a general honest thought
And common good to all, made one of them.
His life was gentle; and the elements
So mixed in him that Nature might stand up,
And say to all the world, ‘This was a man!’”
The resemblance between these words and a celebrated speech of Hamlet’s is unmistakable. Everywhere in Julius Cæsar we feel the proximity of Hamlet. The fact that Hamlet hesitates so long before attacking the King, finds so many reasons to hold his hand, is torn with doubts as to the act and its consequences, and insists on considering everything even while he upbraids himself for considering so long—all this is partly due, no doubt, to the circumstance that Shakespeare comes to him directly from Brutus. His Hamlet has, so to speak, just seen what happened to Brutus, and the example is not encouraging, either with respect to action in general, or with respect to the murder of a stepfather in particular.
It is not difficult to conceive that Shakespeare may at this period have been subject to moments of scepticism, in which he could scarcely understand how any one could make up his mind to act, to assume responsibility, to set in motion the rolling stone which is the type of every action. If we once begin to brood over the incalculable consequences of an action and all that circumstance may make of it, all action on a great scale becomes impossible. Therefore it is that very few old men understand their youth; they dare not and could not act again as, in their recklessness of consequences, they acted then. Brutus forms the transition to Hamlet, and Hamlet no doubt grew up in Shakespeare’s mind during the working out of Julius Cæsar.
The stages of transition are perhaps these: the conspirators, in egging Brutus on to the murder, are always reminding him of the elder Brutus, who pretended madness and drove out the Tarquins. This may have led Shakespeare to dwell upon his character as drawn by Livy, which had always been exceedingly popular. But Brutus the elder is an antique Hamlet; and the very name of Hamlet, as he found it in the older play and in Saxo, seems always to have haunted Shakespeare. It was the name he had given to the little boy whom he lost so early.
X
Ben Jonson and His Roman Plays
In precisely the same year as Shakespeare, his famous brother-poet, Ben Jonson, made his first attempt at a dramatic presentation of Roman antiquity. His play, The Poetaster, was written and acted in 1601. Its purpose is the literary annihilation of two playwrights, Marston and Dekker, with whom the author was at feud; but its action takes place in the time of Augustus; and Jonson, in spite of his satire on contemporaries, no doubt wanted to utilise his thorough knowledge of ancient literature in giving a true picture of Roman manners. As Shakespeare’s Julius Cæsar was followed by two other tragedies of antique Rome, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus, so Ben Jonson also wrote two other plays on Roman themes, the tragedies of Sejanus and Catiline. It is instructive to compare his method of treatment with Shakespeare’s; but a general comparison of the two creative spirits must precede this comparison of artistic processes in a single limited field.
Ben Jonson was nine years younger than Shakespeare, born in 1573, a month after the death of his father, the son of a clergyman whose forefathers had belonged to “the gentry.” He was a child of the town, while Shakespeare was a child of the country; and the fact is not without significance, though town and country were not then so clearly opposed to each other as they are now. When Ben was two years old, his mother married a worthy masterbricklayer, who did what he could to procure his step-son a good education, so that, after passing some years at a small private school, he was sent to Westminster. Here the learned William Camden, his teacher, introduced him to the two classical literatures, and seems, moreover, to have exercised a not altogether fortunate influence upon his subsequent literary habits; for it was Camden who taught him first to write out in prose whatever he wanted to express in verse. Thus the foundation was laid at school, not only of his double ambition to shine as a scholar and a poet, or rather as a scholar-poet, but also of his heavy and rhetorically emphatic verse.
In spite of his worship of learning, his dislike to all handicraft, and his unfitness for practical work, he was forced by poverty to break off his studies in order to enter the employment of his bricklayer stepfather—a fact which, in his subsequent literary feuds, always procured him the nickname of “the bricklayer.” He could not long endure this occupation, went as a soldier to the Netherlands, killed one of the enemy in single combat, under the eyes of both camps, returned to London and married—almost as early as Shakespeare—at the age of only nineteen. Twenty-six years later, in his conversations with Drummond, he called his wife “a shrew, yet honest.” He seems to have been an affectionate father, but had the misfortune to survive his children.
He was strong and massive in body, racy and coarse, full of self-esteem and combative instincts, saturated with the conviction of the scholar’s high rank and the poet’s exalted vocation, full of contempt for ignorance, frivolity, and lowness, classic in his tastes, with a bent towards careful structure and leisurely development of thought in all that he wrote, and yet a true poet in so far as he was not only irregular in his life and quite incapable of saving any of the money he now and then earned, but was, moreover, subject to hallucinations: once saw Carthaginians and Romans fighting on his great toe, and, on another occasion, had a vision of his son with a bloody cross on his brow, which was supposed to forbode his death.
Like Shakespeare, he sought to make his bread by entering the theatre and appearing as an actor. To him, as to Shakespeare, old pieces of the repertory were entrusted to be rewritten, expanded, and furbished up. Thus as late as 1601-2 he made a number of very able additions, in the style of the old play, to that Spanish Tragedy of Kyd’s, which must in many ways have been in Shakespeare’s mind during the composition of Hamlet.
He did this work on the commission of Henslow, for whose company, which competed with Shakespeare’s, he worked regularly from 1597 onwards. He collaborated with Dekker in a tragedy, and had a hand in other plays; in short, he made himself useful to the theatre as best he could, but did not, like Shakespeare, acquire a share in the enterprise, and thus never became a man of substance. He was to the end of his life forced to rely for his income upon the liberality of royal and noble patrons.
The end of 1598 is doubly significant in Ben Jonson’s life. In September he killed in a duel another of Henslow’s actors, a certain Gabriel Spencer (who seems to have challenged him), and was therefore branded on the thumb with the letter T (Tyburn). A couple of months later, this occurrence having evidently led to a break in his connection with Henslow’s company, his first original play, Every Man in his Humour, was acted by the Lord Chamberlain’s men. According to a tradition preserved by Rowe, and apparently trustworthy, the play had already been refused, when Shakespeare happened to see it and procured its acceptance. It met with the success it deserved, and henceforward the author’s name was famous.
Even in the first edition of this play he makes Young Knowell speak with warm enthusiasm of poetry, of the dignity of the sacred art of invention, and express that hatred for every profanation of the Muses which appears so frequently in later works, finding, perhaps, its most vehement utterance in The Poetaster, where the young Ovid eulogises his art in opposition to the scorn of his father and others. From the first, too, he made no concealment of his strong sense of being at once a high-priest of art, and, in virtue of his learning, an Aristarchus of taste. He not only scorned all attempts to tickle the public ear, but, with the firm and superior attitude of a teacher, he again and again imprinted on spectators and readers what Goethe has expressed in the well-known words: “Ich schreibe nicht, Euch zu gefallen; Ihr sollt was lernen.” Again and again he claimed for his own person the sanctity and inviolability of art, and attacked his inferior rivals unsparingly, with ferocious rather than witty satire. His prologues and epilogues are devoted to a self-acclamation which was entirely foreign to Shakespeare’s nature. Asper in Every Man out of his Humour (1599), Crites in Cynthia’s Revels (1600), and Horace in The Poetaster (1601), are so many pieces of self-idolising self-portraiture.
All who, in his judgment, degrade art are made to pay the penalty in scathing caricatures. In The Poetaster, for example, his taskmaster, Henslow, is presented under the name of Histrio as a depraved slave-dealer, and his colleagues Marston and Dekker are held up to ridicule under Roman names, as intrusive and despicable scribblers. Their attacks upon the admirable poet Horace, whose name and personality the extremely dissimilar Ben Jonson has arrogated to himself, spring from contemptible motives, and receive a disgraceful punishment.
This whole warfare must not be taken too seriously. The worthy Ben could be at the same time an indignant moralist and a genial boon-companion. We presently find him taking service afresh with the very Henslow whom he has just treated with such withering contempt; and though his attack of 1601 had been met by a most malicious retort in Marston and Dekker’s Satiromastix, he, three years afterwards, accepts the dedication of Marston’s Malcontent, and in 1605 collaborates with this lately-lampooned colleague and with Chapman in the comedy of Eastward Ho! One could not but think of the German proverb, “Pack schlagt sich, Pack vertragt sich,” were it not that Jonson’s action at this juncture reveals him in anything but a vulgar light. Marston and Chapman having been thrown into prison for certain gibes at the Scotch in this play, which had come to the notice of the King, and being reported to be in danger of having their noses and ears cut off, Ben Jonson, of his own free will, claimed his share in the responsibility and joined them in prison. At a supper which, after their liberation, he gave to all his friends, his mother clinked glasses with him, and at the same time showed him a paper, the contents of which she had intended to mix with his drink in prison if he had been sentenced to mutilation. She added that she herself would not have survived him, but would have taken her share of the poison. She must have been a mother worthy of such a son.
While Ben lay in durance on account of his duel, he had been converted to Catholicism by a priest who attended him—a conversion at which his adversaries did not fail to jeer. He does not seem, however, to have embraced the Catholic dogma with any great fervour, for twelve years later he once more changes his religion and returns to the Protestant Church. Equally characteristic of Ben and of the Renaissance is his own statement, preserved for us by Drummond, that at his first communion after his reconciliation with Protestantism, in token of his sincere return to the doctrine which gave laymen, as well as priests access to the chalice, he drained at one draught the whole of the consecrated wine.
Not without humour, moreover—to use Jonson’s own favourite word—is his story of the way in which Raleigh’s son, to whom he acted as governor during a tour in France (while Raleigh himself was in the Tower), took a malicious pleasure in making his mentor dead drunk, having him wheeled in a wheelbarrow through the streets of Paris, and showing him off to the mob at every street corner. Ben’s strong insistence on his spiritual dignity was not infrequently counterbalanced by an extreme carelessness of his personal dignity.
With all his weaknesses, however, he was a sturdy, energetic, and high-minded man, a commanding, independent, and very comprehensive intelligence; and from 1598, when he makes his first appearance on Shakespeare’s horizon, throughout the rest of his life, he was, so far as we can see, the man of all his contemporaries whose name was oftenest mentioned along with Shakespeare’s. In after days, especially outside England, the name of Ben Jonson has come to sound small enough in comparison with the name of solitary greatness with which it was once bracketed; but at that time, although Jonson was never so popular as Shakespeare, they were commonly regarded in literary circles as the dramatic twin-brethren of the age. For us it is still more interesting to remember that Ben Jonson was one of the few with whom we know that Shakespeare was on terms of constant familiarity, and, moreover, that he brought to this intercourse a set of definite artistic principles, widely different from Shakespeare’s own. Though his society may have been somewhat fatiguing, it must nevertheless have been both instructive and stimulating to Shakespeare, since Ben was greatly his superior in historical and linguistic knowledge, while as a poet he pursued a totally different ideal.
Ben Jonson was a great dramatic intelligence. He never, like the other poets of his time, took this or that novel and dramatised it as it stood, regardless of its more or less incoherent structure, its more or less flagrant defiance of topographical, geographical, or historical reality. With architectural solidity—was he not the step-son of a master-builder?—he built up his dramatic plan out of his own head, and, being a man of great learning, he did his best to avoid all incongruities of local colour. If he is now and then negligent in this respect—if the characters in Volpone now and then talk as if they were in London, not in Venice, and those in The Poetaster as if they were in England, not in Rome—it is because of his satiric purpose, and not at all by reason of the indifference to such considerations which characterises all other dramatists of the time, Shakespeare not the least.
The fundamental contrast between them can be most shortly expressed in the statement that Ben Jonson accepted the view of human nature set forth in the classic comedies and the Latin tragedies. He does not represent it as many-sided, with inward developments and inconsistencies, but fixes character in typical forms, with one dominant trait thrown into high relief. He portrays, for example, the crafty parasite, or the eccentric who cannot endure noise, or the braggart captain, or the depraved anarchist (Catiline), or the stern man of honour (Cato)—and all these personalities are neither more nor less than the labels imply, and act up to their description always and in all circumstances. The pencil with which he draws is hard, but he wields it with such power that his best outlines subsist through the centuries, unforgettable, despite their occasional oddity of design, in virtue of the indignation with which wickedness and meanness are branded, and the racy merriment with which the caricatures are sketched, the farces worked out.
Some of Molière’s farces may now and then remind us of Jonson’s, but, as regards the pitiless intensity of the satire, we shall find no counterpart to his Volpone until we come in our own times to Gogol’s Revisor.
The Graces stood by Shakespeare’s cradle, not by Jonson’s; and yet this heavy-armed warrior has now and then attained to grace as well—has now and then given a holiday to his sound systematic intelligence and his solidly-constructed logic, and, like a true poet of the Renaissance, soared into the rarer atmosphere of pure fantasy.
He shows himself very much at home in the allegorical masques which were performed at court festivals; and in the pastoral play The Sad Shepherd which seems to have been written upon his death-bed, he proved that even in the purely romantic style he could challenge comparison with the best writers of his day. Yet it is not in this sphere that he displays his true originality. It is in his keen and faithful observation of the conditions and manners of his time, which Shakespeare left on one side, or depicted only incidentally and indirectly. The London of Elizabeth lives again in Jonson’s plays; both the lower and higher circles, but especially the lower: the haunters of taverns and theatres, the men of the riverside and the markets, rogues and vagabonds, poets and players, watermen and jugglers, bear-leaders and hucksters, rich city dames, Puritan fanatics and country squires, English oddities of every class and kind, each speaking his own language, dialect, or jargon. Shakespeare never kept so close to the life of the day.
It is especially Johnson’s scholarship that must have made his society full of instruction for Shakespeare. Ben’s acquirements were encyclopædic, and his acquaintance with the authors of antiquity was singularly complete and accurate. It has often been remarked that he was not content with an exhaustive knowledge of the leading writers of Greece and Rome. He knows not only the great historians, poets, and orators, such as Tacitus and Sallust, Horace, Virgil, Ovid, and Cicero, but sophists, grammarians, and scholiasts, men like Athenæus, Libanius, Philostratus, Strabo, Photius. He is familiar with fragments of Æolic lyrists and Roman epic poets, of Greek tragedies and Roman inscriptions; and, what is still more remarkable, he manages to make use of all his knowledge. Whatever in the ancients he found beautiful or profound or stimulating, that he wove into his work. Dryden says of him in his “Essay of Dramatic Poesy”:—
“The greatest man of the last age (Ben Jonson) was willing to give place to the ancients in all things: he was not only a professed imitator of Horace, but a learned plagiary of all the others; you track him everywhere in their snow. If Horace, Lucan, Petronius Arbiter, Seneca, and Juvenal had their own from him, there are few serious thoughts which are new in him.... But he has done his robberies so openly, that one may see he fears not to be taxed by any law. He invades authors like a monarch; and what would be theft in other poets is only victory in him.”
Certain it is that an uncommon learning and an extraordinary memory supplied him with an immense store of small touches, poetical and rhetorical details, which he could not refrain from incorporating in his plays.
Yet his mass of learning was not of a merely verbal or rhetorical nature; he knew things as well as words. Whatever subject he treats of, be it alchemy, or witchcraft, or cosmetics in the time of Tiberius, he handles it with competence and has its whole literature at his fingers’ ends. He thus becomes universal like Shakespeare, but in a different way. Shakespeare knows, firstly, all that cannot be learnt from books, and in the second place, whatever can be gleaned by genius from a casual utterance, an intelligent hint, a conversation with a man of high acquirements. Besides this, he knows the literature which was at that time within the reach of a quick-witted and studious man without special scholarship. Ben Jonson, on the other hand, is a scholar by profession. He has learnt from books all that the books of his day—for the most part, of course, the not too numerous survivals of the classic literatures—could teach a man who made scholarship his glory. He not only possesses knowledge, but he knows whence he has acquired it; he can cite his authorities by chapter and paragraph, and he sometimes garnishes his plays with so many learned references that they bristle with notes like an academic thesis.
Colossal, coarse-grained, vigorous, and always ready for the fray, with his gigantic burden of learning, he has been compared by Taine to one of those war-elephants of antiquity which bore on their backs a whole fortress, with garrison, armoury, and munitions, and under the weight of this panoply could yet move as quickly as a fleet-footed horse.
It must have been intensely interesting for their comrades at the Mermaid to listen to the discussions between Jonson and Shakespeare, to follow two such remarkable minds, so differently organised and equipped, when they debated, in jest or earnest, this or that historic problem, this or that moot point in æsthetics; and no less interesting is it for us, in our days, to compare their almost contemporaneous dramatic treatment of Roman antiquity. We might here expect Shakespeare to have the worst of it, since he, according to Jonson’s well-known phrase, had “small Latine and less Greek;” while Ben was as much at home in ancient Rome as in the London of his day, and, with his altogether masculine talent, could claim a certain kinship with the Roman spirit.
And yet even here Shakespeare stands high above Jonson, who, with all his learning and industry, lacks his great contemporary’s sense for the fundamental element in human nature, to which the terms good and bad do not apply, and has, besides, very few of those unforeseen inspirations of genius which constitute Shakespeare’s strength, and make up for all the gaps in his knowledge. Jonson, moreover, could not modulate into the minor key, and is thus unable to depict the inmost subtleties of feminine character.
None the less would it be unjust to make Jonson, as the Germans are apt to do, nothing but a foil to Shakespeare. We must, in mere equity, bring out the points at which he attains to real greatness.
Although the scene of The Poetaster is laid in Rome in the days of Augustus, the play eludes comparison with Shakespeare’s Roman dramas in so far as its costume is partly a mere travesty under which Ben Jonson defends himself against his contemporaries Marston and Dekker, who also figure, of course, in a Roman disguise. Even here, however, he has done his best to give an accurate picture of antique Roman manners, and has applied to the task all his learning, with rather too little aid, perhaps, from his fancy. His comic figures, for instance, the intrusive Crispinus and the foolish singer Hermogenes, are taken bodily from Horace’s Satires (Book i. Satires 3 and 9); but both these pleasant caricatures are executed with vigour and life.
Ben Jonson has in this play woven together three different actions, one only of which has a symbolic meaning outside the frame of the picture. In the first place, he presents Ovid’s struggle for leave to follow his poetic vocation, his suspected love-affair with Augustus’s daughter, Julia, and his banishment from the court when Augustus discovers the intrigue between the young poet and his child. In the second place, he introduces us into the house of the rich bourgeois Albius, who has been ill-advised enough to marry one of the emancipated great ladies of the period, Chloe by name, and who, by her help, obtains admission to court society. Chloe’s house is a meeting-place for all the love-poets of the period, Tibullus, Propertius, Ovid, Cornelius Gallus, and the ladies who favour them; and Jonson has succeeded very fairly in suggesting the free tone of conversation prevalent in those circles, which was doubtless reproduced in many circles of London life during the Renaissance. Finally, we have a representation—Jonson’s chief object in writing the play—of the conspiracy of the bad and envious poets against Horace, which culminates in a formal impeachment. The Emperor himself, and the famous poets of his court, form a sort of tribunal before which the case is tried. Horace is acquitted on every count, and the accusers are sentenced to a punishment entirely in the spirit of the Aristophanic comedy—so foreign to Shakespeare—Crispinus being forced to take a pill of hellebore, which makes him vomit up all the affected or merely novel words he has used, which appear to Ben Jonson ridiculous. Some of them—for example the first two, “retrograde” and “reciprocal”—have nevertheless survived in modern English. In spite of its allegorical character, the episode is not deficient in an almost too pungent realism.
The most Roman of all these scenes are doubtless those in which the gallantry between the young men and the ladies, and the snobbery which forces its way into Augustus’s court, are freely represented. Less Roman, by reason of their too palpable tendency, are the scenes in which Augustus appears in the circle of his court poets. No serious attempt is made to portray the Emperor’s character, and the speeches placed in the mouths of the poets are very clearly designed simply for the glorification of poetry in general, and Ben Jonson in particular.
The sins of which his enemies were always accusing him were “self-love, arrogancy, impudence, and railing,” together with “filching by translation.” As he explains in the defensive dialogue which he appended to his play, it was his purpose—
“To show that Virgil, Horace, and the rest
Of those great master-spirits, did not want
Detractors then, or practisers against them.”
He makes foolish persons find injurious allusions to themselves, and even insults to the Emperor, in entirely innocent poems of Horace’s, and shows how the Emperor orders them to be whipped as backbiters. Horace’s literary relation to the Greeks, be it noted, was not unlike that of Ben Jonson himself to the Latin writers.
A special interest attaches for us to the passage in the fifth act, where, immediately before Virgil’s entrance, the different poets, at the suggestion of the Emperor, express their judgment of his genius, and where Horace, after warmly protesting against the common belief that one poet is necessarily envious of another, joins in the general eulogy of his great rival. There is this remarkable circumstance about the encomiums on Virgil, here placed in the mouths of Gallus, Tibullus, and Horace, that while some of them are appropriate enough to the real Virgil (else all verisimilitude would have been sacrificed), others seem unmistakably to point away from Virgil towards one or other famous contemporary of Jonson’s own. Look for a moment at these speeches (v. I):—
“Tibullus. That which he hath writ
Is with such judgment labour’d, and distill’d
Through all the needful uses of our lives,
That could a man remember but his lines,
He should not touch at any serious point,
But he might breathe his spirit out of him.
Augustus. You mean, he might repeat part of his works
As fit for any conference he can use?
Tibullus. True, royal Cæsar.
Horace. His learning savours not the school-like gloss
That most consists in echoing words and terms,
And soonest wins a man an empty name;
Nor any long or far-fetch’d circumstance
Wrapp’d in the curious generalties of arts,
But a direct and analytic sum
Of all the worth and first effects of arts.
And for his poesy, ’tis so ramm’d with life,
That it shall gather strength of life, with being,
And live hereafter more admired than now.”
Can we conceive that Ben Jonson had not Shakespeare in his eye as he wrote these speeches, which apply better to him than to any one else? It is true that a Shakespeare scholar of such authority as the late C. M. Ingleby, the compiler of Shakespeare’s Centurie of Prayse, has declared against this theory, together with Nicholson and Furnivall. But none of them has brought forward any conclusive argument to prevent us from following Ben Jonson’s admirer, Gifford, and his impartial critic, John Addington Symonds, in accepting these speeches as allusions to Shakespeare. It is useless to be for ever citing the passage in The Return from Parnassus, as to the “purge” Shakespeare has given Ben Jonson, in proof that there was an open feud between them, when, in fact, there is no evidence whatever of any hostility on Shakespeare’s part; and the very stress laid on the assertion that Horace, as a poet, is innocent of envy towards a famous and popular colleague, makes it unreasonable to take the eulogies as applying solely to the real Virgil, whom they fit so imperfectly. Of course it by no means follows that we are to conceive every word of these eulogies as unreservedly applied to Shakespeare; the speeches seem to have been purposely left somewhat vague, so that they might at once point to the ancient poet and suggest the modern. But out of the mists of the characterisation certain definite contours stand forth; and the physiognomy which they form, the picture of the great teacher in all earthly affairs, rich, not in book-learning, but in the wisdom of life, whose poetry is so vital that it will live through the ages with an ever-intenser life—this portrait we know and recognise as that of the genius with the great, calm eyes under the lofty brow.
Ben Jonson’s Sejanus, which dates from 1603, only two years after The Poetaster, is a historical tragedy of the time of Tiberius, in which the poet, without any reference to contemporary personalities, sets forth to depict the life and customs of the imperial court. It is as an archæologist and moralist, however, that he depicts them, and his method is thus very different from Shakespeare’s. He not only displays a close acquaintance with the life of the period, but penetrates through the outward forms to its spirit. He is animated, indeed, by a purely moral indignation against the turbulent and corrupt protagonist of his tragedy, but his wrath does not prevent him from giving a careful delineation of the figure of Sejanus in relation to its surroundings, by means of thoughtfully-designed and even imaginative individual scenes. Jonson does not, like Shakespeare, display from within the character of this unscrupulous and audacious man, but he shows the circumstances which have produced it, and its modes of action.
The difference between Jonson’s and Shakespeare’s method is not that Jonson pedantically avoids the anachronisms which swarm in Julius Cæsar. In both plays, for instance, watches are spoken of.1 But Ben, on occasion, can paint a scene of Roman life with as much accuracy as we find in a picture by Alma Tadema or a novel by Flaubert. For example, when he depicts an act of worship and sacrifice in the Sacellum or private chapel of Sejanus’s house (v. 4), every detail of the ceremonial is correct. After the Herald (Præco) has uttered the formula, “Be all profane far hence,” and horn and flute players have performed their liturgical music, the priest (Flamen) exhorts all to appear with “pure hands, pure vestments, and pure minds;” his acolytes intone the complementary responses; and while the trumpets are again sounded, he takes honey from the altar with his finger, tastes it, and gives it to the others to taste; goes through the same process with the milk in an earthen vessel; and then sprinkles milk over the altar, “kindleth his gums,” and goes with the censer round the altar, upon which he ultimately places it, dropping “branches of poppy” upon the smouldering incense. In justification of these traits, Jonson gives no fewer than thirteen footnotes, in which passages are cited from a very wide range of Latin authors. Kalisch has counted the notes appended to this play, and finds 291 in all. The ceremonial is here employed to introduce a scene in which “great Mother Fortune,” to whom the libation is made, averts her face from Sejanus, and thereby portends his fall; whereupon, in an access of fury, he overturns her statue and altar.
Another scene, constructed with quite as much learning, and far more able and remarkable, is that which opens the second Act. Livia’s physician, Eudemus, has been suborned by Sejanus to procure him a meeting with the princess, and, moreover, to concoct a potent poison for her husband. In the act of assisting his mistress to rouge her cheek, and recommending her an effective “dentrifice” and a “prepared pomatum to smooth the skin,” he answers her casual questions as to who is to present the poisoned cup to Drusus and induce him to drink it. Here, again, Ben Jonson’s mastery of detail displays itself. Eudemus’s remark, for example, that the “ceruse” on Livia’s cheeks has faded in the sun, is supported by a reference to an epigram of Martial, from which it appears that this cosmetic was injured by heat. But here all these details are merged in the potent general impression produced by the dispassionate and business-like calmness with which the impending murder is arranged in the intervals of a disquisition upon those devices of the toilet which are to enchain the contriver of the crime.
Ben Jonson possesses the undaunted insight and the vigorous pessimism which render it possible to represent Roman depravity and wild-beast-like ferocity under the first Emperors without extenuation and without declamation. He cannot, indeed, dispense with a sort of chorus of honourable Romans, but they express themselves, as a rule, pithily and without prolixity; and he has enough sense of art and of history never to let his ruffians and courtesans repent.
Now and then he even attains to a Shakespearian level. The scene in which Sejanus approaches Eudemus first with jesting talk, and then, with wily insinuations, worms himself into his acquaintance and makes him his creature, while Eudemus, with crafty servility, shows that he can take a half-spoken hint, and, without for a moment committing himself, offers his services as pander and assassin—this passage is in no way inferior to the scene in Shakespeare’s King John in which the King suggests to Hubert the murder of Arthur.
The most remarkable scene, however, is that (v. 10) in which the Senate is assembled in the Temple of Apollo to hear messages from Tiberius in his retreat at Capri. The first letter confers upon Sejanus “the tribunitial dignity and power,” with expressions of esteem, and the Senate loudly acclaims the favourite. Then the second letter is read. It is expressed in a strangely contorted style, begins with some general remarks on public policy, hypocritical in tone, then turns, like the first, to Sejanus, and, to the astonishment of all, dwells with emphasis upon his low origin and the rare honours to which he has been preferred. Already the hearers are alarmed; but the impression is obliterated by new sentences of flattery. Then unfavourable opinions and judgments regarding the favourite are cited and dwelt upon with a certain complacency; then they are refuted with some vehemence; finally, they are brought forward again, and this time in a manner unmistakably hostile to Sejanus. Immediately the senators who have swarmed around him withdraw from his neighbourhood, leaving him in the centre of an empty space; and the reading continues until Laco enters with the guards who are to arrest the hitherto all-powerful favourite and lead him away. We can find no parallel to this reading of the letter and the vacillations it produces among the cringing senators, save in Antony’s speech over the body of Cæsar and the consequent revulsion in the attitude and temper of the Roman mob. Shakespeare’s scene is more vividly projected, and shines with the poet’s humour; Jonson’s scene is elaborated with grim energy, and worked out with the moralist’s bitterness. But in the dramatic movement of the moralist’s scene, no less than of the poet’s, antique Rome lives again.
Jonson’s Catiline, written some time later, appeared in 1611, and was dedicated to Pembroke. Although executed on the same principles, it is on the whole inferior to Sejanus; but it is better fitted for comparison with Julius Cæsar in so far as its action belongs to the same period, and Cæsar himself appears in it. The second act of the tragedy is in its way a masterpiece. As soon as Jonson enters upon the political action proper, he transcribes endless speeches from Cicero, and becomes intolerably tedious; but so long as he keeps to the representation of manners, and seeks, as in his comedies, to paint a quite unemotional picture of the period, he shows himself at his best.
This second act takes place at the house of Fulvia, the lady who, according to Sallust, betrayed to Cicero the conspirators’ secret. The whole picture produces an entirely convincing effect. She first repels with unfeeling coldness an intrusive friend and protector, Catiline’s fellow-conspirator, Curius; but when he at last turns away in anger, telling her that she will repent her conduct when she finds herself excluded from participation in an immense booty which will fall to the share of others, she calls him back, full of curiosity and interest, becomes suddenly friendly, and even caressing, and wrings from him his secret, instantly recognising, however, that Cicero will pay for it without stint, and that this money is considerably safer than the sum which might fall to her share in a general revolution. Her visit to Cicero, with his craftily friendly interrogatory, first of her, and then of her lover Curius, whom he summons and converts into one of his spies, deserves the highest praise. These scenes contain the concentrated essence of Sallust’s Catiline and of Cicero’s Orations and Letters. The Cicero of this play rises high above the Cicero to whom Shakespeare has assigned a few speeches. Cæsar, on the other hand, comes off no better at Ben Jonson’s hands than at Shakespeare’s. The poet was obviously determined to show a certain independence of judgment in the way in which he has treated Sallust’s representation both of Cæsar and of Cicero. Sallust, whom Jonson nevertheless follows in the main, is hostile to Cicero and defends Cæsar. The worthy Ben, on the other hand, was, as a man of letters, a sworn admirer of Cicero, while in Cæsar he sees only a cold, crafty personage, who sought to make use of Catiline for his own ends, and therefore joined forces with him, but repudiated him when things went wrong, and was so influential that Cicero dared not attack him when he rooted out the conspiracy. Thus the great Caius Julius did not touch Jonson’s manly heart any more than Shakespeare’s. He appears throughout in an extremely unsympathetic light, and no speech, no word of his, portends his coming greatness.
Of this greatness Jonson had probably no deep realisation. It is surprising enough to note that the scholars and poets of the Renaissance, in so far as they took sides in the old strife between Cæsar and Pompey, were all on Pompey’s side. Even in the seventeenth century, in France, under a despotism more absolute than Cæsar’s, the men who were familiar with antique history, and who, for the rest, vied with each other in loyalty and king-worship, were unanimously opposed to Cæsar. Strange as it may seem, it is not until our century, with its hostility to despotism and its continuous advance in the direction of democracy, that Cæsar’s genius has been fully appreciated, and the benefits his life conferred on humanity have been thoroughly understood.
The personal relation between Ben Jonson and Shakespeare is not to this day quite clearly ascertained. It was for long regarded as distinctly hostile, no one doubting that Jonson, during his great rival’s lifetime, cherished an obstinate jealousy towards him. More recently, Jonson’s admirers have argued with warmth that cruel injustice has been done him in this respect. So far as we can now judge, it appears that Jonson honestly recognised and admired Shakespeare’s great qualities, but at the same time felt a displeasure he never could quite conquer at seeing him so much more popular as a dramatist, and—as was only natural—regarded his own tendencies in art as truer and better justified.
In the preface to Sejanus (edition of 1605) Jonson uses an expression which, as the piece was acted by Shakespeare’s company, and Shakespeare himself appeared in it, was long interpreted as referring to him. Jonson writes:—
“Lastly, I would inform you that this book, in all numbers, is not the same with that which was acted on the public stage, wherein a second pen had good share; in place of which, I have rather chosen to put weaker, and, no doubt, less pleasing, of mine own, than to defraud so happy a genius of his right by my loathed usurpation.”
The words “so happy a genius,” in particular, together with the other circumstances, have directed the thoughts of commentators to Shakespeare. Mr. Brinsley Nicholson, however (in the Academy, Nov. 14th, 1874), has shown it to be far more probable that the person alluded to is not Shakespeare, but a very inferior poet, Samuel Sheppard. The marked politeness of Jonson’s expressions may be due to his having inflicted on his collaborator a considerable disappointment, almost an insult, by omitting his portion of the work, and at the same time excluding his name from the title-page. It seems, at any rate, that Samuel Sheppard felt wounded by this proceeding, since, more than forty years later, he claimed for himself the honour of having collaborated in Sejanus, in a verse which is ostensibly a panegyric on Jonson.2 Symonds, so late as 1888, nevertheless maintains in his Ben Jonson that the preface most probably refers to Shakespeare; but he does not refute or even mention Nicholson’s carefully-marshalled argument.
It is not, however, of great importance to decide whether a compliment in one of Jonson’s prefaces is or is not addressed to Shakespeare, since we have ample evidence in the warm eulogy and mild criticism in his Discoveries, and in the enthusiastic poem prefixed to the First Folio, that the crusty Ben (who, moreover, is said to have been Shakespeare’s boon companion on his last convivial evening) regarded him with the warmest feelings, at least towards the close of his life and after his death.
This does not exclude the probability that Jonson’s radically different literary ideals may have led him to make incidental and sometimes rather tart allusions to what appeared to him weak or mistaken in Shakespeare’s work.
There is no foundation for the theory which has sometimes been advanced, that the passage in The Poetaster ridiculing Crispinus’s coat of arms is an allusion to Shakespeare. It is beyond all doubt that the figure of Crispinus was exclusively intended for Marston; he himself, at any rate, did not for a moment doubt it. For the rest, Jonson’s ascertained or conjectured side-glances at Shakespeare are these:—
In the prologue to Every Man in his Humour, which can scarcely have been spoken when the play was performed by the Lord Chamberlain’s company, not only is realistic art proclaimed the true art, in opposition to the romanticism which prevailed on the Shakespearian stage, but a quite definite attack is made on those who
“With three rusty swords,
And help of some few foot and half-foot words,
Fight over York and Lancaster’s long jars.”
And this is followed by a really biting criticism of the works of other playwrights, concluding—
“There’s hope left then,
You, that have so graced monsters, may like men.”
The possible jibe at Twelfth Night in Every Man out of his Humour (iii. I) has already been mentioned (ante, p. 272). That, too, must be of late insertion, and is at worst extremely innocent.
Much has been made of the passage in Volpone (iii. 2) where Lady Politick Would-be, speaking of Guarini’s Pastor Fido, says:—
“All our English writers
Will deign to steal out of this author, mainly:
Almost as much as from Montagnié.”
This has been interpreted as an accusation of plagiarism, some pointing it at the well-known passage in The Tempest, where Shakespeare has annexed some lines, from Montaigne’s Essays; others at Hamlet, which has throughout many points of contact with the French philosopher. But The Tempest was undoubtedly written long after Volpone, and the relation of Hamlet to Montaigne is such as to render it scarcely conceivable that an accusation of plagiarism could be founded upon it. Here again Jonson seems to have been groundlessly suspected of malice.
Jacob Feis (Shakespeare and Montaigne, p. 183) would fain see in Nano’s song about the hermaphrodite Androgyno a shameless attack upon Shakespeare, simply because the names Pythagoras and Euphorbus appear in it (Volpone, i. I), as they do in the well-known passage in Meres; but this accusation is entirely fantastic. Equally unreasonable is it of Feis to discover an obscene besmirching of the figure of Ophelia in that passage of Jonson, Marston, and Chapman’s Eastward Ho! (iii. 2) where there occur some passing allusions to Hamlet.
There remain, then, in reality, only one or two passages in Bartholomew Fair, dating from 1614. We have already seen (ante, p. 337) that there may possibly be a satirical allusion to the Sonnets in the introduced puppet-play, The Touchstone of True Love. The Induction contains an unquestionable jibe, both at The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale, whose airy poetry the downright Ben was unable to appreciate.3 Neither Caliban nor the element of enchantment in The Tempest appealed to him, and in The Winters Tale, as in Pericles, it offended his classic taste and his Aristotelian theories that the action should extend over a score of years, so that we see infants in one act reappear in the next as grown-up young women.
But these trifling intolerances and impertinences must not tempt us to forget that it was Ben Jonson who wrote of Shakespeare those great and passionate lines:—
“Triumph, my Britain! thou hast one to show
To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe.
He was not of an age, but for all time!”
XI
Hamlet: Its Antecedents in Fiction, History, and Drama
Many and various emotions crowded upon Shakespeare’s mind in the year 1601. In its early months Essex and Southampton were condemned. At exactly the same time there occurs the crisis in the relations of Pembroke and Shakespeare with the Dark Lady. Finally, in the early autumn, Shakespeare suffered a loss which he must have felt deeply. The Stratford register of burials for 1601 contains this line—
Septemb. 8. Mr. Johannes Shakespeare.
He lost his father, his earliest friend and guardian, whose honour and reputation lay so near to his heart. The father probably lived with his son’s family in the handsome New Place, which Shakespeare had bought four years before. He had doubtless brought up the two girls Susannah and Judith; he had doubtless sat by the death-bed of the little Hamnet. Now he was no more. All the years of his youth, spent at his father’s side, revived in Shakespeare’s mind, memories flocked in upon him, the fundamental relation between son and father preoccupied his thoughts, and he fell to brooding over filial love and filial reverence.
In the same year Hamlet began to take shape in Shakespeare’s imagination.
Hamlet has given the name of Denmark a world-wide renown. Of all Danish men, there is only one who can be called famous on the largest scale; only one with whom the thoughts of men are for ever busied in Europe, America, Australia, aye, even in Asia and Africa, wherever European culture has made its way; and this one never existed, at any rate in the form in which he has become known to the world. Denmark has produced several men of note—Tycho Brahe, Thorvaldsen, and Hans Christian Andersen—but none of them has attained a hundredth part of Hamlet’s fame. The Hamlet literature is comparable in extent to the literature of one of the smaller European peoples—the Slovaks, for instance.
As it is interesting to follow with the eye the process by which a block of marble slowly assumes human form, so it is interesting to observe how the Hamlet theme gradually acquires its Shakespearian character.
The legend first appears in Saxo Grammaticus. Fengo murders his brave brother Horvendil, and marries his widow Gerutha (Gertrude). Horvendil’s son, Amleth, determines to disarm Fengo’s malevolence by feigning madness. In order to test whether he is really mad, a beautiful girl is thrown in his way, who is to note whether, in his passion for her, he still maintains the appearance of madness. But a foster-brother and friend of Amleth’s reveals the plot to him; the girl, too, has an old affection for him; and nothing is discovered. Here lie the germs of Ophelia and Horatio.
With regard to Amleth’s mad talk, it is explained that, having a conscientious objection to lying, he so contorted his sayings that, though he always said what he meant, people could not discover whether he meant what he said, or himself understood it—an account of the matter which applies quite as well to the dark sayings of the Shakespearian Hamlet as to the naïve riddling of the Jutish Amleth.
Polonius, too, is here already indicated—especially the scene in which he plays eavesdropper to Hamlet’s conversation with his mother. One of the King’s friends (præsumtione quam solertia abundantior) proposes that some one shall conceal himself in the Queen’s chamber. Amleth runs his sword through him and throws the dismembered body to the pigs, as Hamlet in the play drags the body out with him. Then ensues Amleth’s speech of reproach to his mother, of which not a little is retained even in Shakespeare:—
“Think’st thou, woman, that these hypocritical tears can cleanse thee of shame, thee, who like a wanton hast cast thyself into the arms of the vilest of nithings, hast incestuously embraced thy husband’s murderer, and basely flatterest and fawnest upon the man who has made thy son fatherless! What manner of creature doest thou resemble? Not a woman, but a dumb beast who couples at random.”
Fengo resolves to send Amleth to meet his death in England, and despatches him thither with two attendants, to whom Shakespeare, as we know, has given the names of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—the names of two Danish noblemen whose signatures have been found in close juxtaposition (with the date 1577) in an album which probably belonged to a Duke of Würtemberg. They were colleagues in the Council of Regency during the minority of Christian IV. These attendants (according to Saxo) had rune-staves with them, on which Amleth altered the runes, as in the play he re-writes the letters.
One more little touch is, as it were, led up to in Saxo: the exchange of the swords. Amleth, on his return, finds the King’s men assembled at his own funeral feast. He goes around with a drawn sword, and on trying its edge against his nails he once or twice cuts himself with it. Therefore they nail his sword fast into its sheath. When Amleth has set fire to the hall and rushes into Fengo’s chamber to murder him, he takes the King’s sword from its hook and replaces it with his own, which the King in vain attempts to draw before he dies.
Now that Hamlet, more than any other Dane, has made the name of his fatherland world-famous, it impresses us strangely to read this utterance of Saxo’s: “Imperishable shall be the memory of the steadfast youth who armed himself against falsehood with folly, and with it marvellously cloaked the splendour of heaven-radiant wisdom.... He left history in doubt as to whether his heroism or his wisdom was the greater.”
The Hamlet of the tragedy, with reference to his mother’s too hasty marriage, says, “Frailty, thy name is woman!” Saxo remarked with reference to Amleth’s widow, who was in too great a hurry to marry again: “Thus it is with all the promises of women: they are scattered like chaff before the wind and pass away like waves of the sea. Who then will trust to a woman’s heart, which changes as flowers shed their leaves, as seasons change, and as new events wipe out the traces of those that went before?”
In Saxo’s eyes, Amleth represented not only wisdom, but bodily strength. While the Hamlet of Shakespeare expressly emphasises the fact that he is anything but Herculean (“My father’s brother, but no more like my father than I to Hercules”), Saxo expressly compares his hero to the Club-Bearer whose name is a synonym for strength: “And the fame of men shall tell of him that, if it had been given him to live his life fortunately to the end, his excellent dispositions would have displayed themselves in deeds greater than those of Hercules, and would have adorned his brows with the demigod’s wreath.” It sounds almost as though Shakespeare’s Hamlet entered a protest against these words of Saxo.
In the year 1559 the legend was reproduced in French in Belleforest’s Histoires Tragiques, and seems in this form to have reached England, where it furnished material for the older Hamlet drama, now lost, but to which we find frequent allusions. It cannot be proved that this play was founded upon Pavier’s English translation of Belleforest, or even that Shakespeare had Pavier before him; for the oldest edition of the translation which has come down to us (reprinted in Collier’s Shakespeare’s Library, ed. 1875, pt. I. vol. ii. p. 224) dates from 1608, and contains certain details (such as the eavesdropper’s concealment behind the arras, and Hamlet’s exclamation of “A rat! a rat!” before he kills Polonius) of which there is no trace in Belleforest, and which may quite as well have been taken from Shakespeare’s tragedy, as borrowed by him from an unknown older edition of the novel.
The earliest known allusion to the old Hamlet drama is the phrase of Thomas Nash, dating from 1589, quoted above (p. 91). In 1594 the Lord Chamberlain’s men (Shakespeare’s company), acting together with the Lord Admiral’s men at the Newington Butts theatre under the management of Henslow and others, performed a Hamlet with reference to which Henslow notes in his account-book for June 9th: “Rd. at hamlet... viii s.” This play must have been the old one, for Henslow would otherwise have added the letters ne (new), and the receipts would have been much greater. His share, as we see, was only eight shillings, whereas it was sometimes as much as nine pounds.
The chief interest of this older play seems to have centred in a figure added by the dramatist—the Ghost of the murdered King, which cried “Hamlet, revenge!” This cry is frequently quoted. It first appears in 1596 in Thomas Lodge’s Wits Miserie, where it is said of the author that he “looks as pale as the visard of ye ghost, which cried so miserably at ye theator like an oister-wife, Hamlet, revenge” It next occurs in Dekker’s Satiromastix, 1602, where Tucca says, “My name’s Hamlet, revenge!” In 1605 we find it in Thomas Smith’s Voiage and Entertainement in Rushia; and it is last found in 1620 in Samuel Rowland’s Night Raven, where, however, it seems to be an inaccurate quotation from the Hamlet we know.
Shakespeare’s play was entered in the Stationers’ Register on the 26th of July 1602, under the title “A booke called ‘the Revenge of Hamlett Prince [of] Denmarke’ as yt was latelie Acted by the Lord Chamberleyne his servantes.”
That it made an instant success on the stage is almost proved by the fact that so early as the 7th of July the opposition manager Henslow pays Chettle twenty shillings for “The Danish Tragedy,” evidently a furbishing up of the old play.
The publication of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, however, did not take place till 1603. Then appeared the First Quarto, indubitably a pirated edition, either founded entirely on shorthand notes, or on shorthand notes eked out by aid of the actors’ parts, and completed, in certain passages, from memory. Although this edition certainly contains a debased and corrupt text, it is impossible to attribute to the misunderstandings or oversights of a copyist or stenographer all its divergences from the carefully-printed quarto of the following year, which is practically identical with the First Folio text. The differences are so great as to exclude such a theory. We have evidently before us Shakespeare’s first sketch of the play, although in a very defective form; and, as far as we can see, this first sketch keeps considerably closer than the definitive text to the old Hamlet drama, on which Shakespeare based his play. Here and there, though with considerable uncertainty, we can even trace scenes from the old play among Shakespeare’s, and touches of its style mingling with his. It is very significant, also, that there are more rhymes in the First than in the Second Quarto.
The most remarkable feature in the 1603 edition is a scene between Horatio and the Queen in which he tells her of the King’s frustrated scheme for having Hamlet murdered in England. The object of this scene is to absolve the Queen from complicity in the King’s crime; a purpose which can also be traced in other passages of this first edition, and which seems to be a survival from the older drama. So far as we can gather, Horatio appears to have played an altogether more prominent part in the old play; Hamlet’s madness appears to have been wilder; and Polonius probably bore the name of Corambis, which is prefixed to his speeches in the edition of 1603. Finally, as we have seen, Shakespeare took the important character of the Ghost, not indicated in either the legend or the novel, from this earlier Hamlet tragedy. The theory that it is the original of the German tragedy, Der bestrafte Brudermord, published by Cohn, from a manuscript of 1710, is unsupported by evidence.
Looking backward through the dramatic literature of England, we find that the author of the old Hamlet drama in all probability sought inspiration in his turn in Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy. It appears from allusions in Jonson’s Cynthia’s Revels and Bartholomew Fair that this play must have been written about 1584. It was one of the most popular plays of its day with the theatre-going public. So late as 1632, Prynne in his Histriomastix speaks of a woman who, on her death-bed, instead of seeking the consolations of religion, cried out: “Hieronimo, Hieronimo! O let me see Hieronimo acted!”
The tragedy opens, after the fashion of its models in Seneca, with the apparition of the murdered man’s ghost, and his demand for vengeance. Thus the Ghost in Shakespeare’s Hamlet is lineally descended from the spirit of Tantalus in Seneca’s Thyestes, and from the spirit of Thyestes in Seneca’s Agamemnon. Hieronimo, who has been driven mad by sorrow for the loss of his son, speaking to the villain of the piece, gives half-ironical, half-crazy expression to the anguish that is torturing him:—
“Lorenzo. Why so, Hieronimo? use me.
Hieronimo. Who? you my lord?
I reserve your favour for a greater honour:
This is a very toy, my lord, a toy.
Lor. All’s one, Hieronimo, acquaint me with it.
Hier. I’ faith, my lord, ’tis an idle thing...
The murder of a son, or so—
A thing of nothing, my lord!”
These phrases foreshadow Hamlet’s speeches to the King. But Hieronimo is really mad, although he speaks of his madness much as Hamlet does, or rather denies it point-blank—
“Villain, thou liest, and thou dost naught
But tell me I am mad: thou liest, I am not mad.
I know thee to be Pedro, and he Jaques;
I’ll prove it to thee; and were I mad, how could I?”
Here and there, especially in Ben Jonson’s additions, we come across speeches which lie very close to passages in Hamlet. A painter, who also has lost his son, says to Hieronimo: “Ay, sir, no man did hold a son so dear;” whereupon he answers—
“What, not as thine? That is a lie,
As massy as the earth: I had a son,
Whose least unvalued hair did weigh
A thousand of thy sons; and he was murdered.”
Thus Hamlet cries to Laertes:—
“I lov’d Ophelia: forty thousand brothers
Could not, with all their quantity of love,
Make up my sum.”
Hieronimo, like Hamlet, again and again postpones his vengeance:—
“All times fit not for revenge.
Thus, therefore, will I rest me in unrest,
Dissembling quiet in unquietness:
Not seeming that I know their villainies,
That my simplicity may make them think
That ignorantly I will let all slip.”
At last he determines to have a play acted, as a means to his revenge. The play is Kyd’s own Solyman and Perseda, and in the course of it the guilty personages, who play the chief parts, are slaughtered, not in make-believe, but in reality.
Crude and naïve though everything still is in The Spanish Tragedy, which resembles Titus Andronicus in style rather than any other of Shakespeare’s works, it evidently, through the medium of the earlier Hamlet play, contributed a good deal to the foundations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
Before going more deeply into the contents of this great work, and especially before trying to bring it into relation to Shakespeare’s personality, we have yet to see what suggestions or impulses the poet may have found in contemporary history.
We have already remarked upon the impression which the Essex family tragedy must have made upon Shakespeare in his early youth, before he had even left Stratford. All England was talking of the scandal: how the Earl of Leicester, who was commonly suspected of having had Lord Essex poisoned, immediately after his death had married his widow, Lady Lettice, whose lover no one doubted that he had been during her husband’s lifetime. There is much in the character of King Claudius to suggest that Shakespeare has here taken Leicester as his model. The two have in common ambition, sensuality, an ingratiating conciliatory manner, astute dissimulation, and complete unscrupulousness. On the other hand, it is quite unreasonable to suppose, with Hermann Conrad,1 that Shakespeare had Essex in his eye in drawing Hamlet himself.
Almost as near to Shakespeare’s own day as the Essex-Leicester catastrophe had been the similar events in the Royal Family of Scotland. Mary Stuart’s second husband, Lord Darnley, who bore the title of King of Scotland, had been murdered in 1567 by her lover, the daring and unscrupulous Bothwell, whom the Queen almost immediately afterwards married. Her contemporaries had no doubt whatever of Mary’s complicity in the assassination, and her son James saw in his mother and his stepfather his father’s murderers. The leaders of the Scottish rebellion displayed before the captive Queen a banner bearing a representation of Darnley’s corpse, with her son kneeling beside it and calling to Heaven for vengeance. Darnley, like the murdered King in Hamlet, was an unusually handsome, Bothwell an unusually repulsive man.
James was brought up by his mother’s enemies, and during her lifetime, and after her death, was perpetually wavering between her adherents, who had defended her legal rights, and her adversaries, who had driven her from the country and placed James himself upon the throne. He made one or two efforts, indeed, to soften Elizabeth’s feelings towards his mother, but refrained from all attempt to avenge her death. His character was irresolute. He was learned and—what Hamlet is very far from being—a superstitious pedant; but, like Hamlet, he was a lover of the arts and sciences, and was especially interested in the art of acting. Between 1599 and 1601 he entertained in Scotland a portion of the company to which Shakespeare belonged; but it is uncertain whether Shakespeare himself ever visited Scotland. There is little doubt, on the other hand, that when, after Elizabeth’s death in 1603, James made his entrance into London, Shakespeare, richly habited in a uniform of red cloth, walked in his train along with Burbage and a few others of the leading players. Their company was henceforth known as “His Majesty’s Servants.”
Although there is in all this no lack of parallels to Hamlet’s circumstances, it is, of course, as ridiculous to take James as to take Essex for the actual model of Hamlet. Nothing could at that time have been stupider or more tactless than to remind the heir-presumptive to the throne, or the new King, of the deplorable circumstances of his early history. This does not exclude the supposition, however, that contemporary history supplied Shakespeare with certain outward elements, which, in the moment of conception, contributed to the picture bodied forth by the creative energy of his genius.
From this point of view, too, we must regard the piles of material which well-meaning students bring to light, in the artless belief that they have discovered the very stones of which Shakespeare constructed his dramatic edifice. People do not distinguish between the possibility that the poet may have unconsciously received a suggestion here and there for details of his work, and the theory that he deliberately intended an imaginative reproduction of definite historic events. No work of imagination assuredly, and least of all such a work as Hamlet, comes into existence in the way these theorists assume. It springs from within, has its origin in an overmastering sensation in the poet’s soul, and then, in the process of growth, assimilates certain impressions from without.
XII
“Hamlet” — Montaigne and Giordano Bruno — Antecedents in Ethnography
Along with motives from novel, drama, and history, impressions of a philosophical and quasi-scientific order went to the making of Hamlet: Of all Shakespeare’s plays, this is the profoundest and most contemplative; a philosophic atmosphere breathes around it. Naturally enough, then, criticism has set about inquiring to what influences we may ascribe these broodings over life and death and the mysteries of existence.
Several students, such as Tschischwitz and König, have tried to make out that Giordano Bruno exercised a preponderating influence upon Shakespeare.1 Passages suggesting a cycle in nature, such as Hamlet’s satirical outburst to the King about the dead Polonius (iv. 3), have directed their thoughts to the Italian philosopher. In some cases they have found or imagined a definite identity between sayings of Hamlet’s and of Bruno’s—for instance, on determinism. Bruno has a passage in which he emphasises the necessity by which everything is brought about: “Whatever may be my pre-ordained eventide, when the change shall take place, I await the day, I, who dwell in the night; but they await the night who dwell in the daylight. All that is, is either here or there, near or far off, now or after, soon or late.” In the same spirit Hamlet says (v. 2): “There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all.” Bruno says: “Nothing is absolutely imperfect or evil; it only seems so in relation to something else, and what is bad for one is good for another.” In Hamlet (ii. 2), “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
When once attention had been directed to Giordano Bruno, not only his philosophical and more popular writings, but even his plays were ransacked in search of passages that might have influenced Shakespeare. Certain parallels and points of resemblance were indeed discovered, very slight and trivial in themselves, but which theorists would not believe to be fortuitous, since it was known that Giordano Bruno had passed some time in England in Shakespeare’s day, and had frequented the society of the most distinguished men. As soon as the matter was closely investigated, however, the probability of any direct influence vanished almost to nothing.
Giordano Bruno remained on English ground from 1583 to 1585. Coming from France, where he had instructed Henri III. in the Lullian art, a mechanical, mnemotechnic method for the solution of all possible scientific problems, he brought with him a letter of recommendation to Mauvissière, the French Ambassador, in whose house he was received as a friend of the family during the whole of his stay in London. He made the acquaintance of many leading men of the time, such as Walsingham, Leicester, Burghley, Sir Philip Sidney and his literary circle, but soon went on to Oxford in order to lecture there and disseminate the doctrines which lay nearest his heart. These were the Copernican system in opposition to the Ptolemaic, which still held the field at Oxford, and the theory that the same principle of life is diffused through everything—atoms and organisms, plants, animals, human beings, and the universe at large. He quarrelled with the Oxford scholars, and held them up to ridicule and contempt in his dialogue La Cena de le Ceneri, published soon after, in which he speaks in the most disparaging terms of the coarseness of English manners. The dirtiness of the London streets, for example, and the habit of letting one goblet go round the table, from which every one drank, aroused his dislike and scorn scarcely less than the rejection of Copernicus by the pedants of the University.
At the very earliest, Shakespeare cannot have come to London until the year of Bruno’s departure from England, and can therefore scarcely have met him. The philosopher exercised no influence upon the spiritual life of the day in England. Not even Sir Philip Sidney was attracted by his doctrine, and his name does not once occur in Greville’s Life of Sidney, although Greville had seen much of Bruno. Brunnhofer, who has studied the question, points out, as showing how little trace Bruno left behind him in England, that there is not in the Bodleian a single contemporary manuscript or document of any kind which throws the least light upon Bruno’s stay in London or Oxford.2 It has been maintained, nevertheless, that Shakespeare must have read his philosophic writings in Italian. It is, of course, possible; but there is nothing in Hamlet to prove it—nothing that cannot be fully accounted for without assuming that he had the slightest acquaintance with them.
The only expression in Shakespeare which, probably by accident, has an entirely pantheistic ring is “The prophetic soul of the wide world” in Sonnet cvii.; the only passages containing an idea, not certainly identical, but comparable with Bruno’s doctrine of the metamorphosis of natural forms are the cyclical Sonnets lix., cvi., cxxiii. If Giordano Bruno really had anything to do with these passages, it must be because Shakespeare had heard some talk about the great Italian’s doctrine, which may just at that time have been recalled to the recollection of his English acquaintances by his death at the stake in Rome, on February 17, 1600. If Shakespeare had studied his writings, he would, among other things, have obtained some glimmering of the Copernican system, of which he knows nothing. On the other hand, it is quite conceivable that he may have picked up in conversation an approximate and incomplete conception of Bruno’s philosophy, and that this conception may have given birth to the above-mentioned philosophical reveries. All the passages in Hamlet which have been attributed to the influence of Bruno really stand in much closer relation to writers under whose literary and philosophical influence we know beyond a doubt that Shakespeare fell.
There is preserved in the British Museum a copy of Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essays, folio, London, 1603, with Shakespeare’s name written on the fly-leaf. The signature is, I believe, a forgery; but that Shakespeare had read Montaigne is clear beyond all doubt.
There are many evidences of the influence exerted by Montaigne’s Essays on English readers of that date. It was only natural that the book should vividly impress the greatest men of the age; for there were not at that time many such books as Montaigne’s—none, perhaps, containing so living a revelation, not merely of an author, but of a human being, natural, many-sided, full of ability, rich in contradictions.
Outside of Hamlet, we trace Montaigne quite clearly in one passage in Shakespeare, who must have had the Essays lying on his table while he was writing The Tempest. Gonzalo says (ii. I)—
“I’ the commonwealth I would by contrarie
Execute all things, for no kind of traffic
Would I admit; no name of magistrate;
Letters should not be known; riches, poverty,
And use of service, none; contract, succession,
Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none;
No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil:
No occupation, all men idle, all;
And women too.”
We find this speech almost word for word in Montaigne (Book i. chap. 30): “It is a nation that hath no kind of traffike, no knowledge of letters, no intelligence of numbers, no name of magistrate, nor of politike superioritie; no vse of service, of riches or of povertie; no contracts, no successions, no partitions, no occupation but idle... no manuring of lands, no vse of wine, corn or metal.”
Since it is thus proved beyond a doubt that Shakespeare was acquainted with Montaigne’s Essays, it is not improbable that the resemblance between passages in that book and passages in Hamlet are due to something more than chance. When such passages occur in the First Quarto (1603), we must assume either that Shakespeare knew the French original, or that—as is likely enough—he may have had an opportunity of reading Florio’s translation before it was published. It happened not infrequently in those days that a book was handed round in manuscript among the author’s private friends five or six years before it was given to the public. Florio’s close connection with the household of Southampton renders it almost certain that Shakespeare must have been acquainted with him; and his translation had been entered in the Stationers’ Register as ready for publication so early as 1599.
Florio was born in 1545, of Italian parents, who, as Waldenses, had been forced to leave their country. He had become to all intents and purposes an Englishman, had studied and given lessons in Italian at Oxford, had been some years in the service of the Earl of Southampton, and was married to a sister of the poet Samuel Daniel. He dedicated each separate book of his translation of Montaigne to two noble ladies. Among them we find Elizabeth, Countess of Rutland, Sidney’s daughter; Lady Penelope Rich, Essex’s sister; and Lady Elizabeth Grey, renowned for her beauty and learning. Each of these ladies was celebrated in a sonnet.
Every one remembers those incomparably-worded passages in Hamlet where the great brooder over life and death has expressed, in terms at once harsh and moving, his sense of the ruthlessness of the destructive forces of Nature, or what might be called the cynicism of the order of things. Take for instance the following (v. I):—
“Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander, till he find it stopping a bung-hole?... As thus: Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth into dust; the dust is earth; of earth we make loam; and why of that loam, whereto he was converted, might they not stop a beer-barrel?
Imperious Cæsar, dead, and turn’d to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away:
O that that earth which kept the world in awe
Should patch a wall to expel the winter’s flaw!”
Hamlet’s grisly jest upon the worms who are eating Polonius is a variation on the same theme (iv. 3):—
“Ham. A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king; and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.
“King. What dost thou mean by this?
“Ham. Nothing, but to show you how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar.”
An attempt has been made to attribute these passages to the influence of Giordano Bruno; but, as Robert Beyersdorff has strikingly demonstrated,3 this theory assumes that Bruno’s doctrine was an atomistic materialism, whereas it was, in fact, pantheism, a perpetual insistence upon the unity of God and Nature. The very atoms, in Bruno, partake of spirit and life; it is not their mechanical conjunction that produces life; no, they are monads. While cynicism is the keynote of these utterances of Hamlet, enthusiasm is the keynote of Bruno’s. Three passages from Bruno’s writings (De la Causa and La Cena de le Ceneri) have been cited as coinciding with Hamlet’s words as to the transformations of matter. But in the first Bruno is speaking of the transformation of natural forms, and of the emanation of all forms from the universal soul; in the second, he is insisting that in all compound bodies there live numerous individuals who remain immortal after the dissolution of the bodies; in the third, he treats of the globe as a vast organism, which, just like animals and men, is renewed by the transformation of matter. The whole resemblance, then, between these passages and Hamlet’s bitter outburst is that they treat of transformations of form and matter in Nature. In spirit they are radically different. Bruno maintains that even what seems to belong entirely to the world of matter is permeated with soul; Hamlet, on the contrary, asserts the wretchedness and transitoriness of human existence.4
But precisely in these points Hamlet comes very near to Montaigne, who has many expressions like those above quoted, and speaks of Sulla very much as Hamlet speaks of Alexander and Cæsar.
On a close comparison of Shakespeare’s expressions with Montaigne’s, their similarity is very striking. Hamlet, for example, says that Polonius is at supper, not where he eats but where he is eaten. “A certain convocation of politic worms are e’en at him. Your worm is your only emperor for diet: we fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots: your fat king, and your lean beggar, is but variable service; two dishes, but to one table: that’s the end.”
Compare Montaigne, Book ii. chap. 12:—
“He [man] need not a Whale, an Elephant, nor a Crocodile, nor any such other wilde beast, of which one alone is of power to defeat a great number of men: seely lice are able to make Sulla give over his Dictatorship: The heart and life of a mighty and triumphant Emperor, is but the break-fast of a seely little Worm.”
We have seen that an attempt has been made to trace to Bruno Hamlet’s utterance as to the relativity of all concepts. In reality it may rather be traced to Montaigne. Hamlet, having remarked (ii. 2) that “Denmark is a prison,” Rosencrantz replies, “We think not so, my lord;” whereupon Hamlet rejoins, “Why, then ’tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”5 The passage in Montaigne is almost identical (Book i. chap. 40):—
“If that which we call evill and torment, be neither torment nor evill, but that our fancie only gives it that qualitie, it is in us to change it.”
We have seen that an attempt has been made to trace Hamlet’s saying about death, “If it be now, ’tis not to come,” &c. to Bruno’s words in the dedication of his Candelajo: “Tutto quel ch’è o è qua o è là, o vicino o lunghi, o adesso o poi, o presso o tardi.” But the same course of thought which leads Hamlet to the conclusion, “The readiness is all,” is found, with the same conclusion, in the nineteenth chapter of Montaigne’s first book: “That to Philosophie, is to learne how to die”—a chapter which has inspired a great many of Hamlet’s graveyard cogitations.6 Montaigne says of death:—
“Let us not forget how many waies our joyes or our feastings be subject unto death, and by how many hold-fasts shee threatens us and them.... It is uncertaine where death looks for us; let us expect her everie where.... I am ever prepared about that which I may be.... A man should ever be ready booted to take his journey.... What matter is it when it commeth, since it is unavoidable?”
Furthermore, we find striking points of resemblance between the celebrated soliloquy, “To be or not to be,” and the passage in Montaigne (Book iii. chap. 12) where he reproduces the substance of Socrates’ Apology. Socrates, as we know, suggests several different possibilities: death is either an “amendment” of our condition or the annihilation of our being; but even in the latter case it is an “amendment” to enter upon a long and peaceful night; for there is nothing better in life than a deep, calm, dreamless sleep. Shakespeare seems to have had no belief in an actual amelioration of our condition at death; Hamlet does not even mention it as a possible contingency; whereas the poet makes him dwell upon the thought of an endless sleep, and on the possibility of horrible dreams. Now and then we seem to find traces in Hamlet of Plato’s monologue, in the vesture given to it by Montaigne. In the French text there is mention of the joy of being free in another life from having to do with unjust and corrupt judges; Hamlet speaks of freeing himself from “The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely.” Some lines added in the edition of 1604 remind us forcibly of a passage in Florio’s translation. Florio reproduces Montaigne’s “Si c’est un anéantissement de notre être” by the phrase, “If it be a consummation of one’s being.” Hamlet, using a word which occurs in only two other places in Shakespeare, says, “A consummation devoutly to be wished.”
Many other small coincidences can be pointed out in the use of names and turns of phrase, which do not, however, actually prove anything. Where Montaigne is describing the anarchic condition of public affairs, his words are rendered in Florio by the curiously poetic expression, “All is out of frame.” This bears a certain resemblance to the phrase which Hamlet, already in the 1603 edition, employs to describe the disorganisation which has followed his father’s death, “The time is out of joint.” The coincience may be fortuitous, but as one among many other points of resemblance it supports the conjecture that Shakespeare had read the translation before it was published.7.
For the rest, Rushton, in Shakespeare’s Euphuism (1871), and after him Beyersdorff, have pointed out not a few parallels to Hamlet in Lily’s Euphues, precisely at the points where critics have sought to trace the much more improbable influence of Bruno. Beyersdorff sometimes goes too far in trying to find in Euphues the origin of ideas which it would be an insult to suppose that Shakespeare needed to borrow from such a source. But sometimes there is a real analogy. It has been alleged that the King must have borrowed from Bruno’s philosophy the topics of consolation whereby (i. 2) he seeks to convince Hamlet of the unreasonableness of “obstinate condolement” over his father’s death. As a matter of fact, the letter of Euphues to Ferardo on his daughter’s death contains precisely the same arguments:—“Knowest thou not, Ferardo, that lyfe is the gifte of God, deathe the due of Nature, as we receive the one as a benefitte, so must we abide the other of necessitie,” &c.
It has been suggested that where Hamlet (ii. 2) speaks of “the satirical rogue” who, in the book he is reading, makes merry over the decrepitude of old age, Shakespeare must have been alluding to a passage in Bruno’s Spaccio, where old men are described as those who have “snow on their head and furrows in their brow.” But if we insist on identifying the “satirical rogue” with any actual author (a quite unreasonable proceeding), Lily at once presents himself as answering to the description. Again and again in Euphues, where old men give good advice to the young, they appear with “hoary haire and watry eyes.” And Euphues repulses, quite in the manner of Hamlet, an old gentleman whose moralising he regards as nothing more than the envy of decrepit age for lusty youth, and whose intellect seems to him as tottering as his legs.
Finally, an attempt has been made to refer Hamlet’s harsh sayings to Ophelia, and his contemptuous utterances about women in general (“Frailty, thy name is woman,” &c.), to a dialogue of Bruno’s (De la Causa IV.) in which the pedant Pollinnio appears as a woman-hater. But the resemblance seems trifling enough when we find that in this case woman is attacked in sound theological fashion as the source of original sin and the cause of all our woe. Many expressions in Euphues lie infinitely nearer to Hamlet’s. “What means your lordship?” Ophelia asks (iii. I), and Hamlet replies, “That if you be honest and fair, your honesty should admit no discourse to your beauty.” Compare in Euphues Ferardo’s words to Lucilla: “For oftentimes thy mother woulde saye, that thou haddest more beautie then was convenient for one that shoulde bee honeste,” and his exclamation, “O Lucilla, Lucilla, woulde thou wert lesse fayre!” Again, Hamlet rails against women’s weakness, crying, “Wise men know well enough what monsters you make of them;” and we find in Euphues exactly similar outbursts: “I perceive they be rather woe vnto men, by their falsehood, gelousie, inconstancie.... I see they will be corasiues (corrosives).”8 Beyersdorff, moreover, is no doubt right in suggesting that the artificial style of Euphues is apparent in such speeches as this of Hamlet’s: “For the power of beauty will sooner transform honesty from what it is to a bawd than the force of honesty can translate beauty into his likeness.”
In Hamlet and elsewhere in Shakespeare we come across traces of a sort of atomistic-materialistic philosophy. In the last scene of Julius Cæsar, Antony actually employs with regard to Brutus the expression, “The elements so mixd in him.” In Measure for Measure (iii. I) the Duke says to Claudio—
“Thou art not thyself;
For thou exist’st on many a thousand grains
That issue out of dust.”
Hamlet says (i. 2)—
“O that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw, and dissolve itself into a dew;”
and to Horatio (iii. 2)—
“Bless’d are those
Whose blood and judgment are so well co-mingled.”
It has already been pointed out how far this atomism, if we can so regard it, differs from Bruno’s idealistic monadism. But in all probability we have here only the expressions of the dominant belief of Shakespeare’s time, that all differences of temperament depended upon the mixture of the juices or “humours.” Shakespeare is on this point, as on many others, more popular and less book-learned, more naïve and less metaphysical, than book-learned commentators are willing to allow.
Writers like Montaigne and Lyly were no doubt constantly in Shakespeare’s hands while Hamlet was taking shape within him. But it would be absurd to suppose that he consulted them especially with Hamlet in view. He did consult authorities with regard to Hamlet, but they were men, not books, and men, moreover, with whom he was in daily intercourse. Hamlet being a Dane and his destiny being acted out in distant Denmark—a name not yet so familiar in England as it was soon to be, when, with the new King, a Danish princess came to the throne— Shakespeare would naturally seize whatever opportunities lay in his way of gathering intelligence as to the manners and customs of this little-known country.
In the year 1585 a troupe of English players had appeared in the courtyard of the Town-Hall of Elsinore. If we are justified in assuming this troupe to have been the same which we find in the following year established at the Danish Court, it numbered among its members three persons who, at the time when Shakespeare was turning over in his mind the idea of Hamlet, belonged to his company of actors, and probably to his most intimate circle: namely, William Kemp, George Bryan, and Thomas Pope. The first of these, the celebrated clown, belonged to Shakespeare’s company from 1594 till March 1602, when he went over for six months to Henslow’s company; the other two also joined Shakespeare’s company as early as 1594. It was evidently from these comrades of his, and perhaps also from other English actors who, under the management of Thomas Sackville, had performed at Copenhagen in 1596 at the coronation of Christian IV., that Shakespeare gathered information on several matters relating to Denmark.
First and foremost, he picked up some Danish names, which we find, indeed, mutilated by the printers in the different texts of Hamlet, but which are easily recognisable. The Rossencraft of the First Quarto has become Rosencraus in the second, and Rosincrane in the Folio; it is clearly enough the name of the ancient Danish family of Rosenkrans. Thus, too, we find in the three editions the name Gilderstone, Guyldensterne, and Guildensterne, in which we recognise the Danish Gyldenstierne; while the names given to the ambassador, Voltemar, Voltemand, Valtemand, Voltumand, are so many corruptions of the Danish Valdemar. The name Gertrude, too, Shakespeare must have learned from his comrades as a Danish name; he has substituted it for the Geruth of the novel. In the Second Quarto it is misprinted Gertrad.
It is evidently in consequence of what he had learnt from his comrades that Shakespeare has transferred the action of Hamlet from Jutland to Elsinore, which they had visited and no doubt described to him. That is how he comes to know of the Castle at Elsinore (finished about a score of years earlier), though he does not mention the name of Kronborg.
The scene in which Polonius listens behind the arras, and in which Hamlet, in reproaching the Queen, points to the portraits of the late and of the present King, has even been regarded as proving that Shakespeare knew something of the interior of the Castle. On the stage, Hamlet is often made to wear a miniature portrait of his father round his neck, and to hold it up before his mother; but the words of the play prove incontestably that Shakespeare imagined life-sized pictures hanging on the wall. Now we find a contemporary description of a “great chamber” at Kronborg, written by an English traveller, in which occurs this passage: “It is hanged with Tapistary of fresh coloured silke without gold, wherein all the Danish kings are exprest in antique habits, according to their severall times, with their armes and inscriptions, containing all their conquests and victories.”9 It is possible, then, though not very probable, that Shakespeare may have heard of the arrangement of this room. When Polonius wanted to play the eavesdropper, it was a matter of course that he should get behind the arras; and it was easy to imagine that portraits of the kings would hang on the walls of a royal castle, without the least knowledge that this was actually the case at Kronborg.
It is probable, on the other hand, that Shakespeare made Hamlet study at Wittenberg because he knew that many Danes went to this University, which, being Lutheran, was not frequented by Englishmen. And it is quite certain that when, in the first and fifth acts, he makes trumpet-blasts and the firing of cannon accompany the healths which are drunk, he must have known that this was a specially Danish custom, and have tried to give his play local colour by introducing it. While Hamlet and his friends (i. 4) are awaiting the appearance of the Ghost, trumpets and cannon are heard “within.” “What does this mean, my lord?” Horatio asks; and Hamlet answers—
“The king doth wake to-night, and takes his rouse,
Keeps wassail, and the swaggering up-spring reels;
And as he drains his draughts of Rhenish down,
The kettle-drum and trumpet thus bray out
The triumph of his pledge.”
Similarly, in the last scene of the play, the King says—
“Give me the cups;
And let the kettle to the trumpet speak,
The trumpet to the cannoneer without,
The cannons to the heavens, the heavens to earth,
‘Now the king drinks to Hamlet!”
Shakespeare must even have been eager to display his knowledge of the intemperate habits of the Danes, and the strange usages resulting therefrom, for, as Schück has ingeniously remarked, in order to bring in this piece of information, he has made Horatio, himself a Dane, ask Hamlet whether it is the custom of the country to celebrate every toast with this noise of trumpets and of ordnance. In answer to this question Hamlet speaks of the custom as though he were addressing a foreigner, and makes the profound remark that a single blemish will often mar a nation’s good report, no less than an individual’s, and that its character
“Shall in the general censure take corruption
From that particular fault.”
It is evident that Denmark “took corruption” from its drinking usages in the “censure” of the better sort of Englishmen. In a notebook kept by “Maister William Segar, Garter King at Armes,” we read under the date July 14, 1603—
“That afternoone the King [of Denmark] went aboord the English ship [which was lying off Elsinore], and had a banket prepared for him vpon the vpper decks, which were hung with an Awning of cloaths of Tissue; every health reported sixe, eight, or ten shot of great Ordinance, so that during the king’s abode, the ship discharged 160 shot.”
Of the same king’s “solemne feast to the [English] embassadour,” Segar writes:—
“It were superfluous to tell you of all superfluities that were vsed; and it would make a man sick to heare of their drunken healths: vse hath brought it into a fashion, and fashion made it a habit, which ill beseemes our nation to imitate.”10
The King here spoken of is Christian IV., then twenty-six years of age. When he, three years afterwards, visited England, it seems as though the Court, which had previously been very sober, justified the fears of the worthy diarist by catching the infection of Danish intemperance. Noble ladies as well as gentlemen took to over-indulgence in wine. The Rev. H. Harington, in his Nugæ Antiquæ (edit. 1779, ii. 126), prints a letter from Sir John Harington to Mr. Secretary Barlow, giving a very humorous description of the festivities in which the Danish King took part. One day after dinner, he relates, “the representation of Solomon his temple and the coming of the Queen of Sheba was made.” But alas! the lady who played the Queen, and who was to bring “precious gifts to both their Majesties, forgetting the steppes arising to the canopy, overset her caskets into his Danish Majesties lap, and fell at his feet, though I rather think it was in his face. Much was the hurry and confusion; cloths and napkins were at hand to make all clean. His Majesty then got up, and would dance with the Queen of Sheba; but he fell down and humbled himself before her, and was carried to an inner chamber, and laid on a bed of state; which was not a little defiled with the presents of the Queen which had been bestowed upon his garments; such as wine, cream, jelly, beverage, cakes, spices and other good matters.” The entertainment proceeded, but most of the “presenters fell down, wine did so occupy their upper chambers.” Now there entered in gorgeous array Faith, Hope, and Charity. Hope “did assay” to speak, but could not manage it, and withdrew, stammering excuses to the King; Faith staggered after her; Charity alone succeeded in kneeling at the King’s feet, and when she returned to her sisters, she found them lying very sick in the lower hall. Then Victory made her entrance in bright armour, but did not triumph long, having to be led away a “silly captive” and left to sleep upon the ante-chamber stairs. Last of all came Peace, who “much contrary to her semblance, most rudely made war with her olive branch upon” those who tried, from motives of propriety, to get her out of the way.
Shakespeare, then, conceived intemperance in drinking, and glorification of drunkenness as a polite and admirable accomplishment, to be a Danish national vice. It is clear enough, however, that no more here than elsewhere was it his main purpose to depict a foreign people. It was not national peculiarities that interested him, but the characteristics common to humanity; and he did not need to search outside of England for the prototypes of his Polonius, his Horatio, his Ophelia, and his Hamlet.
XIII
The Personal Element in Hamlet
In trying to bring together, as we have done, a mass of historical, dramatic, and fictional material, fragments of philosophy, and ethnographical details, which Shakespeare utilised during his work upon Hamlet, or which may, without his knowing it, have hovered in his memory, we do not, of course, mean to imply that the initial impulse to the work came to him from without. The piecing together of external impressions, as we have already remarked, has never produced a work of immortal poetry. In approaching the theme, Shakespeare obeyed a fundamental instinct in his nature; and as he worked it out, everything that stood in relation to it rushed together in his mind. He might have said with Goethe: “After long labour in piling up fuel and straw, I have often tried in vain to warm myself... until at last the spark catches all of a sudden, and the whole is wrapped in flame.”
It is this flame which shines forth from Hamlet, shooting up so high and glowing so red that to this day it fascinates all eyes.
Hamlet assumes madness in order to lull the suspicions of the man who has murdered his father and wrongfully usurped his throne; but under this mask of madness he gives evidence of rare intelligence, deep feeling, peculiar subtlety, mordant satire, exalted irony, and penetrating knowledge of human nature.
Here lay the point of attraction for Shakespeare. The indirect form of expression had always allured him; it was the favourite method of his clowns and humourists. Touchstone employs it, and it enters largely into the immortal wit of Falstaff. We have seen how Jaques, in As You Like It, envied those whose privilege it was to speak the truth under the disguise of folly; we remember his sigh of longing for “as large a charter as the wind to blow on whom he pleased.” He it was who declared motley the only wear; and in his melancholy and longing Shakespeare disguised his own, exclaiming through his mouth—
“Invest me in my motley; give me leave
To speak my mind, and I will through and through
Cleanse the foul body of th’ infected world.”
In Hamlet Shakespeare put this motley coat on his own shoulders; he seized the opportunity of making Hamlet, in the guise of apparent madness, speak sharp and bitter truths in a way that would not soon be forgotten. The task was a grateful one; for earnestness cuts the deeper the more it sounds like jest or triviality; and wisdom appears doubly wise when it is thrown out lightly under the mask of folly, instead of pedantically asserting itself as the fruit of reflection and experience. Difficult for any one else, to Shakespeare the enterprise was merely alluring: it was, in fact, to do what no other poet had as yet succeeded in doing—to draw a genius. Shakespeare had not far to go for his model, and genius would seem doubly effective when it wore the mask of madness, now speaking through that mouthpiece, and again unmasking itself in impassioned monologues.
It cost Shakespeare no effort to transform himself into Hamlet. On the contrary, in giving expression to Hamlet’s spiritual life he was enabled quite naturally to pour forth all that during the recent years had filled his heart and seethed in his brain. He could let this creation drink his inmost heart’s blood; he could transfer to it the throbbing of his own pulses. Behind its forehead he could hide his melancholy; on its tongue he could lay his wit; its eyes he could cause to glow and lighten with flashes of his own spirit.
It is true that Hamlet’s outward fortunes were different enough from his. He had not lost his father by assassination; his mother had not degraded herself. But all these details were only outward signs and symbols. He had lived through all of Hamlet’s experience—all. Hamlet’s father had been murdered and his place usurped by his brother; that is to say, the being whom he most reverenced and to whom he owed most had been overpowered by malice and treachery, instantly forgotten and shamelessly supplanted. How often had not Shakespeare himself seen worthlessness strike greatness down and usurp its place! Hamlet’s mother had married her husband’s murderer; in other words, that which he had long honoured and loved and held sacred, sacred as is a mother to her son, that on which he could not endure to see any stain, had all of a sudden shown itself impure, besmirched, frivolous, perhaps criminal. What a terrible impression must it have made upon Shakespeare himself when he first discovered the unworthiness of that which he had held in highest reverence, and when he first saw and realised that his ideal had fallen from its pedestal into the mire.
The experience which shook Hamlet’s nature was no other than that which every nobly-disposed youth, on first seeing the world as it is, concentrates in the words: “Alas! life is not what I thought it was.” The father’s murder, the mother’s possible complicity, and her indecent haste in entering upon a new wedlock, were only symptoms in the young man’s eyes of the worthlessness of human nature and the injustice of life—only the individual instances from which, by instinctive generalisation, he inferred the dire disillusions and terrible possibilities of existence—only the chance occasion for the sudden vanishing of that rosy light in which everything had hitherto been steeped for him, and in the absence of which the earth seemed to him a sterile promontory, and the heavens a pestilent congregation of vapours.
Just such a crisis, bringing with it the “loss of all his mirth,” Shakespeare himself had recently undergone. He had lost in the previous year the protectors of his youth. The woman he loved, and to whom he had looked up as to a being of a rarer, loftier order, had all of a sudden proved to be a heartless, faithless wanton. The friend he loved, worshipped, and adored had conspired against him with this woman, laughed at him in her arms, betrayed his confidence, and treated him with coldness and distance. Even the prospect of winning the poet’s wreath had been overcast for him. Truly he too had seen his illusions vanish and his vision of the world fall to ruins.
In his first consternation he had been submissive, had stood defenceless, had spoken words without a sting, had been all mildness and melancholy. But this was not his whole, nor his inmost, nature. In his heart of hearts he knew himself a power—a power! He was incomparably armed, quick and keen of fence, full of wit and indignation, the master of them all, and infinitely greater than his fate. Burrow as they might, “it should go hard but he would delve one yard below their mines.” He had suffered many a humiliation; but the revenge which was denied him in real life he could now take incognito through Hamlet’s bitter and scathing invectives.
He had seen high-born gentlemen play a princely part in the society of artists, players, men whom public opinion undervalued and contemned. Now he himself would be the high-born gentleman, would show how the truly princely spirit bore itself towards the poor artists, and give utterance to his own thoughts about art, and his conception of its value and significance.
He merged himself in Hamlet; he felt as Hamlet did; he now and then so mingled their identities that, in placing his own weightiest thoughts in Hamlet’s mouth, as in the famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy, he made him think, not as a prince, but as a subject, with all the passionate bitterness of one who sees brutality and stupidity lording it in high places. Thus it was that he made Hamlet say—
“For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressors wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despis’d love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin?”
Every one can see that this is felt and thought from below upwards, not from above downwards, and that the words are improbable, almost impossible, in the mouth of the Prince. But they embody feelings and thoughts to which Shakespeare had recently given expression in his own name in Sonnet lxvi.:—
“Tir’d with all these, for restful death I cry;—
As, to behold desert a beggar born,
And needy nothing trimm’d in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
And gilded honour shamefully misplac’d,
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgrac’d,
And strength by limping sway disabled,
And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly (doctor-like) controlling skill,
And simple truth miscall’d simplicity,
And captive good attending captain ill:
Tir’d with all these, from these would I be gone,
Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.”
The bright view of life which had prevailed in his youth was overclouded; he saw the strength of malignity, the power of stupidity, unworthiness exalted, true desert elbowed aside. Existence turned its seamy side towards him. Through what experiences had he not come! How often, in the year that had just passed, must he have exclaimed, like Hamlet in his first soliloquy, “Frailty, thy name is woman!” and how much cause had he had to say, “Let her not walk i’ the sun: conception is a blessing; but not as your daughter may conceive.” So far had it gone with him that, finding everything “weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable,” he thought it monstrous that such an existence should be handed on from generation to generation, and that ever new hordes of miserable creatures should come into existence: “Get thee to a nunnery! Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?”
The glimpse of high life which he had seen, his relations with the Court, and the gossip from Whitehall and Greenwich which circulated through the town, had proved to him the truth of the couplet—
“Cog, lie, flatter, and face
Four ways in Court to win men grace.”
Sheer criminals such as Leicester and Claudius flourished and waxed fat at Court.
What did men do at Court but truckle to the great? What throve except wordy morality, mutual espionage, artificial wit, double-tongued falsity, inveterate lack of principle, perpetual hypocrisy? What were these great ones but flatterers and lipservers, always ready to turn their coats according to the wind? And so Polonius and Osrick, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, took shape in his imagination. They knew how to bow and cringe; they were masters of elegant phrases; they were members of the great guild of time-servers. “To be honest as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten thousand.”
And the Danish Court was only a picture in little of all Denmark—that Denmark in whose state there was something rotten, and which was to Hamlet a prison. “Then is the world one?” says Rosencrantz; and Hamlet does not recoil from the conclusion: “A goodly one,” he replies, “in which there are many confines, wards, and dungeons.” The Court-world of Hamlet was but an image of the world at large.
But if this is how matters stand, if a pure and princely nature is thus placed in the world and thus surrounded, we are necessarily confronted with the great and unanswerable questions: “How comes it?” and “Why is it?” The problem of the relation of good and evil in this world, an unsolved riddle, involves further problems as to the government of the world, as to a righteous Providence, as to the relation between the world and a God. And thought—Shakespeare’s no less than Hamlet’s—beats at the locked door of the mystery.
XIV
The Psychology of Hamlet
Though there are in Hamlet more direct utterances of the poet’s inmost spiritual life than in any of his earlier works, he has none the less succeeded in thoroughly disengaging his hero’s figure, and making it an independent entity. What he gave him of his own nature was its unfathomable depth; for the rest, he retained the situation and the circumstances much as he found them in his authorities. It cannot be denied that he thus involved himself in difficulties which he by no means entirely overcame. The old legend, with its harsh outlines, its mediæval order of ideas, its heathen groundwork under a varnish of dogmatic Catholicism, its assumption of vengeance as the unquestionable right, or rather duty, of the individual, did not very readily harmonise with the rich life of thoughts, dreams, and feelings which Shakespeare imparted to his hero. There arose a certain discrepancy between the central figure and his surroundings. A Prince who is the intellectual peer of Shakespeare himself, who knows and declares that “no traveller returns” from beyond the grave, yet sees and holds converse with a ghost. A royal youth of the Renaissance, who has gone through a foreign university, whose chief bent is towards philosophic brooding, who writes verses, who cultivates music, elocution, and rapier-fencing, and proves himself an expert in dramatic criticism, is at the same time pre-occupied with thoughts of personal and bloody vengeance. Now and then, in the course of the drama, a rift seems to open between the shell of the action and its kernel.
But Shakespeare, with his consummate instinct, managed to find an advantage precisely in this discrepancy, and to turn it to account. His Hamlet believes in the ghost and—doubts. He accepts the summons to the deed of vengeance and—delays. Much of the originality of the figure, and of the drama as a whole, springs almost inevitably from this discrepancy between the mediæval character of the fable and its Renaissance hero, who is so deep and many-sided that he has almost a modern air.
The figure of Hamlet, as it at last shaped itself in Shakespeare’s imagination and came to life in his drama, is one of the very few immortal figures of art and poetry, which, like Cervantes’ Don Quixote, exactly its contemporary, and Goethe’s Faust of two centuries later, present to generation after generation problems to brood over and enigmas to solve. If we compare the two great figures of Hamlet (1604) and Don Quixote (1605), we find Hamlet undoubtedly the more enigmatic and absorbing of the two. Don Quixote belongs to the past. He embodies the naïve spirit of chivalry which, having outlived its age, gives offence on all hands in a time of prosaic rationalism, and makes itself a laughing-stock through its importunate enthusiasms. He has the firm, easily-comprehensible contours of a caricature. Hamlet belongs to the future, to the modern age. He embodies the lofty and reflective spirit, standing isolated, with its severely exalted ideals, in corrupt or worthless surroundings, forced to conceal its inmost nature, yet everywhere arousing hostility. He has the unfathomable spirit and ever-changing physiognomy of genius. Goethe, in his celebrated exposition of Hamlet (Wilhelm Meister, Book iv. chap. 13), maintains that in this case a great deed is imposed upon a soul which is not strong enough for it:—
“There is an oak-tree planted in a costly jar, which should have borne only pleasant flowers in its bosom; the roots expand, the jar is shivered. A lovely, pure, noble, and most moral nature, without the strength of nerve which forms a hero, sinks beneath a burden which it cannot bear and must not cast away.”
This interpretation is brilliant and thoughtful, but not entirely just. One can trace in it the spirit of the period of humanity, transforming in its own image a figure belonging to the Renaissance. Hamlet cannot really be called, without qualification, “lovely, pure, noble and most moral”—he who says to Ophelia the penetratingly true, unforgettable words, “I am myself indifferent honest; but yet I could accuse me of such things, that it were better my mother had not borne me.” The light of such a saying as this takes the colour out of Goethe’s adjectives. It is true that Hamlet goes on to ascribe to himself evil qualities of which he is quite innocent; but he was doubtless sincere in the general tenor of his speech, to which all men of the better sort will subscribe. Hamlet is no model of virtue. He is not simply pure, noble, moral, &c., but is, or becomes, other things as well—wild, bitter, harsh, now tender, now coarse, wrought up to the verge of madness, callous, cruel. No doubt he is too weak for his task, or rather wholly unsuited to it; but he is by no means devoid of physical strength or power of action. He is no child of the period of humanity, moral and pure, but a child of the Renaissance, with its impulsive energy, its irrepressible fulness of life and its undaunted habit of looking death in the eyes.
Shakespeare at first conceived Hamlet as a youth. In the First Quarto he is quite young, probably nineteen. It accords with this age that he should be a student at Wittenberg; young men at that time began and ended their university course much earlier than in our days. It accords with this age that his mother should address him as “boy” (“How now, boy!” iii. 4—a phrase which is deleted in the next edition), and that the word “young” should be continually prefixed to his name, not merely to distinguish him from his father. The King, too, in the early edition (not in that of 1604) currently addresses him as “son Hamlet;” and finally his mother is still young enough to arouse—or at least to enable Claudius plausibly to pretend—the passion which has such terrible results. Hamlet’s speech to his mother—
“At your age
The hey-day of the blood is tame, it’s humble,
And waits upon the judgment,”
does not occur in the 1603 edition. The decisive proof, however, of the fact that Hamlet at first appeared in Shakespeare’s eyes much younger (eleven years, to be precise) than he afterwards made him, is to be found in the graveyard scene (v. I). In the older edition, the First Gravedigger says that the skull of the jester Yorick has lain a dozen years in the earth; in the edition of 1604 this is changed to twenty-three years. Here, too, it is explicitly indicated that Hamlet, who as a child knew Yorick, is now thirty years old; for the Gravedigger first states that he took to his trade on the very day on which Prince Hamlet was born, and a little later adds: “I have been sexton here, man and boy, thirty years.” It accords with this that the Player-King now mentions thirty years as the time that has elapsed since his marriage with the Queen, and that Ophelia (iii. I) speaks of Hamlet as the “unmatch’d form of blown [i.e. mature] youth.”
The process of thought in Shakespeare’s mind is evident. At first it seemed to him as if the circumstances of the case demanded that Hamlet should be a youth; for thus the overwhelming effect produced upon him by his mother’s prompt forgetfulness of his father and hasty marriage seemed most intelligible. He had been living far from the great world, in quiet Wittenberg, never doubting that life was in fact as harmonious as it is apt to appear in the eyes of a young prince. He believed in the realisation of ideals here on earth, imagined that intellectual nobility and fine feelings ruled the world, that justice reigned in public, faith and honour in private, life. He admired his great father, honoured his beautiful mother, passionately loved the charming Ophelia, thought nobly of humankind, and especially of women. From the moment he loses his father, and is forced to change his opinion of his mother, this serene view of life is darkened. If his mother has been able to forget his father and marry this man, what is woman worth? and what is life worth? At the very outset, then, when he has not even heard of his father’s ghost, much less seen or held converse with it, sheer despair speaks in his monologue:
“O that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew:
Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d
His canon ’gainst self-slaughter!”
Hence, also, his naïve surprise that one may smile and smile and yet be a villain. He regards what has happened as a typical occurrence, a specimen of what the world really is. Hence his words to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: “I have of late—but wherefore I know not—lost all my mirth.” And those others: “What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty!... in action, how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world!” These words express his first bright view of life. But that has vanished, and the world is no longer anything to him but a “foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.” And man! What is this “quintessence of dust” to him? He has no pleasure in man or woman.
Hence arise his thoughts of suicide. The finer a young man’s character, the stronger is his desire, on entering life, to see his ideals consummated in persons and circumstances. Hamlet suddenly realises that everything is entirely different from what he had imagined, and feels as if he must die because he cannot set it right.
He finds it very difficult to believe that the world is so bad; therefore he is always seeking for new proofs of it; therefore, for instance, he plans the performance of the play. His joy whenever he tears the mask from baseness is simply the joy of realisation, with deep sorrow in the background—abstract satisfaction produced by the feeling that at last he understands the worthlessness of the world. His divination was just—events confirm it. There is no cold-hearted pessimism here. Hamlet’s fire is never quenched; his wound never heals. Laertes’ poisoned blade gives the quietus to a still tortured soul.1.
All this, though we can quite well imagine it of a man of thirty, is more natural, more what we should expect, in one of nineteen. But as Shakespeare worked on at his drama, and came to deposit in Hamlet’s mind, as in a treasury, more and more of his own life-wisdom, of his own experience, and of his own keen and virile wit, he saw that early youth was too slight a framework to support this intellectual weight, and gave Hamlet the age of ripening manhood.2
Hamlet’s faith and trust in humankind are shattered before the Ghost appears to him. From the moment when his father’s spirit communicates to him a far more appalling insight into the facts of the situation, his whole inner man is in wild revolt.
This is the cause of the leave-taking, the silent leave-taking, from Ophelia, whom in letters he had called his soul’s idol. His ideal of womanhood no longer exists. Ophelia now belongs to those “trivial fond records” which the sense of his great mission impels him to efface from the tablets of his memory. There is no room in his soul for his task and for her, passive and obedient to her father as she is. Confide in her he cannot; she has shown how unequal she is to the exigencies of the situation by refusing to receive his letters and visits. She actually hands over his last letter to her father, which means that it will be shown and read at court. At last, she even consents to play the spy upon him. He no longer believes or can believe in any woman.
He intends to proceed at once to action, but too many thoughts crowd in upon him. He broods over that horror which the Ghost has revealed to him, and over the world in which such a thing could happen; he doubts whether the apparition was really his father, or perhaps a deceptive, malignant spirit; and, lastly, he has doubts of himself, of his ability to upraise and restore what has been overthrown, of his fitness for the vocation of avenger and judge. His doubt as to the trustworthiness of the Ghost leads to the performance of the play within the play, which proves the King’s guilt. His feeling of his own unfitness for his task leads to continued procrastination.
During the course of the play it is sufficiently proved that he is not, in the main, incapable of action. He does not hesitate to stab the eavesdropper behind the arras; without wavering and without pity he sends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to certain death; he boards a hostile ship; and, never having lost sight of his purpose, he takes vengeance before he dies. But it is clear, none the less, that he has a great inward obstacle to overcome before he proceeds to the decisive act. Reflection hinders him; his “resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,” as he says in his soliloquy.
He has become to the popular mind the great type of the procrastinator and dreamer; and far on into this century, hundreds of individuals, and even whole races, have seen themselves reflected in him as in a mirror.
We must not forget, however, that this dramatic curiosity—a hero who does not act—was, to a certain extent, demanded by the technique of this particular drama. If Hamlet had killed the King directly after receiving the Ghost’s revelation, the play would have come to an end with the first act. It was, therefore, absolutely necessary that delays should arise.
Shakespeare is misunderstood when Hamlet is taken for that entirely modern product—a mind diseased by morbid reflection, without capacity for action. It is nothing less than a freak of ironic fate that he should have become a sort of symbol of reflective sloth, this man who has gunpowder in every nerve, and all the dynamite of genius in his nature.
It was undeniably and indubitably Shakespeare’s intention to give distinctness to Hamlet’s character by contrasting it with youthful energy of action, unhesitatingly pursuing its aim.
While Hamlet is letting himself be shipped off to England, the young Norwegian prince, Fortinbras, arrives with his soldiers, ready to risk his life for a patch of ground that “hath in it no profit but the name. To pay five ducats, five, I would not farm it.” Hamlet says to himself (iv. 4):
“How all occasions do inform against me,
And spur my dull revenge!...
... I do not know
Why yet I live to say, ‘This thing’s to do.’”
And he despairs when he contrasts himself with Fortinbras, the delicate and tender prince, who, at the head of his brave troops, dares death and danger “even for an egg-shell”:
“Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honour’s at the stake.”
But with Hamlet it is a question of more than “honour,” a conception belonging to a sphere far below his. It is natural that he should feel ashamed at the sight of Fortinbras marching off to the sound of drum and trumpet at the head of his forces—he, who has not carried out, or even laid, any plan; who, after having by means of the play satisfied himself of the King’s guilt, and at the same time betrayed his own state of mind, is now writhing under the consciousness of impotence. But the sole cause of this impotence is the paralysing grasp laid on all his faculties by his new realisation of what life is, and the broodings born of this realisation. Even his mission of vengeance sinks into the background of his mind. Everything is at strife within him—his duty to his father, his duty to his mother, reverence, horror of crime, hatred, pity, fear of action, and fear of inaction. He feels, even if he does not expressly say so, how little is gained by getting rid of a single noxious animal. He himself is already so much more than what he was at first—the youth chosen to execute a vendetta. He has become the great sufferer, who jeers and mocks, and rebukes the world that racks him. He is the cry of humanity, horror-struck at its own visage.
There is no “general meaning” on the surface of Hamlet. Lucidity was not the ideal Shakespeare had before him while he was producing this tragedy, as it had been when he was composing Richard III. Here there are plenty of riddles and self-contradictions; but not a little of the attraction of the play depends on this very obscurity.
We all know that kind of well-written book which is blameless in form, obvious in intention, and in which the characters stand out sharply defined. We read it with pleasure; but when we have read it, we are done with it. There is nothing to be read between the lines, no gulf between this passage and that, no mystic twilight anywhere in it, no shadows in which we can dream. And, again, there are other books whose fundamental idea is capable of many interpretations, and affords matter for much dispute, but whose significance lies less in what they say to us than in what they lead us to imagine, to divine. They have the peculiar faculty of setting thoughts and feelings in motion; more thoughts than they themselves contain, and perhaps of a quite different character. Hamlet is such a book. As a piece of psychological development, it lacks the lucidity of classical art; the hero’s soul has all the untranspicuousness and complexity of a real soul; but one generation after another has thrown its imagination into the problem, and has deposited in Hamlet’s soul the sum of its experience.
To Hamlet life is half reality, half a dream. He sometimes resembles a somnambulist, though he is often as wakeful as a spy. He has so much presence of mind that he is never at a loss for the aptest retort, and, along with it, such absence of mind that he lets go his fixed determination in order to follow up some train of thought or thread some dream-labyrinth. He appals, amuses, captivates, perplexes, disquiets us. Few characters in fiction have so disquieted the world. Although he is incessantly talking, he is solitary by nature. He typifies, indeed, that solitude of soul which cannot impart itself.
“His name,” says Victor Hugo, “is as the name on a woodcut cut of Albert Dürer’s: Melancholia. The bat flits over Hamlet’s head; at his feet sit Knowledge, with globe and compass, and Love, with an hour-glass; while behind him, on the horizon, rests a giant sun, which only serves to make the sky above him darker.” But from another point of view Hamlet’s nature is that of the hurricane—a thing of wrath and fury, and tempestuous scorn, strong enough to sweep the whole world clean.
There is in him no less indignation than melancholy; in fact, his melancholy is a result of his indignation. Sufferers and thinkers have found in him a brother. Hence the extraordinary popularity of the character, in spite of its being the reverse of obvious.
Audiences and readers feel with Hamlet and understand him; for all the better-disposed among us make the discovery, when we go forth into life as grown-up men and women, that it is not what we had imagined it to be, but a thousandfold more terrible. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. Denmark is a prison, and the world is full of such dungeons. A spectral voice says to us: “Horrible things have happened; horrible things are happening every day. Be it your task to repair the evil, to rearrange the course of things. The world is out of joint; it is for you to set it right.” But our arms fall powerless by our sides. Evil is too strong, too cunning for us.
In Hamlet, the first philosophical drama of the modern era, we meet for the first time the typical modern character, with its intense feeling of the strife between the ideal and the actual world, with its keen sense of the chasm between power and aspiration, and with that complexity of nature which shows itself in wit without mirth, cruelty combined with sensitiveness, frenzied impatience at war with inveterate procrastination.
XV
Hamlet as a Drama
Let us now look at Hamlet as a drama; and, to get the full impression of Shakespeare’s greatness, let us first recall its purely theatrical, materially visible side, that which dwells in the memory simply as pantomime.1.
The night-watch on the platform before the Castle of Elsinore, and the appearance of the Ghost to the soldiers and officers there. Then, in contrast to the splendidly-attired courtiers, the blackrobed figure of the Prince, standing apart, a living image of grief, his countenance bespeaking both soul and intellect, but with an expression which seems to say that henceforth joy and he are strangers. Next, his meeting with his father’s spirit; the oath upon the sword, with the constant change of place. Then his wild behaviour when, to hide his excitement, he feigns madness. Then the play within the play; the sword-thrust through the arras; the beautiful Ophelia with flowers and straw in her hair; Hamlet with Yorick’s skull in his hand; the struggle with Laertes in Ophelia’s grave, that grotesque but most significant episode. According to the custom of the time, a dumb show foretold the poisoning in the play, and this fight in the grave is the dumb show which foretells the mortal combat that is soon to take place: both are presently to be swallowed up by the grave in which they stand. Then follows the fencing-scene, during the course of which the Queen dies by the poison which the King destined for Hamlet, and Laertes by the stroke of the poisoned sword also prepared for the Prince, who, with a last great effort, kills the King, and then sinks down poisoned. This wholesale “havock” arranged by the poet, a fourfold lying-in-state, has its gloom broken by the triumphal march of young Fortinbras, which, in its turn, soon changes to a funeral measure. The whole is as effective to the eye as it is great and beautiful.
And now add to this ocular picturesqueness of the play the fascination which it owes to the sympathy Shakespeare has made us feel for its principal character, the impression he has given us of the agonies of a strong and sensitive spirit surrounded by corruption and depravity. Hamlet was by nature candid, enthusiastic, trustful, loving; the guile of others forces him to take refuge in guile; the wickedness of others drives him to distrust and hate; and the crime committed against his murdered father calls upon him from the underworld for vengeance.
His indignation at the infamy around him is heartrending, his contempt for it is stimulating.
By nature he is a thinker. He thinks not only when he is contemplating and planning a course of action, but also from a passionate longing for comprehension in the abstract. Though he is merely making use of the players to unmask the murderer, he gives them apt and profound advice with regard to the practice of their art. When Rosencrantz and Guildenstern question him as to the reason of his melancholy, he expounds to them in words of deep significance his rooted distaste for life.
The feeling produced in him by any strong impression never finds vent in straightforward, laconic words. His speeches never take the direct, the shortest way to express his thoughts. They consist of ingenious, far-fetched similes and witty conceits, apparently remote from the matter in hand. Sarcastic and enigmatical phrases conceal his emotions. This dissimulation is forced upon him by the very strength of his feelings: in order not to betray himself, not to give way to the pain he is suffering, he must smother it in fantastic and boisterous ejaculations. Thus he shouts after having seen the apparition: “Hillo, ho, ho, boy! come, bird, come!” Thus he apostrophises the Ghost: “Well said, old mole! canst work i’ the earth so fast?” And therefore, after the play has made the King betray himself, he cries: “Ah, ha! Come, some music! come, the recorders!” His feigned madness is only an intentional exaggeration of this tendency.
The horrible secret that has been discovered to him has upset his equilibrium. The show of madness enables him to find solace in expressing indirectly what it tortures him to talk of directly, and at the same time his seeming lunacy diverts attention from the real reason of his deep melancholy. He does not altogether dissemble when he talks so wildly; given his surroundings, these fantastic and daring sarcasms are a natural enough mode of utterance for the wild agitation produced by the horror that has entered into his life; “though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.” But the almost frenzied excitement into which he is so often thrown by the action of others subsides at intervals, when he feels the need for mental concentration—a craving which he satisfies in the solitary reflections forming his monologues.
When his passions are roused, he has difficulty in controlling them. It is nervous over-excitement that finds vent when he bids Ophelia get her to a nunnery, and it is in a fit of nervous frenzy that he stabs Polonius. But his passion generally strikes inwards. Constrained as he is, or thinks himself, to employ dissimulation and cunning, he is in a fever of impatience, and is for ever reviling and scoffing at himself for his inaction, as though it were due to indifference or cowardice.
Distrust, that new element in his character, makes him cautious; he cannot act on impulse, nor even speak. “There’s ne’er a villain dwelling in all Denmark,” he begins; “so great as the King” should be the continuation; but fear of being betrayed by his comrades takes possession of him, and he ends with, “but he’s an arrant knave.”
He is by nature open-hearted and warm, as we see him with Horatio; he speaks to the sentinel on the platform as to a comrade; he is cordial, at first, to old acquaintances like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; and he is frank, amiable, kind without condescension, to the troupe of travelling players. But reticence has been suddenly forced upon him by the bitterest, most agonising experiences; no sooner has he put on a mask, so as not to be instantly found out, than he feels that he is being spied upon; even his friends and the woman he loves are on the side of his opponents; and though he believes his life to be threatened, he feels that he must keep silent and wait.
His mask is often enough only of gauze; if only for the sake of the spectators, Shakespeare had to make the madness transparent, that it might not pall.
Read the witty repartees of Hamlet to Polonius (ii. 2), beginning with, “What do you read, my lord?” “Words, words, words.” In reality there is no trace of madness in all these keenedged sayings, till Hamlet at last, in order to annul their effect, concludes with the words, “For yourself, sir, should be old as I am, if, like a crab, you could go backward.”
Or take the long conversation (iii. 2) between Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern about the pipe he has sent for, and asks them to play on. The whole is a parable as simple and direct as any in the New Testament. And he points the moral with triumphant logic in poetic form—
“Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you would make of me! You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you would sound me from my lowest notes to the top of my compass: and there is much music, excellent music in this little organ; yet cannot you make it speak. ‘Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, yet you cannot play upon me.”
It is in order to account for such contemptuous and witty outbursts that Hamlet says: “I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw.”
To outward difficulties are added inward hindrances, which he cannot overcome. He reproaches himself passionately for this, as we have seen. But these self-reproaches of Hamlet’s do not represent Shakespeare’s view of his character or judgment of his action. They express the impatience of his nature, his longing for reparation, his eagerness for the triumph of the right; they do not imply his guilt.
The old doctrine of tragic guilt and punishment, which assumes that the death at the end of a tragedy must always be in some way deserved, is nothing but antiquated scholasticism, theology masking as æsthetics; and it may be regarded as an instance of scientific progress that this view of the matter, which was heretical only a generation since, is now very generally accepted. Very different was the case when the author of these lines, in his earliest published work, entered a protest against such an intrusion of traditional morality into a sphere from which it ought simply to be banished.2
Some critics have summarily disposed of the question of Hamlet’s possible guilt by the assertion that his madness was not only assumed, but real. Brinsley Nicholson, for instance, in his essay “Was Hamlet Mad?” (New Shakspere Society’s Transactions, 1880-86), insists on his morbid melancholy; his strange and incoherent talk after the apparition of the Ghost; his lack of any sense of responsibility for the deaths of Polonius, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern, of which he was either the direct or indirect cause; his fear of sending King Claudius to heaven by killing him while he is praying; his brutality towards Ophelia; his constant suspiciousness, &c., &c. But to see symptoms of real insanity in all this is not only a crudity of interpretation, but a misconception of Shakespeare’s evident meaning. It is true that Hamlet does not dissemble as systematically and coldly as Edgar in the subsequent King Lear; but that is no reason why his state of mental exaltation should be mistaken for derangement. He makes use of insanity; he is not in its power.
Not that it proves really serviceable to him or facilitates his task of vengeance; on the contrary, it impedes his action by tempting him from the straight path into witty digressions and deviations. It is meant to hide his secret; but after the performance of the play the King knows it, and, though he keeps it up, the feigned madness is useless. It is because his secret is betrayed that Hamlet now, in obedience to the Ghost’s command, endeavours to awaken his mother’s sense of shame and to detach her from the King. But having run Polonius through the body, in the belief that he is killing his stepfather, he is put under guards and sent away, and has still farther to postpone his revenge.
While many critics of this century, especially Germans, such as Kreyssig, have contemned Hamlet as a “witty weakling”, one German writer has passionately denied that Shakespeare intended to represent him as morbidly reflective. This critic, with much enthusiasm, with fierce onslaughts upon many of his countrymen, but with a conception of the play which debases its whole idea and belittles its significance, has tried to prove that the hindrances Hamlet had to contend with were purely external. I refer to the lectures on Hamlet delivered by the old Hegelian, Karl Werder, in the University of Berlin between 1859 and 1872.3 Their train of thought, in itself not unreasonable, may be rendered thus:—
What is demanded of Hamlet? That he should kill the King immediately after the Ghost has revealed his father’s fate? Good. But how, after this assassination, is he to justify his deed to the court and the people, and ascend the throne? He can produce no proof whatever of the truth of his accusation. A ghost has told him; that is all his evidence. He himself is not the hereditary supreme judge of the land, deprived of his throne by a usurper. The Queen is “jointress to this warlike state.” Denmark is an elective monarchy—and it is not till the very end of the play that Hamlet speaks of the King as having “popp’d in between the election and my hopes.” In the eyes of all the characters in the play, the existing state of the government is quite normal. And is he to overturn it with a dagger-thrust? Will the Danish people believe his tale of the apparition and the murder? And suppose that, instead of having recourse to the dagger, he comes forward with a public accusation, can there be any doubt that such a king and such a court will speedily make away with him? For where in this court are the elder Hamlet’s adherents? We see none of them. It seems as though the old hero-king had taken them all with him to the grave. What has become of his generals and of his council? Did they die before him? Or was he solitary in his greatness? Certain it is that Hamlet has no friend but Horatio, and finds no supporters at the court.
As matters stand, the truth can be brought to light only by the royal criminal’s betraying himself. Hence Hamlet’s perfectly logical, most ingenious device for forcing him to do so. Hamlet’s object is not to take a purely material revenge for the crime, but to reinstate right and justice in Denmark, to be judge and avenger in one. And this he cannot be if he simply kills the king off-hand.
All this is acute, and in part correct; only it misstates the theme of the play. Had Shakespeare had this outward difficulty in mind, he would have made Hamlet expound, or at least allude to it. As a matter of fact, Hamlet does nothing of the sort. On the contrary, he upbraids himself for his inaction and sloth, thereby indicating clearly enough that the great fundamental difficulty is an inward one, and that the real scene of the tragedy lies in the hero’s soul.
Hamlet himself is comparatively planless, but, as Goethe has profoundly remarked, the play is not therefore without a plan. And where Hamlet is most hesitating, where he tries to palliate his planlessness, there the plan speaks loudest and clearest. Where, for example, Hamlet comes upon the King at his prayers, and will not kill him, because he is not to die “in the purging of his soul” but revelling in sinful debauch, we hear Shakespeare’s general idea in the words which, in the mouth of the hero, sound like an evasion. Shakespeare, not Hamlet, reserves the King for the death which in fact overtakes him just as he has poisoned Laertes’s blade, seasoned “a chalice” for Hamlet, out of cowardice allowed the Queen to drain it, and been the efficient cause of both Laertes’s and Hamlet’s fatal wounds. Hamlet thus actually attains his declared object in allowing the King to live.
XVI
Hamlet and Ophelia
There is nothing more profoundly conceived in this play than the Prince’s relation to Ophelia. Hamlet is genius in love—genius with its great demands and its highly unconventional conduct. He does not love like Romeo, with a love that takes entire possession of his mind. He has felt himself drawn to Ophelia while his father was still in life, has sent her letters and gifts, and thinks of her with an infinite tenderness; but she has not it in her to be his friend and confidant. “Her whole essence,” we read in Goethe, “is ripe, sweet sensuousness.” This is saying too much; it is only the songs she sings in her madness, “in the innocence of madness,” as Goethe himself strikingly says, that indicate an undercurrent of sensual desire or sensual reminiscence; her attitude towards the Prince is decorous, almost to severity. Their relations to each other have been close—how close the play does not tell.
There is nothing at all conclusive in the fact that Hamlet’s manner to Ophelia is extremely free, not only in the affecting scene in which he orders her to a nunnery, but still more in their conversation during the play, when his jesting speeches, as he asks to be allowed to lay his head in her lap, are more than equivocal, and in one case unequivocally loose. We have already seen (p. 48) that this is no evidence against Ophelia’s inexperience. Helena in All’s Well that Ends Well is chastity itself, yet Parolles’s conversation with her is extremely—to our way of thinking impossibly—coarse. In the year 1602, speeches like Hamlet’s could be made without offence by a young prince to a virtuous maid of honour.
Whilst English Shakespearians have come forward as Ophelia’s champions, several German critics (among others Tieck, Von Friesen, and Flathe) have had no doubt that her relations with Hamlet were of the most intimate. Shakespeare has intentionally left this undecided, and it is difficult to see why his readers should not do the same.
Hamlet draws away from Ophelia from the moment when he feels himself the appointed minister of a sacred revenge. In deep grief he bids her farewell without a word, grasps her wrist, holds it at arm’s length from him, “peruses” her face as if he would draw it—then shakes her arm gently, nods his head thrice, and departs with a “piteous” sigh.
If after this he shows himself hard, almost cruel, to her, it is because she was weak and tried to deceive him. She is a soft, yielding creature, with no power of resistance; a loving soul, but without the passion which gives strength. She resembles Desdemona in the unwisdom with which she acts towards her lover, but falls far short of her in warmth and resoluteness of affection. She does not in the least understand Hamlet’s grief over his mother’s conduct. She observes his depression without divining its cause. When, after seeing the Ghost, he approaches her in speechless agitation, she never guesses that anything terrible has happened to him; and, in spite of her compassion for his morbid state, she consents without demur to decoy him into talking to her, while her father and the King spy upon their meeting. It is then that he breaks out into all those famous speeches: “Are you honest? Are you fair?” &c.; the secret meaning of them being: You are like my mother! You too could have acted as she did!
Hamlet has not a thought for Ophelia in his excitement after the killing of Polonius; but Shakespeare gives us indirectly to understand that grief on her account overtook him afterwards—“he weeps for what is done.” Later he seems to forget her, and therefore his anger at her brother’s lamentations as she is placed in her grave, and his own frenzied attempt to outdo the “emphasis” of Laertes’s grief, seem strange to us. But from his words we understand that she has been the solace of his life, though she could not be its stay. She on her side has been very fond of him, has loved him with unobtrusive tenderness. It is with pain she has heard him speak of his love for her as a thing of the past (“I did love you once”); with deep grief she has seen what she takes to be the eclipse of his bright spirit in madness (“Oh, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!”); and at last the death of her father by Hamlet’s hand deprives her of her own reason. At one blow she has lost both father and lover. In her madness she does not speak Hamlet’s name, nor show any trace of sorrow that it is he who has murdered her father. Forgetfulness of this cruellest blow mitigates her calamity; her hard fate condemns her to solitude; and this solitude is peopled and alleviated by madness.
In depicting the relation between Faust and Gretchen, Goethe appropriated and reproduced many features of the relation between Hamlet and Ophelia. In both cases we have the tragic love-tie between genius and tender girlhood. Faust kills Gretchen’s mother as Hamlet kills Ophelia’s father. In Faust also there is a duel between the hero and his mistress’s brother, in which the brother is killed. And in both cases the young girl in her misery goes mad. It is clear that Goethe actually had Ophelia in his thoughts, for he makes his Mephistopheles sing a song to Gretchen which is a direct imitation, almost a translation, of Ophelia’s song about Saint Valentine’s Day.1 There is, however, a more delicate poetry in Ophelia’s madness than in Gretchen’s. Gretchen’s intensifies the tragic impression of the young girl’s ruin; Ophelia’s alleviates both her own and the spectator’s suffering.
Hamlet and Faust represent the genius of the Renaissance and the genius of modern times; though Hamlet, in virtue of his creator’s marvellous power of rising above his time, covers the whole period between him and us, and has a range of significance to which we, on the threshold of the twentieth century, can foresee no limit.
Faust is probably the highest poetic expression of modern humanity—striving, investigating, enjoying, and mastering at last both itself and the world. He changes gradually under his creator’s hands into a great symbol; but in the second half of his life a superabundance of allegoric traits veils his individual humanity. It did not lie in Shakespeare’s way to embody a being whose efforts, like Faust’s, were directed towards experience, knowledge, perception of truth in general. Even when Shakespeare rises highest, he keeps nearer the earth.
But none the less dear to us art thou, O Hamlet! and none the less valued and understood by the men of to-day. We love thee like a brother. Thy melancholy is ours, thy wrath is ours, thy contemptuous wit avenges us on those who fill the earth with their empty noise and are its masters. We know the depth of thy suffering when wrong and hypocrisy triumph, and oh! thy still deeper suffering on feeling that that nerve in thee is severed which should lead from thought to victorious action. To us, too, the voices of the mighty dead have spoken from the under-world. We, too, have seen our mother wrap the purple robe of power round the murderer of “the majesty of buried Denmark.” We, too, have been betrayed by the friends of our youth; for us, too, have swords been dipped in poison. How well do we know that graveyard mood in which disgust and sorrow for all earthly things seize upon the soul. The breath from open graves has set us, too, dreaming with a skull in our hands!
1
OPHELIA.
“To-morrow is Saint Valentine’s day,
All in the morning betime,
And I a maid at your window,
To be your Valentine.
Then up he rose, and donn’d his clothes
And dupp’d the chamber-door;
Let in the maid, that out a maid
Never departed more.”
MEPHISTOFELES.
“Was machst Du mir
Vor Liebchens Thür
Kathrinchen, hier
Bei frühem Tagesblicke?
Lass, lass es sein!
Er lässt dich ein
Als Mädchen ein
Als Mädchen nicht zurücke.”
XVII
Hamlet’s Influence on Later Times
If we to-day can feel with Hamlet, it is certainly no wonder that the play was immensely popular in its own day. It is easy to understand its charm for the cultivated youth of the period; but it would be surprising, if we did not realise the alertness of the Renaissance and its wonderful receptivity for the highest culture, to find that Hamlet was in as great favour with the lower ranks of society as with the higher. A remarkable proof of this tragedy’s and of Shakespeare’s popularity in the years immediately following its appearance, is afforded by some memoranda in a log-book kept by a certain Captain Keeling, of the ship Dragon, which, in September 1607, lay off Sierra Leone in company with another English vessel, the Hector (Captain Hawkins), both bound for India. They run as follows:—
“September 5 [At “Serra Leona”]. I sent the interpreter, according to his desier, abord the Hector, whear he brooke fast, and after came abord mee, wher we gave the tragedie of Hamlett.
“[Sept.] 30. Captain Hawkins dined with me, wher my companions acted Kinge Richard the Second.
“31. I envited Captain Hawkins to a ffishe dinner, and had Hamlet acted abord me: wch I permitt to keepe my people from idlenes and unlawfull games, or sleepe.”
Who could have imagined that Hamlet, three years after its publication, would be so well-known and so dear to English sailors that they could act it for their own amusement at a moment’s notice! Could there be a stronger proof of its universal popularity? It is a true picture of the culture of the Renaissance, this tragedy of the Prince of Denmark acted by common English sailors off the west coast of Africa. It is a pity that Shakespeare himself, in all human probability, never knew of it.
Hamlet’s ever-increasing significance as time rolls on is proportionate to his significance in his own day. A great deal in the poetry of the nineteenth century owes its origin to him. Goethe interpreted and remodelled him in Wilhelm Meister, and this remodelled Hamlet resembles Faust. The trio, Faust, Gretchen, Valentin, in Goethe’s drama answers to the trio, Hamlet, Ophelia, Laertes. Faust transplanted into English soil produced Byron’s Manfred, a true though far-off descendant of the Danish Prince. In Germany, again, the Byronic development assumed a new and Hamlet-like (or rather Yorick-like) form in Heine’s bitter and fantastic wit, in his hatreds and caprices and intellectual superiority. Borne is the first to interpret Hamlet as the German of his day, always moving in a circle and never able to act. But he feels the mystery of the play, and says aptly and beautifully, “Over the picture hangs a veil of gauze. We want to lift it to examine the painting more closely, but find that the veil itself is painted.”
In France, the men of Alfred de Musset’s generation, whom he has portrayed in his Confessions d’un Enfant du Siècle, remind us in many ways of Hamlet—nervous, inflammable as gunpowder, broken-winged, with no sphere of action commensurate with their desires, and with no power Of action in the sphere which lay open to them. And Lorenzaccio, perhaps Musset’s finest male character, is the French Hamlet—practised in dissimulation, procrastinating, witty, gentle to women yet wounding them with cruel words, morbidly desirous to atone for the emptiness of his evil life by one great deed, and acting too late, uselessly, desperately.
Hamlet, who centuries before had been young England, and was to Musset, for a time, young France, became in the ‘forties, as Borne had foretold, the accepted type of Germany. “Hamlet is Germany,” sang Freiligrath.1
Kindred political conditions determined that the figure of Hamlet should at the same period, and twenty years later to a still greater extent, dominate Russian literature. Its influence can be traced from Pushkin and Gogol to Gontscharoff and Tolstoi, and it actually pervades the whole life-work of Turgueneff. But in this case Hamlet’s vocation of vengeance is overlooked; the whole stress is laid on the general discrepancy between reflection and power of action.
In the development of Polish literature, too, during this century, there came a time when the poets were inclined to say: “We are Hamlet; Hamlet is Poland.” We find marked traits of his character towards the middle of the century in all the imaginative spirits of Poland: in Mickiewicz, in Slowacki, in Krasinski. From their youth they had stood in his position. Their world was out of joint, and was to be set right by their weak arms. High-born and noble-minded, they feel, like Hamlet, all the inward fire and outward impotence of their youth; the conditions that surround them are to them one great horror; they are disposed at one and the same time to dreaming and to action, to over-much reflection and to recklessness.
Like Hamlet, they have seen their mother, the land that gave them birth, profaned by passing under the power of a royal robber and murderer. The court to which at times they are offered access strikes them with terror, as the court of Claudius struck terror to the Danish Prince, as the court in Krasinski’s Temptation (a symbolic representation of the court of St. Petersburg) strikes terror to the young hero of the poem. These kinsmen of Hamlet are, like him, cruel to their Ophelia, and forsake her when she loves them best; like him, they allow themselves to be sent far away to foreign lands; and when they speak they dissemble like him—clothe their meaning in similes and allegories. What Hamlet says of himself applies to them: “Yet have I something in me dangerous.” Their peculiarly Polish characteristic is that what enervates and impedes them is not their reflective but their poetic bias. Reflection is what ruins the German of this type; wild dissipation the Frenchman; indolence, self-mockery, and self-despair the Russian; but it is imagination that leads the Pole astray and tempts him to live apart from real life.
The Hamlet character presents a multitude of different aspects. Hamlet is the doubter; he is the man whom over-scrupulousness or over-deliberation condemns to inactivity; he is the creature of pure intelligence, who sometimes acts nervously, and is sometimes too nervous to act at all; and, lastly, he is the avenger, the man who dissembles that his revenge may be the more effectual. Each of these aspects is developed by the poets of Poland. There is a touch of Hamlet in several of Mickiewicz’s creations—in Wallenrod, in Gustave, in Conrad, in Robak. Gustave speaks the language of philosophic aberration; Conrad is possessed by the spirit of philosophic brooding; Wallenrod and Robak dissemble or disguise themselves for the sake of revenge, and the latter, like Hamlet, kills the father of the woman he loves. In Slowacki’s work the Hamlet-type takes a much more prominent place. His Kordjan is a Hamlet who follows his vocation of avenger, but has not the strength for it. The Polish tendency to fantasticating interposes between him and his projected tyrannicide. And while Slowacki gives us the radical Hamlet type, so we find the corresponding conservative Hamlet in Krasinski. The hero of Krasinski’s Undivine Comedy has more than one trait in common with the Prince of Denmark. He has Hamlet’s sensitiveness and power of imagination. He is addicted to monologues and cultivates the drama. He has an extremely tender conscience, but can commit most cruel actions. He is punished for the excessive irritability of his character by the insanity of his wife, very much as Hamlet, by his feigned madness, leads to the real madness of Ophelia. But this Hamlet is consumed by a more modern doubt than that which besets his Renaissance prototype. Hamlet doubts whether the spirit on whose behest he is acting is more than an empty phantasm. When Count Henry shuts himself up in “the castle of the Holy Trinity,” he is not sure that the Holy Trinity itself is more than a figment of the brain.
In other words: nearly two centuries and a half after the figure of Hamlet was conceived in Shakespeare’s imagination, we find it living in English and French literature, and reappearing as a dominant type in German and two Slavonic languages. And now, three hundred years after his creation, Hamlet is still the confidant and friend of sad and thoughtful souls in every land. There is something unique in this. With such piercing vision has Shakespeare searched out the depths of his own, and at the same time of all human, nature, and so boldly and surely has he depicted the outward semblance of what he saw, that, centuries later, men of every country and of every race have felt their own being moulded like wax in his hand, and have seen themselves in his poetry as in a mirror.
1
“Deutschland ist Hamlet! Ernst und stumm
In seinen Thoren jede Nacht
Geht die begrabne Freiheit um,
Und winkt den Männern auf der Wacht.
Da steht die Hohe, blank bewehrt,
Und sagt dem Zaudrer, der noch zweifelt:
‘Sei mir ein Rächer, zieh dein Schwert!
Man hat mir Gift in’s Ohr geträufelt.’”
XVIII
Hamlet as a Critic
Along with so much else, Hamlet gives us what we should scarcely have expected—an insight into Shakespeare’s own ideas of his art as poet and actor, and into the condition and relations of his theatre in the years 1602-3.
If we read attentively the Prince’s words to the players, we see clearly why it is always the sweetness, the mellifluousness of Shakespeare’s art that his contemporaries emphasise. To us he may seem audacious, harrowingly pathetic, a transgressor of all bounds; in comparison with contemporary artists—not only with the specially violent and bombastic writers, like the youthful Marlowe, but with all of them—he is self-controlled, temperate, delicate, beauty-loving as Raphael himself. Hamlet says to the players—
“Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus; but use all gently: for in the very torrent, tempest, and (as I may say) the whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness. O! it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who, for the most part, are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb-shows, and noise: I would have such a fellow whipped for o’er-doing—Termagant; it out-herods Herod: pray you, avoid it.
“I Play. I warrant your honour.
“Ham. Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion be your tutor.”
Here ought logically to follow a warning against the dangers of excessive softness and sweetness. But it does not come. He continues—
“Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature; for anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was, and is, to hold, as’t were, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time, his form and pressure. Now, this overdone, or come tardy off, though it make the unskilful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve; the censure of the which one must, in your allowance, o’erweigh a whole theatre of others. O! there be players, that I have seen play,—and heard others praise, and that highly,—not to speak it profanely, that, neither having the accent of Christians, nor the gait of Christian, pagan, nor man, have so strutted and bellowed, that I have thought that some of nature’s journeymen had made men, and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably.
“I Play. I hope we have reformed that indifferently with us.
“Ham. O! reform it altogether.”
Thus, although it appears to be Hamlet’s wish to caution equally against too much wildness and too much tameness, his warning against tameness is of the briefest, and he almost immediately resumes his homily against exaggeration, bellowing, what we should now call ranting declamation. It is not the danger of tameness, but of violence, that is uppermost in Shakespeare’s mind.
As already pointed out, it is not merely his own general effort as a dramatist which Shakespeare here formulates; he lays down a regular definition of dramatic art and its aim. It is noteworthy that this definition is identical with that which Cervantes, almost at the same time, places into the mouth of the priest in Don Quixote. “Comedy,” he says, “should be as Tullius enjoins, a mirror of human life, a pattern of manners, a presentation of the truth.”
Shakespeare and Cervantes, who shed lustre on the same age and died within a few days of each other, never heard of each other’s existence; but, led by the spirit of their time, both borrowed from Cicero their fundamental conception of dramatic art. Cervantes says so openly; Shakespeare, who did not wish his Hamlet to pose as a scholar, indicates it in the words, “Whose end, both at the first and now, was, and is.”
And as Shakespeare here, by the mouth of Hamlet, has expressed his own idea of his art’s unalterable nature and aim, he has also for once given vent to his passing artistic anxieties, his dissatisfaction with the position of his theatre at the moment. We have already (p. 106) noticed the poet’s complaint of the harm done to his company at this time by the rivalry of the troupe of choir-boys from St. Paul’s Cathedral playing at the Blackfriars Theatre. It is in Hamlet’s dialogue with Rosencrantz that this complaint occurs. There is a bitterness about the wording of it, as though the company had for the time been totally worsted. This was no doubt largely due to the circumstance that its most popular member, its clown, the famous Kemp, had just left it (in 1602), and gone over to Henslow’s troupe. Kemp had from the beginning played all the chief low-comedy parts in Shakespeare’s dramas—Peter and Balthasar in Romeo and Juliet, Shallow in Henry IV., Lancelot in The Merchant of Venice, Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, Touchstone in As You Like It. Now that he had gone over to the enemy, his loss was deeply felt.
The above-mentioned little book, dedicated to Mary Fitton, gives us a most interesting glimpse into the English life of that age. The most important duty of the clown was not to appear in the play itself, but to sing and dance his jig at the end of it, even after a tragedy, in order to soften the painful impression. The common spectator never went home without having seen this afterpiece, which must have resembled the comic “turns” of our variety-shows. Kemp’s jig of The Kitchen-Stuff Woman, for instance, was a screaming farrago of rude verses, some spoken, others sung, of good and bad witticisms, of extravagant acting and dancing. It is of such a performance that Hamlet is thinking when he says of Polonius: “He’s for a jig, or a tale of bawdry, or he sleeps.”
As the acknowledged master of his time in the art of comic dancing, Kemp was immoderately loved and admired. He paid professional visits to all the German and Italian courts, and was even summoned to dance his Morrice Dance before the Emperor Rudolf himself at Augsburg. It was in his youth that he undertook the nine days’ dance from London to Norwich which he describes in his book.
He started at seven o’clock in the morning from in front of the Lord Mayor’s house, and half London was astir to see the beginning of the great exploit. His suite consisted of his “taberer,” his servant, and an “overseer” or umpire to see that everything was performed according to promise. The journey was almost as trying to the “taberer” as to Kemp, for he had his drum hanging over his left arm and held his flageolet in his left hand while he beat the drum with his right. Kemp himself, on this occasion, contributed nothing to the music except the sound of the bells which were attached to his gaiters.
He reached Romford on the first day, but was so exhausted that he had to rest for two days. The people of Stratford-Langton, between London and Romford, had got up a bear-baiting show in his honour, knowing “how well he loved the sport”; but the crowd which had gathered to see him was so great that he himself only succeeded in hearing the bear roar and the dogs howl. On the second day he strained his hip, but cured the strain by dancing. At Burntwood such a crowd had gathered to see him that he could scarcely make his way to the tavern. There, as he relates, two cut-purses were caught in the act, who had followed with the crowd from London. They declared that they had laid a wager upon the dance, but Kemp recognised one of them as a noted thief whom he had seen tied to a post in the theatre. Next day he reached Chelmsford, but here the crowd which had accompanied him from London had dwindled away to a couple of hundred people.
In Norwich the city waits received him in the open market-place with an official concert in the presence of thousands. He was the guest of the town and entertained at its expense, received handsome presents from the mayor, and was admitted to the Guild of Merchant Venturers, being thereby assured a share in their yearly income, to the amount of forty shillings. The very buskins in which he had performed his dance were nailed to the wall in the Norwich Guild Hall and preserved in perpetual memory of the exploit.
So popular an artist as this must of course have felt himself at least Shakespeare’s equal. He certainly assumed the right to address one of her Majesty’s Maids-of-Honour with no slight familiarity. The tone in which he dedicates this catchpenny performance to Mrs. Fitton offers a remarkable contrast to the profoundly respectful tone in which professional authors couch their dedications to their noble patrons or patronesses:—
“In the waine of my little wit I am forst to desire your protection, else every Ballad-singer will proclaime me bankrupt of honesty.... To shew my duety to your honourable selfe, whose favours (among other bountifull friends) make me (dispight this sad world) iudge my hert Corke and my heeles feathers, so that me thinkes I could fly to Rome (at least hop to Rome, as the old Prouerb is) with a Morter on my head.”
His description of the Nine Daies Wonder, with its arrogant dedication, has shown us how conceited he must have been. Hamlet lets us see that he had frequently annoyed Shakespeare by the irrepressible freedom of his “gags” and interpolations. From the text of the plays of an earlier period which have come down to us, we can understand that the clowns were in those days as free to do what they pleased with their parts as the Italian actors in the Commedia dell’ Arte. Shakespeare’s rich and perfect art left no room for such improvisations. Now that Kemp was gone, the poet sent the following shaft after him from the lips of Hamlet:—
“And let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them: for there be of them that will themselves laugh, to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too: though, in the meantime, some necessary question of the play be then to be considered: that’s villainous, and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it.”
This reproof is, however, as the reader sees, couched in quite general terms; wherefore it was allowed to stand when Kemp returned to the company. But a far sharper and much more personal attack, which appears in the edition of 1603, was expunged in the following editions (and consequently from our text of the play), as being no longer in place after the return of the wanderer. It speaks of a clown whose witticisms are so popular that they are noted down by the gentlemen who frequent the theatre. A whole series of extremely poor specimens of his burlesque sallies is given—mere circus-clown drolleries—and then Hamlet disposes of the wretched buffoon by remarking that he “cannot make a jest unless by chance, as a blind man catcheth a hare.”
It is notorious that an artist will more easily forgive an attack on himself than warm praise of a rival in the same line. There can be very little doubt that Shakespeare, in making Hamlet praise the dead Yorick, had in view the lamented Tarlton, Kemp’s amiable and famous predecessor. If there had been no purpose to serve by making the skull that of a jester, it might quite as well have belonged to some old servant of Hamlet’s. But if Shakespeare, in his first years of theatrical life, had known Tarlton personally, and Kemp’s objectionable behaviour vividly recalled by contrast his predecessor’s charming whimsicality, it was natural enough that he should combine with the attack on Kemp a warm eulogy of the great jester.1
Tarlton was buried on the 3rd of September 1588. This date accords with the statement in the first quarto that Yorick has lain in the earth for a dozen years. Not till we have these facts before us can we fully understand the following strong outburst of feeling:—
“Alas, poor Yorick!—I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar?”
Alas, poor Yorick! Hamlet’s heartfelt lament will keep his memory alive when his Owlglass jests recorded in print are utterly forgotten.2 His fooling was equally admired by the populace, the court, and the theatrical public. He is said to have told Elizabeth more truths than all her chaplains, and cured her melancholy better than all her physicians.
Shakespeare, in Hamlet, has not only spoken his mind freely on theatrical matters; he has also eulogised the distinguished actor after his death, and given a great example of the courteous and becoming treatment of able actors during their lives. His Prince of Denmark stands far above the vulgar prejudice against them. And, lastly, Shakespeare has glorified that dramatic art which was the business and pleasure of his life, by making the play the effective means of bringing the truth to light and furthering the ends of justice. The acting of the drama of Gonzago’s death is the hinge on which the tragedy turns. From the moment when the King betrays himself by stopping the performance, Hamlet knows all that he wants to know.
When James ascended the throne, Hamlet received, as it were, a new actuality, from the fact that his queen, Anne, was a Danish princess. At the splendid festival held on the occasion of the triumphal procession of King James, Queen Anne, and Prince Henry Frederick, from the Tower through the city, “the Danish March” was brilliantly performed, out of compliment to the Queen, by a band consisting of nine trumpeters and a kettle-drum, stationed on a scaffolding at the side of St. Mildred’s Church. How this march went we do not know; but there can be little doubt that from that time it was played in the second scene of the fifth act of Hamlet, where music of trumpets and drums is prescribed, and where, in our days, at the Théâtre-Français, they naïvely play, “Kong Christian stod ved höjen Mast.”3
XIX
All’s Well That Ends Well — Attacks on Puritanism
The fortunes of the company having declined by reason of the competition complained of in Hamlet, it became necessary to intersperse a few comedies among the sombre tragedies on which alone Shakespeare’s mind was now bent.
Comedies, therefore, had to be produced. But the disposition of mind in which Shakespeare had created A Midsummer Night’s Dream had long deserted him; and infinitely remote, though so near in point of time, was the mood in which he had produced As You Like It.
Still the thing had to be done. He took one of his old sketches in hand again, the play called Love’s Labour’s Won, which has already been noticed (p. 47). Its original form we do not exactly know; all we can do is to pick out the rhymed and youthfully frivolous passages as having doubtless belonged to the earlier play, to whose title there is probably a reference in Helena’s words in the concluding scene:—
“This is done.
Will you be mine, now you are doubly won?”
It is clear that Shakespeare in his young days took hold of the subject with the purpose of making a comedy out of it. But now it did not turn out a comedy; the time was past when Shakespeare’s chief strength lay in his humour. We could quite well imagine his subsequent tragedies to have been written by his Hamlet, if Hamlet had had life before him; and in the same way we could imagine this and the following play, Measure for Measure, to have been written by his Jaques.
We find many indications in All’s Well that Ends Well— most, as was natural, in the first two acts—of Shakespeare’s having come straight from Hamlet. In the very first scene, the Countess chides Helena for the immoderate grief with which she mourns her father: it is wrong to let oneself be so overwhelmed. Just so the King speaks to Hamlet of the “obstinate condolement” to which he gives himself up. The Countess’s advice to her son, when he is setting off for France, reminds us strongly of the advice Polonius gives to Laertes in exactly the same situation. She says, for instance:—
“Thy blood and virtue
Contend for empire in thee; and thy goodness
Share with thy birthright! Love all, trust a few,
Do wrong to none: be able for thine enemy
Rather in power than use, and keep thy friend
Under thy own life’s key: be check’d for silence,
But never tax’d for speech.”
Compare with these injunctions those of Polonius:—
“Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportion’d thought his act.
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.
The friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel;
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatch’d, unfledg’d comrade. Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel; but, being in,
Bear’t that the opposed may beware of thee.
Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice.”
Notice also in this comedy the numerous sallies against court life and courtiers, which are quite in the spirit of Hamlet. The scene in which Polonius changes his opinion according as Hamlet thinks the cloud like a camel, a weasel, or a whale, and that in which Osric, who “did comply with his dug before he sucked it,” reels off his elegant speeches, seem actually to be commented on in general terms when the Clown (ii. 2) thus discourses about the court:—
“Truly, madam, if God have lent a man any manners, he may easily put it off at court: he that cannot make a leg, put off’s cap, kiss his hand, and say nothing, has neither leg, hands, lip, nor cap; and, indeed, such a fellow, to say precisely, were not for the court.”
Now and again, too, we come upon expressions which recall well-known speeches of Hamlet’s. For instance, when Helena (ii. 3) says to the First Lord:
“Thanks, sir; all the rest is mute,”
we are reminded of Hamlet’s ever-memorable last words:
“The rest is silence.”
Among other more external touches, which likewise point clearly to the period 1602-1603, may be mentioned the many subtle, cautious sallies against Puritanism which are interwoven in the play. They express the bitter contempt for demonstrative piety which filled Shakespeare’s mind just at that time.
Hamlet itself had treated of a hypocrite on the largest scale. Notice, too, the stinging reference to existing conditions in Act iii. Scene 2:—
“Hamlet. Look you, how cheerfully my mother looks, and my father died within’s two hours.
“Ophelia. Nay, ’tis twice two months, my lord.
“Ham. So long? Nay, then, let the devil wear black, for I’ll have a suit of sables. O heavens! die two months ago, and not forgotten yet? Then there’s hope a great man’s memory may outlive his life half a year; but by’r lady, he must build churches then, or else shall he suffer not thinking on, with the hobby-horse; whose epitaph is, ‘For O! for, O! the hobby-horse is forgot.’”
In All’s Well that Ends Well Shakespeare has his sanctimonious enemies constantly in mind. He makes the Clown jeer at the fanatics in both the Protestant and the Catholic camp. They may be of different faiths, but they are alike in being unlucky husbands. The Clown says (i. 3):—
“Young Charbon the Puritan, and old Poysam the Papist, how soe’er their hearts are severed in religion, their heads are both one; they may joll horns together, like any deer i’ the herd.”
A little farther on he continues:—
“Though honesty be no Puritan, yet it will do no hurt; it will wear the surplice of humility over the black gown of a big heart.”
When Lafeu (ii. 3) is talking to Parolles of the marvellous cure of the King of France which Helena has undertaken, he has a hit at those who will find matter in it for a pious treatise:—
“Lafeu. I may truly say, it is a novelty to the world.
“Parolles. It is, indeed: if you will have it in showing, you shall read it in—what do you call there?—
“Laf. A showing of a heavenly effect in an earthly actor.”
Shakespeare clearly took a mischievous pleasure in imitating the title of a Puritanic work of edification.
This polemical tendency, which extends from Hamlet through All’s Well that Ends Well to Measure for Measure, in the form of an increasingly marked opposition to the growing religious strictness and sectarianism of the day, with its accompaniment of hypocrisy, proves plainly that Shakespeare at this time shared the animosity of the Government towards both Puritanism and Catholicism.
Though there is little true mirth to be found in All’s Well that Ends Well, the piece reminds us in various ways of some of Shakespeare’s real comedies. The story resembles in several details that of The Merchant of Venice. Portia in disguise persuades the unwilling Bassanio to give up his ring to her; and Helena, in the darkness of night mistaken for another, coaxes Bertram out of the ring which he had made up his mind she should never obtain from him. In the closing scenes, both Bertram and Bassanio are minus their rings; both are wretched because they have not got them; and in both cases the knot is unravelled by their wives being found in possession of them. There is a more essential relation—that of direct contrast—between the story of All’s Well that Ends Well and that of The Taming of the Shrew. The earlier comedy sets forth in playful fashion how a man by means of the attributes of his sex—physical superiority, boldness, and coolness—helped out by imperiousness, bluster, noise, and violence, wins the devotion of a passionately recalcitrant young woman. All’s Well that Ends Well shows us how a woman, by means of the attributes of her sex—gentleness, goodness of heart, cunning, and finesse—conquers a vehemently recalcitrant man. And in both cases the pair are married before the action proper of the play begins.
Seeing that Shakespeare in The Taming of the Shrew followed the older play on the same subject, and that he took the story of All’s Well that Ends Well from Boccaccio’s Gilette of Narbonne, a translation of which appeared as early as 1566 in Paynter’s Palace of Pleasure, this contrast cannot be said to have been devised by the poet. But it is evident that one of the chief attractions of the latter subject for Shakespeare was the opportunity it offered him of delineating that rare phenomenon: a woman wooing a man and yet possessing and retaining all the charm of her sex. Shakespeare has worked out the figure of Helena with the tenderest partiality. Pity and admiration in concert seem to have guided his pen. We feel in his portraiture a deep compassion for the pangs of despised love—the compassion of one who himself has suffered—and over the whole figure of Helena he has shed a Raphael-like beauty. She wins all, charms all, wherever she goes—old and young, women and men—all except Bertram, the one in whom her life is bound up. The King and the old Lafeu are equally captivated by her, equally impressed by her excellences. Bertram’s mother prizes her as if she were her daughter; more highly, indeed, than she prizes her own obstinate son. The Italian widow becomes so devoted to her that she follows her to a foreign country in order to vouch for her statement and win her back her husband.
She ventures all that she may gain her well-beloved, and in the pursuit of her aim shows an inventive capacity not common among women. For the real object of her journey to cure the King is, as she frankly confesses, to be near Bertram. As in the tale, she obtains the King’s promise that she may, if she is successful in curing him, choose herself a husband among the lords of his court; but in Boccaccio it is the King who, in answer to her question as to the reward, gives her this promise of his own accord; in the play it is she who first states her wish. So possessed is she by her passion for one who does not give her a thought or a look. But when he rejects her (unlike Gilette in the tale), she has no desire to attain her object by compulsion; she simply says to the King with noble resignation—
“That you are well restored, my lord,
I’m glad; let the rest go.”
She offers no objection when Bertram, immediately after the wedding, announces his departure, alleging pretexts which she does not choose to see through; she suffers without a murmur when, at the moment of parting, he refuses her a kiss. When she has learnt the whole truth, she can at first utter nothing but short ejaculations (iii. 2): “My lord is gone, for ever gone.” “This is a dreadful sentence!” “Tis bitter!”—and presently she leaves her home, that she may be no hindrance to his returning to it. Predisposed though she is to self-confidence and pride, no one could possibly love more tenderly and humbly.
All the most beautiful passages of her part show by the structure of the verse and the absence of rhyme that they belong to the poet’s riper period. Note, for example, the lines (i. I) in which Helena tells how the remembrance of her dead father has been effaced in her mind by the picture of Bertram:—
“My imagination
Carries no favour in’t but Bertram’s.
I am undone: there is no living, none,
If Bertram be away. It were all one
That I should love a bright particular star,
And think to wed it; he is so above me:
In his bright radiance and collateral light
Must I be comforted, not in his sphere.
The ambition in my love thus plagues itself:
The hind that would be mated by the lion
Must die for love. ’Twas pretty, though a plague,
To see him every hour: to sit and draw
His arched brows, his hawking eye, his curls,
In our heart’s table; heart too capable
Of every line and trick of his sweet favour:
But now he’s gone, and my idolatrous fancy
Must sanctify his relics.”
If we compare the style of this passage with that which prevails in Helena’s rhymed speeches, with their euphuistic word-plays and antitheses, the difference is very striking, and we feel what a distance Shakespeare has traversed since the days of his apprenticeship. Here we find no glitter of wit, but the utterance of a heart that loves simply and deeply.
Though the play as a whole was evidently not one of those which Shakespeare cared most about, and though he has allowed things to stand in it which preclude the possibility of a satisfactory and harmonious end, yet he has evidently concentrated his whole poetic strength on the development and perfection of Helena’s most winning character. These are the terms (i. 3) in which, speaking to Bertram’s mother, she makes confession of her love:—
“Be not offended, for it hurts not him,
That he is lov’d of me. I follow him not
By any token of presumptuous suit;
Nor would I have him till I do deserve him,
Yet never know how that desert should be.
I know I love in vain, strive against hope;
Yet, in this captious and intenible sieve
I still pour in the waters of my love,
And lack not to lose still. Thus, Indian-like,
Religious in mine error, I adore
The sun, that looks upon his worshipper,
But knows of him no more.”
There is something in her nature which anticipates the charm, earnestness, and boundless devotion with which Shakespeare afterwards endows Imogen. When Bertram goes off to the war, simply to escape acknowledging her and living with her as his wife, she exclaims (iii. 2)—
“Poor lord! is’t I
That chase thee from thy country, and expose
Those tender limbs of thine to the event
Of the none-sparing war?...
O you leaden messengers,
That ride upon the violent speed of fire,
Fly with false aim; move the still-’pearing air,
That sings with piercing, do not touch my lord!
Whoever shoots at him, I set him there;
Whoever charges on his forward breast,
I am the caitiff that do hold him to it.”
In this there is a fervour and a glow that we do not find in the earlier comedies. When one reads these verses, one understands how it is that Coleridge calls Helena, “Shakespeare’s loveliest character.”
Pity that this deep passion should have been inspired by so unworthy an object. It undoubtedly lessens the interest of the play that Shakespeare should not have given Bertram some more estimable qualities along with the all too youthful and unchivalrous ones which he possesses. The poet has here been guilty of a certain negligence, which shows that it was only to parts of the play that he gave his whole mind. Bertram is right enough in refusing to have a wife thrust upon him against his will, simply because the King has a debt of gratitude to pay. But this first motive for refusing gives place to one with which we have less sympathy: to wit, pride of rank, which makes him look down on Helena as being of inferior birth, though king, courtiers, and his own mother consider her fit to rank with the best. Even this, however, need not lower Bertram irretrievably in our esteem; but he adds to it traits of unmanliness, even of baseness. For instance, he enjoins Helena, through Parolles, to invent some explanation of his sudden departure which will make the King believe it to have been a necessity; and then he leaves her, not, as he falsely declares, for two days, but for ever. His readiness to marry a daughter of Lafeu the moment the report of Helena’s death has reached him is a very extraordinary preparation for the reunion of the couple at the end of the play, and reminds us unpleasantly of the exactly similar incident in Much Ado About Nothing (p. 217). But, worst of all, and an indisputable dramatic mistake, is his entangling himself, just before the final reconciliation, in a web of mean lies with reference to the Italian girl to whom he had laid siege in Tuscany.
It was to make Helena’s position more secure, and to avoid any suspicion of the adventuress about her, that Shakespeare invented the character of the Countess, that motherly friend whose affection sets a seal on all her merits. In the same way Parolles was invented with the purpose of making Bertram less guilty. Bertram is to be considered as ensnared by this old “fool, notorious liar, and coward” (as Helena at once calls him), who figures in the play as his evil genius.
Parolles in Love’s Labours Won was doubtless a gay and purely farcical figure—the first slight sketch for Falstaff. Coming after Falstaff, he necessarily seems a weak repetition; but this is no fault of the poet’s. Still, it is very plain that in the re-writing Shakespeare’s attempt at gaiety missed fire. His frame of mind was too serious; the view of the subject from the moral standpoint displaces and excludes pure pleasure in its comicality. Parolles, who has Falstaff’s vices without a gleam of his genius, brings anything but unmixed merriment in his train. The poet is at pains to impress on us the lesson we ought to learn from Parolles’s self-stultification, and the shame that attends on his misdeeds. Thus the Second Lord (iv. 3), speaking of the rascality he displays in his outpourings when he is blindfolded, says—
“I will never trust a man again for keeping his sword clean, nor believe he can have everything in him by wearing his apparel neatly.”
And Parolles himself says when his effrontery is crushed (iv. 3)—
“If my heart were great,
’Twould burst at this. Captain I’ll be no more;
But I will eat and drink, and sleep as soft
As captain shall: simply the thing I am
Shall make me live. Who knows himself a braggart,
Let him fear this; for it will come to pass
That every braggart shall be found an ass”
The other comic figure, the Clown, witty as he is, has not the serene gaiety of the earlier comedies. He speaks here and there, as already noted (p. 49), in the youthfully whimsical style of the earliest comedies; but as a humoristic house-fool he does not rank with such a sylvan fool as Touchstone, a creation of a few years earlier, nor with the musical court-fool in Twelfth Night.
A single passage in All’s Well that Ends Well has always struck me as having a certain personal note. It is one of those which were quite evidently added at the time of the re-writing. The King is speaking of Bertram’s deceased father, and quotes his words (i. 2)—
“‘Let me not live,’—
Thus his good melancholy oft began,
On the catastrophe and heel of pastime,
When it was out,—‘Let me not live,’ quoth he,
‘After my flame lacks oil, to be the snuff
Of younger spirits, whose apprehensive senses
All but new things disdain.’...
This he wish’d:
I, after him, do after him wish too.”
A courtier objects to this despondent utterance—
“You are lov’d, sir;
They that least lend it you shall lack you first.”
Whereupon the King replies with proud humility—
“I fill a place, I know’t.”
These words could not have been written save by a mature man, who has seen impatient youth pressing forward to take his place, and who has felt the sting of its criticism. The disposition of mind which here betrays itself foretells that overpowering sense of the injustice of men and of things which is soon to take possession of Shakespeare’s soul.
XX
Measure for Measure — Angelo and Tartuffe
A covert polemical intention could be vaguely divined here and there in All’s Well that Ends Well. It contained, as we have seen, some incidental mockery of the increasing Puritanism of the time, with its accompaniment of self-righteousness, moral intolerance, and unctuous hypocrisy. The bent of thought which gave birth to these sallies reappears still more clearly in the choice of the theme treated in Measure for Measure.
The plot of All’s Well that Ends Well turns on the incident, familiar in every literature, of one woman passing herself off for another at a nocturnal rendezvous, without the substitution being detected by the man—an incident so fruitful in dramatic situations, that even its gross improbability has never deterred poets from making use of it.
A standing variation of this theme, also to be found in the most diverse literatures, is as follows:—A man is condemned to death. His mistress, his wife, or his sister implores the judge to pardon him. The judge promises, on condition that she shall pass a night with him, to let the prisoner go free, but afterwards has him executed all the same.
This subject has been treated over and over again from mediæval times down to our own days, its latest appearances, probably, being in Paul Heyse’s novel, Der Kinder Sünde der Väter Fluch, and in Victorien Sardou’s play La Tosca. In Shakespeare’s time it appeared in the form of an Italian novella in Giraldi Cinthio’s Hecatommithi (1565), on which an English dramatist, George Whetstone, founded his play, The Right Excellent and Famous History of Promos and Cassandra (1578), and also a prose story in his Heptameron of Civil Discourses, published in 1582. Whetstone’s utterly lifeless and characterless comedy is the immediate source from which Shakespeare derived the outlines of the story. He is indebted to Whetstone for nothing else.
What attracted Shakespeare to this unpleasant subject was clearly his indignation at the growing Pharisaism in matters of sexual morality which was one outcome of the steady growth of Puritanism among the middle classes. It was a consequence of his position as an actor and theatrical manager that he saw only the ugliest side of Puritanism—the one it turned towards him.
Its estimable sides well deserved a poet’s sympathy. Small wonder, indeed, that independent and pious men should seek the salvation of their souls without the bounds of the Anglican State Church, with its Thirty-Nine Articles, to which all clergymen and state officials were bound to swear, and to which all citizens must make submission. It was a punishable offence to use any other ritual than the official one, or even to refuse to go to church. The Puritans, who dreamed of leading the Christian Church back to its original purity, and who had returned home after their banishment during the reign of Mary with the ideal of a democratic Church before their eyes, could not possibly approve of a State Church subject to the crown, or of such an institution as Episcopacy. Some of them looked to Scottish Presbyterianism as a worthy model, and desired to see Church government by laymen, the elders of the congregation, introduced into England, in place of the spiritual aristocracy of the bishops. Others went still farther, denied the necessity of one common form of worship for all, and desired to have the Church broken up into independent congregations, in which any believer might officiate as priest. We have here the germs of the great party division in Cromwell’s time into Presbyterians and Independents.
So far as we can see, Shakespeare took no interest whatever in any of these ecclesiastical or religious movements. He came into contact with Puritanism only in its narrow and fanatical hatred of his art, and in its severely intolerant condemnation and punishment of moral, and especially of sexual, frailties. All he saw was its Pharisaic aspect, and its often enough only simulated virtue.
It was his indignation at this hypocritical virtue that led him to write Measure for Measure. He treated the subject as he did, because the interests of the theatre demanded that the woof of comedy should be interwoven with the severe and sombre warp of tragedy. But what a comedy! Dark, tragic, heavy as the poet’s mood—a tragi-comedy, in which the unusually broad and realistic comic scenes, with their pictures of the dregs of society, cannot relieve the painfulness of the theme, or disguise the positively criminal nature of the action. One feels throughout, even in the comic episodes, that Shakespeare’s burning wrath at the moral hypocrisy of self-righteousness underlies the whole structure like a volcano, which every moment shoots up its flames through the superficial form of comedy and the interludes of obligatory merriment.
And yet it is not really against hypocrisy that his attack is aimed. At this stage of his development he is far too great a psychologist to depict a ready-made, finished hypocrite. No, he shows us how weak even the strictest Pharisee will prove, if only he happens to come across the temptation which really tempts him; and how such a man’s desire, if it meets with opposition, reveals in him quite another being—a villain, a brute beast—who allows himself actions worse a hundredfold than those which, in the calm superiority of a spotless conscience, he has hitherto punished in others with the utmost severity.
It is not a type of Shakespeare’s opponents that he here unmasks and brands—it is a man in many ways above the average type, as he saw it. The chief character in Measure for Measure is the judge of public morality, the hard and stern Censor morum, who in his moral fanaticism believes that he can root out vice by persecuting its tools, and imagines that he can purify and reform society by punishing every transgression, however natural and comparatively harmless, as a capital crime. The play shows us how this man, as soon as a purely sensual passion takes possession of him, does not hesitate to commit, under the mask of piety, a crime against real morality so revolting and so monstrous that no expression of loathing and contempt would be too severe for it, and scarcely any punishment too rigorous.
From its nature such a drama ought to end by appeasing in some satisfactory manner the craving for justice awakened in the spectator. But comedy was what Shakespeare’s company wanted; and besides, it would have been unwise, and perhaps even dangerous, to carry to extremities this question of the punishment of moral hypocrisy. So the knot in the play was summarily loosed, without any great expenditure of pathos, by the provident care and timely intervention of a wise and invisibly omnipresent prince, an occidental Haroun-al-Raschid. Fastidious in his choice of means this prince was not. With an ingenuity which is profoundly unsatisfactory to any one of the least delicacy of feeling, he substitutes a lovable girl, whom the iniquitous judge had at one time promised to marry, for the beautiful young woman who is the object of his bestial desire.
The Duke, wishing to test his servants, gives out that he is leaving Vienna on a long journey. He intrusts the regency during his absence to Angelo, an official of high standing and reputation.
No sooner does Angelo come into power than he begins a regular crusade against licentiousness and all laxity in the domain of morals. In the first place, he decrees that all houses of ill-fame in the city of Vienna are to be pulled down. In the older drama by Whetstone, which Shakespeare used as a foundation for his play, there was a whole troop of disreputable personages, procuresses, prostitutes, bullies, improper characters of every description. Shakespeare retains part of this company; he has a single procuress, Mistress Overdone, who reminds us slightly of Doll Tearsheet, a single bully, that very amusing personage, Pompey; and he adds to them an extremely entertaining character, the utterly dissolute but witty tattler and liar, Lucio.
But the chief alteration he makes in the subject-matter of the play is that the Duke, disguised as a friar, is witness from the beginning of Angelo’s abuse of his power as ruler and judge. Among other advantages resulting from this modification, we must reckon the fact that the spectators are thus reassured in advance as to the final issue. On the Duke’s disguise, moreover, depends most of the comic effect arising out of the character of Lucio, who is constantly repeating to him the most absurd slanders about himself, as if he had them from the best authority. Further, the Duke’s concealed presence is essential to the other great change made in the story, namely, that Isabella is not really required to sacrifice herself for her brother, her place being filled, as in All’s Well that Ends Well, by a woman who has old claims on the man concerned. In this manner the too revoltingly painful part of the subject is avoided.
Shakespeare has imagined one of the men who were the bitterest enemies of his art and his calling invested with absolute power, and using it to proceed against immorality with cruel rigour. The first step is his attack on common prostitution, which he persuades himself he can exterminate. This vain imagination is repeatedly ridiculed. “What shall become of me?” says Mistress Overdone. “Come; fear not you: good counsellors lack no clients.” In the Act ii. sc. I we read:—
“Escalus. How would you live, Pompey? by being a bawd? What do you think of the trade, Pompey? is it a lawful trade?
“Pompey. If the law would allow it, sir.
“Escal. But the law will not allow it, Pompey; nor it shall not be allowed in Vienna.
“Pomp. Does your worship mean to geld and splay all the youth of the city.
“Escal. No, Pompey.
“Pomp. Truly, sir, in my poor opinion, they will to’t then.”
And Lucio (iii. 2) also ridicules Angelo’s severity as fruitless:—
“Lucio. A little more lenity to lechery would do no harm in him: something too crabbed that way, friar.
“Duke. It is too general a vice, and severity must cure it.
“Lucio. Yes, in good sooth, the vice is of a great kindred: it is well allied; but it is impossible to extirp it quite, friar, till eating and drinking be put down. They say, this Angelo was not made by man and woman, after this downright way of creation: is it true, think you?”
But besides taking strict proceedings against actual debauchery, Angelo revives an old law which has long been in disuse—according to the Duke for fourteen, according to Claudio for nineteen years—making death the punishment of all sexual commerce without marriage; and by this law young Claudio is condemned to death for his relation to Juliet.
It was an innocent relation. He says (i. 3):—
“She is fast my wife
Save that we do the denunciation lack
Of outward order: this we came not to,
Only for propagation of a dower
Remaining in the coffer of her friends.”
But this avails nothing. An example is to be made. It is in vain that even the highly respectable Provost feels compassion for him, and says (ii. 2):—
“All sects, all ages smack of this vice, and he
To die for it!”
The young men of the town cannot explain this insane severity in any other way than by the supposition that Lord Angelo is a man with “snow-broth” in his veins in place of blood.
It soon appears, however, that he is not the man of ice he is taken to be.
Escalus, an old, honourable nobleman, bids him bear in mind that though his own virtue be of the straitest, it has, perhaps, never been tempted; had it been exposed to temptations, it might not have stood the test better than that of others. Angelo answers haughtily that to be tempted is one thing, to fall another. But now comes Claudio’s sister, Isabella, young, charming, and intelligent, and beseeches him to spare her brother’s life (ii. 2):—
“Good, good my lord, bethink you:
Who is it that hath died for this offence?
There’s many have committed it.”
He is inexorable. She shows the unreason of punishing so stringently the errors of love:
“Isab. Could great men thunder
As Jove himself does, Jove would ne’er be quiet,
For every pelting, petty officer
Would use his heaven for thunder; nothing but thunder.—
Merciful heaven!
Thou rather with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt
Splitt’st the unwedgeable and gnarled oak,
Than the soft myrtle.”
And she continues in such a strain, that we cannot but hear the poet’s voice through hers:—
“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; who, with our spleens,
Would all themselves laugh mortal.”
And she appeals to his own self-knowledge:—
“Go to your bosom;
Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know
That’s like my brother’s fault.”
He invites her to come again the next day; and hardly is she gone when, in a monologue, he reveals his hateful passion, and even hints at his still more hateful purpose of forcing her to gratify it in payment for her brother’s release.
He makes her his proposal. She is appalled; she now sees, like Hamlet, what life can be, what undreamt-of horrors can happen, to what a pitch villainy can be carried, even on the judgment-seat:—
“O, ’tis the cunning livery of hell,
The damned’st body to invest and cover
In princely guards! Dost thou think, Claudio?—
If I would yield him my virginity,
Thou mightst be freed.”
She cannot even denounce him, for, as he himself points out to her, no one will believe her; his stainless name, his strict life and high rank, will stifle the accusation if she dares to make it. Feeling himself safe, he is doubly audacious. Thus, when, at the conclusion of the play (v. 3), she lays her indictment before the reinstated Duke, Angelo says brazenly, “My lord, her wits, I fear me, are not firm.” Then follows, as if in continuation of Isabella’s just-quoted speech, the fiery protest springing from the poet’s intensest conviction:—
“Make not impossible
That which but seems unlike. ’Tis not impossible,
But one, the wicked’st caitiff on the ground,
May seem as shy, as grave, as just, as absolute,
As Angelo.”
(See p. 241.)
But the protest has no immediate result. Isabella is, for the time being, sent to prison for slandering a man of unblemished honour. And the irony is kept up to the last. The Duke, in his character as a friar, has learnt bitter lessons; amongst others, that there is hardly enough honesty in the world to hold society together. But when he himself, in his disguise, relates what he has witnessed, his own faithful servants are on the point of sending him also to prison. In his rôle of Haroun-al-Raschid, he has seen and realised that law is made to serve as a screen for might. Thus he says—
“My business in this state
Made me a looker-on here in Vienna,
Where I have seen corruption boil and bubble
Till it o’er-run the stew: laws for all faults,
But faults so countenanc’d, that the strong statutes
Stand like the forfeits in a barber’s shop,
As much in mock as mark.
‘Escal. Slander to the state! Away with him to prison.”
As a play, Measure for Measure rests entirely on three scenes: the one in which Angelo is tempted by Isabella’s beauty; that in which he makes the shameless, proposal that she shall give her honour in exchange for her brother’s life; and, thirdly, that most dramatic one in which Claudio, after first hearing with fortitude and indignation what his sister has to tell him of Angelo’s baseness, breaks down, and, like Kleist’s Prince of Homburg two centuries later, begins meanly to beg for his life. Round these principal scenes are grouped the many excellent and vigorously realistic comic passages, treated in a spirit which afterwards revived in Hogarth and Thackeray; and other scenes designed solely to retard the dramatic wheel a little, which, therefore, jar upon us as conventional. It is, for example, an entirely unjustifiable experiment which the Duke tries on Isabella in the fourth act, when he falsely assures her that her brothers head has already been cut off and sent to Angelo. This is introduced solely for the sake of an effect at the end.
In this very unequally elaborated play, it is evident that Shakespeare cared only for the main point—the blow he was striking at hypocrisy. And it is probable that he here ventured as far as he by any means dared. It is a giant stride from the stingless satire on Puritanism in the character of Malvolio to this representation of a Puritan like Angelo. Probably for this very reason, Shakespeare has tried in every way to shield himself. The subject is treated entirely as a comedy. There is a threat of executing first Claudio, then the humorous scoundrel Barnardine, whose head is to be delivered instead of Claudio’s; Barnardine is actually brought on the scene directly before execution, and the spectators sit in suspense; but all ends well at last, and the head of a man already dead is sent to Angelo. A noble maiden is threatened with dishonour; but another woman, Mariana, who was worthy of a better fate, keeps tryst with Angelo in her stead, and this danger is over. Finally, threats of retribution close round Angelo, the villain, himself; but after all he escapes unpunished, being merely obliged to marry the amiable girl whom he had at an earlier period deserted. In this way the play’s terrible impeachment of hypocrisy is most carefully glozed over, and along with it the pessimism which animates the whole.
For it is remarkable how deeply pessimistic is the spirit of this play. When the Duke is exhorting Claudio (iii. I) not to fear his inevitable fate, he goes farther in his depreciation of human life than Hamlet himself when his mood is blackest:—
“Reason thus with life:—
If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing
That none but fools would keep; a breath thou art,
Servile to all the skyey influences,
That do this habitation, where thou keep’st,
Hourly afflict. Merely, thou art death’s fool;
For him thou labour’st by thy flight to shun,
And yet runn’st toward him still.
.........
Happy thou art not;
For what thou hast not, still thou striv’st to get,
And what thou hast, forgett’st. Thou art not certain;
For thy complexion shifts to strange effects,
After the moon. If thou art rich, thou’rt poor;
For, like an ass, whose back with ingots bows,
Thou bear’st thy heavy riches but a journey,
And death unloads thee. Friends hast thou none;
For thine own bowels, which do call thee sire,
The mere effusion of thy proper loins,
Do curse the gout, serpigo, and the rheum,
For ending thee no sooner. Thou hast nor youth, nor age,
But, as it were, an after-dinner’s sleep,
Dreaming on both; for all thy blessed youth
Becomes as aged, and doth beg the alms
Of palsied eld: and when thou art old and rich,
Thou hast neither heat, affection, limb, nor beauty
To make thy riches pleasant. What’s yet in this,
That bears the name of life? Yet in this life
Lie hid more thousand deaths; yet death we fear,
That makes these odds all even.”
Note with what art and care everything is here assembled that can confound and abash the normal instinct that makes for life. Here for the first time Shakespeare anticipates Schopenhauer.
It is clear that in this play the poet was earnestly bent on proving his own standpoint to be the moral one. In hardly any other play do we find such persistent emphasis laid, with small regard for consistency of character, upon the general moral.
For example, could there be a more direct utterance than the Duke’s monologue at the end of Act iii.:—
“He who the sword of heaven will bear
Should be as holy as severe;
Pattern in himself to know,
Grace to stand, and virtue go;
More nor less to others paying,
Than by self-offences weighing.
Shame to him whose cruel striking
Kills for faults of his own liking!
Twice treble shame on Angelo,
To weed my vice, and let his grow!”
Similarly, and in a like spirit, the moral pointer comes into play wherever there is an opportunity of showing how apt princes and rulers are to be misjudged, and how recklessly they are disparaged and slandered.
Thus the Duke says towards the close of Act iii.:—
“No might nor greatness in mortality
Can censure scape: black-wounding calumny
The whitest virtue strikes. What king so strong
Can tie the gall up in the slanderous tongue?”
And later (iv. I), again:—
“O place and greatness! millions of false eyes
Are stuck upon thee. Volumes of report
Run with these false and most contrarious quests
Upon thy doings.”
It is quite remarkable how this dwelling on baseless criticism by subjects is accompanied by a constant tendency to invoke the protection of the sovereign, or, in other words, of James I., who had just ascended the throne, and who, with his long-accumulated bitterness against Scottish Presbyterianism, was already showing himself hostile to English Puritanism. Hence the politic insistence, at the close, upon a point quite irrelevant to the matter of the play: all other sins being declared pardonable, save only slander or criticism of the sovereign. Lucio alone, who, to the great entertainment of the spectators, has told lies about the Duke, and, though only in jest, has spoken ill of him, is to be mercilessly punished. To the last moment it seems as if he were to be first whipped, then hanged. And even after this sentence is commuted in order that the tone of comedy may be preserved, and he is commanded instead to marry a prostitute, it is expressly insisted that whipping and hanging ought by rights to have been his punishment. “Slandering a prince deserves it,” says the Duke, at the beginning of the final speech.
This attitude of Shakespeare’s presents an exact parallel to that of Molière in the concluding scene of Tartuffe, sixty years later. The prince, in accordance with James of Scotland’s theories of princely duty, appears as the universally vigilant guardian of his people; he alone chastises the hypocrite, whose lust of power and audacity distinguish him from the rest. The appeal to the prince in Measure for Measure answers exactly to the great Deus-ex-machinâ speech in Tartuffe, which relieves the leading characters from the nightmare that has oppressed them:—
“Nous vivons sous un prince, ennemi de la fraude,
Un prince dont les yeux se font jour dans les cœurs
Et que ne peut tromper tout l’art des imposteurs.”
In the seventeenth century kings were still the protectors of art and artists against moral and religious fanaticism.
XXI
Accession of James and Anne — Raleigh’s Fate — Shakespeare’s Company Become His Majesty’s Servants — Scotch Influence
In Measure for Measure it is not only the monarchical tone of the play, but some quite definite points, that mark it out as having been produced at the time of James’s accession to the throne in 1603. In the very first scene there is an allusion to the new king’s nervous dislike of crowds. This peculiarity, which caused much surprise on the occasion of his entrance into England, is here placed in a flattering light. The Duke says:—
“I’ll privily away: I love the people,
But do not like to stage me to their eyes.
Though it do well, I do not relish well
Their loud applause and Aves vehement,
Nor do I think the man of safe discretion
That does affect it.”
It is also with unmistakable reference to James’s antipathy for a throng that Angelo, in Act ii. sc. 4, describes the crowding of the people round a beloved sovereign as an inadmissible intrusion:—
“So play the foolish throngs with one that swoons,
Come all to help him, and so stop the air
By which he should revive: and even so
The general, subject to a well-wish’d king,
Quit their own part, and in obsequious fondness
Crowd to his presence, where their untaught love
Must needs appear offence.”
Elizabeth had breathed her last on the 24th of March 1603. On her deathbed, when she could no longer speak, she had made the shape of a crown above her head with her hands, to signify that she chose as her successor one who was already a king. Her ministers had long been in secret negotiation with James VI. of Scotland, and had promised him the succession, in spite of a provision in Henry VIII.’s will which excluded his elder sister’s Scottish descendants from the throne. This had to be set aside; for there was not in the younger line any personage of sufficient distinction to be at all eligible. There was obvious advantage, too, in uniting the crowns of England and Scotland on one head; too long had the neighbour kingdoms wasted each other’s energies in mutual feuds. All parties in the nation agreed with the ministers in looking to James as Elizabeth’s natural successor. The Protestants felt confidence in him as a Protestant; the Catholics looked for better treatment from the son of the Catholic martyr-queen; the Puritans hoped that he, as a new and peace-loving king, would sanction such alterations in the statutory form of worship as should enable them to take part in it without injury to their souls. Great expectations greeted him.
Hardly was the breath out of Queen Elizabeth’s body when Sir Robert Carey, a gentleman on whom she had conferred many benefits, but who, in his anxiety to ensure the new King’s favour, had post-horses standing ready at every station, galloped off to be the first to bring the news to James in Edinburgh. On the way he was thrown from his horse, which kicked him on the head; but in spite of this he reached Holyrood on the evening of the 26th of March, just after the King had gone to bed. He was hurriedly conducted into the bed-chamber, where he knelt and greeted James by the title of King of England, Scotland, France, and Ireland. “Hee gave mee his hand to kisse,” writes Carey, “and bade me welcome.” He also promised Carey a place as Gentleman of the Bed-Chamber, and various other things, in reward for his zeal; but forgot all these promises as soon as he stood on English ground.
In London all preparations had been carefully made. A proclamation of James as King had been drawn up by Cecil during Elizabeth’s lifetime, and sent to Scotland for James’s sanction. This the Prime Minister read, a few hours after the Queen’s death, to an assembly of the Privy Council and chief nobility, and a great crowd, of the people, amidst universal approbation. Three heralds with a trumpeter repeated the proclamation in the Tower, “whereof as well prysoners as others rejoyced, namely, the Earle of Southampton, in whom all signes of great gladnesse appeared.” Not without reason; for almost the first order James gave was that a courier should convey to Southampton the King’s desire that he should at once join him and accompany him on his progress through England to London, where he was to receive the oath of allegiance and to be crowned.
On the 5th of April 1603, James I. of Great Britain left Edinburgh to take possession of his new kingdom. His royal progress was a very slow one, for every nobleman and gentleman whose house he passed invited him to enter; he accepted all invitations, spent day after day in festivities, and rewarded hospitality by distributing knighthoods in unheard-of and excessive numbers. One of his actions was unequivocally censured. At Newark “was taken a cutpurse doing the deed,” and James had him hanged without trial or judgment. The displeasure shown made it plain to him that he could not thus assume superiority to the laws of England. In Scotland there had been a general demand for a strong monarchy, which could hold the nobles and the clergy in check; in England the day for this was over, and the new King’s successors learned to their cost the futility of trying to carry on the traditions of despotism on English soil.
James himself was received with the naïve, disinterested joy with which the mass of the people are apt to greet a new monarch, of whose real qualities nothing is yet known, and with the less disinterested flatteries by which every one who came into contact with the King sought personal favour in his eyes.
There was nothing kingly or even winning in King James’s exterior. Strange that the handsome Henry Darnley and the beautiful Mary Stuart should have had such an insignificant and ungainly son! He was something over middle height, indeed, but his figure was awkward, his head lumpish, and his eyes projecting. His language was the broadest Scotch, and when he opened his mouth it was rather to spit out the words than to speak; he hustled them out so that they stumbled over each other. He talked, ate, and dressed like a peasant, and, in spite of his apparently decorous life, was addicted to the broadest improprieties of talk, even in the presence of ladies. He walked like one who has no command over his limbs, and he could never keep still, even in a room, but was always pacing up and down with clumsy, sprawling movements. His muscles were developed by riding and hunting, but his whole appearance was wanting in dignity.
The shock inflicted on his mother during her pregnancy, by Rizzio’s assassination, probably accounts for his dread of the sight of drawn steel. The terrorism in which he was brought up had increased his natural timidity. While he was yet but a youth, the French ambassador, Fontenay, summed up his description of him thus: “In one word, he is an old young man.”
Now, in the thirty-sixth year of his age, he was a learned personage, full of prejudices, wanting neither in shrewdness nor in wit, but with two absorbing passions—the one for conversation on theological and ecclesiastical matters, and the other for hunting expeditions, to which he sometimes gave up so much as six consecutive days. He had not Elizabeth’s political instinct; she had chosen her councillors among men of the most different parties; he admitted to his council none but those whose opinions agreed with his own. But his vanity was quite equal to hers. He had the pedant’s boastfulness; he was fond of bragging, for instance, that he could do more work in one hour than others in a day; and he was especially proud of his learning. Some Shakespeare students have, as already observed, seen in him the prototype of Hamlet. He was certainly no Hamlet, but rather what Alfred Stern somewhere calls him—a Polonius on the throne. We have a description by Sir John Harington of an audience James gave him in 1604. The King “enquyrede muche of lernynge” in such a way as to remind him of “his examiner at Cambridge aforetyme,” quoted scraps of Aristotle which he hardly understood himself, and made Harington read aloud part of a canto of Ariosto. Then he asked him what he “thoughte pure witte was made of,” and whom it best became, and thereupon inquired whether he did not think a king ought to be “the beste clerke” in his country. Farther, “His Majestie did much presse for my opinion touchinge the power of Satane in matter of witchcraft, and... why the Devil did worke more with anciente women than others.” This question Sir John boldly and wittily answered by reminding him of the preference for “walking in dry places” ascribed in Scripture to the Devil. James then told of the apparition of “a bloodie heade dancinge in the aire,” which had been seen in Scotland before his mother’s death, and concluded: “Now, sir, you have seen my wisdome in some sorte, and I have pried into yours. I praye you, do me justice in your reporte, and, in good season, I will not fail to add to your understandinge, in suche pointes as I may find you lacke amendmente.” Perhaps only one European sovereign since James has so plumed himself on his own omniscience.
James’s relations with England during Elizabeth’s reign had not been invariably friendly. Nourishing a lively ill-will to the Presbyterian clergy, who were always trying to interfere in matters of state, he had in 1584, at the age of eighteen, appealed to the Pope for assistance for himself and his imprisoned mother. But the very next year, in consideration of the payment of a pension of £4000 a year, he concluded a treaty with Elizabeth. When this was ratified in 1586, his mother disinherited him and nominated Philip II. her successor. At the very time when the trial of Mary Stuart was going on, James made application to have his title as heir to the throne of England acknowledged. This unworthy, unchivalrous proceeding made it impossible for him in any way to interfere with the carrying out of whatever sentence the English Government chose to pronounce in his mother’s case. Nevertheless her execution naturally affected him painfully, and it was his resentment that made him hasten on his long-planned marriage with the Danish princess Anne, daughter of Frederick II.—an alliance which he knew to be disagreeable to Elizabeth. He gained a political advantage by it, Denmark waiving her claim to the Orkney Islands.
His bride, born at Skanderborg towards the close of 1574, was at the time of her marriage not fifteen years old—a pretty, fair-skinned, golden-haired girl. Daughter of a Lutheran father and the Lutheran Sophia of Mecklenburg, she had been brought up in Lutheran orthodoxy. She had received some instruction in chemistry from Tycho Brahe; but her education, on the whole, had been rather that of a spoilt child. Great ideas had been instilled into her of what it meant to belong to the royal house of Denmark, so that she agreed with her future husband in a conviction of the importance of kingly state. Other features of her character were good-humour, inborn wit, and a superficial gaiety which sometimes went to unguarded lengths. Her behaviour, only three years after her marriage, gave rise to a scandal—public opinion (doubtless unjustly) making James accessory to the assassination of the Earl of Murray, whom it was supposed that he had good reasons for wishing out of the way.
The difficulties which beset Anne’s voyage from Denmark to Scotland in 1589 are well known. A storm, for raising which many Danish “witches” and no fewer than two hundred luckless Scottish crones had to suffer at the stake, drove the bride to Oslo in Norway. The impatient bridegroom then undertook the one romantic adventure of his life and set off in search of her. He found her at Oslo, was married there, and spent the winter in Denmark.
As Queen of Scotland, Anne already showed herself possessed by the same mania for building which characterised her brother, Christian IV. As Queen of England she aroused dissatisfaction by her constant coquetting with Roman Catholicism. By her own wish, the Pope sent her gifts of all sorts of Catholic gimcracks; they were taken from her, and the bearer was consigned to the Tower. She showed a certain amiable independence in the sympathy and good-will which she displayed towards Sir Walter Raleigh, whom her husband imprisoned in the Tower; but on the whole she was an insignificant woman, pleasure-loving and pomp-loving (consequently a patroness of those poets who, like Ben Jonson, wrote masques for court festivals), and, in contrast to the economical Elizabeth, so extravagant that she was always in debt. Very soon after her arrival in England, she owed enormous sums to jewellers and other merchants.
The new King soon disappointed the hopes which Puritans and Catholics had cherished as to his tolerance. Even during the course of his journey from Edinburgh to London numerous petitions for the better treatment of Dissenters had been handed to him, and he seemed to give good promises to both parties. But as early as January 1604, on the occasion of a conference he summoned at Hampton Court, there was a rupture between him and the Puritans—the very mention of the word “Presbyter” making him furious. The formula, “No bishop, no king,” though not invented by him, expressed his principles. And when the House of Commons favoured measures of a Puritan tendency, he retaliated by proroguing Parliament, after rebuking the House in undignified and boastful terms. He complained in this speech that whereas in Scotland he had been regarded “not only as a king but as a counsellor,” in England, on the contrary, there was “nothing but curiosity from morning to evening to find fault with his propositions.” “There all things warranted that came from me. Here all things suspected,” &c. &c. The Puritan clergy, who refused to accept the Anglican ritual, were driven from their livings.
The Catholics fared still worse. James had at first intended to lighten the heavy penalties to which they were subject, but the discovery of Catholic conspiracies led him to change his mind. The Catholic priests and the pupils of the Jesuit schools were banished. After the discovery of Guy Fawkes’s great Gunpowder Plot in 1605, the position of the Catholics naturally became as bad as possible.
One of the most marked traits in James’s political character was his eagerness to bring about and preserve peace with Spain. While yet on the way to London, he ordered a cessation of all hostilities, and by 1604 he had concluded peace. One of the reasons for his at once assuming a hostile attitude towards Raleigh was that he was well acquainted with Raleigh’s hatred of Spain and disinclination to peace with that country; and Raleigh increased the King’s displeasure during the following months by constantly urging upon him a war policy. But there were other and less impersonal reasons for the King’s hostility. Raleigh had been Elizabeth’s favourite, and had in 1601 presented to her a state-paper drawn up by himself on “The Dangers of a Spanish Faction in Scotland,” the rumoured contents of which had so alarmed James that he offered Elizabeth the assistance of three thousand Scottish troops against Spain. Raleigh had been an opponent of Essex, who had sought support from James and attached himself to his fortunes. And what was worse, he had an enemy, though he scarcely knew it, in the person of a man who had opposed Essex much more strongly than he, but who had, even before the Queen’s death, assured James of his absolute devotion. This was Robert Cecil, who feared Raleigh’s ambition and ability.
Raleigh was in the West of England when the Queen died, and could not at once join in the great rush northwards to meet King James, which emptied London of all its nobility. By the time he started, with a large retinue, to wait on the King, he had already received a kind of command not to do so, in the shape of one of the orders dispensing the recipient from attendance on the King, which James had sent in blank to Cecil, to be filled in with the names of those whom Cecil thought he should keep at a distance. James received Raleigh ungraciously, and at once told him, with a bad pun on his name, that he had been prejudiced against him: “On my soul, man, I have heard but rawly of thee.” A few weeks later he was deprived (though not without compensation) of the office of Captain of the Guard, which was given to a Scotchman, Sir Thomas Erskine; and within the same month he was ordered immediately to give up to the Bishop of Durham the town palace of that See, which he had occupied, and on which he had spent great sums of money.
At last, one day in July 1603, as he was standing ready to ride out with the King, he was arrested and imprisoned on a charge of high treason. This was the beginning of a long series of base proceedings against this eminent man, who had deserved so well of his country. He was a prisoner in the Tower for thirteen years, and the persecution ended only with the judicial murder which was committed when, in 1618, after making the most beautiful speech ever heard from the scaffold, he laid his head on the block with incomparable courage and calm dignity.
It is difficult for us to-day to understand how a man of Raleigh’s worth could at that time be the best-hated man in England. For us he is simply, as Gardiner has expressed it, “the man who had more genius than all the Privy Council put together;” or, as Gosse has called him, “the figure which takes the same place in the field of action which Shakespeare takes in that of imagination and Bacon in that of thought.” But that he was generally hated at the time of his imprisonment is certain.
Many disliked him as the enemy of Essex. It was said that in Essex’s last hours Raleigh had jeered at him. Raleigh himself wrote in 1618:—
“It is said I was a persecutor of my Lord of Essex; that I puffed out tobacco in disdain when he was on the scaffold. But I take God to witness I shed tears for him when he died. I confess I was of a contrary faction, but I knew he was a noble gentleman. Those that set me up against him [evidently Cecil] did afterwards set themselves against me.”
But what mattered the falseness of the accusation if it was believed? And there were other, much less reasonable, grounds of hatred. From one of Raleigh’s letters, written in the last days of Queen Elizabeth, we learn that the tavern-keepers throughout the country held him responsible for a tax imposed on them, which was in fact due solely to the Queen’s rapacity. In this letter he prays Cecil to prevail on Elizabeth to remit the tax, for, says he: “I cannot live, nor show my face out of my doors, without it, nor dare ride through the towns where these taverners dwell.” It seems as if his very greatness had marked him out for universal hatred; and, being conscious of his worth, he would not stoop to a truckling policy.
There was much that was popularly winning about the tall, vigorous, rather large-boned Raleigh, with his bright complexion and his open expression; but, like a true son of the Renaissance, he challenged dislike by his pride and magnificence. His dress was always splendid, and he loved, like a Persian Shah or Indian Rajah of our day, to cover himself, down to his shoes, with the most precious jewels. When he was arrested in 1603, he had gems to the value of £4000 (about £20,000 in modern money) on his breast, and when he was thrown into prison for the last time in 1618, his pockets were found full of jewels and golden ornaments which he had hastily stripped off his dress.
He was worshipped by those who had served under him; they valued his qualities of heart as well as his energy and intellect. But the crowd, whom he treated with disdain, and the courtiers and statesmen with whom he had competed for Elizabeth’s favour, saw nothing in him but matchless effrontery and unscrupulousness. In spite of the favour he enjoyed, his rivals prevented his ever attaining any of the highest posts. On those naval expeditions in which he most distinguished himself, his place was always second in command. He was baulked even in the desire which he cherished during Elizabeth’s later years for a place in the Privy Council.
He was now over fifty, and aged before his time. His untrustworthy friend, Lord Cobham, was suspected of complicity in Watson’s Catholic plot; and this suspicion extended to Raleigh, who was thought to have been a party to intrigues for the dethronement of James in favour of his kinswoman, Arabella Stuart. He was tried for high treason; and as the law then stood in England, any man accused of such a crime was as good as lost, however innocent he might be. “A century later,” says Mr. Gardiner, “Raleigh might well have smiled at the evidence which was brought against him.” Then the law was as cruel as it was unjust. The accused was considered guilty until he proved his innocence; no advocate was allowed to plead his cause; unprepared, at a moment’s notice, he had to refute charges which had been carefully accumulated and marshalled against him during a long period. That a man should be suspected of such an enormity as desiring to bring Spanish armies on to the free soil of England was enough to deprive him at once of all sympathy. Little wonder that Raleigh, a few days after his indictment, tried to commit suicide. His famous letter to his wife, written before the attempt, gives consummate expression to a great man’s despair in face of a destiny which he does not fear, yet cannot master.
While this tragedy was being enacted in the Tower, London was making magnificent preparations for the state entrance of King James and Queen Anne into their new capital. Seven beautiful triumphal arches were erected; “England’s Cæsar,” as Henry Petowe in his coronation ode with some little exaggeration entitled James, was exalted and glorified by the poets of the day with as great enthusiasm as though his exploits had already rivalled those of “mightiest Julius.”
Henry Chettle wrote The Shepheard’s Spring Song for the Entertainment of King James, our most potent Sovereign; Samuel Daniel, A Panegyrike Congratulatorie to the Kings Majestie; Michael Drayton, To the Majestie of King James, a Gratulatorie Poem. The actor Thomas Greene composed A Poet’s Vision and a Prince’s Glorie. Dedicated to the high and mightie Prince James, King of England, Scotland, France and Ireland; and scores of other poets lifted up their voices in song. Daniel wrote a masque which was acted at Hampton Court; Dekker, a description of the King’s “Triumphant Passage,” with poetic dialogues; Ben Jonson, a similar description; and Drayton, a Pæan Triumphall. Ben Jonson also produced a masque called Penates, and another entitled The Masque of Blackness; while a host of lesser lights wrote poems in the same style. The unobtrusive, mildly flattering allusions to James, which we have found and shall presently find in Shakespeare’s plays of this period, produce an exceedingly feeble, almost imperceptible effect amid this storm of adulation. To have omitted them altogether, or to have made them in the slightest degree less deferential, would have been gratuitously and indefensibly churlish, in view of the favour which James had made haste to extend to Shakespeare’s company.
It is most interesting to-day to read the programme of the royal procession from the Tower to Whitehall in 1604, in which all the dignitaries of the realm took part, and all the privileged classes, court, nobility, clergy, royal guard, were fully represented.
In the middle of the enormous procession rides the King under a canopy. Immediately before him, the dukes, marquises, eldest sons of dukes, earls, &c. &c. Immediately behind him comes the Queen, and after her all the first ladies of the kingdom—duchesses, marchionesses, countesses, viscountesses, &c. Among the ladies mentioned by name is Lady Rich, with the note, “by especiall comandement.” At the foot of the page, another note runs thus: “To go as a daughter to Henry Bourchier, Earl of Essex.” James desired to honour in her the memory of her ill-fated brother. Among the lawyers in the procession Sir Francis Bacon has a place of honour; he is described as “the King’s Counsell at Lawe.” Bacon’s learning and obsequious pliancy, James’s pedantry and monarchical arrogance, quickly brought these two together. But among “His Majesty’s Servants,” at the very head of the procession, immediately after the heralds and the Prince’s and Queen’s men-in-waiting, William Shakespeare was no doubt to be seen, dressed in a suit of red cloth, which the court accounts show to have been provided for him.
James was a great lover of the play, but Scotland had neither drama nor actors of her own. Not long before this, in 1599; he had vigorously opposed the resolution of his Presbyterian Council to forbid performances by English actors.
As early as May 17, 1603, he had granted the patent Pro Laurentio Fletcher et Willielmo Shakespeare et aliis, which promoted the Lord Chamberlain’s company to be the King’s own actors.
The fact that Lawrence Fletcher is named first gives us a clue to the reasons for this proceeding on the part of the King. In the records of the Town Council of Aberdeen for October 1601, there is an entry to the effect that, by special recommendation of the King, a gratuity was paid to a company of players for their performances in the town, and that the freedom of the city was conferred on one of these actors, Lawrence Fletcher. There can be hardly any doubt that Charles Knight, in spite of Elze’s objections in his Essays on Shakespeare, is correct in his opinion that this Fletcher was an Englishman, and that he was closely connected with Shakespeare; for the actor Augustine Philipps, who, in 1605, bequeaths thirty shillings in gold to his “fellowe” William Shakespeare, likewise bequeaths twenty shillings to his “fellowe” Lawrence Fletcher.
James arrived in London on the 7th of May 1603, removed to Greenwich on account of the plague on the 13th, and, as already mentioned, dated the patent from there on the 17th. It can scarcely be supposed that, in so short a space of time, the Lord Chamberlain’s men should not only have played before James, but so powerfully impressed him that he at once advanced them to be his own company. He must evidently have known them before; perhaps he already, as King of Scotland, had some of them in his service. This supposition is supported by the fact that, as we have seen, some members of Shakespeare’s company were in Aberdeen in the autumn of 1601. It is even probable that Shakespeare himself was in Scotland with his comrades. In Macbeth, he has altered the meadow-land, which Holinshed represents as lying around Inverness, into the heath which is really characteristic of the district; and the whole play, with its numerous allusions to Scottish affairs, bears the impress of having been conceived on Scottish soil. Possibly Shakespeare’s thoughts were hovering round the Scottish tragedy while he passed along in the procession with the royal arms on his red dress.1
XXII
Macbeth — Macbeth and Hamlet — Difficulties Arising From the State of the Text
Dowden somewhere remarks that if Shakespeare had died at the age of forty, posterity would have said that this was certainly a great loss, but would have found comfort in the thought that Hamlet marked the zenith of his productive power—he could hardly have written another such masterpiece.
And now follow in rapid succession Macbeth, Othello, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, and the rest. Hamlet was not the conclusion of a career; Hamlet was the spring-board from which Shakespeare leaped forth into a whole new world of mystery and awe. Dowden has happily compared the tragic figures that glide one after the other across his field of vision between 1604 and 1610 with the bloody and threatening apparitions that pass before Macbeth in the witches’ cavern.
The natural tendency of his youth had been to see good everywhere. He had even felt, with his King Henry, that “there is some soul of goodness in things evil.” Now, when the misery of life, the problem of evil, presented itself to his inward eye, it was especially the potency of wickedness that impressed him as strange and terrible. We have seen him brooding over it in Hamlet and Measure for Measure. He had of course recognized it before, and represented it on the grandest scale; but in Richard III. the main emphasis is still laid on outward history; Richard is the same man from his first appearance to his last. What now fascinates Shakespeare is to show how the man into whose veins evil has injected some drops of its poison, becomes bloated, gangrened, foredoomed to self-destruction or annihilation, like Macbeth, Othello, Lear. Lady Macbeth’s ambition, Iago’s malice, the daughters’ ingratitude, lead, step by step, to irresistible, ever-increasing calamity.
It is my conviction that Macbeth was the first of these subjects which Shakespeare took in hand. All we know with certainty, indeed, is that the play was acted at the Globe Theatre in 1610. Dr. Simon Forman, in his Booke of Plaies and Notes thereon, gave a detailed account of a performance of it at which he was present on the 20th of April of this year. But in the comedy of The Puritan, dating from 1607, we find an unmistakable allusion to Banquo’s ghost; and the lines in the play itself (iv. I)—
“And some I see
That twofold balls and treble sceptres carry,”
—a reference to the union of England and Scotland, and their conjunction with Ireland under James—would have had little effect unless spoken from the stage shortly after the event. As James was proclaimed King of Great Britain and Ireland on the 20th of October 1604, we may conclude that Macbeth was not produced later than 1604-1605.
At James’s accession a breath of Scottish air blew over England; we feel it in Macbeth. The scene of the tragedy is laid in the country from which the new king came, and most true to nature is the reproduction in this dark drama of Scotland’s forests and heaths and castles, her passions and her poetry.
There is much to indicate that an unbroken train of thought led Shakespeare from Hamlet to Macbeth. The personality of Macbeth is a sort of counterpart to that of Hamlet. The Danish prince’s nature is passionate, but refined and thoughtful. Before the deed of vengeance which is imposed upon him he is restless, self-reproachful, and self-tormenting; but he never betrays the slightest remorse for a murder once committed, though he kills four persons before he stabs the King. The Scottish thane is the rough, blunt soldier, the man of action. He takes little time for deliberation before he strikes; but immediately after the murder he is attacked by hallucinations both of sight and hearing, and is hounded on, wild and vacillating and frenzied, from crime to crime. He stifles his self-reproaches and falls at last, after defending himself with the hopeless fury of the “bear tied to the stake.”
Hamlet says:—
“And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.”
Macbeth, on the contrary, declares (iv. I)—
“From this moment
The very firstlings of my heart shall be
The firstlings of my hand.”
They stand at opposite poles—Hamlet, the dreamer; Macbeth, the captain, “Bellona’s bridegroom.” Hamlet has a superabundance of culture and of intellectual power. His strength is of the kind that wears a mask; he is a master in the art of dissimulation. Macbeth is unsophisticated to the point of clumsiness, betraying himself when he tries to deceive. His wife has to beg him not to show a troubled countenance, but to “sleek o’er his rugged looks.”
Hamlet is the born aristocrat: very proud, keenly alive to his worth, very self-critical—too self-critical to be ambitious in the common acceptation of the word. To Macbeth, on the contrary, a sounding title is honour, and a wreath on the head, a crown on the brow, greatness. When the Witches on the heath, and another witch, his wife in the castle, have held up before his eyes the glory of the crown and the power of the sceptre, he has found his great goal—a tangible prize in this life, for which he is willing to risk his welfare in “the life to come.” Whilst Hamlet, with his hereditary right, hardly gives a thought to the throne of which he has been robbed, Macbeth murders his king, his benefactor, his guest, that he may plunder him and his sons of a chair with a purple canopy.
And yet there is a certain resemblance between Macbeth and Hamlet. One feels that the two tragedies must have been written close upon each other. In his first monologue (i. 7) Macbeth stands hesitating with Hamlet-like misgivings:—
“If it were done, when’t is done, then’t were well
It were done quickly: if the assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch
With his surcease success; that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all here,
But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,—
We’d jump the life to come.—But in these cases
We still have judgment here.”
Hamlet says: Were we sure that there is no future life, we should seek death. Macbeth thinks: Did we not know that judgment would come upon us here, we should care little about the life to come. There is a kinship in these contradictory reflections. But Macbeth is not hindered by his cogitations. He pricks the sides of his intent, as he says, with the spur of ambition, well knowing that it will o’erleap itself and fall. He cannot resist when he is goaded onward by a being superior to himself, a woman.
Like Hamlet, he has imagination, but of a more timorous and visionary cast. It is through no peculiar faculty in Hamlet that he sees his father’s ghost; others had seen it before him and see it with him. Macbeth constantly sees apparitions that no one else sees, and hears voices that are inaudible to others.
When he has resolved on the king’s death he sees a dagger in the air:—
“Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee:—
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling, as to sight? or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?”
Directly after the murder he has an illusion of hearing:—
“Methought I heard a voice cry, ‘Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murder sleep.’”
And, very significantly, Macbeth hears this same voice give him the different titles which are his pride:—
“Still it cried, ‘Sleep no more!’ to all the house:
‘Glamis hath murder’d sleep, and therefore Cawdor
Shall sleep no more, Macbeth shall sleep no more!’”
Yet another parallel shows the kinship between the Danish and the Scottish tragedy. It is in these dramas alone that the dead leave their graves and reappear on the scene of life; in them alone a breath from the spirit-world reaches the atmosphere of the living. There is no trace of the supernatural either in Othello or in King Lear.
No more here than in Hamlet are we to understand by the introduction of supernatural elements that an independently working superhuman power actively interferes in human life; these elements are transparent symbols. Nevertheless the supernatural beings that make their appearance are not to be taken as mere illusions; they are distinctly conceived as having a real existence outside the sphere of hallucination. As in Hamlet, the Ghost is not seen by the prince alone, so in Macbeth it is not only Macbeth himself who sees the Witches; they even appear with their queen, Hecate, when there is no one to see them except the spectators of the play.
It must not be forgotten that this whole spirit—and witchworld meant something quite different to Shakespeare’s contemporaries from what it means to us. We cannot even be absolutely certain that Shakespeare himself did not believe in the possible existence of such beings. Great poets have seldom been consistent in their incredulity—even Holberg believed that he had seen a ghost. But Shakespeare’s own attitude of mind matters less than that of the public for whom he wrote.
In the beginning of the seventeenth century the English people still believed in a great variety of evil spirits, who disturbed the order of nature, produced storms by land and sea, foreboded calamities and death, disseminated plague and famine. They were for the most part pictured as old, wrinkled women, who brewed all kinds of frightful enormities in hellish cauldrons; and when such beldams were thought to have been detected, the law took vengeance on them with fire and sword. In a sermon preached in 1588, Bishop Jewel appealed to Elizabeth to take strong measures against wizards and witches. Some years later, one Mrs. Dyer was accused of witchcraft for no other reason than that toothache had for some nights prevented the Queen from sleeping. In the small town of St. Osees in Essex alone, seventy or eighty witches were burnt. In a book called “The Discoverie of Witchcraft,” published in 1584, Reginald Scott refuted the doctrine of sorcery and magic with wonderful clearness and liberal-mindedness; but his voice was lost in the chorus of the superstitious. King James himself was one of the most prominent champions of superstition. He was present in person at the trial by torture of two hundred witches who were burnt for occasioning the storm which prevented his bride’s crossing to Scotland. Many of them confessed to having ridden through the air on broomsticks or invisible chariots drawn by snails, and admitted that they were able to make themselves invisible—an art of which they, strangely enough, did not avail themselves to escape the law. In 1597 James himself produced in his Dæmonologie a kind of handbook or textbook of witchcraft in all its developments, and in 1598 he caused no fewer than 600 old women to be burnt. In the Parliament of 1604 a bill against sorcery was brought in by the Government and passed.
Shakespeare produced wonderful effects in Hamlet by drawing on this faith in spirits; the apparition on the castle platform is sublime in its way, though the speech of the Ghost is far too long. Now, in Macbeth, with the Witches’ meeting, he strikes the keynote of the drama at the very outset, as surely as with a tuning-fork; and wherever the Witches reappear the same note recurs. But still more admirable, both psychologically and scenically, is the scene in which Macbeth sees Banquo’s ghost sitting in his own seat at the banquet-table. The words run thus:—
“Rosse. Please it your highness
To grace us with your royal company?
Macbeth. The table’s full.
Lennox. Here is a place reserv’d, sir.
Macb. Where?
Len. Here, my good lord. What is’t that moves your highness?
Macb. Which of you have done this?
Lords. What, my good lord?
Macb. Thou canst not say I did it: never shake
Thy gory locks at me.”
The grandeur, depth, and extraordinary dramatic and theatrical effect of this passage are almost unequalled in the history of the drama.
The same may be said of well-nigh the whole outline of this tragedy—from a dramatic and theatrical point of view it is beyond all praise. The Witches on the heath, the scene before the murder of Duncan, the sleep-walking of Lady Macbeth—so potent is the effect of these and other episodes that they are burnt for ever on the spectator’s memory.
No wonder that Macbeth has become in later times Shakespeare’s most popular tragedy—his typical one, appreciated even by those who, except in this instance, have not been able to value him as he deserves. Not one of his other dramas is so simple in composition as this, no other keeps like this to a single plane. There is no desultoriness or halting in the action as in Hamlet, no double action as in King Lear. All is quite simple and according to rule: the snowball is set rolling and becomes the avalanche. And although there are gaps in it on account of the defective text, and although there may here and there be ambiguities—in the character of Lady Macbeth, for instance—yet there is nothing enigmatic, there are no riddles to perplex us. Nothing lies concealed between the lines; all is grand and clear—grandeur and clearness itself.
And yet I confess that this play seems to me one of Shakespeare’s less interesting efforts; not from the artistic, but from the purely human point of view. It is a rich, highly moral melodrama; but only at occasional points in it do I feel the beating of Shakespeare’s heart.
My comparative coolness of feeling towards Macbeth may possibly be due in a considerable degree to the shamefully mutilated form in which this tragedy has been handed down to us. Who knows what it may have been when it came from Shakespeare’s own hand! The text we possess, which was not printed till long after the poet’s death, is clipped, pruned, and compressed for acting purposes. We can feel distinctly where the gaps occur, but that is of no avail.
The abnormal shortness of the play is in itself an indication of what has happened. In spite of its wealth of incident, it is distinctly Shakespeare’s shortest work. There are 3924 lines in Hamlet, 3599 in Richard III., &c., &c., while in Macbeth there are only 1993.
It is plain, moreover, that the structure of the piece has been tampered with. The dialogue between Malcolm and Macduff (iv. 3), which, strictly speaking, must be called superfluous from the dramatic point of view, is so long as to form about an eighth part of the whole tragedy. It may be presumed that the other scenes originally stood in some sort of proportion to this; for there is no other instance in Shakespeare’s work of a similar disproportion.
In certain places omissions are distinctly felt. Lady Macbeth (i. 5) proposes to her husband that he shall murder Duncan. He gives no answer to this. In the next scene the King arrives. In the next again, Macbeth’s deliberations as to whether or not he is to commit the murder are all over, and he is only thinking how it can be done with impunity. When he wavers, and says to his wife, “I dare do all that may become a man; who dares do more is none,” her answer shows how much is wanting here:—
“When you durst do it, then you were a man;
And, to be more than what you were, you would
Be so much more the man. Nor time nor place
Did then adhere, and yet you would make both.”
We spectators or readers know nothing of all this. There has not even been time for the shortest conversation between husband and wife.
Shakespeare took the material for his tragedy from the same source on which he drew for all his English histories—Holinshed’s Chronicle to wit. In this case Holinshed, at no time a trustworthy historian, simply reproduced a passage of Hector Boece’s Scotorum Historiæ. Macdonwald’s rebellion and Sweno’s Viking invasion are fables; Banquo and Fleance, as founders of the race of Stuart, are inventions of the chroniclers. There was a blood-feud between the house of Duncan and the house of Macbeth. Lady Macbeth, whose real name was Gruoch, was the grand-daughter of a king who had been killed by Malcolm II., Duncan’s grandfather. Her first husband had been burnt in his castle with fifty friends. Her only brother was killed by Malcolm’s order. Macbeth’s father also, Finlegh or Finley, had been killed in a contest with Malcolm. Therefore they both had the right to a blood-revenge on Duncan. Nor did Macbeth sin against the laws of hospitality in taking Duncan’s life. He attacked and killed him in the open field. It is further to be observed that by the Scottish laws of succession he had a better right to the throne than Duncan. After having seized the throne he ruled firmly and justly. There is a quite adequate psychological basis for the real facts of the year 1040, though it is much simpler than that underlying the imaginary events of Holinshed’s Chronicle, which form the subject of the tragedy.
Shakespeare on the whole follows Holinshed with great exactitude, but diverges from him in one or two particulars. According to the Chronicle, Banquo was accessory to the murder of Duncan; Shakespeare alters this in order to give King James a progenitor of unblemished reputation. Instead of using the account of the murder which is given in the Chronicle, Shakespeare takes and applies to Duncan’s case all the particulars of the murder of King Duffe, Lady Macbeth’s grandfather, as committed by the captain of the castle of Forres, who “being the more kindled in wrath by the words of his wife, determined to follow her advice in the execution of so heinous an act.” It is hardly necessary to remark that the finest parts of the drama, such as the appearance of Banquo’s ghost and Lady Macbeth’s sleep-walking scene, are due to Shakespeare alone.
Some sensation was made in the year 1778 by the discovery of the manuscript of The Witch, a play by Shakespeare’s contemporary Middleton, containing in their entirety two songs which are only indicated in Macbeth by the quotation of their first lines. These are “Come away, come away” (iii. 5), and “Black spirits, &c.” (iv. I). A very idle dispute arose as to whether Shakespeare had here made use of Middleton or Middleton of Shakespeare. The latter is certainly the more probable assumption, if we must assume either to have borrowed from the other. It is likely enough, however, that single lines of the lesser poet have here and there been interpolated in the witch scenes of Shakespeare’s text as contained in the Folio edition.
Shakespeare has employed in the treatment of this subject a style that suits it—vehement to violence, compressed to congestion—figures treading upon each other’s heels, while general philosophic reflections occur but rarely. It is a style eminently fitted to express and to awaken terror; its tone is not altered, but only softened, even in the painfully touching conversation between Lady Macduff and her little son. It is sustained throughout with only one break—the excellent burlesque monologue of the Porter.
The play centres entirely round the two chief characters, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth; in their minds the essential action takes place. The other personages are only outlined.
The Witches’ song, with which the tragedy opens, ends with that admirable line, in which ugliness and beauty are confounded:—
“Fair is foul, and foul is fair.”
And it is significant that Macbeth, who has not heard this refrain, recalls it in his very first speech:—
“So foul and fair a day I have not seen.”
It seems as if these words were ringing in his ears; and this foreshadows the mysterious bond between him and the Witches. Many of these delicate consonances and contrasts may be noted in the speeches of this tragedy.
After Lady Macbeth, who is introduced to the spectator already perfected in wickedness, has said to herself (i. 5)—
“The raven himself is hoarse,
That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan
Under my battlements,”
the next scene opens serenely with the charming pictures of the following dialogue:—
“Duncan. This castle hath a pleasant seat; the air
Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself
Unto our gentle senses.
Banquo. This guest of summer,
The temple-haunting martlet, does approve,
By his lov’d mansionry, that the heaven’s breath
Smells wooingly here: no jutty, frieze,
Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird
Hath made his pendent bed and procreant cradle:
Where they most breed and haunt, I have observ’d
The air is delicate.”
Then the poet immediately plunges anew into the study of this lean, slight, hard woman, consumed by lust of power and splendor. Though by no means the impassive murderess she fain would be, she yet goads her husband, by the force of her far stronger will, to commit the crime which she declares he has promised her:—
“I have given suck, and know
How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck’d my nipple from its boneless gums.
And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to this.”
So coarsely callous is she! And yet she is less hardened than she would make herself out to be; for when, just after this, she has laid the daggers ready for her husband, she says:—
“Had he not resembled
My father as he slept, I had done’t.”
The absolutely masterly, thrilling scene between husband and wife after the murder, is followed, in horrible, humoristic contrast, by the fantastic interlude of the Porter. He conceives himself to be keeping watch at hell-gate, and admitting, amongst others, an equivocating Jesuit, with his casuistry and reservatio mentalis; and his soliloquy is followed by a dialogue with Macduff on the influence of drink upon erotic inclination and capacity. It is well known that Schiller, in accordance with classical prejudices, omitted the monologue in his translation, and replaced it by a pious morning-song. What seems more remarkable is that an English poet like Coleridge should have found its effect disturbing and considered it spurious. Without exactly ranking with Shakespeare’s best low-comedy interludes, it affords a highly effective contrast to what goes before and what follows, and is really an invaluable and indispensable ingredient in the tragedy. A short break in the action was required at this point, to give Macbeth and his wife time to dress themselves in their nightclothes; and what interruption could be more effective than the knocking at the castle gate, which makes them both thrill with terror, and gives occasion to the Porter episode?
Another of the gems of the play is the scene (iv. 2) between Lady Macduff and her wise little son, before the murderers come and kill them both. All the witty child’s sayings are interesting, and the mother’s bitterly pessimistic speeches are not only wonderfully characteristic of her, but also of the poet’s own present frame of mind:—
“Whither should I fly?
I have done no harm. But I remember now
I am in this earthly world, where, to do harm,
Is often laudable; to do good, sometime,
Accounted dangerous folly: why then, alas!
Do I put up that womanly defence,
To say I have done no harm?”
Equally despairing is Macduff’s ejaculation when he learns of the slaughter in his home: “Did heaven look on, and would not take their part?” The beginning of this lengthy scene (iv. 3), with its endless dialogue between Malcolm and Macduff, which Shakespeare has transcribed literally from his Holinshed, is weak and flagging. It presents hardly any point of interest except the far-fetched account of King Edward the Confessor’s power of curing the king’s evil, evidently dragged in for the sake of paying King James a compliment which the poet knew he would value, in the lines—
“’Tis spoken,
To the succeeding royalty he leaves
The healing benediction.”
But the close of the scene is admirable, when Rosse breaks the news to Macduff of the attack on his castle and the massacre of his family:—
“Macd. My children too?
Rosse. Wife, children, servants, all
That could be found.
Macd. And I must be from thence!
My wife kill’d too?
Rosse I have said.
Mal. Be comforted:
Let’s make us medicines of our great revenge,
To cure this deadly grief.
Macd. He has no children.—All my pretty ones?
Did you say, all?—O hell-kite!—All?
What, all my pretty chickens, and their dam,
At one fell swoop?
Mai. Dispute it like a man.
Macd. I shall do so;
But I must also feel it as a man:
I cannot but remember such things were,
That were most precious to me.—Did Heaven look on,
And would not take their part?”
The voice of revolt makes itself heard in these words, the same voice that sounds later through the despairing philosophy of King Lear: “As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods: They kill us for their sport.” But immediately afterwards Macduff falls back on the traditional sentiment:—
“Sinful Macduff!
They are all struck for thee. Naught that I am,
Not for their own demerits, but for mine,
Fell slaughter on their souls.”
Among these horror-stricken speeches there is one in particular that gives matter for reflection—Macduff’s cry, “He has no children.” At the close of the third part of Henry VI. there is a similar exclamation of quite different import. There, when King Edward, Gloucester, and Clarence have stabbed Margaret of Anjou’s son before her eyes, she says:—
“You have no children, butchers! if you had,
The thought of them would have stirr’d up remorse.”
Many interpreters have attributed the same sense to Macduff’s cry of agony; but their mistake is plain; for the context undeniably shows that the one thought of the now childless father is the impossibility of an adequate revenge.
But there is another noticeable point about this speech, “He has no children,” which is, that elsewhere we are led to believe that he has children. Lady Macbeth says, “I have given suck, and know how tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me;” and we have neither learned that these children are dead nor that they were born of an earlier marriage. Shakespeare never mentions the former marriage of the historical Lady Macbeth. Furthermore, not only does she talk of children, but Macbeth himself seems to allude to sons. He says (iii. I):—
“Upon my head they plac’d a fruitless crown,
And put a barren sceptre in my gripe,
Thence to be wrench’d with an unlineal hand,
No son of mine succeeding. If’t be so,
For Banquo’s issue have I filed my mind.”
If he had no children of his own, the last line is meaningless. Had Shakespeare forgotten these earlier speeches when he wrote that ejaculation of Macduff’s? It is improbable; and, in any case, they must have been constantly brought to his mind again at rehearsals and performances of the play. We have here one of the difficulties which would be solved if we were in possession of a complete and authentic text.
The crown which the Witches promised to Macbeth soon becomes his fixed idea. He murders his king—and sleep. He slays, and sees the slain for ever before him. All that stand between him and his ambition are cut down, and afterwards raise their bloody heads as bodeful visions on his path. He turns Scotland into one great charnel-house. His mind is “full of scorpions;” he is sick with the smell of all the blood he has shed. At last life and death become indifferent to him. When, on the day of battle, the tidings of his wife’s death are brought to him, he speaks those profound words in which Shakespeare has embodied a whole melancholy life-philosophy:—
“She should have died hereafter:
There would have been a time for such a word.—
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
This is the final result arrived at by Macbeth, the man who staked all to win power and glory. Without any underlining on the part of the poet, a speech like this embodies an absolute moral lesson. We feel its value all the more strongly, as Shakespeare’s study of humanity in other parts of this play does not seem to have been totally unbiassed, but rather influenced by the moral impression which he desired to produce on the audience. The drama is even a little marred by the constant insistence on the fabula docet, the recurrent insinuation that “such is the consequence of grasping at power by the aid of crime.” Macbeth, not by nature a bad man, might in the drama, as in real life, have tried to reconcile the people to that crime, which, after all, he had reluctantly committed, by making use of his power to rule well. The moral purport of the play excludes this possibility. The ice-cold, stony Lady Macbeth might be conceived as taking the consequences of her counsel and action as calmly as the high-born Locustas of the Renaissance, Catherine de’ Medici, or the Countess of Somerset. But in this case we should have missed the moral lesson conveyed by her ruin, and, what would have been worse, the incomparable sleep-walking scene, which—whether it be perfectly motived or not—shows us in the most admirable manner how the sting of an evil conscience, even though it may be blunted by day, is sharpened again at night, and robs the guilty one of sleep and health.
In dealing with the plays immediately preceding Macbeth, we observed that Shakespeare at this period frequently gives a formal exposition of the moral to be drawn from his scenes. Possibly there is some connection between this tendency of his and the steadily-growing animosity of public opinion to the stage. In the year 1606, an edict was issued absolutely prohibiting the utterance of the name of God on the profane boards of the theatre. Not even a harmless oath was to be permitted. In view of the state of feeling which produced such an Act of Parliament, it must have been of vital importance to the tragic poet to prove as clearly as possible the strictly moral character of his works.
XXIII
Othello — The Character and Significance of Iago
When we consider how Macbeth explains life’s tragedy as the result of a union of brutality and malignity, or rather of brutality envenomed by malignity, we feel that the step from this to Othello is not a long one. But in Macbeth the treatment of life’s tragedy as a whole, of wickedness as a factor in human affairs, lacks firmness, and is not in the great style.
In a very much grander and firmer style do we find the same subject treated in Othello.
Othello is, in the popular conception, simply the tragedy of jealousy, as Macbeth is simply the tragedy of ambition. Naïve readers and critics fancy in their innocence that Shakespeare, at a certain period of his life, determined to study one or two interesting and dangerous passions, and to put us on our guard against them. Following out this intention, he wrote a play on ambition and its dangers, and another of the same kind on jealousy and all the evils that attend it. But that is not how things happen in the inner life of a creative spirit. A poet does not write exercises on a given subject. His activity is not the result of determination or choice. A nerve in him is touched, vibrates, and reacts.
What Shakespeare here attempts to realise is neither jealousy nor credulity, but simply and solely the tragedy of life; whence does it arise? what are its causes? what its laws?
He was deeply impressed with the power and significance of evil. Othello is much less a study of jealousy than a new and more powerful study of wickedness in its might. The umbilical cord that connects the master with his work leads, not to the character of Othello, but to that of Iago.
Simple-minded critics have been of opinion that Shakespeare constructed Iago on the lines of the historic Richard III.—that is to say, found him in literature, in the pages of a chronicler.
Believe me, Shakespeare met Iago in his own life, saw portions and aspects of him on every hand throughout his manhood, encountered him piecemeal, as it were, on his daily path, till one fine day, when he thoroughly felt and understood what malignant cleverness and baseness can effect, he melted down all these fragments, and out of them cast this figure.
Iago—there is more of the grand manner in this figure than in the whole of Macbeth. Iago—there is more depth, more penetrating knowledge of human nature in this one character than in the whole of Macbeth. Iago is the very embodiment of the grand manner.
He is not the principle of evil, not an old-fashioned, stupid devil; nor a Miltonic devil, who loves independence and has invented firearms; nor a Goethe’s Mephistopheles, who talks cynicism, makes himself indispensable, and is generally in the right. Neither has he the magnificently foolhardy wickedness of a Cæsar Borgia, who lives his life in open defiance and reckless atrocity.
Iago has no other aim than his own advantage. It is the circumstance that not he, but Cassio, has been appointed second in command to Othello, which first sets his craft to work on subtle combinations. He coveted this post, and he will stick at nothing in order to win it. In the meantime, he takes advantage of every opportunity of profit that offers itself; he does not hesitate to fool Roderigo out of his money and his jewels. He is always masked in falsehood and hypocrisy; and the mask he has chosen is the most impenetrable one, that of rough outspokenness, the straightforward, honest bluntness of the soldier who does not care what others think or say of him. He never flatters Othello or Desdemona, or even Roderigo. He is the free-spoken, honest friend.
He does not seek his own advantage without side-glances at others. He is mischievousness personified. He does evil for the pleasure of hurting, and takes active delight in the adversity and anguish of others. He is that eternal envy which merit or success in others never fails to irritate—not the petty envy which is content with coveting another’s honours or possessions, or with holding itself more deserving of another’s good fortune. No; he is an ideal personification. He is blear-eyed rancour itself, figuring as a great power—nay, as the motive force—in human life. He embodies the detestation for others’ excellences which shows itself in obstinate disbelief, suspicion, or contempt; the instinct of hatred for all that is open, beautiful, bright, good, and great.
Shakespeare not only knew that such wickedness exists; he seized it and set his stamp on it, to his eternal honour as a psychologist.
Every one has heard it said that this tragedy is magnificent in so far as the true and beautiful characters of Othello and Desdemona are concerned; but Iago—who knows him?—what motive underlies his conduct?—what can explain such wickedness? If only he had even been frankly in love with Desdemona and therefore hated Othello, or had had some other incentive of a like nature!
Yes, if he had been the ordinary amorous villain and slanderer, everything would undoubtedly have been much simpler; but, at the same time, everything would have sunk into banality, and Shakespeare would here have been unequal to himself.
No, no! precisely in this lack of apparent motive lies the profundity and greatness of the thing. Shakespeare understood this. Iago in his monologues is incessantly giving himself reasons for his hatred. Elsewhere, in reading Shakespeare’s monologues, we learn what the person really is; he reveals himself directly to us; even a villain like Richard III. is quite honest in his monologues. Not so Iago. This demi-devil is always trying to give himself reason for his malignity, is always half fooling himself by dwelling on half motives, in which he partly believes, but disbelieves in the main. Coleridge has aptly designated this action of his mind: “The motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity.” Again and again he expounds to himself that he believes Othello has been too familiar with his wife, and that he will avenge the dishonour. He now and then adds, to account for his hatred of Cassio, that he suspects him too of tampering with Emilia.1 He even thinks it worth while to allege, as a secondary motive, that he himself is enamoured of Desdemona. His words are (ii. I):—
“Now, I do love her too;
Not out of absolute lust, (though, peradventure,
I stand accountant for as great a sin,)
But partly led to diet my revenge,
For that I do suspect the lusty Moor
Hath leap’d into my seat.”
These are half-sincere attempts at self-understanding, sophistical self-justifications. Yellow-green, venomous envy has always a motive in its own eyes, and tries to make its malignity towards the better man pass muster as a desire for righteous vengeance. But Iago, who, a few lines before, has himself said of Othello that he is “of a constant, loving, noble nature,” is a thousand times too clever to believe that he has been wronged by him. The Moor is, to his eyes, transparent as glass.
An ordinary human capacity for love or hatred springing from a definite cause would degrade and detract from Iago’s supremacy in evil. In the end, he is sentenced to torture, because he will not vouchsafe a word of explanation or enlightenment. Hard and, in his way, proud as he is, he will certainly keep his lips tightly closed under the torture; but even if he wanted to speak, it would not be in his power to give any real explanation. He has slowly, steadily poisoned Othello’s nature. We watch the working of the venom on the simple-hearted man, and we see how the very success of the poisoning process brutalises and intoxicates Iago more and more. But to ask whence the poison came into Iago’s soul would be a foolish question, and one to which he himself could give no answer. The serpent is poisonous by nature; it gives forth poison as the silkworm does its thread and the violet its fragrance.
Towards the close of the tragedy (iv. 2) there occurs one of its profoundest passages, which shows us how Shakespeare must have dwelt upon and studied the potency of evil during these years. After Emilia has witnessed the breaking out of Othello’s mad rage against Desdemona, she says—
“Emil. I will be hang’d, if some eternal villain,
Some busy and insinuating rogue,
Some cogging, cozening slave, to get some office,
Have not devis’d this slander; I’ll be hang’d else.
Iago. Fie! there is no such man: it is impossible.
Des. If any such there be, Heaven pardon him!
Emil. A halter pardon him, and hell gnaw his bones!”
All three characters stand out in clear relief in these short speeches. But Iago’s is the most significant. His “Fie! there is no such man; it is impossible,” expresses the thought under shelter of which he has lived and is living: other people do not believe that such a being exists.
Here we meet once more in Shakespeare the astonishment of Hamlet at the paradox of evil, and once more, too, the indirect appeal to the reader which formed the burden, as it were, of Hamlet and Measure for Measure, the now thrice-repeated, “Say not, think not, that this is impossible!” The belief in the impossibility of utter turpitude is the very condition of existence of such a king as Claudius, such a magistrate as Angelo, such an officer as Iago. Hence Shakespeare’s “Verily I say unto you, this highest degree of wickedness is possible in the world.”
It is one of the two factors in life’s tragedy. Stupidity is the other. On these two foundations rests the great mass of all this world’s misery.
XXIV
Othello — The Theme and Its Treatment — A Monograph in the Great Style
A manuscript preserved in the Record Office, of doubtful date, but probably copied from an authentic document, contains the following entry:—
The plaiers 1605 The Poets wchBy the Kings Hallamas Day being the mayd the plaies
Maties plaiers First of November A play in the Banketing house Shaxberd.
Att withal called the
Moore of Venis
Thus Othello was probably produced in the autumn of 1605. After this we have no proof of its performance till four and a half years later, when we hear of it again in the journal of Prince Ludwig Friedrich of Würtemberg, written by his secretary, Hans Wurmsser. The entry for the 30th of April 1610 runs thus:—
“Lundi, 30. S. E[minence] alla au Globe, lieu ordinaire ou l’on Joue les Commedies, y fut representé l’histoire du More de Venise.”
In face of these data it matters nothing that there should appear in Othello, as we have it, a line that must have been written in or after 1611. The tragedy was printed for the first time in a quarto edition in 1622, for the second time in the Folio of 1623. The Folio text contains an additional 160 lines (proving that another manuscript has been made use of), and all oaths and mentions of the name of God are omitted. It is not only possible, but certain, that this line must have been a late interpolation. Its entire discordance with its position in the play shows this clearly enough, and seems to me to render it doubtful whether it is by Shakespeare at all.
In the scene where Othello bids Desdemona give him her hand, and loses himself in reflections upon it (iii. 4), he makes this speech:—
“A liberal hand: the hearts of old gave hands;
But our new heraldry is hands, not hearts.”
Here there is an allusion, which could only be understood by contemporaries, to the title of Baronet, created and sold by James, which gave its possessors the right of bearing in their coat-of-arms a bloody hand on a field argent. Most naturally Desdemona replies to this irrelevant remark: “I cannot speak of this.”
In Cinthio’s Italian collection of tales, where he had found the plot of Measure for Measure, Shakespeare at the same time (in Decade 3, Novella 7) came upon the material for Othello. The story in the Hecatommithi runs as follows: A young Venetian lady named Disdemona falls in love with a Moor, a military commander—“not from feminine desire,” but because of his great qualities—and marries him in spite of the opposition of her relatives. They live in Venice in complete happiness; “no word ever passed between them that was not loving.” When the Moor is ordered to Cyprus to take command there, his one anxiety is about his wife; he is equally unwilling to expose her to the dangers of the sea voyage and to leave her alone. She settles the question by declaring that she will rather follow him anywhere, into any danger, than live in safety apart from him; whereupon he rapturously kisses her, with the ejaculation: “May God long preserve you so loving, my dearest wife!” Thus the perfect initial harmony between the pair which Shakespeare depicts is suggested by his original.
The Ensign undermines their happiness. He is described as remarkably handsome, but “as wicked by nature as any man that ever lived in the world.” He was dear to the Moor, “who had no idea of his baseness.” For although he was an arrant coward, he managed by means of proud and blusterous talk, aided by his fine appearance, so to conceal his cowardice that he passed for a Hector or Achilles. His wife, whom he had taken with him to Cyprus, was a fair and virtuous young woman, much beloved by Disdemona, who spent the greater part of the day in her company. The Lieutenant (il capo di squadra) came much to the Moor’s house, and often supped with him and his wife.
The wicked Ensign is passionately in love with Disdemona, but all his attempts to win her love are entirely unsuccessful, as she has not a thought for any one but the Moor. The Ensign, however, imagines that the reason for her rejection of him must be that she is in love with the Lieutenant, and therefore determines to rid himself of this rival, while his love for Disdemona is changed into the bitterest hatred. From this time forward, his object is not only to bring about the death of the Lieutenant, but to prevent the Moor from finding the pleasure in Disdemona’s love which is denied to himself. He goes to work as in the drama, though of course with some differences of detail. In the novel, for example, the Ensign steals Disdemona’s handkerchief whilst she is visiting his wife, and playing with their little girl. Disdemona’s death-scene is more horrible in the tale than in the tragedy. By command of the Moor, the Ensign hides himself in a room adjoining Othello’s and Disdemona’s bed-chamber. He makes a noise, and Disdemona rises to see what it is; whereupon the Ensign gives her a violent blow on the head with a stocking filled with sand. She calls to her husband for help, but he answers by accusing her of infidelity; she in vain protests her innocence, and dies at the third blow of the stocking. The murder is concealed, but the Moor now begins to hate his Ensign, and dismisses him. The Ensign is so exasperated by this, that he lets the Lieutenant know who is responsible for the night assault that has just been made upon him. The Lieutenant accuses the Moor before the council, and Othello is put to torture. He refuses to confess, and is sent into banishment. The wicked Ensign, who has brought a false accusation of murder against one of his comrades, is himself in turn accused by the innocent man, and subjected to torture until he dies.
To the characters in the novel, Shakespeare has added two, Brabantio and Roderigo. Only one of the names he uses is found in the original. Disdemona, which seems made to designate the victim of an evil destiny, Shakespeare has changed into the sweeter-sounding Desdemona. The other names are of Shakespeare’s own choosing. Most of them are Italian (Othello itself is a Venetian noble name of the sixteenth century); others, such as Iago and Roderigo, are Spanish.
With his customary adherence to his original, Shakespeare, like Cinthio, calls his protagonist a Moor; but it is quite unreasonable to suppose from this that he thought of him as a negro. It was, of course, inconceivable that a negro should attain the rank of general and admiral in the service of the Venetian Republic; and Iago’s mention of Mauritania as the country to which Othello intends to retire, shows plainly enough that the “Moor” ought to be represented as an Arab. It is no argument against this that men who hate and envy him apply to him epithets that would befit a negro. Thus Roderigo in the first scene of the play calls him “thick-lips,” and Iago, speaking to Brabantio, calls him “an old black ram.” But a little later Iago compares him with “a Barbary horse “—that is to say, an Arab from North Africa. It is always animosity and hate that exaggerate the darkness of his hue, as when Brabantio talks of his “sooty bosom”. That Othello calls himself black only means that he is dark. In this very play Iago says of dark women:
“If she be black, and thereto have a wit,
She’ll find a white that shall her blackness fit.”
And we have seen how, in the Sonnets and in Love’s Labours Lost, “black” is constantly employed in the sense of dark-complexioned. As a Moor, Othello has a complexion sufficiently swarthy to form a striking contrast to the white and even blonde Desdemona, and there is also a sufficiently marked race-contrast between him, as a Semite, and the Aryan girl. It is quite conceivable, too, that a Christianised Moor should reach a high position in the army and fleet of the Republic.
It ought further to be noted that the whole tradition of the Venetian “Moor” has possibly arisen from a confusion of words. Rawdon Browne, in 1875, suggested the theory that Giraldi had founded his tale on the simple misunderstanding of a name. In the history of Venice we read of an eminent patrician, Christoforo Moro byname, who in 1498 was Podesta of Ravenna, and afterwards held similar office in Faenza, Ferrara, and the Romagna; then became Governor of Cyprus; in 1508 commanded fourteen ships; and later still was Proveditore of the army. When this man was returning from Cyprus to Venice in 1508, his wife (the third), who is said to have belonged to the family of Barbarigo (note the resemblance to Brabantio), died on the voyage, and there seems to have been some mystery connected with her death. In 1515 he took as his fourth wife a young girl, who is said to have been nicknamed Demonio bianco—the white demon. From this the name Desdemona may have been derived, in the same way as Moor from Moro.
The additions which Shakespeare made to the story as he found it in Cinthio—Desdemona’s abduction, the hurried and secret marriage, the accusation, to us so strange, but in those days so natural and common, of the girl’s heart having been won by witchcraft—these all occur in the history of Venetian families of the period.
Be this as it may, when Shakespeare proceeds to the treatment of the subject, he arranges all the conditions and circumstances, so that they present the most favourable field for Iago’s operations, and he so fashions Othello as to render him more susceptible than any other man would be to the poison which Iago (like Lucianus in the play-scene in Hamlet) drops into his ear. Then he lets us trace the growth of the passion from its first germ, through every stage of its development, until it blasts and shatters the victim’s whole character.
Othello’s is an inartificial soul, a simple, straightforward, soldier nature. He has no worldly wisdom, for he has lived his whole life in camps:
“And little of this great world can I speak,
More than pertains to feats of broil and battle.”
A good and true man himself, he believes in goodness in others, especially in those who make a show of outspokenness, bluffness, undaunted determination to blame where blame is due—like Iago, who characteristically says of himself to Desdemona:
“For I am nothing if not critical.”
And Othello not only believes in Iago’s honesty, but is inclined to take him for his guide, as being far superior to himself in knowledge of men and of the world.
Again, Othello belongs to the noble natures that are never preoccupied with the thought of their own worth. He is devoid of vanity. He has never said to himself that such exploits, such heroic deeds, as have won him his renown, must make a far deeper impression on the fancy of a young girl of Desdemona’s disposition than the smooth face and pleasant manners of a Cassio. He is so little impressed with the idea of his greatness that it almost at once appears quite natural to him that he should be scorned.
Othello is the man of despised race, with the fiery African temperament. In comparison with Desdemona he is old—more of an age with her father than with herself. He tells himself that he has neither youth nor good looks to keep her love with, not even affinity of race to build upon. Iago exasperates Brabantio by crying:
“Even now, now, very now, an old black ram
Is tupping your white ewe.”
Othello’s race has a reputation for low sensuality, therefore Roderigo can inflame the rage of Desdemona’s father by such expressions as “gross clasps of a lascivious Moor.”
That she should feel attracted by him must have seemed to outsiders like madness or the effect of sorcery. For, far from being of an inviting, forward, or coquettish nature Desdemona is represented as more than ordinarily reserved and modest. Her father calls her (i. 3):
“A maiden never bold;
Of spirit so still and quiet, that her motion
Blush’d at herself.”
She has been brought up as a tenderly-nurtured patrician child in rich, happy Venice. The gilded youth of the city have fluttered around her daily, but she has shown favour to none of them, Therefore, her father says (i. 2):
“For I’ll refer me to all things of sense,
If she in chains of magic were not bound,
Whether a maid so tender, fair, and happy,
So opposite to marriage, that she shunn’d
The wealthy curled darlings of our nation,
Would ever have, to incur a general mock,
Run from her guardage to the sooty bosom
Of such a thing as thou.”
Shakespeare, who knew everything about Italy, knew that the Venetian youth of that period had their hair curled, and wore a lock down on the forehead.
Othello, on his part, at once feels himself strongly drawn to Desdemona. And it is not merely the fair, delicate girl in her that allures him. Had he not loved her, her only, with burning passion, he would never have married her; for he has the fear of marriage that belongs to his wild, freedom-loving nature, and he in no wise considers himself honoured and exalted by this connection with a patrician family. He is descended from the princes of his country (i. 2):
“I fetch my life and being
From men of royal siege;”
And he has shrunk from binding himself:
“But that I love the gentle Desdemona,
I would not my unhoused free condition
Put into circumscription and confine
For the sea’s worth.”
Truly there is magic in it—not the gross and common sorcery which the others believe in and suppose to have been employed— not the “foul charms” and “drugs or minerals that weaken motion,” to which her father alludes—but the sweet, alluring magic by which a man and a woman are mysteriously enchained.
Othello’s speech of self-vindication in the council chamber, in which he explains to the Duke how he came to win Desdemona’s sympathy and tenderness, has been universally admired.
Having gained her father’s favour, he was often asked by him to tell the story of his life, of its dangers and adventures. He told of sufferings and hardships, of hairbreadth ‘scapes from death, of imprisonment by cruel enemies, of far-off strange countries he had journeyed through. (The fantastic catalogue, it may be noted, is taken from the fabulous books of travel of the day.) Desdemona loved to listen, but was often called away by household cares, always returning when these were despatched to follow his story with a greedy ear. He “found means” to draw from her a request to tell her his history, not in fragments, but entire. He consented, and often her eyes were filled with tears when she heard of the distresses of his youth. With innocent candour she bade him at last, if ever he had a friend that loved her, to teach him how to tell her Othello’s story—“and that would woo her.”
In other words, she is not won through the eye, though we must take Othello to have been a stately figure, but through the ear—“I saw Othello’s visage in his mind.” She becomes his through her sympathy with him in all he has suffered and achieved:—
“She lov’d me for the dangers I had pass’d,
And I lov’d her that she did pity them.
This only is the witchcraft I have us’d.
Duke. I think, this tale would win my daughter too.”
Such, then, is the relation in which the poet has decreed that these two shall stand to each other. This is no love between two of the same age and the same race, whom only family enmity keeps apart, as in Romeo and Juliet. Still less is it a union of hearts like that of Brutus and Portia, where the perfect harmony is the result of tenderest friendship in combination with closest kinship, added to the fact that the wife’s father is her husband’s hero and ideal. No, in direct contrast to this last, it is a union which rests on the attraction of opposites, and which has everything against it—difference of race, difference of age, and the strange, exotic aspect of the man, with the lack of self-confidence which it awakens in him.
Iago expounds to Roderigo how impossible it is that this alliance should last. Desdemona fell in love with the Moor because he bragged to her and told her fantastical lies; does any one believe that love can be kept alive by prating? To inflame the blood anew, “sympathy in years, manners, and beauties” is required, “all which the Moor is defective in.”
The Moor himself is at first troubled by none of these reflections. And why not? Because Othello is not jealous.
This sounds paradoxical, yet it is the plain truth. Othello not jealous! It is as though one were to say water is not wet or fire does not burn. But Othello’s is no jealous nature; jealous men and women think very differently and act very differently. He is unsuspicious, confiding, and in so far stupid—there lies the misfortune; but jealous, in the proper sense of the word, he is not. When Iago is preparing to insinuate his calumnies of Desdemona, he begins hypocritically (iii. 3):
“O beware, my lord, of jealousy;
It is the green-eyed monster....”
Othello answers:
“’Tis not to make me jealous,
To say—my wife is fair, feeds well, loves company,
Is free of speech, sings, plays, and dances well;
Where virtue is, these are more virtuous:
Nor from mine own weak merits will I draw
The smallest fear, or doubt of her revolt;
For she had eyes, and chose me.”
Thus not even his exceptional position causes him any uneasiness, so long as things take their natural course. But there is no escaping the steady pursuit of which he, all unwitting, is the object. He becomes as suspicious towards Desdemona as he is credulous towards Iago—“Brave Iago!” “Honest Iago!” Brabantio’s malison recurs to his mind—“She has deceived her father, and may thee;” and close on it crowd Iago’s reasons:
“Haply, for I am black,
And have not those soft parts of conversation
That chamberers have; or, for I am declin’d
Into the vale of years;—yet that’s not much.”
And the torment seizes him of feeling that one human being is a sealed book to the other—that it is impossible to control passion and appetite in a woman, though the law may have given her into one’s hand—until at last he feels as if he were stretched on the rack, and Iago can exult in the thought that not all the drowsy syrups of the world can procure him the untroubled sleep of yesterday. Then follows the mournful farewell to all his previous life, and on this sadness once more follows doubt, and despair at the doubt:—
“I think my wife be honest and think she is not;
I think that thou art just and think thou art not,”
—until all his thoughts are centred in the craving for revenge and blood.
Not naturally jealous, he has become so through the working of the base but devilishly subtle slander which he is too simple to penetrate and spurn.
In these masterly scenes (the third and fourth of the third act) there are more reminiscences of other poets than we find elsewhere in Shakespeare within such narrow compass; and they are of interest as showing us what he knew, and what his mind was dwelling upon in those days.
In Berni’s Orlando Innamorato (Canto 51, Stanza I), we come upon Iago’s declaration:—
“Who steals my purse, steals trash; ’tis something, nothing;
’Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands;
But he that filches from me my good name,
Robs me of that which not enriches him,
And makes me poor indeed.”
The passage in Berni runs thus:—
“Chi ruba un corno, un cavallo, un anello,
E simil cose, ha qualche discrezione,
E potrebbe chiamarsi ladroncello;
Ma quel che ruba la riputazione
E de Paltrui fatiche si fa bello
Si può chiamare assassino e ladrone.”
A reminiscence also lies hidden in Othello’s exquisite farewell to a soldier’s life:—
“O now for ever
Farewell the tranquil mind! farewell content!
Farewell the plumed troops, and the big wars,
That make ambition virtue! O, farewell!
Farewell the neighing steed, and the shrill trump,
The spirit-stirring drum, the ear-piercing fife,
The royal banner, and all quality,
Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war!”
It is clear that there must have lurked in Shakespeare’s mind a reminiscence of an apostrophe contained in the old play, A Pleasant Comedie called Common Conditions, which he must, doubtless, have seen as a youth in Stratford. In it the hero says:—
“But farewell now, my coursers brave, attrapped to the ground.
Farewell, adieu, all pleasures eke, with comely hawk and hound!
Farewell, ye nobles all! Farewell, each martial knight!
Farewell, ye famous ladies all, in whom I did delight!”
The study of Ariosto in Italian has also left its trace. It is where Othello, talking of the handkerchief, says:—
“A sibyl, that had number’d in the world
The sun to course two hundred compasses,
In her prophetic fury sew’d the work.”
In Orlando Furioso (Canto 46, Stanza 80) we read:—
“Una donzella della terra d’Ilia,
Ch’avea il furor profetico congiunto
Con studio di gran tempo, e con vigilia
Lo fece di sua man di tutto punto.”
The agreement here cannot possibly be accidental. And what makes it still more certain that Shakespeare had the Italian text before him is that the words prophetic fury, which are the same in Othello as in the Italian, are not to be found in Harington’s English translation, the only one then in existence. He must thus, whilst writing Othello, have been interested in Orlando, and had Berni’s and Ariosto’s poems lying on his table.
Desdemona’s innocent simplicity in these scenes rivals the boundless and actually tragic simplicity of Othello. In the first place, she is convinced that the Moor, whom she sees wrought up to the verge of madness, cannot possibly suspect her, and is unassailable by jealousy.
“Emilia. Is he not jealous?
Desdemona. Who? he! I think the sun where he was born
Drew all such humours from him.”
So she acts with foolish indiscretion, continuing to tease Othello about Cassio’s reinstatement, although she ought to feel that it is her harping on this topic that enrages him.
Then follow Iago’s still more monstrous lies: the confession he pretends to have heard Cassio make in his sleep; the story that she has presented the precious handkerchief to Cassio; and the pretence that Desdemona is the subject of the words which Othello, from his hiding-place, hears Cassio let fall as to his relations with the courtesan, Bianca. To hear his wife, his beloved, thus derided, stings the Moor to frenzy.
It is such a consistently sustained imposture that there is, perhaps, only one at all comparable to it in history—the intrigue of the diamond necklace, in which Cardinal de Rohan was as utterly duped and ruined as Othello is here.
And now Othello has reached the stage at which he can no longer think coherently, or speak except in ejaculations (iv. I):—
“Iago. Lie with her.
“Othello. With her?
“Iago. With her, on her, what you will.
“Othello. Lie with her! lie on her!—We say, lie on her when they belie her. Lie with her! that’s fulsome.—Handkerchief,—confessions, —handkerchief.—To confess, and be hanged for his labour.—First, to be hanged, and then to confess.... It is not words, that shakes me thus.—Pish!—Noses, ears, and lips.—Is it possible?—Confess!— Handkerchief!—O devil!”
With the mind’s eye he sees them in each other’s arms.1 He is seized with an epileptic fit and falls.
This is not a representation of spontaneous but of artificially induced jealousy; in other words, of credulity poisoned by malignity. Hence the moral which Shakespeare, through the mouth of Iago, bids the audience take home with them:
“Thus credulous fools are caught;
And many worthy and chaste dames even thus,
All guiltless, meet reproach.”
It is not Othello’s jealousy, but his credulity that is the prime cause of the disaster; and even so must Desdemona’s noble simplicity bear its share in the blame. Between them they render possible the complete success of a man like Iago.
When Othello bursts into tears before Desdemona’s eyes, without her suspecting the reason (iv. 2), he says most touchingly that he could have borne affliction and shame, poverty and captivity—could even have endured to be made the butt of mockery and scorn—but that he cannot bear to see her whom he worshipped the object of his own contempt. He does not suffer most from jealousy, but from seeing “the fountain from the which his current runs” a dried-up swamp, or “a cistern for foul toads to knot and gender in.” This is pure, deep sorrow at seeing his idol sullied, not mean frenzy at the idol’s preferring another worshipper.
And with that grace which is an attribute of perfect strength, Shakespeare has introduced as a contrast, directly before the terrible catastrophe, Desdemona’s delicate little ditty of the willowtree—of the maiden who weeps because her lover is untrue to her, but who loves him none the less. Desdemona is deeply touching when she pleads with her cruel lord for but a few moments’ respite, but she is great in the instant of death, when she expires with the sublime lie, the one lie of her life, upon her lips, designed to shield her murderer from his punishment.
Ophelia, Desdemona, Cordelia—what a trefoil! Each has her characteristic features, but they resemble one another like sisters they all present the type which Shakespeare at this point loves and most affects. Had they a model? Had they perhaps one and the same model? Had he about this time encountered a young and charming woman, living, as it were, under a cloud of sorrow, injustice, misunderstanding, who was all heart and tenderness, without any claims to intellect or wit? We may suspect this, but we know nothing of it.
The figure of Desdemona is one of the most charming Shakespeare has drawn. She is more womanly than other women, as the noble Othello is more manly than other men. So that after all there is a very good reason for the attraction between them; the most womanly of women feels herself drawn to the manliest of men.
The subordinate figures are worked out with hardly less skill than the principal characters of the tragedy. Emilia especially is inimitable—good-hearted, honest, and not exactly light, but still sufficiently the daughter of Eve to be unable to understand Desdemona’s naïve and innocent chastity.
At the end of Act iv. (in the bedroom scene) Desdemona asks Emilia if she believes that there really are women who do what Othello accuses her of. Emilia answers in the affirmative. Then her mistress asks again: “Would’st thou do such a deed for all the world?” and receives the jesting answer, “The world is a huge thing; ’tis a great price for a small vice:
“Marry, I would not do such a thing for a joint-ring, nor for measures of lawn, nor for gowns, petticoats, nor caps, nor any petty exhibition; but, for the whole world!... Why, the wrong is but a wrong i’ the world; and, having the world for your labour, ’tis a wrong in your own world, and you might quickly make it right.”
In passages like this a mildly playful note is struck in the very midst of the horror. And according to his habit and the custom of the times, Shakespeare also introduces, by means of the Clown, one or two deliberately comic passages; but the Clown’s merriment is subdued, as Shakespeare’s merriment at this period always is.
The composition of Othello is closely akin to that of Macbeth. In these two tragedies alone there are no episodes; the action moves onward uninterrupted and undissipated. But the beautiful proportion of all its parts and articulations gives Othello the advantage over the mutilated Macbeth which we possess. Here the crescendo of the tragedy is executed with absolute maestria; the passion rises with a positively musical effect; Iago’s devilish plan is realised step by step with consummate certainty; all details are knit together into one firm and well-nigh inextricable knot; and the carelessness with which Shakespeare has treated the necessary lapse of time between the different stages of the action, has, by compressing the events of months and years into a few days, heightened the effect of strict and firm cohesion which the play produces.
There are some inaccuracies in the text as we have it. At the close of the play there is a passage, to account for which we must almost assume that part of a vitiated text, adapted to some special performance, has been interpolated. In the full rush of the catastrophe, when only Othello’s last speeches are wanting, Lodovico volunteers some information as to what has happened, which is not only superfluous for the spectator, but quite out of the general style and tone of the play:
“Lodovico. Sir, you shall understand what hath befall’n,
Which, as I think, you know not. Here is a letter,
Found in the pocket of the slain Roderigo;
And here another: the one of them imports
The death of Cassio to be undertook
By Roderigo.
Othello. O villain!
Cassio. Most heathenish and most gross!
Lod. Now, here’s another discontented paper,
Found in his pocket too,” &c., &c.
These speeches, and yet a third, are all aimed at making Othello understand how shamefully he has been deceived; but they are nerveless and feeble and detract from the effect of the scene. This passage ought to be expunged; it is not Shakespeare’s, and it forms a little stain on his flawless work of art.
For flawless it is. I not only find several of Shakespeare’s greatest qualities united in this work, but I see hardly a fault in it.
It is the only one of Shakespeare’s tragedies which does not treat of national events, but is a family tragedy,—what was later known as tragédie domestique or bourgeoise. But the treatment is anything but bourgeois; the style is of the very grandest. One gets the best idea of the distance between it and the tragédie bourgeoise of later times on comparing with it Schiller’s Kabale und Liebe, which is in many ways an imitation of Othello.
We see here a great man who is at the same time a great child; a noble though impetuous nature, as unsuspicious as it is unworldly. We see a young woman, all gentleness and nobility of heart, who lives only for him she has chosen, and who dies with solicitude for her murderer on her lips. And we see these two elect natures ruined by the simplicity which makes them an easy prey to wickedness.
A great work Othello undoubtedly is, but it is a monograph. It lacks the breadth which Shakespeare’s plays as a rule possess. It is a sharply limited study of a single and very special form of passion, the growth of suspicion in the mind of a lover with African blood and temperament—a great example of the power of wickedness over unsuspecting nobility. Taken all in all, this is a restricted subject, which becomes monumental only by the grandeur of its treatment.
No other drama of Shakespeare’s had been so much of a monograph. He assuredly felt this, and with the impulse of the great artist to make his new work a complement and contrast to the immediately preceding one, he now sought and found the subject for that one of his tragedies which is least of all a monograph, which grew into nothing less than the universal tragedy—all the great woes of human life concentrated in one mighty symbol.
He turned from Othello to Lear.
XXV
King Lear — The Feeling Underlying It — The Chronicle — Sidney’s Arcadia and the Old Play
In King Lear, Shakespeare’s vision sounded the abyss of horror to its very depths, and his spirit showed neither fear, nor giddiness, nor faintness at the sight.
On the threshold of this work, a feeling of awe comes over one, as on the threshold of the Sistine Chapel, with its ceiling-frescoes by Michael Angelo—only that the suffering here is far more intense, the wail wilder, the harmonies of beauty more definitely shattered by the discords of despair.
Othello was a noble piece of chamber-music—simple and easily apprehended, powerfully affecting though it be. This work, on the other hand, is the symphony of an enormous orchestra—all earth’s instruments sound in it, and every instrument has many stops.
King Lear is the greatest task Shakespeare ever set himself, the most extensive and the most imposing;—all the suffering and horror that can arise from the relation between a father and his children expressed in five acts of moderate length.
No modern mind has dared to face such a subject; nor could any one have grappled with it. Shakespeare did so without even a trace of effort, by virtue of the overpowering mastery which he now, in the meridian of his genius, had attained over the whole of human life. He handles his theme with the easy vigour that belongs to spiritual health, though we have here scene upon scene of such intense pathos that we seem to hear the sobs of suffering humanity accompanying the action, much as one hears by the sea-shore the steady plash and sob of the waves.
Under what conditions did Shakespeare take hold of this subject? The drama tells plainly enough. He stood at the turning-point of human life; he had lived about forty-two years; ten years of life still lay before him, but of these certainly not more than seven were intellectually productive. He now brought that which makes life worse than death face to face with that which makes life worth living—the very breath of our lungs and Cordelia-like solace of our suffering—and swept them both forward to a catastrophe that appals us like the ruin of a world.
In what frame of mind did Shakespeare set himself to this work? What was seething in his brain, what was moaning in his breast, at the time he chanced upon this subject? The drama tells plainly enough. Of all the different forms of cruelty, coarseness, and baseness with which life had brought him into contact, of all the vices and infamies that embitter the existence of the nobler sort of men, one vice now seemed to him the worst—stood out before him as the most abominable and revolting of all—one of which he himself, no doubt, had again and again been the victim—to wit, ingratitude. He saw no baseness more widespread or more indulgently regarded.
Who can doubt that he, immoderately enriched by nature, he whose very existence was, like that of Shelley’s cloud, a constant giving, an eternal beneficence, a perpetual bringing of “fresh showers to the thirsting flowers”—who can doubt that such a giver on the grandest scale must again and again have been rewarded with the blackest ingratitude? We see, for instance, how Hamlet, so far his greatest work, was received with instant attack, with what Swinburne has aptly called “the jeers, howls, hoots and hisses of which a careful ear may catch some far, faint echo even yet—the fearful and furtive yelp from beneath of the masked and writhing poeticule.”1 His life passed in the theatre. We can very well guess, where we do not know, how comrades to whom he gave example and assistance; stage poets, who envied while they admired him; actors whom he trained and who found in him a spiritual father; the older men whom he aided, the young men whom he befriended—how all these would now fall away from him, now fall upon him; and each new instance of ingratitude was a shock to his spiritual life. For years he kept silence, suppressed his indignation, locked it up in his own breast. But he hated and despised ingratitude above all vices, because it at once impoverished and belittled his soul.
His was certainly not one of those artist natures that are free-handed with money when they have it, and confer benefits with good-natured carelessness. He was a competent, energetic business man, who spared and saved in order to gain an independence and restore the fallen fortunes of his family. But none the less he was evidently a good comrade in practical, a benefactor in intellectual, life. And he felt that ingratitude impoverished and degraded him, by making it hard for him to be helpful again, and to give forth with both hands out of the royal treasure of his nature, when he had been disappointed and deceived so often, even by those for whom he had done most and in whom he believed most. He felt that if there were any baseness which could drive its victim to despair, to madness, it was the vice of black ingratitude.
In such a frame of mind he finds, one day, when he is as usual turning over the leaves of his Holinshed, the story of King Lear, the great giver. In the same temper he reads the old play on the subject, dating from 1593-4, and entitled Chronicle History of King Leir. Here he found what he needed, the half-worked clay out of which he could model figures and groups. Here, in this superficially dramatised chronicle of appalling ingratitude, was the very theme for him to develop. So he took it to his heart and brooded over it till it quickened and came to life.
We can determine without difficulty the period during which Shakespeare was working at King Lear. Were it not clear from other reasons that the play cannot have been written before 1603, we should know it from the fact that in this year was published Harsnet’s Declaration of Popish Impostures, from which he took the names of some of the fiends mentioned by Edgar (iii. 4). And it cannot have been produced later than 1606, for on the 26th December of that year it was acted before King James. This we know from its being entered in the Stationers’ Register on the 26th of November 1607, with the addition “as yt was played before the kinges maiestie at Whitehall vppon Sainct Stephens night at Christmas last.” But we can get still nearer than this to the time of its composition. When Gloucester (i. 2) speaks of “these late eclipses,” he is doubtless alluding to the eclipse of the sun in October 1605. And the immediately following remarks about “machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all ruinous disorders” prevailing at the time, refer in all probability to the great Gunpowder Plot of November 1605.
Thus it was towards the end of 1605 that Shakespeare began to work at King Lear.
The story was old and well known. It was told for the first time in Latin by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his Historia Britonum, for the first time in English by Layamon in his Brut about 1205. It came originally from Wales and bears a distinctly Celtic impress, which Shakespeare, with his fine feeling for all national peculiarities, has succeeded in retaining and intensifying.
He found all the main features of the story in Holinshed. According to this authority, Leir, son of Baldud, rules in Britain “at what time Joash reigned as yet in Juda.” His three daughters are named Gonorilla, Regan, and Cordeilla. He asks them how great is their love for him, and they answer as in the tragedy. Cordeilla, repudiated and disinherited, marries one of the princes of Gaul. When the two elder daughters have shamefully ill-treated Leir, he flees to Cordeilla. She and her husband raise an army, sail to England, defeat the armies of the two sisters, and reinstate Leir on his throne. He reigns for two more years; then Cordeilla succeeds to the throne—and this happens “in the yeere of the world 3155, before the bylding of Rome 54, Uzia then reigning in Juda and Jeroboam over Israell.” She rules the kingdom for five years. Then her husband dies, and her sisters’ sons rise in rebellion against her, lay waste a great part of the country, take her prisoner, and keep her strictly guarded. This so enrages Cordeilla, who is of a masculine spirit, that she takes her own life.
The material Shakespeare found in this tradition did not suffice him. The thoughts and imaginings which the story set astir within him led him to seek for a supplement to the action in the tale of Gloucester and his sons, which he took from Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, a book not yet twenty years old. With the story of the great giver, who is recompensed with ingratitude by his wicked daughters after he has banished his good daughter, he entwined the story of the righteous duke, who, deceived by slander, repudiates his good son, and is hurled by the bad one into the depths of misery, until at last his eyes are torn out of his head.
According to Sidney, some princes are overtaken by a storm in the kingdom of Galacia. They take refuge in a cave, where they find an old blind man and a youth, whom the old man in vain entreats to lead him to the top of a rock, from which he may throw himself down, and thus put an end to his life. The old man had formerly been Prince of Paphlagonia, but the “hard-hearted ungratefulness” of his illegitimate son had deprived him not only of his kingdom but of his eyesight. This bastard had previously had a fatal influence over his father. By his permission the Prince had given orders to his servants to take his legitimate son out into a wood and there kill him. The young man, however, escaped, went into foreign military service, and distinguished himself; but when he heard of the evils that had befallen his father, he hastened back to be a support to his hapless age, and is now heaping coals of fire upon his head. The old man begs the foreign princes to make his story known, that it may bring honour to the pious son,—the only reward he can expect.
The old drama of King Leir had kept strictly to Holinshed’s chronicle. It is instructive reading for any one who is trying to mete out the compass of Shakespeare’s genius. A childish work, in which the rough outlines of the principal action, as we know them from Shakespeare, are superficially reproduced, it compares with Shakespeare’s tragedy as the melody of Schiller’s “An die Freude,” played with one finger, compares with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. And even this comparison does rather too much honour to the old drama, in which the melody is barely suggested.
XXVI
King Lear — The Tragedy of a World-Catastrophe
I imagine that Shakespeare must, as a rule, have worked early in the morning. The division of the day at that time would necessitate this. But it can scarcely have been in bright morning hours, scarcely in the daytime, that he conceived King Lear. No; it must have been on a night of storm and terror, one of those nights when a man, sitting at his desk at home, thinks of the wretches who are wandering in houseless poverty through the darkness, the blustering wind, and the soaking rain—when the rushing of the storm over the house-tops and its howling in the chimneys sound in his ears like shrieks of agony, the wail of all the misery of earth.
For in King Lear, and King Lear alone, we feel that what we in our day know by the awkward name of the social problem, in other words, the problem of extreme wretchedness and want, existed already for Shakespeare. On such a night he says with Lear (iii. 4):—
“Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these?”
And he makes the King add:—
“O! I have ta’en
Too little care of this. Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou may’st shake the superflux to them,
And show the heavens more just.”
On such a night was Lear conceived. Shakespeare, sitting at his writing-table, heard the voices of the King, the Fool, Edgar, and Kent on the heath, interwoven with each other, contrapuntally answering each to each, as in a fugue; and it was for the sake of the general effect, in all its sublimity, that he wrote large portions of the tragedy which, in themselves, cannot have interested him. The whole introduction, for instance, deficient as it is in any reasonable motive for the King’s behaviour, he took, with his usual sovereign indifference in unessential matters, from the old play.
With Shakespeare we always find that each work is connected with the preceding one, as ring is linked with ring in a chain. In the story of Gloucester the theme of Othello is taken up again and varied. The trusting Gloucester is spiritually poisoned by Edmund, exactly as Othello’s mind is poisoned by Iago’s lies. Edmund calumniates his brother Edgar, shows forged letters from him, wounds himself in a make-believe defence of his father’s life against him—in short, upsets Gloucester’s balance just as Iago did Othello’s. And he employs the very same means as Schiller’s Franz Moor employs, two centuries later, to blacken his brother Karl in their old father’s estimation. Die Räuber is a sort of imitation of this part of King Lear; even the father’s final blindness is copied.
Shakespeare moves all this away back into primeval times, into the grey days of heathendom; and he welds the two originally independent stories together with such incomparable artistic dexterity that their interaction serves to bring out more forcibly the fundamental idea and feeling of the play. He skilfully contrives that Gloucester’s compassion for Lear shall provide Edmund with means to bring about his father’s utter ruin, and he ingeninously invents the double passion of Regan and Goneril for Edmund, which leads the two sisters to destroy each other. He fills the tame little play of the earlier writer with horrors such as he had not presented since his youthful days in Titus Andronicus, not even shrinking from the tearing out of Gloster’s eyes on the stage. He means to show pitilessly what life is. “You see how this world goes,” says Lear in the play.
Shakespeare has nowhere else shown evil and good in such immediate opposition—bad and good human beings in such direct conflict with each other; and nowhere else has he so deliberately shunned the customary and conventional issue of the struggle—the triumph of the good. In the catastrophe, blind and callous Fate blots out the good and the bad together.
Everything centres in the protagonist, poor old, stupid, great Lear, King every inch of him, and every inch human. Lear’s is a passionate nature, irritably nervous, all too ready to act on the first impulse. At heart he is so lovable that he arouses the unalterable devotion of the best among those who surround him; and he is so framed to command and so accustomed to rule, that he misses every moment that power which, in an access of caprice, he has renounced. For a brief space at the beginning of the play the old man stands erect; then he begins to bend. And the weaker he grows the heavier load is heaped upon him, till at last, overburdened, he sinks. He wanders off, groping his way, with his crushing fate upon his back. Then the light of his mind is extinguished; madness seizes him.
And Shakespeare takes this theme of madness and sets it for three voices—divides it between Edgar, who is mad to serve a purpose, but speaks the language of real insanity; the Fool, who is mad by profession, and masks the soundest practical wisdom under the appearance of insanity; and the King, who is bewildered and infected by Edgar’s insane talk—the King, who is mad with misery and suffering.
As already remarked, it is evident from the indifference with which Shakespeare takes up the old material to make a beginning and set the play going, that all he really cared about was the essential pathos of the theme, the deep seriousness of the fundamental emotion. The opening scenes are of course incredible. It is only in fairy-tales that a king divides the provinces of his kingdom among his daughters, on the principle that she gets the largest share who can assure him that she loves him most; and only a childish audience could find it conceivable that old Gloucester should instantly believe the most improbable calumnies against a son whose fine character he knew. Shakespeare’s individuality does not make itself felt in such parts as these; but it certainly does in the view of life, its course and character, which bursts upon Lear when he goes mad, and which manifests itself here and there all through the play. And Shakespeare’s intellect has now attained such mastery, every passion is rendered with such irresistible power, that the play, in spite of its fantastic, unreal basis, produces an effect of absolute truth.
“Lear. A man may see how this world goes with no eyes. Look with thine ears: see how yond justice rails upon yond simple thief. Hark, in thine ear: change places; and, handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?—Thou hast seen a farmer’s dog bark at a beggar?
“Gloster. Ay, sir.
“Lear. And the creature run from the cur? There thou might’st behold the great image of authority: a dog’s obey’d in office.”
And then follow outbursts to the effect that the punisher is generally worse than the punished; the beadle flogs the loose woman, but the rascally beadle is as lustful as she. The idea here answers to that in Measure for Measure: the beadle should flog himself, not the woman. And then come complaints that the rich are exempt from punishment: dress Sin in armour of goldplate, and the lance of Justice will shiver against it. Finally, he concentrates his indictment of life in the words:—
“When we are born, we cry that we are come
To this great stage of fools.”
We hear a refrain from Hamlet running through all this. But Hamlet’s criticism of life is here taken up by many voices; it sounds louder, and awakens echo upon echo.
The Fool, the best of Shakespeare’s Fools, made more conspicuous by coming after the insignificant Clown in Othello, is such an echo—mordantly witty, marvellously ingenious. He is the protest of sound common-sense against the foolishness of which Lear has been guilty, but a protest that is pure humour; he never complains, least of all on his own account. Yet all his foolery produces a tragic effect. And the words spoken by one of the knights, “Since my young lady’s going into France, sir, the fool hath much pined away,” atone for all his sharp speeches to Lear. Amongst Shakespeare’s other master-strokes in this play must be reckoned that of exalting the traditional clown, the buffoon, into so high a sphere that he becomes a tragic element of the first order.
In no other play of Shakespeare’s has the Fool so many proverbial words of wisdom. Indeed, the whole piece teems with such words: Lear’s “‘Ay’ and ‘no,’ too, was no good divinity;” Edgar’s “Ripeness is all;” Kent’s “To be acknowledged, madam, is o’erpaid.”
Whilst the elder daughters have inherited and over-developed Lear’s bad qualities, Cordelia has fallen heir to his goodness of heart; but he has also transmitted to her a certain obstinacy and pride, but for which the conflict would not have arisen. His first question to her, and her answer to it, are equally wanting in tact. But as the action proceeds, we find that her obstinacy has melted away; her whole being is goodness and charm.
How touching is the passage where Cordelia finds her brainsick sire, and tends him until, by aid of the healing art, and sleep, and music, he slowly regains his health. Everything is beautiful here, from the first kiss to the last word. Lear is borne sleeping on to the stage. The doctor orders music to sound, and Cordelia says (iv. 7):—
“Cor. O my dear father! Restoration hang
Thy medicine on my lips, and let this kiss
Repair those violent harms, that my two sisters
Have in thy reverence made!
Kent. Kind and dear princess!
Cor. Had you not been their father, these white flakes
Had challeng’d pity of them. Was this a face
To be oppos’d against the warring winds?
.................
Mine enemy’s dog,
Though he had bit me, should have stood that night
Against my fire.”
He awakes, and Cordelia says to him:—
Cor. How does my royal lord? How fares your majesty?
Lear. You do me wrong to take me out o’ the grave.
Thou art a soul in bliss; but I am bound
Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears
Do scald like molten lead.”
Then he comes to himself, asks where he has been, and where he is; is surprised that it is “fair daylight;” remembers what he has suffered:—
“Cor. O look upon me, sir,
And hold your hands in benediction o’er me.—
No, sir, you must not kneel.”
Notice this last line. It has its history. In the old drama of King Leir this kneeling was made a more prominent feature. There the King and his faithful Perillus (so Kent was called in the old play) are wandering about, perishing with hunger and thirst, when they fall in with the King of Gaul and Cordelia, who are spying out the land disguised as peasants. The daughter recognises her father, and gives the starving man food and drink; then, when he is satisfied, he tells her his story in deep anguish of spirit:—
“Leir. O no men’s children are vnkind but mine.
Cordelia. Condemne not all, because of others crime,
But looke, deare father, looke, behold and see
Thy louing daughter speaketh vnto thee.
(She kneeles).
Leir. O, stand thou vp, it is my part to kneele,
And aske forgiueness for my former faults.
(He kneeles).”
The scene is beautiful, and there is true filial feeling in it, but it would be impossible on the stage, where two persons kneeling to each other cannot but produce a comic effect. The incident, indeed, actually occurs in some of Molière’s and Holberg’s comedies. Shakespeare understood how to preserve and utilise this (with all other traits of any value in his predecessor’s work) in such a manner that only its delicacy remains, while its external awkwardness disappears. Lear says to Cordelia, when they have fallen into the hands of their enemies:—
“Come, let’s away to prison:
We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage:
When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness. So we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news.”
The old play ends naïvely and innocently with the triumph of the good. The King of Gaul and Cordelia conduct Leir home again, tell the wicked daughters sharp truths to their faces, and thereupon totally rout their armies. Leir thanks and rewards all who have been faithful to him, and passes the remainder of his days in agreeable leisure under the care of his daughter and son-in-law.
Shakespeare does not take such a bright view of life. According to him, Cordelia’s army is defeated, and the old King and his daughter are thrown into prison. But no past and no present adversity can crush Lear’s spirit now. In spite of everything, in spite of the loss of power, of self-reliance, and for a time of reason, in spite of defeat in the decisive battle, he is as happy as an old man can be. He has his lost daughter again. Age had already isolated him. In the peace that a prison affords he will live not much more lonely than great age is of necessity, shut in with the object, now the sole object, of his love. It seems for a moment as though Shakespeare would say: “Happy is that man, even though he may be in prison, who in the last years of his life has the darling of his heart beside him.”
But this is not the conclusion to which Shakespeare leads us. Edmund commands that Cordelia shall be hanged in prison, and the murderer executes his order.
The tragedy does not culminate till Lear enters with Cordelia dead in his arms. After a wild outburst of grief, he asks for a looking-glass to see if she still breathes, and in the pause that ensues Kent says:—
“Is this the promised end?”
And Edgar:—
“Or image of that horror?”
Lear is given a feather. He utters a cry of joy—it moves—she is alive! Then he sees that he has been mistaken. Curses follow, and after them this exquisite touch of characterisation:—
“Her voice was ever soft,
Gentle, and low, an excellent thing in woman.”
Then the disguised Kent makes himself known, and Lear learns that the two criminal daughters are dead. But his capacity for receiving new impressions is almost gone. He can feel nothing but Cordelia’s death: “And my poor fool is hang’d! No, no, no life!” He faints and dies.
“Kent Vex not his ghost: O let him pass! He hates him
That would upon the rack of this tough world
Stretch him out longer.”
That this old man should lose his youngest daughter—this is the catastrophe which Shakespeare has made so great that it is with reason Kent asks: “Is this the promised end? Is this the end of the world?” In the loss of this daughter he loses all; and the abyss that opens seems wide enough and deep enough to engulph a world.
The loss of a Cordelia—that is the great catastrophe. We all lose, or live under the dread of losing, our Cordelia. The loss of the dearest and the best, of that which alone makes life worth living—that is the tragedy of life. Hence the question: Is this the end of the world? Yes it is. Each of us has only his world and lives with the threat of its destruction hanging over him. And in the year 1606 Shakespeare was in no mood to write other than dramas on the doom of worlds.
For the end of all things seems to have come when we see the ruin of the moral world—when he who is noble and trustful like Lear is rewarded with ingratitude and hate; when he who is honest and brave like Kent is punished with dishonour; when he who is merciful like Gloucester, taking the suffering and injured under his roof, has the loss of his eyes for his reward; when he who is noble and faithful like Edgar must wander about in the semblance of a maniac, with a rag round his loins; when, finally, she who is the living emblem of womanly dignity and of filial tenderness towards an old father who has become as it were her child—when she meets her death before his eyes at the hands of assassins! What avails it that the guilty slaughter and poison, each other afterwards? None the less is this the titanic tragedy of human life; there rings forth from it a chorus of passionate, jeering, wildly yearning, and desperately wailing voices.
Sitting by his fire at night, Shakespeare heard them in the roar of the storm against the window-pane, in the howling of the wind in the chimneys—heard all these terrible voices contrapunctually inwoven one with another as in a fugue, and heard in them the torture-shriek of suffering humanity.
XXVII
Antony and Cleopatra — What Attracted Shakespeare to the Subject
If it is the last titanic tragedy of human life that has now been written, what is there more to add? There is nothing left to write. Shakespeare may lay down his pen.
So it would seem to us. But what is the actual course of events? what do we see? That for years to come, work follows work in uninterrupted succession. It is with Shakespeare as with all other great, prolific geniuses; time and again we think, “Now he has done his best, now he has reached his zenith, now he has touched the limit of his power, exhausted his treasury, made his crowning effort, his highest bid,”—when behold! he takes up a new work the day after he has let go the old; takes it up as if nothing had happened, unexhausted, unwearied by the tremendous task he has accomplished, fresh as if he had just arisen from repose, indefatigable as though he were only now setting forth with his name and fame yet to be won.
King Lear makes a sensation among Shakespeare’s impressionable audience; crowds flock to the theatre to see it; the book is quickly sold out—two quarto editions in 1608; all minds are occupied with it; they have not nearly exhausted its treasures of profundity, of wit, of practical wisdom, of poetry—Shakespeare alone no longer gives a moment’s thought to it; he has left it behind and is deep in his next work.
A world-catastrophe! He has no mind now to write of anything else. What is sounding in his ears, what is filling his thoughts, is the crash of a world falling to ruin.
For this music he seeks out a new text. He has not far to seek; he has found it already. Since the time when he wrote Julius Cæsar, Plutarch has never been out of his hands. In his first Roman drama he depicted the fall of the world-republic; but in that world, as a whole, fresh, strong forces were still at work. Cæsar’s spirit dominated it. We heard more of his greatness than we saw of it; but we could infer his true significance from the effects of his disappearance from the scene. And the republic still lived in spirits proud like Brutus, or strong like Cassius, and did not expire with them. By Brutus’s side stood Cato’s daughter, delicate but steadfast, the tenderest and bravest of wives. In short, there were still many sound elements in the body politic. The republic fell by historical necessity, but there was no decadence of mind, no degeneracy, no ruin.
But Shakespeare read on in his Plutarch and came to the life of Marcus Antonius. This he read first out of curiosity, then with attention, then with eager emotion. For here, here was the real downfall of the Roman world. Not till now did he hear the final, fatal crash of the old world-republic. The might of Rome, stern and austere, shivered at the touch of Eastern voluptuousness. Everything sank, everything fell—character and will, dominions and principalities, men and women. Everything was worm-eaten, serpent-bitten, poisoned by sensuality—everything tottered and collapsed. Defeat in Asia, defeat in Europe, defeat in Africa, on the Egyptian coast; then self-abandonment and suicide.
Again a poisoning-story like that of Macbeth. In Macbeth’s case the virus was ambition, in Antony’s it was sensuality. But the story of Antony, with its far-reaching effects, was a very much weightier and more interesting subject than the story of the little barbarian Scottish king. Macbeth was spiritually poisoned by his wife, a woman ambitious to bloodthirstiness, an abnormal woman, more masculine than her husband, almost a virago. She speaks of dashing out the brains of babes as of one of those venial offences which one may commit on an emergency rather than break one’s word, and she undertakes without a tremor to smear the faces of the murdered King’s servants with his blood. What is Lady Macbeth to us? What’s Hecuba to us? And what was this Hecuba now to Shakespeare!
In a very different and more personal way did he feel himself attracted by Cleopatra. She poisons slowly, half-involuntarily, and in wholly feminine fashion, the faculty of rule, the generalship, the courage, the greatness of Antony, ruler of half the world—and her, Cleopatra, he, Shakespeare, knew. He knew her as we all know her, the woman of women, quintessentiated Eve, or rather Eve and the serpent in one—“My serpent of old Nile,” as Antony calls her. Cleopatra—the name meant beauty and fascination—it meant alluring sensuality combined with finished culture—it meant ruthless squandering of human life and happiness and the noblest powers. Here, indeed, was the woman who could intoxicate and undo a man, even the greatest; uplift him to such happiness as he had never known before, and then plunge him into perdition, and along with him that half of the world which it was his to rule.
Who knows! If he himself, William Shakespeare, had met her, who knows if he would have escaped with his life? And had he not met her? Was it not she whom in bygone days he had met and loved, and by whom he had been beloved and betrayed? It moved him strongly to find Cleopatra described as so dark, so tawny. His thoughts dwelt upon this. He too had stood in close relation to a dark, ensnaring woman—one whom in bitter moments he had been tempted to call a gipsy; “a right gipsy,” as Cleopatra is called in this play, by those who are afraid of her or angry with her. She of whom he never thought without emotion, his black enchantress, his life’s angel and fiend, whom he had hated and adored at the same time, whom he had despised even while he sued for her favour—what was she but a new incarnation of that dangerous, ensnaring serpent of the Nile! And how nearly had his whole inner world collapsed like a soap-bubble in his association with, and separation from, her! That would indeed have been the ruin of a world! How he had revelled and writhed, exulted and complained in those days! played ducks and drakes with his life, squandered his days and nights! Now he was a maturer man, a gentleman, a landed proprietor and tithe-farmer; but in him still lived the artist-Bohemian, fitted to mate with the gipsy queen.
Three times in Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet, ii. 4, and Antony and Cleopatra, i. 1, and iv. 12) Cleopatra is slightingly called gipsy, probably from the word’s resemblance in sound to Egyptian. But there was a certain significance in this word-play; for the high-mindedness of the princess and the fickleness of the gipsy were mysteriously combined in her nature. And how well he knew this combination! The model for the great Egyptian queen stood living before his eyes. With the same palette which he had used not many years before to sketch the “dark lady” of the Sonnets, he could now paint this monumental historical portrait.
This figure charmed him, attracted him strongly. He came fresh from Cordelia. He had built up that whole titanic tragedy of King Lear as a pedestal for her. And what is Cordelia? The ideal which one’s imagination reads on a young girl’s white brow, and which the young girl herself hardly understands, much less realises. She was the ray of white light—the great, clear symbol of the purity and nobility of heart which were expressed in her very name. He believed in her; he had looked into her innocent eyes, whose expression inspired him with the idea of her character; he had chanced upon that obstinate, almost ungracious truthfulness in young women, which seems to augur a treasure of real feeling behind it; but he had not known or associated with Cordelia in daily life.
Cleopatra, on the contrary, O Cleopatra! He passed in succession before his eyes the most feminine, and therefore the most dangerous, women he had known since he gained a footing in London, and he gave her the grace of the one, the caprices of the other, the teasing humour of a third, a fourth’s instability; but deep in his heart he was thinking of one only, who had been to him all women in one, a mistress in the art of love and of awakening love, inciting to it as no other incited, and faithlessly betraying as no other betrayed—true and false, daring and frail, actress and lover without peer!
There were several earlier English dramas on the subject of Antony and Cleopatra, but only one or two of them are worth mentioning. There was Daniel’s Cleopatra of 1594 founded partly on Plutarch’s Lives of Antonius and Pompeius, partly on a French book called the “History of the Three Triumvirates.” Then there was a play entitled The Tragedie of Antonie, translated from the French by the Countess of Pembroke, the mother of Shakespeare’s friend, in the year 1595. Shakespeare does not seem to have been indebted to either of these works, nor to any of the numerous Italian plays on the subject. He had none of them before him when he sat down to write his drama, which appears to have been acted for the first time shortly before the 20th of May 1608, on which day it is entered in the Stationers’ Register as “a booke called Anthony and Cleopatra” by Edward Blount, one of the publishers who afterwards brought out the First Folio. It is probable, therefore, that the play was written during the course of the year 1607.
The only source, probably, from which Shakespeare drew, and from which he drew largely, was the Life of Marcus Antonius, in North’s translation of Plutarch. It was on the basis of what he read there that he planned and executed his work, even where, as in the first act, he writes without in every point adhering to Plutarch. The farther the drama progresses the more closely does he keep to Plutarch’s narrative, ingeniously and carefully making use of every touch, great or small, that appears to him characteristic. It is evident, indeed, that several traits are included merely because they are true, or rather because Shakespeare thinks they are true. At times he introduces quite unnecessary personages, like Dolabella, simply because he will not put into the mouth of another the message which Plutarch assigns to him; and it is very seldom that he permits himself even the most trifling alteration.
Shakespeare ennobled the character of Antony to a certain extent. Plutarch depicts him as a Hercules in stature, and inclined to ape the demigod by certain affectations of dress; a hearty, rough soldier, given to praising himself and making game of others, but capable, too, of enduring banter as well as praise. His inclination to prodigality and luxurious living made him rapacious, but he was ignorant of most of the infamies that were committed in his name. There was no craft in his nature, but he was brutal, recklessly profligate, and devoid of all sense of decency. A popular, light-hearted, free-handed general, who sat far too many hours at table—indifferent whether it were with his own soldiers or with princes—who showed himself drunken on the public street, and would “sleepe out his drunkennesse” in the light of day, degraded himself by the lowest debauchery, exhausted whole treasuries on his journeys, travelled with priceless gold and silver plate for his table, had chariots drawn by lions, gave away tens of thousands of pounds in a single gift; but in defeat and misfortune rose to his full height as the inspiriting leader who uncomplainingly renounced all his own comforts and kept up the courage of his men. Calamity always raised him above himself—a sufficient proof that, in spite of everything, he was not without a strain of greatness. There was something of the stage-king in him, something of the Murat, a touch of Skobeloff, and a suggestion of the mediæval knight. What could be less antique than his twice challenging Octavius to single combat? And in the end, when misfortune overwhelmed him, and those on whom he had showered benefits ungratefully forsook him, there was something in him that recalled Timon of Athens nursing his melancholy and his bitterness. He himself recognised the affinity.
Women, according to Plutarch, were Antony’s bane. After a youth in which many women had had a share, he married Fulvia, the widow of the notorious tribune, Clodius. She acquired the mastery over him, and bent him to all her wishes, so that from her hand he passed into Cleopatra’s, ready broken-in to feminine dominion.
According to Plutarch, moreover, Antony was endowed with a considerable flexibility of character. He was fond of disguising himself, of playing practical jokes. Once, for instance, on returning from a campaign, he, dressed as a slave, delivered to his wife, Fulvia, a letter telling of his own death, and then suddenly embraced her as she stood terror-struck. This was only one of many manifestations of his power of self-metamorphosis. Sometimes he would seem nerveless, sometimes iron-nerved; sometimes effeminate, sometimes brave to foolhardiness; now avid of honour, now devoid of honour; now revengeful, now magnanimous. This undulant diversity and changeableness in Antony fascinated Shakespeare. Yet he did not accept the character exactly as he found it in Plutarch. He threw into relief the brighter sides of it, building upon the foundation of Antony’s inborn magnificence, the superb prodigality of his nature, his kingly generosity, and that reckless determination to enjoy the passing moment, which is a not uncommon attribute both of great rulers and great artists.
There was a crevice in this antique figure through which Shakespeare’s soul could creep in. He had no difficulty in imagining himself into Antony’s moods; he was able to play him just as, in his capacity of actor, he could play a part that was quite in his line. Antony possessed that power of metamorphosis which is the essence of the artist nature. He was at one and the same time a master in the art of dissimulation—see his funeral oration in Julius Cæsar, and in this play the manner in which he takes Octavia to wife—and an open, honest character; he was in a way faithful, felt closely bound to his mistress and to his comrades-in-arms, and was yet alarmingly unstable. In other words, his was an artist-nature.
Among his many contradictory qualities two stood out preeminent: the bent towards action and the bent towards enjoyment. Octavius says in the play that these two propensities are equally strong in him, and this is perhaps just about the truth. If, with his immense bodily strength, he had been still more voluptuously inclined, he would have become what in later history Augustus the Strong became, and Cleopatra would have been his Aurora von Königsmarck. If energy had been more strongly developed in him, then generalship and love of drink and dissipation would have combined in him much as they did in Alexander the Great, and Antony in Alexandria would have presented a parallel to Alexander in Babylon. The scales hung evenly balanced for a long time, until Antony met his fate in Cleopatra.
Shakespeare has endowed them both with extreme personal beauty, though neither of them is young. Antony’s followers see in him a Mars, in her a Venus. Even the gruff Enobarbus (ii. 2) declares that when he saw her for the first time, she “o’erpictured that Venus where we see the fancy outwork nature.” She is the enchantress whom, according to Antony, “everything becomes”—chiding, laughing, weeping, as well as repose. She is “a wonderful piece of work.” Antony can never leave her, for, as Enobarbus says (ii. 2; compare Sonnet lvi.):—
“Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety. Other women cloy
The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies; for vilest things
Become themselves in her.”
What matters it that Shakespeare pictures her to himself dark as an African (she was in reality of the purest Greek blood), or that she, with some exaggeration, calls herself old? She can afford to jest on the subject of her complexion as on that of her age:—
“Think on me
That am with Phœbus amorous pinches black,
And wrinkled deep in time.”
She is what Antony calls her when he (viii. 2) exclaims in ecstasy, “O thou day o’ the world!”
In person and carriage Antony is as if created for her. It is not only Cleopatra’s passion that speaks when she says of Antony (v. 2)
“I dream’d there was an Emperor Antony...
His face was as the heavens...”
And to the beauty of his face answers that of his voice:—
“Propertied
As all the tuned spheres, and that to friends;
But when he meant to quail and shake the orb,
He was as rattling thunder.”
She prizes his rich, generous nature:—
“For his bounty,
There was no winter in’t; and autumn ’twas,
That grew the more by reaping:
.......
In his livery
Walk’d crowns and crownets; realms and islands were
As plates dropped from his pocket.”
And just as Enobarbus maintained that Cleopatra was more beautiful than that pictured Venus in which imagination had surpassed nature, Cleopatra, in her exaltation after Antony’s death, maintains that his glorious humanity surpassed what fancy can invent:—
“Cleopatra. Think you there was or might be such a man
As this I dreamt of?
Dolabella. Gentle madam, no.
Cleopatra. You lie, up to the hearing of the gods.
But, if there be, or ever were, one such,
It’s past the size of dreaming: nature wants stuff
To vie strange forms with fancy; yet, to imagine
An Antony, were nature’s piece ’gainst fancy,
Condemning shadows quite.”
Not of an Antony should we speak thus now-a-days, but of a Napoleon in the world of action, of a Michael Angelo, a Beethoven, or a Shakespeare in the world of art.
But the figure of Antony had to be one which made such a transfiguration possible in order that it might be worthy to stand by the side of hers who is the queen of beauty, the very genius of love.
Pascal says in his Pensées: “Si le nez de Cléopâtre eût été plus court, toute la face de la terre aurait changé.” But her nose was, as the old coins show us, exactly what it ought to have been; and in Shakespeare we feel that she is not only beauty itself, but charm, except in one single scene, where the news of Antony’s marriage throws her into a paroxysm of unbeautiful rage. Her charm is of the sense-intoxicating kind, and she has, by study and art, developed those powers of attraction which she possessed from the outset, till she has become inexhaustible in inventiveness and variety. She is the woman who has passed from hand to hand, from her husband and brother to Pompey, from Pompey to the great Cæsar, from Cæsar to countless others. She is the courtesan by temperament, but none the less does she possess the genius for a single, undivided love. She, like Antony, is complex, and being a woman, she is more so than he. Vir duplex, femina triplex.
From the beginning and almost to the end of the tragedy she plays the part of the great coquette. What she says and does is for long only the outcome of the coquette’s desire and power to captivate by incalculable caprices. She asks where Antony is, and sends for him (i. 2). He comes. She exclaims: “We will not look upon him,” and goes. Presently his absence irks her, and again she sends a messenger to remind him of her and keep him in play (i. 3)—
“If you find him sad,
Say I am dancing; if in mirth, report
That I am sudden sick...”
He learns of his wife’s death. She would have been beside herself if he had shown grief, but he speaks with coldness of the loss, and she attacks him because of this:—
“Where be the sacred vials thou shouldst fill
With sorrowful water? Now I see, I see
In Fulvia’s death how mine received shall be.”
This incalculability, this capriciousness of hers extends to the smallest matters. She invites Mardian to play a game of billiards with her (an amusing anachronism), and, finding him ready, she turns him off with: “I’ll none now.”
But all this mutability does not exclude in her the most real, most passionate love for Antony. The best proof of its strength is the way in which she speaks of him when he is absent (i. 5):—
“O Charmian!
Where think’st thou he is now? Stands he, or sits he?
Or does he walk? or is he on his horse?
O happy horse, to bear the weight of Antony!
Do bravely, horse, for wott’st thou whom thou mov’st?
The demi-Atlas of this earth, the arm
And burgonet of men.”
So it is but the truth she is speaking when she tells with what immovable certainty and trust, with what absolute assurance for the future, love filled both her and Antony when they saw each other for the first time (i. 3):—
“No going then;
Eternity was in our lips and eyes,
Bliss in our brows’ bent; none our parts so poor,
But was a race of heaven.”
Nor is it irony when Enobarbus, in reply to Antony’s complaint (i. 2), “She is cunning past man’s thought,” makes answer, “Alack, sir, no; her passions are made of nothing but the finest part of pure love.” This is literally true—only that the love is not pure in the sense of being sublimated or unegoistic, but in the sense of being quintessential erotic emotion, chemically free from all the other elements usually combined with it.
And outward circumstances harmonise with the character and vehemence of this passion. He lays the kingdoms of the East at her feet; with reckless prodigality, she lavishes the wealth of Africa on the festivals she holds in his honour.
XXVIII
The Dark Lady as a Model — The Fall of the Republic a World-Catastrophe
Assuming that it was Shakespeare’s design in Antony and Cleopatra, as in King Lear, to evoke the conception of a world-catastrophe, we see that he could not in this play, as in Macbeth or Othello, focus the entire action around the leading characters alone. He could not even make the other characters completely subordinate to them; that would have rendered it impossible for him to give the impression of majestic breadth, of an action embracing half of the then known world, which he wanted for the sake of the concluding effect.
He required in the group of figures surrounding Octavius Cæsar, and in the groups round Lepidus, Ventidius, and Sextus Pompeius, a counterpoise to Antony’s group. He required the placid beauty and Roman rectitude of Octavia as a contrast to the volatile, intoxicating Egyptian. He required Enobarbus to serve as a sort of chorus and introduce an occasional touch of irony amid the highflown passion of the play. In short, he required a throng of personages, and (in order to make us feel that the action was not taking place in some narrow precinct in a corner of Europe, but upon the stage of the world) he required a constant coming and going, sending and receiving of messengers, whose communications are awaited with anxiety, heard with bated breath, and not infrequently alter at one blow the situation of the chief characters.
The ambition which characterised Antony’s past is what determines his relation to this great world; the love which has now taken such entire possession of him determines his relation to the Egyptian queen, and the consequent loss of all that his ambition had won for him. Whilst in a tragedy like Goethe’s Clavigo, ambition plays the part of the tempter, and love is conceived as the good, the legitimate power, here it is love that is reprehensible, ambition that is proclaimed to be the great man’s vocation and duty.
Thus Antony says (i. 2):
“These strong Egyptian fetters I must break,
Or lose myself in dotage.”
We saw that one element of Shakespeare’s artist-nature was of use to him in his modelling of the figure of Antony. He himself had ultimately broken his fetters, or rather life had broken them for him; but as he wrote this great drama, he lived through again those years in which he himself had felt and spoken as he now made Antony feel and speak:
“A thousand groans, but thinking on thy face,
One on another’s neck, do witness bear,
Thy black is fairest in my judgment’s place.”
—(Sonnet cxxxi.)
Day after day that woman now stood before him as his model who had been his life’s Cleopatra—she to whom he had written of “lust in action”:
“Mad in pursuit, and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof,—and prov’d, a very woe.”
—(Sonnet cxxix.)
He had seen in her an irresistible and degrading Delilah, the Delilah whom De Vigny centuries later anathematised in a famous couplet.1 He had bewailed, as Antony does now, that his beloved had belonged to many:
“If eyes, corrupt by over-partial looks,
Be anchor’d in the bay where all men ride,
......
Why should my heart think that a several plot
Which my heart knows the wide world’s common place?’’
—(Sonnet cxxxvii.)
He had, like Antony, suffered agonies from the coquetry she would lavish on any one she wanted to win. He had then burst forth in complaint, as Antony in the drama breaks out into frenzy:
“Tell me thou lov’st elsewhere; but in my sight,
Dear heart, forbear to glance thine eye aside:
What need’st thou wound with cunning, when thy might
Is more than my o’er-pressed defence can ’bide?”
—(Sonnet cxxxix.)
Now he no longer upbraided her; now he crowned her with a queenly diadem, and placed her, living, breathing, and in the largest sense true to nature, on that stage which was his world.
As in Othello he had made the lover-hero about as old as he was himself at the time he wrote the play, so now it interested him to represent this stately and splendid lover who was no longer young. In the Sonnets he had already dwelt upon his age. He says, for instance, in Sonnet cxxxviii.:
“When my love swears that she is made of truth,
I do believe her, though I know she lies,
That she might think me some untutor’d youth,
Unlearned in the world’s false subtleties.
Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,
Although she knows my days are past the best,
Simply I credit her false-speaking tongue.”
When Antony and Cleopatra perished with each other, she was in her thirty-ninth, he in his fifty-fourth year. She was thus almost three times as old as Juliet, he more than double the age of Romeo. This correspondence with his own age pleases Shakespeare’s fancy, and the fact that time has had no power to sear or wither this pair seems to hold them still farther aloof from the ordinary lot of humanity. The traces years have left upon the two have only given them a deeper beauty. All that they themselves in sadness, or others in spite, say to the contrary, signifies nothing. The contrast between their age in years and that which their beauty and passion make for them merely enhances and adds piquancy to the situation. It is in sheer malice that Pompey exclaims (ii. I):
“But all the charms of love,
Salt Cleopatra, soften thy waned lip!”
This means no more than her own description of herself as “wrinkled.” And it is on purpose to give the idea of Antony’s age, of which in Plutarch there is no indication, that Shakespeare makes him dwell on the mixed colour of his own hair. He says (iii. 9):
“My very hairs do mutiny; for the white
Reprove the brown for rashness, and they them
For fear and doting.”
In the moment of despair he uses the expression (iii. II): “To the boy Cæsar send this grizzled head.” And again, after the last victory, he recurs to the idea in a tone of triumph. Exultingly he addresses Cleopatra (iv. 8):
“What, girl! though grey
Do something mingle with our younger brown, yet ha’ we
A brain that nourishes our nerves, and can
Get goal for goal of youth.”
With a sure hand Shakespeare has depicted in Antony the mature man’s fear of letting a moment pass unutilised: the vehement desire to enjoy before the hour strikes when all enjoyment must cease. Thus Antony says in one of his first speeches (i. I):
“Now, for the love of Love and her soft hours....
There’s not a minute of our lives should stretch
Without some pleasure now.”
Then he feels the necessity of breaking his bonds. He makes Fulvia’s death serve his purpose of gaining Cleopatra’s consent to his departure; but even then he is not free. In order to bring out the contrast between Octavius the statesman and Antony the lover, Shakespeare emphasises the fact that Octavius has reports of the political situation brought to him every hour, whilst Antony receives no other daily communication than the regularly arriving letters from Cleopatra which foment the longing that draws him back to Egypt.
As a means of allaying the storm and gaining peace to love his queen at leisure, he agrees to marry his opponent’s sister, knowing that, when it suits him, he will neglect and repudiate her. Then vengeance overtakes him for having so contemptuously thrown away the empire over more than a third of the civilised world—vengeance for having said as he embraced Cleopatra (i. I):
“Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch
Of the ranged empire fall! Here is my space.”
Rome melts through his fingers. Rome proclaims him a foe to her empire, and declares war against him. And he loses his power, his renown, his whole position, in the defeat which he so contemptibly brings upon himself at Actium. In Cleopatra flight was excusable. Her flight in the drama (which follows Plutarch and tradition) is due to cowardice; in reality it was prompted by tactical, judicious motives. But Antony was in honour bound to stay. He follows her in the tragedy (as in reality) from brainless, contemptible incapacity to remain when she has gone; leaving an army of 112,000 men and a fleet of 450 ships in the lurch, without leader or commander. Nine days did his troops await his return, rejecting every proposal of the enemy, incapable of believing in the desertion and flight of the general they admired and trusted. When at last they could no longer resist the conviction that he had sunk his soldier’s honour in shame, they went over to Octavius.
After this everything turns on the mutual relation of Antony and Cleopatra, and Shakespeare has admirably depicted its ecstasies and its revulsions. Never before had they loved each other so wildly and so rapturously. Now it is not only he who openly calls her “Thou day o’ the world!” She answers him with the cry, “Lord of lords! O infinite virtue!” (iv. 8).
Yet never before has their mutual distrust been so deep. She, who was at no time really great except in the arts of love and coquetry, has always felt distrustful of him, and yet never distrustful enough; for though she was prepared for a great deal, his marriage with Octavia overwhelmed her. He, knowing her past, knowing how often she has thrown herself away, and understanding her temperament, believes her false to him even when she is innocent, even when, as with Desdemona, only the vaguest of appearances are against her. In the end we sea Antony develop into an Othello.
Here and there we come upon something in his character which seems to indicate that Shakespeare had been lately occupied with Macbeth. Cleopatra stimulates Antony’s voluptuousness, his sensuality, as Lady Macbeth spurred on her husband’s ambition; and Antony fights his last battle with Macbeth’s Berserk fury, facing with savage bravery what he knows to be invincibly superior force. But in his emotional life after the disaster of Actium it is Othello whom he more nearly resembles. He causes Octavius’s messenger, Thyreus, to be whipped, simply because Cleopatra at parting has allowed him to kiss her hand. When some of her ships take to flight, he immediately believes in an alliance between her and the enemy, and heaps the coarsest invectives upon her, almost worse than those with which Othello overwhelms Desdemona. And in his monologue (iv. 10) he raves groundlessly like Othello:
“Betray’d I am.
O this false soul of Egypt! this grave charm,—
Whose eye beck’d forth my wars, and call’d them home,
Whose bosom was my crownet, my chief end,—
Like a right gipsy, hath, at fast and loose,
Beguil’d me to the very heart of loss.”
They both, though faithless to the rest of the world, meant to be true to each other, but in the hour of trial they place no trust in each other’s faithfulness. And all these strong emotions have shaken Antony’s judgment. The braver he becomes in his misfortune, the more incapable is he of seeing things as they really are. Enobarbus closes the third act most felicitously with the words:
“I see still
A diminution in our captain’s brain
Restores his heart: when valour preys on reason
It eats the sword it fights with.”
To tranquillise Antony’s jealous frenzy, Cleopatra, who always finds readiest aid in a lie, sends him the false tidings of her death. In grief over her loss, he falls on his sword and mortally wounds himself. He is carried to her, and dies. She bursts forth:
“Noblest of men, woo’t die?
Hast thou no care of me? shall I abide
In this dull world, which in thy absence is
No better than a sty?—O! see, my women,
The crown o’ the earth doth melt.”
In Shakespeare, however, her first thought is not of dying herself. She endeavours to come to a compromise with Octavius, hands over to him an inventory of her treasures, and tries to trick him out of the larger half. It is only when she has ascertained that nothing, neither admiration for her beauty nor pity for her misfortunes, moves his cold sagacity, and that he is determined to exhibit her humiliation to the populace of Rome as one of the spectacles of his triumph, that she lets the worm of Nilus give her her death.
In these passages the poet has placed Cleopatra’s behaviour in a much more unfavourable light than the Greek historian, whom he follows as far as details are concerned; and he has evidently done so wittingly and purposely, in order to complete his home-thrust at the type of woman whose dangerousness he has embodied in her. In Plutarch all these negotiations with Octavius were a feint to deceive the vigilance with which he thought to prevent her from killing herself. Suicide is her one thought, and he has baulked her in her first attempt. She pretends to cling to her treasures only to delude him into the belief that she still clings to life, and her heroic imposture is successful. Shakespeare, for whom she is ever the quintessence of the she-animal in woman, disparages her intentionally by suppressing the historical explanation of her behavior.2.
The English critic, Arthur Symons, writes: “Antony and Cleopatra is the most wonderful, I think, of all Shakespeare’s plays, and it is so mainly because the figure of Cleopatra is the most wonderful of Shakespeare’s women. And not of Shakespeare’s women only, but perhaps the most wonderful of women.”
This is carrying enthusiasm almost too far. But thus much is true: the great attraction of this masterpiece lies in the unique figure of Cleopatra, elaborated as it is with all Shakespeare’s human experience and artistic enthusiasm. But the greatness of the world-historic drama proceeds from the genius with which he has entwined the private relations of the two lovers with the course of history and the fate of empires. Just as Antony’s ruin results from his connection with Cleopatra, so does the fall of the Roman Republic result from the contact of the simple hardihood of the West with the luxury of the East. Antony is Rome, Cleopatra is the Orient. When he perishes, a prey to the voluptuousness of the East, it seems as though Roman greatness and the Roman Republic expired with him.
Not Cæsar’s ambition, not Cæsar’s assassination, but this crumbling to pieces of Roman greatness fourteen years later brings home to us the ultimate fall of the old world-republic, and impresses us with that sense of universal annihilation which in this play, as in King Lear, Shakespeare aims at begetting.
This is no tragedy of a domestic, limited nature like the conclusion of Othello; there is no young Fortinbras here, as in Hamlet, giving the promise of brighter and better times to come; the victory of Octavius brings glory to no one and promises nothing. No; the final picture is that which Shakespeare was bent on painting from the moment he felt himself attracted by this great theme—the picture of a world-catastrophe.
1
“Toujours ce compagnon dont le cœur n’est pas sûr,
La Femme—enfant malade et douze fois impur.”
Notes
1 Macaulay, Essays—“Burleigh and his Times.”
1 Arthur Weldon: The Court and Character of King James, 1650; quoted by Drake, ii. 149.
3 Froude: History of England, vol. xii. Conclusion.
1 James Spedding: Letters and Life of Francis Bacon, i. 371.
2 Gosse: Raleigh, p. 113.
3 A. Collins: Letters and Memorials of State, ii. 132.
1 Compare Dictionary of National Biography, Robert Devereux; Spedding, Letters and Life of Francis Bacon, ii. 190-374; Edwin Abbott, Francis Bacon, an Account of his Life and Works, pp. 53-82; Macaulay, Lord Bacon; Gosse, Raleigh.
1 Hermann Conrad in Preussische Jahrbücher, February 1895. Under the pseudonym of Hermann Isaac in Jahrbuch der Deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft, vol. xix. p. 176.
2 I do not find that Mr. G. A. Leigh has succeeded in identifying the rival poet with Tasso (Westminster Review, February 1897).
1 Reproduced in Tyler’s Shakespeare’s Sonnets.
2
“Damon. Whore-master in thy face;
Thou hast lain with her thyself, I’ll prove it in this place.
“Leatherhead. They are whore-masters both, sir, that’s a plain case.
“Pythias. Thou lie like a rogue.
“Leatherhead. Do I lie like a rogue?
“Pythias. A pimp and a scab.
“Leatherhead. A pimp and a scab!
I say, between you you have both but one drab.
“Pythias and Damon. Come, now we’ll go together to breakfast to Hero.
“Leatherhead. Thus, gentles, you perceive without any denial
’Twixt Damon and Pythias here friendship’s true trial.”
1 For instance, in Sonnet xxiii.:—
“O let my books be then the eloquence
And dumb presagers of my speaking breast,
Who plead for love, and look for recompense.”
And in Sonnet xxvi.:—
“Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage
Thy merit hath my duty strongly knit.
2 Ludwig von Scheffler: Michel Angelo. Eine Renaissancestudie, 1892.
3 “E se io non àrò l’arte del navicare per l’onde del mare del vostro valoroso ingegno, quello mi scuserà, nè si sdegnierà del mio disaguagliarsigli, nè desiderrà da me quello che in me non è: perchè chi è solo in ogni cosa, in cosa alcuna non può aver compagni. Però la vostra Signoria, luce del secol nostro unica al mondo, non puo sodisfarsi di opera d’alcuno altro, non avendo pari nè simile à sè,” &c.
4 “E io non nato, o vero nato morto mi reputerei, e direi in disgrazia del cielo e della terra, se per la vostra non avessi visto e creduto vostra Signoria accettare volentieri alcune delle opere mie.” “Avete data la copia de’ sopradetti Madrigali a messer Tomaso... che se m’uscissi della mente, credo che súbito cascherei morto.”
6 This line, however, is obviously suggested by the famous passage in Macbeth (Act v.)—
“My way of life
Is fall’n into the sere, the yellow leaf.”
7 Several passages in the Sonnets suggest that Pembroke must have conferred substantial gifts upon Shakespeare—for example, that expression “wealth” in Sonnet xxxvii., “your bounty” in Sonnet liii., and “your own dear-purchased right” in Sonnet cxvii.
8 “Anzi posso prima dimenticare il cibo di ch’io vivo, che nutrisce solo il corpo infelicemente, che il nome vostro, che nutrisce il corpo e l’anima, riempiendo l’uno e l’altro di tanta dolcezza, che nè noia nè timor di morte, mentre la memoria mi vi serba, posso sentire.”
9 Jahrbuch der deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft, Band xiii. S. 158.
1 Compare Dowden, Shakspere, p. 280.
2 Mommsen, History of Rome, translated by W. P. Dickson, ed. 1894, vol. v. p. 371. Gaston Boissier, Cicéron et ses Amis, p. 224
1 “Observe him as his watch observes his clock.”—Sejanus, i. I.
2 He says of Jonson in The Times Displayed in Six Sesfyads:—
“So His, that Divine Plautus equalled,
Whose Commick vain Menander nere could hit,
Whose tragic sceans shal be with wonder Read
By after ages, for unto his wit
My selfe gave personal ayd, I dictated
To him when as Sejanus fall he writ,
And yet on earth some foolish sots there bee
That dare make Randolph his Rival in degree.”
3 “If there be never a servant-monster in the fair, who can help it, he says, nor a nest of antiques? He is loth to make Nature afraid in his plays, like those that beget tales, tempests, and such-like drolleries.”
1 Preuss. Jahrbücher, February 1895.
1 Tschischwitz: Shakespeare-Forschungen; König: Shakespeare-Jahrbuch, xi.
2 Brunnhofer: Giordano Bruno’s Weltanschauung und Verhängniss.
3 Giordano Bruno und Shakespeare, Oldenburg, 1889, p. 26.
4 A comic analogy to Bruno’s doctrine may be found in the following lines of Hotspur’s (Henry IV., Pt. I. iii. l):
“Diseased nature oftentimes breaks forth
In strange eruptions: oft the teeming earth
Is with a kind of colic pinch’d and vex’d
By the imprisoning of unruly wind
Within her womb; which, for enlargement striving,
Shakes the old beldam Earth, and topples down
Steeples and moss-grown towers.”
But no one will seriously attribute this passage to the philosophical influence of Giordano Bruno. Hotspur was quite capable of hitting upon this image without any suggestion from Nola or Naples.
5 This speech first occurs in the First Folio.
6 This was first pointed out (about 1860) by Otto Ludwig. See his Shakespeare-Studien, p. 373. The relation between Shakespeare and Montaigne is dwelt upon in an ill-arranged book by G. F. Stedefeld: Hamlet, ein Tendenz-Drama (1871).
7 Compare Jacob Feis, Shakespeare and Montaigne, pp. 64-130. Beyersdorff, Giordano Bruno und Shakespeare, p. 27 et seq.
8 Beyersdorff, op. cit., p. 33. John Lyly, Evphves: The Anatomy of Wit, ed. Landmann, pp. 72, 75.
9 New Shakspere Society’s Transactions, 1874, p. 513. Compare Schück, “Englische Komödianten in Skandinavien,” Skandinavisches Archiv.
10 New Shakspere Society’s Transactions, 1874, p. 512.
1 See Hermann Türck: Das psychologische Problem in der Hamlet-Tragödie. 1890.
2 See E. Sullivan: “On Hamlet’s Age.” New Shakspere Society’s Transactions. 1880-86.
1 K. Werder: Vorlesungen über Hamlet, p. 3 et seq.
2 Georg Brandes: Æsthetiske Studier. Essay “On the Concept: Tragic Fate.”
3 Karl Werder: Vorlesungen über Shakespeare’s Hamlet, 1875.
1 Compare New Shakspere Society’s Transactions, 1880-86, p. 60.
2 Tarlton’s Jests and News out of Purgatory. Edited by J. O. Halliwell. London, 1844.
3 The Danish national song of to-day, written by Ewald, and the music composed by Hartmann, 1778.
1 S. R. Gardiner: History of England, vol. i. Thomas Milner: The History of England. Alfred Stern: Geschichte der Revolution in England. Gosse: Raleigh. J. Nicols: The Progresses, Processions, and Magnificent Festivities of King James the First, vol. i. Disraeli: An Inquiry into the Literary and Political Character of James the First. Dictionary of National Biography: James, Anne. Nathan Drake: Shakespeare and his Times.
1 He says (i. 3):—
“I hate the Moor,
And it is thought abroad, that ’twixt my sheets
‘Has done my office. I know not if ’t be true;
But I for mere suspicion in that kind
Will do as if for surety.”
He adds (ii. 7):—
“I’ll have our Michael Cassio on the hip,
Abuse him to the Moor in the rank garb,
For fear Cassio with my night-cap too.
1 The development of this passage exactly corresponds to Spinoza’s classic definition of jealousy, written seventy years later. See Ethices, Pars III., Propositio XXXV., Scholium: “Præterea hoc odium erga rem amatam majus erit pro ratione Lætitiæ, qua Zelotypus ex reciproco rei amatæ. Amore solebat affici, et etiam pro ratione affectus, quo erga illum, quem sibi rem amatam jungere imaginatur, affectus erat. Nam si eum oderat, eo ipso rem amatam odio habebit, quia ipsam id, quod ipse odio habet, Lætitia afficere imaginatur; et etiam ex eo, quod rei amatæ imaginem imagini ejus, quem odit, jungere cogitur, quæ ratio plerumque locum habet in Amore erga fœminam; qui enim imaginatur mulierem, quam amat, alteri sese prostituere, non solum ex eo, quod ipsius appetitus coercetur, contristabitur, sed etiam quia rei amatæ maginem pudendis et excrementis alterius jungere cogitur, eandem aversatur.”
1 Swinburne: A Study of Shakespeare, p. 164.
2 Goethe has a marked imitation of Shakespeare’s Cleopatra in the Adelheid of Götz von Berlichingen. And he has placed Weislingen between Adelheid and Maria as Antony stands between Cleopatra and Octavia bound to the former and marrying the latter.