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The Man Shakespeare

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In this wonderful world of ours great dramatic writers are sure to have
dramatic lives. Again and again in his disgrace Antony cries:

"Whither hast thou led me, Egypt?"

Shakespeare's passion for Mary Fitton led him to shame and madness and
despair; his strength broke down under the strain and he never won back
again to health. He paid the price of passion with his very blood. It is
Shakespeare and not Antony who groans:

"O this false soul of Egypt! this grave charm,--
* * * * *
Like a right gipsy, hath, at fast and loose,
Beguil'd me to the very heart of loss."

Shakespeare's love for Mary Fitton is to me one of the typical tragedies
of life--a symbol for ever. In its progress through the world genius is
inevitably scourged and crowned with thorns and done to death;
inevitably, I say, for the vast majority of men hate and despise what is
superior to them: Don Quixote, too, was trodden into the mire by the
swine. But the worst of it is that genius suffers also through its own
excess; is bound, so to speak, to the stake of its own passionate
sensibilities, and consumed, as with fire.




CHAPTER XI

THE DRAMA OF MADNESS: "LEAR"


Ever since Lessing and Goethe it has been the fashion to praise
Shakespeare as a demi-god; whatever he wrote is taken to be the rose of
perfection. This senseless hero-worship, which reached idolatry in the
superlatives of the "Encyclopaedia Britannica" and elsewhere in England,
was certain to provoke reaction, and the reaction has come to vigorous
expression in Tolstoi, who finds nothing to praise in any of
Shakespeare's works, and everything to blame in most of them, especially
in "Lear." Lamb and Coleridge, on the other hand, have praised "Lear" as
a world's masterpiece. Lamb says of it:

"While we read it, we see not Lear; but we are Lear,--we are in his
mind, we are sustained by a grandeur which baffles the malice of
daughters and storms; in the aberrations of his reason we discover a
mighty irregular power of reasoning, immethodised from the ordinary
purposes of life, but exerting its powers, as the wind bloweth where it
listeth, at will upon the corruptions and abuses of mankind."

Coleridge calls "Lear," "the open and ample playground of Nature's
passions."

These dithyrambs show rather the lyrical power of the writers than the
thing described.

Tolstoi, on the other hand, keeps his eyes on the object, and sets
himself to describe the story of "Lear" "as impartially as possible." He
says of the first scene:

"Not to mention the pompous, characterless language
of King Lear, the same in which all Shakespeare's kings
speak, the reader or spectator cannot conceive that a
king, however old and stupid he may be, could believe
the words of the vicious daughters with whom he had
passed his whole life, and not believe his favourite
daughter, but curse and banish her; and therefore, the
spectator or reader cannot share the feelings of the
persons participating in this unnatural scene."

He goes on to condemn the scene between Gloucester and his sons in the
same way. The second act he describes as "absurdly foolish." The third
act is "spoiled, by the characteristic Shakespearean language." The
fourth act is "marred in the making," and of the fifth act, he says:
"Again begin Lear's awful ravings, at which one feels ashamed, as at
unsuccessful jokes." He sums up in these words:

"Such is this celebrated drama. However absurd it
may appear in my rendering (which I have endeavoured
to make as impartial as possible), I may confidently say
that in the original it is yet more absurd. For any man
of our time--if he were not under the hypnotic suggestion
that this drama is the height of perfection--it would
be enough to read it to its end (were he to have sufficient
patience for this) in order to be convinced that, far from
being the height of perfection, it is a very bad, carelessly-composed
production, which, if it could have been of
interest to a certain public at a certain time, cannot evoke
amongst us anything but aversion and weariness. Every
reader of our time who is free from the influence of suggestion
will also receive exactly the same impression from
all the other extolled dramas of Shakespeare, not to mention
the senseless dramatized tales, 'Pericles,' 'Twelfth
Night,' 'The Tempest,' 'Cymbeline,' and 'Troilus and
Cressida.'"

Every one must admit, I think, that what Tolstoi has said of the
hypothesis of the play is justified. Shakespeare, as I have shown, was
nearly always an indifferent playwright, careless of the architectural
construction of his pieces, contemptuous of stage-craft. So much had
already been said in England, if not with the authority of Tolstoi.

It may be conceded, too, that the language which Shakespeare puts into
Lear's mouth in the first act is "characterless and pompous," even
silly; but Tolstoi should have noticed that as soon as Lear realizes the
ingratitude of his daughters, his language becomes more and more simple
and pathetic. Shakespeare's kings are apt to rant and mouth when first
introduced; he seems to have thought pomp of speech went with royal
robes; but when the action is engaged even his monarchs speak naturally.

The truth is, that just as the iambics of Greek drama were lifted above
ordinary conversation, so Shakespeare's language, being the language
mainly of poetic and romantic drama, is a little more measured and, if
you will, more pompous than the small talk of everyday life, which seems
to us, accustomed as we are to prose plays, more natural. Shakespeare,
however, in his blank verse, reaches heights which are not often reached
by prose, and when he pleases, his verse becomes as natural-easy as any
prose, even that of Tolstoi himself. Tolstoi finds everything Lear says
"pompous," "artificial," "unnatural," but Lear's words:

"Pray do not mock me,
I am a very foolish-fond old man
Fourscore and upward, not an hour more nor less,
And, to deal plainly
I fear I am not in my perfect mind."

touch us poignantly, just because of their childish simplicity; we feel
as if Lear, in them, had reached the heart of pathos. Tolstoi, I am
afraid, has missed all the poetry of Lear, all the deathless phrases.
Lear says:

"I am a man,
More sinn'd against than sinning,"

and the new-coined phrase passed at once into the general currency. Who,
too, can ever forget his description of the poor?

"Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these?"

The like of that "looped and windowed raggedness" is hardly to be found
in any other literature. In the fourth and fifth acts Lear's language is
simplicity itself, and even in that third act which Tolstoi condemns as
"incredibly pompous and artificial," we find him talking naturally:

"Ha! here 's three on's are sophisticated: thou art
the thing itself, unaccommodated man is no more but
such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art."

There is still another reason why some of us cannot read "Lear" with the
cold eyes of reason, contemptuously critical. "Lear" marks a stage in
Shakespeare's agony. We who know the happy ingenuousness of his youth
undimmed by doubts of man or suspicions of woman, cannot help
sympathizing with him when we see him cheated and betrayed, drinking the
bitter cup of disillusion to the dregs. In "Lear" the angry brooding
leads to madness; and it is only fitting that the keynote of the
tragedy, struck again and again, should be the cry.

"O, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet Heaven!
Keep me in temper: I would not be mad."

"Lear" is the first attempt in all literature to paint madness, and not
the worst attempt.

In "Lear," Shakespeare was intent on expressing his own disillusion and
naked misery. How blind Lear must have been, says Tolstoi; how
incredibly foolish not to know his daughters better after living with
them for twenty years; but this is just what Shakespeare wishes to
express: How blind I was, he cries to us, how inconceivably trusting and
foolish! How could I have imagined that a young noble would be grateful,
or a wanton true? "Lear" is a page of Shakespeare's autobiography, and
the faults of it are the stains of his blistering tears.

"Lear" is badly constructed, but worse was to come. The next tragedy,
"Timon," is merely a scream of pain, and yet it, too, has a deeper than
artistic interest for us as marking the utmost limit of Shakespeare's
suffering. The mortal malady of perhaps the finest spirit that has ever
appeared among men has an interest for us profounder than any tragedy.
And to find that in Shakespeare's agony and bloody sweat he ignores the
rules of artistry is simply what might have been expected, and, to some
of us, deepens the personal interest in the drama.

In "Lear" Edgar is peculiarly Shakespeare's mouthpiece, and to Edgar
Shakespeare gives some of the finest words he ever coined:

"The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
Make instruments to plague us."

Here, too, in what Edgar says of himself, is the moral of all passion:
it is manifestly Shakespeare's view of himself:

"A most poor man, made tame to Fortune's blows,
Who by the art of knowing and feeling sorrows
Am pregnant to good pity."

Then we find the supreme phrase--perhaps the finest ever written:

"Men must endure
Their going hence even as their coming hither.
Ripeness is all."

Shakespeare speaks through Lear in the last acts as plainly as through
Edgar. In the third scene of the fifth act Lear talks to Cordelia in the
very words Shakespeare gave to the saint Henry VI. at the beginning of
his career. Compare the extracts on pages 118-9 with the following
passage, and you will see the similarity and the astounding growth in
his art.

"... Come, let's away to prison:
We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage:
When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness: so we'll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; ..."

More characteristic still of Shakespeare is the fact that when Lear is
at his bitterest in the fourth act, he shows the erotic mania which is
the source of all Shakespeare's bitterness and misery; but which is
utterly out of place in Lear. The reader will mark how "adultery" is
dragged in:

"... Ay, every inch a king:
When I do stare, see how the subject quakes.
I pardon that man's life. What was thy cause?
Adultery?
Thou shalt not die: die for adultery! No:
The wren goes to 't, and the small gilded fly
Does lecher in my sight.
Let copulation thrive; ...
...
Down from the waist they are Centaurs,
Though women all above;
But to the girdle do the gods inherit,
Beneath is all the fiends'; ..."

Thus Lear raves for a whole page: Shakespeare on his hobby: in the same
erotic spirit he makes both Goneril and Regan lust after Edmund.

The note of this tragedy is Shakespeare's understanding of his insane
blind trust in men; but the passion of it springs from erotic mania and
from the consciousness that he is too old for love's lists. Perhaps his
imagination never carried him higher than when Lear appeals to the
heavens because they too are old:

"... O heavens,
If you do love old men, if your sweet sway
Allow obedience, if yourselves are old,
Make it your cause."




CHAPTER XII

THE DRAMA OF DESPAIR: "TIMON OF ATHENS"


"Timon" marks the extremity of Shakespeare's suffering. It is not to be
called a work of art, it is hardly even a tragedy; it is the causeless
ruin of a soul, a ruin insufficiently motived by complete trust in men
and spendthrift generosity. If there was ever a man who gave so lavishly
as Timon, if there was ever one so senseless blind in trusting, then he
deserved his fate. There is no gradation in his giving, and none in his
fall; no artistic crescendo. The whole drama is, as I have said, a
scream of suffering, or rather, a long curse upon all the ordinary
conditions of life. The highest qualities of Shakespeare are not to be
found in the play. There are none of the magnificent phrases which
bejewel "Lear"; little of high wisdom, even in the pages which are
indubitably Shakespeare's, and no characterization worth mentioning. The
honest steward, Flavius, is the honest Kent again of "Lear," honest and
loyal beyond nature; Apemantus is another Thersites. Words which throw a
high light on Shakespeare's character are given to this or that
personage of the play without discrimination. One phrase of Apemantus is
as true of Shakespeare as of Timon and is worth noting:

"The middle of humanity thou never knewest, but the
extremity of both ends."

The tragic sonnet-note is given to Flavius:
"What viler thing upon the earth than friends
Who can bring noblest minds to basest ends!"

In so far as Timon is a character at all he is manifestly Shakespeare,
Shakespeare who raves against the world, because he finds no honesty in
men, no virtue in women, evil everywhere--"boundless thefts in limited
professions." This Shakespeare-Timon swings round characteristically as
soon as he finds that Flavius is honest:

"Had I a steward
So true, so just, and now so comfortable?
It almost turns my dangerous nature mild.
Let me behold thy face. Surely this man
Was born of woman.
Forgive my general and exceptless rashness,
You perpetual-sober gods! I do proclaim
One honest man--mistake me not--but one ..."

I cannot help putting the great and self-revealing line [Footnote: This
passage is among those rejected by the commentators as un-Shakespearean:
"it does not stand the test," says the egregious Gollancz.] in italics;
a line Tolstoi would, no doubt, think stupid-pompous. Timon ought to
have known his steward, one might say in Tolstoi's spirit, as Lear
should have known his daughters; but this is still the tragedy, which
Shakespeare wishes to emphasize that his hero was blind in trusting.

Towards the end Shakespeare speaks through Timon quite unfeignedly:
Richard II. said characteristically:

"Nor I nor any man that but man is
With nothing shall be pleased, till he be eased
With being nothing:"

And Timon says to Flavius:

"My long sickness
Of health and living now begins to mend
And nothing brings me all things."

Then the end:

"Timon hath made his everlasting mansion
Upon the beachèd verge of the salt flood...."

We must not leave this play before noticing the overpowering erotic
strain in Shakespeare which suits Timon as little as it suited Lear. The
long discussion with Phrynia and Timandra is simply dragged in: neither
woman is characterized: Shakespeare-Timon eases himself in pages of
erotic raving:

"... Strike me the counterfeit matron;
It is her habit only that is honest,
Herself's a bawd:..."

And then:

"Consumptions sow
In hollow bones of man...........
...............Down with the nose,
Down with it flat; take the bridge quite away ..."

The "damned earth" even is "the common whore of mankind."

"Timon" is the true sequel to "The Merchant of Venice." Antonio gives
lavishly, but is saved at the crisis by his friends. Timon gives with
both hands, but when he appeals to his friends, is treated as a bore.
Shakespeare had travelled far in the dozen years which separate the two
plays.

All Shakespeare's tragedies are phases of his own various weaknesses,
and each one brings the hero to defeat and ruin. Hamlet cannot carry
revenge to murder and fails through his own irresolution. Othello comes
to grief through mad jealousy. Antony fails and falls through excess of
lust; Lear through trust in men, and Timon through heedless generosity.
All these are separate studies of Shakespeare's own weaknesses; but the
ruin is irretrievable, and reaches its ultimate in Timon. Trust and
generosity, Shakespeare would like to tell us, were his supremest
faults. In this he deceived himself. Neither "Lear" nor "Timon" is his
greatest tragedy; but "Antony and Cleopatra," for lust was his chief
weakness, and the tragedy of lust his greatest play.

Much of "Timon" is not Shakespeare's, the critics tell us, and some of
it is manifestly not his, though many of the passages rejected with the
best reason have, I think, been touched up by him. The second scene of
the first act is as bad as bad can be; but I hear his voice in the line:

"Methinks, I could deal kingdoms to my friends,
And ne'er be weary."

At any rate, this is the keynote of the tragedy, which is struck again
and again. Shakespeare probably exaggerated his generosity out of
aristocratic pose; but that he was careless of money and freehanded to a
fault, is, I think, certain from his writings, and can be proved from
the facts known to us of his life.




CHAPTER XIII

SHAKESPEARE'S LAST ROMANCES: ALL COPIES.

"Winters Tale": "Cymbeline": "The Tempest."


The wheel has swung full circle: Timon is almost as weak as "Titus
Andronicus"; the pen falls from the nerveless hand. Shakespeare wrote
nothing for some time. Even the critics make a break after "Timon,"
which closes what they are pleased to call his third period; but they do
not seem to see that the break was really a breakdown in health. In
"Lear" he had brooded and raged to madness; in "Timon" he had spent
himself in futile, feeble cursings. His nerves had gone to pieces. He
was now forty-five years of age, the forces of youth and growth had left
him. He was prematurely old and feeble.

His recovery, it seems certain, was very slow, and he never again, if I
am right, regained vigorous health, I am almost certain he went down to
Stratford at this crisis and spent some time there, probably a couple of
years, trying, no doubt, to staunch the wound in his heart, and win back
again to life. The fear of madness had frightened him from brooding: he
made up his mind to let the dead past bury its dead; he would try to
forget and live sanely. After all, life is better than death.

It was probably his daughter who led him back from the brink of the
grave. Almost all his latest works show the same figure of a young girl.
He seems now, for the first time, to have learned that a maiden can be
pure, and in his old idealizing way which went with him to the end, he
deified her. Judith became a symbol to him, and he lent her the ethereal
grace of abstract beauty. In "Pericles" she is Marina; in "The Winter's
Tale" Perdita; in "The Tempest" Miranda. It is probable when one comes
to think of it, that Ward was right when he says that Shakespeare spent
his "elder years" in Stratford; he was too broken to have taken up his
life in London again.

The assertion that Shakespeare broke down in health, and never won back
to vigorous life, will be scorned as my imagining. The critics who have
agreed to regard "Cymbeline," "The Winter's Tale," and "The Tempest" as
his finest works are all against me on this point, and they will call
for "Proofs, proofs. Give us proofs," they will cry, "that the man who
went mad and raved with Lear, and screamed and cursed in "Timon" did
really break down, and was not imagining madness and despair." The
proofs are to be found in these works themselves, plain for all men to
read.

The three chief works of his last period are romances and are all
copies; he was too tired to invent or even to annex; his own story is
the only one that interests him. The plot of "The Winter's Tale" is the
plot of "Much Ado about Nothing." Hero is Hermione. Another phase of
"Much Ado About Nothing" is written out at length in "Cymbeline"; Imogen
suffers like Hero and Hermione, under unfounded accusation. It is
Shakespeare's own history turned from this world to fairyland: what
would have happened, he asks, if the woman whom I believed false, had
been true? This, the theme of "Much Ado," is the theme also of "The
Winter's Tale" and of "Cymbeline." The idealism of the man is
inveterate: he will not see that it was his own sensuality which gave
him up to suffering, and not Mary Fitton's faithlessness. "The Tempest"
is the story of "As you Like it." We have again the two dukes, the
exiled good Duke, who is Shakespeare, and the bad usurping Duke,
Shakespeare's rival, Chapman, who has conquered for a time. Shakespeare
is no longer able or willing to discover a new play: he can only copy
himself, and in one of the scenes which he wrote into "Henry VIII." the
copy is slavish.

I allude to the third scene in the second act; the dialogue between Anne
Bullen and the Old Lady is extraordinarily reminiscent. When Anne Bullen
says--

"'Tis better to be lowly born,
And range with humble livers in content,
Than to be perk'd up in a glistering grief
And wear a golden sorrow"

I am reminded of Henry VI. And the contention between Anne Bullen and
the Old Lady, in which Anne Bullen declares that she would not be a
queen, and the Old Lady scorns her:

"Beshrew me, I would,
And venture maidenhead for't; and so would you,
For all this spice of your hypocrisy."

is much the same contention, and is handled in the same way as the
contention between Desdemona and Emilia in "Othello."

There are many other proofs of Shakespeare's weakness of hand throughout
this last period, if further proofs were needed. The chief
characteristics of Shakespeare's health are his humour, his gaiety, and
wit--his love of life. A correlative characteristic is that all his
women are sensuous and indulge in coarse expressions in and out of
season. This is said to be a fault of his time; but only professors
could use an argument which shows such ignorance of life. Homer was
clean enough, and Sophocles, Spenser, too; sensuality is a quality of
the individual man. Still another characteristic of Shakespeare's
maturity is that his characters, in spite of being idealized, live for
us a vigorous, pulsing life.

All these characteristics are lacking in the works after "Timon." There
is practically no humour, no wit, the clowns even are merely
boorish-stupid with the solitary exception of Autolycus, who is a pale
reflex of one or two characteristics of Falstaff. Shakespeare's humour
has disappeared, or is so faint as scarcely to be called humour; all the
heroines, too, are now vowed away from sensuality: Marina passes through
the brothel unsoiled; Perdita might have milk in her veins, and not
blood, and Miranda is but another name for Perdita. Imogen, too, has no
trace of natural passion in her: she is a mere washing-list, so to
speak, of sexless perfections. In this last period Shakespeare will have
nothing to do with sensuality, and his characters, and not the female
characters alone, are hardly more than abstractions; they lack the blood
of emotion; there is not one of them could cast a shadow. How is it that
the critics have mistaken these pale, bloodless silhouettes for
Shakespeare's masterpieces?

In his earliest works he was compelled, as we have seen, to use his own
experiences perpetually, not having had any experience of life, and in
these, his latest plays, he also uses when he can his own experiences to
give his pictures of the world from which he had withdrawn, some sense
of vivid life. For example, in "Winter's Tale" his account of the death
of the boy Mamillius is evidently a reflex of his own emotion when he
lost his son, Hamnet, an emotion which at the time he pictured
deathlessly in Arthur and the grief of the Queen-mother Constance.
Similarly, in "Cymbeline," the joy of the brothers in finding the sister
is an echo of his own pleasure in getting to know his daughter.

I have an idea about the genesis of these last three plays as regards
their order which may be wholly false, though true, I am sure, to
Shakespeare's character. I imagine he was asked by the author to touch
up "Pericles." On reading the play, he saw the opportunity of giving
expression to the new emotion which had been awakened in him by the
serious sweet charm of his young daughter, and accordingly he wrote the
scenes in which Marina figures. Judith's modesty was a perpetual wonder
to him.

His success induced him to sketch out "The Winter's Tale," in which tale
he played sadly with what might have been if his accused love, Mary
Fitton, had been guiltless instead of guilty. I imagine he saw that the
play was not a success, or supreme critic as he was, that his hand had
grown weak, and seeking for the cause he probably came to the conclusion
that the comparative failure was due to the fact that he did not put
himself into "The Winter's Tale," and so he determined in the next play
to draw a full-length portrait of himself again, as he had done in
"Hamlet," and accordingly he sketched Posthumus, a staider, older,
idealized Hamlet, with lymph in his veins, instead of blood. In the same
idealizing spirit, he pictured his rose of womanhood for us in Imogen,
who is, however, not a living woman at all, any more than his earliest
ideal, Juliet, was a woman. The contrast between these two sketches is
the contrast between Shakespeare's strength and his weakness. Here is
how the fourteen-year-old Juliet talks of love:

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