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The Man Shakespeare

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"He probed from hell to hell
Of human passions, but of love deflowered
His wisdom was not...."
--Meredith's Sonnet on Shakespeare.

With "Hamlet" and his dreams of an impossible revenge Shakespeare got
rid of some of the perilous stuff which his friend's traitorism had bred
in him. In "Othello" he gave deathless expression to the madness of his
jealous rage and so cleared his soul, to some extent, of that poisonous
infection. But passion in Shakespeare survived hatred of the betrayer
and jealousy of him; he had quickly finished with Herbert; but Mary
Fitton lived still for him and tempted him perpetually--the lust of the
flesh, the desire of the eye, insatiable, cruel as the grave. He will
now portray his mistress for us dramatically--unveil her very soul, show
the gipsy-wanton as she is. He who has always painted in high lights is
now going to paint French fashion, in blackest shadows, for with the
years his passion and his bitterness have grown in intensity. Mary
Fitton is now "false Cressid." Pandarus says of her in the first scene
of the first act:

"An her hair were not somewhat darker than Helen's--well,
go to--there were no more comparison between
the women."

Mary Fitton's hair, we know, was raven-black, but the evidence
connecting Shakespeare's mistress with "false Cressid" is stronger, as
we shall see, than any particular line or expression.

"Troilus and Cressida" is a wretched, invertebrate play without even a
main current of interest. Of course there are fine phrases in it, as in
most of the productions of Shakespeare's maturity; but the
characterization is worse than careless, and at first one wonders why
Shakespeare wrote the tedious, foolish stuff except to get rid of his
own bitterness in the railing of Thersites, and in the depicting of
Cressida's shameless wantonness. It is impossible to doubt that "false
Cressid" was meant for Mary Fitton. The moment she appears the play
begins to live; personal bitterness turns her portrait into a
caricature; every fault is exaggerated and lashed with rage; it is not
so much a drama as a scene where Shakespeare insults his mistress.

Let us look at this phase of his passion in perspective. Almost as soon
as he became acquainted with Miss Fitton, about Christmas 1597,
Shakespeare wrote of her as a wanton; yet so long as she gave herself to
him he appears to have been able to take refuge in his tenderness and
endure her strayings. But passion in him grew with what it fed on, and
after she faulted with Lord Herbert, we find him in a sonnet threatening
her that his "pity-wanting pain" may induce him to write of her as she
was. No doubt her pride and scornful strength revolted under this
treatment and she drew away from him. Tortured by desire he would then
praise her with some astonishing phrases; call her "the heart's blood of
beauty, love's invisible soul," and after some hesitation she would
yield again. No sooner was the "ruined love" rebuilt than she would
offend again, and again he would curse and threaten, and so the
wretched, half-miserable, half-ecstatic life of passion stormed along,
one moment in Heaven, the next in Hell.

All the while Shakespeare was longing, or thought he was longing for
truth and constancy, and at length he gave form and name to his desire
for winnowed purity of love and perfect constancy, and this consoling
but impalpable ideal he called Ophelia, Desdemona, Cordelia. But again
and again Miss Fitton reconquered him and at length his accumulated
bitterness compelled him to depict his mistress realistically. Cressida
is his first attempt, the first dramatic portrait of the mistress who
got into Shakespeare's blood and infected the current of his being, and
the portrait is spoiled by the poet's hatred and contempt just as the
whole drama is spoiled by a passion of bitterness that is surely the
sign of intense personal suffering. Cressida is depicted as a vile
wanton, a drab by nature; but it is no part even of this conception to
make her soulless and devilish. On the contrary, an artist of
Shakespeare's imaginative sympathy loves to put in high relief the grain
of good in things evil and the taint of evil in things good that give
humanity its curious complexity. Shakespeare observed this rule of
dramatic presentation more consistently than any of his predecessors or
contemporaries--more consistently, more finely far than Homer or
Sophocles, whose heroes had only such faults as their creators thought
virtues; why then did he forget nature so far as to picture "false
Cressida" without a redeeming quality? He first shows her coquetting
with Troilus, and her coquetry even is unattractive, shallow, and
obvious; then she gives herself to Troilus out of passionate desire; but
Shakespeare omits to tell us why she takes up with Diomedes immediately
afterwards. We are to understand merely that she is what Ulysses calls a
"sluttish spoil of opportunity," and "daughter of the game." But as
passionate desire is not of necessity faithless we are distressed and
puzzled by her soulless wantonness. And when she goes on to present
Diomedes with the scarf that Troilus gave her, we revolt; the woman is
too full of blood to be so entirely heartless. Here is the scene
embittered by the fact that Troilus witnesses Cressida's betrayal:

"Diomedes. I had your heart before, this follows it.

Troilus. [Aside.] I did swear patience.

Cressida. You shall not have it, Diomed, faith you shall not;
I'll give you something else.

Diomedes. I will have this: whose was it?

Cressida. It is no matter.

Diomedes. Come, tell me whose it was?

Cressida. 'Twas one that loved me better than you will,
But, now you have it, take it."

The scene is a splendid dramatic scene, a piece torn from life, so
realistic that it convinces, and yet we revolt; we feel that we have not
got to the heart of the mystery. There is so much evil in Cressida that
we want to see the spark of goodness in her, however fleeting and
ineffective the spark may be. But Shakespeare makes her attempt at
justification a confession of absolute faithlessness:

"Troilus, farewell! one eye yet looks on thee,
But with my heart the other eye doth see.
Ah! poor our sex! This fault in us I find,
The error of our eye directs our mind."

This is plainly Shakespeare's reflection and not Cressida's apology, and
if we contrast this speech with the dialogue given above, it becomes
plain, I think, that the terrible scene with Diomedes is taken from
life, or is at least Shakespeare's vision of the way Mary Fitton
behaved. There's a magic in those devilish words of Cressida that
outdoes imagination:

"'Twas one that loved me better than you will,
But, now you have it, take it."

And then:

"Sweet, honey Greek, tempt me no more to folly:"

The very power of the characterization makes the traitress hateful. If
Mary Fitton ever gave any gift of Shakespeare to Lord Herbert, the
dramatist should have known that she no longer loved him, had in reality
already forgotten him in her new passion; but to paint a woman as
remembering a lover, indeed as still loving him, and yet as giving his
gift to another, is an offence in art though it may be true to nature.
It is a fault in art because it is impossible to motive it in a few
lines. The fact of the gift is bad enough; without explanation it is
horrible. For this and other reasons I infer that Shakespeare took the
fact from his own experience: he had suffered, it seems to me, from some
such traitorism on the part of his mistress, or he ascribed to Mary
Fitton some traitorism of his own.

In sonnet 122 he finds weighty excuse for having given away the
table-book which his friend had given to him. His own confessed
shortcoming might have taught him to exercise more lenient judgment
towards his frail love.

But when Shakespeare wrote "Troilus and Cressida" a passion of
bitterness possessed him; he not only vilified Cressida but all the
world, Agamemnon, Nestor, Achilles, Ajax; he seems indeed to have taken
more pleasure in the railing of Thersites than in any other part of the
work except the scourging of Cressida. He shocks us by the picture of
Achilles and his myrmidons murdering Hector when they come upon him
unarmed.

One or two incidental difficulties must be settled before we pass to a
greater play.

"Troilus and Cressida" has always been regarded as a sort of enigma.
Professor Dowden asks: "With what intention and in what spirit did
Shakespeare write this strange comedy? All the Greek heroes who fought
against Troy are pitilessly exposed to ridicule?" And from this fact and
the bitterness of "Timon" some German critics have drawn the inference
that Shakespeare was incapable of comprehending Greek life, and that
indeed he only realized his Romans so perfectly because the Roman was
very like the Briton in his mastery of practical affairs, of the details
of administration and of government. This is an excellent instance of
German prejudice. No one could have been better fitted than Shakespeare
to understand Greek civilization and Greek art with its supreme love of
plastic beauty, but his master Plutarch gave him far better pictures of
Roman life than of Greek life, partly because Plutarch lived in the time
of Roman domination and partly because he was in far closer sympathy
with the masters of practical affairs than with artists in stone like
Phidias or artists in thought like Plato. The true explanation of
Shakespeare's caricatures of Greek life, whether Homeric or Athenian, is
to be found in the fact that he was not only entirely ignorant of it but
prejudiced against it. And this prejudice in him had an obvious root.
Chapman had just translated and published the first books of his Iliad,
and Chapman was the poet whom Shakespeare speaks of as his rival in
Sonnets 78-86. He cannot help smiling at the "strained touches" of
Chapman's rhetoric and his heavy learning. Those who care to remember
the first scene of "Love's Labour's Lost" will recall how Shakespeare in
that early work mocked at learning and derided study. When he first
reached London he was no doubt despised for his ignorance of Greek and
Latin; he had had to bear the sneers and flouts of the many who
appraised learning, an university training and gentility above genius.
He took the first opportunity of answering his critics:

"Small have continual plodders ever won,
Save bare authority from others' books."

But the taunts rankled, and when the bitter days came of disappointment
and disillusion he took up that Greek life which his rival had tried to
depict in its fairest colours, and showed what he thought was the seamy
side of it. But had he known anything of Greek life and Greek art it
would have been his pleasure to outdo his rival by giving at once a
truer and a fairer presentation of Greece than Chapman could conceive.
It is the rivalry of Chapman that irritates Shakespeare into pouring
contempt on Greek life in "Troilus and Cressida." As Chapman was for the
Greeks, Shakespeare took sides with the Trojans.

But why do I assume that "Troilus and Cressida" is earlier than "Antony
and Cleopatra?" Some critics, and among them Dr. Brandes, place it
later, and they have some reason for their belief. The bitterness in
"Troilus and Cressida," they say rightly, is more intense; and as
Shakespeare's disappointment with men and things appears to have
increased from "Hamlet" to "Timon," or from 1602 to 1607-8, they put the
bitterer play later. Cogent as is this reasoning, I cannot believe that
Shakespeare could have painted Cressida after having painted Cleopatra.
The same model has evidently served for both women; but while Cleopatra
is perhaps the most superb portrait of a courtesan in all literature,
Cressida is a crude and harsh sketch such as a Dumas or a Pinero might
have conceived.

It is more than probable, I think, that "Troilus and Cressida" was
planned and the love-story at least written about 1603, while
Shakespeare's memory of one of his mistress's betrayals was still vivid
and sharp. The play was taken up again four or five years later and the
character of Ulysses deepened and strengthened. In this later revision
the outlook is so piercing-sad, the phrases of such pregnancy, that the
work must belong to Shakespeare's ripest maturity. Moreover, he has
grown comparatively careless of characterization as in all his later
work; he gives his wise sayings almost as freely to Achilles as to
Ulysses.

"Troilus and Cressida" is interesting because it establishes the opinion
that Chapman was indeed the rival poet whom Shakespeare referred to in
the sonnets, and especially because it shows us the poet's mistress
painted in a rage of erotic passion so violent that it defeats itself,
and the portrait becomes an incredible caricature--that way madness
lies. "Troilus and Cressida" points to "Lear" and "Timon."




CHAPTER X

DRAMAS OF LUST: PART II

Antony and Cleopatra


We now come to the finest work of Shakespeare's maturity, to the drama
in which his passion for Mary Fitton finds supreme expression.

"Antony and Cleopatra" is an astonishing production not yet fairly
appreciated even in England, and perhaps not likely to be appreciated
anywhere at its full worth for many a year to come. But when we English
have finally left that dark prison of Puritanism and lived for some time
in the sun-light where the wayside crosses are hidden under climbing
roses, we shall probably couple "Antony and Cleopatra" with "Hamlet" in
our love as Shakespeare's supremest works. It was fitting that the same
man who wrote "Romeo and Juliet," the incomparable symphony of first
love, should also write "Antony and Cleopatra," the far more wonderful
and more terrible tragedy of mature passion.

Let us begin with the least interesting part of the play, and we shall
see that all the difficulties in it resolve themselves as soon as we
think of it as Shakespeare's own confession. Wherever he leaves
Plutarch, it is to tell his own story.

Some critics have reproached Shakespeare with the sensualism of "Romeo
and Juliet"; no one, so far as I can remember, has blamed the Sapphic
intensity of "Antony and Cleopatra," where the lust of the flesh and
desire of the eye reign triumphant. Professor Dowden indeed says: "The
spirit of the play, though superficially it appear voluptuous, is
essentially severe. That is to say, Shakespeare is faithful to the
fact." Antony and Cleopatra kill themselves, forsooth, and thus
conventional virtue is justified by self-murder. So superficial and
false a judgement is a quaint example of mid-Victorian taste: it reminds
me of the horsehair sofa and the antimacassar. Would Professor Dowden
have had Shakespeare alter the historical facts, making Antony conquer
Caesar and Cleopatra triumph over death? Would this have been sufficient
to prove to the professor that Shakespeare's morals are not his, and
that the play is certainly the most voluptuous in modern literature?
Well, this is just what Shakespeare has done. Throughout the play Caesar
is a subordinate figure while Antony is the protagonist and engages all
our sympathies; whenever they meet Antony shows as the larger, richer,
more generous nature. In every act he conquers Caesar; leaving on us the
gorgeous ineffaceable impression of a great personality whose superb
temperament moves everyone to admiration and love; Caesar, on the other
hand, affects one as a calculating machine.

But Shakespeare's fidelity to the fact is so extraordinary that he gives
Caesar one speech which shows his moral superiority to Antony. When his
sister weeps on hearing that Antony has gone back to Cleopatra, Caesar
bids her dry her tears,

...
But let determined things to destiny
Hold unbewailed their way ..."

This line alone suffices to show why Antony was defeated; the force of
imperial Rome is in the great phrase; but Shakespeare will not admit his
favourite's inferiority, and in order to explain Antony's defeat
Shakespeare represents luck as being against him, luck or fate, and this
is not the only or even the chief proof of the poet's partiality.
Pompey, who scarcely notices Caesar when Antony is by, says of Antony:

"his soldiership
Is twice the other twain."

And, indeed, Antony in the play appears to be able to beat Caesar
whenever he chooses or whenever he is not betrayed.

All the personages of the play praise Antony, and when he dies the most
magnificent eulogy of him is pronounced by Agrippa, Caesar's friend:

"A rarer spirit never
Did steer humanity; but you, Gods, will give us
Some faults to make us men."

Antony is even permitted at the last to console himself; he declares
exultantly that in the other world the ghosts shall come to gaze at him
and Cleopatra, and:

"Dido and her Aeneas shall want troops."

Shakespeare makes conquering Caesar admit the truth of this boast:

"No grave upon the earth shall clip in it
A pair so famous."

To win in life universal admiration and love, and in death imperishable
renown, is to succeed in spite of failure and suicide, and this is the
lesson which Shakespeare read into Plutarch's story. Even Enobarbus is
conquered at the last by Antony's noble magnanimity. But why does
Shakespeare show this extraordinary, this extravagant liking for him who
was "the bellows and the fan to cool a gipsy's lust," for that Marc
Antony who might have been the master of the world, and who threw away
empire, life, and honour to be "a strumpet's fool?" There is only one
possible explanation: Shakespeare felt the most intense, the most
intimate sympathy with Antony because he, too, was passion's slave, and
had himself experienced with his dark mistress, Mary Fitton, the
ultimate degradation of lust. For this reason he took Plutarch's
portrait of Antony, and, by emphasizing the kingly traits, transformed
it. In the play, as Dr. Brandes sees, Antony takes on something of the
"artist-nature." It is Antony's greatness and weakness; the spectacle of
a high intellect struggling with an overpowering sensuality; of a noble
nature at odds with passionate human frailty, that endeared him to
Shakespeare. The pomp of Antony's position, too, and his kingly
personality pleased our poet. As soon as Shakespeare reached maturity,
he began to depict himself as a monarch; from "Twelfth Night" on he
assumed royal state in his plays, and surely in this figure of Antony he
must for the moment have satisfied his longing for regal magnificence
and domination. From the first scene to the last Antony is a king of men
by right divine of nature.

It is, however, plain that Antony's pride, his superb mastery of life,
the touch of imperious brutality in him, are all traits taken from
Plutarch, and are indeed wholly inconsistent with Shakespeare's own
character. Had Shakespeare possessed these qualities his portraits of
men of action would have been infinitely better than they are, while his
portraits of the gentle thinker and lover of the arts, his Hamlets and
his Dukes, would have been to seek.

The personal note of every one of his great tragedies is that
Shakespeare feels he has failed in life, failed lamentably. His Brutus,
we feel, failed of necessity because of his aloofness from practical
life; his Coriolanus, too, had to fail, and almost forgoes sympathy by
his faults; but this Antony ought not to have failed: we cannot
understand why the man leaves the sea-battle to follow Cleopatra's
flight, who but an act or two before, with lesser reason, realized his
danger and was able to break off from his enchantress. Yet the passion
of desire that sways Antony is so splendidly portrayed; is, too, so
dominant in all of us, that we accept it at once as explaining the
inexplicable.

In measure as Shakespeare ennobled Antony, the historical fact of
ultimate defeat and failure allowed him to degrade Cleopatra. And this
he did willingly enough, for from the moment he took up the subject he
identified the Queen of Egypt with his own faithless mistress, Mary
Fitton, whom he had already tried to depict as "false Cressid." This
identification of himself and his own experience of passion with the
persons and passions of the story explains some of the faults of the
drama; while being the source, also, of its singular splendour.

In this play we have the finest possible example of the strife between
Shakespeare's yielding poetic temperament and the severity of his
intellect. He heaps praises on Antony, as we have seen, from all sides;
he loved the man as a sort of superb alter ego, and yet his
intellectual fairness is so extraordinary that it compelled him to
create a character who should uphold the truth even against his heart's
favourite. Dr. Brandes speaks of Enobarbus as a "sort of chorus"; he is
far more than that; he is the intellectual conscience of the play, a
weight, so to speak, to redress the balance which Shakespeare used this
once and never again. What a confession this is of personal partiality!
A single instance will suffice to prove my point: Shakespeare makes
Antony cast the blame for the flight at Actium on Cleopatra, and manages
almost to hide the unmanly weakness of the plaint by its infinitely
pathetic wording:

"Whither hast them led me, Egypt?

A little later Cleopatra asks:

"Is Antony or we in fault for this?"

and at once Enobarbus voices the exact truth:

"Antony only, that would make his will
Lord of his reason. What though you fled
. . . . . .
. . . why should he follow?"

Again and again Antony reproaches Cleopatra, and again and again
Enobarbus is used to keep the truth before us. Some of these reproaches,
it seems to me, are so extravagant and so ill-founded that they discover
the personal passion of the poet. For example, Antony insults Cleopatra:

"You have been a boggler ever."

And the proof forsooth is:

"I found you as a morsel cold upon
Dead Caesar's trencher."

But to have been Caesar's mistress was Cleopatra's chief title to fame.
Shakespeare is here probably reviling Mary Fitton for being deserted by
some early lover. Curiously enough, this weakness of Antony increases
the complexity of his character, while the naturalistic passion of his
words adds enormously to the effect of the play. Again and again in this
drama Shakespeare's personal vindictiveness serves an artistic purpose.
The story of "Troilus and Cressida" is in itself low and vile, and when
loaded with Shakespeare's bitterness outrages probability; but the love
of Antony and Cleopatra is so overwhelming that it goes to ruin and
suicide and beyond, and when intensified by Shakespeare's personal
feeling becomes a world's masterpiece.

We have already seen that the feminine railing Shakespeare puts in the
mouth of Antony increases the realistic effect, and just in the same way
the low cunning, temper, and mean greed which he attributes to
Cleopatra, transform her from a somewhat incomprehensible historical
marionette into the most splendid specimen of the courtesan in the
world's literature. Heine speaks of her contemptuously as a "kept
woman," but the epithet only shows how Heine in default of knowledge
fell back on his racial gift of feminine denigration. Even before she
enters we see that Shakespeare has not forgiven his dark scornful
mistress; Cleopatra is the finest picture he ever painted of Mary
Fitton; but Antony's friends tell us, at the outset, she is a "lustful
gipsy," a "strumpet," and at first she merely plays on Antony's
manliness; she sends for him, and when he comes, departs. A little later
she sends again, telling her messenger:

"I did not send you: if you find him sad,
Say, I am dancing; if in mirth, report
That I am sudden sick: quick, and return."

And when Charmian, her woman, declares that the way to keep a man is to
"cross him in nothing," she replies scornfully:

"Thou teachest, like a fool, the way to lose him."

She uses a dozen taunts to prevent her lover from leaving her; but when
she sees him resolved, she wishes him victory and success. And so
through a myriad changes of mood and of cunning wiles we discover that
love for Antony which is the anchor to her unstable nature.

The scene with the eunuch Mardian is a little gem. She asks:

"Hast thou affections?
Mar. Yes, gracious madam.
Cleo. Indeed?
Mar. Not in deed, madam; for I can do nothing.
But what indeed is honest to be done;
Yet have I fierce affections, and think
What Venus did with Mars.
Cleo. O, Charmian!
Where think'st thou he is now? Stands he, or sits he?"

She is with her lover again, and recalls his phrase for her, "my serpent
of old Nile," and feeds herself with love's "delicious poison."

No sooner does she win our sympathy by her passion for Antony than
Shakespeare chills our admiration by showing her as the courtesan:

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