No More Learning

And it may seem
to some that many scenes-some of them, no doubt, not wholly
or originally from his pen—many of the battle pieces, French and
English; the starting of the rose dispute; the quarrel of Win-
chester and Gloucester and the deaths of both; all, as has been
said, of the scenes where Margaret appears; much of the Cade
part; the deaths, again, of York and Clifford; of prince Edward
and king Henry-smack of Shakespeare in their altered forms.
But it would be altogether uncritical to be positive here. It may
be sufficient to say that Part I exhibits least change; Part II
most; and Part III somewhat less than Part II, but still a very
considerable amount; while, independently of positive changes, the
whole composition of Part I is very much less Shakespearean,
even as compared with his earliest probable work, than that of
the other two. At any rate, we may safely return to the position
that, in this chronicle work, Shakespeare had new and admirable
opportunities for developing his grasp of character and for getting
into complete working order that remarkable and, in fact, unique,
conception of the loose, many-centred drama kept together by
character itself, which was to be his--and ours.


## p. 187 (#211) ############################################

Henry IV.
IV. Plays not mentioned by Meres 187
Last of the Meres-warranted batch comes Henry IV, like the
others worked up from an earlier production, The Famous Victories
of Henry the fifth, but more remarkable than any of them, if
not for passages of pure poetry (for which its theme gives but rare
opportunity), for complete transformation of the merest brute
material into magnificent art. The first assignment of the world-
famous part of Falstaff-one of the very greatest of dramatic
creations, and practically a creation, in the precise sense of the
word—to the luckless Lollard Oldcastle was a mistake; but it was
speedily rectified—though not without further protest on the part of
the prosaic in favour of the historical warrior Fastolf. The actual
play (for its two parts are practically one) is, undoubtedly, with the
reservation above stated, one of Shakespeare's very greatest
achievements; and, seeing that he had already proved himself able
to supply pure poetry in unlimited quantities and in any required
degree of strength, no drawback or shortcoming could possibly
be urged. The entwining and enforcing of the purely historical
part receives, and, probably, has always received, less attention from
readers and spectators; but it is wonderful in itself. The prince
(the famous key-soliloquy, 'I know you all’ and the other on the
crown excepted) is designedly kept undeveloped in his public
capacity. But the king, the Percies, Glendower, the younger
princes and wiser noblemen, are all vivified and spirited up in the
inscrutable Shakespearean manner. Still, 'the general are not
wrong in preferring to dwell on the Bohemian society of which
the prince is the rather Mephistophelian centre, but of which
Falstaff is the real master and king. Not a member of it, male
or female, but has the certain, vital touches. “Bowdlerising' is
seldom less justified of its works than when it here prevents
readers from appreciating the curious and universal humanity of
Shakespeare's portraiture, and its contrast with the artificial efforts
of modern realism. The supremacy of Falstaff does not disparage
the exemplary virtue of Pistol or the modest adequacy of Bardolph
and of Nym; and, in the same way, Nell and Doll make each the
other deformitate formosam videri. Everyone has noticed how, in
this most genial, if not most poetical, of his cycles (anticipating,
for a moment, The Merry Wives), Shakespeare has been prodigal
of home memories-of Warwickshire and Gloucestershire detail.
But everybody, perhaps, has not noticed the singular fashion in
which, once more, this yoking of almost domestic minutiae with
public affairs passes itself off, in contrast with the strident dis-
cord of Poetaster and The Mayor of Quinborough. Shallow,


## p. 188 (#212) ############################################

188
Shakespeare
immortal in his own way, is a planet in a greater system only; and
all the parts combine to work this out.
We are now deprived of the safe, if not in all ways definite,
assistance of Meres in respect of chronology; and, for the rest of
the contents of the folio as well as for Pericles (the single play
outside of it which will be considered in the present chapter) we
have, in a majority of cases, nothing but guesswork to guide us.
But, using the same general principles as heretofore-the internal
evidence of versification and dramatic craftsmanship, with such
positive aids as may bear investigation, we can continue this history
of Shakespeare's work on the same general lines. Only, it will be
desirable to adhere to the usual folio order with one single ex-
ception, that of The Tempest, which, in accordance with general
practice (to be critically examined later) we shall keep to the end,
putting Pericles, which has no folio order, in its place, though by no
means asserting that it certainly deserves priority over all the others.
That the whole of Pericles is not Shakespeare's is extremely
probable; but the allocation of parts to other dramatists, named or
unnamed, is as hazardous a piece of 'hariolation 'as has been tried
even in this hazardous game. It is not too much to say that there
is no part which might not be his; the very choruses which
have been denied him are extremely Shakespearean, and group
excellently with similar things in A Midsummer Night's Dream
and As You Like It. The brothel scenes can be similarly, if not
so completely, paired with passages in the Errors and in Measure
for Measure; and divers examples of stiff Marlowe verse and hand-
ling with others in Titus Andronicus and the early chronicles and
elsewhere. On the other hand, some of the best things throughout
the play are aut Shakespeare aut Diabolus, and it must have been
a most superior fiend who forged the shipwreck passage. Still,
nothing is heard of the play till 1606, when it was licensed; and
it is pretty certain that, whether the whole was written by Shake-
speare or not, the whole was not written by Shakespeare at or near
that time. The present writer would be prepared to take either
side on the question : ‘Did Shakespeare about this time complete
an early immature sketch of his own; or did he furnish, voluntarily
or involuntarily, scenes to one which was vamped up and botched off
by another or others ? ' But he rather inclines to the first alter-
native, because of the distinct similarity of the phenomena to those
shown in others of Shakespeare's plays actually contained in the
folio. That the scheme of the play is not of a mature period is
shown by the fact that it has little character, and that what it has


## p. 189 (#213) ############################################

The Merry Wives. Measure for Measure 189
is still less concerned with the working out of the action. The
contrast here, not merely with A Winter's Tale but with the much
abused Cymbeline, is remarkable.
To cast back to the earlier, but not yet discussed, plays of the
canon, The Merry Wives of Windsor, as most people know, is a
play with a legend—that the queen wished to see Falstaff 'in love,'
and that it was written in fourteen days to please her. This, how-
ever (the later part of which is one of the curious Shakespeare-
Molière coincidences), comes only from Dennis, a hundred years
after date. The play was actually licensed in 1601, and imperfectly
printed next year-dates which suit well enough with the inclusion
of Henry IV in the Meres list of 1598 and its completion by
Henry V in that year or 1599. With his usual preference of
artistic convenience to prosaic exactitude, Shakespeare has not
troubled himself about niching this episode very carefully in his
precedent history of the fat knight. Shallow appears duly, but
.
Slender replaces Silence; "the wild prince and Poins' are referred
to, but vaguely. You neither need, nor are you intended, to make a
'harmony' of the four pieces. So, too, it seems to be lost labour
and idle sentimentality to lament the decadence and defeat of
Falstaff. Men are generally decadent, and frequently defeated,
.
when dealing with women in such circumstances; and Falstaff's
overthrow does not make him fall very hard after all. On the
other hand, the vis comica of the piece is perfect; its exuberant
invention and variety are unsurpassed; and the actual construction
is more careful than usual. In character and dialogue, it is not
surpassed by the very greatest of the plays, allowance being made
for kind and atmosphere. Everybody is alive and everything is
vividly illuminated-not with the extra-natural, if not non-natural,
Congreve rockets, but with a lambent easy light of air. Sir Hugh
Evans must have been meant as a brother in dramatic arms to
Fluellen, and it is difficult to prefer Roland to Oliver or vice versa.
The attractive grace—though given in outline merely—of sweet
Anne Page is masterly; and, in her mother and Mistress Ford,
Shakespeare has given, as hardly another writer has ever succeeded
in doing, in bourgeois condition and deliberately prosaised tone,
the same high but perfectly human standard of wifeliness which,
elsewhere, he has carried to the court of poetical quintessence in
Hermione and in Imogen. There are few things more amusing to
a liberally catholic student of literature than the half patronising,
half apologetic, tone adopted, sometimes, towards The Merry Wives,
as a 'farce. ' And, here again, one is reminded of Molière.
-


## p. 190 (#214) ############################################

190
Shakespeare
Measure for Measure is a more difficult play-one not so
liable to be undervalued from inability to perceive that a comic
microcosm may be thoroughly cosmic, but more apt to disconcert,
if not actually to disgust, by reason of its singular apparent
discords, its unusual scheme of conduct and character and its
scant reconcilableness with that un-puritan, but fairly severe,
system of poetical justice which Shakespeare generally maintains.
Its 'disagreeableness'—to use a word often laughed at but expres-
sive and without a synonym—is less to some tastes than that of
Als Well that Ends Well; but, to a certain extent, it exists. On
the other hand, its power is unquestionable, and it contains some of
the greatest things in Shakespeare. It was certainly (or almost
certainly) performed in 1604, and it has been customary to accept
that year as the approximate date of the composition. To the
present writer, this seems very improbable, and he would select
Measure for Measure as the strongest instance of the suggested
earliness, in a more or less incomplete form, of many more plays than
are contained in Meres's list. Shakespeare, indeed, has improved
immensely on the original Italian story and on Whetstone's two
English versions, in novel and drama. He has not only added the
magnificent scenes between Isabella and Angelo, and Isabella and
her brother, and the character (dramatically important, inasmuch as
it helps to save Isabella and provides a dénouement) of 'Mariana in
the moated grange'; he has lavished his nepenthe of poetry on a not
particularly attractive theme. But, in the first place, it seems very
unlikely that he would have chosen that theme so late ; and, in the
second, it is nearly certain that, if he had, he would have worked
it up with different results. His seventeenth century plays
generally contain nothing so crude as the cruder parts of Measure
for Measure, while these are very like parts of the early certainties
and of Pericles. Moreover, even if Pompey and Lucio were
cleaner-mouthed, they would still be unfinished studies, com-
panions of Launce and Launcelot, not of Touchstone and Feste.
The play, as a whole, gives one the idea of an early, half finished
piece which the writer has resumed, which he has improved
immensely, but on which he has rather hung additional and
separate jewels than spent the full labour of thorough refashion-
ing and refounding. Had it come straight from the hands of the
Shakespeare of 1604, we should surely have had a much more
defensible and, in fact, intelligible duke, than the person who runs
his state and his servants into difficulties in order that he may come
to the rescue as a rather shabby Providence- an Angelo more of


## p. 191 (#215) ############################################

Much Ado and its Successors
191
a piece, less improbably repentant (not to say so improbably
flagitious) and less flagrantly let off. ' If one cared to conjecture, it
might be possible to show a strong case for an original intention to
adopt the story in its blackest shape, Titus fashion; a disgust with
this leading to the abandonment of the thing for a time; an
inspiration to create a 'Saint Isabel' and a consequent adapta-
tion and transformation to 'happy ending' and poetical injustice.
But even a Shakespeare cannot reshape ends in a manner entirely
contrary to their rough-hewing, without some loss of accomplish-
ment, verisimilitude and effect.
Measure for Measure was never printed in Shakespeare's life-
time; Much Ado about Nothing, which (with the much earlier
Errors between them) follows it in the folio and which, like it, is
founded on an Italian story, had been actually printed four years
before the alleged date of Measure for Measure and is thought to
have been written even a year earlier than this. Here, there is
neither necessity nor probability for any theory of partial composi-
tion. The play is all of a piece; and the best things in it are
entirely original. The trick played on Hero had appeared both in
Bandello's prose and in Ariosto's verse; and there seems actually
to have been an English play on the subject so early as 1583. But
Shakespeare added Benedick and Beatrice; he added Dogberry
and Verges and he made the whole thing into one of the most
remarkable instances of the kind of tragicomedy where no actual
tragedy is permitted, but where it is only just avoided, and where
tragic motives are allowed to work freely. The play is of extra-
ordinary merit, and Shakespeare has only left one loose stitch-
a stitch which he might have picked up with very little trouble-
in the entirely unexplained, and very nearly inexplicable, behaviour
of Margaret, who, being certainly not a traitress and as certainly
not a fool, first lends herself to a proceeding obviously prejudicial
to her mistress, and then holds her tongue about it. Except in
this point, the play works with perfect ease of action; and, if one
does not envy Hero her husband, and does grudge her very much
to him, that is no uncommon case.
As for Benedick and Beatrice,
they are, perhaps, as good touchstones as any in Shakespeare. No
one but an 'innocent' can possibly fail to like them; no one but
a charlatan will ever pretend not to do so.
The authorities of
Messina are more ‘farcical”; but the farce, again, is superfarcical.
It might well have been thought that nothing better in the way
of romantic comedy would be written. But this was to be triumph-
antly contradicted by two plays, As You Like It and Twelfth Night,
>


## p. 192 (#216) ############################################

192
Shakespeare
which are believed to have followed Much Ado very quickly, and
which, in the folio (with plays already mentioned intervening),
observe the order in which they have been named. But it is not
positively known which appeared first. Twelfth Night was acted
on 2 February 1601/2; As You Like It, on less certain grounds, is
put some two years before. So far as one can judge from internal
evidence, Twelfth Night would seem to be a little the earlier, or,
at any rate, to retain a little more of the characteristics of Shake-
speare's earliest comedies. But, in reality, Much Ado About
Nothing, As You Like It and Twelfth Night form a trio of which
the best thing to say is that only the man who wrote the other two
could have written any one of them. Still, As You Like It has a
certain pre-eminence, and may put in a claim to be the greatest of
Shakespeare's comedies—the typical romantic comedy-excluding
The Tempest as belonging rather to that middle kind for which
there is no English name, but which is inexactly designated drame
in French. There is hardly more than one fault in it--a fault
which, oddly enough, is very rare in Shakespeare, though extremely
common in his contemporaries--the fault of concluding the play
with a violent revolution' merely communicated by a messenger.
That an 'old religious man’ of Shakespeare's creation might have
converted even such an exceedingly unpromising subject as duke
Frederick need not be denied: it is very difficult to say what any
one of Shakespeare's creation might not have done. But it would
have been very interesting to hear the arguments used on the
occasion. With this exception, there is nothing that exceeds the
licence of romantic character comedy. That was the way they
lived in Arden—there can be no doubt of it. And the other things
had to happen in order that they might so live. A fresh qualm,
succeeded by a fresh desire, may, indeed, be aroused by the
announced intention of Jaques to seek duke Frederick's company:
the qualm as to his probable reception, the desire to have Shake-
speare's account of it. But Jaques himself, with whom some have
quarrelled, is a perfectly allowable, and a perfectly admirable, foil
to the lovers and the fleeters of the time. The vividness of almost
every scene and passage is unmatched even in Shakespeare; there
are no longueurs; and, if there were, Rosalind and Touchstone
would save them. The poet has not here, as he did earlier in
A Midsummer Night's Dream, and, later, in The Tempest, resorted
to supernatural machinery to help his glamour. We are no further
from ordinary life than romance always is, and in the least extra-
ordinary regions of romance itself. But 'Arden' is none the less


## p. 193 (#217) ############################################

As You Like It and Twelfth Night 193
By this
made an enchanted ground without spells or incantations, an
earthly Paradise, with nothing that is not within reach of almost
any human being. Wit, wisdom and poetry are the only trans-
figurers. Shakespeare, of course, had certainly for canvas Lodge's
Euphuist romance of Rosalynde ; perhaps it would be pleasant to
think so) the Tale of Gamelyn itself-but it was merely canvas.
The charm of Rosalind, the marrowy moralising of Jaques, the
unfailing fool-wisdom of Touchstone, are all his own.
time, too, he had arrived at that complete command of verse of
which something will be specially said later, and had perfected his
wonderful prose. Both the blank verse and the lyric in As You
Like It are in absolute perfection, each for its special purpose; and
there is, perhaps, no play (for Hamlet lacks the lyric) in which all
three media are so perfectly displayed.
As You Like It, with Rosalind as Ganymede, had taken advan-
tage of that habit of representing women's parts by boys which has
been supposed to possess advantages in itself. Cleopatra, played
by a boy (as with true Shakespearean audacity she is herself made
to suggest) must have been absurd, but Shakespeare could not
help himself and the custom of the country. Here, he could help
himself; and he did so with admirable success. Moreover, the
success could evidently be repeated (if the artist were strong
enough) in a different key. The artist was strong enough and he
repeated it in Viola; relying here on the custom to emphasise and
make probable the confusion of brother and sister. Twelfth
Night or What You Will—the latter title an obvious pendant to
As You Like It; the former, perhaps unnecessarily, supposed to
refer to the time of produetion—is the purest comedy of all
Shakespeare's plays. We know that the captain is in no danger;
none, even apparently, threatens any one else. To make Malvolio,
as has sometimes been attempted, an almost tragic personage,
virtuous and deeply wronged, is an absurdity. The duke is, and is
meant to be, a feeble person; but he can talk exquisite poetry, is a
gentleman, probably made exactly the sort of husband that Viola
wanted and so is one of those subtlest, because most faintly
nuanced, criticisms of life which only the greatest masters dare to
allow themselves. Feste is not Touchstone's equal—but who is?
and, besides, it would not have done for the clown to be wittier
than the knight when both were witty-in As You Like It things
are different. The rest are of the Upper House almost without an
exception. Viola, no Rosalind or Beatrice, but a jewel of the
other type and differenced exquisitely from such sisters as Juliet
13
E. L. V.
CH, VIII.


## p. 194 (#218) ############################################

194
Shakespeare
a
and Miranda; Olivia, stately, but perfectly human; Maria, not
elaborately, but sufficiently, drawn in the other vein for contrast,
form an extraordinary triad even for Shakespeare; and it is afflict-
ing that some commentators should forget that 'the youngest wren
of nine' was no 'waiting maid’ in the modern sense. On the other
side, Sir Toby Belch is one of those doubles that are no doubles,
over which nearly all artists stumble. He is of the same genus as
Falstaff, but of a different species; and almost entirely different as
an individual; just as Sir Andrew is of the tribe of Silence and
Slender, but quite other than they. As for Malvolio, he has no
parallel anywhere save Molière's Alceste, who, like him but more
commonly, has been travestied into a persona tragica by incom-
petent criticism. A gentleman, a man of honour and of his duty,
of parts and of merit, his comic åpapria is compounded of vanity,
sourness of temper, lack of humour, a little jack-in-officeship, much
ambition and, probably, not a little downright jealousy-and it
brings the comic punishment upon him most completely and con-
dignly. Sebastian, no doubt, has extraordinary, but not impos-
sible, luck.
From this point, we may take a liberty—of which we have
already given warning with the folio arrangement. The Winter's
Tale would come next, according to the division of 'Comedies,
Histories and Tragedies,' and several histories, earlier according
to the Meres point de repère, would come next after that. But,
according to that class of internal evidence which we have allowed,
The Winter's Tale is distinctly later; some more plays regarded
as ‘histories' in Shakespeare's time are, not merely to us, but
essentially, romantic tragedies; and the arrangement, according to
logic and literature must, in other ways, be altered. We shall
rearrange the scene from this point, therefore, recording all certain,
or even probable, data as to individual plays as they arise, under
four heads—the remaining English histories, the classical plays
subsequent to Titus Andronicus, the romantic tragedies and the
three final drames.
The first of the histories is Henry V, which was partly drawn
from the same originals as Henry IV, and followed it closely. It
was published (imperfectly) and 'stayed'in 1600; and is supposed
to have been acted the year before. The magnificent death of
Falstaff almost necessitated the previous turning upon him of the
king, which, indeed, had been foreshadowed in Henry IV. Partly
this, and partly other things, have prejudiced some critics against
this 'patriot king,' who, nevertheless, is one of the greatest, if not
>


## p. 195 (#219) ############################################

.
Henry VIII.
Troilus and Cressida 195
the most attractive, of Shakespeare's creations. The fresh present-
ment of Pistol and the addition of Fluellen demonstrate the in-
exhaustibleness of the poet's comic prosopopoeia, and, besides the
fine tirades which figure in all the extract books, there are in-
numerable passages of literary excellence. But, in a panoramic
survey of Shakespeare's plays, Henry V, perhaps, with one excep-
tion to be dealt with presently, stands forth most conspicuously as
almost the deftest of his spiritings up of chronicles—as a pattern
of the difficult accomplishment of vitalising chronicle by character.
Here, it is by character diffuse rather than compact—by the
extraordinary vivacity of the different personages rather than by
interest concentrated in a hero. So far as he is concerned, it is
the triumph of Henry of England, rather than that of Harry of
Monmouth, in which we rejoice.
The last remaining, and, probably, the last written, of the English
group, Henry VIII, presents remarkable peculiarities; and it has
been usual to take it as Shakespeare's only in parts-Fletcher's,
and, perhaps, Massinger's, in others. A play on Henry VIII was
represented in 1613 and interrupted by the burning of the play-
house. The piece which, ten years later, appeared in the folio is a
loose composition (though, perhaps, not much looser than Cymbe-
line); and, though there are points of great and truly Shakespearean
interest of character in the king and, still more, in Wolsey and
queen Katharine, it cannot be said that the character in any one
instance, or in all put together, unifies the play as it generally does
with Shakespeare. Still, there is no doubt about his authorship in
whole or part. No reasonable critic will attempt to go behind the
folio as regards plays—though no such critic need accept either
the whole folio' as regards passages or ‘nothing but the folio'
in any way. The play is patchy, and some of the patches are
inferior; while there are hardly any marks in it of that early and
‘first draft' character which we have detected in others.
With the classical plays, we come to a new and very interesting
group.
In a sense, of course, Titus Andronicus belongs to it; but
nothing like the extreme earliness of that piece belongs to any of
the others, and none of them is mentioned by Meres. Two of them,
however, are, internally as well as externally, of very uncertain
date; the other three are of Shakespeare's very meridian.
For Troilus and Cressida, a licence to print was obtained in
1602/3; but the players objected, and it was not published till half
a dozen years later, and then surreptitiously. It is extremely
difficult not to believe that it is much older than the earlier date
)
>
13-2


## p. 196 (#220) ############################################

196
Shakespeare
a
would show. Some of the blank verse, no doubt, is fairly mature:
but the author may have furbished this up, and much of it is not
mature at all. Instead of transcending his materials, as Shake-
speare almost invariably does, he has here failed almost entirely to
bring out their possibilities; has not availed himself of Chaucer's
beautiful romance so fully as he might; and has dramatised the
common Troy-books with a loose yet heavy hand utterly un-
suggestive of his maturer craftsmanship. If it were not for certain
speeches and touches chiefly in the part of Ulysses, and in the
parts of the hero and heroine, it might be called the least Shake-
spearean of all the plays.
Timon of Athens, again a puzzle, is a puzzle of a different kind.
It is usual to resort to the rather Alexandrine suggestion of
collaboration and then to put it as late as 1607. To the present
writer, the first theory seems unnecessary and the last impossible.
There is nothing in Timon that Shakespeare, at one time or another,
may not have written; there are some things which hardly anybody
but Shakespeare can have written; but that he wrote this piece just
after Lear, even with somebody, not to help, but to hinder, him, is
not, from the point of view from which the present survey is
written, conceivable. The play is as chaotic as Troilus, or more
so; and, except Timon himself, it has no character of interest in it.
But Timon himself must be Shakespeare's own; he has so much
of good in him, and might have been made so much better, that it
is impossible to imagine Shakespeare, in his maturity, turning over
such a character to be botched by underlings, and associated with
third rate company. On the other hand, he might have written the
whole play in his nonage and-as in the other case—have thrown in
some 'modern touches' to freshen it up and get it off his hands. At
any rate, the two plays (which may be called Greek) stand in the
sharpest contrast to the great Roman trio, based, in Shakespeare's
most easy-going fashion, on North’s Plutarch for matter, and,
sometimes, even for words, but made his own, absolutely and
for ever.
None of the three was printed till the folio appeared, though
licence appears to have been obtained for Antony and Cleopatra
in 1608. It is usual to select that date for it and for Coriolanus,
and to put Julius Caesar seven years earlier, because of an apparent
allusion to it in that year. Internal evidence does not, perhaps,
supply any valid reason for such a separation in date; and, as they
are all taken from the same source, they may very well all have
been written about the same time. This could not have been very


## p. 197 (#221) ############################################

The Roman Plays : Julius Caesar 197
early, from the complete mastery of the blank verse, but might be
anywhere after the close of the sixteenth century. All three are
masterpieces, but curiously different in kind; though there is an
equally curious agreement between them in the manner in which
the author, at one time, simply arranges the very words not merely
of Plutarch but of North, while, at another, he will add or substi-
tute passages of absolute originality.
Julius Caesar has, at least, this mark of an earlier date that
its interest is of a diffused character, and that there is a certain
prodigality of poetic passages put in everybody's mouth. The
titular hero perishes before half the play is done; and his place is
taken, first by Antony and then by Brutus. Nor does he make any
very copious appearance even before his murder. Further, the
marvellous Shakespearean impartiality seems to take delight in
doing the best for each of these heroes in turn; while the pro-
digality above referred to furnishes not merely the three, Cassius,
who is all but a fourth hero,and Portia, but quite insignificant people
- Marullus, Casca, Calpurnia-with splendid poetical utterance.
The magnificent speech of Antony-all Shakespeare's own; the
great exchange of mind between Brutus and Cassius, both as friends
and as (almost) foes; the dialogue of Brutus and Portia: these,
and many other things, with the surpassing majesty and interest of
the theme, have always made the play a great favourite, and
deservedly so. Moreover, its central interest from the point of
view of romance--the death and revenging of Caesar-is perfect.
But, from the point of view of unity of character, which is
Shakespeare's general appeal, it may be thought somewhat lacking.
Brutus is the only person whose character can supply a continuous
tie rod-and, except to those who take the old French Revolution
or Roman declamation line of admiration for tyrannicide per se,
Brutus, admirably as he develops, is rather thin at first.
plausibly be argued that either he should not have required
Cassius's blend of personal and pseudo-patriotic hatred of Caesar
to ferment his own patriotism, or he should have detected the
insufficiency of the ‘lean and hungry' conspirator. Practically,
however, Julius Caesar is of the panoramic, if not of the kalei-
doscopic, order of drama-its appeal is of sequence rather than
of composition.
With the other two Roman plays, it is quite different. Coriolanus
is certainly not deficient in variety of incident, or of personage,
but every incident and every personage is, in a way, subservient to
the hero. The ordinary descriptions of the dramatis personae-
It may


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198
Shakespeare
>
'friend to Coriolanus,''mother to Coriolanus,''wife to Coriolanus '--
acquire a new appositeness from this feature. Menenius and
Volumnia are no shadows; the 'gracious silence' herself is all the
more gracious for her unobtrusiveness. But it is in relation to
Coriolanus that they interest us most. The sordid spite of the
tribunes—types well known at this time and at all times—helps to
bring out the arrogance, at its worst not sordid, of Caius Martius.
The inferior generals set him off. And that interesting, and not very
easy, character, Tullus Aufidius, whose psychical evolution Shake-
speare has left in obviously intentional uncertainty, furnishes yet
another contrast in his real changes from enmity to friendship,
and then from hospitality to treachery, with the changes of
Coriolanus from the height of Roman patriotism to actual hostility
against his ungrateful and degraded country, and from that hostility
to semi-reconciliation, at least to the foregoing of his vengeance in
obedience to his mother. Most of all do the various mobs—the
mob of Rome above all, but, also, the rank and file of the army,
the Volscian conspirators, the officers, the senators, the very servants
of Aufidius--throw up against their own vulgar variety and charac-
terless commonness the ‘headstrong beauty of the great soldier's
mind and will—his hatred of the vulgus itself, of its malignity, of
its meanness, of its ingratitude. He is, of course, no flawless
character: he need not have been rude to the people (one cannot
blame him for being so to their misguiders); and, because they
committed virtual treason to Rome by banishing its defender, he
was certainly not justified in himself committing the overt act.
But he remains one of the noblest figures in literature, and his
nobility is largely the work of Shakespeare himself. What is more,
he has provided Shakespeare with the opportunity of working
out a 'one-man' drama, as, except in inferior specimens like
Timon, he has done nowhere else. For, even in Hamlet, the single
and peculiar life of the hero does not overshadow all the others,
as is done here.
Great as Coriolanus is, however, it is not nearly so great as
Antony and Cleopatra. Coriolanus, personally, is a great figure,
but rather narrowly great and hardly as provocative of delight as of
admiration. The interest of his story is somewhat lacking in variety,
and, cunningly as the comic or serio-comic aspects and interludes
are employed to lighten it up, the whole play is rather statuesque.
Antony and Cleopatra has nearly as infinite a variety as its
incomparable heroine herself: its warmth and colour are of the
liveliest kind; its character drawing is of the Shakespearean best;


## p. 199 (#223) ############################################

Antony and Cleopatra.
Hamlet 199
the beauties of its versification and diction are almost unparalleled
in number, diversity and intensity; and, above all, the powers of
the two great poetic motives, love and death, are utilised in it to
the utmost possible extent. Even this long list of merits does not
exhaust its claims. From the technical side, it is the very type and
triumph of the chronicle play-of the kind which dramatises whole
years of history, solid portions of the life of man, and keeps them
dramatically one by the interwoven threads of character interest,
by individual passages of supreme poetry and by scenes or sketches
of attaching quality. Here, again, Shakespeare follows North, at
times very closely indeed ; and here, more than ever, he shows how
entirely he is able not to follow his leader when he chooses. The
death of Cleopatra, with the ineffable music of the words that
follow 'Peace, Peace,' is only the strongest example of a pervading
fact. But the central interest of character and the side portraits
which accompany and enforce it are the greatest points about the
play. Nowhere has even Shakespeare given such a pair, hero and
heroine, as here. Antony, at once ruined and ennobled by the
passion which is both his á papria and his abiding title to sympathy,
which completes his friendship for Caesar in the earlier play;
Cleopatra, her frailty sublimated into the same passion—both
heroic in their very weakness and royal in the way in which they
throw away their royalty : there is nothing like them anywhere.
There is no palliation of fault or of folly ; both are set as plainly
before the spectator as may be, and he will imitate them at his
peril. But the power of romantic tragedy in this direction can go
no further.
It might be questioned whether this power actually went further
in any other direction. But, possibly, between Julius Caesar and
the other two Roman plays--certainly in the same general period,
and, according to popular reckoning, between 1602 and 1605–
Shakespeare produced, it is thought in the order to be named,
what are pre-eminently the four wheels of his chariot, the four
wings of his spirit, in the tragic and tragicomic division,
Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and Lear. To condense the enormous
mass of discussion on these, and especially on the first, were
here impossible. The puzzles of the text of Hamlet (which differs
most remarkably in the quarto of 1602, apparently pirated, in
that of 1604, which at least claims authenticity, and in that of the
folio), though perhaps less than they seem, and much less than
they have been thought to be, are considerable ; and the problems
of the play are infinite. Its immediate, lasting and now world-wide


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200
Shakespeare
a
popularity is not surprising. For, though Hamlet himself is capable
of being problematised to the nth, he is a sufficiently taking figure
(especially as introduced by the ghost scenes) to persons who care
little indeed for problems. The enormous length of the play is
diversified by the most varied, and, at times, most exciting, action.
In the common phrase, there is something for everyone-the
supernatural, the death of Polonius, that of Ophelia, the fight
or almost fight in the churchyard, the duel, the final slaughter
scene (simply an exciting moment for the mere vulgar)—the pity
of all these things for the sentimental, the poetry of them for those
who can appreciate it. And, above all, and with all, there is the
supreme interest of the character presentment, which informs and
transforms the incidents, and which, not merely in the central
figure, is the richest and most full to be found in Shakespeare.
This may be developed in one instance.
It has been impossible, in the scale and range of the present
notice, to dwell on individual characters. But, putting sheer
poetical expression aside, the Shakespearean character is the Shake-
spearean note; and, for more reasons than one, it would be an
incorrectness not to offer a specimen of dealing with this feature.
No better suggests itself than the character of Claudius. For it
seems to have escaped even some elect wits; and it is very
typical. There were at least two ways in which an ordinary, or
rather more than ordinary, dramatist might have dealt with
this other 'majesty of Denmark. ' He could have been made a
crude dramatic villain—a crowned 'Shakebag' or 'Black Will,' to
use the phraseology of his creator's own day. He could have
been made pure straw-a mere common usurper. And it would
appear that he has actually seemed to some to be one or other of
these two. Neither of them is the Claudius which Shakespeare
has presented; and those who take him as either seem to miss the
note which, putting sheer poetic faculty once more aside, is the
note of Shakespeare. It is not to be supposed that Shakespeare
liked Claudius ; if he did, and if he has produced on respectable
readers the effect above hinted at, he certainly was as ineffectual
a writer as the merest crétin, or the merest crank, among his critics
could imagine. But neither did he dislike Claudius; he knew that,
in the great Greek phrase, it was the duty of creators to see fair'-
Tàľoa véuelv—in the handling of their creations. It would appear
that the successor of Hamlet I might have been a very respectable
person, if his brother had not possessed a kingdom and a queen that
he wanted for himself. But this brother did, unluckily, possess these


## p. 201 (#225) ############################################

Hamlet
201
>
things and the Claudian-not åmapria, not 'tragic frailty,' but out-
rageous, unforgivable, fully punished—crime was that he would not
tolerate this possession. He put an end to it, and let those laugh
—
at him who like—he seems to have thought that he could trammel
up the consequence. Macbeth was wiser. If it were not for the
ugly circumstances and the illegitimate assistance of the ghost, we
might be rather sorry for Claudius at first. There was nothing
out of the way in the succession of brother before son. There was
nothing (except, perhaps, undue haste) out of the way, under the dis-
pensation of dispensations, in the successive marriage of one woman
to two brothers. Fifty years before Shakespeare's birth, queen
Katharine did it, and few people thought or think her other than
a saint. A hundred years after Shakespeare's birth, Louise de
Gonzague, queen of Poland, did it, and nobody thought the worse
of her at all. It is clear that there was not much likelihood of
offspring from the second marriage : even Hamlet himself, in the
very scene where his abusive description of the king ('not evidence,
if ever anything was not) has prejudiced many against Claudius,
seems to admit this. Claudius himself would probably-his very
words could be cited-have been most happy to regard Hamlet as
crown prince, would not have objected to receive Ophelia (perhaps
with a slight protest against derogation) as crown princess and,
after a due enjoyment of his kingdom and his wife, to assign the
former to them and die quite comfortably.
But this could not be: the gods would not have seen fair' if they
had allowed it, and the potapxos ämn of the crime in the orchard
bears its fruit. Yet Claudius behaves himself by no means ill. He
meets Hamlet's early, and, as yet, ungrounded, or only half grounded,
sulks with a mixture of dignity and kindness which is admirable
in a difficult situation. There does not appear any prejudice against
Hamlet (though, of course, guilt makes the king uneasy) when
Polonius first tells him of the prince's antics. When he has eaves-
dropped, a proceeding fully justified by the statecraft of the time,
his desire to get rid of Hamlet, somehow, is natural, and it does
not yet appear that he has any design to‘get rid of him in criminal
kind. · Even after the play-an outrageous insult in any case
there is no sign of murderous purpose either in his words to
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern or in the prayer soliloquy. Only
after the killing of Polonius, which might have alarmed an innocent
man, does he decide on the literae Bellerophontis. Few who have
paid any attention to it have denied the combined courage and
skill with which he meets the émeute headed by Laertes. Even


## p. 202 (#226) ############################################

202
Shakespeare
a
a
thenceforward, he is not pure villain, and, though it endangers all
his plans, he tries to save the queen, between whom and himself it
is quite certain that a real affection exists. He is a villain, but he
is a man; and there are probably lesser villains who are rather
poorer personages as men. Now, is this mere whitewashing on the
critic's part, or the puerile and sneaking kindness for villany which
is not quite unknown in men of letters? Not at all. No better
deserved swordthrust was ever given than Hamlet's last; and
Shakespeare never palliates the crime of Claudius in the very
least degree. But he knows that a criminal is not necessarily bad
all through; and he knows that there is no cheaper or falser
morality than that which thinks that you must represent a criminal
as bad all through lest you tempt people to sympathise with his
crime. May it be added that, at this time of his career, he simply
could not 'scamp' his work in the direction of character any more
than in the direction of poetry? Others might throw in ‘supers'
to fill up a play-he would not. Claudius, of course, in no way
disputes the position of hero; but there is stuff in him, as he is
presented, for half a dozen heroes of the Racinian type.
Of Ophelia, and Polonius, and the queen and all the rest, not
to mention Hamlet himself (in whose soul it would be absurd
to attempt to discover new points here), after this we need not say
anything. But it is observable that they are not, as in the case of
Coriolanus, interesting merely or mainly for their connection with
the hero, but in themselves. And it must be added that, not merely
in the soliloquies and set speeches, but in the dialogue, even in its
least important patchwork, Shakespeare's mastery of blank verse
has reached complete perfection.
If Othello came next, as it may very well have done-it has
been asserted, on the faith of a document not now producible,
to have been acted at court on 1 November 1604—there was
certainly no falling off. The pity, if not the terror, is made more
intense than even in Hamlet. And, though for complexity lago
cannot approach Hamlet, he is almost as interesting. Once more,
the Shakespearean impartiality is shown in this character. Iago,
in the ordinary sense, is a much 'worse' man than Claudius;
and, unlike Claudius, he has no compunction. But you see his
point of view. It is by no means so certain as some critics have
thought that his suspicions of Othello and Emilia are merely pre-
tended; it is quite certain that he has never forgiven, and never
will forgive, Othello or Cassio for the preference accorded by the
former to the latter. Against Desdemona, he probably has no


## p. 203 (#227) ############################################

-
Othello. Macbeth
203
personal spite whatsoever; but she is the most convenient instru-
ment that suggests itself for embroiling his two foes with each
other and plaguing them both; so he uses her, once more without
compunction of any kind. Roderigo is another instrument and
a useful pigeon as well. But this newer 'ancient’-very different
'
from Pistol 1-has an admirable intellect, a will of steel and a
perfectly dauntless courage. 'I bleed, sir; but not killed' is one
of the greatest speeches in Shakespeare, and the innocent com-
mentators who have asked whether Shakespeare did not hate
lago' can never have apprehended it. As for Desdemona herself,
an interesting point arises in connection with another of Shake-
speare's most pity-claiming figures, Cordelia, and may be noticed
when we come to her.
Those who (if there be any such) believe that Shakespeare
wrote the whole of Macbeth and that he wrote it about 1605, must
have curious standards of criticism. To believe that he wrote the
whole of it is quite easy-indeed, the present writer has little or
no doubt on the matter; but the belief is only possible on the
supposition that it was written at rather different times. The
second scene, that in which the ‘bleeding sergeant' appears, and
some few other passages, are, in verse and phrase, whole stages
older than the bulk of the play, which, in these respects, is fully
equal to its great companions. The character interest is limited
to the hero and heroine. But in the thane and king—who is
a marvellous variant sketch of Hamlet, except that he can never
leave off, while Hamlet can never begin, and that, also, he can never
leave off metaphysicalising on the things he does, while Hamlet's
similar self-indulgence is confined to those he does not do-its
intensity and variety yield only to that of Hamlet himself; while
Lady Macbeth is quite peerless. And the fresh handling of the
supernatural illustrates, fortunately not for the last time, the
curious fertility of the writer in a direction where, especially
when it is blended with events and motives not supernatural,
failure is not so much the usual, as the invariable, result. That the
Shakespeare of one play, or part, should be the Shakespeare of
another, is a constantly repeated marvel; but it is scarcely any-
where more marvellous than in the fact that the same writer
wrote A Midsummer Night's Dream, Hamlet, Macbeth and The
Tempest.
Early British history seems at this moment to have had a
fascination for Shakespeare; for Macbeth appears to have been
followed pretty quickly by King Lear, and the date of Cymbeline
>


## p. 204 (#228) ############################################

204
Shakespeare
cannot have been very distant as it was certainly a stage play in
1610. King Lear, like its companions in the great quatuor, has
special virtues, but it resembles them and Antony and Cleopatra
in a certain regality of tone which hardly appears elsewhere. It
resembles Othello, also, in being a tragedy of pity above all
things; and it offers, perhaps, the most notable opportunity for the
examination of the Shakespearean åpapria, which at once agrees
and contrasts strikingly with the Aristotelian. The terrible fate
of Lear-which the poet wisely introduced instead of the happy (or
differently unhappy) ending which occurs in the chronicles and in
a worthless contemporary play, a little earlier than his own-may
seem excessive. As a punishment for his selfish abandonment and
parcelling out of the kingdom, his general petulance and his blind
misjudgment of his daughters, it may be so; as the consequence of
his frailty, not. So, too, Cordelia's disinheritance and her ultimate
fate are caused (whether deserved or not is, as before, a different
question) by her self-willed and excessive want of compliance with
her father's foolish, but not wholly unnatural, craving for professions
of affection. The calamities of Gloster are a little more in the way
of strict poetical justice of the ordinary kind; but they coincide
well enough. The character of Edmund is a pendant to that of
Iago, and his final speeches 'The wheel is come full circle: I am
here,' and 'Yet Edmund was beloved,' are even more revealing than
the stoical finale of the ancient. The extraordinary success of the
fool has never been denied save by his unofficial successors; nor
the superhuman poetry of the heath scenes. That the tragedy is
too tragical, may be an argument against tragedy, or against the
theatre generally; but not against this play. The one accusation
of some weight is the horror of the Gloster mutilation scene,
a survival of the old Andronicus days which, in a way, is interesting,
but which, perhaps, could have been spared. The fact that it
actually is a survival is the most interesting thing about it, except
the other fact that it shocks, as, in an earlier play, it certainly
would not. Nothing can show better the enormous lift which
Shakespeare had himself given to the stage in, at most, some fifteen
years, than the demand made on him, by modern criticism, not to
do what everyone had been doing.
Last come the famous three: Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale
and The Tempest, where no idle fancy has seen the calmed and
calming mens adepta' of which one of all but the greatest of Shake-
speare's contemporaries, Fulke Greville, speaks in a great passage
of prose. The first and second were seen by Simon Forman, an


## p. 205 (#229) ############################################

Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale
205
astrologer of the day, in 1610 and 1611; The Tempest was certainly
performed in 1613, and may have been written one or two years
earlier-a theory which makes it not a late play at all is absurd
and rebutted by the whole internal evidence. But internal
coincides with external in allotting the three to the latest period
possible: the versification supporting the general tone, and the
intense romantic influence corroborating both. In respect of
construction, however, there is a remarkable difference between
Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale, on the one hand, and The
Tempest, on the other.
Cymbeline has by some been reproached with being, and by
others regretfully admitted to be, the loosest and most disorderly
play in Shakespeare. Not only does he take his largest romantic
licence of neglecting unity of time and place-to that the reader
must long have been accustomed. Not only does he mix plots
and interests with the most insouciant liberality, as if he were
making a salad of them. But he leaves his materials, his person-
ages, his incidents, at a perfect tangle of loose ends. Still, the
interest is maintained, partly because of the actual attraction of
many of his episodes; partly because of the exquisite poetry
which is showered upon the play in every direction; but, most
of all, because of the perfect. charm of the character of the
heroine. That Shakespeare has equalled Imogen is certainly
true; but he has never surpassed her, and he has never repeated
or anticipated her.
Perhaps there is nothing more remarkable in these three plays,
even among Shakespeare's work, than the extraordinary beauty-
both in phrase, passage and scene-of their separate parts. The
word beauty is used advisedly. Here, in Cymbeline, for instance,
fault may be found-irrelevantly, perhaps, but not ungroundedly
-with construction, with connection of scenes and so forth. But
those who look, not at the skeleton, but at the body, not at the
mathematical proportion of features, but at the countenance, will
hardly be disturbed by this. The two Imogen and lachimo scenes;
the whole episode of Belarius and his supposed sons; the miraculous
song dirge which Collins, though he made a pretty thing of it, merely
prettified—these are things impossible to conceive as bettered,
difficult to imagine as equalled, or approached.
The Winter's Tale has something, but less, of the same sublime
neglect of meticulous accuracy of construction; it has, perhaps,
a more varied interest; it has even more lavishness of poetical
appeal. The 'sea coast of Bohemia' is nothing; but the story,


## p. 206 (#230) ############################################

206
Shakespeare
merely as a story, is certainly more romantic than dramatic. There
is no character that approaches Imogen; for Perdita, exquisite as
she is, has no character, properly speaking. The jealousy of Leontes,
though an interesting variant on that of Othello and that of
Posthumus, not to say on that of Master Ford, has a certain touch
of ferocious stupidity, which Shakespeare probably intended, but
which is not engaging. Hermione, admirable so far as she goes, is
,
not quite fully shown to us; and, though Paulina is a capital
portrait of what Ben Jonson declared his own wife to be-'a
shrew but honest'-she does not go far. Autolycus, perhaps, is
the only figure who fully displays the Shakespearean completeness.
But the fascination of the play is quite independent of these knots
in the reed. The abundance of it—the cheerful' beginning and
sombre close of the first Sicilian scenes; the partly tragic opening
and pastoral continuation of the Bohemian; the tragicomedy and
coup de théâtre of the end-is very great. But the suffusion of the
whole with quintessenced poetry in the fashion just mentioned is
greater. It appears chiefly in flash of phrase for the first three
acts till the great storm scene at the end of the third, with the
rather severe punishment of Antigonus and the contrasted farce
of the shepherds. But, in the fourth, where comedy and romance
take the place of farce and tragedy, and especially in Perdita's
famous flower speech, it overflows; and there is plenty of it in the
fifth. Had Greene lived to see this dramatising of his story, he
might have been more angry than ever with the upstart crow;
if, as sometimes, though too seldom, happens, his stormy spring
had settled into a mellow early autumn, he ought to have been
reconciled.
But, while the charms of Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale
appear in even greater measure in The Tempest, this astonishing
swan song is open to none of the objections which, from some points
of view, may lie against them. It is almost regular, so far as 'time'
is concerned; its violation of 'place' is very small, being confined
to the limits of one little island; and its 'action' though, of course,
of the English multiple kind, can be plausibly argued to be almost
single in its multiplicity. The working of the spells of Prospero
on all the important members of the shipwrecked crew in their
diverse natures, qualities and importance—for correction on
Alonso, Antonio and Sebastian (though these last two were
probably incorrigible); for trial and reward on Ferdinand; for
well deserved plaguing on Stephano and Trinculo-might have
given more pause to Aristotle 'if he had seen ours,' as Dryden


## p. 207 (#231) ############################################

The Tempest
207
says, than anything else. The contrast of Caliban and Ariel is
almost classical in conception, though ultraromantic in working
out. The loves of Ferdinand and Miranda at once repair and
confirm according to justice the acquisition of Milan by Naples,
which has been unjustly accomplished before the opening. In
the management of the supernatural, too, Shakespeare once more
shows that unique combination of power and economy which has
been noted. But he has not, because of this extra expenditure-if,
indeed, it was an extra expenditure-of trouble, in the very least
stinted the outpouring of beauty on individual character, scene,
passage, phrase or line. Ariel and Caliban among super- or extra-
natural personages, and Miranda, even among Shakespeare's women,
occupy positions of admitted supremacy. Prospero is of extra-
ordinary subtlety; the butler and the jester are among the best
of their excellent class. It is curious that this play makes a
kind of pendant to Much Ado About Nothing in the nearness
with which comedy approaches tragedy, though the supernatural
element relieves the spectator of the apprehension which, in
the other case, is not unjustified. The inset masque, too (to
which there is a faint parallel in Cymbeline), is a remarkable
feature, and adds to the complicated, and yet not disorderly,
attractions of the piece. But these attractions are all-pervading.
The versification, though in part of Shakespeare's latest style, is
of his best, in song and dialogue alike, throughout; and there are
curious side interests in Gonzalo's citation of Montaigne, and in
other matters. But the main charm is once more in the poetry, to
which the prose adds not a little. The vividness of the storm; the
admirable protasis of Miranda and Prospero; Ariel, whenever he
speaks, and Caliban not seldom-give this charm, while Prospero
himself is always a master of it. Indeed, in the great parallel
with Calderon of 'life's a dream,' led up to by the picture of the
vanishing universe, it reaches one of the 'topless towers' of poetry.
To refuse to see an actual leavetaking in this perfect creation with
its (to say the least) remarkable prophecy of the 'burial of the
book’ is, surely, an idle scepticism, considering the weight of
positive evidence of all kinds which supports the idea. At any
rate, if it were not the last, it ought to have been; and, though
there are too many instances of non-coincidence between what
ought to be and what is, we need hardly lay it down as a rule that
what ought to have been could not be. The Tempest is not all
Shakespeare: only all Shakespeare is that. But it may, at least,
be pronounced a diploma piece of Shakespeare's art.
a


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208
Shakespeare
>
The foregoing survey of Shakespeare's plays has been made
rather from the results of a long and intimate familiarity with
their contents, than in reference to traditional opinion in their
favour, or to recent efforts in the opposite direction. Some of these
latter, such as the attacks of the very remarkable young Breton
critic Ernest Hello not long since, and those of Tolstoy, only the
other day, have been made, seriously and in good faith, from points
of view wbich, when allowed for, deprive them of most of their
effect. Others have come from mere mountebankery, or from the
more respectable, but not much more valuable, desire to be unlike
other people. But, apparently, they have had the effect of inducing
some critics who are nearer to the truth to make provisos and
qualifications—to return, in fact, to something like the attitude of
George III, that 'a great deal of Shakespeare is sad stuff, only one
must not say so,' but to put on more show of courage than the
king and dare to 'say so,' with more or less excuse for theatrical
necessities, 'faults of the time,' journeyman's work executed as a
mere matter of business and the like. Perhaps this is only a new
form of cant. For the characteristics of the time something, of
course, must be allowed; with, however, the remembrance that, after
all, they may not be faults when brought sub specie aeternitatis.
But, except in the very earliest plays—not half a dozen out of the
a
whole seven and thirty-and in passages of the middle division, it
may almost be said that there is no 'sad stuff' in Shakespeare,
though there is a great deal of very sad stuff in what has
been written about him. In particular, both the impugners and
the defenders on the theatrical side seem to protest too much.
It is, of course, quite true that all Shakespeare's plays were
written to be acted; but it may be questioned whether this is
much more than an accident, arising from the fact that the drama
was the dominant form of literature. It was a happy accident,
because of the unique opportunity which this form gives of
employing both the vehicles of poetry and of prose. But, though
in a far milder degree, it was unlucky, because nothing has varied
more or more quickly than the popular taste in drama, and, there-
fore, dramatic work has been exposed to even greater vicissitudes
than those which necessarily await all literary performance. Even
here, its exceptional excellence is evidenced curiously enough by
the fact that there has been no time—the last forty years of the
seventeenth century are not a real exception-at which Shake-
speare has not (sometimes, it is true, in more or less travestied
forms) retained popularity even on the stage.
>
2


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Shakespeare's Censors
209
a
But, if we regard his work from the far more permanent, and
less precarious, standpoint of literary criticism, his exceptional
greatness can be shown in divers and striking ways. The chain of
literary dictators who have borne witness to it in their several
fashions and degrees-Ben Jonson, Dryden, Pope, Samuel Johnson,
Coleridge—has been pointed out often enough. It has not, per-
.
haps, been pointed out quite so often that the reservations of
these great critics, when they make them, and the more or less
unqualified disapproval of others, can always be traced to some
practically disabling cause. Ben Jonson held a different theory of
the drama; Dryden, for a time, at least, was led aside by the heroic
play and, for another time, by the delusion that the manners,
language and so forth of the present day' must be an improve-
ment on those of yesterday; Pope, by something not dissimilar to
that which worked in Dryden's case, and Johnson, by something
not dissimilar to that which worked in Jonson's; Coleridge, by
‘his fun'—that is to say, by occasional crotchet and theory.
On the other hand, Voltaire, with all who followed him, differed
partly in point of view, and partly was influenced by the half
concealed, half open conviction that French literature must be
supreme. Patriotism worked in another way on Rümelin, vexed
at the way in which his countrymen, led by the Schlegels (from
the earlier, and too much forgotten, John Elias onwards) and
Goethe, had deified foreigners. Hello was affected by that strange
dread and distrust of great human art which has influenced the
Roman Catholic church almost as much as the extreme protestant
sects, and which descends from Plato through the Fathers. The
mere dissident for the sake of dissent need hardly be noticed; still
less the mountebanks. But it is a certificate of genuineness to
have mountebanks against you; and the heretic, by the fact of
his heresy, goes further than he knows to establish the orthodox-
ness of orthodoxy.
Except from the historical side, however, it is unnecessary to
dwell on this part of the matter. What establishes the greatness
of Shakespeare is the substance of Shakespeare's work. "Take
and read is the very best advice that can be given in reference to
him. It is not necessary, nor at all desirable, to disparage at least
part of the enormous labour that has been spent upon him by
others. But it is quite certain that anyone who, with fair
education and competent wits, gives his days and nights to the
reading of the actual plays will be a far better judge than
anyone who allows himself to be distracted by comment and
14
E. L. V.
CH. VIII.


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210
Shakespeare
controversy. The important thing is to get the Shakespearean
atmosphere, to feel the breath of the Shakespearean spirit. And
it is doubtful whether it is not much safer to get this first, and at
first hand, than to run the risk of not getting it while investigating
the exact meaning of every allusion and the possible date of every
item. The more thoroughly and impartially this spirit is observed
and extracted, the more will it be found to consist in the sub-
jection of all things to what may be called the romantic process of
presenting them in an atmosphere of poetical suggestion rather
than as sharply defined and logically stated. But this romantic
process is itself characterised and pervaded by a philosophical
depth and width of conception of life which is not usually asso-
ciated with romance. And it is enlivened and made actual by
the dramatic form which, whether by separable or inseparable
accident, the writer has adopted. Thus, Shakespeare-as no one
had done before him, and as people have done since far more
often in imitation of him than independently-unites the powers
and advantages of three great forms: the romance (in verse
or prose), pure poetry and the drama. The first gives him variety,
elasticity, freedom from constraint and limit. The second enables
him to transport. The third at once preserves his presentations
from the excessive vagueness and vastness which non-dramatic
romance invites, and helps him to communicate actuality and
vividness.
It is in the examination of his treatment, now of individual
incidents and personages, now of complicated stories, by the aid of
these combined instruments, that the most profitable, as well as
the most delightful, study of Shakespeare consists. But there is
no doubt that, as a result of this study, two things emerge as his
special gifts. The first is the coinage of separate poetic phrases ;
the second is the construction and getting into operation of indi-
vidual and combined character. In a third point-the telling of
a story or the construction of a drama-he is far greater than is
often allowed. After his earliest period, there is very little in any
play that does not directly bear upon the main plot in his sense of
that word. Even in so very long, so very complicated, a piece
.