II The Plays of Shakespeare4
SOME MISTAKES OF THE EDITORS.
SOME MISTAKES OF THE ACTORS.
THE CHARACTER OF LADY MACBETH.
SHAKESPEARE’S JEW AND MARLOWE’S CHRISTIANS.
THE AUTHORS OF “KING HENRY THE EIGHTH.”
“TROILUS AND CRESSIDA.”
Neither in the theatre nor on the printed page can it be said that Shakespeare’s dramas to-day reflect the form of his art or the thought of his age. The versions acted on the stage are unlike those read in the study, and all are dissimilar to the “authentic copies.” In order to understand the cause of these discrepancies it is necessary to trace their origin and history.
Some Mistakes of the Editors
A number of Shakespeare’s plays were published during his lifetime, the first, “The Comedy of Errors,” appearing in 1595, and the last one, “Pericles,” in 1609. Some of these plays went through several editions, and the text of four of them, in their first edition, was extremely faulty, but the second editions of “Romeo and Juliet” and of “Hamlet” were probably printed direct from the author’s manuscripts.
The special features of these early quartos are:
1. The title-pages, which indicate what in Shakespeare’s time were the popular incidents and characters in each play.
2. The unbroken continuity of the story, the plays having no divisions to suggest where pauses were made, if any, during the representation.
3. Some descriptive stage-directions which do not reappear in subsequent editions, and which in all probability are authentic evidence of the action as it was then seen on the stage.
These quartos are the only playbooks existing to-day which can show Shakespeare’s constructive art as a dramatist, and it will be necessary to refer to them from time to time.
Seven years after his death, Shakespeare’s fellow-actors, Heminge and Condell, collected all his dramas, and, with the help of some booksellers, published them in one volume in what is known as the first folio (1623). These “trifles,” as the editors called them, were dedicated to two noblemen in the confidence that this tribute would help to keep the author’s memory alive, and the reader is invited to purchase the book because the plays had found favour on the stage where they were first tried and “stood out all appeales.” There is, besides, some anxiety shown by the editors lest the publication of the volume should detract from the author’s fame as a dramatist, for the reader is urged to read the plays “againe and againe,” if he does not like them, or in other words, if he does not understand them. Now, in this first folio, Heminge and Condell began marking divisions for intervals in the plays. This was an innovation, probably suggested to them by the booksellers at the instigation of Ben Jonson. Fortunately, the editors left their task unfinished, finding, perhaps, that these divisions were unsuitable interpolations.
In 1709 there came a new phase in the history of Shakespearian Bibliography when Rowe, the poet-dramatist, at the suggestion of his bookseller, who believed that “none but a poet should presume to meddle with a poet,” undertook to present to the world a new edition of Shakespeare’s plays, in which the player-dramatist was for the first time to be brought within the fraternity of academicians. His works were to be edited on similar lines to those of the poets of Rowe’s time, with the appendage of a life and a recommendatory preface. The contrast between this preface and that of Heminge and Condell is characteristic. To Rowe it is “a great wonder” that Shakespeare should have advanced dramatic poetry as far as he did; and, since he wrote “under a mere light of nature,” and was never acquainted with Aristotle’s precepts, it would be hard to “judge him by a law he knew nothing of.” With Rowe, also, the “fable” comes first for criticism, because even if it is not the most difficult or beautiful part of the play, it is the most important; yet he contends that in this art Shakespeare has “no mastery or strength.” In accordance with academic notions, Rowe completes the work begun by Heminge and Condell, and divides all the plays into acts and scenes; cutting up the text, as it is said, on “rational principles.”5 But Rowe’s divisions are both misplaced and unauthorized; and even his text is faulty through being printed from the fourth edition of the first folio, the latest one and the least accurate.
Pope follows Rowe as editor in 1723, and upholds the authority of the early copies, which, as he says with truth, “hold the place of the originals, and are the only materials left to repair the deficiencies, or restore the corrupted sense of the author.” Pope’s study of the “originals,” however, confirms him in Rowe’s opinion that Heminge and Condell were ignorant men, both as editors and actors. It was—
“Ben Jonson, getting possession of the stage, brought critical learning into vogue: and that this was not done without difficulty may appear from those frequent lessons (and indeed almost declamations) which he was forced to prefix to his first plays, and put into the mouth of his actors.... Till then, our authors had no thoughts of writing on the model of the ancients: their tragedies were only histories in dialogue: and their comedies followed the thread of any novel as they found it no less implicitly than if it had been true history.”
Pope also remarks that “players have ever had a standard to themselves upon other principles than those of Aristotle,” and Shakespeare’s “wrong judgment as a poet” must be ascribed to his “right judgment as a player.” It is evident, then, that Pope, like Rowe, had nothing favourable to say about Shakespeare’s art in the management of his “fable,” and if Heminge and Condell put in some act and scene divisions, “often where there is no pause in the action,” Pope marks a change of scene at every removal of place, “which is more necessary in this author than in any other, because he shifts them more frequently.”
It was said of Pope’s edition that he had rejected whatever he disliked, and thought more of amputation than cure. In the controversy which followed, Pope found his match in Theobald. This critic points out in his preface (1726) that an editor should be well versed in the history and manners of his author’s age, “if he aim at doing him service.” But Theobald, like Rowe, fails to understand Shakespeare’s dramatic art, and compares him with a “corrupt classic” for whom classical remedies are necessary. Fortunately, Theobald confines his attention entirely to textual emendations, and, unlike Pope, he does not tamper with the text in order to make Shakespeare “speak better than the old copies have done.” Johnson, in spite of his censure, honoured Theobald by borrowing largely from his labours in his own edition.
Warburton (1747) defends Pope, and shrewdly remarks that Shakespeare’s works “when they escaped the players did not fall into much better hands when they came amongst printers and booksellers,” adding, “the truth is Shakespeare’s condition was yet but ill-understood.” But Warburton is wanting in historical knowledge when he writes, “The stubborn nonsense, with which he was incrusted, occasioned his lying long neglected amongst the common lumber of the stage.” In fact, Warburton abuses Rowe’s editing, yet none the less adopts his tone in disparaging “those impurities,” the original copies.
Dr. Johnson (1765) brings vigour and common sense to bear upon his editorial labours, without, however, betraying special sympathy with the poet’s achievements, or any subtle comprehension of his art as a dramatist. But Johnson never forgets that Shakespeare wrote plays and not poems, and that he sold them to actors and not printers. His criticisms are those of a playgoer writing of plays, as if he had seen them acted at the theatre. At the same time he follows Rowe’s lead in saying that Shakespeare’s plots are so loosely constructed that not one play would now “be heard to the conclusion,” and similarly with Rowe, he generalizes as to the text being vitiated “by the blunders of the penman, or changed by the affectation of the players.” About the division into acts and scenes, he writes:
“I have preserved the common distribution of the plays into acts, though I believe it to be in almost all the plays void of authority. Some of those which are divided in the later editions have no division in the first folio, and some that are divided in the folio have no division in the preceding copies. The settled mode of the theatre requires four intervals in the play, but few if any of our author’s compositions can be properly distributed in that manner. An act is so much of the drama as passes without intervention of time or change of place. A pause makes a new act. In every real and therefore in every imitative action, the intervals may be more or fewer, the restriction of five acts being accidental and arbitrary. This Shakespeare knew, and this he practised; his plays were written, and at first printed in one unbroken continuity, and ought now to be exhibited with short pauses, interposed as often as the scene is changed, or any considerable time is required to pass. This method would at once quell a thousand absurdities.”
Something must be said later on about the “short pauses.” There is wisdom as well as humour in Johnson’s observation: “Let him who desires to feel the highest pleasure that the drama can give read every play from the first scene to the last with utter negligence of all his commentators.”
To Steevens belongs the credit of being the first to collect and reprint (1766) in one volume the original quartos, of which a revised and completed edition is much needed. “Many of the quartos,” he writes, “as our own printers assure me, were far from being unskilfully executed, and some of them were much more correctly printed than the folio.” With regard to Shakespeare’s text, he observes: “To make his meaning intelligible to his audience seems to have been his only care, and with the ease of conversation he has adopted its incorrectness.” In fact, Steevens thinks that Shakespeare, of all the writers of his day, was the most ungrammatical.
Capell (1768) is perhaps the least dogmatic of all the eighteenth-century editors, and the most cautious in his judgment, when he remarks: “Generally speaking, the more distant a new edition is from its original, the more it abounds in faults which is done by destroying all marks of peculiarity and notes of time.” And in another passage: “That division of scenes which Jonson seems to have attempted, and upon which the French stage prides itself, Shakespeare does not appear to have any idea of.” In a note he adds: “The current editions are divided in such a manner that nothing like a rule can be collected from any of them.” Unfortunately, like all the other editors, Capell believes it necessary to divide Shakespeare’s plays into acts and scenes.
With Malone (1790) Shakespearian criticism enters upon a new phase—the historical one—when research and evidence take precedence of conjecture. What he says of the first editors of his century remains as true to-day as it was when written—“that the men never looked behind them, but considered their own era and their own phraseology as the standard of perfection.”
Malone, moreover, observes that the two chief duties of an editor are to show the genuine text of an author and to explain his obscurities. This, it must be admitted, is the view taken by all his contemporaries; and yet dramas are not poems any more than words are deeds. And while Malone spares no pains to amend a corrupt text in the hope of arriving at verbal accuracy, he has little scruple about marring Shakespeare’s scheme of action. “All the stage-directions,” he writes, “throughout this work I have considered as wholly in my power, and have regulated them in the best manner I could.” To do this is to run counter to an editor’s province and duty; for a dramatist to know that his text is correct affords him small consolation if his story has been misunderstood and mutilated. It is doubtful whether scholars who insist on editing Shakespeare’s plays as if they were anything or everything but drama have any just appreciation of the work they undertake. When Dr. Johnson contends that Shakespeare was “read, admired, and imitated while he was yet deformed,” he is indirectly praising deformity. All the eighteenth-century editors blame Shakespeare for the management of his “fable,” and attribute it to his ignorance, while many modern editors altogether overlook his art of making a play. The late Dr. Furnivall’s introduction to the “Leopold Shakespeare,” which has been deservedly and universally praised, has yet one vital defect as dramatic criticism—his comments apply to the art of a novelist, not to that of a playwright.
The arguments brought forward in the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy are a striking illustration of this imperfect knowledge. While the Baconians pride themselves on discovering a similarity in the phraseology or philosophical sentiments of the two writers, they forget that Shakespeare was preeminent in the writing of drama—an art which is as difficult to master as that of a painter or a musician, and in which the hand of an amateur can be as easily detected; an art for which Bacon showed no aptitude, and for which he had had no training. A novelist who describes characters vividly was once asked why she seldom made them talk. Her answer was: “I have little talent for writing dialogue; when my characters speak they often cease to be the same people.” Undoubtedly Bacon would have given a similar answer to anyone attributing to him the plays of Shakespeare. Moreover, there is a wide difference between the art of writing dialogue for a novel and for a play. The novelist has innumerable means of escape from difficulties which beset the dramatist. The skill required for successfully conducting the story of a play by means limited to the use of dialogue makes the dramatist’s art one of the most difficult to succeed in, and puts it outside the reach of all but the few and the specially gifted. To illustrate Shakespeare’s constructive art it is only necessary to look at the old play of “King John,” on which his own play is based. Then, to take an instance from a later play—“Twelfth Night”—Viola, when first seen on the stage, is a castaway, rescued by sailors. After an interval of one short scene she reappears as Cesario, the Duke’s favourite page. How can the gap be most naturally bridged over? Many dramatists would add dialogue detached from the story, but Shakespeare gives the necessary information in three words, which flash a picture upon the spectator’s mind. Valentine says to Viola as they both enter the stage together: “If the Duke continue these favours towards you, Cesario, you are like to be much advanced,” etc. In scheming the sequence of incidents, and in suppressing explanatory narrative, lies the art of the dramatist. This result is not obtained without a good deal of practice. Even Shakespeare could not have written a play so compact as “Twelfth Night” at a period when he was writing “The Two Gentlemen of Verona.”
In his young days Shakespeare must certainly have read “Gorboduc,” with its five acts, its five dumb shows, and its chorus; he may, perhaps, have seen it revived at Greenwich Palace, or elsewhere, and have seen other plays of the kind which were written in five acts by academicians—amateurs who were anxious to air their learning before Queen Bess at the Universities or at the Inns of Court. Then there was Ben Jonson at hand to instruct his elder rival on the superiority of Latin comedy. Chapman, too, who was highly esteemed by clergy and scholars, was within call to point out to “artless Will” the merits of Senecan tragedy. In fact, the Bard of Avon had good reason to know why his playhouse dramas were despised by the learned, who, however, were not justified in presuming that he was ignorant of classical conventions simply because he chose to ignore them.
No doubt it was possible in Shakespeare’s time to write plays in five acts for the public stage. We know that at the Rose and Fortune theatres the action of the play was often suspended to allow of dancing and singing, though whether these intervals for interludes came after the termination of each act it is difficult to decide.
But if the four choruses in “Henry V.” were intended by Shakespeare to denote act divisions, they are not so marked in the first folio; while “The Tempest,” which may have been divided into acts by Shakespeare, has stage-directions which suggest that it was not written originally for representation in the public theatre, but for the Court.
It must also be remembered that of the plays wholly written by Shakespeare, with the one exception of “The Tempest,” all are so constructed that characters who leave the stage at the end of an episode are never the first to reappear, a reappearance which would involve a short pause and an empty stage; nor, even, does a character who ends one of the acts marked in the folio ever begin the one that follows, as Ben Jonson directs shall be done in his tragedy of “Sejanus” (1616). Can we reasonably suppose, then, that a method so consistently carried out by Shakespeare throughout all his plays respecting the exit and the re-entrance of characters was due to mere accident, and not to deliberate intention on the part of the dramatist? And in acted drama the exact position where a pause comes in the movement of the story is a matter of importance to the proper understanding of the play. Yet, in the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays the divisions made are so irrelevant to the story that Heminge and Condell may have considered them as merely ornamental. It may never have occurred to them that the divisions would some day be used as an authority for actors as well as for readers. The result has been disastrous to both. A slavish adherence by the actor to these unfortunate divisions for over two hundred years, has caused the representation of Shakespeare’s plays on the stage to be in most cases unintelligent, if not almost unintelligible; while, on the other hand, it has for an equally long period been the means of misleading scholars as to Shakespeare’s method of dramatic construction. Until editors ignore the acts and scenes in the folio edition of 1623 and take the form of the play as it appears in the quartos—that is, without divisions—no progress can be made with the study of Shakespeare’s dramatic art. It is now more generally recognized, especially by American scholars, that the folio divisions are a real stumbling-block and must go overboard. In some of the early comedies, perhaps, pauses can be made where the acts are marked, in the folio, without serious injury to the representation, but the comedies were written to be acted without break, and gain immensely when so given. Besides, the lengths of the present divisions are absurdly unequal. The last act of “Love’s Labour’s Lost” is more than twice the length of the first act, and nearly four times the length of the second and third acts. In a theatre, it should be the shortest act. Then, the “Comedy of Errors” was acted as an after-supper interlude at Gray’s Inn. Time there would not allow of its having four intervals. Throughout Shakespeare’s early and middle periods his plays in their dramatic form of construction provide no opportunity for regular intervals, nor should they ever have been divided into five acts. To put more than one break into “Romeo and Juliet,” “The Merchant of Venice,” “Macbeth,” “King Lear,” “Hamlet” (acting version) injures the drama. Shakespeare rarely cares to draw breath until he has reached the crisis, nor should the reader be expected to do so. And to halt for talk and refreshments on the eve of a crisis is to play havoc with the story. The crisis comes in the “Merchant of Venice” at that part of the play marked in the folio, Act III., Scene i. But it is almost impossible for an actor to be animated in a scene following an entr’acte. The story of Macready and the ladder is a well known instance. The pause, if any, should come after the scene and not before it.
It cannot be urged too often that Shakespeare invented his dramatic construction to suit his own particular stage. And but for the special conditions of his playhouse, Shakespearian drama could never have come into being; for Shakespeare’s genius was not adapted to writing plays with intervals for music, as was done at Court. Unity of design was his aim. “Scene individable” is his motto. The internal evidence of the plays themselves proves this.
Dr. Johnson, then, was right to contend that Shakespeare wrote his plays as they were first printed “in one unbroken continuity,” but to infer that “they ought now to be exhibited with short pauses interposed as often as the scene is changed, or any considerable time is required to pass,” shows that he failed to grasp the real object for which Shakespeare adopted the continuous movement. An Elizabethan audience was absorbed by the story of the play, and thought little about lapse of time or change of place. There was only one locality recognized, and that one was the platform, which projected to the centre of the auditorium, where the story was recited. There was, besides, only one period, and that was “now,” meaning the moment at which the events were being talked about or acted. All inconsistencies, then, that are apparent in the text, arising from change of place or break in the time, should be ignored in representing the play. It is no advantage to rearrange the order of the scenes, or to lower the curtain, or to make a pause in the progress of the story in order to call attention to change of place or interval of time. Whatever information Shakespeare wished the audience to have on these matters, he put into the mouths of his characters, and he expected the audience to accept it without any questioning or further illustration by actual presentation. Elizabethan folk-songs are sung without pausing between the verses; in this way attention is fixed on the story, and Shakespeare obtains the same result by dispensing with the empty stage.
Capell long ago pointed out the real difficulty, when he wrote in his preface: “Neither can the representation be managed nor the order and thread of the fable be properly conceived by the reader till the question of acts and scenes be adjusted.” Unfortunately, Capell could prescribe no remedy. To this day these irregular divisions continue, and all our modern editions need reprinting and re-editing. One of the debts we owe to Shakespeare is to present his plays in their authentic form. This is due to him for what he was and for what he has done for us, as our greatest national poet and dramatist.
Some Mistakes of the Actors.
In Shakespeare’s time the relations existing between the author and his actors were often strained. Those who interpreted the characters were blamed for more faults than their own, while the author, who was out of sight, had his reputation depending upon the skill of his interpreters. The actors, besides, were the author’s paymasters, and often gave less for a new play than they paid for a silk doublet, while at the same time they were the absolute owners of all the dramas they produced. It was natural, then, for authors to taunt the actors with being men who thrived by speaking words which “better wits had framed.”
The hired player, however, fared no better than the authors, and it was only those actors who had the right to pool the theatre takings who became rich. Before Shakespeare was forty years of age, he was earning a competent income out of his shares in two playhouses. No other dramatist of his time occupied so fortunate a position, nor probably one more isolated. As a tradesman’s son, brought up at a grammar school only, he would have no standing among scholars, and as a writer of plays he was the “upstart crow,” taking the bread out of the mouths of those who had paid for a college education. Then the historical dramas which brought the Globe fame and fortune were not calculated to please at Court, because neither the Queen nor the nobility cared to see their ancestors walking the public stages, unmasked, showing authority robbed of its sincerity and of its sanctity. Across the Thames stood the Blackfriars, where the children of the Chapel Royal, backed by royal favour, were rapidly becoming the attraction among the leaders of fashion and culture. These patrons upheld a class of entertainment with which Shakespeare had no sympathy. So the master spirit of the Elizabethan drama, like Beethoven, withdrew from the crowd to work out his own destiny, and to perfect himself in an art that fascinated him, and for which his practical life in the theatre, and his independence, gave him exceptional opportunity for experiment. During his last ten years in London he wrote some dozen or more plays, all of them of supreme merit. That they were dramas far in advance of the requirements of the day is probable, since few of them were printed during the poet’s lifetime. Some of them, perhaps, were acted “not above once.” He had outgrown, indeed, the theatrical taste of the day, and now only cared for plays which were “well digested in the scenes,” meaning well constructed. But this was an achievement which no dramatist of his time attempted, unless it was Ben Jonson, who wrote artificial comedy after the classical models. Shakespeare, however, wanted the art of the theatre to imitate Nature, and he contrived to make speech and story appear natural; and, indeed, his contemporaries mistook this art for Nature, and thought it the work of an untutored mind and an unskilled hand. Even to-day many actors are under the impression that Shakespeare would have sanctioned as improvements the liberties now taken on the stage with his plays. Perhaps, also, his own fellow-actors failed to interpret his dramas entirely in accordance with his wishes; and yet his art is so vital and so vividly impressed on the printed page of the “authentic copies” that there is little justification for misrepresenting it. There is an anecdote about Mrs. Siddons, to the effect that when again reading over the part of Lady Macbeth, after her retirement from the stage, she was amazed to find some new points in the character “which had never struck her before”! A confession which would seem incredible were it not known how apt English actors are to base the study of their parts not on the text, but on stage traditions, which often are valueless, because unauthorized. Yet no actor should defend a conception of character which is shown to be at variance with the author’s words.
The only copies of Shakespeare’s plays which can with any authority be called acting-versions are the quartos, published during the poet’s lifetime, and these are not acting-versions in the modern sense of the term, because, with the exception of textual errors, or abbreviations of dialogue, there is no shortening of the play by the omission of entire scenes or characters. The early quartos, with the notable exceptions of the 1599 “Romeo and Juliet,” the 1604 “Hamlet,” and the 1609 “Troilus and Cressida,” have the appearance of being made up from actors’ parts, or taken down by shorthand writers during performances. In consequence, they are less esteemed by the literary expert than are the plays as they appear printed in the first folio; yet to the actors they provide information which cannot be found elsewhere. That in some of these quartos the text is corrupt may be explained by the difficulty of taking down dialogue spoken rapidly from the stage, but at the same time it is unlikely that the note-takers went out of their way to describe any movement which they did not actually see carried out by the actors. From the title-page of “The Merchant of Venice” it is evident that the copyist saw the play acted differently from the way it is now acted. Take, for instance, the headline which is worded: “The comicall Historie of the Merchant of Venice”; and the title-page, which sets forth the “extreme crueltie of Shylocke the Jewe towards the sayd Merchant, in cutting a just pound of his flesh, and the obtayning of Portia by the choyse of three chests.” These two stories, which are continued in alternate scenes throughout most of the play, were to the Elizabethans regarded as of equal importance. To-day the title-page would have to be rewritten, and might run thus: “The tragicall Historie of the Jewe of Venice, with the extreme injustice of Portia towards the sayd Jewe in denying him the right to cut a just pound of the Merchant’s flesh, together with the obtayning of the rich heiress by the prodigal Bassanio.” Over the Shylock controversy enough ink has been wasted without adding more, but the shortening of all the Portia scenes, and the omission of the Prince of Aragon, one of the three suitors, and one who provides excellent comedy, are indefensible mutilations.
The title-page of the 1600 quarto of “Henry V.” mentions Henry’s “battell fought at Agin Court, in France, togither with Auntient Pistoll.” “Swaggering Pistoll,” like Falstaff, had become a delight to the town. The play is, in fact, not a “chronicle history,” but a slice out of history, and not of well-made history either, since the evils of Henry’s unjust wars are not touched upon. Then Shakespeare’s King is an endless talker, while in reality he was the most silent of men. It was ostensibly a “Jingo” play, written to open the Globe playhouse with a patriotic flourish of trumpets. Its object, besides, was to please those Londoners who had not forgotten 1588, when Englishmen faced a similar ordeal to that at Agincourt, and came out victorious, not because they had the means but the men. The interest of this drama, to the Elizabethan playgoer, depended on the knowledge that a handful of starved and ragged soldiers had won a decisive battle over an army which was its superior in numbers and equipment, and contained all the pride and chivalry of the French nation. And the stage-direction in the folio indicates the contrast thus: “Enter the King and his poore Souldiers.” On the modern stage, however, this direction is ignored, though perhaps it has never been noticed. The whole evening is taken up by the evolutions of a handsome young prince, gorgeously dressed, and spotlessly clean, newly come from his military tailor, together with a large number of equally well-dressed and well-fed soldiers, who tramp after him on and off the stage, not a penny the worse for all the hardships they are supposed to have encountered! Of the French episodes two are omitted and the rest mutilated, while no prominence is given to them, nor is the numerical superiority of the French indicated. Nothing is seen of its army beyond the leaders and their one or two attendants, who are thrust into the contracted space of a front scene. This seems rather an upside down way to act the play!
Among the early quartos, the two most interesting to the actor are the first and second editions of “Romeo and Juliet,” because they show how Shakespeare adapted his art to the stage of his time. From them it may be inferred that characters on the stage did not always retire from view when they had finished speaking their lines. This, perhaps, was a necessity due to the presence of spectators on the platform, who made, as it were, an outer ring round the forefront or acting part of the stage. Romeo therefore did not leave the stage in the balcony episode, where Juliet is made to call him back again. He merely retired to the side of the platform, among the gallants. When Romeo hears of his banishment, the direction to the Nurse is “Enter and Knocke,” which means that she comes in at the door of the tiring-house and remains at one side of the stage, probably knocking the floor with her crutch. After three knocks there is again the direction “Enter,” when, on hearing her cue, she moves from the side into the centre of the stage to join in the dialogue. In this same quarto she and not the Friar is directed to snatch the dagger from Romeo, an evidence that this so-called “traditional-business,” still in use, is not of Shakespeare’s time. Another stage-direction shows how characters denoted change of locality merely by walking round the inner stage. No doubt this “business” was done to keep the spectators on the stage from chattering, which might easily happen whenever the actors left the forefront of the platform.
With regard to the first quarto of “Hamlet,” and its probable history, something will be said later on. But it might be well here to call attention to the three stage-directions in this quarto, which have dropped out of all the subsequent editions, and which elucidate the context. Ophelia, in her “mad” scene, did not bring in flowers, but had a lute in her hands. There would be no need for the Queen so minutely to describe Ophelia’s flowers at the time of her death if she had been previously seen with the garlands. The ghost, when in the Queen’s chamber, wore a dressing-gown, not armour, probably the same gown he wore at the time of his death; Hamlet is overwhelmed with horror at this pitiful sight of his father. And Ophelia’s body was followed to the grave by villagers and a solitary priest, who took no further part in the ceremony.
Elizabethan players had an advantage over modern actors in that they could more readily appreciate the construction of Shakespeare’s plays. They knew that the dramatist’s characters mutually supported each other within a definite dramatic structure, and that it was the business of the actor to preserve the author’s framework. This attitude towards the play grew naturally out of the conditions belonging to their theatre, for unless the plot were adhered to, confusion would have arisen in the matter of entrances and exits, causing the continuity of the movement to be interrupted.
After the Restoration, when the public theatres were reopened, the “fable” ceased to have the same importance attached to it by the actors, and attention became more and more centred on those characters which were good acting parts. In 1773 appeared a collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays, “As they are now performed at the Theatres Royal, Regulated from the Prompt Books of each House.” The volumes were dedicated to Garrick, whom Bell, the compiler, pronounced to be “the best illustrator of, and the best living comment on, Shakespeare that ever has appeared or possibly ever will grace the British stage”; a statement which is qualified by the remark of Capell that “Garrick spoke many speeches of Shakespeare as if he did not understand them.” Garrick, however, expresses his fear lest—
“the prunings, transpositions, or other alterations which in his province as a manager he had often found necessary to make or adopt with regard to the text, for the convenience of representation or accommodation to the powers and capacities of his performers, might be misconstrued into a critical presumption of offering to the literati a reformed and more correct edition of our author’s works; this being by no means his intention.”
The reader need only examine one of the plays in Bell’s “Companion to the Theatre” to understand Garrick’s modesty as to his “prunings.” Take the actor’s stage-version of “Macbeth”—one of Bell’s notes states, “This play, even amidst the fine sentiments it contains, would shrink before criticism did not Macbeth and his lady afford such uncommon scope for acting merit. Upon the whole, it is a fine drama with some gross blemishes.” Apparently the “blemishes” are only found in those scenes where Macbeth or his wife do not appear, for Bell continues:
“The part of the porter is properly omitted....”
“The flat, uninteresting scene, between Lenox and another useless Lord, is properly omitted....”
“Here Shakespeare, as if the vigorous exertion of his faculties in the preceding scene required relaxation, has given us a most trifling, superfluous dialogue between Lady Macduff, Rosse, and her son, merely that another murder may be committed on the stage. We heartily concur in and approve of striking out the greater part of it....”
“There are about eighty lines of this scene (Macduff’s) omitted, which, retained, would render it painfully tedious, and, indeed, we think them as little deserving of the closet as of the stage,” etc.
It does not seem to have struck Garrick that the scenes he “pruned” might have some significance in the scheme of the author’s drama independently of their individual characteristics.
To take another instance. In Garrick’s version of “Romeo and Juliet,” reprinted in Dolby’s “British Theatre” (1823), the following paragraph is inserted underneath the list of characters:
“The scenery in ‘Romeo and Juliet’ at Covent Garden this season (1823) is very grand. That of the ‘Funeral of Juliet’ is truly solemn and impressive. The architectural arrangement of the interior of the church is most chaste and appropriate: the slow approach of the funeral procession, the tolling of the bell, and the heart-saddening tones of the choristers, swelling in all the sublime richness of the minor key, make an impression on the feelings of the auditory which can never be forgotten.”
Here, then, are illustrations, in two plays, of methods adopted by actors—methods still in use—which are a direct interference with the poet’s dramatic intentions. They are methods, moreover, which Elizabethan actors would have regarded as unintelligent, because they turned good drama into bad drama, and created inconsistencies between character and situation. The earliest acting-version of “Romeo and Juliet” (1597) has some eight hundred lines less than the unshortened play (1599), and yet there is no entire scene omitted, nor any of the characters; and those scenes which have dropped out of the play, on the modern stage, are those least curtailed in the 1597 version. In the first acting-version of “Hamlet,” published in 1603, there is still more striking evidence of the Elizabethan actor’s skill in compressing a play of Shakespeare’s when it was necessary. Not only was the play considerably shortened, without the omission of scenes and characters, but it was slightly reconstructed. Herr Emile Devrient, the greatest exponent of the part of Hamlet in Germany, contended that this first quarto was a better constructed play than either the 1604 version or that of the folio. In fact, with the faulty dialogue amended from the perfect text, this 1603 actor’s copy, which has 1,757 fewer lines than in the full play, and 557 lines less than in the modern acting edition, would be the best model from which to shorten the play so as to bring it within the limit of a two hours’ representation. That Shakespeare sanctioned either the compression or the reconstruction for use in the Globe is not likely. But that he tolerated the alterations is possible, since he would recognize that his own less regular plot, though more artistically suited as the framework for Hamlet’s irregular mind, was too subtle and elaborate to be effective on the public stage.
With regard to acting-versions, therefore, it may be contended that the interests of the author are more often than not opposed to those of the modern actor in so far as the latter considers the author’s drama to be tedious whenever it fails to enhance the acting merits of some particular character or characters in the play. Thus it is questionable whether, in the absence of the author, the actors are the persons best qualified to make stage-versions of his dramas. Their point of view is rarely the same as that of the author, and if it is necessary to shorten a play they can hardly be expected to undertake the work entirely to the satisfaction of the author, nor yet in the interests of the public, since the value of the fable may or may not be a matter of moment to an actor. If, then, Shakespeare’s plays are a valuable asset to the artistic wealth of the nation, the amount of “pruning” they require for the stage should be determined by competent experts. Unfortunately, actors believe that a scholar is not qualified to advise on the matter, owing to his lack of what they call “a sense of the theatre.” This “sense” would no doubt be differently interpreted by different actors. Broadly speaking, it may be taken to mean the ability to forecast what degree of emotion or sympathy certain incidents can arouse in an audience when they are seen represented on the stage. Pope rejected the Gonzalo dialogue in the second act of “The Tempest,” asserting that it was not Shakespeare’s because courtiers who had been just shipwrecked on a desert island would not indulge in idle gossip! Here Pope missed the theatre point of view. The audience see in the first act an old man who once had been a King, but who was cruelly and unjustly thrust out of his kingdom, and exposed with his baby daughter in a frail and rotten bark to the mercy of the perilous ocean. Moreover, it hears that the very men who did this wrong are now themselves shipwrecked on this enchanted island, where Prospero is living. What the audience is curious to see, then, in the second act, is not noblemen who are suffering from shipwreck, but ignoble men, who merit the contempt of those who look upon them, and who deserve the just rebuke they receive from the man who is once more restored to his rights. The question as to what these noblemen have themselves suffered in the course of being shipwrecked, Shakespeare rightly judged was not one that an audience, under the circumstances, could be interested in. Then, again, to take a textual illustration from “King Lear” quoted by Steevens, the commentator. He writes in his “Advertisement to the Reader”:
“The dialogue might, indeed, sometimes be lengthened by yet other insertions than have been made (from the quartos), without advantage either to its spirit or beauty, as in the following instance:
“‘Lear. No.
“‘Kent. Yes.
“‘Lear. No, I say.
“‘Kent. I say, yea.’
“Here the quartos add:
“‘Lear. No, no; they would not.
“‘Kent. Yes; they have.’
“By the admission of the negation and affirmation, would any new idea be gained?”
The answer given by the actor is, “Certainly! The added words from the quartos give the idea of reality and character.” It is inconceivable that Shakespeare, himself an actor, omitted the additional lines. Without this reiteration, the expression of Lear’s amazement at the indignity put upon his servant cannot be adequately tuned by the actor, nor yet be consistent with his character. This, then, is the dilemma with regard to stage-versions; scholars are hampered in their judgment by want of knowledge of the art of the theatre; and actors by their bias for good acting parts, or, in other words, for parts which are always in view of the audience.
As to elocution, it may be well to recall what an Antwerp merchant who had for many years resided in London said of the English people, about the year 1588. He then observed that “they do not speak from the chest like the Germans, but prattle only with the tongue.” The word “prattle” is used in the same sense by Shakespeare in his play of “Richard the Second.”6 In the “Stage Player’s Complaint,” we find an actor making use of the expression, “Oh, the times when my tongue hath ranne as fast upon the Sceane as a Windebanke’s pen over the ocean.” Added to this, there is the celebrated speech to the players, in which Hamlet directs the actors to speak “trippingly on the tongue.” There can be no doubt, therefore, that Shakespeare’s verse was spoken on the stage of the Globe easily and rapidly. And the actor had the advantage of standing well within the building in a position now occupied by the stalls, nor were audiences then stowed away under deep projecting galleries. But unless English actors can recover the art of speaking Shakespeare’s verse, his plays will never again enjoy the favour they once had. Poetry may require a greater elevation of style in its elocution than prose, but in either case the fundamental condition is that of representing life, and as George Lewes ably puts it, “all obvious violations of the truths of life are errors in art.” In the delivery of verse, therefore, on the stage, the audience should never be made to feel that the tones are unusual. They should still follow the laws of speaking, and not those of singing. But our actors, who excel in modern plays by the truth and force of their presentation of life, when they appear in Shakespeare make use of an elocution that no human being was ever known to indulge in. They employ, besides, a redundancy of emphasis which destroys all meaning of the words and all resemblance to natural speech. It is necessary to bear in mind that, when dramatic dialogue is written in verse, there are more words put into a sentence than are needed to convey the actual thought that is uppermost in the speaker’s mind; in order, therefore, to give his delivery an appearance of spontaneity, the actor should arrest the attention of the listener by the accentuation of those words which convey the central idea or thought of the speech he is uttering, and should keep in the background, by means of modulation and deflection of voice, the words with which that thought is ornamented. Macbeth should say:
“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; that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which, being taught, RETURN
To plague the INVENTOR.”
If the emphasis fall upon the words marked, then these and no others should be the words inflected; but modern actors, if they inflect the right words, inflect the wrong ones too, until it becomes impossible for the listener to identify the sense by the sound. This artificial way of speaking verse seems traditional to the eighteenth century. David Garrick and Edmund Kean no doubt used a more natural delivery, and also Mrs. Siddons, though some of her exaggerations of emphasis probably were never heard at the Globe. Shakespeare would hardly have endorsed her reading of Lady Macbeth’s words, “Give me the daggers!” There was nobody else to whom Macbeth could give them. At moments of tension, speech is always direct. A lady, tête à tête with her husband at the breakfast-table, enjoying an altercation over the contents of the newspaper, would surely indicate the natural emphasis by exclaiming, “Give me the newspaper!” words that can, in this way, be spoken in half the time that Mrs. Siddons took to speak hers. The two and a half hours in which a play in Shakespeare’s time was often acted would not be possible to-day, even without delays for acts and scenes, with the methods of elocution now in vogue. It is legitimate for Romeo to exclaim in his farewell to Juliet:
“Eyes, look your last!
Arms, take your last embrace!”
or he may say:
“Eyes, look your LAST!
Arms, take your last EMBRACE!”
but it is not correct to say:
“Eyes, look your LAST!
Arms, take your last EMBRACE!”
which every Romeo persists in saying to-day; and this method of duplicating emphasis, being used by all the actors throughout the whole play, the time taken up in speaking it is at once doubled. Hence the need for excessive “prunings.”
To sum up the arguments: Shakespeare’s dramatic art, which is unique of its kind, cannot to-day be properly understood or appreciated on the stage for the following reasons: (1) Because editors print the plays as if they were five-act dramas, which they are not; (2) because actors, in their stage versions, mutilate the “fable,” and interpolate pictorial effects where none are intended; (3) because, also, actors use a faulty and artificial elocution, unsuited to the poet’s verse. These causes, combined, oust Shakespeare’s original plays from the theatre, and impose in their place pseudo-classical dramas which are not of his making, nor of his time. To remedy this evil it is necessary to insist that the early quartos alone represent Shakespeare’s form of construction and his method of representation, and that for the purpose of determining the text these same quartos should be collated with the first folio, with occasional reference to modern editions. Cheap facsimiles of the quartos as well as the folio should be accessible to actors, and from these an attempt should be made to standardize stage-versions of Shakespeare’s most popular plays, and these stage-versions should be the joint work of scholars and actors.
Perhaps what is important for the general public to recognize is that the acting-versions of Shakespeare’s plays, the interpretation given to his characters, and the actor’s “readings” have altered but little during the last two hundred years, so that the performances given on the stage to-day are chiefly founded upon traditions which never came into touch with Elizabethan times. More and more, therefore, must it be realized that if an actor wishes to interpret the plays intelligently, he must shut his eyes to all that has taken place on the stage since the poet’s time, turning to Shakespeare’s text and trusting to that alone for inspiration.
The Character of Lady Macbeth.
I should never think, for instance, of contesting an actress’s right to represent Lady Macbeth as a charming, insinuating woman, if she really sees the figure that way. I may be surprised at such a vision; but so far from being scandalized, I am positively thankful for the extension of knowledge, of pleasure, that she is able to open to me.—Henry James.
The introduction of women players led to one of the evils connected with the star system. So long as boys acted the women’s parts there was no danger of any woman’s character being made over-prominent to the extent of unbalancing the play. But when Mrs. Siddons became famous by her impersonation of Lady Macbeth, it may be contended, without prejudice to the talent of the actress, that the character ceased to represent Shakespeare’s point of view. This is the more to be regretted in view of Mrs. Siddons’ confession that her personality was not suited to the part. There was, besides, another drawback unfortunately in that, during the eighteenth century, the part of Lady Macduff dropped out of the playbill, thus removing from the play the one person in it whose presence was necessary for the proper understanding of Lady Macbeth’s character. The appearance of Lady Macduff on the stage affords opportunity for the reflection that Duncan’s murder would never have taken place had she been Macbeth’s wife. Yet she, too, has shortcomings to which she falls a victim, for when the assassins are at her door she exclaims:
“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?”
Now, admirable as this reflection is from an ethical standpoint, it is not appropriate to the moment, and in Lady Macbeth’s eyes it would have been “dangerous folly” to talk moral platitudes at such a time. In fact, if the mistress of Inverness Castle had been placed in Lady Macduff’s cruel position, it is more than likely she would have had the courage and the energy to save her own life and those of her children from the fury of Macbeth. Nor is it inconceivable that if Lady Macbeth had married a man of stronger moral fibre than her husband, she might have lived a useful life, loved and respected by all who knew her. And yet, unhappily for both women, neither Macbeth nor Macduff were fine types of manhood.
Another idea which needs to be cleared out of the way is that of the unusual enormity of Lady Macbeth’s crime in contriving the death of a man who was her guest. Shakespeare’s audience knew that a sovereign was never immune from assassination. Queen Elizabeth’s life became the mark for assassin after assassin. Moreover, the Catholics contended that “good Queen Bess,” by beheading Mary Stuart, had murdered a woman who was her guest and who had come into her kingdom assured of protection. There was something childish about Duncan’s credulity in face of the treachery he had already experienced from the first Thane of Cawdor. In a monarch whose position was open to attack from the jealousy of his nobles, Duncan’s conduct showed an almost incredible want of caution. In fact, it was his unguarded confidence which brought about his death. No onlooker in the Globe playhouse ever thought the murder of this King at Inverness to be an improbable or unusual occurrence. And this inference suggests another of even more importance, namely, the period in which Shakespeare’s tragedy is placed. When the poet-dramatist demanded that his actors should hold the mirror up to Nature, it was not the nature of the Greeks, nor of the Romans, nor of the early Britons that he meant. The spirit of the Italian Renaissance, with its humanism and intellectuality, had taken too strong a hold upon the imagination of Englishmen to allow of their playgoers being interested in the puppets of a bygone age. Shakespeare had no need to look beyond his own time to find his Lady Macbeth. There were many women still existing who were uninfluenced by the didactic teaching of the Puritans and their love of moral introspection. Queen Elizabeth herself was an instance. As the historian Green points out, we track her through her tortuous maze of lying and intrigue until we find that she revelled in byways and crooked ways, and yet was adored by her subjects for a womanliness she, in reality, never possessed. And this love of shuffling and lack of all genuine religious emotion failed utterly to blur the brightness of the national ideal. Or, to take her rival, Mary Stuart. The rough Scottish nobles owned that there was in her some enchantment whereby men were bewitched. “Her beauty,” writes Green, “her exquisite grace of manner, her generosity of temper and warmth of affection, her frankness of speech, her sensibility, her gaiety, her womanly tears, her manlike courage, the play and freedom of her nature... flung a spell over friend or foe which has only deepened with the lapse of years.” And yet this piece of feminine fascination visited her sick husband, Darnley, in his lonely house near Holyrood Palace, in which he was lodged by her order, kissed him, bade him farewell, and rode gaily back to a dance within two hours of the terrible explosion which deprived him of his life, a murder that was attributed to Bothwell, and at which Mary herself may easily have connived.
And so it was with Lady Macbeth. Murder, to those who were not injured by it, was no crime in her opinion, and excited neither terror nor remorse. She was to the last unconscious of being criminal or sinful. Her life was the playing of a red-handed game by one who thought herself innocent. For this reason she could walk placidly through any evil she contemplated. She knew that her persuasive power over men lay in her womanliness, and that in this there was nothing compromising. Unlike her husband, her face betrayed no moral conflict. The Puritan spirit had never penetrated her own nature. Whatever her outward religion might be, she was at heart a materialist, not from conviction, but from shallowness, due to the absence of all the higher powers of reflection and imagination. Banquo is dead, and therefore she knows that it is impossible for him to come out of his grave to torment his murderer. It is only necessary to wash the blood from her hands, and that will clear away the consequences. Even the “spirits,” to which her husband has alluded; those which she mockingly invokes to her feminine aid, have no reality to her, because they have no material whereabouts. So that her husband’s talk about conscience and retribution is unintelligible to her. She knows that what he would do “wrongly” he would like to do “holily,” because she has heard about the Ten Commandments; but these things have no meaning for her, they do not come within her experience. With her limited outlook, the beginning and end of everything necessary for her husband’s success in life is that he should be practical, inventive, and never appear embarrassed.
The most marked feature, then, in Lady Macbeth’s character is her femininity, and Shakespeare dwells upon this trait throughout her career. In the first place, no one at Inverness Castle suspects that she is accessory to the terrible crime. Macduff is distressed at the mere thought of telling her what has happened. The woman who would have been trampled under foot in the courtyard on that eventful night, if the truth about her had been known, becomes the centre of immediate anxiety when she faints, or feigns to faint, to rescue her husband from a perilous position. Duncan could not find words to express his delight at her charm as a hostess. The guests at the royal coronation banquet grieve that she should be exposed to a trying ordeal through her husband’s extraordinary behaviour. The doctor who overhears her dying confessions is a “mated” and “amazed” and incredulous at the thought of her self-implications. One voice speaks of her with harshness, and it is that of the son of the murdered King, and then only at the close of the play. If, again, we turn to her own reflections, it is always her woman’s weakness which she dreads may defeat her purpose. Murder is something foreign to her temperament; the details are ugly and revolting; the sight of blood may unnerve her. She can do the crime herself if she can accomplish it without seeing the wound the dagger will make; but she evidently imagines that her husband, who has killed men in battle, can do it better, and this conviction becomes a moral certainty when she is confronted with the pathetic figure of that trusting, white face, with its whiter hair, so like her own father’s. When the fatal moment arrives she cannot meet her husband in her normal mood, but has recourse to the wine-cup, not because she shrinks from the notion of murder, but from dislike for the details of the operation. She has, besides, all the little partialities of a woman who delights in the beauty of the innocent flower and in perfumes of Arabia. Then the thought of being a Queen and wearing a real crown is an intense delight to her. Macbeth knew of her weakness for finery when he sought her approval of the deed; it was his bribe for her help. And women of Lady Macbeth’s temperament do not care to be disappointed of their pleasures. To break promise in these matters, she tells her husband, is as cruel as it would be for her to kill her own child, that being a crime of which she is incapable, for she is a devoted mother.
Nor must the marked contrast between her attitude before and after the crime be overlooked. At its inception, murder is a mere means to an end, which creates no misgivings in her mind. She sees “the future in the instant,” a future which gives her “the golden round,” and bestows on her husband “sovereign sway and masterdom.” But no sooner is the crime committed than her optimism fails her, for her husband seems no nearer to “masterdom” than he was before. After the coronation there comes her tragic reflection that the murder was a mistake. Unfortunately for her, it was worse than a mistake; it was a blunder for which her husband deposes her authority. No longer does he listen to her counsels, and although she has not lost any of her charm or her womanliness, her spell over him has gone for ever. Never again can she say, “From this time such I account thy love,” but merely ejaculates, “Did you send to him, sir?” No such cruel awakening was in store for her husband. He knew from the first that his crime must bring retribution and arouse the anger of the gods; but she, for her part, foresaw no harm and no consequences. It is the shock of her failure which paralyzes her power for further action. She is not repentant, because she is unconscious of having sinned, and to the last she is at a loss to understand why murdering an old man in his bed has divorced her husband’s affection from her, and turned him into a bloodthirsty tyrant. Her brain is not big enough to take in what all these things mean, and under strain of anxiety and disappointment her mind gives way. This, then, is the Lady Macbeth that Mrs. Siddons identifies as “a character which, I believe, is generally allowed to be most captivating to the other sex, fair, feminine, nay, perhaps even fragile. Such a combination only, respectable in energy and strength of mind and captivating in feminine loveliness, could have composed a charm of such potency as to fascinate the mind of a hero so dauntless as Macbeth.”
There is no portrait in Shakespeare’s gallery of women more generally misunderstood than this one, the reason, perhaps, being that the poet has not been credited with the desire or experience to draw a type of woman so obviously disingenuous. But no one can read Shakespeare aright who thinks that the men and women who live in our age do not resemble those who lived in his time. Not until we read the Lady Macduff scene carefully can we grasp the kind of woman Shakespeare had in his mind. Then it will be evident that the real criminal in the play is Macbeth, whose conscience warns him that “unnatural deeds beget unnatural troubles,” and who, against his better judgment, allows himself to be influenced, out of connubial love, into an action of which he knows his wife to be incapable of foreseeing the consequences. When disaster follows, we can set up that “womanly defence” for her and say, “she meant no harm.” There is no such appeal possible for her husband, who is condemned from the first out of his own mouth.
Shakespeare, it must be remembered, wrote the play of “Macbeth” probably about 1605, when the Globe actors were still competing with the children at Blackfriars, who, with their fine music, gorgeous costumes, and “candlelight,” attracted the well-to-do people of the town. In this tragedy, therefore, Shakespeare revives interest in the Faustus legend, once so popular at a rival house. The notion that man could set himself up in opposition to the Deity was due to the teaching of the Reformation. If man could defy the supremacy of the Pope, might he not challenge also Omniscience Itself? Having once tasted of the Tree of Knowledge, Faustus will not rest until he can know all, can do all, and dare all:
“Till swoln with cunning of a self-conceit,
His waxen wings did mount above his reach,
And, melting, heavens conspir’d his overthrow.”
And Hecate prophesies of Macbeth that—
“He shall spurn fate, scorn death, and bear
His hopes ’bove wisdom, grace, and fear;
And you all know security
Is mortals’ chiefest enemy.”
To playgoers at the Globe, then, the interest in the play of “Macbeth” lay in the man’s daring attempt to defeat the supernatural. The scheme of drama requires that Macbeth, like Faustus, shall be the pivot of the play. Of necessity, then, it is an error of judgment for a stage-manager to allow the part of Lady Macbeth to be overacted. Apart from the witches, there are only two women in the play, neither of whom are of more than common mould. They are alike in this, that both are by nature domestic, and appreciate family ties; while in other respects they are finely contrasted, and represent the old and the new type of character which must have so interested dramatists in Shakespeare’s time—that of the Renaissance or Italian type, upholding the doctrine of expediency; and that of the Reformation, demanding obedience to conscience.
Shakespeare’s Jew and Marlowe’s Christians.7
In the opinion of Heinrich Heine, Shylock, as a typical study of Judaism, was merely a caricature. If this is a correct estimate of the character, then Shakespeare’s Jew is the Elizabethan Christian’s notion of an infidel in much the same way as the modern stage Paddy is the Englishman’s idea of an Irishman. Shakespeare, in fact, thrusts the conventional usurer of the old Latin comedy into a play of love and chance and money-bags in order to serve the purpose of a stage villain, and calls him a Jew. Shylock is an isolated figure, unsociable, parsimonious, and relentless, who tries to inflict harm on those who envy him his wealth and hate him for his avarice.
Perhaps it is this marked isolation in which the dramatist has placed Shylock that tempts the modern actor to represent him as a victim of religious persecution, and therefore as one who does not merit the misfortune that falls upon him. In this way the figure becomes tragic, and, contrary to the dramatist’s intention, is made the leading part; so that when the Jew finally leaves the stage, the interest of the audience goes with him. But if Shakespeare intended his comedy to produce this impression, he was at fault in writing a last act in which every character that appears is evidently not aware that Shylock’s defeat was undeserved; nor is there any evidence to show that Shakespeare designed his comedy as a satire on the inhumanity of Christians. How then has it been brought about that, while the exigencies of the drama require Shylock to be the wrongdoer, he now appears on the stage as the one who is wronged?
In the first place, a change of opinion in a nation’s religion or politics causes a change in the theatre. New plays are written to give expression to the new sentiment, and the old plays, when revived, must be modified or readjusted to bring them in touch with the new opinions. To meet this marked change in public taste managers and actors are forced to abandon convention. It is useless at such a time to quote authorities. Public opinion is arbitrary, and the genius of a Macklin or a Kean would fail to arouse interest if it were out of sympathy with the newly awakened conscience. A popular actor is tempted, therefore, to show the old figure in the light of the new sentiment, and his impersonation is then set up as a model to which every contemporary candidate for favour is expected to conform.
It must be conceded, also, that our playgoers are rarely familiar with the text of Shakespeare’s plays, and thus increased opportunity is given to the actor to overrule the author. Yet this does not explain why an interpretation, quite unjustified by the text, should find favour with many dramatic critics. If a sound judgment and true taste are to prevail among playgoers, criticism should dissociate history from sentiment and discriminate between old conventions and modern innovations. Few critics, however, care to separate themselves from the opinions of their day; in fact, so far as Shakespeare’s plays are concerned, newspaper criticism is often limited to the business of reporting. Otherwise it is difficult to explain the chorus of unanimous approval with which the Press, as well as the public, hailed the new Shylock in the picturesque and sympathetic rendering given at the Lyceum in the early eighties.
Even if it be admitted that the terms of opprobrium with which Shylock is accosted by all the Christians in Shakespeare’s comedy are unnecessarily harsh, even if it be granted that to Gratiano, Solanio, and Salarino he is the “dog Jew,” meaning a creature outside the pale of heaven, yet if we read between the lines it is evident that religious differences are not the chief grievance. Shylock is a Jew, therefore a moneylender; a moneylender, therefore rich; rich, yet a miser, and therefore of little value to the community, which remains unbenefited by his usurious loans. This, in the eyes of the Christian merchants, is the real significance of the word Jew. The Catholic Church, by forbidding Christians to take interest, had unintentionally given the Jews a monopoly of the money-market, but with it that odium which attaches to the usurer. This point of view can be specially illustrated by Marlowe’s Barabas, in “The Jew of Malta,” the precursor of Shylock. Barabas makes no secret as to the unpopularity of his profession:
“I have been zealous in the Jewish faith,
Hard-hearted to the poor, a covetous wretch,
That would for lucre’s sake have sold my soul.
A hundred for a hundred I have ta’en;
And now for store of wealth may I compare
With all the Jews in Malta.”
His riches are blessings reserved exclusively for his race:
“And thus are we on every side enriched:
These are the blessings promised to the Jews.”
*****
“Rather had I a Jew be hated thus,
Than pitied in a Christian poverty:”
*****
“Aye, wealthier far than any Christian.”
*****
“What more may Heaven do for earthly man
Than thus to pour out plenty in their laps.”
This, then, was the Christian notion of the Jew in Shakespeare’s time, and while we have no reason for supposing that it was Shakespeare’s also, there is enough evidence to show that for the purpose of his story the dramatist adopted the prevalent opinion that the Jew was a man who lived solely for his wealth. In the face of this knowledge it is difficult to understand the opinion of some commentators that Shylock was intended as a protest against Marlowe’s “mere monster.” The similarity between Shylock and Barabas has been pointed out by Dr. Ward. Both love money, both hoard their wealth, both starve their servants to save expense, both defend their religion as well as their usury, both love to despoil the Christians and taunt them with their lack of fairness. Of course, every good critic admits that there are two sides to an argument. Even Sir Walter Scott, when reviewing a book, confesses to his son-in-law that his criticism might have been very different were the mandate déchirer. And those who want to defame Shylock’s character will not find it a difficult thing to do. The following illustration of the character is given after the manner of a schoolboy’s paraphrase:
Shylock thinks it folly to lend money without interest. Jacob was blessed for thriving, even if he prospered by cunning means, and to thrive by any means short of stealing is to deserve God’s blessing. Shylock can make money as quickly as ewes and rams can breed. He will show how generous he can be towards Christians by lending Antonio money without asking a farthing of interest, provided Antonio consents, by way of a joke, to lose a pound of his flesh if he should fail to repay the money on a special day; and this pound to be taken from any part of his body which Shylock may choose, meaning, no doubt, nearest to the heart, so as to ensure death. Yet Bassanio need have no anxiety about the safety of his friend’s life, because human flesh is not a marketable commodity like mutton or beef.
Shylock has a servant who eats too much, and is so lazy that the Jew is glad to part with him to the impecunious Bassanio, in the hope that Launcelot will help to squander his new master’s “borrowed purse.” For a similar reason he will himself go to Bassanio’s feast, although his religion forbids him to eat with Christians. His daughter is not to have any pleasure from the masque, but to shut herself up in the house so that no sound of Christian masquerading may reach her ears. His last words to her are in praise of thrift.
The Jew’s first exclamation on hearing that Jessica cannot be found is that he has lost a diamond worth 2,000 ducats. He would like to see his daughter dead at his feet if only he can have again the jewels that are in her ears, and find the ducats in her coffin. It is heartrending to think how Jessica has been squandering his treasures, and of the additional loss to him in having to pay Tubal for trying to find the girl; yet it is gratifying to hear of Antonio’s misfortunes; and since the merchant is likely to become bankrupt it will be well to fee an officer in readiness to arrest him the moment the time of the bond expires. If only Antonio can be got out of the way, Shylock will be able to make as much money as ever he likes. With this thought to console him he goes to the synagogue to say his prayers.
When Antonio is arrested, Shylock demands the utmost penalty of the law because of a “lodged hate and a certain loathing” he bears the bankrupt. No amount of money will tempt him to forgo his rights, and the letter of the law must be observed in every detail; not even a surgeon must be allowed on the spot in the hope of saving this lend-you-money-for-nothing merchant’s life. When Portia frustrates his purpose and he finds the law against him, he can still ask that the loan be repaid “thrice” (Portia and Bassanio thought “twice” a sufficiently tempting offer). And when Portia points out that, as an alien, who has deliberately plotted to take the life of a Christian, Shylock’s own life is forfeited, as well as the whole of his wealth, he still demands the return of his principal.
Now if we go back to the Latin Comedies and consider the origin of the moneylender, we find a type of character similar to that of Shylock. Molière’s Harpagon, who is modelled on the miser of Plautus, has a strong resemblance to Barabas and to Shylock, although Shylock is undoubtedly the most human. Reference has already been made to the likeness between Barabas and Shylock, and it needs but a few illustrations to show the resemblance between the English and French miser. Both are moneylenders, who when asked for a loan declare that it is necessary for them to borrow the sum required from a friend. Sheridan makes little Moses do the same. Harpagon exclaims to his servant: “Ah, wretch, you are eating up all my wealth,” and Shylock says the same thing to Launcelot. Harpagon’s, “It is out of Christian charity that he covets my money,” is not unlike the reproach of Shylock, “He was wont to lend out money for a Christian courtesy!” And “justice, impudent rascal, will soon give me satisfaction!” is with Shylock “the Duke shall grant me justice!” While if we compare the words which Molière puts into the mouths of those who revile the miser, they suggest the taunts thrown at Shylock. “I tell you frankly that you are the laughing-stock of everybody, and that nothing delights people more than to make game of you”; has its equivalent in the speech “Why, all the boys in Venice follow him,” etc. And “never does anyone mention you, but under the name of Jew and usurer,” tallies with Launcelot’s “My master is a very Jew.” Other instances might be quoted.
Of course it cannot be overlooked that Shakespeare has given Shylock one speech of undoubted power which silences all his opponents. For while the Christians are unconscious of any wrongdoing on their side towards the Jew, Shylock complains loudly and bitterly of the indignities thrust upon him by the Christians, and in that often-quoted speech beginning “Hath not a Jew eyes” he complains with an insistence which certainly claims consideration. Now in so far as Shylock resents the want of tolerance shown him by the Christians, he is in the right and Shakespeare is with him; but when he tries to justify his method of retaliation and schemes to take Antonio’s life, not simply in order to revenge the indignities thrust upon him, but also that he may put more money into his purse, Shylock is in the wrong and Shakespeare is against him. For it is obvious that Shylock does not seek the lives of Gratiano, Solanio, or Salarino, the men who called him the “dog Jew,” or the life of the man who ran away with his daughter, but of the merchant who lends out money gratis, who helps the unfortunate debtors, and who exercises generosity and charity. Whatever blame attaches to the Christians on the score of intolerance, Antonio is the least offender, except in so far as it touches Shylock’s pocket. And when Shylock the usurer asserts that a Christian is no better than a Jew, he forgets that Christianity, in its original conception and purpose, forbade the individual to prey on his fellow-creatures; and this is the Christianity which Antonio practises.
Finally it is the intention of the comedy, as Shakespeare has designed it, to illustrate the consequence of a too rigid adherence to the letter of the law. The terms of the bond to which Shylock clings so tenaciously, and for which he demands unquestioning obedience, ultimately endanger his own life and with it the whole of his property. Shylock falls a victim to his own plot in the same way that Barabas tumbles into his own burning caldron; but the Christians spare the Jew’s life and half his wealth is restored to him, and restored to him by Antonio “the bankrupt,” who is still himself greatly in need of money. That Shylock must in return for this mercy deny his faith is not in the eyes of the Christian a punishment or even an act of malice, but a means of salvation.
The basis, then, of Shakespeare’s comedy, it is contended, is a romantic story of love and adventure. It shows us a lovable and high-minded heroine, her adventurous and fervent lover, and his unselfish friend, together with their merry companions and sweethearts. And into this happy throng, for the purpose of having a villain, the dramatist thrusts the morose and malicious usurer, who is intended to be laughed at and defeated, not primarily because he is a Jew, but because he is a curmudgeon; thus the prodigal defeats the miser.
If we look more closely into the two plays of Marlowe and Shakespeare, and compare not only Barabas with Shylock, but also Marlowe’s Christians with those of Shakespeare, we find a dissimilarity in the portraiture of the Christians so marked that it is impossible to ignore the idea that Shakespeare, perhaps, wished to protest not against Marlowe’s “inhuman Jew,” but against his pagan Christians. The variance, in fact, is too striking to be accidental, as the following table will show:
| The Famous Tragedy of the Rich Jew of Malta. | The Most Excellent History of the Merchant of Venice. | |
| The play is named after the Jew who owns the argosies. | The play is named after the Christian who owns the argosies. | |
| The Christians take forcible possession of all the Jew’s wealth. | The Christians ask a loan of the Jew on business terms. | |
| The Jew upbraids the Christians for quoting Scripture to defend their roguery. | The Christian upbraids the Jew for quoting Scripture to defend his roguery. | |
| The Christians break faith with the Turks, and also with the Jew. | A Christian Court upholds the Jew’s claim to his bond. | |
| The Jew’s daughter Abigail rescues her father’s money from the Christians. | Jessica gives away her father’s money to the Christians. | |
| The Jew’s servant helps his master to cheat the Christians. | Launcelot leaves his master to join the Christians. | |
| Two Christians try to cajole the Jew of his daughter, and die victims to his treachery. | Lorenzo elopes with Jessica, and finally inherits the Jew’s wealth. | |
| Abigail becomes a Christian and is poisoned by her father. | Jessica becomes a Christian and is happy ever after. | |
| The Jew is the means of saving the Christians from the Turks. | Portia saves the Christian from the Jew. | |
| The Christians are accessory to the Jew’s death, which is an act of treachery on their part. | The Christians spare the Jew’s life, which is an act of mercy on their part. |
It might be objected that the interval of seven years between the production of the two plays renders it improbable that Shakespeare would have intentionally contrasted his play with Marlowe’s. But the popularity of “The Jew of Malta” exceeded that of any other contemporary play. Although it was not printed till 1604, it was produced in 1588, and references to it in contemporary plays continue to be found until 1609. Owing, besides, to Alleyne’s extraordinary success as Barabas, the play continued to be acted at intervals until 1594, between which date and 1598 Shakespeare had written his own comedy. The setting-off, too, of play against play was a common practice, especially among the early Elizabethan dramatists, and Greene did not hesitate to avail himself of the success of Marlowe’s “Doctor Faustus” to write his “Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay.”
Now in so far as “The Jew of Malta” makes fun of friars and nuns, it would be considered legitimate amusement by a Protestant audience. We have a similar record on the French stage of revolutionary times when as M. Fleury remarks: “All the convents in France were shown up at the theatres, and the surest mode of drawing money to the treasury was to raise a laugh at the expense of the Veil.” But Marlowe goes further than this. He attacks Christianity wantonly and aggressively, not only by portraying Barabas’s contempt for the Christians, but by making the Christians contemptible in themselves, and wanting in all those virtues which were upheld in the newly accessible Gospels. They are without honour and chivalry or any sense of justice or loyalty. They are false and treacherous to Jew and Turk alike, and Barabas can well say of them:
“For I can see no fruits in all their faith,
But malice, falsehood, and excessive pride,
Which methinks fits not their profession.”
Further, the Christians take by force the Jew’s money to pay the city’s tribute to the Turks, which after all is not paid, the Christians keeping the money for themselves. It is but the bare truth that Barabas states when he mutters:
“Who, of mere charity and Christian truth,
To bring me to religious purity,
And as it were in catechising sort,
To make me mindful of my mortal sins,
Against my will, and whether I would or no,
Seized all I had, and thrust me out o’ doors.”
And Marlowe also makes Barabas say, indignant at the Christians’ hypocrisy:
“Is theft the ground of your religion?
*****
What, bring you scripture to confirm your wrongs?
Preach me not out of my possessions.”
Scepticism is rampant throughout “The Jew of Malta,” and Marlowe flaunts his opinions before a theatre full of Christians. Not that it is contended that Marlowe was himself an atheist, but in “The Jew of Malta” he seems, perhaps out of a spirit of retaliation for the wanton attacks made upon him, to be bent on exposing to ridicule the upholders of the orthodox faith. In Marlowe’s “Faustus” the good angel, the aged pilgrim, and the final repentance satisfy the religious conscience, but his later play has no such compensations. The boast of Barabas that, “some Jews are wicked as all Christians are,” passes unchallenged.
Now it is unlikely that any member of Elizabeth’s Court, any Protestant nobleman who was responsible for upholding the reformed faith, much less that any Catholic, could have been present at the performance of this play without protesting against the poet’s attitude towards Christianity. Nor is it probable that the Lord Chamberlain’s servants would overlook Marlowe’s taunts at the national religion spoken from the citizens’ playhouse. So that the poet-player whose sonnets were being circulated in the houses of the nobility, whose patron was the Earl of Southampton, the friend of Essex, and who had begun to be talked about at Court, might with advantage to himself expose the other side of the picture, and defend the abused Christians.
It remained then for Shakespeare to show that Christians, if they hated the infidel, were not in themselves contemptible. In addition to her many fascinations of mind and person, Portia possesses in an eminent degree a sense of honour and a love of mercy. The obligations imposed upon her by her father are religiously observed. Even when her lover is choosing the caskets, and a glance would have put him out of his misery, her attitude towards him is uncompromising. Later on she upholds the Jew’s plea for justice, while at the same time she urges the more divine attribute of mercy.
Where Shakespeare, however, differs from Marlowe most strikingly is in the character of the Merchant after whom the comedy is named. Barabas has boasted that—
“he from whom my most advantage comes
Shall be my friend.
This is the life we Jews are used to lead.”
Then he naïvely adds:
“And reason, too, for Christians do the like.”
Now the dearest object of affection in the world for Antonio is Bassanio, and it is the knowledge that his beloved friend has a rival for his love in Portia, which causes Antonio’s sadness; yet he not only gives up his companion ungrudgingly to the enjoyment of greater happiness, but provides him with the necessary means; and for this purpose he signs a perilous bond with his bitterest foe. Of necessity he dislikes Shylock, whose debtors he has so often saved from ruin. With Jessica’s flight he had nothing to do. He certainly never sanctioned it. Moreover, when misfortune comes upon him he has no desire to escape from the penalty of the bond, and when he himself is in poverty he saves from a similar calamity a man who hates him. In face of these facts it is difficult to understand why Heine should consider Antonio unworthy to tie Shylock’s shoelaces!
Again, Bassanio is often called a fortune-hunter, but without justification. He knew that he enjoyed the esteem and affection of Portia while her father was yet alive. The “speechless messages” of her eyes invited his return to Belmont. On his arrival he finds that she can no longer dispose of herself, and yet, unlike most of the other suitors, he does not on that account withdraw: he wins her because he loves her and knows that love is worth more than gold or silver. When he hears of Antonio’s danger he rushes to his friend’s side to offer his own life to save him. It is to be noticed also that Portia’s esteem for Antonio’s openly proclaimed virtues is drawn from a comparison with those of Bassanio. They are by no means contemptible.
Jessica, again, who must be counted among the Christians, finds life at home too hopelessly rigid to be longer endured. There is not a word in the text to justify the belief that her father loves her, apart from his own needs. She is expected to guard his gold and silver and to listen to his discussions with Tubal and Chus about the hated Antonio and his bond. So the girl must look after herself if she is to enjoy happiness in the future. Lorenzo knows that to allow Jessica to forsake her father and to rob him is a sin towards Heaven. He prays for punishment to be withheld because she has married a Christian, and, to his credit, it must be acknowledged that he is unconscious of any hypocrisy. As for the “braggart” Gratiano and the remaining Christians, we tolerate them because they love Antonio, the man who of all others most deserves our respect. Perhaps as Christians they insist too much on their moral superiority, but this is natural after Marlowe’s play had been seen on the stage.
Of course, there are critics who will hold that Marlowe’s Christians, in some respects, are more life-like than Shakespeare’s. Perhaps if “The Merchant of Venice” had been written while Marlowe was alive, he would have challenged Shakespeare to uphold that in matters of conduct where money interests were involved there was any marked distinction between the morals of the believer and the unbeliever. Marlowe might have contended that out of one hundred Christians ninety-nine would act as his Governor of Malta had done, though he was a Knight of St. John. It might not be impossible for a Christian to persuade himself that money taken forcibly from the infidel Jew, as a tribute, could justly be withheld from the infidel Turk to whom it was due, and that it was folly to hesitate in cutting the cord that would let the infidel Jew into the burning cauldron, instead of the infidel Turk for whom it was designed, especially when one hundred thousand pounds of the citizens’ money would in that way be saved. As a mere worldly truism the words that Barabas utters, when his daughter changes her faith, have a deeper significance than the “noble platitudes” of Lorenzo and Jessica:
“She that varies from me in belief,
Gives great presumption that she loves me not;
Or loving, does mislike of something done.”
Shakespeare, probably, would have answered Marlowe’s objection with the assurance that there still remained the odd Christian out of every hundred to be reckoned with, and that he himself was more interested in showing the world what men ought to be like than what they actually were. But if Shakespeare preferred to live outside the walls of reality, he did so only in imagination, for he must have had a very practical knowledge of men’s dealings with each other. No doubt our great dramatist was not eager to break with conventions or to imitate Marlowe by saying unpalatable truths about the Christians at a time when he himself was still seeking the favour of Elizabeth’s Court.
The Authors of “King Henry the Eighth.”8
The play of “Henry VIII.” first appeared in print in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death. It was published in the first collected edition of the poet’s dramas, and so became known to the world as his play. For two centuries the genuineness of the drama was not called in question. The earliest commentators never expressed misgivings on the subject, nor is there evidence to show that Shakespeare’s contemporaries disputed the authorship. Choice extracts from the play have appeared in collections of poetry, which compare favourably with selections from “Hamlet” or “Macbeth.” Wolsey’s famous soliloquy is universally thought to be Shakespeare’s reflections on the vicissitudes of life. At the British Museum will be found versions of the play in French, German, Italian, and even one in Greek. The drama, moreover, is familiar to the playgoer, while eminent actors and actresses, with no intention of impersonating the creations of an inferior dramatist, have won distinction in the characters of the Cardinal and of Queen Katharine. Yet, in the face of evidence that is apparently convincing, it may be safely assumed that “Henry VIII.” is not Shakespeare’s play in the sense in which we speak of “Hamlet” or “Macbeth” as being his. Indeed, the statement has been put forth that not one line of the play was written by its reputed author.
Now it is always an ungrateful task to defend an argument which no one cares to accept, and the admirers of those scenes which have made actors and actresses famous, and of those speeches which adorn our books of extracts, are still too numerous and too enthusiastic to desire any other dramatist than Shakespeare to be the author of them. Possession is nine points of the law, and while tradition has the prior claim, public opinion will not readily endorse the verdict of a handful of literary sceptics. On the other hand, it must be conceded that even to challenge the genuineness of a play attributed to the world’s greatest dramatist does involve, to some extent, a censure upon that play. The doubt implies that the play, as a whole, does not average the work of Shakespeare’s later dramas, that it does not bear comparison with the “Winter’s Tale,” “Cymbeline,” and the “Tempest,” plays which, in the date of their composition, are contemporary with “Henry VIII.,” and which were written at a time when the poet had obtained complete mastery over the resources of his art. If there are precedents of poets living till their once-glowing imaginations become cold, there is no record of a dramatist losing technical skill which has been acquired by the experience of a lifetime. It was but natural, then, that there should exist a feeling of uneasiness in the minds of impartial inquirers in regard to the authorship of this play, and it may be worth while to consider the history of the controversy.
The earliest known mention of the play is by a contemporary, Thomas Lorkin, in a letter of the last day of June, 1613. He writes that the day before, while Burbage and his company were playing “Henry VIII.” in the Globe Theatre, the building was burnt down through a discharge of “chambers,” that is to say of small pieces of cannon. Early in the month following Sir Henry Wotton writes to his nephew giving particulars of the fire, and describing the pageantry, which was evidently an important feature of the play:
“The King’s players had a new play called ‘All is True,’ representing some principal pieces of the reign of Henry the Eighth, which was set forth with many extraordinary circumstances of pomp and majesty, even to the matting of the stage; the Knights of the Order with their Georges and Garter, the guards with their embroidered coats, and the like; sufficient in truth, within a while, to make greatness very familiar if not ridiculous.”
Now, if Sir Henry Wotton is correct in his assertion that the play was a new one in 1613, it was probably the last play written by Shakespeare: although some commentators contend that there is internal evidence to show that the play was written during Elizabeth’s reign, and that after her death it was amended by the insertion of speeches complimentary to the new sovereign, King James. In 1623 the play appears in print inserted in the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s dramas, by Heminge and Condell, who were the poet’s fellow-actors, and who claim to have printed all the plays from the author’s manuscripts. If, then, this statement were trustworthy, there could be no reason to doubt the genuineness of the drama. But the copies in the hands of Heminge and Condell were evidently in some cases very imperfect, either in consequence of the burning of the Globe Theatre, or by the necessary wear and tear of years. And it is certain that, in several instances, the editors reprinted the plays from the earlier quarto impressions with but few changes, sometimes for the better, and sometimes for the worse. It has also been ascertained that at least four of the plays in the folio were only partially written by Shakespeare, while no mention is made of his possible share in “Pericles,” the play having been omitted altogether. So that it is presumed that if “Henry VIII.,” in its present form, was a play rewritten by theatre-hacks to replace a similar play by Shakespeare that was destroyed in the fire, the editors would not be unlikely to insert it in the folio instead of the original.
So long as Shakespeare’s authorship was not doubted there seems to have been no desire on the part of commentators to call attention to faults which are obvious to every careful reader of the play. Most of the early criticisms are confined to remarks on single scenes or speeches irrespective of the general character of the drama and its personages. Comments such as the following of Dr. Drake fairly represent those of most writers until the middle of the last century. He writes in 1817: “The entire interest of the tragedy turns upon the characters of Queen Katherine and Cardinal Wolsey, the former being the finest picture of suffering and defenceless virtue, and the latter of disappointed ambition, that poet ever drew.” Dr. Johnson, who ranks the play as second class among the historical works, had previously asserted “that the genius of Shakespeare comes in and goes out with Katherine. Every other part may be easily conceived and easily written.”
When, however, the play is judged as a work of art in its complete form, the difficulty of writing favourably of its dramatic qualities becomes evident by the apologetic modes of expression used. Schlegel remarks that “Henry VIII.” has somewhat “of a prosaic appearance, for Shakespeare, artist-like, adapted himself to the quality of his materials. While others of his works, both in elevation of fancy, and in energy of pathos and character tower far above this, we have here, on the other hand, occasion to admire his nice powers of discrimination and his perfect knowledge of courts and the world.” Coleridge is content to define the play as that of “a sort of historical masque or show play”; and Victor Hugo observes that Shakespeare is so far English as to attempt to extenuate the failings of Henry VIII., adding, “it is true that the eye of Elizabeth is fixed upon him!”
In an interesting little volume containing the journal of Emily Shore, who made some valuable contributions to natural history, are to be found some remarks upon the play written in the year 1836. The criticism is the more noteworthy since Miss Shore was only in her sixteenth year when she wrote it, and she then showed no slight appreciation of literature, especially of Shakespeare:
“This evening my uncle finished reading ‘King Henry VIII.’ I must say I was mightily disappointed in it. Whether it is that I am not capable of understanding Shakespeare and cannot distinguish his beauties, I do not know. There is no effort in Shakespeare’s works; he takes so little pains that what is interesting or noble or sublime or finely exhibiting the features of the mind, seems to drop from his pen by chance. One cannot help thinking that every play is executed with slovenly neglect, that he has done himself injustice and that if he pleased he might have given to the world works which would throw into the shade all that he has actually written. To be sure this gives one a very exalted idea of his intellect, for even if the mere unavoidable overflowings of his genius excel the depths of other men’s minds, how magnificent must have been the fountain of that genius whose very bubbles sparkle so beautifully! But to speak of ‘Henry VIII.’ in particular. Henry himself, Katherine and Wolsey, though they display a degree of character, are not half so vigorously drawn as I had expected, or as I would methinks have done myself. The character of Cranmer exists more in Henry’s language about him than in his own actions.”
To come now to the opinion of the German commentators. Gervinus observes:
“No one in this short explanation of the main character of ‘Henry VIII.’ will mistake the certain hand of the poet. It is otherwise when we approach closer to the development of the action and attentively consider the poetic diction. The impression on the whole becomes then at once strange and unrefreshing; the mere external threads seem to be lacking which ought to link the actions to each other; the interest of the feelings becomes strangely divided, it is continually drawn into new directions and is nowhere satisfied. At first it clings to Buckingham, and his designs against Wolsey, but with the second act he leaves the stage; then Wolsey attracts our attention in an increased degree, and he, too, disappears in the third act; in the meanwhile our sympathies are more and more strongly drawn to Katherine, who then likewise leaves the stage in the fourth act; and after we have been thus shattered through four acts by circumstances of a purely tragic character, the fifth act closes with a merry festivity for which we are in no wise prepared, crowning the King’s loose passion with victory in which we could take no warm interest.”
Ulrici is even more severe in his remarks upon the play:
“The drama of ‘Henry VIII.’ is poetically untrue, devoid of real life, defective in symmetry and composition, because wanting in internal organic construction, i.e., in ethical vitality.”
So also is Professor Hertzberg:
“A chronicle history with three and a half catastrophes varied by a marriage and a coronation pageant, ending abruptly with the baptism of a child in which are combined the elements of a satirical drama with a prophetic ecstasy, and all this loosely connected by the nominal hero whom no poet in heaven or earth could ever have formed into a tragic character.”
And Dr. Elze, who is a warm supporter of Shakespeare’s authorship, admits that the play—
“measured by the standard of the historical drama is inferior to the other histories and wants both a grand historical substance and the unity of strictly defined dramatic structure.”
But it is not only with the general design of the play and its feeble characterization that fault is found, but also with the versification. The earliest criticism on the peculiarity of the metre of the play appeared about 1757. It consists of some remarks, published by Mr. Thomas Edwards, which were made by Mr. Roderick on Warburton’s edition of Shakespeare. Mr. Roderick, after pointing out that there are in the play many more lines than in any other which end with a redundant syllable, continues:
“This Fact (whatever Shakespeare’s design was in it) is undoubtedly true, and may be demonstrated to Reason, and proved to sense; the first by comparing any number of lines in this Play, with an equal number in any other Play, by which it will appear that this Play has very near two redundant verses to one in any other Play. And to prove it to sense, let anyone read aloud an hundred lines in any other Play, and an hundred in this; and if he perceives not the tone and cadence of his own voice to be involuntarily altered in the latter case from what it was in the former, I would never advise him to give much credit to the information of his ears.”
Later on we find that Emerson is also struck with the peculiarity of the metre, and in his lecture on “Representative Men,” observes:
“In ‘Henry VIII.’ I think I see plainly the cropping out of the original rock on which his (Shakespeare’s) own finer structure was laid. The first play was written by a superior thoughtful man, with a vicious ear. I can mark his lines and know well their cadence. See Wolsey’s soliloquy, and the following scene with Cromwell, where, instead of the metre of Shakespeare, whose secret is that the thought constructs the tune, so that reading for the sense will best bring out the rhythm; here the lines are constructed on a given tune; and the verse has even a trace of pulpit eloquence.”
Now these quotations, it may be urged, were picked out with a view to prejudice a favourable opinion of the play. But disparagements are, none the less, important links in a question of authorship. In fact it was because Shakespearian critics, of undisputed authority, declared that “Henry VIII.” was not a play worthy of the poet’s genius that a few advanced scholars were encouraged to come forward and pronounce that no part of the play had been written by Shakespeare.
In the autumn of 1850 Mr. Spedding, the able editor of Bacon’s works, published a paper in the Gentleman’s Magazine in which he stated it to be his belief that a great portion of the play of “Henry VIII.” was written by Fletcher; a conjecture that indeed had been anticipated and was at once confirmed by other writers. Tennyson, on Mr. Spedding’s authority, had pointed out many years previously the resemblance of the style in some parts of the play to Fletcher’s. In fact, the conclusion arrived at by the advanced critics was that the play has two totally different metres which are the work of two different authors. On this point Mr. Spedding wrote:
“A distinction so broad and so uniform running through so large a portion of the same piece cannot have been accidental, and the more closely it is examined, the more clearly will it appear that the metre in these two sets of scenes is managed upon entirely different principles and bears evidence of different workmen.”
This conclusion, however, was not endorsed by all commentators. It was acknowledged that metrical evidence must not be neglected, and that “there is no play of Shakespeare’s in which eleven syllable lines are so frequent as they are in “Henry VIII.”; and even Swinburne, whose faith in Shakespeare’s authorship was unwavering, asserted “that if not the partial work it may certainly be taken as the general model of Fletcher, in some not unimportant passages.” It was contended besides that the poet’s hand was hampered by a difficulty inherent in the subject, since of all Shakespeare’s plays, “Henry VIII.” is the nearest in its story to the poet’s own time, and that the elliptical construction and the licence of versification, which are peculiar to this play, are necessary in order to bring the dialogue closer to the language of common life. In fact, Mr. Spedding’s opponents, while admitting an anonymous hand in the prologue and epilogue, rejected the theory as to the manner in which the collaboration was carried out, and asserted that the structure of the play, the development of the action and the characters showed it to be the work of one hand, and that Shakespeare’s.
Another challenger of the metre was Mr. Robert Boyle, who endeavoured to show, from a careful and elaborate study of Elizabethan blank verse, that Shakespeare had no share whatever in the composition of the play, and that whoever was the author who collaborated with Fletcher (in Mr. Boyle’s opinion it was Massinger) he certainly did not write before 1612, for the metrical peculiarities of the verse are those of the later dramatic style, of which the earliest characteristics did not make themselves felt in the work of any poet till about 1607. It was after reading this paper that Robert Browning, then the president of the New Shakspere Society, wrote his final judgment on the play which was published in the Society’s “Transactions.”
“As you desired I have read once again ‘Henry the Eighth’; my opinion about the scanty portion of Shakespeare’s authorship in it was formed about fifty years ago, while ignorant of any evidence external to the text itself. I have little doubt now that Mr. Boyle’s judgment is right altogether; that the original play, presumably Shakespeare’s, was burnt along with the Globe Theatre; that the present work is a substitution for it, probably with certain reminiscences of ‘All is true.’ In spite of such huff-and-bullying as Charles Knight’s for example, I see little that transcends the power of Massinger and Fletcher to execute. It is very well to talk of the tediousness of the Chronicles, which have furnished pretty well whatever is admirable in the characters of Wolsey and Katherine; as wisely should we depreciate the bone which holds the marrow we enjoy on a toast. The versification is nowhere Shakespeare’s. But I have said my little say for what it is worth.”
There is yet another peculiarity that is special to this play, and it is one which seems to have escaped the notice of the critics. The stage-directions in it are unlike those of any other play published in the first folio. In no other play are they so full, and so carefully detailed. With the exception of “Henry VIII.,” the stage-directions in the folio are so few in number and so abbreviated that they appear to have been written solely for the author’s convenience. It is very rare that any reference is made to movement, more than to indicate the entrance or exit of characters, or to note that they fight or that they die. Sometimes the characters are not so much as named, and the direction is simply, “Enter the French Power and the English Lords”; at other times the directions are so concise as to be almost incomprehensible to the modern reader, for example, “Enter Hermione (like a statue),” “Enter Imogene (in her bed)”! The legitimate inference, therefore, is that Shakespeare considered it to be no part of his business to be explicit in these matters. It is startling, then, to find, in the play of “Henry VIII.,” a stage-direction so elaborate as the following: “The Queen makes no answer, rises out of her chair, goes about the Court, comes to the King, and kneels at his feet, then speaks.” No doubt in Elizabeth’s time all stage movement was of the simplest kind, and of a conventional order, so as to be applicable to a great variety of plays, and what was special to any particular play in the way of movement would, in Shakespeare’s dramas, be explained at rehearsal by the author. So that the detailed and minute stage-directions that in the first folio are special to “Henry VIII.” would seem to suggest that the play was written at a time when the author was absent from the theatre. To the actor, however, who is experienced in the technicalities of the stage, these elaborate directions show that the author was not only very familiar with what in theatrical parlance is known as stage “business,” but that he regarded the minute description of the actors’ movements as forming an essential part of the dramatist’s duty. In fact, the story of the play is made subservient to the “business” or to pageant throughout. A dramatic incident, then a procession, another dramatic incident, and then another procession. This seems to be the sort of effect aimed at. Towards the year 1610 the taste for spectacle created by the genius of Inigo Jones spread from the Court to the public theatre. Perhaps this may account for Shakespeare’s early retirement. He wrote plays and not masques, and his genius lay in portraying the drama of human life. Unlike Ben Jonson, he never devoted his talents to the service of the stage carpenter. Seeing the altered condition of the public taste, there would be nothing unnatural in his yielding his place silently and without bitterness to others who were willing to supply the theatrical market with the desired commodity. Had Shakespeare wanted money it would perhaps be difficult to deny that he would have adapted his work to the requirement of the times. But by 1610 he was very well able to live in retirement upon a competent income, and it is difficult to believe that one who had attained his wonderful balance of intellect and heart, of reason and imagination, would have condescended to elaborate the details of baptismal and coronation festivities.
And now in conclusion, what is there to be said for or against the genuineness of the play? The supporters of the Shakespearian authorship dwell upon the beauty of particular passages, and on the general similarity, in many scenes, to Shakespeare’s verse in his later plays; the sceptics contend that it is a mistake to leave entirely out of view the most important part of every drama—viz., its action and its characterization; and unreasonable, moreover, to suppose that Shakespeare had no imitators at the close of his successful career. But, say the admirers, this kind of reasoning is no evidence that Shakespeare was not the author of all that is most liked in the play. Here, however, we are met with the argument that the popular scenes of all others in the play, are those the most easily to be identified with the metre peculiar to Fletcher. Then, again, it is hardly possible to accept the opinion of Charles Knight, Professor Delius, and Dr. Elze that all the shortcomings of the play, both in the structure and versification, are due to the fact that the poet was hampered by a “difficulty inherent in the subject.” Is genius ever hampered by its subject? Does not history prove the contrary? Have not the shackles put upon musicians, poets, painters, and sculptors by their patrons, instead of checking their genius, elicited the most exquisite products of their imagination? The conscientious inquirer, therefore, who wades through a mass of literary criticism in the hope of obtaining some elucidation of the question, seems only doomed to experience disappointment. Nothing is gained but an unsettling of all preconceived ideas. If expectations of a possible solution are aroused they are not fulfilled because the unprejudiced mind refuses to accept conjectural criticism and to believe more than it is possible to know. Still, it must be admitted that in re-reading the play in the light of all the more modern criticism upon it, the dissatisfaction with the inferior portions becomes more acute, while the finer scenes shine with a lessened glory. It is not only dramatic perception in the development of character that is wanting, but the power which gives words form and meaning is also lacking; the closely packed expression, the lifelike reality and freshness, the rapid and abrupt turnings of thought, so quick that language can hardly follow fast enough; the impatient audacity of intellect and fancy with which we are familiar in Shakespeare’s later plays are not to be found in “Henry VIII.” We miss even the objections raised by modern grammarians, the idle conceits, the play upon words, the puns, the improbability, the extravagance, the absurdity, the obscenity, the puerility, the bombast, the emphasis, the exaggeration. Therefore it must be admitted that in order to uphold “Henry VIII.” as a late play of Shakespeare’s, it becomes necessary for his sincere admirers to invent all sorts of apologies for its faults, and to overlook the consistent development of the poet’s genius from the close of the great tragedies to the play of the “Tempest,” “where we see him shining to the last in a steady, mild, unchanging glory.”
Troilus and Cressida9
The mystery in which the history of this play is shrouded bewilders students, for the information available is scanty. The play was entered on the Stationers’ Register on February 7, 1603, as “The Booke of Troilus and Cresseda,” but it was not to be printed until the publisher had got the necessary permission from its owners; and it was also the same book, “as it is acted by my Lord Chamberlen’s men,” and a play of Shakespeare’s had never before been entered on the Register as one that was being acted at the time of its publication, plays being seldom printed in those days until they had become, to some extent, obsolete on the stage. Then Mr. A. W. Pollard points out that the Globe managers often got some publisher to enter a play on the Stationers’ Register in order to protect their playhouse copies from pirates, and for this or some other reason not yet fully explained, the play did not get printed. But on January 28, 1609, another firm of publishers entered on the Register a book with a similar name, which soon afterwards was published, with the following words on its title-page: “The Historie of Troylus and Cresseda. As it was acted by the Kings Majesties servants at the ‘Globe.’” Shortly afterwards this title-page was suppressed, being torn out of the book, and another one inserted to allow of the following qualification: “The Famous Historie of Troylus and Cresseid. Excellently expressing the beginning of their loves, with the conceited wooing of Pandarus, Prince of Licia.” On both title-pages Shakespeare is announced as the author, and apparently the object of the second title-page was to contradict the former statement that the play had been acted at the Globe, or, in other words, was the property of the Globe managers; and also to suggest by the title “Prince of Licia” that the book was not the same play as the one the actors of the theatre owned. In addition to the altered title there appeared on the back of the new leaf a preface, and this was another unusual proceeding, since there had not appeared before one attached to a Shakespeare play. No further editions were issued until 1623, when Heminge and Condell published their player’s copy, with additions and corrections taken from the 1609 quarto. It was inserted in the first folio in a position between the Histories and Tragedies, where it appears unpaged after having been removed from its original position among the Tragedies. No mention is made of it in the contents of the volume. In the folio the play is called a tragedy, which, if a correct title, is not the one given to it in the 1609 preface.
Now, in the Epilogue to “Henry IV., Part Two,” we have this allusion to a recently acted play by Shakespeare, which had not been well received by the audience, “Be it known to you, as it is very well, I was lately here in the end of a displeasing play, to pray your patience for it and to promise you a better. I meant, indeed, to pay you with this.” And in 1903 Mr. Arthur Acheson, of Chicago, in his book on “Shakespeare and the Rival Poet,” advanced the theory (1) that this “displeasing play,” was “Troilus and Cressida”; (2) that it was written at some time between the autumn of 1598 and the spring of 1599; (3) that it preceded and did not follow Ben Jonson’s “Poetaster,” and therefore had nothing to do with the “War of the Theatres”; (4) that it was written to ridicule Chapman’s fulsome praise of Homer and his Greek heroes—praise which was displayed in his prefaces to the seven books of the Iliad issued in that year. On this point Mr. Acheson says, forcibly:
“Chapman claims supremacy for Homer, not only as a poet, but as a moralist, and extends his claims for moral altitude to include the heroes of his epics. Shakespeare divests the Greek heroes of the glowing, but misty, nimbus of legend and mythology, and presents them to us in the light of common day, and as men in a world of men. In a modern Elizabethan setting he pictures these Greeks and Trojans, almost exactly as they appear in the sources from which he works. He does not stretch the truth of what he finds, nor draw wilfully distorted pictures, and yet, the Achilles, the Ulysses, the Ajax, etc., which we find in the play, have lost their demigodlike pose. How does he do it? The masterly realistic and satirical effect he produces comes wholly from a changed point of view. He displays pagan Greek and Trojan life in action—with its low ideals of religion, womanhood, and honour, with its bloodiness and sensuality—upon a background from which he has eliminated historical perspective.”
Nor is this explanation inapplicable when we realize how exaggerated are Chapman’s eulogies on Homer. To take as an instance the following passage:
“Soldiers shall never spende their idle howres more profitablie then with his studious and industrious perusell; in whose honors his deserts are infinite. Counsellors have never better oracles then his lines; fathers have no morales so profitable for their children as his counsailes; nor shal they ever give them more honord injunctions then to learne Homer without book, that being continually conversant in him his height may descend to their capacities, and his substance prove their worthiest riches. Husbands, wives, lovers, friends, and allies, having in him mirrors for all their duties; all sortes of which concourse and societie, in other more happy ages, have in steed of sonnets and lascivious ballades, sung his Iliades.”
Now, Mr. Acheson may be right as to the date in which “Troilus and Cressida” was written, because neither in its dramatic construction nor in its verse and characterization can the play consistently be called a later composition, so that it is possible to contend that the whole of the play, with the exception, perhaps, of the prologue, was written before “Henry IV., Part Two.” It can be urged, also, that Ben Jonson’s “Poetaster,” which was acted in 1601, contains allusions to Shakespeare’s play, and to its having been unfavourably received; then that certain incidents in the life of Essex come into the play, and that these would not have been mentioned had the play been written later than the spring of 1599, when Essex had left for Ireland.
With regard to the “Poetaster,” it is now generally admitted that there is no evidence to support the assertion that, at the time this satirical play was written, its author was on bad terms with Shakespeare. In it Jonson announced his next production to be a tragedy, and in 1603 “Sejanus” followed at the Globe; Shakespeare was in the cast, and may have been also a collaborator. But the failure of this tragedy to please the patrons of the Globe may have led to a temporary estrangement from that theatre, for Jonson did not undervalue himself or forget that Chapman, as Mr. Acheson has clearly shown, was always a bitter opponent of Shakespeare, while it was characteristic of Jonson himself to be equally ready to defend or to quarrel with friends. Now in the “Poetaster” Jonson refers to Chapman and to his “divine” Homer, as, for instance, when he makes the father of Ovid say: “Ay, your god of poets there, whom all of you admire and reverence so much, Homer, he whose worm-eaten statue must not be spewed against but with hallowed lips and grovelling adoration, what was he? What was he?... You’ll tell me his name shall live; and that, now being dead, his works have eternized him and made him divine” (Act I., Scene 1.) Again, the incident of the gods’ banquet, although it is modelled by Ben Jonson upon the synod of the Iliad, is obviously a satire upon Chapman’s ecstatic admiration for Homer’s heroes. It may also refer to Shakespeare’s “Troilus and Cressida,” for if this comedy was acted in 1598 it might well have been suppressed after its first performance, since to the groundlings it must have been “caviare,” and to Chapman’s allies, the scholars, a malicious piece of “ignorance and impiety,” while the Court would have been sure to take offence at the Essex incidents. Besides Jonson, in the “Poetaster,” seems to be defending someone from attacks who has dared to laugh at Chapman’s idol. This appears in such witty expressions as “Gods may grow impudent in iniquity, and they must not be told of it”... “So now we may play the fool by authority”... “What, shall the king of gods turn the king of good fellows, and have no fellow in wickedness? This makes our poets that know our profaneness live as profane as we” (Act IV., Scene 3.) Continually in this play is Jonson attacking Chapman for the same reason that Shakespeare did, and, more than this, Jonson proclaims that the poet Virgil is as much entitled to be regarded “divine” as Homer, while the word “divine” is seized hold of for further satire in the remark, “Well said, my divine deft Horace.”
Jonson says he wrote his “Poetaster” to ridicule Marston, the dramatist, who previously had libelled him on the stage. In addition to Marston, Jonson appeared himself in the play as Horace, together with Dekker and other men in the theatre. It was but natural, then, for commentators to centre their attention on those parts of the play where Marston and Horace were prominent. But there is an underplot to which very little attention hitherto has been given, and it is hardly likely, if Jonson was writing a comedy in order to satirize living persons and contemporary events, that his underplot would be altogether free from topical allusions. It may be well, then, to relate the story of the underplot, and, if possible, to try to show its significance. Julia, who is Cæsar’s daughter, lives at Court, and she invites to the palace her lover, Ovid, a merchant’s son, and some tradesmen of the town, with their wives; then she contrives, unknown to her father, for these plebeians to counterfeit the gods at a banquet prepared for them. An actor of the Globe reports to one of Cæsar’s spies that Julia has sent to the playhouse to borrow suitable properties for this “divine” masquerade, so that while the sham gods are in the midst of their licentious convivialities Cæsar suddenly appears, led there by his spy, and is horrified at the daring act of profanity perpetrated by his daughter. “Be they the gods!” he exclaims,
“Oh impious sight!...
Profaning thus their dignities in their forms,
And making them like you but counterfeits.”
Then he goes on to say:
“If you think gods but feigned and virtue painted,
Know we sustain our actual residence,
And with the title of our emperor
Retain his spirit and imperial power.”
And then, with correct imperial conventionality, he proceeds to punish the offenders, locking up his daughter behind “iron doors” and exiling her lover. Now, Horace—that is to say, Jonson—is supposed by the revellers to be responsible for having betrayed the inspirer of these antics. But this implication Jonson indignantly repudiates in a scene between Horace, the spy, and the Globe player, in which Horace severely upbraids them for their malice:
“To prey upon the life of innocent mirth
And harmless pleasures bred of noble wit,”
a rebuke that found expression in almost similar words in the 1609 preface to Shakespeare’s “Troilus and Cressida”: “For it is a birth of (that) brain that never undertook anything comical vainly: and were but the vain names of comedies changed for titles of commodities or of plays for pleas, you should see all those grand censors that now style them such vanities flock to them for the main grace of their gravities.” Now Jonson, if he, indeed, intended to defend the attacks made on his friend Shakespeare’s play, has shown considerable adroitness in the delicate task he undertook, for since the “Poetaster” was written to be acted at the Blackfriars, a theatre under Court patronage, Jonson could not there abuse “the grand censors,” and this he avoids doing by making Cæsar justly incensed at the impudence of the citizens in daring to counterfeit the divine gods, while Horace, out of reach of Cæsar’s ear, soundly rates the police spy and the actor for mistaking the shadow for the substance and regarding playacting as if it were political conspiracy. But what, it may be contended, connects the underplot in the “Poetaster” directly with Shakespeare’s play is the speech of citizen Mercury and its satirical insistence that immorality may be tolerated by the gods:
“The great god Jupiter, of his licentious goodness, willing to make this feast no fast from any manner of pleasure, nor to bind any god or goddess to be anything the more god or goddess for their names, he gives them all free licence to speak no wiser than persons of baser titles; and to be nothing better than common men or women. And, therefore, no god shall need to keep himself more strictly to his goddess than any man does to his wife; nor any goddess shall need to keep herself more strictly to her god than any woman does to her husband. But since it is no part of wisdom in these days to come into bonds, it should be lawful for every lover to break loving oaths, to change their lovers, and make love to others, as the heat of everyone’s blood and the spirit of our nectar shall inspire. And Jupiter save Jupiter!”
Now this speech, it may be contended, is but a good-natured parody of Shakespeare’s travesty of the Iliad story, as he wrote it in answer to Chapman’s absurd claim for the sanctity of Homer’s characters. Shakespeare’s consciousness of power might naturally have incited him to place himself immediately by the side of Homer, but it is more likely that he was interested in the ethical than in the personal point of view. Unlike most of his plays, as Dr. Ward has pointed out, this comedy follows no single original source accurately, because the author’s satire was more topical than anything he had previously attempted, except, perhaps, in “Love’s Labour’s Lost.” But Shakespeare for once had miscalculated not his own powers, but the powers of the “grand censors,” who could suppress plays which reflected upon the morality or politics of those who moved in high places; nor had he sufficiently allowed for the hostility of the “sinners who lived in the suburbs.” Shakespeare, indeed, found one of the most striking compositions of his genius disliked and condemned not from its lack of merit, but for reasons that Jonson so forcibly points out in words put into the mouth of Virgil:
“’Tis not the wholesome sharp morality,
Or modest anger of a satiric spirit,
That hurts or wounds the body of the state;
But the sinister application
Of the malicious, ignorant, and base
Interpreter, who will distort and strain
The general scope and purpose of an author
To his particular and private spleen.”
The stigma that rested on Shakespeare in his lifetime for having written this play rests on him still, for some unintelligible reason, since no man ever sat down to put his thoughts on paper with a loftier motive. But so it is! Then, as now, whenever a dramatist attempts to be teacher and preacher, all the other teachers and preachers in the world hold up their hands in horror and exclaim: “What impiety! What stupendous ignorance!”
Gervinus, in his criticism of this play, compares the satire of the Elizabethen poet with that of Aristophanes, and points out that the Greek dramatist directed his sallies against the living. This, he contends, should ever be the object of satire, because a man must not war against the defenceless and dead. Yet Shakespeare’s instincts as a dramatist were too unerring for him to be unconscious of this fundamental principle of his art. The stage in his time supplied the place now occupied by the Press, and political discussions were carried on in public through the mouth of the actor, of which few indications can now be traced on the printed page, owing to the difficulty of fitting the date of composition with that of the performance. Heywood, the dramatist, in his answer to the Puritan’s abuse of the theatre, alludes to the stage as the great political schoolmaster of the people. And yet until recent years the labours of commentators have been chiefly confined to making literary comparisons, to discovering sources of plots, and the origin of expressions, so that there still remains much investigation needed to discover Shakespeare’s political, philosophical, and religious affinities as they appear reflected in his plays. Mr. Richard Simpson, the brilliant Shakespearian scholar, many years ago pointed out the necessity for a new departure in criticism, and added that it was still thought derogatory to Shakespeare “to make him an upholder of any principles worth assertion,” or to admit that, as a reasoner, he took any decided part in the affairs which influenced the highest minds of his day. Now, in regard to politics, government by factions was then the prevailing feature; factions consisting of individuals who centred round some nobleman, whom the Queen favoured and made, or weakened, according to her judgment or caprice. In the autumn of 1597 Essex’s influence over the Queen was waning, and after a sharp rebuke received from her at the Privy Council table, he abruptly left the Court and sullenly withdrew to his estate at Wanstead, where he remained so long in retirement that his friends remonstrated with him against his continued absence. One of them, who signed himself “Thy true servant not daring to subscribe,” urged him to attend every Council and to let nothing be settled either at home or abroad without his knowledge. He should stay in the Court, and perform all his duties there, where he can make a greater show of discontent than he possibly could being absent; there is nothing, adds this writer, that his enemies so much wish, enjoy, and rejoice in as his absence. He is advised not to sue any more, “because necessity will entreat for him.” All he need do now is to dissemble like a courtier, and show himself outwardly unwilling of that which he has inwardly resolved. For by retiring he is playing his enemies’ game, since “the greatest subject that ever is or was greatest, in the prince’s favour, in his absence is not missed.” In “Troilus and Cressida” we have a similar situation, and we hear similar advice given. Achilles, like Essex, has withdrawn unbidden and discontentedly to his tent, refusing to come again to his general’s council table. For doing so Ulysses remonstrates with him in almost the same words as the writer of the anonymous letter.
“The present eye praises the present object.
Then marvel not, thou great and complete man,
That all the Greeks begin to worship Ajax;
Since things in motion sooner catch the eye
Than what not stirs. The cry went once on thee,
And still it might, and yet it may again,
If thou would’st not entomb thyself alive,
And case thy reputation in thy tent;
Whose glorious deeds, but in these fields of late,
Made emulous missions ’mongst the gods themselves
And drave great Mars to faction.”
Then Achilles replies:
“Of this my privacy I have strong reasons.”
And Ulysses continues:
“But ’gainst your privacy
The reasons are more potent and heroical,
’Tis known, Achilles, that you are in love
With one of Priam’s daughters.
Achilles: Ha! known?
Ulysses: Is that a wonder?
*****
All the commerce that you have had with Troy
As perfectly is ours as yours, my lord;
And better would it fit Achilles much
To throw down Hector than Polyxena.”
If, again, we turn to the life and letters of Essex, we find there that upon the 11th of February, 1598, “it is spied out by some that my Lord of Essex is again fallen in love with his fairest B.: it cannot chance but come to her Majesty’s ears, and then he is undone.” The lady in question was Mary Brydges, a maid-of-honour and celebrated beauty. Again, in the same month Essex writes to the Queen, “I was never proud till your Majesty sought to make me too base.” And Achilles is blamed by Agamemnon for his pride in a remarkably fine passage. Then after news had come of the disaster to the Queen’s troops in Ireland, in the summer of 1598, Essex reminds the Queen that, “I posted up and first offered my attendance after my poor advice to your Maj. But your Maj. rejected both me and my letter: the cause, as I hear, was that I refused to give counsel when I was last called to my Lord Keeper.” A similar situation is found in the play. Agamemnon sends for Achilles to attend the Council and he refuses to come, and later on, when he desires a reconciliation, the Council pass him by unnoticed. It is almost impossible to read the third act of this play without being reminded of these and other incidents in Essex’s life. Nor would Shakespeare forget the stir that had been created in London when in 1591 it was known at Court that Essex, at the siege of Rouen, had sent a personal challenge to the governor of the town couched in the following words: “Si vous voulez combattre vous-même à cheval ou à pied je maintiendrai que la querelle du rois est plus juste que celle de la ligue, et que ma Maîtresse est plus belle que la votre.” And Æneas, the Trojan, brings a challenge in almost identical words from Hector to the Greeks. It is true that this incident is in the Iliad together with the incidents connected with the withdrawal of Achilles, but Shakespeare selected his material from many sources and appears to have chosen what was most likely to appeal to his audience. Now it is not presumed that Achilles is Essex, nor that Ajax is Raleigh, nor Agamemnon Elizabeth, or that Shakespeare’s audience for a moment supposed that they were; although it is to be noticed that the Achilles who comes into Shakespeare’s play is not the same man at the beginning and end of the play as he is in the third act, where, in conversation with Ulysses he suddenly becomes an intelligent being and not simply a prize-fighter. To the injury of his drama, Shakespeare here runs away from his Trojan story, and does so for reasons that must have been special to the occasion for which the play was written. For about this time, the Privy Council wrote to some Justices of the Peace in Middlesex, complaining that certain players at the Curtain were reported to be representing upon the stage “the persons of some gentlemen of good descent and quality that are yet alive,” and that the actors were impersonating these aristocrats “under obscure manner, but yet in such sorte as all the hearers may take notice of the matter and the persons that are meant thereby. This being a thing very unfit and offensive.” The protest seems almost to suggest that the Achilles’s scenes in Shakespeare’s play express, “under obscure manner,” reflections upon contemporary politicians. But, indeed, the growing political unrest which marked the last few years of Elizabeth’s reign could not fail to find expression on the stage.
It must be remembered, besides, that the years 1597 to 1599 were marked by a group of dramas which may be called plays of political adventure. Nash had got into trouble over a performance of “The Isle of Dogs” at the Rose in 1597. In the same year complaints were made against Shakespeare for putting Sir John Oldcastle on the stage in the character of Falstaff. Also at the same period Shakespeare’s “Richard the Second” was published, but not without exciting suspicions at Court, for the play had a political significance in the eyes of Catholics: Queen Mary of Scotland told her English judges that “she remembered they had done the same to King Richard, whom they had degraded from all honour and dignity.” Then on the authority of Mr. H. C. Hart we are told that Ben Jonson brought Sir Walter Raleigh, the best hated man in England, on to the stage in the play of “Every Man Out of His Humour,” in 1599, and, as a consequence, in the summer of the same year it was decided by the Privy Council that restrictions should be placed on satires, epigrams, and English histories, and that “noe plays be printed except they be allowed by such as have an authoritie.” Dramatists, therefore, had to be much more circumspect in their political allusions after 1599 than they were before.
There are two new conjectures therefore put forward in this article: (1) That the underplot in the “Poetaster” contains allusions to Shakespeare’s play, and (2) that the withdrawal of Achilles is a reflection on the withdrawal of Essex from Elizabeth’s Court. Presuming that further evidence may one day be found to support these suppositions, it is worth while to consider them in relation to the history of the play.
And first to clear away the myth in connection with the idea that this is one of Shakespeare’s late plays, or that it was only partly written by the poet, or written at different periods of his life. It may be confidently asserted that Shakespeare allowed no second hand to meddle with a work so personal to himself as this one, nor was he accustomed to seek the help of any collaborator in a play that he himself initiated. We know, besides, that he wrote with facility and rapidly. As to the date of the play, the evidence of the loose dramatic construction, and the preference for dialogue where there should be drama, place it during the period when Shakespeare was writing his histories. The grip that he ultimately obtained over the stage handling of a story so as to produce a culminating and overpowering impression on his audience is wanting in “Troilus and Cressida.” In fact, it is impossible to believe that this play was written after “Julius Cæsar,” “Much Ado,” or “Twelfth Night.” Nor is there evidence of revision in the play, since there are no topical allusions to be found in it which point to a later date than 1598 except perhaps in the prologue, which could hardly have been written before 1601, and did not appear in print before 1623. Again, it is contended that there is too much wisdom crammed into the play to allow of its being an early composition. But the false ethics underlying the Troy story, which Shakespeare meant to satirize in “Troilus and Cressida,” had been previously exposed in his poem of “Lucrece”:
“Show me the strumpet that began this stir,
That with my nails her beauty I may tear.
Thy heat of lust, fond Paris, did incur
This load of wrath that burning Troy did bear:
Thy eye kindled the fire that burneth here;
And here in Troy, for trespass of thine eye
The sire, the son, the dame, and daughter die.
“Why should the private pleasure of some one
Become the public plague of many moe?
Let sin, alone committed, light alone
Upon his head that hath transgressed so;
Let guiltless souls be freed from guilty woe:
For one’s offence why should so many fall,
To plague a private sin in general.
“Lo, here weeps Hecuba, here Priam dies,
Here manly Hector faints, here Troilus swounds,
Here friend by friend in bloody charnel lies,
And friend to friend gives unadvisèd wounds,
And one man’s lust these many lives confounds;
Had doting Priam check’d his son’s desire,
Troy had been bright with fame, and not with fire.”
The difficulty with commentators is the knowledge that the play might have been written yesterday, while the treatment of the subject, in its modernity, is as far removed from “The Tempest” as it is from “Henry V.” Now, if the drama be recognized as a satire written under provocation and with extraordinary mental energy, the date of the composition can be as well fixed for 1598, when Shakespeare was thirty-four years old, as for the year 1609. There is, besides, something to be said with regard to its vocabulary, as Mr. Richard Simpson has shown, which is peculiar to this play alone. Shakespeare introduces into it a large number of new words which he had never used before and never employed afterwards. The list is a long one. There are 126 latinized words that are coined or used only for this play, words such as propugnation, protractive, Ptisick, publication, cognition, commixture, commodious, community, complimental. And in addition to all the latinized words there are 124 commoner words simple and compound, not elsewhere to be found in the poet’s plays, showing an unwonted search after verbal novelty.
We will now, with the help of the new information, attempt to unravel the mystery as to the history of the play. The creation of the character of Falstaff in “Henry IV.” (Part I.) brought Shakespeare’s popularity, as a dramatist, to its zenith, and he seized the opportunity to reply to the attacks made upon himself, as a poet, by his rival poet, Chapman, and wrote a play giving a modern interpretation to the story of Troy, and working into the underplot some political allusion to Essex and the Court. The play may have been acted at the Curtain late in 1598, or at the Globe in the spring of 1599, or, perhaps, privately at some nobleman’s mansion, who might have been one of Essex’s faction. It was not liked, and Shakespeare experienced his first and most serious reverse on the stage. But he quickly retrieved his position by producing another Falstaff play, “Henry IV.” (Part II.), in the summer of 1599, followed by “Henry V.” in the same autumn, when Essex’s triumphs in Ireland are predicted. Shakespeare, none the less, must have felt both grieved and annoyed by the treatment his satirical comedy had received from the hands of the “grand censors.” So at Christmas, 1601, when Ben Jonson produced his “Poetaster” at Blackfriars, the younger dramatist defended his friend from the silly objections which had been made to the Trojan comedy. Then early in 1603 a revival of “Troilus and Cressida” may have been contemplated at the Globe, and also its publication, but the death of Essex was still too near to the memory of Londoners to make this possible, and the suggestion may have been dropped on the eve of its fulfilment; Shakespeare, meanwhile, had written a prologue, to be spoken by an actor in armour, in imitation of Jonson’s prologue, with a view to protect his play from further hostility. In 1609 Shakespeare was preparing to give up his connection with the stage, and may have handed his copy of the play to some publishers, for a consideration, and the book was then printed. The Globe players, however, demurred and claimed the property as theirs. The publishers then removed their first title page and inserted another one to give the appearance to the reader of the play being new. They also wrote a preface to show that the publication, if unauthorized, was warranted, since the play had not been acted on the public stage. The real object of the preface, however, was to defend the play from the attacks of the “grand censors,” who thought that the comedy had some deep political significance, and was not merely intended to amuse and instruct. It also shows the writer’s resentment at the high-handed action of the “grand possessors,” the Globe players, who were unwilling either to act the play themselves or yet to allow it to be published.