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The Man Shakespeare

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But this Antonio has not only the melancholy, courtesy and boundless
generosity of Shakespeare; he has other qualities of the master which
need to be thrown into relief.

First of all, Antonio has that submission to misfortune, that
resignation in face of defeat and suffering which we have already seen
as characteristics of Richard II. The resignation might almost be called
saintly, were it not that it seems to spring rather from the natural
melancholy and sadness of Shakespeare's disposition; "the world is a
hard, all-hating world," he seems to say, "and misery is the natural lot
of man; defeat comes to all; why should I hope for any better fortune?"
At the very beginning of the trial he recognizes that he is certain to
lose; Bassanio and Gratiano appeal to the Duke for him; but he never
speaks in his own defence; he says of his opponent at the outset:

"I do oppose
My patience to his fury, and am arm'd
To suffer, with a quietness of spirit,
The very tyranny and rage of his."

and again he will not contend, but begs the Court,

".... with all brief and plain conveniency
Let me have judgement and the Jew his will."

Even when Bassanio tries to cheer him,

"What, man, courage yet!
The Jew shall have my flesh, blood, bones and all,
Ere thou shalt lose for me one drop of blood."

Antonio answers:

"I am a tainted wether of the flock,
Meetest for death: the weakest kind of fruit
Drops earliest to the ground: and so let me:
You cannot better be employed, Bassanio,
Than to live still and write mine epitaph."

He will not be saved: he gives himself at once to that "sweet way of
despair" which we have found to be the second Richard's way and
Shakespeare's way.

Just as we noticed, when speaking of Posthumus in "Cymbeline," that
Shakespeare's hero and alter ego is always praised by the other
personages of the drama, so this Antonio is praised preposterously by
the chief personages of the play, and in the terms of praise we may see
how Shakespeare, even in early manhood, liked to be considered. He had
no ambition to be counted stalwart, or bold, or resolute like most young
males of his race, much less "a good hater," as Dr. Johnson confessed
himself: he wanted his gentle qualities recognized, and his intellectual
gifts; Hamlet wished to be thought a courtier, scholar, gentleman; and
here Salarino says of Antonio:

"A kinder gentleman treads not the earth,"

and he goes on to tell how Antonio, when parting from Bassanio, had
"eyes big with tears":

"Turning his face, he put his hand behind him,
And with affection wondrous sensible
He wrung Bassanio's hand; and so they parted."

This Antonio is as tender-hearted and loving as young Arthur. And
Lorenzo speaks of Antonio to Portia just as Salarino spoke of him:

"Lor. But if you knew to whom you show this honour.
How true a gentleman you send relief,
How dear a lover of my lord your husband,
I know you would be prouder of the work
Than customary bounty can enforce you."

and finally Bassanio sums Antonio up in enthusiastic superlatives:

"The dearest friend to me, the kindest man,
The best-condition'd and unwearied spirit
In doing courtesies, and one in whom
The ancient Roman honour more appears
Than any that draws breath in Italy."

It is as a prince of friends and most courteous gentleman that Antonio
acts his part from the beginning to the end of the play with one notable
exception to which I shall return in a moment. It is astonishing to find
this sadness, this courtesy, this lavish generosity and contempt of
money, this love of love and friendship and affection in any man in
early manhood; but these qualities were Shakespeare's from youth to old
age.

I say that Antonio was most courteous to all with one notable exception,
and that exception was Shylock.

It has become the custom on the English stage for the actor to try to
turn Shylock into a hero; but that was assuredly not Shakespeare's
intention. True, he makes Shylock appeal to the common humanity of both
Jew and Christian.

"I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew
hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?
fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons,
subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means,
warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as
a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you
tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not
die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?"

But if Shakespeare was far in advance of his age in this intellectual
appreciation of the brotherhood of man; yet as an artist and thinker and
poet he is particularly contemptuous of the usurer and trader in other
men's necessities, and therefore, when Antonio meets Shylock, though he
wants a favour from him, he cannot be even decently polite to him. He
begins by saying in the third scene of the first act:

"Although I neither lend nor borrow
By taking nor by giving of excess,
Yet to supply the ripe wants of my friend,
I'll break a custom."

The first phrase here reminds me of Polonius: "neither a borrower nor a
lender be." When Shylock attempts to defend himself by citing the way
Jacob cheated Laban, Antonio answers contemptuously "The devil can cite
Scripture for his purpose." Shylock then goes on:

"Signor Antonio, many a time and oft,
In the Rialto you have rated me
About my moneys and my usances:
Still, I have borne it with a patient shrug,
For sufferance is the badge of all our tribe.
You call me mis-believer, cut-throat dog,
And spit upon my Jewish gaberdine,
And all for use of that which is mine own.
Well then, it now appears you need my help:
Go to, then; you come to me, and you say,
'Shylock, we would have moneys:' you say so
You that did void your rheum upon my beard
And foot me as you spurn a stranger cur
Over your threshold: moneys is your suit.
What should I say to you? Should I not say
'Hath a dog money? is it possible
A cur can lend three thousand ducats?'"

Antonio answers this in words which it would be almost impossible to
take for Shakespeare's because of their brutal rudeness, were it not, as
we shall see later, that Shakespeare loathed the Jew usurer more than
any character in all his plays. Here are the words:

"Ant. I am as like to call thee so again,
To spit on thee again, to spurn thee too.
If thou will lend this money, lend it not
As to thy friends; for when did friendship take
A breed for barren metal of his friend?
But lend it rather to thine enemy
Who, if he break, thou mayst with better face
Exact the penalty."

Then Shylock makes peace, and proposes his modest penalty. Bassanio
says:

"You shall not seal to such a bond for me:
I'll rather dwell in my necessity."

Antonio is perfectly careless and content: he says:

"Content, i' faith: I'll seal to such a bond,
And say there is much kindness in the Jew."

Antonio's heedless trust of other men and impatience are qualities most
foreign to the merchant; but are shown again and again by Shakespeare's
impersonations.

Perhaps it will be well here to prove once for all that Shakespeare did
really hate the Jew. In the first place he excites our sympathy again
and again for him on the broad grounds of common humanity; but the
moment it comes to a particular occasion he represents him as hateful,
even where a little thought would have taught him that the Jew must be
at his best. It is a peculiarity of humanity which Shakespeare should
not have overlooked, that all pariahs and outcasts display intense
family affection; those whom the world scouts and hates are generally at
their noblest in their own homes. The pressure from the outside, Herbert
Spencer would say, tends to bring about cohesion among the members of
the despised caste. The family affection of the Jew, his kindness to his
kindred, have become proverbial. But Shakespeare admits no such kindness
in Shylock: when his daughter leaves Shylock one would think that
Shakespeare would picture the father's desolation and misery, his sorrow
at losing his only child; but here there is no touch of sympathy in
gentle Shakespeare:

".... I would my daughter were dead at my foot, and the jewels in her
ear! would she were hearsed at my foot, and the ducats in her coffin!"

But there is even better proof than this: when Shylock is defeated in
his case and leaves the Court penniless and broken, Shakespeare allows
him to be insulted by a gentleman. Shylock becomes pathetic in his
defeat, for Shakespeare always sympathized with failure, even before he
came to grief himself:

"Shy. Nay, take my life and all; pardon not that:
You take my house when you do take the prop
That doth sustain my house; you take my life
When you do take the means whereby I live."

"Por. What mercy can you render him, Antonio?

Gra. A halter gratis; nothing else for God's sake."

And then Antonio offers to "quit the fine for one-half his goods."
Utterly broken now, Shylock says:

"I pray you, give me leave to go from hence;
I am not well: send the deed after me,
And I will sign it.

Duke. Get thee gone, but do it.

Gra. In christening shalt thou have two godfathers:
Had I been judge, thou should'st have had ten more,
To bring thee to the gallows, not the font."

A brutal insult from a gallant gentleman to the broken Jew: it is the
only time in all Shakespeare when a beaten and ruined man is so
insulted.

Antonio, it must be confessed, is a very charming sketch of Shakespeare
when he was about thirty years of age, and it is amusing to reflect that
it is just the rich merchant with all his wealth at hazard whom he picks
out to embody his utter contempt of riches. The "royal merchant," as he
calls him, trained from youth to barter, is the very last man in the
world to back such a venture as Bassanio's--much less would such a man
treat money with disdain. But Shakespeare from the beginning of the play
put himself quite naively in Antonio's place, and so the astounding
antinomy came to expression.




CHAPTER III

THE SONNETS: PART I


Ever since Wordsworth wrote that the sonnets were the key to
Shakespeare's heart, it has been taken for granted (save by those who
regard even the sonnets as mere poetical exercises) that Shakespeare's
real nature is discovered in the sonnets more easily and more surely
than in the plays. Those readers who have followed me so far in
examining his plays will hardly need to be told that I do not agree with
this assumption. The author whose personality is rich and complex enough
to create and vitalize a dozen characters, reveals himself more fully in
his creations than he can in his proper person. It was natural enough
that Wordsworth, a great lyric poet, should catch Shakespeare's accent
better in his sonnets than in his dramas; but that is owing to
Wordsworth's limitations. And if the majority of later English critics
have agreed with Wordsworth, it only shows that Englishmen in general
are better judges of lyric than of dramatic work. We have the greatest
lyrics in the world; but our dramas, with the exception of
Shakespeare's, are not remarkable. And in that modern extension of the
drama, the novel, we are distinctly inferior to the French and Russians.
This inferiority must be ascribed to the new-fangled prudery of language
and thought which emasculates all our later fiction; but as that prudery
is not found in our lyric verse it is evident that here alone the
inspiration is full and rich enough to overflow the limits of epicene
convention.

Whether the reader agrees with me or not on this point, it may be
accepted that Shakespeare revealed himself far more completely in his
plays than as a lyric poet. Just as he chose his dramatic subjects with
some felicity to reveal his many-sided nature, so he used the sonnets
with equal artistry to discover that part of himself which could hardly
be rendered objectively. Whatever is masculine in a man can be depicted
superbly on the stage, but his feminine qualities--passionate
self-abandonment, facile forgivingness, self-pity--do not show well in
the dramatic struggle. What sort of a drama would that be in which the
hero would have to confess that when in the vale of years he had fallen
desperately in love with a girl, and that he had been foolish enough to
send a friend, a young noble, to plead his cause, with the result that
the girl won the friend and gave herself to him? The protagonist would
earn mocking laughter and not sympathy, and this Shakespeare no doubt
foresaw. Besides, to Shakespeare, this story, which is in brief the
story of the sonnets, was terribly real and intimate, and he felt
instinctively that he could not treat it objectively; it was too near
him, too exquisitely painful for that.

At some time or other life overpowers the strongest of us, and that
defeat we all treat lyrically; when the deepest depth in us is stirred
we cannot feign, or depict ourselves from the outside dispassionately;
we can only cry our passion, our pain and our despair; this once we use
no art, simple truth is all we seek to reach. The crisis of
Shakespeare's life, the hour of agony and bloody sweat when his weakness
found him out and life's handicap proved too heavy even for his
strength--that is the subject of the sonnets.

Now what was Shakespeare's weakness? his besetting temptation? "Love is
my sin," he says; "Love of love and her soft hours" was his weakness:
passion the snare that meshed his soul. No wonder Antony cries:

"Whither hast thou led me, Egypt?"

for his gipsy led Shakespeare from shame to shame, to the verge of
madness. The sonnets give us the story, the whole terrible, sinful,
magical story of Shakespeare's passion.

As might have been expected, Englishmen like Wordsworth, with an intense
appreciation of lyric poetry, have done good work in criticism of the
sonnets, and one Englishman has read them with extraordinary
understanding. Mr. Tyler's work on the sonnets ranks higher than that of
Coleridge on the plays. I do not mean to say that it is on the same
intellectual level with the work of Coleridge, though it shows wide
reading, astonishing acuteness, and much skill in the marshalling of
argument. But Mr. Tyler had the good fortune to be the first to give to
the personages of the sonnets a local habitation and a name, and that
unique achievement puts him in a place by himself far above the mass of
commentators. Before his book appeared in 1890 the sonnets lay in the
dim light of guess-work. It is true that Hallam had adopted the
hypothesis of Boaden and Bright, and had identified William Herbert,
Earl of Pembroke, with the high-born, handsome youth for whom
Shakespeare, in the sonnets, expressed such passionate affection; but
still, there were people who thought that the Earl of Southampton filled
the requirements even better than William Herbert, and as I say, the
whole subject lay in the twilight of surmise and supposition.

Mr. Tyler, working on a hint of the Rev. W. A. Harrison, identified
Shakespeare's high-born mistress, the "dark lady" of the sonnets, with
Mistress Mary Fitton, a maid of honour to Queen Elizabeth.

These, then, are the personages of the drama, and the story is very
simple: Shakespeare loved Mistress Fitton and sent his friend, the young
Lord Herbert, to her on some pretext, but with the design that he should
commend Shakespeare to the lady. Mistress Fitton fell in love with
William Herbert, wooed and won him, and Shakespeare had to mourn the
loss of both friend and mistress.

It would be natural to speak of this identification of Mr. Tyler's as
the best working hypothesis yet put forward; but it would be unfair to
him; it is more than this. Till his book appeared, even the date of the
sonnets was not fixed; many critics regarded them as an early work, as
early indeed, as 1591 or 1592; he was the first person to prove that the
time they cover extends roughly from 1598 to 1601. Mr. Tyler then has
not only given us the names of the actors, but he has put the tragedy in
its proper place in Shakespeare's life, and he deserves all thanks for
his illuminating work.

I bring to this theory fresh corroboration from the plays. Strange to
say, Mr. Tyler has hardly used the plays, yet, as regards the story told
in the sonnets, the proof that it is a real and not an imaginary story
can be drawn from the plays. I may have to point out, incidentally, what
I regard as mistakes and oversights in Mr. Tyler's work; but in the main
it stands four-square, imposing itself on the reason and satisfying at
the same time instinct and sympathy.

Let us first see how far the story told in the sonnets is borne out by
the plays. For a great many critics, even to-day, reject the story
altogether, and believe that the sonnets were nothing but poetic
exercises.

The sonnets fall naturally into two parts: from 1 to 126 they tell how
Shakespeare loved a youth of high rank and great personal beauty; sonnet
127 is an envoi; from 128 to 152 they tell of Shakespeare's love
for a "dark lady." What binds the two series together is the story told
in both, or at least told in one and corroborated in the other, that
Shakespeare first sent his friend to the lady, most probably to plead
his cause, and that she wooed his friend and gave herself to him. Now
this is not a common or easily invented story. No one would guess that
Shakespeare could be so foolish as to send his friend to plead his love
for him. That's a mistake that no man who knows women would be likely to
make: but the unlikelihood of the story is part of the evidence of its
truth--credo quia incredibile has an element of persuasion in it.

No one has yet noticed that the story of the sonnets is treated three
times in Shakespeare's plays. The first time the story appears it is
handled so lightly that it looks to me as if he had not then lived
through the incidents which he narrates. In the "Two Gentlemen of
Verona" Proteus is asked by the Duke to plead Thurio's cause with
Silvia, and he promises to do so; but instead, presses his own suit and
is rejected. The incident is handled so carelessly (Proteus not being
Thurio's friend) that it seems to me to have no importance save as a
mere coincidence. When the scene between Proteus and Silvia was written
Shakespeare had not yet been deceived by his friend. Still in "The Two
Gentlemen of Verona" there is one speech which certainly betrays
personal passion. It is in the last scene of the fifth act, when
Valentine surprises Proteus offering violence to Silvia.

"Val.(coming forward) Ruffian, let go that rude uncivil
touch,--
Thou friend of an ill fashion!

Pro. Valentine!

Val. Thou common friend, that's without faith or love,--
For such is a friend now;--treacherous man!
Thou hast beguiled my hopes: nought but mine eye
Could have persuaded me. Now I dare not say
I have one friend alive: thou would'st disprove me.
Who should be trusted when one's own right hand
Is perjured to the bosom? Proteus,
I am sorry I must never trust thee more,
But count the world a stranger for thy sake.
The private wound is deepest: time most accurst
'Mongst all foes that a friend should be the worst!"

The first lines which I have italicised are too plain to be misread;
when they were written Shakespeare had just been cheated by his friend;
they are his passionate comment on the occurrence--"For such is a friend
now"--can hardly be otherwise explained. The last couplet, too, which I
have also put in italics, is manifestly a reflection on his betrayal: it
is a twin rendering of the feeling expressed in sonnet 40:

"And yet love knows it is a greater grief
To bear love's wrong than hate's known injury."

It contrasts "foe and friend," just as the sonnet contrasts "love and
hate."

Mr. Israel Gollancz declares that "several critics are inclined to
attribute this final scene to another hand," and to his mind "it bears
evident signs of hasty composition." No guess could be wider from the
truth. The scene is most manifestly pure Shakespeare--I take the
soliloquy of Valentine, with which the scene opens, as among
Shakespeare's most characteristic utterances--but the whole scene is
certainly later than the rest of the play. The truth probably is that
after his friend had deceived him, "The Two Gentlemen of Verona" was
played again, and that Shakespeare rewrote this last scene under the
influence of personal feeling. The 170 lines of it are full of phrases
which might be taken direct from the sonnets. Here 's such a couplet:

"O, 'tis the curse in love, and still approved,
When women cannot love where they're beloved."

The whole scene tells the story a little more frankly than we find it in
the sonnets, as might be expected, seeing that Shakespeare's rival was a
great noble and not to be criticised freely. This fact explains to me
Valentine's unmotived renunciation of Silvia; explains, too, why he is
reconciled to his friend with such unseemly haste. Valentine's last
words in the scene are illuminating:

"'Twere pity two such friends should be long foes."

The way this scene in "The Two Gentlemen of Verona" is told throws more
light on Shakespeare's feelings at the moment of his betrayal than the
sonnets themselves. Under the cover of fictitious names Shakespeare
ventured to show the disgust and contempt he felt for Lord Herbert's
betrayal more plainly than he cared, or perhaps dared, to do when
speaking in his own person.

There is another play where the same incident is handled in such fashion
as to put the truth of the sonnet-story beyond all doubt.

In "Much Ado about Nothing" the incident is dragged in by the ears, and
the whole treatment is most remarkable. Every one will remember how
Claudio tells the Prince that he loves Hero, and asks his friend's
assistance: "your highness now may do me good." There's no reason for
Claudio's shyness: no reason why he should call upon the Prince for help
in a case where most men prefer to use their own tongues; but Claudio is
young, and so we glide over the inherent improbability of the incident.
The Prince at once promises to plead for Claudio with Hero and with her
father:

"And thou shalt have her. Was't not to this end
That thou began'st to twist so fine a story?"

Now comes the peculiar handling of the incident. Claudio knows the
Prince is wooing Hero for him, therefore when Don John tells him that
the Prince "is enamoured on Hero," he should at once infer that Don John
is mistaken through ignorance of this fact; but instead of that he falls
suspicious, and questions:

"How know you he loves her?

D. John. I heard him swear his affection.

Bor. So did I too, and he swore he would marry her
to-night."

There is absolutely nothing even in this corroboration by Borachio to
shake Claudio's trust in the Prince: neither Don John nor Borachio knows
what he knows, that the Prince is wooing for him (Claudio) and at his
request. He should therefore smile at the futile attempt to excite his
jealousy. But at once he is persuaded of the worst, as a man would be
who had already experienced such disloyalty: he cries:

"'Tis certain so; the prince woos for himself."

And then we should expect to hear him curse the prince as a traitorous
friend, and dwell on his own loyal service by way of contrast, and so
keep turning the dagger in the wound with the thought that no one but
himself was ever so repaid for such honesty of love. But, no! Claudio
has no bitterness in him, no reproachings; he speaks of the whole matter
as if it had happened months and months before, as indeed it had; for
"Much Ado about Nothing" was written about 1599. Reflection had already
shown Shakespeare the unreason of revolt, and he puts his own thought in
the mouth of Claudio:

"'Tis certain so; the prince woos for himself.
Friendship is constant in all other things
Save in the office and affairs of love:
Therefore all hearts in love use their own tongues;
Let every eye negotiate for itself,
And trust no agent; for beauty is a witch,
Against whose charms faith melteth into blood.
This is an accident of hourly proof,
Which I mistrusted not. Farewell, therefore, Hero."

The Claudio who spoke like this in the first madness of love lost and
friendship cheated would be a monster. Here we have Shakespeare speaking
in all calmness of something that happened to himself a considerable
time before. The lines I have put in italics admit no other
interpretation: they show Shakespeare's philosophic acceptance of things
as they are; what has happened to him is not to be assumed as singular
but is the common lot of man--"an accident of hourly proof"--which he
blames himself for not foreseeing. In fact, Claudio's temper here is as
detached and impartial as Benedick's. Benedick declares that Claudio
should be whipped:

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