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The Man Shakespeare

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Let us begin, then, by treating Shakespeare as we would treat any other
writer, and ask simply how a dramatic author is most apt to reveal
himself. A great dramatist may not paint himself for us at any time in
his career with all his faults and vices; but when he goes deepest into
human nature, we may be sure that self-knowledge is his guide; as Hamlet
said, "To know a man well, were to know himself" (oneself), so far
justifying the paradox that dramatic writing is merely a form of
autobiography. We may take then as a guide this first criterion that, in
his masterpiece of psychology, the dramatist will reveal most of his own
nature.

If a dozen lovers of Shakespeare were asked to name the most profound
and most complex character in all his dramas it is probable that every
one without hesitation would answer Hamlet. The current of cultivated
opinion has long set in this direction. With the intuition of a kindred
genius, Goethe was the first to put Hamlet on a pedestal: "the
incomparable," he called him, and devoted pages to an analysis of the
character. Coleridge followed with the confession whose truth we
shall see later: "I have a smack of Hamlet myself, if I may say so." But
even if it be admitted that Hamlet is the most complex and profound of
Shakespeare's creations, and therefore probably the character in which
Shakespeare revealed most of himself, the question of degree still
remains to be determined. Is it possible to show certainly that even the
broad outlines of Hamlet's character are those of the master-poet?

There are various ways in which this might be proved. For instance, if
one could show that whenever Shakespeare fell out of a character he was
drawing, he unconsciously dropped into the Hamlet vein, one's suspicion
as to the identity of Hamlet and the poet would be enormously
strengthened. There is another piece of evidence still more convincing.
Suppose that Shakespeare in painting another character did nothing but
paint Hamlet over again trait by trait--virtue by virtue, fault by
fault--our assurance would be almost complete; for a dramatist only
makes this mistake when he is speaking unconsciously in his proper
person. But if both these kinds of proof were forthcoming, and not once
but a dozen times, then surely our conviction as to the essential
identity of Hamlet and Shakespeare would amount to practical certitude.

Of course it would be foolish, even in this event, to pretend that
Hamlet exhausts Shakespeare; art does little more than embroider the
fringe of the garment of life, and the most complex character in drama
or even in fiction is simple indeed when compared with even the simplest
of living men or women. Shakespeare included in himself Falstaff and
Cleopatra, beside the author of the sonnets, and knowledge drawn from
all these must be used to fill out and perhaps to modify the outlines
given in Hamlet before one can feel sure that the portrait is a
re-presentment of reality. But when this study is completed, it will be
seen that with many necessary limitations, Hamlet is indeed a revelation
of some of the most characteristic traits of Shakespeare.

To come to the point quickly, I will take Hamlet's character as analyzed
by Coleridge and Professor Dowden.

Coleridge says: "Hamlet's character is the prevalence of the abstracting
and generalizing habit over the practical. He does not want courage,
skill, will or opportunity; but every incident sets him thinking: and it
is curious, and at the same time strictly natural, that Hamlet, who all
the play seems reason itself, should be impelled at last by mere
accident to effect his object." Again he says: "in Hamlet we see a
great, an almost enormous intellectual activity and a proportionate
aversion to real action consequent upon it."

Professor Dowden's analysis is more careful but hardly as complete. He
calls Hamlet "the meditative son" of a strong-willed father, and adds,
"he has slipped on into years of full manhood still a haunter of the
university, a student of philosophies, an amateur in art, a ponderer on
the things of life and death who has never formed a resolution or
executed a deed. This long course of thinking apart from action has
destroyed Hamlet's very capacity for belief.... In presence of the
spirit he is himself 'a spirit,' and believes in the immortality of the
soul. When left to his private thoughts he wavers uncertainly to and
fro; death is a sleep; a sleep, it may be, troubled with dreams.... He
is incapable of certitude.... After his fashion (that of one who
relieves himself by speech rather than by deeds) he unpacks his heart in
words."

Now what other personage is there in Shakespeare who shows these traits
or some of them? He should be bookish and irresolute, a lover of thought
and not of action, of melancholy temper too, and prone to unpack his
heart with words. Almost every one who has followed the argument thus
far will be inclined to think of Romeo. Hazlitt declared that "Romeo is
Hamlet in love. There is the same rich exuberance of passion and
sentiment in the one, that there is of thought and sentiment in the
other. Both are absent and self-involved; both live out of themselves in
a world of imagination." Much of this is true and affords a noteworthy
example of Hazlitt's occasional insight into character, yet for reasons
that will appear later it is not possible to insist, as Hazlitt does,
upon the identity of Romeo and Hamlet. The most that can be said is that
Romeo is a younger brother of Hamlet, whose character is much less
mature and less complex than that of the student-prince. Moreover, the
characterization in Romeo--the mere drawing and painting--is very
inferior to that put to use in Hamlet. Romeo is half hidden from us in
the rose-mist of passion, and after he is banished from Juliet's arms we
only see him for a moment as he rushes madly by into never-ending night,
and all the while Shakespeare is thinking more of the poetry of the
theme than of his hero's character. Romeo is crude and immature when
compared with a profound psychological study like Hamlet. In "Hamlet"
the action often stands still while incidents are invented for the
mere purpose of displaying the peculiarities of the protagonist. "Hamlet,"
too, is the longest of Shakespeare's plays with the exception of "Antony
and Cleopatra," and "the total length of Hamlet's speeches," says
Dryasdust, "far exceeds that of those allotted by Shakespeare to any
other of his characters." The important point, however, is that Romeo
has a more than family likeness to Hamlet. Even in the heat and heyday
of his passion Romeo plays thinker; Juliet says, "Good-night" and
disappears, but he finds time to give us the abstract truth:

"Love goes towards love, as schoolboys from their books,
But love from love, toward school with heavy looks."

Juliet appears again unexpectedly, and again Hamlet's generalizing habit
asserts itself in Romeo:

"How silver-sweet sound lovers' tongues by night,
Like softest music to attending ears."

We may be certain that Juliet would have preferred more pointed praise.
He is indeed so lost in his ill-timed reverie that Juliet has to call
him again and again by name before he attends to her.

Romeo has Hamlet's peculiar habit of talking to himself. He falls into a
soliloquy on his way to Juliet in Capulet's orchard, when his heart must
have been beating so loudly that it would have prevented him from
hearing himself talk, and into another when hurrying to the apothecary.
In this latter monologue, too, when all his thoughts must have been of
Juliet and their star-crossed fates, and love-devouring Death, he is
able to picture for us the apothecary and his shop with a wealth of
detail that says more for Shakespeare's painstaking and memory than for
his insight into character. The fault, however, is not so grave as it
would be if Romeo were a different kind of man; but like Hamlet he is
always ready to unpack his heart with words, and if they are not the
best words sometimes, sometimes even very inappropriate words, it only
shows that in his first tragedy Shakespeare was not the master of his
art that he afterwards became.

In the churchyard scene of the fifth act Romeo's likeness to Hamlet
comes into clearest light.

Hamlet says to Laertes:

"I pr'ythee, take thy fingers from my throat;
For though I am not splenitive and rash
Yet have I something in me dangerous
Which let thy wisdom fear."

In precisely the same temper, Romeo says to Paris:

"Good, gentle youth, tempt not a desperate man;
Fly hence and leave me; think upon these gone,
Let them affright thee."

This magnanimity is so rare that its existence would almost of itself be
sufficient to establish a close relationship between Romeo and Hamlet.
Romeo's last speech, too, is characteristic of Hamlet: on the very
threshold of death he generalizes:

"How oft when men are at the point of death,
Have they been merry? which their keepers call
A lightening before death."

There is in Romeo, too, that peculiar mixture of pensive sadness and
loving sympathy which is the very vesture of Hamlet's soul; he says to
"Noble County Paris":

"O, give me thy hand,
One writ with me in sour misfortune's book."

And finally Shakespeare's supreme lyrical gift is used by Romeo as
unconstrainedly as by Hamlet himself. The beauty in the last soliloquy
is of passion rather than of intellect, but in sheer triumphant beauty
some lines of it have never been surpassed:

"Here, here will I remain
With worms that are thy chambermaids; O, here
Will I set up my everlasting rest
And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars
From this world-wearied flesh."

The whole soliloquy and especially the superb epithet "world-wearied"
are at least as suitable to Hamlet as to Romeo. Passion, it is true, is
more accentuated in Romeo, just as there is greater irresolution
combined with intenser self-consciousness in Hamlet, yet all the
qualities of the youthful lover are to be found in the student-prince.
Hamlet is evidently the later finished picture of which Romeo was merely
the charming sketch. Hamlet says he is revengeful and ambitious,
although he is nothing of the kind, and in much the same way Romeo says:

"I'll be a candle-holder and look on,"

whereas he plays the chief part and a very active part in the drama. If
he were more of a "candle-holder" and onlooker, he would more resemble
Hamlet. Then too, though he generalizes, he does not search the darkness
with aching eyeballs as Hamlet does; the problems of life do not as yet
lie heavy on his soul; he is too young to have felt their mystery and
terror; he is only just within the shadow of that melancholy which to
Hamlet discolours the world.

Seven or eight years after writing "Romeo and Juliet," Shakespeare
growing conscious of these changes in his own temperament embodied them
in another character, the melancholy "Jaques" in "As You Like It." Every
one knows that Jaques is Shakespeare's creation; he is not to be found
in Lodge's "Rosalynde," whence Shakespeare took the story and most of
the characters of his play. Jaques is only sketched in with light
strokes, but all his traits are peculiarly Hamlet's traits. For Jaques
is a melancholy student of life as Hamlet is, with lightning-quick
intelligence and heavy heart, and these are the Hamlet qualities which
were not brought into prominence in the youthful Romeo. Passages taken
at haphazard will suffice to establish my contention. "Motley's the only
wear," says Jaques, as if longing to assume the cap and bells, and
Hamlet plays the fool's part with little better reason. Jaques exclaims:

"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."

And Hamlet cries:

"The Time is out of joint; O cursèd spite
That ever I was born to set it right."

The famous speech of Jaques, "All the world's a stage," might have been
said by Hamlet, indeed belongs of right to the person who gave the
exquisite counsel to the players. Jaques' confession of melancholy, too,
both in manner and matter is characteristic of Hamlet. How often
Shakespeare must have thought it over before he was able to bring the
peculiar nature of his own malady into such relief:

"I have neither the scholar's melancholy, which is emulation; nor the
musician's, which is fantastical; nor the courtier's, which is proud;
nor the soldier's, which is ambitious; nor the lawyer's, which is
politic; nor the lady's, which is nice; nor the lover's, which is all
these; but it is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples,
extracted from many objects, and, indeed, the sundry contemplation of my
travels; which, by often rumination, wraps me in, a most humourous
sadness."

This "humourous sadness," the child of contemplation, was indeed
Shakespeare's most constant mood. Jaques, too, loves solitude and the
country as Hamlet loved them--and above all the last trait recorded of
Jaques, his eagerness to see the reformed Duke and learn from the
convert, is a perfect example of that intellectual curiosity which is
one of Hamlet's most attaching characteristics. Yet another trait is
attributed to Jaques, which we must on no account forget. The Duke
accuses him of lewdness though lewdness seems out of place in Jaques's
character, and is certainly not shown in the course of the action. If we
combine the characters of Romeo, the poet-lover, and Jaques, the
pensive-sad philosopher, we have almost the complete Hamlet.

It is conceivable that even a fair-minded reader of the plays will admit
all I have urged about the likeness of Romeo and Jaques to Hamlet
without concluding that these preliminary studies, so to speak, for the
great portrait render it at all certain that the masterpiece of
portraiture is a likeness of Shakespeare himself. The impartial critic
will probably say, "You have raised a suspicion in my mind; a strong
suspicion it may be, but still a suspicion that is far from certitude."
Fortunately the evidence still to be offered is a thousand times more
convincing than any inferences that can properly be drawn from Romeo or
from Jaques, or even from both together.




CHAPTER II

HAMLET--MACBETH

There is a later drama of Shakespeare's, a drama which comes between
"Othello" and "Lear," and belongs, therefore, to the topmost height of
the poet's achievement, whose principal character is Hamlet, Hamlet over
again, with every peculiarity and every fault; a Hamlet, too, entangled
in an action which is utterly unsuited to his nature. Surely if this
statement can be proved, it will be admitted by all competent judges
that the identity of Hamlet and his creator has been established. For
Shakespeare must have painted this second Hamlet unconsciously. Think of
it. In totally new circumstances the poet speaks with Hamlet's voice in
Hamlet's words. The only possible explanation is that he is speaking
from his own heart, and for that reason is unaware of the mistake. The
drama I refer to is "Macbeth." No one, so far as I know, has yet thought
of showing that there is any likeness between the character of Hamlet
and that of Macbeth, much less identity; nevertheless, it seems to me
easy to prove that Macbeth, "the rugged Macbeth," as Hazlitt and Brandes
call him, is merely our gentle irresolute, humanist, philosopher Hamlet
masquerading in galligaskins as a Scottish thane.

Let us take the first appearance of Macbeth, and we are forced to remark
at once that he acts and speaks exactly as Hamlet in like circumstances
would act and speak. The honest but slow Banquo is amazed when Macbeth
starts and seems to fear the fair promises of the witches; he does not
see what the nimble Hamlet-intellect has seen in a flash--the dread
means by which alone the promises can be brought to fulfilment. As soon
as Macbeth is hailed "Thane of Cawdor" Banquo warns him, but Macbeth, in
spite of the presence of others, falls at once, as Hamlet surely would
have fallen, into a soliloquy: a thing, considering the circumstances,
most false to general human nature, for what he says must excite
Banquo's suspicion, and is only true to the Hamlet-mind, that in and out
of season loses itself in meditation. The soliloquy, too, is startlingly
characteristic of Hamlet. After giving expression to the merely natural
uplifting of his hope, Macbeth begins to weigh the for and against like
a student-thinker:

"This supernatural soliciting
Cannot be ill; cannot be good; if ill,
Why hath it given me earnest of success,
Commencing in a truth? I am thane of Cawdor:
If good, why do I yield to that suggestion
Whose horrid image ...
... function
Is smothered in surmise and nothing is
But what is not,----"

When Banquo draws attention to him as "rapt," Macbeth still goes on
talking to himself, for at length he has found arguments against action:

"If chance will have me King, why chance may crown me,
Without my stir,"--
all in the true Hamlet vein. At the end of the act, Macbeth when
excusing himself to his companions becomes the student of Wittenberg in
proper person. The courteous kindliness of the words is almost as
characteristic as the bookish illustration:

"Kind gentlemen, your pains
Are registered where every day I turn
The leaf to read them."

If this is not Hamlet's very tone, manner and phrase, then individuality
of nature has no peculiar voice.

I have laid such stress upon this, the first scene in which Macbeth
appears, because the first appearance is by far the most important for
the purpose of establishing the main outlines of a character; first
impressions in a drama being exceedingly difficult to modify and almost
impossible to change.

Macbeth, however, acts Hamlet from one end of the play to the other; and
Lady Macbeth's first appearance (a personage almost as important to the
drama as Macbeth himself) is used by Shakespeare to confirm this view of
Macbeth's character. After reading her husband's letter almost her first
words are:

"Yet do I fear thy nature.
It is too full o' the milk of human kindness
To catch the nearest way."

What is this but a more perfect expression of Hamlet's nature than
Hamlet himself gives? Hamlet declares bitterly that he is "pigeon
livered," and lacks "gall to make oppression bitter"; he says to
Laertes, "I loved you ever," and to his mother:

"I must be cruel only to be kind,"

and she tells the King that he wept for Polonius' death. But the best
phrase for his gentle-heartedness is what Lady Macbeth gives here: he is
"too full o' the milk of human kindness." The words are as true of the
Scottish chieftain as of the Wittenberg student; in heart they are one
and the same person.

Though excited to action by his wife, Macbeth's last words in this scene
are to postpone decision. "We will speak further," he says, whereupon
the woman takes the lead, warns him to dissemble, and adds, "leave all
the rest to me." Macbeth's doubting, irresolution, and dislike of action
could hardly be more forcibly portrayed.

The seventh scene of the first act begins with another long soliloquy by
Macbeth, and this soliloquy shows us not only Hamlet's irresolution and
untimely love of meditation, but also the peculiar pendulum-swing of
Hamlet's thought:

"If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well
It were done quickly: if the assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch
With his surcease success: that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all; here,
But here upon this bank and shoal of time
We'd jump the life to come. . . . ."

Is not this the same soul which also in a soliloquy questions
fate?--"Whether 'tis better in the mind...."

Macbeth, too, has Hamlet's peculiar and exquisite intellectual
fairness--a quality, be it remarked in passing, seldom found in a
ruthless murderer. He sees even the King's good points:

...... "this Duncan
Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been
So clear in his great office, that his virtues
Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against
The deep damnation of his taking off."

Is it not like Hamlet to be able to condemn himself in this way
beforehand? Macbeth ends this soliloquy with words which come from the
inmost of Hamlet's heart:

"I have no spur
To prick the sides of my intent, but only
Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself,
And falls on the other."

Hamlet, too, has no spur to prick the sides of his intent, and Hamlet,
too, would be sure to see how apt ambition is to overleap itself, and so
would blunt the sting of the desire. This monologue alone should have
been sufficient to reveal to all critics the essential identity of
Hamlet and Macbeth. Lady Macbeth, too, tells us that Macbeth left the
supper table where he was entertaining the King, in order to indulge
himself in this long monologue, and when he hears that his absence has
excited comment, that he has been asked for even by the King, he does
not attempt to excuse his strange conduct, he merely says, "We will
proceed no further in this business," showing in true Hamlet fashion how
resolution has been "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought." In
fact, as his wife says to him, he lets "'I dare not' wait upon 'I would'
like the poor cat i' the adage." Even when whipped to action by Lady
Macbeth's preternatural eagerness, he asks:

"If we should fail?"

whereupon she tells him to screw his courage to the sticking place, and
describes the deed itself. Infected by her masculine resolution, Macbeth
at length consents to what he calls the "terrible feat." The word
"terrible" here is surely more characteristic of the humane
poet-thinker than of the chieftain-murderer. Even at this crisis, too,
of his fate Macbeth cannot cheat himself; like Hamlet he is compelled to
see himself as he is:

"False face must hide what the false heart doth know."

I have now considered nearly every word used by Macbeth in this first
act: I have neither picked passages nor omitted anything that might make
against my argument; yet every impartial reader must acknowledge that
Hamlet is far more clearly sketched in this first act of "Macbeth" than
in the first act of "Hamlet." Macbeth appears in it as an irresolute
dreamer, courteous, and gentle-hearted, of perfect intellectual fairness
and bookish phrase; and in especial his love of thought and dislike of
action are insisted upon again and again.

In spite of the fact that the second act is one chiefly of incident,
filled indeed with the murder and its discovery, Shakespeare uses
Macbeth as the mouthpiece of his marvellous lyrical faculty as freely as
he uses Hamlet. A greater singer even than Romeo, Hamlet is a poet by
nature, and turns every possible occasion to account, charming the ear
with subtle harmonies. With a father's murder to avenge, he postpones
action and sings to himself of life and death and the undiscovered
country in words of such magical spirit-beauty that they can be compared
to nothing in the world's literature save perhaps to the last chapter of
Ecclesiastes. From the beginning to the end of the drama Hamlet is a
great lyric poet, and this supreme personal gift is so natural to him
that it is hardly mentioned by the critics. This gift, however, is
possessed by Macbeth in at least equal degree and excites just as little
notice. It is credible that Shakespeare used the drama sometimes as a
means of reaching the highest lyrical utterance.

Without pressing this point further let us now take up the second act of
the play. Banquo and Fleance enter; Macbeth has a few words with them;
they depart, and after giving a servant an order, Macbeth begins another
long soliloquy. He thinks he sees a dagger before him, and immediately
falls to philosophizing:

"Come let me clutch thee:--
I have thee not and yet I see thee still.
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?
I see thee yet in form as palpable
As that which now I draw....
* * * * *
Mine eyes are made the fools o' the other senses.
Or else worth all the rest: I see thee still;
And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood
Which was not so before.--There's no such thing."

What is all this but an illustration of Hamlet's assertion:

"There is nothing either good or bad
But thinking makes it so."

Just too as Hamlet swings on his mental balance, so that it is still a
debated question among academic critics whether his madness was feigned
or real, so here Shakespeare shows us how Macbeth loses his foothold on
reality and falls into the void.

The lyrical effusion that follows is not very successful, and probably
on that account Macbeth breaks off abruptly:

"Whiles I threat he lives,
Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives,"

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