The Facts About Shakespeare Part 9

[Page Heading: In the United States]

Known in the literature and theater of every civilized nation, the subject of a vast and increasing amount of discussion and criticism, the source of a scholars.h.i.+p rivaling that devoted to the writers of antiquity, the familiar theme for music and painting, the household possession of Great Britain, Germany, and America, influencing thought and conduct as few books have ever influenced them, and now an important element in the education of a great democracy,--the plays of Shakespeare occupy a position whence imagination "can not pierce a wink beyond, but doubt discovery there." His reputation and influence must change greatly in the years to come; but this at least is secure--three hundred years of an ever increasing sway over the human mind.

CHAPTER X

CONCLUSION

The purpose of this volume has been to summarize what we know about Shakespeare. The doc.u.mentary records and early traditions of his life have been supplemented by information in regard to the times and places in which he lived, the literature which he read, and the theaters for which he worked. The evolution of the drama that grew up in those theaters has been reviewed, and its manifest connections with Shakespeare's own development have been indicated. That development has been traced by means of a careful determination of the chronology of the plays; and the recognition of this growth of his powers has been shown to be a necessary basis for a just estimate of their achievement.

If, now, in conclusion, we attempt to define our general impression of the man and his work, this must inevitably take into account considerations of environment and development. The man belonged to his era, his city, and his profession. The doc.u.ments make it plain that he did not live apart, but in close contact with the affairs of his day and generation. The plays make it clear that few men ever became so intimately familiar with the manners, morals, and ideas of their own time. There is no doubt that he drank deeply of the experience that Elizabethan London offered him. Still more, the plays make it clear that his life was one of constant and extraordinary intellectual and spiritual growth. Though, from the objective nature of the dramas, it is impossible to translate them into terms of personal experience or into exact stages of mental growth, yet it is none the less evident that the progress from the author of _Love's Labour's Lost_ to the author of _The Tempest_, from the creator of Richard III and Valentine to the creator of Iago and Antony, was marked, not only by a widening experience, but also by a development of personal character.

[Page Heading: The Sonnets]

To understand a man's surroundings does not, however, reveal the man; and to measure the growth of genius does not interpret its quality.

Lovers of the plays are likely always to query: What manner of man was this? Taken out of his London, at any time in his career, how would he seem if we could know him as a man? Of what nature is this companion and friend whose presence we have felt through all his verses and in all of his characters? The few clues offered by records or tradition, and the difficulties in separating the creator from the thousand men and women of his creation, have driven many to seek answers to these questions in the sonnets. There he speaks in the first person, and there are revealed not merely some dubious hints of actual incidents, but the surer indications of emotional conflicts that went to the heart of the man's nature. At their worst, the sonnets may have been only literary exercises on conventional themes, but at their best they are surely both superb poetry and the result of genuine emotion. Can we doubt that the poet knew the pitfalls that beset the course of human pa.s.sion or that he had faith in the triumphant beauty of love and friends.h.i.+p? Yet the most splendid of these lyrical declarations of faith add little to what we knew of the creator of the lovers and friends of the dramas. The trivialities and the sublimities, the sin and the idealism of the sonnets coalesce with the emotional effects of the comedies and tragedies. In forming our impression of the man, whatever we may derive from the sonnets does not contradict and does not largely affect the impressions made by the poetry and humanity of the plays. For the conception which each one forms of Shakespeare the man must be derived in the main from the impressions of personality implied by the plays.

Such a conception is bound to be individual and without validity that can rest on proofs, but in the main it has not varied greatly from individual to individual or from generation to generation. From Jonson and Dryden to Goethe and Tennyson, there has been no great difference in the essentials of this estimate of the man.

[Page Heading: Personality of Shakespeare]

If the plays do not throw a clear light on matters of conduct and exercise of the will, they certainly tell of no lack of self-control and no weakness or feverishness of action. The traditions of conviviality and the records of a life of constant industry that secured wealth and social position are both in accord with the impressions derived from the plays of an eagerness for experience controlled by a self-mastery and a serenity of purpose. If one were to search for a modern writer most like Shakespeare, one would select Scott, rather than Sh.e.l.ley, or Byron, or Wordsworth. As to the intellectual quality of the author of the plays, it is clear that he was not a Galileo or a Bacon.

If we judge intellectual power by its creation of system or synthesis, we shall probably estimate Shakespeare less highly than if we remember that intellect of the highest order is often displayed by maintaining openness and largeness of view in face of the solicitations of theory or prejudice. No one can read the plays in connection with the literature of the time, or of any time, without marveling at their freedom from vulgarity, pettiness, or narrowness of mental att.i.tude. If they do not afford evidences of a profound culture in philosophy, letters, or science, they offer no trace of intellectual blindness or conceit, and they leave no doubt that their author had thought greatly and freely.

Even more certain is their a.s.surance of the range and intensity of his emotional life. In these respects again, no one can compare his work with that of other writers without feeling the effect of his personality. Fletcher, perhaps next to him among the Elizabethans in a versatile expression of a wide range of emotions, gives no sign of the sincere, profound, and searching interest in humankind which we are sure was Shakespeare's. Bacon, surpa.s.sing him perhaps in intellectual curiosity and thoroughness, manifestly gives no evidence in his writings of the warmth of sympathy, the quickness of emotional response, the fire of pa.s.sion which we find in the author of Shakespeare's plays. It is difficult to disbelieve that their imaginative partic.i.p.ation in the height and breadth of human feeling was the creation of a man who united intellectual greatness with an emotional susceptibility of extraordinary range and delicacy, and with a sympathy, genial, wide, tolerant, but also heartfelt, deep, and pa.s.sionate. Such is the ineffaceable impression of the man which has been shared by many generations of readers, and which found expression two hundred and fifty years ago in Dryden's carefully considered estimate, "The man who of all Moderns, and perhaps Ancient Poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul."

What of the plays themselves? Is there any fixed and universal estimate of their quality and significance as literature? In this volume we have been concerned in reviewing our knowledge about them rather than in their interpretation or evaluation. We have noted the sources from which their plots were drawn, the conditions under which they were produced in the playhouses, the influences at work in the contemporary drama which determined in some measure their subjects and treatment. Starting with the probable dates of their composition, we have traced them from the theater to the printer, through the hands of many editors, and through the long history of their effects on theatergoers and readers. In their history they have played a part in the changes of taste and opinion of three centuries, and if they have grown greatly in men's estimation, this has not been without much variability of appreciation and uncertainty as to their value. What, then, are the qualities of the plays that raised them at once above the measure of contemporary influence and rivalry? Are these the qualities that have continued to win the most general appreciation? Despite all the stress we are to-day taught to place on change, growth, evolution, are there qualities in these plays which insure them a continued preeminence in literature?

[Page Heading: Qualities of the Plays]

Differences of opinion testify, indeed, to the comprehensive appeal of the plays to different minds, nations, or epochs, but they have not greatly affected the essential elements in men's admiration. If some critic brings into new prominence a quality that has partly escaped attention, his discovery is not likely to affect the more permanent elements of their reputation. If for a time attention is turned to the plays as plays rather than as poems and to the merits of Shakespeare as a dramatist, this criticism does not lead to any lasting disregard of their poetic quality or to the permanent acceptance of skill in dramatic structure as a chief element in their literary preeminence. Nor is such an element discoverable in their philosophical synthesis or their incidental wisdom, although some of the most brilliant criticism has exalted that wisdom or sought to formulate and expound their view of life. Concerning the essential elements of their greatness no real difference of opinion has arisen from the time they were written down to the present day. They were lifted at once above the level of contemporary endeavor, and they have continued to grow in reputation chiefly because of their poetry and their characterization.

Concerning the nature and quality of these there is little difference of opinion, though critics may vary in estimating their beauty or value.

One may prefer the verse of Homer or of Milton, but he will not deny the traits that distinguish Shakespeare's. Another may prefer the well-ordered study of human motives in Sophocles, or the realistic a.n.a.lysis of a modern realist like Turgenieff, but he will recognize the qualities in Shakespeare's characterization that are the basis of general admiration. Still another may condemn that admiration, but he will not differ from us as to the chief sources of its existence.

These two sources are hardly to be separated, for the persons are revealed through the beauty of the verse, and the poetry is ever adapted to the speakers. In the early plays the poet's fancy often refuses to be bound by the requirements of his characters and escapes in lyric or descriptive excursions; but as his art becomes more masterly, the poetry adapts itself with increasing devotion to the dramatic task, discarding the limitations of the verse form and even at times sacrificing clarity and harmony of expression in its effort to make a few lines significant of the thought and emotion of some individual. An enormous vocabulary is treated with daring freedom; words are coined, changed, or restamped in order to let nothing of significance escape.

The effect is not primarily that of finished workmans.h.i.+p or elaborate harmony, though these may be found in many pa.s.sages and notably in the greatest of the sonnets. Broken rather than completed images, richness of suggestion rather than unity of impressiveness, surprise and novelty in words rather than their delicate adjustment, make up an effect of bewildering enchantment rather than of perfected form. This is true even in an early play like _Romeo and Juliet_, where the verse becomes undramatic in order to make the most of every opportunity for fancy or melody, and it is true also in _Oth.e.l.lo_, where poetry and characterization are wedded with consummate art. The reader's pleasure is not in finding each idea finally developed or each motive given full elaboration. It is rather in the flow of words which endow each person and moment with their wealth of color and suggestion, and somehow carry on to the reader both their impression of life and the transforming power of their dignity and splendor.

[Page Heading: Poetry of the Plays]

In a last a.n.a.lysis the quality of the poetry is less dependent on the music of line or pa.s.sage than on the imagery of the words themselves. It seems as if the imagination had hurried on Ariel's wing around the universe in order to freight each phrase with a fresh trope and an unexpected meaning. Sometimes, to be sure, there results an excess or mixture of figures; but restrained to character and situation, bound by the measure of the pentameter, the carnival of words becomes a gorgeous yet ordered pageant, the very spectacle of beauty.

Let us take but one pa.s.sage, not from the great crises of pa.s.sion, nor from those unsurpa.s.sable revelations of the tortured spirit, but from the opening of a play where the purpose is chiefly expository, and where indeed the language is not free from that mixture of figures which some condemn. The wonderful first scene of _Antony and Cleopatra_, which within the compa.s.s of its sixty-two lines presents the two protagonists and their background of empire and war, opens thus in the speech of a subordinate.

Nay, but this dotage of our general's O'erflows the measure. Those his goodly eyes, That o'er the files and musters of the war Have glow'd like plated Mars, now bend, now turn The office and devotion of their view Upon a tawny front; his captain's heart, Which in the scuffles of great fights hath burst The buckles on his breast, reneges all temper, And is become the bellows and the fan To cool a gipsy's l.u.s.t.

[Page Heading: Characterization]

A few lines further on Antony speaks thus, as he embraces Cleopatra.

Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch Of the rang'd Empire fall! Here is my s.p.a.ce.

Kingdoms are clay; our dungy earth alike Feeds beast as man; the n.o.bleness of life Is to do thus, when such a mutual pair And such a twain can do't, in which I bind, On pain of punishment, the world to wit We stand up peerless.

No other man ever wrote verse like this; and it is hard to believe that words will ever again respond to such a magician.

This poetry is the fitting accompaniment of a characterization, the range and vitality of which, the world to wit, stand up peerless. While these are in general qualities of the Elizabethan drama, it is noteworthy that almost from the beginning Shakespeare outstripped his rivals. Launce, Richard III, Shylock, Juliet, were enough to establish a supremacy. The years that followed with their maturing thought and experience gave an amazing development to what was manifestly the native bent of his genius. Whatever else one may find in the plays, indeed whatever one finds there of wisdom or beauty, truth or art, it cannot be separated from their revelation of human nature.

It is this primarily that makes the dramas great and lasting. The histories, with all their pomp and movement and patriotism, reveal kings and lords and peasants as alike the subjects of changing fortune, alike human beings for our pity, admiration, or laughter. The comedies with their fancy and sentiment and fun, and their perennial suns.h.i.+ne on the self-deceived and selfish, are ruled by the most charming and refined of womankind. The tragedies with their presentation of the waste and suffering of life, though here depravity may seem to fill the scene and innocence share in the punishment and ruin, yet redeem us from the terror of their devastation by their a.s.surances of both the majesty and the loveliness of men and women.

Shakespeare's methods in characterization have seemed to some haphazard and bewildering. He does not fit his men and women into an a.n.a.lysis of the const.i.tution of society or into an obvious view of man's relations in the universe. Nor does he use his characters to ill.u.s.trate fixed conceptions or processes of cause and effect. He usually started with an old story, with certain types of character, and he was not forgetful of theatrical necessities or dramatic construction. But as he went on he brought all his astounding interest in human nature to focus on the old plot and the stock type. Hamlet, the hesitating avenger, becomes the sentimentalist, the idealist, the thinker at war with himself, the embodiment of that conflict between circ.u.mstance and a nature unfitted to its task, which in some measure we have all encountered in life. An arrogant and doting old man, by the force of creative imagination, transcends the nursery tale from which he came, and carries to us all the implications of suffering and love that surround the aging of parents and the growth of children. Cleopatra is a wanton, but no a.n.a.lysis can explain the subtleties with which the idealism and animalism, the sacrifice and frivolity--and how much else--of human pa.s.sion are bound together in the few hundred lines which she speaks. It is impossible to affirm that each of the great characters is thoroughly consistent or offers a strictly accurate motivation. Rather, they are magnificent portraits--like the Mona Lisa--crowded with a penetrating but question-provoking psychology. Into such parts and situations as the drama could afford are impressed every possible revelation of our motives; but his model was always reality and he never yielded truth to whim or prepossession.

[Page Heading: Human Nature]

Human nature, at its best or worst, droll or tragic, is thus given magnitude and potency. This idealization, rendered still more effective by the verse, persuades us as we read that here are our own attributes and conflicts exalted, now into serene beauty, again into torment and horror, and again into the Olympic warfare of unknown supermen. No doubt there is confusion because of the complexity of motives depicted and the multiplicity of impressions created, but there is also a final message of the greatness and comprehensiveness of human souls. In this world of sin and weakness and death, it is human beings, however mocked or maltreated by circ.u.mstance or by themselves, that are still triumphant and interesting. Out of his strifes and failures, the individual man yet emerges, the object of our contemplation and the a.s.surance of our faith.

In periods or persons when interest in the individual gives way to thought about cla.s.s or system or some form of organization, it is likely that admiration for Shakespeare's plays will suffer a decline. In periods or persons when the individual a.s.sumes a larger place in thought and his power to affect and dominate the world is emphasized, the plays are likely to acquire a new regard. As long, however, as the study of human nature is a chief occupation of mankind and as long as we believe that a great purpose of imaginative literature is to enlarge our knowledge and sympathy for our fellows, so long, we may be sure, these dramas will not lose their preeminence in literature.

APPENDICES

Appendix A

BIOGRAPHICAL DOc.u.mENTS AND AUTHORITIES

I. REPOSITORIES OF DOc.u.mENTS

L. refers to Lambert's _Shakespeare Doc.u.ments_ and H.-P. to Halliwell-Phillipps's _Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare_. 7th ed.

1

THE PARISH REGISTERS OF STRATFORD-ON-AVON are the authority for the baptisms of John Shakespeare's seven children (L. 1-7); for the burials of Anne and Edmund (L. 10); for the baptisms of William Shakespeare's daughter Susanna (L. 13) and the twins, Hamnet and Judith (L. 14); for the burials of Hamnet (L. 28), of the poet's father, John (L. 75), of his mother, Mary (L. 110), of the poet himself (L. 146), and of his widow (L. 159). These Registers have been edited for the Parish Registers Society, by R. Savage, 1898-9.

2

THE CORPORATION RECORDS OF STRATFORD-ON-AVON contain the Quiney-Sturley correspondence (L. 39, 43, 44; H.-P. II. 57-60); a return of the quant.i.ties of corn and malt held by the inhabitants of the ward in which New Place was situated, "Wm. Shackespere" being down for ten quarters (L. 53); a Bill of Complaint presented by R. Lane, T. Green, and William Shakespeare respecting the t.i.thes of Stratford-upon-Avon (L. 125); the answer of William Combe to the foregoing Bill (L. 126).

[Page Heading: Biographical Doc.u.ments]