The Man Shakespeare and His Tragic Life Story Part 20

But this is only an involuntary _apercu_ of Valentine, as indeed Bened.i.c.k is only an intellectual mood of Shakespeare. And here Valentine is contrasted with Proteus, who gives somewhat different advice to Thurio, and yet advice which is still more characteristic of Shakespeare than Valentine-Bened.i.c.k's counsel. Proteus says:

"You must lay lime to tangle her desires By wailful sonnets, whose composed rhymes Should be full fraught with serviceable vows."

In this way the young poet sought to give expression to different views of life, and so realize the complexity of his own nature.

The other traits of Valentine's character that do not necessarily belong to him as a lover are all characteristic traits of Shakespeare. When he is playing the banished robber-chief far from his love, this is how Valentine consoles himself:

"This shadowy desert, unfrequented woods, I better brook than flouris.h.i.+ng peopled towns: Here can I sit alone unseen of any, And to the nightingale's complaining notes Tune my distresses and record my woes."

This idyllic love of nature, this marked preference for the country over the city, however peculiar in a highway robber, are characteristics of Shakespeare from youth to age. Not only do his comedies lead us continually from the haunts of men to the forest and stream, but also his tragedies. He turns to nature, indeed, in all times of stress and trouble for its healing unconsciousness, its gentle changes that can be foreseen and reckoned upon, and that yet bring fresh interests and charming surprises; and in times of health and happiness he pictures the pleasant earth and its diviner beauties with a pa.s.sionate intensity.

Again and again we shall have to notice his poet's love for "unfrequented woods," his thinker's longing for "the life removed."

At the end of the drama Valentine displays the gentle forgivingness of disposition which we have already had reason to regard as one of Shakespeare's most marked characteristics. As soon as "false, fleeting Proteus" confesses his sin Valentine pardons him with words that echo and re-echo through Shakespeare's later dramas:

"Then I am paid, And once again I do receive thee honest.

Who by repentance is not satisfied Is nor of heaven nor earth; for these are pleased; By patience the Eternal's wrath's appeased."

He even goes further than this, and confounds our knowledge of human nature by adding:

"And that my love may appear plain and free All that was mine in Silvia I give thee."

And that the meaning may be made more distinct than words can make it, he causes Julia to faint on hearing the proposal. One cannot help recalling the pa.s.sage in "The Merchant of Venice" when Ba.s.sanio and Gratiano both declare they would sacrifice their wives to free Antonio, and a well-known sonnet which seems to prove that Shakespeare thought more of a man's friends.h.i.+p for a man than of a man's love for a woman.

But as I shall have to discuss this point at length when I handle the Sonnets, I have, perhaps, said enough for the moment. Nor need I consider the fact here that the whole of this last scene of the last act was manifestly revised or rewritten by Shakespeare _circa_ 1598--years after the rest of the play.

I think every one will admit now that Shakespeare revealed himself in "The Two Gentlemen of Verona," and especially in Valentine, much more fully than in Biron and in "Love's Labour's Lost" The three earliest comedies prove that from the very beginning of his career Shakespeare's chief aim was to reveal and realize himself.

CHAPTER II. SHAKESPEARE AS ANTONIO, THE MERCHANT

No one, so far as I know, has yet tried to identify Antonio, the Merchant of Venice, with Shakespeare, and yet Antonio is Shakespeare himself, and Shakespeare in what to us, children of an industrial civilization, is the most interesting att.i.tude possible. Here in Antonio for the first time we discover Shakespeare in direct relations with real life, as real life is understood in the twentieth century. From Antonio we shall learn what Shakespeare thought of business men and business methods--of our modern way of living. Of course we must be on our guard against drawing general conclusions from this solitary example, unless we find from other plays that Antonio's att.i.tude towards practical affairs was indeed Shakespeare's. But if this is the case, if Shakespeare has depicted himself characteristically in Antonio, how interesting it will be to hear his opinion of our money-making civilization. It will be as if he rose from the dead to tell us what he thinks of our doings. He has been represented by this critic and by that as a master of affairs, a prudent thrifty soul; now we shall see if this monstrous hybrid of tradesman-poet ever had any foundation in fact.

The first point to be settled is: Did Shakespeare reveal himself very ingenuously and completely in Antonio, or was the "royal merchant" a mere pose of his, a mood or a convention? Let us take Antonio's first words, the words, too, which begin the play:

"In sooth, I know not why I am so sad: It wearies me; you say it wearies you; But how I caught it, found it, or came by it, What stuff 'tis made of, whereof it is born, I am to learn; And such a want-wit sadness makes of me, That I have much ado to know myself."

It is this very sadness that makes it easy for us to know Shakespeare, even when he disguises himself as a Venetian merchant. A little later and Jaques will describe and define the disease as "humorous melancholy"; but here it is already a settled habit of mind.

Antonio then explains that his sadness has no cause, and incidentally attributes his wealth to fortune and not to his own brains or endeavour.

The modern idea of the Captain of Industry who enriches others as well as himself, had evidently never entered into Shakespeare's head.

Salarino says Antonio is "sad to think upon his merchandise"; but Antonio answers:

"Believe me, no: I thank my fortune for it.

My ventures are not in one bottom trusted, Nor to one place: nor is my whole estate Upon the fortune of this present year: Therefore my merchandise makes me not sad."

This tone of modest gentle sincerity is Shakespeare's habitual tone from about his thirtieth year to the end of his life: it has the accent of unaffected nature. In bidding farewell to Salarino Antonio shows us the exquisite courtesy which Shakespeare used in life. Salarino, seeing Ba.s.sanio approaching, says:

"I would have stayed till I had made you merry, If worthier friends had not prevented me."

Antonio answers:

"Your worth is very dear in my regard.

I take it, your own business calls on you, And you embrace the occasion to depart."

More characteristic still is the dialogue between Gratiano and Antonio in the same scene. Gratiano, the twin-brother surely of Mercutio, tells Antonio that he thinks too much of the things of this world, and warns him:

"They lose it that do buy it with much care."

Antonio replies:

"I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano; A stage, where every man must play a part, And mine a sad one."

Every one who has followed me so far will admit that this is Shakespeare's most usual and most ingenuous att.i.tude towards life; "I do not esteem worldly possessions," he says; "life itself is too transient, too unreal to be dearly held." Gratiano's reflection, too, is Shakespeare's, and puts the truth in a nutsh.e.l.l:

"They lose it that do buy it with much care."

We now come to the most salient peculiarity in this play. When Ba.s.sanio, his debtor, asks him for more money, Antonio answers:

"My purse, my person, my extremes! means, Lie all unlocked to your occasions."

And, though Ba.s.sanio tells him his money is to be risked on a romantic and wild adventure, Antonio declares that Ba.s.sanio's doubt does him more wrong than if his friend had already wasted all he has, and the act closes by Antonio pressing Ba.s.sanio to use his credit "to the uttermost." Now, this contempt of money was, no doubt, a pose, if not a habit of the aristocratic society of the time, and Shakespeare may have been aping the tone of his betters in putting to show a most lavish generosity. But even if his social superiors encouraged him in a wasteful extravagance, it must be admitted that Shakespeare betters their teaching. The lord was riotously lavish, no doubt, because he had money, or could get it without much trouble; but, put in Antonio's position, he would not press his last penny on his friend, much less strain his credit "to the uttermost" for him as Antonio does for Ba.s.sanio. Here we have the personal note of Shakespeare: "Your affection," says the elder man to the younger, "is all to me, and money's less than nothing in the balance. Don't let us waste a word on it; a doubt of me were an injury!" But men will do that for affection which they would never do in cool blood, and therefore one cannot help asking whether Shakespeare really felt and practised this extreme contempt of wealth? For the moment, if we leave his actions out of the account, there can be, I think, no doubt about his feelings. His dislike of money makes him disfigure reality. No merchant, it may fairly be said, either of the sixteenth century or the twentieth, ever ama.s.sed or kept a fortune with Antonio's principles. In our day of world-wide speculation and immense wealth it is just possible for a man to be a millionaire and generous; but in the sixteenth century, when wealth was made by penurious saving, by slow daily adding of coin to coin, merchants like this Antonio were unheard of, impossible.

Moreover all the amiable characters in this play regard money with unaffected disdain; Portia no sooner hears of Shylock's suit than she cries:

"Pay him six thousand, and deface the bond; Double six thousand, and then treble that, Before a friend of this description Shall lose a hair through Ba.s.sanio's fault."

And if we attribute this outburst to her love we must not forget that, when it comes to the test in court, and she holds the Jew in her hand and might save her gold, she again reminds him:

"Shylock, there's thrice thy money offered thee."

A boundless generosity is the characteristic of Portia, and Ba.s.sanio, the penniless fortune-hunter, is just as extravagant; he will pay the Jew's bond twice over, and,

"If that will not suffice, I will be bound to pay it ten times o'er, On forfeit of my hands, my head, my heart."

It may, of course, be urged that these Christians are all prodigal in order to throw Shylock's avarice and meanness into higher light; but that this disdain of money is not a.s.sumed for the sake of any artistic effect will appear from other plays. At the risk of being accused of super-subtlety, I must confess that I find in Shylock himself traces of Shakespeare's contempt of money; Jessica says of him:

"I have heard him swear To Tubal and to Chus, his countrymen, That he would rather have Antonio's flesh Than twenty times the value of the sum That he did owe him."

Even Shylock, it appears, hated Antonio more than he valued money, and this hatred, though it may have its root in love of money, half redeems him in our eyes. Shakespeare could not imagine a man who loved money more than anything else; his hated and hateful usurer is more a man of pa.s.sion than a Jew.

The same prodigality and contempt of money are to be found in nearly all Shakespeare's plays, and, curiously enough, the persons to show this disdain most strongly are usually the masks of Shakespeare himself. A philosophic soliloquy is hardly more characteristic of Shakespeare than a sneer at money. It should be noted, too, that this peculiarity is not a trait of his youth chiefly, as it is with most men who are free-handed. It rather seems, as in the case of Antonio, to be a reasoned att.i.tude towards life, and it undoubtedly becomes more and more marked as Shakespeare grows older. Contempt of wealth is stronger in Brutus than in Antonio; stronger in Lear than in Brutus, and stronger in Timon than in Lear.

But can we be at all certain that Antonio's view of life in this respect was Shakespeare's? It may be that Shakespeare pretended to this generosity in order to loosen the purse-strings of his lordly patrons.

Even if his motive for writing in this strain were a worthy motive, who is to a.s.sure us that he practised the generosity he preached? When I come to his life I think I shall be able to prove that Shakespeare was excessively careless of money; extravagant, indeed, and generous to a fault. Shakespeare did not win to eminence as a dramatist without exciting the envy and jealousy of many of his colleagues and contemporaries, and if these sharp-eyed critics had found him in drama after drama advocating lavish free-handedness while showing meanness or even ordinary prudence in his own expenditure, we should probably have heard of it as we heard from Greene how he took plays from other playwrights. But the silence of his contemporaries goes to confirm the positive testimony of Ben Jonson, that he was of "an open and free nature,"--openhanded always, and liberal, we may be sure, to a fault. In any case, the burden of proof lies with those who wish us to believe that Shakespeare was "a careful and prudent man of business," for in a dozen plays the personages who are his heroes and incarnations pour contempt on those who would lock "rascal counters" from their friends, and, in default of proof to the contrary, we are compelled to a.s.sume that he practised the generosity which he so earnestly and sedulously praised. At least it will be advisable for the moment to a.s.sume that he pictured himself as generous Antonio, without difficulty or conscious self-deception.

But this Antonio has not only the melancholy, courtesy and boundless generosity of Shakespeare; he has other qualities of the master which need to be thrown into relief.