The Man Shakespeare and His Tragic Life Story Part 37

"My long sickness Of health and living now begins to mend And nothing brings me all things."

Then the end:

"Timon hath made his everlasting mansion Upon the beached verge of the salt flood...."

We must not leave this play before noticing the overpowering erotic strain in Shakespeare which suits Timon as little as it suited Lear. The long discussion with Phrynia and Timandra is simply dragged in: neither woman is characterized: Shakespeare-Timon eases himself in pages of erotic raving:

"... Strike me the counterfeit matron; It is her habit only that is honest, Herself's a bawd:..."

And then:

"Consumptions sow In hollow bones of man...........

...............Down with the nose, Down with it flat; take the bridge quite away ..."

The "d.a.m.ned earth" even is "the common wh.o.r.e of mankind."

"Timon" is the true sequel to "The Merchant of Venice." Antonio gives lavishly, but is saved at the crisis by his friends. Timon gives with both hands, but when he appeals to his friends, is treated as a bore.

Shakespeare had travelled far in the dozen years which separate the two plays.

All Shakespeare's tragedies are phases of his own various weaknesses, and each one brings the hero to defeat and ruin. Hamlet cannot carry revenge to murder and fails through his own irresolution. Oth.e.l.lo comes to grief through mad jealousy. Antony fails and falls through excess of l.u.s.t; Lear through trust in men, and Timon through heedless generosity.

All these are separate studies of Shakespeare's own weaknesses; but the ruin is irretrievable, and reaches its ultimate in Timon. Trust and generosity, Shakespeare would like to tell us, were his supremest faults. In this he deceived himself. Neither "Lear" nor "Timon" is his greatest tragedy; but "Antony and Cleopatra," for l.u.s.t was his chief weakness, and the tragedy of l.u.s.t his greatest play.

Much of "Timon" is not Shakespeare's, the critics tell us, and some of it is manifestly not his, though many of the pa.s.sages rejected with the best reason have, I think, been touched up by him. The second scene of the first act is as bad as bad can be; but I hear his voice in the line:

"Methinks, I could deal kingdoms to my friends, And ne'er be weary."

At any rate, this is the keynote of the tragedy, which is struck again and again. Shakespeare probably exaggerated his generosity out of aristocratic pose; but that he was careless of money and freehanded to a fault, is, I think, certain from his writings, and can be proved from the facts known to us of his life.

CHAPTER XIII. SHAKESPEARE'S LAST ROMANCES: ALL COPIES.

_"Winters Tale": "Cymbeline": "The Tempest."_

The wheel has swung full circle: Timon is almost as weak as "t.i.tus Andronicus"; the pen falls from the nerveless hand. Shakespeare wrote nothing for some time. Even the critics make a break after "Timon,"

which closes what they are pleased to call his third period; but they do not seem to see that the break was really a breakdown in health. In "Lear" he had brooded and raged to madness; in "Timon" he had spent himself in futile, feeble cursings. His nerves had gone to pieces. He was now forty-five years of age, the forces of youth and growth had left him. He was prematurely old and feeble.

His recovery, it seems certain, was very slow, and he never again, if I am right, regained vigorous health, I am almost certain he went down to Stratford at this crisis and spent some time there, probably a couple of years, trying, no doubt, to staunch the wound in his heart, and win back again to life. The fear of madness had frightened him from brooding: he made up his mind to let the dead past bury its dead; he would try to forget and live sanely. After all, life is better than death.

It was probably his daughter who led him back from the brink of the grave. Almost all his latest works show the same figure of a young girl.

He seems now, for the first time, to have learned that a maiden can be pure, and in his old idealizing way which went with him to the end, he deified her. Judith became a symbol to him, and he lent her the ethereal grace of abstract beauty. In "Pericles" she is Marina; in "The Winter's Tale" Perdita; in "The Tempest" Miranda. It is probable when one comes to think of it, that Ward was right when he says that Shakespeare spent his "elder years" in Stratford; he was too broken to have taken up his life in London again.

The a.s.sertion that Shakespeare broke down in health, and never won back to vigorous life, will be scorned as my imagining. The critics who have agreed to regard "Cymbeline," "The Winter's Tale," and "The Tempest" as his finest works are all against me on this point, and they will call for "Proofs, proofs. Give us proofs," they will cry, "that the man who went mad and raved with Lear, and screamed and cursed in "Timon" did really break down, and was not imagining madness and despair." The proofs are to be found in these works themselves, plain for all men to read.

The three chief works of his last period are romances and are all copies; he was too tired to invent or even to annex; his own story is the only one that interests him. The plot of "The Winter's Tale" is the plot of "Much Ado about Nothing." Hero is Hermione. Another phase of "Much Ado About Nothing" is written out at length in "Cymbeline"; Imogen suffers like Hero and Hermione, under unfounded accusation. It is Shakespeare's own history turned from this world to fairyland: what would have happened, he asks, if the woman whom I believed false, had been true? This, the theme of "Much Ado," is the theme also of "The Winter's Tale" and of "Cymbeline." The idealism of the man is inveterate: he will not see that it was his own sensuality which gave him up to suffering, and not Mary Fitton's faithlessness. "The Tempest"

is the story of "As you Like it." We have again the two dukes, the exiled good Duke, who is Shakespeare, and the bad usurping Duke, Shakespeare's rival, Chapman, who has conquered for a time. Shakespeare is no longer able or willing to discover a new play: he can only copy himself, and in one of the scenes which he wrote into "Henry VIII." the copy is slavish.

I allude to the third scene in the second act; the dialogue between Anne Bullen and the Old Lady is extraordinarily reminiscent. When Anne Bullen says--

"'Tis better to be lowly born, And range with humble livers in content, Than to be perk'd up in a glistering grief And wear a golden sorrow"

I am reminded of Henry VI. And the contention between Anne Bullen and the Old Lady, in which Anne Bullen declares that she would not be a queen, and the Old Lady scorns her:

"Beshrew me, I would, And venture maidenhead for't; and so would you, For all this spice of your hypocrisy."

is much the same contention, and is handled in the same way as the contention between Desdemona and Emilia in "Oth.e.l.lo."

There are many other proofs of Shakespeare's weakness of hand throughout this last period, if further proofs were needed. The chief characteristics of Shakespeare's health are his humour, his gaiety, and wit--his love of life. A correlative characteristic is that all his women are sensuous and indulge in coa.r.s.e expressions in and out of season. This is said to be a fault of his time; but only professors could use an argument which shows such ignorance of life. Homer was clean enough, and Sophocles, Spenser, too; sensuality is a quality of the individual man. Still another characteristic of Shakespeare's maturity is that his characters, in spite of being idealized, live for us a vigorous, pulsing life.

All these characteristics are lacking in the works after "Timon." There is practically no humour, no wit, the clowns even are merely boorish-stupid with the solitary exception of Autolycus, who is a pale reflex of one or two characteristics of Falstaff. Shakespeare's humour has disappeared, or is so faint as scarcely to be called humour; all the heroines, too, are now vowed away from sensuality: Marina pa.s.ses through the brothel unsoiled; Perdita might have milk in her veins, and not blood, and Miranda is but another name for Perdita. Imogen, too, has no trace of natural pa.s.sion in her: she is a mere was.h.i.+ng-list, so to speak, of s.e.xless perfections. In this last period Shakespeare will have nothing to do with sensuality, and his characters, and not the female characters alone, are hardly more than abstractions; they lack the blood of emotion; there is not one of them could cast a shadow. How is it that the critics have mistaken these pale, bloodless silhouettes for Shakespeare's masterpieces?

In his earliest works he was compelled, as we have seen, to use his own experiences perpetually, not having had any experience of life, and in these, his latest plays, he also uses when he can his own experiences to give his pictures of the world from which he had withdrawn, some sense of vivid life. For example, in "Winter's Tale" his account of the death of the boy Mamillius is evidently a reflex of his own emotion when he lost his son, Hamnet, an emotion which at the time he pictured deathlessly in Arthur and the grief of the Queen-mother Constance.

Similarly, in "Cymbeline," the joy of the brothers in finding the sister is an echo of his own pleasure in getting to know his daughter.

I have an idea about the genesis of these last three plays as regards their order which may be wholly false, though true, I am sure, to Shakespeare's character. I imagine he was asked by the author to touch up "Pericles." On reading the play, he saw the opportunity of giving expression to the new emotion which had been awakened in him by the serious sweet charm of his young daughter, and accordingly he wrote the scenes in which Marina figures. Judith's modesty was a perpetual wonder to him.

His success induced him to sketch out "The Winter's Tale," in which tale he played sadly with what might have been if his accused love, Mary Fitton, had been guiltless instead of guilty. I imagine he saw that the play was not a success, or supreme critic as he was, that his hand had grown weak, and seeking for the cause he probably came to the conclusion that the comparative failure was due to the fact that he did not put himself into "The Winter's Tale," and so he determined in the next play to draw a full-length portrait of himself again, as he had done in "Hamlet," and accordingly he sketched Posthumus, a staider, older, idealized Hamlet, with lymph in his veins, instead of blood. In the same idealizing spirit, he pictured his rose of womanhood for us in Imogen, who is, however, not a living woman at all, any more than his earliest ideal, Juliet, was a woman. The contrast between these two sketches is the contrast between Shakespeare's strength and his weakness. Here is how the fourteen-year-old Juliet talks of love:

"Spread thy close curtain, love-performing night, That runaways' eyes may wink, and Romeo Leap to these arms, untalk'd of and unseen.

Lovers can see to do their amorous rites By their own beauties."

And here what Posthumus says of Imogen:

"Me of my lawful pleasure she restrain'd, And pray'd me oft forbearance: did it with A pudency so rosy, the sweet view on't Might well have warmed old Saturn."

Neither of these statements is very generally true: but the second is out of character. When Shakespeare praises restraint in love he must have been very weak; in full manhood he prayed for excess of it, and regarded a surfeit as the only rational cure.

I think Shakespeare liked Posthumus and Imogen; but he could not have thought "Cymbeline" a great work, and so he pulled himself together for a masterpiece. He seems to have said to himself, "All that fighting of Posthumus is wrong; men do not fight at forty-eight; I will paint myself simply in the qualities I possess now; I will tell the truth about myself so far as I can." The result is the portrait of Prospero in "The Tempest."

Let me just say before I begin to study Prospero that I find the introduction of the Masque in the fourth act extraordinarily interesting. Ben Jonson had written cla.s.sic masques for this and that occasion; masques which were very successful, we are told; they had "caught on," in fact, to use our modern slang. Shakespeare will now show us that he, too, can write a masque with cla.s.sic deities in it, and better Jonson's example. It is pitiful, and goes to prove, I think, that Shakespeare was but little esteemed by his generation.

Jonson answered him conceitedly, as Jonson would, in the Introduction to his "Bartholomew Fair" (1612-14), "If there be never a _Servant monster_ i' the Fayre, who can help it, he sayes; nor a nest of _Antiques_. He is loth to make nature afraid in his _Playes_, like those that beget _Tales_, _Tempests_, and such like _Drolleries_."

At the very end, the creator of Hamlet, the finest mind in the world, was eager to show that he could write as well in any style as the author of "Every Man in his Humour." To me the bare fact is full of interest, and most pitiful.

Let us now turn to "The Tempest," and see how our poet figures in it. It is Shakespeare's last work, and one of his very greatest; his testament to the English people; in wisdom and high poetry a miracle.

The portrait of Shakespeare we get in Prospero is astonis.h.i.+ngly faithful and ingenuous, in spite of its idealization. His life's day is waning to the end; shadows of the night are drawing in upon him, yet he is the same bookish, melancholy student, the lover of all courtesies and generosities, whom we met first as Biron in "Love's Labour's Lost." The gaiety is gone and the sensuality; the spiritual outlook is infinitely sadder--that is what the years have done with our gentle Shakespeare.

Prospero's first appearance in the second scene of the first act is as a loving father and magician; he says to Miranda:

"I have done nothing but in care of thee, Of thee, my dear one! thee, my daughter."

He asks Miranda what she can remember of her early life, and reaches magical words:

"What seest thou else In the dark backward and abysm of time?"