The Man Shakespeare and His Tragic Life Story Part 25

There can be no doubt that in this Rosaline of "Romeo and Juliet" and of "Love's Labour's Lost," Shakespeare is describing the "dark lady" of the second sonnet-series, and describing her, against his custom in play-writing, even more exactly than he described her in the lyrics.

There is a line at the end of this act which is very characteristic when considered with what has gone before; it is clearly a confession of Shakespeare himself, and a perfect example of what one might call the conscience that pervades all his mature work:

"Light wenches may prove plagues to men forsworn."

We were right, it seems, in putting some stress on that "perjured" when we first met it.

In the second scene of the fifth act, which opens with a talk between the Princess and her ladies, our view of Rosaline is confirmed.

Katherine calls Rosaline light, and jests upon this in lewd fas.h.i.+on; declares, too, that she is "a merry, nimble, stirring spirit," in fact, tells her that she is

"A light condition in a beauty dark."

All these needless repet.i.tions prove to me that Shakespeare is describing his mistress as she lived and moved. Those who disagree with me should give another instance in which he has used or abused the same precise portraiture. But there is more in this light badinage of the girls than a description of Rosaline. When Rosaline says that she will torture Biron before she goes, and turn him into her va.s.sal, the Princess adds,

"None are so surely caught when they are catch'd As wit turned fool."

Rosaline replies,

"The blood of youth burns not with such excess As gravity's revolt to wantonness."

This remark has no pertinence or meaning in Rosaline's mouth. Biron is supposed to be young in the play, and he has never been distinguished for his gravity, but for his wit and humour: the Princess calls him "quick Biron." The two lines are clearly Shakespeare's criticism of himself. When he wrote the sonnets he thought himself old, and certainly his years (thirty-four) contrasted badly with those of Mary Fitton who was at this time not more than nineteen.

Late in 1597 then, before William Herbert came upon the scene at all, Shakespeare knew that his mistress was a wanton:

"Ay, and by heaven, one that will do the deed; Though Argus were her eunuch and her guard."

Shakespeare has painted his love for us in these plays as a most extraordinary woman: in person she is tall, with pallid complexion and black eyes and black brows, "a gipsy," he calls her; in nature imperious, lawless, witty, pa.s.sionate--a "wanton"; moreover, a person of birth and position. That a girl of the time has been discovered who united all these qualities in herself would bring conviction to almost any mind; but belief pa.s.ses into cert.i.tude when we reflect that this portrait of his mistress is given with greatest particularity in the plays, where in fact it is out of place and a fault in art. When studying the later plays we shall find this gipsy wanton again and again; she made the deepest impression on Shakespeare; was, indeed, the one love of his life. It was her falseness that brought him to self-knowledge and knowledge of life, and turned him from a light-hearted writer of comedies and histories into the author of the greatest tragedies that have ever been conceived. Shakespeare owes the greater part of his renown to Mary Fitton.

CHAPTER V. THE SONNETS: PART III.

The most interesting question in the sonnets, the question the vital importance of which dwarfs all others, has never yet been fairly tackled and decided. As soon as English critics noticed, a hundred years or so ago, that the sonnets fell into two series, and that the first, and longer, series was addressed to a young man, they cried, "shocking!

shocking!" and registered judgement with smug haste on evidence that would not hang a cat. Hallam, "the judicious," held that "it would have been better for Shakespeare's reputation if the sonnets had never been written," and even Heine, led away by the consensus of opinion, accepted the condemnation, and regretted "the miserable degradation of humanity"

to be found in the sonnets. But before giving ourselves to the novel enjoyment of moral superiority over Shakespeare, it may be worth while to ask, is the fact proved? is his guilt established?

No one, I think, who has followed me so far will need to be told that I take no interest in white-was.h.i.+ng Shakespeare: I am intent on painting him as he lived and loved, and if I found him as vicious as Villon, or as cruel as a stoat, I would set it all down as faithfully as I would give proof of his generosity or his gentleness.

Before the reader can fairly judge of Shakespeare's innocence or guilt, he must hold in mind two salient peculiarities of the man which I have already noted; but which must now be relieved out into due prominence so that one will make instinctive allowance for them at every moment, his sensuality and his sn.o.bbishness.

His sensuality is the quality, as we have seen, which unites the creatures of his temperament with those of his intellect, his poets with his thinkers, and proves that Romeo and Jaques, the Duke of "Twelfth Night" and Hamlet, are one and the same person. If the matter is fairly considered it will be found that this all-pervading sensuality is the source, or at least a natural accompaniment of his gentle kindness and his unrivalled sympathy.

Shakespeare painted no portrait of the hero or of the adventurer; found no new word for the virile virtues or virile vices, but he gave immortal expression to desire and its offspring, to love, jealousy, and despair, to every form of pathos, pleading and pity, to all the gentler and more feminine qualities. Desire in especial has inspired him with phrases more magically expressive even than those gasped out by panting Sappho when l.u.s.t had made her body a lyre of deathless music. Her lyric to the beloved is not so intense as Oth.e.l.lo's:

"O, thou weed Who art so lovely fair and smell'st so sweet That the sense aches at thee";

or as Cleopatra's astonis.h.i.+ng:

"There is gold, and here My bluest veins to kiss";

--the revelation of a lifetime devoted to vanity and sensuality, sensuality pampered as a G.o.d and adored with an Eastern devotion.

I do not think I need labour this point further; as I have already noticed, Orsino, the Duke of "Twelfth Night," sums up Shakespeare's philosophy of love in the words:

"Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, The appet.i.te may sicken, and so die."--

Shakespeare told us the truth about himself when he wrote in sonnet 142, "Love is my sin." We can expect from him new words or a new method in the painting of pa.s.sionate desire.

The second peculiarity of Shakespeare which we must establish firmly in our minds before we attempt to construe the sonnets is his extraordinary sn.o.bbishness.

English sn.o.bbishness is like a London fog, intenser than can be found in any other country; it is so extravagant, indeed, that it seems different in kind. One instance of this: when Mr. Gladstone was being examined once in a case, he was asked by counsel, Was he a friend of a certain lord? Instead of answering simply that he was, he replied that he did not think it right to say he was a friend of so great a n.o.ble: "he had the honour of his acquaintance." Only in England would the man who could make n.o.blemen at will be found bowing before them with this humility of soul.

In Shakespeare's time English sn.o.bbishness was stronger than it is to-day; it was then supported by law and enforced by penalties. To speak of a lord without his t.i.tle was regarded as defamation, and was punished as such more than once by the Star Chamber. Shakespeare's position, too, explains how this native sn.o.bbishness in him was heightened to flunkeyism. He was an aristocrat born, as we have seen, and felt in himself a kins.h.i.+p for the courtesies, chivalries, and generosities of aristocratic life. This tendency was accentuated by his calling. The middle cla.s.s, already steeped in Puritanism, looked upon the theatre as scarcely better than the brothel, and showed their contempt for the players in a thousand ways. The groundlings and common people, with their "greasy caps" and "stinking breath" were as loathsome to Shakespeare as the crop-headed, gain-loving citizens who condemned him and his like pitilessly. He was thrown back, therefore, upon the young n.o.blemen who had read the cla.s.sics and loved the arts. His works show how he admires them. He could paint you Ba.s.sanio or Bened.i.c.k or Mercutio to the life. Everybody has noticed the predilection with which he lends such characters his own poetic spirit and charm. His lower orders are all food for comedy or farce: he will not treat them seriously.

His sn.o.bbishness carries him to astounding lengths. One instance: every capable critic has been astonished by the extraordinary fidelity to fact he shows in his historical plays; he often takes whole pages of an earlier play or of Plutarch, and merely varying the language uses them in his drama. He is punctiliously careful to set down the fact, whatever it may be, and explain it, even when it troubles the flow of his story; but as soon as the fact comes into conflict with his respect for dignitaries, he loses his nice conscience. He tells us of Agincourt without ever mentioning the fact that the English bowmen won the battle; he had the truth before him; the chronicler from whom he took the story vouched for the fact; but Shakespeare preferred to ascribe the victory to Henry and his lords. Shakespeare loved a lord with a pa.s.sionate admiration, and when he paints himself it is usually as a duke or prince.

Holding these truths in our mind, Shakespeare's intense sensitiveness and sensuality, and his almost inconceivable sn.o.bbishness, we may now take up the sonnets.

The first thing that strikes one in the sonnets is the fact that, though a hundred and twenty-five of them are devoted to a young man, and Shakespeare's affection for him, and only twenty-six to the woman, every one of those to the woman is characterized by a terrible veracity of pa.s.sion, whereas those addressed to the youth are rather conventional than convincing. He pictures the woman to the life; strong, proud, with dark eyes and hair, pale complexion--a wanton with the rare power of carrying off even a wanton's shame. He finds a method new to literature to describe her. He will have no poetic exaggeration; snow is whiter than her b.r.e.a.s.t.s; violets sweeter than her breath:

"And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare As any she belied with false compare."

His pa.s.sion is so intense that he has no desire to paint her seduction as greater than it was. She has got into his blood, so to speak, and each drop of it under the microscope would show her image. Take any sonnet at haphazard, and you will hear the rage of his desire.

But what is the youth like?--"the master-mistress" of his pa.s.sion, to give him the t.i.tle which seems to have convinced the witless of Shakespeare's guilt. Not one word of description is to be found anywhere; no painting epithet--nothing. Where is the cry of this terrible, shameless, outrageous pa.s.sion that mastered Shakespeare's conscience and enslaved his will? Hardly a phrase that goes beyond affection--such affection as Shakespeare at thirty-four might well feel for a gifted, handsome aristocrat like Lord Herbert, who had youth, beauty, wealth, wit to recommend him. Herbert was a poet, too: a patron unparagoned! "If Southampton gave me a thousand pounds," Shakespeare may well have argued, "perhaps Lord Herbert will get me made Master of the Revels, or even give me a higher place." An aristocratic society tends to make parasites even of the strong, as Dr. Johnson's famous letter to Lord Chesterfield proves. But let us leave supposition and come to the sonnets themselves, which are addressed to the youth. The first sonnet begins:

"From fairest creatures we desire increase, That thereby beauty's rose might never die."

This is a very good argument indeed when addressed to a woman; but when addressed to a man by a man it rings strained and false. Yet it is the theme of the first seventeen sonnets. It is precisely the same argument which Shakespeare set forth in "Venus and Adonis" again and again:

"Seeds spring from seeds and beauty breedeth beauty; Thou wast begot; to get it is thy duty."

"And so, in spite of death, thou dost survive, In that thy likeness still is left alive ..."

(173-4.)

"Foul cankering rust the hidden treasure frets, But gold that's put to use more gold begets."

(767-8.)

At the end of the third sonnet we find the same argument:

"But if thou live, remember'd not to be, Die single, and thine image dies with thee."

Again, in the fourth, sixth, and seventh sonnets the same plea is urged.

In the tenth sonnet the poet cries:

"Make thee another self, for love of me, That beauty still may live in thine or thee."