The Man Shakespeare and His Tragic Life Story Part 4

"They have tied me to a stake; I cannot fly, But bear-like I must fight the course."

This seems to me intensely characteristic of Hamlet; the brutal side of action was never more contemptuously described, and Macbeth's next soliloquy makes the ident.i.ty apparent to every one; it is in the true thinker-sceptic vein:

"Why should I play the Roman[1] fool and die On mine own sword?"

[Footnote 1: About the year 1600 Shakespeare seems to have steeped himself in Plutarch. For the next five or six years, whenever he thinks of suicide, the Roman way of looking at it occurs to him. Having made up his mind to kill himself, Laertes cries:

"I am more an antique Roman than a Dane,"

and, in like case, Cleopatra talks of dying "after the high Roman fas.h.i.+on."]

Macbeth then meets Macduff, and there follows the confession of pity and remorse, which must be compared to the gentle-kindness with which Hamlet treats Laertes and Romeo treats Paris. Macbeth says to Macduff:

"Of all men else I have avoided thee: But get thee back, my soul is too much charged With blood of thine already."

Then comes the "something desperate" in him that Hamlet boasted of--and the end.

Here we have every characteristic of Hamlet without exception, The crying difference of situation only brings out the essential ident.i.ty of the two characters. The two portraits are of the same person and finished to the finger-tips. The slight shades of difference between Macbeth and Hamlet only strengthen our contention that both are portraits of the poet; for the differences are manifestly changes in the same character, and changes due merely to age. Just as Romeo is younger than Hamlet, showing pa.s.sion where Hamlet shows thought, so Macbeth is older than Hamlet; in Macbeth the melancholy has grown deeper, the tone more pessimistic, and the heart gentler. [Footnote: Immediately after the publication of these first two essays, Sir Henry Irving seized the opportunity and lectured before a distinguished audience on the character of Macbeth. He gave it as his opinion that "Shakespeare has presented Macbeth as one of the most blood-thirsty, most hypocritical villains in his long gallery of men, instinct with the virtues and vices of their kind (_sic_)." Sir Henry Irving also took the occasion to praise the simile of pity:

"And pity, like a naked new-born babe, Striding the blast."

This ridiculous fustian seemed to him "very beautiful." All this was perfectly gratuitous: no one needed to be informed that a man might have merit as an actor and yet be without any understanding of psychology or any taste in letters.] I venture, therefore, to a.s.sert that the portrait we find in Romeo and Jaques first, and then in Hamlet, and afterwards in Macbeth, is the portrait of Shakespeare himself, and we can trace his personal development through these three stages.

CHAPTER III. DUKE VINCENTIO--POSTHUMUS

It may be well to add here a couple of portraits of Shakespeare in later life in order to establish beyond question the chief features of his character. With this purpose in mind I shall take a portrait that is a mere sketch of him, Duke Vincentio in "Measure for Measure," and a portrait that is minutely finished and perfect, though consciously idealized, Posthumus, in "Cymbeline." And the reason I take this careless, wavering sketch, and contrast it with a highly-finished portrait, is that, though the sketch is here and there hardly recognizable, the outline being all too thin and hesitating, yet now and then a characteristic trait is over-emphasized, as we should expect in careless work. And this sketch in lines now faint, now all too heavy, is curiously convincing when put side by side with a careful and elaborate portrait in which the same traits are reproduced, but harmoniously, and with a perfect sense of the relative value of each feature. No critic, so far as I am aware, not Hazlitt, not Brandes, not even Coleridge, has yet thought of identifying either Duke Vincentio or Posthumus with Hamlet, much less with Shakespeare himself. The two plays are very unlike each other in tone and temper; "Measure for Measure" being a sort of tract for the times, while "Cymbeline" is a purely romantic drama.

Moreover, "Measure for Measure" was probably written a couple of years after "Hamlet," towards the end of 1603, while "Cymbeline" belongs to the last period of the poet's activity, and could hardly have been completed before 1610 or 1611. The dissimilarity of the plays only accentuates the likeness of the two protagonists.

"Measure for Measure" is one of the best examples of Shakespeare's contempt for stagecraft. Not only is the mechanism of the play, as we shall see later, astonis.h.i.+ngly slipshod, but the ostensible purpose of the play, which is to make the laws respected in Vienna, is not only not attained, but seems at the end to be rather despised than forgotten.

This indifference to logical consistency is characteristic of Shakespeare; Hamlet speaks of "the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns" just after he has been talking with his dead father. The poetic dreamer cannot take the trouble to tie up the loose ends of a story: the real purpose of "Measure for Measure," which is the confusion of the pretended ascetic Angelo, is fulfilled, and that is sufficient for the thinker, who has thus shown what "our seemers be."

It is no less characteristic of Shakespeare that Duke Vincentio, his _alter ego_, should order another to punish loose livers--a task which his kindly nature found too disagreeable. But, leaving these general considerations, let us come to the first scene of the first act: the second long speech of the Duke should have awakened the suspicion that Vincentio is but another mask for Shakespeare. The whole speech proclaims the poet; the Duke begins:

"Angelo There is a kind of character in thy life,"

Hamlet says to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in what is supposed to be prose:

"There is a kind of confession in your looks."

A little later the line:

"Spirits are not finely touched But to fine issues,"

is so characteristic of Hamlet-Shakespeare that it should have put every reader on the track.

The speeches of the Duke in the fourth scene of the first act are also characteristic of Shakespeare. But the four lines,

"My holy sir, none better knows than you How I have ever loved the life removed, And held in idle price to haunt a.s.semblies, Where youth and cost and witless bravery keep,"

are to me an intimate, personal confession; a fuller rendering indeed of Hamlet's "Man delights not me; no, nor woman neither." In any case it will be admitted that a dislike of a.s.semblies and cost and witless bravery is peculiar in a reigning monarch, so peculiar indeed that it reminds me of the exiled Duke in "As You Like It," or of Duke Prospero in "The Tempest" (two other incarnations of Shakespeare), rather than of any one in real life. A love of solitude; a keen contempt for shows and the "witless bravery" of court-life were, as we shall see, characteristics of Shakespeare from youth to old age.

In the first scene of the third act the Duke as a friar speaks to the condemned Claudio. He argues as Hamlet would argue, but with, I think, a more convinced hopelessness. The deepening scepticism would of itself force us to place "Measure for Measure" a little later than "Hamlet":

"Reason thus with life:-- If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing That none but fools would keep; a breath thou art, - - - - - - - - - - The best of rest is sleep, And that thou oft provok'st, yet grossly fear'st Thy death, which is no more. Thou'rt not thyself; For thou exist'st on many a thousand grains That issue out of dust. Happy thou art not; For what thou hast not, still thou striv'st to get, And what thou hast, forgett'st.

- - - - - - - - - - What's in this, That bears the name of life? Yet in this life Lie hid more thousand deaths; yet death we fear, That makes these odds all even."

That this scepticism of Vincentio is Shakespeare's scepticism appears from the fact that the whole speech is worse than out of place when addressed to a person under sentence of death. Were we to take it seriously, it would show the Duke to be curiously callous to the sufferings of the condemned Claudio; but callous the Duke is not, he is merely a pensive poet-philosopher talking in order to lighten his own heart. Claudio makes unconscious fun of the Duke's argument:

"To sue to live, I find I seek to die, And seeking death, find life: let it come on."

This scepticism of Shakespeare which shows itself out of place in Angelo and again most naturally in Claudio's famous speech, is one of the salient traits of his character which is altogether over-emphasized in this play. It is a trait, moreover, which finds expression in almost everything he wrote. Like nearly all the great spirits of the Renaissance, Shakespeare was perpetually occupied with the heavy problems of man's life and man's destiny. Was there any meaning or purpose in life, any result of the striving? was Death to be feared or a Hereafter to be desired?--incessantly he beat straining wings in the void. But even in early manhood he never sought to deceive himself. His Richard II. had sounded the shallow vanity of man's desires, the futility of man's hopes; he knew that man

"With nothing shall be pleased, till he be eased With being nothing."

And this sad knowledge darkened all Shakespeare's later thinking.

Naturally, when youth pa.s.sed from him and disillusionment put an end to dreaming, his melancholy deepened, his sadness became despairing; we can see the shadows thickening round him into night. Brutus takes an "everlasting farewell" of his friend, and goes willingly to his rest.

Hamlet dreads "the undiscovered country"; but unsentient death is to him "a consummation devoutly to be wished." Vincentio's mood is half-contemptuous, but the melancholy persists; death is no "more than sleep," he says, and life a series of deceptions; while Claudio in this same play shudders away from death as from annihilation, or worse, in words which one cannot help regarding as Shakespeare's:

"_Claud_. Ay, but to die, and go we know not where; To lie in cold obstruction and to rot...."

A little later and Macbeth's soul cries to us from the outer darkness: "there's nothing serious in mortality"; life's

"a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing."

And from this despairing gloom come Lear's shrieks of pain and pitiful ravings, and in the heavy intervals the gibberings of the fool. Even when the calmer mood of age came upon Shakespeare and took away the bitterness, he never recanted; Posthumus speaks of life and death in almost the words used by Vincentio, and Prospero has nothing to add save that "our little life is rounded with a sleep."

It is noteworthy that Shakespeare always gives these philosophic questionings to those characters whom I regard as his impersonations,[1]

and when he breaks this rule, he breaks it in favour of some Claudio who is not a character at all, but the mere mouthpiece of one of his moods.

[Footnote 1: One of my correspondents, Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton, has been kind enough to send me an article contributed to "Colbourn's Magazine" in 1873, in which he declares that "Shakespeare seems to have kept a sort of Hamlet notebook, full of Hamlet thoughts, of which 'To be or not to be' may be taken as the type. These he was burdened with.

These did he cram into Hamlet as far as he could, and then he tossed the others indiscriminately into other plays, tragedies and histories, perfectly regardless of the character who uttered them." Though Mr.

Watts-Dunton sees that some of these "Hamlet thoughts" are to be found in Macbeth and Prospero and Claudio, he evidently lacks the key to Shakespeare's personality, or he would never have said that Shakespeare tossed these reflections "indiscriminately into other plays."

Nevertheless the statement itself is interesting, and deserves more notice than has been accorded to it.]

I now come to a point in the drama which at once demands and defies explanation. In the first scene of the third act the Duke, after listening to the terrible discussion between Isabella and Claudio, first of all tells Claudio that "Angelo had never the purpose to corrupt"

Isabella, and then a.s.sures Claudio that to-morrow he must die. The explanation of these two falsehoods would be far to seek, unless we take it that they were invented simply in order to prolong our interest in the drama. But this a.s.sumption, though probable, does not increase our sympathy with the protagonist--the lies seem to be too carelessly uttered to be even characteristic--nor yet our admiration of the structure of a play that needs to be supported by such flimsy b.u.t.tresses. Still this very carelessness of fact, as I have said, is Shakespearean; the philosophic dreamer paid little attention to the mere incidents of the story.

The talk between the Duke and Isabella follows. The form of the Duke's speech, with its touch of euphuistic conceit, is one which Hamlet-Shakespeare affects:

"The hand that hath made you fair hath made you good: the goodness that is cheap in beauty makes beauty brief in goodness; but grace, being the soul of your complexion, shall keep the body of it ever fair."

This Duke plays philosopher, too, in and out of season as Hamlet did: he says to Isabella:

"Virtue is bold, and goodness never fearful,"

generalizing his praise even to a woman.