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The Man Shakespeare

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"And thereof came it that the man was mad."

And she adds:

"The venom clamours of a jealous woman
Poisons more deadly than a mad dog's tooth."

Again, a needlessly emphatic condemnation. But Adriana will not accept
the reproof: she will have her husband at all costs. The whole scene
discovers personal feeling. Adriana is the portrait that Shakespeare
wished to give us of his wife.

The learned commentators have seemingly conspired to say as little about
"The Two Gentlemen of Verona" as possible. No one of them identifies the
protagonist, Valentine, with Shakespeare, though all of them identified
Biron with Shakespeare, and yet Valentine, as we shall see, is a far
better portrait of the master than Biron. This untimely blindness of the
critics is, evidently, due to the fact that Coleridge has hardly
mentioned "The Two Gentlemen of Verona," and they have consequently been
unable to parrot his opinions.

"The Two Gentlemen of Verona" is manifestly a later work than "Love's
Labour's Lost"; there is more blank verse and less rhyme in it, and a
considerable improvement in character-drawing. Julia, for example, is
individualized and lives for us in her affection and jealousy; her talks
with her maid Lucetta are taken from life; they are indeed the first
sketch of the delightful talks between Portia and Nerissa, and mark an
immense advance upon the wordy badinage of the Princess and her
ladies in "Love's Labour's Lost," where there was no attempt at
differentiation of character. It seems indubitable to me that "The Two
Gentlemen of Verona" is also later than "The Comedy of Errors," and just
as far beyond doubt that it is earlier than "A Midsummer Night's Dream,"
in spite of Dr. Furnival's "Trial Table."

The first three comedies, "Love's Labour's Lost," "The Comedy of
Errors," and "The Two Gentlemen of Verona," are all noteworthy for the
light they throw on Shakespeare's early life.

In "The Two Gentlemen of Verona" Shakespeare makes similar youthful
mistakes in portraiture to those we noticed in "Love's Labour's Lost";
mistakes which show that he is thinking of himself and his own
circumstances. At the beginning of the play the only difference between
Proteus and Valentine is that one is in love, and the other, heart-free,
is leaving home to go to Milan. In this first scene Shakespeare speaks
frankly through both Proteus and Valentine, just as he spoke through
both the King and Biron in the first scene of "Love's Labour's Lost,"
and through both AEgeon and Antipholus of Syracuse in "The Comedy of
Errors." But whilst the circumstances in the earliest comedy are
imaginary and fantastic, the circumstances in "The Two Gentlemen of
Verona" are manifestly, I think, taken from the poet's own experience.
In the dialogue between Valentine and Proteus I hear Shakespeare
persuading himself that he should leave Stratford. Some readers may
regard this assumption as far-fetched, but it will appear the more
plausible, I think, the more the dialogue is studied. Valentine begins
the argument:

"Home-keeping youth have ever homely wits,"--

he will "see the wonders of the world abroad" rather than live "dully
sluggardiz'd at home," wearing out "youth with shapeless idleness." But
all these reasons are at once superfluous and peculiar. The audience
needs no persuasion to believe that a young man is eager to travel and
go to Court. Shakespeare's quick mounting spirit is in the lines, and
the needlessness of the argument shows that we have here a personal
confession. Valentine, then, mocks at love, because it was love that
held Shakespeare so long in Stratford, and when Proteus defends it, he
replies:

"Even so by Love the young and tender wit
Is turned to folly; blasting in the bud,
Losing his verdure even in the prime,
And all the fair effects of future hopes."

Here is Shakespeare's confession that his marriage had been a failure,
not only because of his wife's mad jealousy and violent temper, which we
have been forced to realize in "The Comedy of Errors," but also because
love and its home-keeping ways threatened to dull and imprison the eager
artist spirit. In the last charming line I find not only the music of
Shakespeare's voice, but also one of the reasons--perhaps, indeed, the
chief because the highest reason--which drew him from Stratford to
London. And what the "future hope" was, he told us in the very first
line of "Love's Labour's Lost." The King begins the play with"

"Let Fame, that all hunt after in their lives."

Now all men don't hunt after fame; it was Shakespeare who felt that Fame
pieced out Life's span and made us "heirs of all eternity"; it was young
Shakespeare who desired fame so passionately that he believed all other
men must share his immortal longing, the desire in him being a forecast
of capacity, as, indeed, it usually is. If any one is inclined to think
that I am here abusing conjecture let him remember that Proteus, too,
tells us that Valentine is hunting after honour.

When Proteus defends love we hear Shakespeare just as clearly as when
Valentine inveighs against it:

"Yet writers say, as in the sweetest bud
The eating canker dwells, so eating love
Inhabits in the finest wits of all."

Shakespeare could not be disloyal to that passion of desire in him which
he instinctively felt was, in some way or other, the necessary
complement of his splendid intelligence. We must take the summing-up of
Proteus when Valentine leaves him as the other half of Shakespeare's
personal confession:

"He after honour hunts, I after love:
He leaves his friends to dignify them more;
I leave myself, my friends, and all for love.
Thou, Julia, thou hast metamorphosed me,--
Made me neglect my studies, lose my time,
War with good counsel, set the world at naught;
Made wit with musing weak, heart sick with thought."

Young Shakespeare hunted as much after love as after honour, and these
verses show that he has fully understood what a drag on him his foolish
marriage has been. That all this is true to Shakespeare appears from the
fact that it is false to the character of Proteus. Proteus is supposed
to talk like this in the first blush of passion, before he has won
Julia, before he even knows that she loves him. Is that natural? Or is
it not rather Shakespeare's confession of what two wasted years of
married life in Stratford had done for him? It was ambition--desire of
fame and new love--that drove the tired and discontented Shakespeare
from Anne Hathaway's arms to London.

When his father tells Proteus he must to Court on the morrow, instead of
showing indignation or obstinate resolve to outwit tyranny, he
generalizes in Shakespeare's way, exactly as Romeo and Orsino generalize
in poetic numbers:

"O, how this spring of love resembleth
The uncertain glory of an April day."

Another reason for believing that this play deals with Shakespeare's own
experiences is to be found in the curious change that takes place in
Valentine. In the first act Valentine disdains love: he prefers to
travel and win honour; but as soon as he reaches Milan and sees Silvia,
he falls even more desperately in love than Proteus. What was the
object, then, in making him talk so earnestly against love in the first
act? It may be argued that Shakespeare intended merely to contrast the
two characters in the first act; but he contrasts them in the first act
on this matter of love, only in the second act to annul the distinction
himself created. Moreover, and this is decisive, Valentine rails against
love in the first act as one who has experienced love's utmost rage:

"To be
In love: when scorn is bought with groans; coy looks,
With heart-sore sighs; one fading moment's mirth,
With twenty watchful, weary, tedious nights."

The man who speaks like this is not the man who despises love and
prefers honour, but one who has already given himself to passion with an
absolute abandonment. Such inconsistencies and flaws in workmanship are
in themselves trivial, but, from my point of view, significant; for
whenever Shakespeare slips in drawing character, in nine cases out of
ten he slips through dragging in his own personality or his personal
experience, and not through carelessness, much less incompetence; his
mistakes, therefore, nearly always throw light on his nature or on his
life's story. From the beginning, too, Valentine like Shakespeare is a
born lover.

As soon, moreover, as he has gone to the capital and fallen in love he
becomes Shakespeare's avowed favourite. He finds Silvia's glove and
cries:

"Sweet ornament that decks a thing divine--"

the exclamation reminding us of how Romeo talks of Juliet's glove. Like
other men, Shakespeare learned life gradually, and in youth poverty of
experience forces him to repeat his effects.

Again, when Valentine praises his friend Proteus to the Duke, we find a
characteristic touch of Shakespeare. Valentine says:

"His years but young; but his experience old;
His head unmellowed; but his judgement ripe."

In "The Merchant of Venice" Bellario, the learned doctor of Padua,
praises Portia in similar terms:

"I never knew so young a body with so old a head."

But it is when Valentine confesses his love that Shakespeare speaks
through him most clearly:

"Ay, Proteus, but that life is altered now,
I have done penance for contemning love;
* * * * *
For in revenge of my contempt of love
Love hath chased sleep from my enthralled eyes
And made them watchers of my own heart's sorrow.
O gentle Proteus, Love's a mighty lord,"--

and so on.

Every word in this confession is characteristic of the poet and
especially the fact that his insomnia is due to love. Valentine then
gives himself to passionate praise of Silvia, and ends with the "She is
alone" that recalls "She is all the beauty extant" of "The Two Noble
Kinsmen." Valentine the lover reminds us of Romeo as the sketch
resembles the finished picture; when banished, he cries:

"And why not death, rather than living torment? To die is to be banished
from myself; And Silvia is myself: banished from her, Is self from self;
a deadly banishment. What light is light, if Silvia be not seen? What
joy is joy, if Silvia be not by? Unless it be to think that she is by
And feed upon the shadow of perfection. Except I be by Silvia in the
night There is no music in the nightingale,"

and so forth. I might compare this with what Romeo says of his
banishment, and perhaps infer from this two-fold treatment of the theme
that Shakespeare left behind in Stratford some dark beauty who may have
given Anne Hathaway good cause for jealous rage. It must not be
forgotten here that Dryasdust tells us he was betrothed to another girl
when Anne Hathaway's relations forced him to marry their kinswoman.

A moment later and this lover Valentine uses the very words that we
found so characteristic in the mouth of the lover Orsino in Twelfth
Night":

"O I have fed upon this woe already,
And now excess of it will make me surfeit."

Valentine, indeed, shows us traits of nearly all Shakespeare's later
lovers, and this seems to me interesting, because of course all the
qualities were in the youth, which were later differenced into various
characters. His advice to the Duke, who pretends to be in love, is far
too ripe, too contemptuous-true, to suit the character of such a votary
of fond desire as Valentine was; it is mellow with experience and
man-of-the-world wisdom, and the last couplet of it distinctly
fore-shadows Benedick:

"Flatter and praise, commend, extol their graces;
Though ne'er so black, say they have angels' faces.
That man that hath a tongue, I say, is no man
If with his tongue he cannot win a woman."

But this is only an involuntary aperçu of Valentine, as indeed
Benedick 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-Benedick's counsel. Proteus says:

"You must lay lime to tangle her desires
By wailful sonnets, whose composéd 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 flourishing 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 passionate 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 passage in "The Merchant of Venice" when Bassanio 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 friendship 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 attitude 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 attitude 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
Bassanio 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 attitude 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 nutshell:

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

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

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

And, though Bassanio tells him his money is to be risked on a romantic
and wild adventure, Antonio declares that Bassanio's doubt does him more
wrong than if his friend had already wasted all he has, and the act
closes by Antonio pressing Bassanio 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
Bassanio. 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 amassed 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 Bassanio'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 Bassanio,
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 assumed 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
passion 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 attitude 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 assure 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 assume
that he practised the generosity which he so earnestly and sedulously
praised. At least it will be advisable for the moment to assume that he
pictured himself as generous Antonio, without difficulty or conscious
self-deception.

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