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The Man Shakespeare

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"But love is blind and lovers cannot see
The pretty follies that themselves commit."

Here we have "the pretty follies" which is used again as "pretty wrongs"
in sonnet 41. Immediately afterwards Lorenzo, another mask of
Shakespeare, praises Jessica as "wise, fair, and true," just as in
sonnet 105 Shakespeare praises his friend as "kind, fair, and true,"
using again words which his passion for a woman has taught him.

The fourth act sets forth the same argument we find in the sonnets. When
it looks as if Antonio would have to give his life as forfeit to the
Jew, Bassanio exclaims:

"Antonio, I am married to a wife
Which is as dear to me as life itself;
But life itself, my wife and all the world
Are not with me esteem'd above thy life.
I would lose all, ay, sacrifice them all
Here to this devil to deliver you."

This is the language of passionate exaggeration, one might say.
Antoniois suffering in Bassanio's place, paying the penalty, so to
speak, for Bassanio's happiness. No wonder Bassanio exaggerates his
grief and the sacrifice he would be prepared to make. But Gratiano has
no such excuse for extravagant speech, and yet Gratiano follows in the
self-same vein:

"I have a wife whom, I protest, I love:
I would she were in heaven, so she could
Entreat some power to change this currish Jew."

The peculiarity of this attitude is heightened by the fact that the two
wives, Portia and Nerissa, both take the ordinary view. Portia says:

"Your wife would give you little thanks for that
If she were by to hear you make the offer."

And Nerissa goes a little further:

"Tis well you offer it behind her back,
The wish would make else an unquiet house."

The blunder is monstrous; not only is the friend prepared to sacrifice
all he possesses, including his wife, to save his benefactor, but the
friend's friend is content to sacrifice his wife too for the same
object. Shakespeare then in early manhood was accustomed to put
friendship before love; we must find some explanation of what seems to
us so unnatural an attitude.

In the last scene of "The Two Gentlemen of Verona," which is due to a
later revision, the sonnet-case is emphasized. And at this time
Shakespeare has suffered Herbert's betrayal. As soon as the false friend
Proteus says he is sorry and asks forgiveness, Valentine, another
impersonation of Shakespeare, replies:

"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 pleas'd;
By penitence the Eternal's wrath's appeased;
And that my love may appear plain and free,
All that was mine in Silvia I give thee."

This incarnation of Shakespeare speaks of repentance in Shakespeare's
most characteristic fashion, and then coolly surrenders the woman he
loves to his friend without a moment's hesitation, and without even
considering whether the woman would be satisfied with the transfer. The
words admit of no misconstruction; they stand four-square, not to be
shaken by any ingenuity of reason, and Shakespeare supplies us with
further corroboration of them.

"Coriolanus" was written fully ten years after "The Merchant of Venice,"
and long after the revision of "The Two Gentlemen of Verona." And yet
Shakespeare's attitude at forty-three is, in regard to this matter, just
what it was at thirty-three. When Aufidius finds Coriolanus in his
house, and learns that he has been banished from Rome and is now
prepared to turn his army against his countrymen, he welcomes him as
"more a friend than e'er an enemy," and this is the way he takes to show
his joy:

"Know thou first,
I loved the maid I married: never man
Sigh'd truer breath; but that I see thee here,
Thou noble thing! more dances my rapt heart
Than when I first my wedded mistress saw
Bestride my threshold."

Here's the same attitude; the same extravagance; the same insistence on
the fact that the man loves the maid and yet has more delight in the
friend. What does it mean? When we first find it in "The Merchant of
Venice" it must give the reader pause; in "The Two Gentlemen of Verona"
it surprises us; in the sonnets, accompanied as it is by every
flattering expression of tender affection for the friend, it brings us
to question; but its repetition in "Coriolanus" must assure us that it
is a mere pose. Aufidius was not such a friend of Coriolanus that we can
take his protestation seriously. The argument is evidently a stock
argument to Shakespeare: a part of the ordinary furniture of his mind:
it is like a fashionable dress of the period--the wearer does not notice
its peculiarity.

The truth is, Shakespeare found in the literature of his time, and in
the minds of his contemporaries, a fantastically high appreciation of
friendship, coupled with a corresponding disdain for love as we moderns
understand it. In "Wit's Commonwealth," published in 1598, we find: "The
love of men to women is a thing common and of course, but the friendship
of man to man, infinite and immortal." Passionate devotion to friendship
is a sort of mark of the Renaissance, and the words "love" and "lover"
in Elizabethan English were commonly used for "friend" and "friendship."
Moreover, one must not forget that Lyly, whose euphuistic speech
affected Shakespeare for years, had handled this same incident in his
"Campaspe," where Alexander gives up his love to his rival, Apelles.
Shakespeare, not to be outdone in any loyalty, sets forth the same
fantastical devotion in the sonnets and plays. He does this, partly
because the spirit of the time infected him, partly out of sincere
admiration for Herbert, but oftener, I imagine, out of self-interest. It
is pose, flunkeyism and the hope of benefits to come and not passion
that inspired the first series of sonnets.

Whoever reads the scene carefully in "Much Ado About Nothing," cannot
avoid seeing that Shakespeare at his best not only does not minimize his
friend's offence, but condemns it absolutely:

"The transgression is in the stealer."

And in the sonnets, too, in spite of himself, the same true feeling
pierces through the snobbish and affected excuses.

"Ay me! but yet them might'st my seat forbear,
And chide thy beauty and thy straying youth,
Who lead thee in their riot even there
Where thou art forced to break a twofold truth,
Hers, by thy beauty tempting her to thee,
Thine, by thy beauty being false to me."

Shakespeare was a sycophant, a flunkey if you will, but nothing worse.

Further arguments suggest themselves. Shakespeare lived, as it were, in
a glass house with a score of curious eyes watching everything he did
and with as many ears pricked for every word he said; but this foul
accusation was never even suggested by any of his rivals. In especial
Ben Jonson was always girding at Shakespeare, now satirically, now
good-humouredly. Is it not manifest that if any such sin had ever been
attributed to him, Ben Jonson would have given the suspicion utterance?
There is a passage in his "Bartholomew Fair" which I feel sure is meant
as a skit upon the relations we find in the Sonnets. In Act V, scene
iii, there is a puppet-show setting forth "the ancient modern history of
Hero and Leander, otherwise called the Touchstone of true Love, with as
true a trial of Friendship between Damon and Pythias, two faithful
friends o' the Bankside." Hero is a "wench o' the Bankside," and Leander
swims across the Thames to her. Damon and Pythias meet at her lodgings,
and abuse each other violently, only to finish as perfect good friends.

"Damon. Whore-master in thy face;
Thou hast lain with her thyself, I'll prove it in this place.

Leatherhead. They are whore-masters both, sir, that's
a plain case.

Pythias. Thou lie like a rogue.

Leatherhead. Do I lie like a rogue?

Pythias. A pimp and a scab.

Leatherhead. A pimp and a scab!
I say, between you you have both but one drab.

Pythias and Damon. Come, now we'll go together to
breakfast to Hero.

Leatherhead. Thus, gentles, you perceive without any
denial
'Twixt Damon and Pythias here friendship's true trial."

Rare Ben Jonson would have been delighted to set forth the viler charge
if it had ever been whispered.

Then again, it seems to me certain that if Shakespeare had been the sort
of man his accusers say he was, he would have betrayed himself in his
plays. Consider merely the fact that young boys then played the girls'
parts on the stage. Surely if Shakespeare had had any leaning that way,
we should have found again and again ambiguous or suggestive expressions
given to some of these boys when aping girls; but not one. The
temptation was there; the provocation was there, incessant and prolonged
for twenty-five years, and yet, to my knowledge, Shakespeare has never
used one word that malice could misconstrue. Yet he loved suggestive and
lewd speech.

Luckily, however, there is stronger proof of Shakespeare's innocence
than even his condemnation of his false friend, proof so strong, that if
all the arguments for his guilt were tenfold stronger than they are,
this proof would outweigh them all and bring them to nought. Nor should
it be supposed, because I have only mentioned the chief arguments for
and against, that I do not know all those that can be urged on either
side. I have confined myself to the chief ones simply because by merely
stating them, their utter weakness must be admitted by every one who can
read Shakespeare, by every one who understands his impulsive
sensitiveness, and the facility with which affectionate expressions came
to his lips. Moreover, it must not be forgotten that while the sonnets
were being written he was in rivalry with Chapman for this very patron's
favour, and this rivalry alone would explain a good deal of the fervour,
or, should I say, the affected fervour he put into the first series of
sonnets; but now for the decisive and convincing argument for
Shakespeare's innocence.

Let us first ask ourselves how it is that real passion betrays itself
and proves its force. Surely it is by its continuance; by its effect
upon the life later. I have assumed, or inferred, as my readers may
decide, that Shakespeare's liking for Herbert was chiefly snobbish, and
was deepened by the selfish hope that he would find in him a patron even
more powerful and more liberally disposed than Lord Southampton. He
probably felt that young Herbert owed him a great deal for his
companionship and poetical advice; for Herbert was by way of being a
poet himself. If my view is correct, after Shakespeare lost Lord
Herbert's affection, we should expect to hear him talking of man's
forgetfulness and ingratitude, and that is just what Lord Herbert left
in him, bitterness and contempt. Never one word in all his works to show
that the loss of this youth's affection touched him more nearly. As we
have seen, he cannot keep the incident out of his plays. Again and again
he drags it in; but in none of these dramas is there any lingering
kindness towards the betrayer. And as soon as the incident was past and
done with, as soon as the three or four years' companionship with Lord
Herbert was at an end, not one word more do we catch expressive of
affection. Again and again Shakespeare rails at man's ingratitude, but
nothing more. Think of it. Pembroke, under James, came to great power;
was, indeed, made Lord Chamberlain, and set above all the players, so
that he could have advanced Shakespeare as he pleased with a word: with
a word could have made him Master of the Revels, or given him a higher
post. He did not help him in any way. He gave books every Christmas to
Ben Jonson, but we hear of no gift to Shakespeare, though evidently from
the dedication to him of the first folio, he remained on terms of
careless acquaintance with Shakespeare. Ingratitude is what Shakespeare
found in Lord Pembroke; ingratitude is what he complains of in him. What
a different effect the loss of Mary Fitton had upon Shakespeare. Just
consider what the plays teach us when the sonnet-story is finished. The
youth vanishes; no reader can find a trace of him, or even an allusion
to him. But the woman comes to be the centre, as we shall see, of
tragedy after tragedy. She flames through Shakespeare's life, a fiery
symbol, till at length she inspires perhaps his greatest drama, "Antony
and Cleopatra," filling it with the disgrace of him who is "a strumpet's
fool," the shame of him who has become "the bellows and the fan to cool
a harlot's lust."

The passion for Mary Fitton was the passion of Shakespeare's whole life.
The adoration of her, and the insane desire of her, can be seen in every
play he wrote from 1597 to 1608. After he lost her, he went back to her;
but the wound of her frailty cankered and took on proud flesh in him,
and tortured him to nervous breakdown and to madness. When at length he
won to peace, after ten years, it was the peace of exhaustion. His love
for his "gipsy-wanton" burned him out, as one is burnt to ashes at the
stake, and his passion only ended with his life.

There is no room for doubt in my mind, no faintest suspicion. Hallam and
Heine, and all the cry of critics, are mistaken in this matter.
Shakespeare admired Lord Herbert's youth and boldness and beauty, hoped
great things from his favour and patronage; but after the betrayal, he
judged him inexorably as a mean traitor, "a stealer" who had betrayed "a
twofold trust"; and later, cursed him for his ingratitude, and went
about with wild thoughts of bloody revenge, as we shall soon see in
"Hamlet" and "Othello," and then dropped him into oblivion without a
pang.

It is bad enough to know that Shakespeare, the sweetest spirit and
finest mind in all literature, should have degraded himself to pretend
such an affection for the profligate Herbert as has given occasion for
misconstruction. It is bad enough, I say, to know that Shakespeare could
play flunkey to this extent; but after all, that is the worst that can
be urged against him, and it is so much better than men have been led to
believe that there may be a certain relief in the knowledge.




CHAPTER VI

THE FIRST-FRUIT OF THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE: BRUTUS


The play of "Julius Caesar" was written about 1600 or 1601. As "Twelfth
Night" was the last of the golden comedies, so "Julius Caesar" is the
first of the great tragedies, and bears melancholy witness to us that
the poet's young-eyed confidence in life and joy in living are dying, if
not dead. "Julius Caesar" is the first outcome of disillusion. Before it
was written Shakespeare had been deceived by his mistress, betrayed by
his friend; his eyes had been opened to the fraud and falsehood of life;
but, like one who has just been operated on for cataract, he still sees
realities as through a mist, dimly. He meets the shock of traitorous
betrayal as we should have expected Valentine or Antonio or Orsino to
meet it--with pitying forgiveness. Suffering, instead of steeling his
heart and drying up his sympathies, as it does with most men, softened
him, induced him to give himself wholly to that "angel, Pity." He will
not believe that his bitter experience is universal; in spite of
Herbert's betrayal, he still has the courage to declare his belief in
the existence of the ideal. At the very last his defeated Brutus cries:

"My heart doth joy that yet in all my life
I found no man but he was true to me."

The pathos of this attempt still to believe in man and man's truth is
over the whole play. But the belief was fated to disappear. No man who
lives in the world can boast of loyalty as Brutus did; even Jesus had a
Judas among the Twelve. But when Shakespeare wrote "Julius Caesar" he
still tried to believe, and this gives the play an important place in
his life's story.

Before I begin to consider the character of Brutus I should like to draw
attention to three passages which place Brutus between the melancholy
Jaques of "As You Like It," whose melancholy is merely temperamental,
and the almost despairing Hamlet. Jaques says:

"Invest me in my motley; give me leave
To speak my mind, and I will through and through
Cleanse the foul body of the infected world,
If they will patiently receive my medicine."

This is the view of early manhood which does not doubt its power to cure
all the evils which afflict mortality. Then comes the later, more
hopeless view, to which Brutus gives expression:

"Till then, my noble friend, chew upon this;
Brutus had rather be a villager
Than to repute himself a son of Rome
Under these hard conditions as this time
Is like to lay upon us."

And later still, and still more bitter, Hamlet's:

"The time is out of joint; O cursed spite,
That ever I was born to set it right!"

But Shakespeare is a meliorist even in Hamlet, and believes that the
ailments of man can all be set right.

The likenesses between Brutus and Hamlet are so marked that even the
commentators have noticed them. Professor Dowden exaggerates the
similarities. "Both (dramas)," he writes, "are tragedies of thought
rather than of passion; both present in their chief characters the
spectacle of noble natures which fail through some weakness or
deficiency rather than through crime; upon Brutus as upon Hamlet a
burden is laid which he is not able to bear; neither Brutus nor Hamlet
is fitted for action, yet both are called to act in dangerous and
difficult affairs." Much of this is Professor Dowden's view and not
Shakespeare's. When Shakespeare wrote "Julius Caesar" he had not reached
that stage in self-understanding when he became conscious that he was a
man of thought rather than of action, and that the two ideals tend to
exclude each other. In the contest at Philippi Brutus and his wing win
the day; it is the defeat of Cassius which brings about the ruin;
Shakespeare evidently intended to depict Brutus as well "fitted for
action."

Some critics find it disconcerting that Shakespeare identified himself
with Brutus, who failed, rather than with Caesar, who succeeded. But
even before he himself came to grief in his love and trust, Shakespeare
had always treated the failures with peculiar sympathy. He preferred
Arthur to the Bastard, and King Henry VI. to Richard III., and Richard
II. to proud Bolingbroke. And after his agony of disillusion, all his
heroes are failures for years and years: Brutus, Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear,
Troilus, Antony, and Timon--all fail as he himself had failed.

There is some matter for surprise in the fact that Brutus is an ideal
portrait of Shakespeare. Disillusion usually brings a certain bitter
sincerity, a measure of realism, into artistic work; but its first
effect on Shakespeare was to draw out all the kindliness in him; Brutus
is Shakespeare at his sweetest and best. Yet the soul-suffering of the
man has assuredly improved his art: Brutus is a better portrait of him
than Biron, Valentine, Romeo, or Antonio, a more serious and bolder
piece of self-revealing even than Orsino. Shakespeare is not afraid now
to depict the deep underlying kindness of his nature, his essential
goodness of heart. A little earlier, and occupied chiefly with his own
complex growth, he could only paint sides of himself; a little later,
and the personal interest absorbed all others, so that his dramas became
lyrics of anguish and despair. Brutus belongs to the best time,
artistically speaking, to the time when passion and pain had tried the
character without benumbing the will or distracting the mind: it is a
masterpiece of portraiture, and stands in even closer relation to Hamlet
than Romeo stands to Orsino. As Shakespeare appears to us in Brutus at
thirty-seven, so he was when they bore him to his grave at
fifty-two--the heart does not alter greatly.

Let no one say or think that in all this I am drawing on my imagination;
what I have said is justified by all that Brutus says and does from one
end of the play to the other. According to his custom, Shakespeare has
said it all of himself very plainly, and has put his confession into the
mouth of Brutus on his very first appearance (Act i. sc. 2):

"Cassius
Be not deceived: if I have veiled my look
I turn the trouble of my countenance
Merely upon myself. Vexed I am
Of late with passions of some difference,
Conceptions only proper to myself,
Which gives some soil, perhaps, to my behaviours,
But let not therefore my good friends be grieved,--
Among which number, Cassius, be you one,--
Nor construe any further in neglect,
Than that poor Brutus, with himself at war,
Forgets the shows of love to other men."

What were these "different passions," complex personal passions, too,
which had vexed Brutus and changed his manners even to his friends?
There is no hint of them in Plutarch, no word about them in the play. It
was not "poor Brutus," but poor Shakespeare, racked by love and
jealousy, tortured by betrayal, who was now "at war with himself."

I assume the identity of Brutus with Shakespeare before I have
absolutely proved it because it furnishes the solution to the
difficulties of the play. As usual, Coleridge has given proof of his
insight by seeing and stating the chief difficulty, without, however,
being able to explain it, and as usual, also, the later critics have
followed him as far as they can, and in this case have elected to pass
over the difficulty in silence. Coleridge quotes some of the words of
Brutus when he first thinks of killing Caesar, and calls the passage a
speech of Brutus, but it is in reality a soliloquy of Brutus, and must
be considered in its entirety. Brutus says:

"It must be by his death: and for my part,
I know no personal cause to spurn at him
But for the general. He would be crowned:--
How that might change his nature, there's the question?
It is the bright day that brings forth the adder,
And that craves wary walking. Crown him?--that;
And then, I grant, we put a sting in him
That at his will he may do danger with.
The abuse of greatness is, when it disjoins
Remorse from power: and to speak truth of Caesar,
I have known his affections swayed
More than his reason. But 'tis a common proof,
That lowliness is young ambition's ladder,
Whereto the climber-upwards turns his face;
But when he once attains the topmost round,
He then unto the ladder turns his back,
Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees
By which he did ascend. So Caesar may:
Then, lest he may, prevent. And since the quarrel
Will bear no colour for the thing he is,
Fashion it thus: that, what he is, augmented,
Would run to these and these extremities:
And therefore think him as a serpent's egg,
Which, hatched, would as his kind grow mischievous;
And kill him in the shell."

Coleridge's comment on this deserves notice. He wrote: "This speech is
singular; at least, I do not at present see into Shakespeare's motive,
his rationale, or in what point of view he meant Brutus'
character to appear. For surely ... nothing can seem more discordant
with our historical preconceptions of Brutus, or more lowering to the
intellect of the Stoico-Platonic tyrannicide, than the tenets here
attributed to him--to him, the stern Roman republican; namely, that he
would have no objection to a king, or to Caesar, a monarch in Rome,
would Caesar but be as good a monarch as he now seems disposed to be!
How, too, could Brutus say that he found no personal cause--none in
Caesar's past conduct as a man? Had he not passed the Rubicon? Had he
not entered Rome as a conqueror? Had he not placed his Gauls in the
Senate? Shakespeare, it may be said, has not brought these things
forward. True;--and this is just the ground of my perplexity. What
character did Shakespeare mean his Brutus to be?"

All this is sound criticism, and can only be answered by the truth that
Shakespeare from the beginning of the play identified himself with
Brutus, and paid but little attention to the historic Brutus whom he had
met in Plutarch. Let us push criticism a little further, and we shall
see that this is the only possible way to read the riddle. We all know
why Plutarch's Brutus killed Caesar; but why does Shakespeare's Brutus
kill the man he so esteems? Because Caesar may change his nature when
king; because like the serpent's egg he may "grow mischievous"? But when
he speaks "truth" of Caesar he has to admit Caesar's goodness. The
"serpent's egg" reason then is inapplicable. Besides, when speaking of
himself on the plains of Philippi, Shakespeare's Brutus explicitly
contradicts this false reasoning:

"I know not how
But I do find it cowardly and vile,
For fear of what might fall, so to prevent
The term of life."

It would seem, therefore, that Brutus did not kill Caesar, as one
crushes a serpent's egg, to prevent evil consequences. It is equally
manifest that he did not do it for "the general," for if ever "the
general" were shown to be despicable and worthless it is in this very
play, where the citizens murder Cinna the poet because he has the same
name as Cinna the conspirator, and the lower classes are despised as the
"rabblement," "the common herd," with "chapped hands," "sweaty
night-caps," and "stinking breath."

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