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The Man Shakespeare

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which is, of course, precisely Hamlet's complaint:

"This is most brave;
That I, the son of a dear father murdered,
Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,
Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words."

After this Lady Macbeth enters, and the murder is committed, and now
wrought to the highest tension Macbeth must speak from the depths of his
nature with perfect sincerity. Will he exult, as the ambitious man
would, at having taken successfully the longest step towards his goal?
Or will he, like a prudent man, do his utmost to hide the traces of his
crime, and hatch plans to cast suspicion on others? It is Lady Macbeth
who plays this part; she tells Macbeth to "get some water,"

"And wash this filthy witness from your hand,"

while he, brainsick, rehearses past fears and shows himself the
sensitive poet-dreamer inclined to piety: here is the incredible scene:

"Lady M. There are two lodged together.
Macb. One cried, 'God bless us!' and 'Amen' the other,
As they had seen me with these hangman's hands.
Listening their fear, I could not say 'Amen,'
When they did say 'God bless us.'
Lady M. Consider it not so deeply.
Macb. But wherefore could not I pronounce 'Amen'?
I had most need of blessing, and 'Amen'
Stuck in my throat."

This religious tinge colouring the weakness of self-pity is to be found
again and again in "Hamlet"; Hamlet, too, is religious-minded; he begs
Ophelia to remember his sins in her orisons. When he first sees his
father's ghost he cries:

"Angels and ministers of grace defend us,"

and when the ghost leaves him his word is, "I'll go pray." This new
trait, most intimate and distinctive, is therefore the most conclusive
proof of the identity of the two characters. The whole passage in the
mouth of a murderer is utterly unexpected and out of place; no wonder
Lady Macbeth exclaims:

"These deeds must not be thought
After these ways: so, it will make us mad."

But nothing can restrain Macbeth; he gives rein to his poetic
imagination, and breaks out in an exquisite lyric, a lyric which has
hardly any closer relation to the circumstances than its truth to
Shakespeare's nature:

"Methought I heard a voice cry, 'Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murder sleep,'--the innocent sleep:
Sleep, that knits up the ravelled sleave of care,"

and so forth--the poet in love with his own imaginings.

Again Lady Macbeth tries to bring him back to a sense of reality; tells
him his thinking unbends his strength, and finally urges him to take the
daggers back and

"smear
The sleepy grooms with the blood."

But Macbeth's nerve is gone; he is physically broken now as well as
mentally o'erwrought; he cries:

"I'll go no more;
I am afraid to think what I have done.
Look on't again I dare not."

All this is exquisitely characteristic of the nervous student who has
been screwed up to a feat beyond his strength, "a terrible feat," and
who has broken down over it, but the words are altogether absurd in the
mouth of an ambitious, half-barbarous chieftain.

His wife chides him as fanciful, childish--"infirm of purpose,"--she'll
put the daggers back herself; but nothing can hearten Macbeth; every
household noise sets his heart thumping:

"Whence is that knocking?
How is't with me when every noise appals me?"

His mind rocks; he even imagines he is being tortured:

"What hands are here? Ha!
They pluck out my eyes."

And then he swings into another incomparable lyric:

"Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red."

There is a great deal of the poet-neuropath and very little of the
murderer for ambition's sake in this lyrical hysteria. No wonder Lady
Macbeth declares she would be ashamed "to wear a heart so white." It is
all Hamlet over again, Hamlet wrought up to a higher pitch of intensity.
And here it should be remembered that "Macbeth" was written three years
after "Hamlet" and probably just before "Lear"; one would therefore
expect a greater intensity and a deeper pessimism in Macbeth than in
Hamlet.

The character-drawing in the next scene is necessarily slight. The
discovery of the murder impels every one save the protagonist to action,
but Macbeth finds time even at the climax of excitement to coin
Hamlet-words that can never be forgotten:

"There's nothing serious in mortality;"

and the description of Duncan:

"His silver skin laced with his golden blood"

--as sugar'd sweet as any line in the sonnets, and here completely out
of place.

In these first two acts the character of Macbeth is outlined so firmly
that no after-touches can efface the impression.

Now comes a period in the drama in which deed follows so fast upon deed,
that there is scarcely any opportunity for characterization. To the
casual view Macbeth seems almost to change his nature, passing from
murder to murder quickly if not easily. He not only arranges for
Banquo's assassination, but leaves Lady Macbeth innocent of the
knowledge. The explanation of this seeming change of character is at
hand. Shakespeare took the history of Macbeth from Holinshed's
Chronicle, and there it is recorded that Macbeth murdered Banquo and
many others, as well as Macduff's wife and children. Holinshed makes
Duncan have "too much of clemencie," and Macbeth "too much of crueltie."
Macbeth's actions correspond with his nature in Holinshed; but
Shakespeare first made Macbeth in his own image--gentle, bookish and
irresolute--and then found himself fettered by the historical fact that
Macbeth murdered Banquo and the rest. He was therefore forced to explain
in some way or other why his Macbeth strode from crime to crime. It must
be noted as most characteristic of gentle Shakespeare that even when
confronted with this difficulty he did not think of lending Macbeth any
tinge of cruelty, harshness, or ambition. His Macbeth commits murder for
the same reason that the timorous deer fights--out of fear.

"To be thus is nothing;
But to be safely thus. Our fears in Banquo
Stick deep, and in his royalty of nature
Reigns that which would be feared":

And again:

"There is none but he
Whose being I do fear":...

This proves, as nothing else could prove, the all-pervading, attaching
kindness of Shakespeare's nature. Again and again Lady Macbeth saves the
situation and tries to shame her husband into stern resolve, but in
vain; he's "quite unmann'd in folly."

Had Macbeth been made ambitious, as the commentators assume, there would
have been a sufficient motive for his later actions. But ambition is
foreign to the Shakespeare-Hamlet nature, so the poet does not employ
it. Again and again he returns to the explanation that the timid grow
dangerous when "frighted out of fear." Macbeth says:

"But let the frame of things disjoint, both the worlds suffer
Ere we will eat our meal in fear, and sleep
In the affliction of these terrible dreams
That shake us nightly."

In passing I may remark that Hamlet, too, complains of "bad dreams."

In deep Hamlet melancholy, Macbeth now begins to contrast his state with
Duncan's:

"After life's fitful fever he sleeps well.
Treason has done his worst: nor steel nor poison,
Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing,
Can touch him further."

Lady Macbeth begs him to sleek o'er his rugged looks, be bright and
jovial. He promises obedience; but soon falls into the dark mood again
and predicts "a deed of dreadful note." Naturally his wife questions
him, and he replies:

"Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck,
Till thou applaud the deed. Come, seeling night,
Scarf up the tender eye of pityful day,
And with thy bloody and invisible hand
Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond
Which keeps me pale."

No other motive for murder is possible to Shakespeare-Macbeth but fear.

Banquo is murdered, but still Macbeth cries:
"I am cabined, cribbed, confined, bound in
To saucy doubts and fears."
The scene with the ghost of Banquo follows, where-in Macbeth again shows
the nervous imaginative Hamlet nature. His next speech is mere
reflection, and again Hamlet might have framed it:

"the time has been
That when the brains were out the man would die
And there an end": ...

But while fear may be an adequate motive for Banquo's murder, it can
hardly explain the murder of Macduff's wife and children. Shakespeare
feels this, too, and therefore finds other reasons natural enough; but
the first of these reasons, "his own good," is not especially
characteristic of Macbeth, and the second, while perhaps characteristic,
is absurdly inadequate: men don't murder out of tediousness:

"For mine own good
All causes shall give way: I am in blood[1]
Stepped in so far, that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er."
[Footnote 1: It seems to me probable that Shakespeare, unable to find an
adequate motive for murder, borrowed this one from "Richard III." Richard
says:

"But I am in
So far in blood that sin will pluck on sin"--

This is an explanation following the fact rather than a cause producing
it--an explanation, moreover, which may be true in the case of a
fiendlike Richard, but is not true of a Macbeth.]

Take it all in all, this latter reason is as poor a motive for
cold-blooded murder as was ever given, and Shakespeare again feels this,
for he brings in the witches once more to predict safety to Macbeth and
adjure him to be "bloody, bold and resolute." When they have thus
screwed his courage to the sticking place as his wife did before,
Macbeth resolves on Macduff's murder, but he immediately recurs to the
old explanation; he does not do it for his "own good" nor because
"returning is tedious "; he does it

"That I may tell pale-hearted fear it lies,
And sleep in spite of thunder."

It is fair to say that Shakespeare's Macbeth is so gentle-kind, that he
can find no motive in himself for murder, save fear. The words
Shakespeare puts into Hubert's mouth in "King John" are really his own
confession:

"Within this bosom never enter'd yet
The dreadful motion of a murderous thought."

The murders take place and the silly scenes in England between Malcolm
and Macduff follow, and then come Lady Macbeth's illness, and the
characteristic end. The servant tells Macbeth of the approach of the
English force, and he begins the wonderful monologue:

"my May of life
Is fall'n into the sear, the yellow leaf;
And that which should accompany old age,
As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have; but in their stead
Curses, not loud, but deep, mouth-honour, breath
Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not."

Truly this is a strange murderer who longs for "troops of friends," and
who at the last push of fate can find in himself kindness enough towards
others to sympathize with the "poor heart." All this is pure Hamlet; one
might better say, pure Shakespeare.

We are next led into the field with Malcolm and Macduff, and immediately
back to the castle again. While the women break into cries, Macbeth
soliloquizes in the very spirit of bookish Hamlet:

"I have almost forgot the taste of fears.
The time has been, my senses would have cooled
To hear a night-shriek; and my fell of hair
Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir
As life were in 't."

The whole passage, and especially the "dismal treatise," recalls the
Wittenberg student with a magic of representment.

The death of the Queen is announced, and wrings from Macbeth a speech
full of despairing pessimism, a bitterer mood than ever Hamlet knew; a
speech, moreover, that shows the student as well as the incomparable
lyric poet:

"She should have died hereafter:
There would have been a time for such a word.--
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."

Macbeth's philosophy, like Hamlet's, ends in utter doubt, in a passion
of contempt for life, deeper than anything in Dante. The word "syllable"
in this lyric outburst is as characteristic as the "dismal treatise" in
the previous one, and more characteristic still of Hamlet is the
likening of life to "a poor player."

The messenger tells Macbeth that Birnam Wood has begun to move, and he
sees that the witches have cheated him. He can only say, as Hamlet might
have said:

"I 'gin to be aweary of the sun,
And wish the estate o' the world were now undone.--
Ring the alarum bell! Blow wind! Come, wrack!
At least we'll die with harness on our back."

And later he cries:

"They have tied me to a stake; I cannot fly,
But bear-like I must fight the course."

This seems to me intensely characteristic of Hamlet; the brutal side of
action was never more contemptuously described, and Macbeth's next
soliloquy makes the identity apparent to every one; it is in the true
thinker-sceptic vein:

"Why should I play the Roman[1] fool and die
On mine own sword?"

[Footnote 1: About the year 1600 Shakespeare seems to have steeped
himself in Plutarch. For the next five or six years, whenever he thinks
of suicide, the Roman way of looking at it occurs to him. Having made up
his mind to kill himself, Laertes cries:

"I am more an antique Roman than a Dane,"

and, in like case, Cleopatra talks of dying "after the high Roman
fashion."]

Macbeth then meets Macduff, and there follows the confession of pity and
remorse, which must be compared to the gentle-kindness with which Hamlet
treats Laertes and Romeo treats Paris. Macbeth says to Macduff:

"Of all men else I have avoided thee:
But get thee back, my soul is too much charged
With blood of thine already."

Then comes the "something desperate" in him that Hamlet boasted of--and
the end.

Here we have every characteristic of Hamlet without exception, The
crying difference of situation only brings out the essential identity of
the two characters. The two portraits are of the same person and
finished to the finger-tips. The slight shades of difference between
Macbeth and Hamlet only strengthen our contention that both are
portraits of the poet; for the differences are manifestly changes in the
same character, and changes due merely to age. Just as Romeo is younger
than Hamlet, showing passion where Hamlet shows thought, so Macbeth is
older than Hamlet; in Macbeth the melancholy has grown deeper, the tone
more pessimistic, and the heart gentler. [Footnote: Immediately after
the publication of these first two essays, Sir Henry Irving seized the
opportunity and lectured before a distinguished audience on the
character of Macbeth. He gave it as his opinion that "Shakespeare has
presented Macbeth as one of the most blood-thirsty, most hypocritical
villains in his long gallery of men, instinct with the virtues and vices
of their kind (sic)." Sir Henry Irving also took the occasion to
praise the simile of pity:
"And pity, like a naked new-born babe,
Striding the blast."

This ridiculous fustian seemed to him "very beautiful." All this was
perfectly gratuitous: no one needed to be informed that a man might have
merit as an actor and yet be without any understanding of psychology or
any taste in letters.] I venture, therefore, to assert that the portrait
we find in Romeo and Jaques first, and then in Hamlet, and afterwards in
Macbeth, is the portrait of Shakespeare himself, and we can trace his
personal development through these three stages.




CHAPTER III

DUKE VINCENTIO--POSTHUMUS

It may be well to add here a couple of portraits of Shakespeare in later
life in order to establish beyond question the chief features of his
character. With this purpose in mind I shall take a portrait that is a
mere sketch of him, Duke Vincentio in "Measure for Measure," and a
portrait that is minutely finished and perfect, though consciously
idealized, Posthumus, in "Cymbeline." And the reason I take this
careless, wavering sketch, and contrast it with a highly-finished
portrait, is that, though the sketch is here and there hardly
recognizable, the outline being all too thin and hesitating, yet now and
then a characteristic trait is over-emphasized, as we should expect in
careless work. And this sketch in lines now faint, now all too heavy, is
curiously convincing when put side by side with a careful and elaborate
portrait in which the same traits are reproduced, but harmoniously, and
with a perfect sense of the relative value of each feature. No critic,
so far as I am aware, not Hazlitt, not Brandes, not even Coleridge, has
yet thought of identifying either Duke Vincentio or Posthumus with
Hamlet, much less with Shakespeare himself. The two plays are very
unlike each other in tone and temper; "Measure for Measure" being a sort
of tract for the times, while "Cymbeline" is a purely romantic drama.
Moreover, "Measure for Measure" was probably written a couple of years
after "Hamlet," towards the end of 1603, while "Cymbeline" belongs to
the last period of the poet's activity, and could hardly have been
completed before 1610 or 1611. The dissimilarity of the plays only
accentuates the likeness of the two protagonists.

"Measure for Measure" is one of the best examples of Shakespeare's
contempt for stagecraft. Not only is the mechanism of the play, as we
shall see later, astonishingly slipshod, but the ostensible purpose of
the play, which is to make the laws respected in Vienna, is not only not
attained, but seems at the end to be rather despised than forgotten.
This indifference to logical consistency is characteristic of
Shakespeare; Hamlet speaks of "the undiscovered country from whose
bourne no traveller returns" just after he has been talking with his
dead father. The poetic dreamer cannot take the trouble to tie up the
loose ends of a story: the real purpose of "Measure for Measure," which
is the confusion of the pretended ascetic Angelo, is fulfilled, and that
is sufficient for the thinker, who has thus shown what "our seemers be."
It is no less characteristic of Shakespeare that Duke Vincentio, his
alter ego, should order another to punish loose livers--a task
which his kindly nature found too disagreeable. But, leaving these
general considerations, let us come to the first scene of the first act:
the second long speech of the Duke should have awakened the suspicion
that Vincentio is but another mask for Shakespeare. The whole speech
proclaims the poet; the Duke begins:

"Angelo
There is a kind of character in thy life,"

Hamlet says to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in what is supposed to be
prose:

"There is a kind of confession in your looks."

A little later the line:

"Spirits are not finely touched
But to fine issues,"

is so characteristic of Hamlet-Shakespeare that it should have put every
reader on the track.

The speeches of the Duke in the fourth scene of the first act are also
characteristic of Shakespeare. But the four lines,

"My holy sir, none better knows than you
How I have ever loved the life removed,
And held in idle price to haunt assemblies,
Where youth and cost and witless bravery keep,"

are to me an intimate, personal confession; a fuller rendering indeed of
Hamlet's "Man delights not me; no, nor woman neither." In any case it
will be admitted that a dislike of assemblies and cost and witless
bravery is peculiar in a reigning monarch, so peculiar indeed that it
reminds me of the exiled Duke in "As You Like It," or of Duke Prospero
in "The Tempest" (two other incarnations of Shakespeare), rather than of
any one in real life. A love of solitude; a keen contempt for shows and
the "witless bravery" of court-life were, as we shall see,
characteristics of Shakespeare from youth to old age.

In the first scene of the third act the Duke as a friar speaks to the
condemned Claudio. He argues as Hamlet would argue, but with, I think, a
more convinced hopelessness. The deepening scepticism would of itself
force us to place "Measure for Measure" a little later than "Hamlet":

"Reason thus with life:--
If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing
That none but fools would keep; a breath thou art,
* * * * *
The best of rest is sleep,
And that thou oft provok'st, yet grossly fear'st
Thy death, which is no more. Thou'rt not thyself;
For thou exist'st on many a thousand grains
That issue out of dust. Happy thou art not;
For what thou hast not, still thou striv'st to get,
And what thou hast, forgett'st.
* * * * *
What's in this,
That bears the name of life? Yet in this life
Lie hid more thousand deaths; yet death we fear,
That makes these odds all even."

That this scepticism of Vincentio is Shakespeare's scepticism appears
from the fact that the whole speech is worse than out of place when
addressed to a person under sentence of death. Were we to take it
seriously, it would show the Duke to be curiously callous to the
sufferings of the condemned Claudio; but callous the Duke is not, he is
merely a pensive poet-philosopher talking in order to lighten his own
heart. Claudio makes unconscious fun of the Duke's argument:

"To sue to live, I find I seek to die,
And seeking death, find life: let it come on."

This scepticism of Shakespeare which shows itself out of place in Angelo
and again most naturally in Claudio's famous speech, is one of the
salient traits of his character which is altogether over-emphasized in
this play. It is a trait, moreover, which finds expression in almost
everything he wrote. Like nearly all the great spirits of the
Renaissance, Shakespeare was perpetually occupied with the heavy
problems of man's life and man's destiny. Was there any meaning or
purpose in life, any result of the striving? was Death to be feared or a
Hereafter to be desired?--incessantly he beat straining wings in the
void. But even in early manhood he never sought to deceive himself. His
Richard II. had sounded the shallow vanity of man's desires, the
futility of man's hopes; he knew that man

"With nothing shall be pleased, till he be eased
With being nothing."

And this sad knowledge darkened all Shakespeare's later thinking.
Naturally, when youth passed from him and disillusionment put an end to
dreaming, his melancholy deepened, his sadness became despairing; we can
see the shadows thickening round him into night. Brutus takes an
"everlasting farewell" of his friend, and goes willingly to his rest.
Hamlet dreads "the undiscovered country"; but unsentient death is to him
"a consummation devoutly to be wished." Vincentio's mood is
half-contemptuous, but the melancholy persists; death is no "more than
sleep," he says, and life a series of deceptions; while Claudio in this
same play shudders away from death as from annihilation, or worse, in
words which one cannot help regarding as Shakespeare's:

"Claud. Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot...."

A little later and Macbeth's soul cries to us from the outer darkness:
"there's nothing serious in mortality"; life's

"a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."

And from this despairing gloom come Lear's shrieks of pain and pitiful
ravings, and in the heavy intervals the gibberings of the fool. Even
when the calmer mood of age came upon Shakespeare and took away the
bitterness, he never recanted; Posthumus speaks of life and death in
almost the words used by Vincentio, and Prospero has nothing to add save
that "our little life is rounded with a sleep."

It is noteworthy that Shakespeare always gives these philosophic
questionings to those characters whom I regard as his impersonations,[1]
and when he breaks this rule, he breaks it in favour of some Claudio who
is not a character at all, but the mere mouthpiece of one of his moods.

[Footnote 1: One of my correspondents, Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton, has
been kind enough to send me an article contributed to "Colbourn's
Magazine" in 1873, in which he declares that "Shakespeare seems to have
kept a sort of Hamlet notebook, full of Hamlet thoughts, of which 'To be
or not to be' may be taken as the type. These he was burdened with.
These did he cram into Hamlet as far as he could, and then he tossed the
others indiscriminately into other plays, tragedies and histories,
perfectly regardless of the character who uttered them." Though Mr.
Watts-Dunton sees that some of these "Hamlet thoughts" are to be found
in Macbeth and Prospero and Claudio, he evidently lacks the key to
Shakespeare's personality, or he would never have said that Shakespeare
tossed these reflections "indiscriminately into other plays."
Nevertheless the statement itself is interesting, and deserves more
notice than has been accorded to it.]

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