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Shakespeare's Progress
Also by Frank O'Connor
Guests of the Nation
The Saint and Mary Kate
Bones of Contention
The Big Fellow
Dutch Interior
Crab Apple Jelly
Irish Miles
The Common Chord
Traveller's Samples
Leinster, Munster, and Connaught
The Stories of Frank O'Connor
More Stories of Frank O'Connor
Domestic Relations
Kings, Lords, and Commons
Mirror in the Roadway
An Only Child (in preparation)
Shakespeare's
Progress
BY
Frank O'Connor
THE WORLD PUBLISHING COMPANY
Cleveland and New York
Published by The World Publishing Company
2231 West 110th Street, Cleveland 2, Ohio
Published simultaneously in Canada by
Nelson, Foster & Scott Ltd.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 60-1 1466
Under the title The Road to Stratford this book was published
in somewhat different form in Great Britain in 1948.
HC 1060
Copyright I960 by Frank O'Connor.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form
without written permission from the publisher , except for brief passages
included in a review appearing in a newspaper or magazine.
Printed in the United States of America.
Contents
Introductory Note 9
Preface 1 1
L John Shakespeare's Wild Son 19
2. Maturity 23
3. Disillusionment 35
4. The Early Plays 54
5. The Early Tragedies 68
6. Masterpieces 82
7. FalstaflTandHal 91
8. Before Hamlet 98
9. Hamlet 114
10. The Breakthrough 129
11. The Bad Texts 138
1 2 . Measure for Measure 1 50
13. Antony and Cleopatra 1 70
14. The Baroque Plays 176
Introductory Note
IN the writing of this essay I have been indebted
mainly to Sir Edmund Chambers' William Shake-
speare, and Elizabethan Stage, as well as to the textual
criticism of Professor J. D. Wilson in the New Cam-
bridge Shakespeare. In a more general and perhaps more
personal way I am indebted to Dr. G. B. Harrison's
popular works, Shakespeare at Work, Elizabethan Plays
and Players, and Elizabethan and Jacobean Journals.
I have been compelled to test for myself the correct-
ness of certain ascriptions to Shakespeare and the pos-
sibility that certain works not ascribed to him may
really be his. These are things which no literary critic,
however unscholarly by nature, can take at second-
hand. It would be the negation of criticism to treat
Julius Caesar as a play of Shakespeare's if there were
the slightest possibility that it really was by Marlowe,
and to treat Edivard III as a play of Marlowe's if,
as I am now convinced, it is an early play of Shake-
speare's. But the fact that I have been compelled to do
this and sometimes to disagree with the authorities
does not mean that I regard myself in any way as an
authority, and where I have permitted myself to doubt,
it has been in the spirit of a true child of the Church
who unreservedly submits himself to the censure of
his superiors.
Preface
THIS little book is the result of a few years spent in
the theater and of the discoveries I made there. The
most important of these was that most of the old plays
I loved Shakespeare's, Chekhov's, Goldsmith's,
Sheridan's, and some of Ibsen's could not be satis-
factorily produced at all. Another was that a great
many modern plays I heartily detested could be pro-
duced very successfully and could entertain even my-
self. The reason, as I soon discovered, was that the
former did not create any link between the authors and
the actors or between the actors and the audience,
while the latter were written by men who were them-
selves contemporary with the actors and the audience
so that the whole action became a communal entertain-
ment. Once, when a dramatization of a little story of
my own was being performed, I wrote in a single line
of dialogue about Irish which I put into the mouth of a
middle-class wife. It wasn't a very witty line ; it merely
ran "I never did like that language" but, on the first
night, when I heard the roar of laughter that shook the
theater, I realized to my shame that I could now do
what none of my gods and heroes could do, and use my
players to communicate directly with my audience. No
actor can rouse a laugh with Shakespeare's dirty jokes :
they are unintelligible to the audience, usually unintel-
ligible to the actor, and sometimes unintelligible to
scholars as well.
I once heard a Shakespearean scholar lecture on
11
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
Shakespeare's handwriting in the riot scene of Sir
Thomas More and end by adapting a speech of Mal-
volio's "Here be his 'C's,' his 'U's,' and his TV and
here makes he his great T's.'"
I described my disillusionment in three lectures pub-
lished under the title of "The Art of the Theatre" and
see no reason to revise my conclusions. It is clear that
Shakespeare's plays moved many of his contemporaries
profoundly. All I can say is that they do not move me.
What has happened is that the collaboration between
author, players, and audience that produces great
theater has ceased to exist. Sometimes the dissolution
of that collaboration occurs with such extraordinary
rapidity that people begin to doubt if the critics of any
period are ever in their right minds. It happened after
the death of Synge, when The Playboy of the Western
World suddenly ceased to madden Irish audiences and
charmed them instead. This does not mean that the
Synge-haters who hissed the original Playboy, pro-
duced under Synge's eye, were intelligent. They
weren't; but neither were they hissing the play that I
saw fifteen years later. The same sort of thing hap-
pened in France at the end of World War II when
Giraudoux and Jouvet were both dead, and people
wondered if their memories of the Giraudoux plays
were merely youthful illusions. They weren't. The
masterpieces we saw were real enough, but those who
see them nowadays and for the future will not see the
plays that Giraudoux wrote, that Jouvet produced, and
that we listened to in enchantment. How on earth can
one explain to those who have not experienced it that
elaborate underplaying of long, impassioned scenes
and the sudden explosive overplaying of an apparently
12
PREFACE
unimportant line that any actor in his senses would
have thrown away ?
It is the same fate that must overtake any art which
depends on collaboration as much as the theater does.
What we see, what we hear in a Shakespearean play
today is no longer creation; it is criticism, or rather
theatrical scholarship. No Elizabethan audience view-
ing Hamlet would have seen in Polonius the tendentious
old bore that we see. It would have seen a caricature of
some eminent politician well known to the worldly
members of the audience. We know, in fact, that it
must have seen such a caricature, for in the two earlier
versions of Hamlet, the German text and the First
Quarto, Polonius was called "Corambis" and for some
reason of policy this had to be changed. Obviously it
provided a key to the identity of the original.Today it is
no key, and even if we did know whom Shakespeare was
supposed to be caricaturing, it would still not be a key,
for it would provide us with no hint as to how the part
should be played. I have suggested that the Fortinbras
episodes may be linked with a propaganda campaign
to secure the uncontested accession of James VI of
Scotland a suggestion that seemed fanciful even to
me when I made it, but does not seem so fanciful now
that we know more of Elizabethan propaganda. Richard
II had been used by the Essex faction in precisely this
way, and Elizabeth understood its significance. "I am
Richard II, know ye not that ?" It was an age without
newspapers, and great public issues were discussed in
general terms, by analogy with the behavior of famous
historical figures, in the works of tendentious historians
and historical dramatists. Who "Corambis" was, and
whom the audience understood under the forms of
13
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
Fortinbras and Richard II, are questions unimportant
in themselves but very important as part of the atmos-
phere in which Shakespeare arid his fellows wrote and
performed. It was an atmosphere of excitement and
danger, not unlike that of a newspaper office under a
dictatorship in which editor and staff may yet end up
before a military tribunal. That is an atmosphere we
cannot restore in the theater. Whether Fortinbras is
James VI or not, we cannot make a modern audience
excited over the question of who is to succeed the
dying Hamlet. What was literally a matter of life and
death to Shakespeare and his audience is of no concern
to us.
As performances of Shakespeare are merely criti-
cism of Shakespeare, criticism is often merely perform-
ance. There is Hamlet the philosopher, Hamlet the
mother's boy, Hamlet "the man who could not make
up his mind." Any standard work on Shakespeare will
fill in the fable of the cheerful man who began his
dramatic career in the 1590's, became gloomy about
the turn of the century, and then after six or seven years
brightened up no end and became reconciled to things
as they were. As a description of Shakespeare's prog-
ress from 1 Henry VI to The Two Noble Kinsmen this is
far too vague, and in its implications it is highly mis-
leading.
There is a school of criticism in the United States
which holds that there are a hundred great books, and
that these books may be read and grasped with no
particular recourse to "secondary" criticism: the de-
tails of when an author lived, when he died, what his
marriage was like, whether he was rich or poor, Con-
servative or Liberal indeed, what else he wrote be-
14
PREFACE
sides his "masterpiece/' This I call the "absolute"
school, and it seems to me completely unhistorical.
"But after all, we have Hamlet," it says complacently.
If it has Hamlet it does remarkably little to make it
more intelligible to us.
My own position is simple. It is that no literary
work is an absolute. The writer's medium is much
more imperfect than that of the painter or sculptor.
Within a short time literature becomes an aspect of
history and after a few hundred years begins to become
unintelligible, as Chaucer, to all intents and purposes,
has become unintelligible, and Shakespeare is fast be-
coming unintelligible to any but students. The reader
who wishes to get the full enjoyment out of Shakespeare
must saturate himself to the point of identification with
Shakespeare, the butcher's apprentice from Stratford
who, having got into trouble with a local bigwig, made
for London and became a vagabond player of ill-written
plays ; who learned late in life that he could write the
plays much better than anyone else, and, having ac-
quired a little fortune, returned to his birthplace to
play the gentleman amongst those who had looked
down on him.
Apart from the plays, we know little or nothing
about his life, but the plays themselves form a pattern
of a man's existence in this world. Apart altogether
from the hints we get in the sonnets and in The Merry
Wives of Windsor, where he apparently avenged him-
self on Sir Thomas Lucy for some early grievance, we
can see that Shakespeare was an abnormally sensitive
man, a man on whom every experience left its mark,
and though we usually have no idea what the experience
was, we can always observe its traces, as in the obses-
16
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
sion with suicide that begins in Hamlet and continues
to the end of his career as a dramatist. What made him
so preoccupied for the last ten years of his literary life
with
Those that with cords, knives, drams, precipitance,
Weary of this world's light, have to themselves
Been death's most horrid agents ?
Did someone he loved commit suicide, and did he
himself actually witness the "maimed rites" he so un-
convincingly attaches to Ophelia whose death was the
merest accident ? We have no idea of the nature of the
wound. All we can say is that the wound is there.
The work of every great writer is to a certain extent
an allegory of his passage through life, but this is far
truer of Shakespeare than of most other writers ; first,
as I have said, because he was an abnormally sensitive
man, but also because he was, more than most writers,
intuitive in his approach to literature, not governed as
were, for instance, Ben Jonson, Henry James, or James
Joyce, by the theoretical approach. He adopted a man-
ner or a method with great facility and dropped it with-
out fuss when it had ceased to serve its purpose. This
became a real weakness in his later years when he
lightly took up subjects that he was incapable of han-
dling, but whether as strength or weakness, it kept his
work unmistakably his own and unmistakably personal
in tone.
Accordingly, the student of Shakespeare should sat-
isfy himself that not only has he the pieces of the pat-
tern in the right order, but that he has all the pieces that
are available. He should not take my word for it that
Edward HI, certain scenes in Sir Thomas More, and a
16
PREFACE
great deal of The Two Noble Kinsmen are Shakespeare's
work, but neither should he take the word of a far
greater number of writers that they are the work of
somebody else. Above all, he should decide for himself
whether what Shakespeare revealed of his own inner
life can really be simplified into a pattern of optimism,
pessimism, and resignation.
A final word. Nobody who reads Shakespeare should
forget that Shakespeare was not only a dramatist; he
was a poet as well, and, though it is not as easy to sum-
marize one's impression of language as it is one's im-
pressions of dramatic incidents, it is equally expressive
and equally revealing. Shakespeare's language changed
almost from play to play, and when, as he sometimes
did, he wrote in a few lines after an interval of years,
the change in style is so strident that it stops us dead.
Beginning as a rhetoric in which the meaning scarcely
matters, Shakespeare's language developed through
the most elaborate exploration of meaning into a style
where once more the meaning seems to lose itself in
its own excess.
That is what I understand by Shakespeare's Prog-
ress ; it is the story of Everyman, written by the man
of all men on whom that story seems to have made the
deepest impression.
17
1 . John Shakespeare's
Wad Son
WE identify William Shakespeare first in the world
of letters by a bad joke. Up to the age of thirty
it would have needed a surgical operation to convince
him that puns about "deer" and "hart" were not the
best jokes and the most touching allusions in the world.
The only part of the Shakespeare legend we can con-
fidently pronounce true on the face of it is that which
says he had to leave Stratford because of a misunder-
standing with Sir Thomas Lucy "Lousy Lucy" as he
called him about poaching. For years his literary
capital apart from a large collection of proverbs which
he trotted out on every possible occasion was an
obviously firsthand acquaintance with deer, dogs,
horses, and hawks, and when we read his early plays
like Titus Andronicus and Henry VI, certain words be-
gin to stick in our minds as they stuck in his ; words like
"paling" and "park," "hart," and "single" and "bay,"
and we begin to gather the impression of a most enjoy-
ably misspent youth. Even without knowing that he
had got a girl older than himself into trouble, we should
have to agree that there was probably something to be
said in favor of "Lousy Lucy," who has had the mis-
fortune to acquire the most ghastly sort of immortality,
all because of John Shakespeare's wild son.
A wild boy he certainly was, in spite of the proverbs,
who left home not altogether of his own free will and
with a certain resentful air of braggadocio which comes
out in his plays, even the earliest.
19
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
Such wind as scatters young men through the world
To seek their fortunes farther than at home
Where small experience grows. 1
"Home-keeping youth have ever homely wits/' he
was to write later, without remembering the fable of
the fox and the grapes, and even when he had returned
in middle age, a wealthy, well-traveled man, he could
still look out complacently at the home-keeping youths
of his own generation and fancy them envying him and
regretting their lost opportunities.
What should we speak of
When we are old as you ? when we shall hear
The rain and wind beat dark December, how
In this our pinching cave shall we discourse
The freezing hours away ? 2
But home-keeping youth have the initial advantage
of a settled home, and the adventurous Shakespeare
drifted into acting, which was no career for a fastidious
young man. On the whole, it was a bad time for fastid-
ious young men who hadn't an independent income.
Most of the literary men of Shakespeare's day, though
university trained, were outcasts, almost outlaws, with
the half-savage, unsocial mentality of their kind. An
actor, more particularly an actor who had no share in
the company, was far lower in the social scale even
than they. The advantage to be gained by his London
season was conditioned by the Plague which might
banish him for years to the provinces. Even in London
he played in innyards and makeshift theaters, in broad
daylight and the open air, the companion of clowns,
tumblers, and dancers. His theater, with its stage jut-
* r. of Sh., 1. 2. 2 Cym., III. 3.
20
JOHJV SHAKESPEARE'S WILD SOW
ting out into the audience, was part of that betwixt-and-
between state of things which we associate with Eliz-
abethan England; its architecture which is half
Renaissance, half Gothic, and its prose something
rather isolated by its geographical and religious posi-
tion from the main current of art and thought. So too
the plays in which he acted, written by university men
who had come down in the world, were less according
to "the law of writ" than "the liberty"; less in the
manner of classical models than that of a wild, popular
art in which only the ornaments came from classical
tradition. The fact that he was dealing with a folk art
rather than with an established art form was to be a
source of much trouble to Shakespeare as a dramatist.
Even the style of performance must have been mark-
edly different from ours, for the protruding stage makes
it so difficult for us to imagine how it appeared to con-
temporaries that we find even a great scholar like
Granville Barker writing of "the semi-circle of the
audience" as though the Elizabethan actor acted in one
direction only. To Shakespeare the audience must have
been a circle, and when Hamlet spoke "To be or not
to be" he could not have stood facing one way but must
have swept about the stage, hurling one phrase to the
left, another to the right, like an orator at an open-air
meeting. In the same way, when Polonius and he were
together on the stage they could not have kept the
alignment which modern actors keep but must have
moved about one another like boxers and fencers, so
that the audience saw them from every side.
We may, accordingly, if we choose, imagine our
young scapegrace riding a cheap nag or stealing a lift
on the baggage wagon as the weary procession of
21
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
mummers passed through the hopfields in summer.
Outside some little town they would form up in their
ragged finery, and, with trumpets blowing and feath-
ered hats tossing, parade the town in the manner of a
modern circus. In the innyard they would fall to the
erection of their stage, and the afternoon would see the
townspeople paying their pennies as they came in off"
the street, the more respectable paying an extra penny
to mount into the sheltered gallery. A trumpeter would
sound a blast, and the young man with the long sensi-
tive face and intense eyes would appear and perform
his part in one of those preposterous plays which in
later life would make him shriek with laughter. The
light would fade, the players would perform their
dance, and then the audience would go home, leaving
him to the freedom of the public houses. The platform
and the finery would be packed up
And all our beauty and our trim decays
Like courts removing or like ended plays.
Coming on toward morning he would wake and hear
the trampling of horses and the voices of early stirring
carters in the cobbled yard. "I think this be the most
villainous house in all London road for fleas" and even
as he recorded the phrase, with a smile of amusement,
his heart would turn over with self-pity.
O do thou for my sake with Fortune chide,
The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds
Who did not better for my life provide
Than public means that public manners breeds.
All the tragedy of the fastidious man who has to make
his living in the theater is in that last unforgettable line.
22
2. Maturity
BY the time we first hear of him in October, 1592,
Shakespeare was twenty-eight : already an elderly
man by the standards of his day. Even what we learn
of him at that time does not, however, enlighten us
much.
It seems that the poet and playwright Robert Greene
had died, and a publisher had produced "Greene's
Groatsworth of Wit/' a pamphlet which contains an
attack on some rival playwrights, one of whom appears
to be Marlowe and the other Shakespeare. This is the
passage that seems to identify Shakespeare :
"Yes, trust them not," the pamphlet says, referring
to actors generally, "for there is an upstart Crow, beau-
tified with our feathers, that with his Tiger's heart
wrapped in a Player's hide, supposes he is as well able
to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you : and
being an absolute Johannes factotum, is in his own con-
ceit the only Shakesscene in a country/' 1 The first
italicized passage is a parody of Shakespeare's "O
Tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide" from 3
Henry VI.
Thomas Nashe, the poet, replied to this in a new
edition of his own "Piers Penniless."
Other news I am advertised of, that a scald, trivial, lying
pamphlet called Greene's Groatsworth of Wit is given out
1 "Greene's Groatsworth of Wit" (Bodley Head Quartos).
23
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
to be of my doing. God never have care of my soul, but
utterly renounce me if the least word or syllable in it pro-
ceeded from my pen, or if I were in any way privy to the
writing or printing of it. 2
Then Henry Chettle, a printer and hack writer,
added to the squabble in a book that was registered
for publication on December 8.
About three months since died M. Robert Greene, leav-
ing many papers in sundry booksellers' hands, among others
his Groatsworth of Wit, in which a letter written to divers
playmakers is offensively by one or two of them taken; and
because on the dead they cannot be avenged, they wilfully
forge in their conceits a living author : and after tossing it
to and fro, no remedy but it must light on me. How I have
all the time of my conversing in printing hindered the bitter
inveighing against scholars, it hath been very well known;
and how in that I dealt, I can sufficiently prove. With neither
of them that take offence was I acquainted, and with one of
them I care not if I never be : [presumably Marlowe] the
other [Shakespeare ?], whom at that time I did not so much
spare as since I wish I had, for that as I have moderated the
heat of living writers, and might have used my own discre-
tion (especially in such a case) the author being dead, that I
did not, I am as sorry as if the original fault had been my
fault, because myself have seen his demeanour no less civil
than he excellent in the quality he professes [acting ?] : be-
sides, divers of worship have reported his uprightness of
dealing which argues his honesty, and his facetious grace
in writing, that approves his art. For the first, whose learn-
ing I reverence, and at the perusing of Greene's book, struck
out what then in conscience I thought he in some displeasure
writ; or had it been true, yet to publish it was intolerable;
him I would wish to use me no worse than I deserve. I had
2 "Piers Penniless' Supplication to the Devil" (Bodley Head Quartos).
MATURITY
only in the copy this share; it was ill-written, as sometimes
Greene's hand was none of the best, licensed it must be ere
it could be printed, which could never be if it might not be
read. To be brief I writ it over, and as near as I could fol-
lowed the copy, only in that letter I put something out, but
in the whole book not a word in, for I protest it was all
Greene's, not mine, nor Master Nashe's, as some unjustly
have affirmed. Neither was he the writer of an epistle to the
second part of Gerileon, though by the workman's error,
T. N. were set to the end; that I confess to be mine, and
repent it not. 3
I have quoted these familiar passages in full be-
cause, in spite of their familiarity, they seem to me
to be generally misunderstood no great wonder, con-
sidering Chettle's peculiar syntax. As Shakespeare
and Marlowe were apparently both satisfied that
"Greene's Groatsworth of Wit" was not Greene's
work at all, it is hard luck on his memory that almost
every writer on Shakespeare should believe him to be
the author.
What I gather from the documents is that, for some
reason which is not apparent to us, "Greene's Groats-
worth of Wit" was recognized as a forgery. Thomas
Nashe was blamed, and, whether or not he had any-
thing to do with it, he took fright. Shakespeare, ac-
companied by "divers of worship," called on the printer
and discovered that the manuscript was not in the
handwriting of Greene but in that of the typesetter,
Chettle. Either Shakespeare and his aristocratic friends
called on Chettle, or Chettle called on them :it the
theater and explained how he came to make a fair copy
of Greene's manuscript before submitting it to the
* "Kindheart's Dream" (Bodley Head Quartos).
25
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
licensing authority. As the proof of this had been in his
own possession, we must assume that he also told them
that he had destroyed the original. Asked how it came
about that a certain publication called "Gerileon" con-
tained an item signed "T. N." which was not Thomas
Nashe's work, he admitted his own authorship and
blamed the typesetter for the mistake. Chettle was a
poor specimen of a man. When Gabriel Harvey later
took Nashe to task for the words he had written of
"Greene's Groatsworth of Wit," Chettle furnished
Nashe with an extraordinary testimonial that begins :
"I hold it no good manners, Mr. Nash, being but an
artificer, to give Dr. Harvey the lie, though he have
deserved it by publishing in print you have done me
wrong, which privately I never found. . . ."* Clearly,
he was in a panic, and could only apologize abjectly
to Shakespeare and acquit Nashe of any share in the
slander. He repeated his insults to Marlowe, but by
that time Marlowe had few aristocratic friends.
But at least he showed us that by 1592 Shakespeare
not only had a group of plays to his credit ; he had made
some influential friends. Within the following months
Shakespeare dedicated "Venus and Adonis," and Nashe
"Jack Wilton," to the Earl of Southampton. Another
friend was probably Lord Strange, Marlowe's patron,
who had abandoned him because of the charge of athe-
ism made against him. A third was probably Sir George
Carey.
Shakespeare's earliest works consist of a blood-
thirsty tragedy, Titus Andronicus, a brilliant comedy,
The Taming of the Shrew, and a group of four historical
plays dealing with Henry VI and Richard III obviously
written in sequence. Titus Andronicus is usually re-
4 Nashe, Works, ed. McKerrow.
26
MATURITY
garded as not being Shakespeare's at all, but I am
afraid it is entirely his, and the verbal parallels show
that it is contemporary with the Henry VI group,
"Venus and Adonis," and a number of early sonnets.
The Taming of the Shrew is also believed to be only
partly Shakespeare's, and most editors limit him to the
Introduction and the Petruchio-Katharina episodes.
Thus, according to both Fleay and Chambers, III. 2.
129-150 is by a collaborator. When two great scholars
select from a scene of over 25O lines twenty-one as
being by somebody other than Shakespeare, there
should, one feels, be something spectacularly un-
Shakespearean about them. But look at these two lines
which are among the ones they dismiss.
Which once performed, let all the world say no,
I'll keep my own despite of all the world. 6
What is there about these that is un-Shakespearean ?
Aren't they, on the contrary, so typically Shakespear-
ean that no one in his critical senses could imagine
them written by anyone but Shakespeare ? As we read
them, do our memories not supply echoes from all the
early plays and sonnets : "Though I once gone to all
the world must die" ; "My life, my food, my joy, my
All the world"; "I care not, I, knew she and all the
world"; "For you in my respect are All the World."
The phrase occurs in two other places in the play (II.
1. 284 and IV. 2. 35) and the same authorities assign
one to the collaborator, the other to Shakespeare. Bless
our poor criticism from underminers and blowers-up!
There was no collaborator.
Here, too, as in Titus and 1 Henry VI, Shakespeare
also strikes the characteristic pose that the author of
*r.ofSh., III. 2.
27
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
"Willobie's Avisa" was later to make such fun of; that
of the English Ovid, the man who really knew all about
women the most dangerous of all poses for a man to
strike.
She's beautiful and therefore to be wooed,
She is a woman, therefore to be won.
He strikes another Ovidian pose we shall also hear
more about; that of opposing experience with women
to the academic education of his day.
But to the critic, the most interesting plays of this
group are the historical plays, for here, in a rough-and-
ready sequence, we can see for ourselves how Shake-
speare learned his job as a theater poet. The first part
of Henry VI is a wretched production by any standard ;
that goes without saying. But that does not mean that
it is either a Shakespearean revision of a play by a
syndicate of authors or one that he wrote as a member
of such a syndicate. I have no idea how it came about
that it seems to be the new play of Henry VI which
Henslowe records as having been first produced in the
spring of 1592, at a time when (as we know from
"Greene's Groatsworth of Wit") the fine third part
must already have been in existence, unless Shake-
speare had been carrying it round with him for years ;
but I do not for a moment believe in the "hands" that
scholars identify with such care, and even Sir Edmund
Chambers fails to convince me that "Had Death been
French then Death had died today" or "No more can
I be severed from your side than can yourself yourself
in twain divide" were not written by Shakespeare. In-
deed, as I shall show in discussing the sonnets, the
second passage is so obviously Shakespearean that if
it was written by another hand we are faced with a
28
MATURITY
problem far more difficult than that of how Shakespeare
came to write a rotten play.
The second part of Henry VI is better only in the
sense that it is more competent, and here, at least,
there is no question whatever of Shakespeare's author-
ship, for in the Jack Cade scenes we can all recognize
his characteristic obsession with the idea of public
order. This was a theme that haunted him to the day
of his death. He had a real obsession with mobs, as
though at some time he had himself been caught up in
one and found himself unable to escape. He draws them
with great vividness and even humor, as in the lines he
gives the old lady in Sir Thomas More, who wished to
hear More speak because he had made "my brother,
Arthur Watchins, Sergeant Safe's yeoman," but the
fear always breaks through. Nothing in Julius Caesar
is so vivid as the scene in which the mob tears the poet,
Cinna, asunder. By the time he wrote Troilus and Ores-
sida and Hamlet his fear had become hysterical, and in
all the later plays tragedy is emphasized by the insist-
ence on the disappearance of class distinctions : "preor-
dinance and first decree," "the primogenitive and due
of birth" are falling into contempt; the peasant is gall-
ing the courtier's kibe; reverence that "angel of the
world" which "makes distinction between high and
low" is in bad shape; "the odds is gone," "all man-
nerly distinguishment left out between the prince and
beggar" ; and the end of the world is obviously round
the next corner.
But for all its weaknesses 2 Henry VI mounts stead-
ily, and one can almost perceive the moment when
Shakespeare felt Eleanor and Gloucester come alive
under his hands. Clearly, he liked the play, and about
160O he toyed with the idea of revising it, and scribbled
29
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
in some revisions on the margin in his mature style.
Be what thou hop'st to be or what thou art
Resign to death. 6
He also almost rewrote the final two scenes from the
entry of young Clifford to York's quest for Salisbury.
That winter lion who in rage forgets
Aged contusions, and all brush of time
And like a gallant in the brow of youth
Repairs him with occasion.
These passages have a unique interest for they show
us exactly how Shakespeare worked, piecemeal rather
than wholesale. But for the rest the play has all the
characteristics of the early Shakespeare : the weakness
for proverbs, the fondness for sporting allusions, and
a certain ponderous, coarse poetic power that can be
felt even in half a dozen lines.
The gaudy, blabbing and remorseful day
Is crept into the bosom of the sea;
And now loud-howling wolves arouse the jades
That drag the tragic, melancholy night;
Who with their drowsy, slow and flagging wings
Clip dead men's graves, and from their misty jaws
Breathe foul, contagious darkness in the air. 7
That is not what we should nowadays call a typical
Shakespearean passage as we should call the preceding
ones Shakespearean, but it is characteristic of Shake-
speare in what critics call his "Marlovian" phase. I do
not think it owes anything to Marlowe, whose in-
fluence appears much later in his work. Marlowe was
the one and only Playboy of the Western World, and I
sometimes fancy John Synge must have had something
5 Henry VI, III. 1. 7 2 Henry VI, IV. 1.
30
MATURirr
more than an unconscious recollection of him when he
christened his hero Christopher Mahon. When Mar-
lowe went the round of the London pubs, roaring out
his really atrocious blasphemies and defending un-
natural vice and smoking (before King James made
smoking unfashionable), he was not so much express-
ing views that had been arrived at by any known process
of reasoning as giving a lep to the east while bringing
down the loy on the ridge of his da's skull and leaving
him split to the breeches belt. Marlowe's uproarious
poetry, like Christy Mahon's, is full of radiance;
Shakespeare's, as one can see even from the few lines
I have quoted, has no radiance at all. On the contrary, it
is leaden and sinister. What Shakespeare has, and
Marlowe has not, is weight. He is all the time trying
to make his lines carry more weight, and sometimes
he loads them so much that he breaks their backs. Even
in the seven lines I have quoted there are fourteen
adjectives ; one can see him at his favorite trick of load-
ing up a noun with adjectives as in "The gaudy, blab-
bing and remorseful day," or "Who with their drowsy,
slow and flagging wings" ; and if I had continued to
quote I should have had to produce others like "And
lofty, proud, encroaching tyranny," and "Upon these
paltry, servile, abject drudges." One can see that he
doesn't worry very much about the meaning of the
adjectives so long as there are plenty of them.
One can also see him building compounds under the
impression that a compound is twice as effective as a
simple adjective, as in the "loud-howling wolves";
and a glance through this group of plays reveals dozens
of them: "gentle-sleeping," "earnest-gaping," "bit-
ter-searching," "great-commanding," and even "dead-
killing." In Romeo and Juliet, in the firm conviction
31
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
that five words say five times as much as one, he writes :
"Beguiled, divorced, wrongfcd, spited, slain." Some-
times, by sheer mass, he actually does achieve an effect
of extraordinary solemnity. "The gaudy, blabbing and
remorseful day" is a fine line, whatever it means, and
Queen Margaret's "I stood upon the hatches in the
storm" is a magnificent line.
The opening scenes of 3 Henry F/show Shakespeare
in perfect command of this sort of poetry. They contain
far finer lines than anything in the previous two parts,
but they are the same sort of lines, and the effect they
aim at is largely physical a blow in the midriff or a
knock over the head.
That raught [[reached^ at mountains with outstretched arms
Yet parted but the shadow with his hands. 8
These eyes that now are dimmed with death's black veil
Have been as piercing as the midday sun
To search the secret treasons of the world. 9
Richard III is the masterpiece of this period, and a
masterpiece it is, for all its violence, coarseness, and
vulgarity. It is the same sort of poetry : "I stood upon
the hatches in the storm" or "The gaudy, blabbing and
remorseful day" are lines that might have come out of
Clarence's dream, with its "To gaze upon the secrets
of the deep" or "To find the empty, vast and wandering
air," and that particular sort of poetry went on for
years in Shakespeare's work, even after he had devel-
oped a far subtler technique. Even in Edward III,
King John, and The Comedy of Errors we find lines like
"Even in the barren, bleak and fruitless air" or "Of
the old, feeble and day-weary sun," "And eyeless terror
of all-ending night," "Before the always wind-obeying
8 3 Henry VI, 1.4. 3 Henry VI, V. 4.
32
deep," and "Lord of the wide world and wild watery
seas."
It seems to me great poetry. It is certainly poetry
that aims at a knockout ; that tries to make your hair
stand on end. The trouble with it is that it is merely
poetry. Shakespeare, like Marlowe, was at this time
a poet first and foremost, and to every true poet poetry
is an end in itself. The medium is more important than
the content; or if you care to put it another way, to the
poet plays are merely an occasion for fine verse, and
the stronger the situation, the better the verse is likely
to be. Thus, every poet in the theater has a tendency to
melodrama. It was not only the unsophisticated Tudor
audiences who liked tubs of blood. The poets got quite
a kick out of them too.
As for myself, I walk abroad at night
And kill sick people groaning under walls.
But drama is of a younger house. Poetry is about
oneself and other people in relation to oneself; drama
is about other people and only about oneself in relation
to other people; and it is only occasionally that the
subject that makes for poetry also makes for drama.
Marlowe's plays tell us more about Marlowe than
they do about their characters, as do Yeats's and
Shakespeare's Henry VI plays.
In life, Shakespeare must have been an energetic,
ambitious, passionate man, for all the people in these
plays are of that type ; but the spectacle of so many
people being energetic, ambitious, and passionate to-
gether creates an extraordinarily somber effect, as
though we were being smothered in an atmosphere of
subjectivity; and we find ourselves longing to get out
again into the air and light. Have you noticed how all
33
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
the fine lines in these plays are somber ? How there
seem to be none that have lightness and grace, and how
they seem to attract gloomy imagery like mountains
and seas, darkness and storm ?
Drama happens only when the poet's hard shell of
subjectivity cracks, and when he is half in, half out of
his shell, like the girl in Hardy's poem of the "Des-
ecrated Churchyard/' who dreaded lest "half of her
should rise herself and half some sturdy strumpet."The
poet must not interfere with his own creation except
in the last resort, when his imagination refuses to fol-
low his characters further or when he finally chooses
to identify himself with them in the last gesture of all.
When Shakespeare had completed this group of plays
he had come to a dead end, had reached at mountains
with outstretched arms and parted but the shadow with
his hands. But during those years something happened
to crack the shell of subjectivity, for even in 3 Henry VI
he was feeling his way toward another sort of excel-
lence, the excellence of Edward III and Richard II,
which have nothing shadowy about them. Out of the
roar of the Henry plays comes just one speech that
shows us what the next phase in Shakespeare's devel-
opment was to be the speech of the pious king,
cobweb-thin but piercingly true.
What time the shepherd blowing of his nails
And:
His cold, thin drink out of his leathern bottle. 10
And after the thunder a still, small voice. And it was
so.
"3 Henry VI, II. 5.
34
3. Disillusionment
WE are sometimes inclined to ignore one impor-
tant fact about Shakespeare's life: like many
other provincials, he developed exceedingly late. He
was close to thirty when Richard HI was produced.
Within five years he was the greatest of European
writers ; within ten, perhaps the greatest writer who
has ever lived. Throughout the plays after Richard III,
we see an amazingly swift development that one would
suppose possible only in an adolescent, and parallel
with this we have a group of sonnets that accompany
the development and seem to describe a personal
emotional disturbance sufficient to account for it. This
alone would be enough to justify any curiosity we might
feel about them.
The story, so far as we can gather it from the son-
nets, is that Shakespeare became deeply attached to a
good-looking young aristocrat who apparently refused
to marry the girl his family had chosen for him. At the
same time he was himself in love with a black-haired
married woman "of noted misbehaviour with old and
young," if we are to believe himself. The woman was
attracted to Shakespeare's friend and became his mis-
tress, leaving the poet doubly bereaved. It is ironic that
our English Ovid should have fallen into the very trap
against which Ovid warns his students of the art of
love, for, according to him, to tell a friend of a mistress
was to lose both.
35
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
Unfortunately, if the sonnets do tell us this, which is
far from certain, they tell us very little else. They give
us no clue as to who the young man was, unless, as
seems most likely, he was the "Mr. W. H." of the
dedication. All the identifications of him are mere
guesswork; they do not tell us when the episode oc-
curred or where. Except for the Marriage sonnets,
which were probably in the form of a booklet, they
were written from time to time, sometimes two, some-
times four to a sheet, and by the time they reached the
printer the sheets had been shuffled and the continuity
destroyed.
They are extraordinary poems by a most extraor-
dinary man. The sonnets to the woman begin with
jocose compliments and degenerate into something
very like scurrility. The sonnets to the friend begin in
adoration, but this is soon almost smothered in re-
proaches and complaints. They oscillate in the most
disturbing way between a sociable jocosity and a
shuddering sensibility; a sonnet will begin in the
urbane convention of courtly love with a line like
"These pretty wrongs that liberty commits," and sud-
denly burst into "Ay, me, but yet thou might'st my
seat forbear," which immediately tears the whole
delicate web of convention to shreds and makes it seem
vulgar and commonplace.
One word in particular is repeated over and over
again until it literally dins itself into the reader's brain
the word "all."
Take all my loves, my love, yea, take them all ...
Take all my comfort of thy worth and truth . . .
And by a part of all thy glory live . . .
86
DISILLUSIONMENT
For whether beauty, worth or wealth or wit,
Or any of these all, or all, or more . . .
All frailties that besiege all kinds of blood . . .
To leave for nothing all thy sum of good,
For nothing this wide universe I call
Save thou, my Rose, in it thou art my all ...
Or gluttoning on all, or all away . . .
Sin of self-love possesseth all mine eye,
And all my soul, and all my every part . . .
And thou, all they, hast all the all of me.
To me, at least, this suggests a lacerated sensibility,
a man of great sincerity but of such wild extremes of
emotion that he was completely powerless against his
own attachments; and the very devil for the bright
young things of the sixteenth century who must so
often have bidden him "take life easy as the grass grows
on the weirs." If this was the best the English Ovid
could do in the imitation of ancient Rome, he had a lot
to learn.
Apart from certain minor readjustments suggested
by the Arden editor and Sir Edmund Chambers, no
attempt at rearranging the sonnets has ever proved
convincing. A simple test is the sequence often sonnets
on Immortality, in each of which the concluding couplet
consoles the Friend for the ravages of time by promis-
ing him an immortality of letters. These, at least,
should go together, but Professor Tucker Brooke and
Sir Denys Bray agree on their further dispersal. Profes-
sor Brooke makes the additional and common mistake
of treating the first seventeen sonnets (those addressed
to a young man who does not wish to marry) as the
37
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
beginning of the whole series, which on every ground
of technique is impossible. The earliest may be a couple
of short sequences: one on a journey, the other a
particularly silly one about eye and heart at war for
the privilege of contemplating the friend's beauty.
This bit of nonsense, apparently modeled on Constable,
probably dates from the publication of Constable's son-
nets in 1592. By this time Shakespeare, as we know
from Chettle's references to "divers of worship," had
some powerful friends. The Friend and he had met in
the spring; this was probably the spring of 1592, for
the usual date of 1593 is far too late.
The long sequence apologizing for his silence and
referring to some rival poet is maturer in style but
still far from faultless. In "Greene's Groatsworth of
Wit" there is an image of "a player that being out of
his part at his first entrance is fain to have the book to
speak what he should perform" 1 ; and in Gabriel Har-
vey's description of the grief of Greene's mistress, he
describes Greene as one "that a tenth muse honoured
more being dead than all nine honoured him alive/' 2
It is hard to read these without thinking of Shake-
speare's "unperfect actor on the stage who with his fear
is put beside his part" and his "tenth muse, ten times
more in worth than those old nine which rhymers in-
vocate" ; and the fact that both occur in the Apologetic
Muse sequence may indicate that it was written soon
after September, 1592. The sonnets to the Dark Lady
cannot be much later. In Daniel's poem "The Com-
plaint of Rosamund," published also in 1592, there is a
line "By the revenues of a wanton bed" which seems
1 "Greene's Groatsworth of Wit" (Bodley Head Quartos).
2 Harvey, Four Letters (Bodley Head Quartos).
38
DISILLUSIONMENT
to be echoed in Shakespeare's charge that the Dark
Lady "robbed other beds revenues of their rents." I
doubt if these and the Canker in the Rose sequence
which preceded them can be dated later than 1593.
This date is also suggested by the two long poems,
"Venus and Adonis" (1593) and "The Rape of Lu-
crece" (1594). They are of fundamental importance
in the study of Shakespeare's development, because
like the frosty but beautiful Marriage sonnets they are
written with a wealth of craftsmanship that Shakespeare
rarely expended on everyday jobs. They are generally
treated as academic exercises. For instance, according
to Dr. Harrison, Shakespeare, being inspired by Mar-
lowe's "Hero and Leander," wrote "Venus and Ado-
nis" (which might be politely described as a poem about
a young man who did not wish to get married ) , printed
it, and then set out to find a patron. He found one in the
Earl of Southampton ( also a young man who did not
wish to get married), and Southampton introduced
him into his household, where, following the fashion,
he wrote the sonnets advising his patron to get
married.
I do not think that Shakespeare was influenced by
"Hero and Leander" nor am I altogether satisfied that
Southampton is the Friend referred to in the Dark
Lady sonnets ; but anyhow, the trouble with this ex-
planation is that it involves an obvious coincidence;
and Professor Wilson, with characteristic subtlety,
side-steps this by suggesting that Shakespeare arrived
on Southampton's doorstep one fine morning with a
copy of "Venus and Adonis" and the first seventeen
sonnets, in which a nobleman Shakespeare had never
met was addressed as his "dear love" and advised to
39
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
obey his guardian and get married. Somehow I don't
think it happened just like that.
But there is stranger to follow, for Shakespeare and
the Earl, according to the same eminent authorities,
became fast friends, and Shakespeare entertained the
Earl with another long poem, in which a poor man,
Collatine, tells a princely friend, Tarquin, of the charms
of his wife, Lucrece, and Tarquin, inflamed by the
description, goes off and rapes her. Now, about this
time, Shakespeare, a poor man, was the lover of the
Dark Lady, and his aristocratic friend came on the
scene and made her his mistress. Shakespeare had such
uncanny luck with his long poems that it is small won-
der he gave up writing them.
What I suggest, of course, is that if the poems are
academic exercises, they are uncommonly prophetic;
if not prophetic, they must be an artistic treatment of
the situations described in the sonnets. As I feel sure
that this is what they are, I find it hard to believe that
Lord Southampton, to whom both are dedicated, was
really the Friend of the Dark Lady sonnets. On the
other hand, he may well be the hero of the Marriage
sonnets. There seems to me to be no good reason for
assuming that the sonnets all refer to one young man.
There is what seems to me a distinctly personal note
about some of the passages in "The Rape of Lucrece"
that refer to Tarquin :
Those that much covet are with gain so fond
For what they have not, that which they possess
They scatter and unloose it ...
This is repeated a little later when we are told that
this "ambitious foul infirmity"
40
DISILLUSIONMENT
In having much torments us with defect
Of that we have ; so then we do neglect
The thing we have. . . .
That "the thing we have" was himself, slighted by
a youthful Tarquin to whom he was deeply attached
as attached as only a poor young man can be to an
aristocrat who befriends him is at least suggested by
the way the theme re-emerges in almost identical words
over a period of twenty years. It first comes back in
Much Ado About Nothing ( 1598) with a new conclud-
ing phrase that gives it its characteristic form "Ne'er
loved till lost" ; the adolescent dream of "Then they'll
be sorry."
That which we have, we prize not to the worth
Whiles we enjoy it, but being lacked and lost,
Why then we rack the value . . , 3
We get it again in Measure for Measure ( 1604) :
"For what thou hast not, still thou striv'st to get, and
what thou hast forget'st"; three times in All's Well
That Ends Well (which was probably the old play
Love's Labour's Won that Shakespeare wrote about this
particular time) with its "You are loved, sir. They
that least lend it you shall lack you first" ; "She whom
I ... since I have lost have loved," and :
Love that comes too late
Like a remorseful pardon slowly carried
To the great sender turns a sour offence,
Crying 'That's good that's gone.' 4
We find it twice in Antony and Cleopatra of 1607-8
"the ebbed man, ne'er loved till nothing worth
3 M. .4. jv., iv. i. *A.tr.E.ir.,v.s.
41
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
comes deared by being lacked" and "she's good, being
gone"; in Coriolanus ( 1609) "I shall be loved when
I am lacked," and it makes its final appearance in what
was probably Shakespeare's last play, The Two Nobk
Kinsmen (1613).
For what we lack
We laugh, for what we have are sorry, still
Are children in some kind. 5
The date is also suggested by "Willobie's Avisa,"
a skit on "The Rape of Lucrece" published in the same
year as that poem, 1594. In this, Henry Willobie of
West Knoyle in Wiltshire (a real person as Professor
Hotson has shown, and a relative by marriage of
Shakespeare's friend, Thomas Russell) 6 is described
in a vain courtship of Avisa, wife of the owner of an
inn called The George or The George and Dragon,
which Dr. Harrison, in his brilliant edition of the poem,
identifies with the George at Sherborne in Dorset,
then the home of Sir Walter Ralegh. It may be sig-
nificant that in King John, probably written in the
same year, Shakespeare speaks of
Saint George who swinged the Dragon and e'er since
Sits on his horse back at mine hostess' door. 7
Dr. Harrison shows that the poem is almost certainly
a reply to an attack on Ralegh, against whom a charge
of atheism was investigated by a local commission in
the spring of 1594. Sir Ralph Horsey, one of the Com-
s 7. JV. K. 9 V. 4. 6 Hotson, / William Shakespeare.
* King John, II. 1.
42
DISILLUSIONMENT
mission, is satirized under the name of "Caveileiro/*
but it is not clear what Willobie had done against
Ralegh. He is encouraged in his courtship by his friend,
"W. S.," "an old player/' "who not long before had
tried the courtesy of the like passion and was now
newly recovered of the like infection," and that this is
Shakespeare is shown by a parody of one of his favorite
cadences which the satirist puts into his mouth
She is no saint, she is no nun,
I think in time she may be won.
These verses are so like the Ovidian advice to a
lover printed as Shakespeare's in "The Passionate Pil-
grim" that they may well be from the same poem. But
whether or not they are his, they make it plain that he
did pose as the English Ovid, the amorous smart aleck,
and left himself wide open to ridicule.
The slight circumstantial evidence that might link
" Willobie's Avisa" with the sonnets is that the Friend's
name seems to have been "Will," which might equally
well stand for Willobie, and that there are a couple of
sonnets, definitely not in Shakespeare's manner, which
refer to Bath, which is close to West Knoyle. That the
Friend of the sonnets got the girl while Henry Wil-
lobie is supposed not to have got Avisa would, of
course, mean nothing: the skit would otherwise mis-
fire. At the same time one must take count of Sir
Edmund Chambers' warning that "the like passion"
does not necessarily mean a passion for Avisa; it might
equally mean a disappointment with another woman
the Dark Lady, in fact.
The most important evidence of all is that of Edward
III, a play Tucker Brooke supposes to be by Peele,
43
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
Robertson to be by Greene, and which some Shake-
spearean scholars believe contains two acts of Shake-
speare. I have no doubt whatever that the play is
entirely Shakespeare's. Edward III was registered for
publication late in 1595 and published early the follow-
ing year without an author's name, and as it is a reg-
ular playhouse text of a play that had had its run, it was
presumably produced not later than the end of 1593
or the spring of 1594 that is to say at the time when
Shakespeare was putting the finishing touches to "The
Rape of Lucrece." It deals with a similar subject in a
similar way. King Edward makes love to the Count-
ess of Salisbury, who defends herself more effectually
than Lucrece, "whose ransacked treasury hath tasked
the vain endeavours of so many pens," as the drama-
tist reminds us. In poem and play (as well as in the
Dark Lady sonnets) the offense is magnified by the
offender's rank
basest theft is that
Which cannot cloak itself in poverty. 8
The essence of authority is self-control. Thus Lu-
crece says :
Hast thou command ? By Him that gave it thee
From a pure heart command thy rebel will.
Edward himself says :
Shall the large limit of fair Brittany
By me be overthrown, and shall I not
Master this little mansion of myself?
a Edward III, II. 2.
44
DISILLUSIONMENT
Lucrece says :
The mightier man, the mightier is the thing
That makes him honoured or begets him hate.
Warwick in Edward III says :
The greater man, the greater is the thing
Be't good or bad that he shall undertake. 9
Shakespeare in the sonnets says :
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.
Warwick in the play says :
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds. 10
Plagiarism ? I doubt it.
It is even more curious in a play written at the very
time of the sonnets to find King Edward ordering his
secretary Lodowick to write sonnets on his behalf to
the Countess and then rejecting the first sonnet on the
ground that it is inadequate. This is not only first-rate
comedy; it seems startlingly personal, and adds yet
another question mark to the sonnets themselves.
These are echoed everywhere through the play. In
the beautiful love scenes, Edward, interrupted in his
love-making by the appearance of the Black Prince,
murmurs (as though he were remembering ''Thou art
thy mother's glass and she in thee calls back the lovely
April of her prime" or Lucretius' "Poor broken glass,
I often did behold in thy sweet semblance my old age
newborn") :
I see the boy; oh, how his mother's face
Modelled in his, corrects my strayed desire. 11
Edward III, II. 1. 10 Edward III, II. 1. " Edward III, II. 2.
45
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
There is the echo of another sonnet in the magnif-
icent lines on death.
When to the great Star Chamber o'er our heads
The universal sessions calls to count . . , 12
Perhaps the most startling is the cry of delight with
which the Countess of Salisbury welcomes her brother,
with its echo of the loveliest of sonnets "O summer's
day |" a mer e catch in the breath like Laertes' "O
Rose of May!" or Charmian's "O Eastern Star!"
and the really remarkable fact that one line is the very
proverb that forms the theme of the Dark Lady son-
nets "Too bright a morning breeds a louring day." 13
In passing, I may note that there are some striking
affinities with Measure for Measure which I do not
understand. One of these I must deal with later, but
there are others, like "To be a king is of a younger
house than to be married," which immediately recalls
the mutilated lines from Measure for Measure "Igno-
my in ransom and free pardon are of two (different)
houses," and the fine image of coining
He that doth clip or counterfeit your stamp
Shall die, my Lord; and will your sacred self
Commit high treason against the King of Heaven
plainly imitated in Measure for Measure "coin God's
image in stamps that are forbid." But there are similar
affinities between "The Rape of Lucrece" and Measure
for Measure and they may merely mean that the play
existed in an early form as part of a group of works all
associated with the Dark Lady entanglement.
12 Edward ///, II. 2. Edward III, IV. 9.
46
DISILLUSIONMENT
But the evidence that clinches the authorship of
Edward HI is the identity of style with other Shake-
spearean plays of the same period ; an identity beyond
any possibility of imitation, even if the author of
Edward HI needed to imitate anyone. Whatever the
nature of Shakespeare's emotional experience, it had
an immediate and pronounced effect on his work, which
became more finicking, more restrained, more intel-
lectual. This is particularly marked in his use of what I
may call the "reflexive" conceit. "Thyself thyself mis-
usest," says Queen Elizabeth to Richard III. "Myself
myself confound!" retorts Richard. Of course, there is
nothing unusual about the conceit itself, which is merely
a rhetorical way of saying "You abuse yourself" or
"May I destroy myself." But there is always an impli-
cation of antithesis. Everyone and everything contains
its own opposite by which it is saved or destroyed ; and
this harmonized with a certain duality in the Eliza-
bethan temperament that enabled it to act and at the
same time to watch itself acting, and to see in art and
literature patterns by which to measure its own be-
havior, like Lucrece's seeing, in the picture of the Fall
of Troy, herself as Hecuba and Tarquin as Sinon.
Again, the conceit is not peculiar to Shakespeare ;
Daniel, for instance, also has phrases like "thyself thy-
self deniest" and "greatness greatness mars." But
Shakespeare made more use of it than any other
Elizabethan writer I know of; in fact, he used it to the
point of fatiguing the reader. Adonis, by refus'iig to
become the lover of Venus, like the hero of the Mar-
riage sonnets turns into "the tomb of his self-love to
stop posterity." "So in thyself thyself art made away";
"Narcissus so himself himself forsook." There is no
47
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
hope for Tarquin "When he himself himself confounds,
betrays/' and he must "himself himself seek every hour
to kill/' His crime has made Lucrece "herself herself
detest/' In Edward III the Black Prince must "himself
himself redeem/' and the Countess of Salisbury is not
beautiful "if that herself were by to stain herself"
("Herself poised with herself in either eye" as in
Romeo and Juliet}.
The treatment of the conceit in Edward III is very
elaborate. Warwick says "Well may I tempt myself
to wrong myself," the Countess asks the King to "En-
treat thyself to stay awhile with me," and he tells her
to "take thyself aside a little way and tell thyself a
king doth dote on thee." Here the antithesis is com-
plete, and the character treated both as subject and
object. It is not, as I have said, an infallible sign of
Shakespearean authorship, but when in a scene in
1 Henry VI ', which Sir Edmund Chambers attributes to
his "Hand B" and which he sees "no obvious reason
for not assigning to Peele," I find "No more can I be
severed from your side than can yourself yourself in
twain divide," 14 I require a great deal more evidence
to convince me that the lines are not Shakespeare's,
and Shakespeare's in a very characteristic way.
The conceit is not confined to individuals. Anything
that is capable of being personified may be presented
as an antithesis of which the two parts are identical, as
in "And Time doth weary Time with her complaining"
or "And Tyranny strike terror to thyself" the latter
again from Edward III. "Light seeking light doth
light of light beguile" from Love's Labour's Lost is
an elaboration of another line from Edward HI
" I Henry VI, IV. 5.
48
DISILLUSIONMENT
"With light to take light from a mortal eye." These
lines are merely playful, but there are many passages
where it is impossible to regard the reflexive conceit
in this way, and we are compelled to recognize it as a
rudimentary form of casuistry, a method of breaking
down the fundamental meaning of words/'setting the
Word itself against the Word" like Richard II in
prison. That play gives us a striking example in the
scene where York betrays to Bolingbroke the details
of his son's conspiracy, and his wife argues that he is
not to be trusted since "Love loving not itself none
other can/' (For the contrary view see the sonnet on
self-love: "Love so self-loving were iniquity.") York
tells Bolingbroke to say Pardonne moy instead of "Par-
don" and she retorts that "thou dost teach Pardon
pardon to destroy" and "set'st the word itself against
the word." In the New Cambridge edition Professor
Wilson tells us that the second line is part of the old
play that Shakespeare was revising "Thyself thyself
revisest," in fact.
That this is a form of casuistry is indicated by the
way the conceit is used again and again in scenes where
some character is arguing himself out of an oath. The
classical example is in King John, where Cardinal Pan-
dulph argues altogether too forcibly in this way. Philip,
according to him, "makes faith an enemy to faith,"
swearing against religion, "by what thou swear 'st
against the thing thou swear'st," which is "in thyself,
rebellion to thyself," and since "fire cools fire' and
"falsehood falsehood cures" his only hope of salvation
lies in being twice forsworn. In Edward III there are
no less than three scenes in which the argument hinges
on a breach of faith. Warwick decides to break the oath
49
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
he has sworn to the King for the same reason that the
Cardinal suggests to Philip, because it involves a con-
tradiction in terms.
Well may I tempt myself to wrong myself
When he has sworn me by the name of God
To break a vow made in the name of God. 15
It is all very curious, and very personal, and I should
be inclined to think that Shakespeare was tormented
by a conflict in himself between Catholicism and Prot-
estantism if it were not that the casuistry seems to be
merely part of a greater upheaval that made him ques-
tion all values.
A very illuminating example of the contradiction in
terms is provided by the early passages on death. Put
in the form of the preceding examples, the proposition
is something like "Death destroys Death" : that is to
say all we know of death is the fear of it ; every time we
fear we die, and when we die the fear dies with us, so
death may be said to die as well. The corollary of this
is that life is merely a continuation of the fear of death,
so that by seeking life we seek many deaths.
In the early plays and sonnets we find the proposi-
tion in its simple form. "And Death once dead there's
no more dying then" of the sonnets becomes "The
worst is Death and Death will have his day" and
"Fight and die is Death destroying Death" of Richard
II. In Edward III we get the corollary without the
proposition : "Since for to live is but to seek to die and
dying but beginning of new life."
It may be that Peele (or Greene, as the guessing
Edward ///, II. 1.
50
DISILLUSIONMENT
goes) inferred the proposition, though I do not remem-
ber any example of it in such work of theirs as I have
read; in which case we may also assume that one of
them took a hand in Julius Caesar with its "He who
cuts off' twenty years of life cuts off' so many years of
fearing death" and "Cowards die many times before
their deaths, the valiant never taste of death but once" ;
and also lent his assistance in Measure for Measure,
where we are told that "in this life lie hid moe thousand
deaths" and Claudio, like the Black Prince, finds that
"To seek to live I find I seek to die and seeking death
find life" and the Duke tells us that "That life is
better life past fearing death than that which lives to
fear."
In Edward HI the fear of death is itself treated as a
contradiction in terms, because it is in fact a source of
danger. "If we do fear, with fear we do but aid the thing
we fear to seize on us the sooner," so that fear too
destroys itself.
The spirit of fear that feareth nought but death
Cowardly works confusion on itself. 16
Or as the Bishop of Carlisle puts it in Richard II:
To fear the foe since fear oppresseth strength
Gives in your weakness strength unto your foe. 17
We read the same thing in "The Rape of Lucrece"
but surely, one need not pursue the argument further.
Is it not obvious that the two passages on death which
follow, the one from Edward III and the other from
Measure for Measure, were written by the same man ?
16 Edward ///, IV. 7. Richard //, III. 2.
61
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
For from the instant we begin to live
We do pursue and hunt the time to die.
First bud we, then we blow, and after seed,
Then presently we fall; and as a shade
Follows the body so we follow death. 18
Merely thou art death's fool ;
For him thou labour'st by thy flight to shun
And yet run'st towards him still. 19
That Edward III is all Shakespeare's seems to me
unquestionable ; that it was written shortly after Rich-
ard III and before Richard II and roughly at the same
time as "The Rape of Lucrece" is highly probable. Its
anti-Scottish sentiments would fully account for its ex-
clusion from the Folio. In 1598 there were protests in
Scotland against the fact that "the comedians of Lon-
don should scorn the king and the people of this land
in their play."
If I am wrong in believing that "The Rape of Lu-
crece" is an artistic treatment of the situation described
in the Dark Lady sonnets, then the coincidence that
Shakespeare should write such a poem before the situa-
tion occurred becomes phenomenal, for in Edward III
not only does he handle the same situation with obvious
biographical detail but actually uses the proverb on
which the Dark Lady sonnets are based. "Too bright a
morning breeds a louring day/' I have no belief in
either coincidence, and feel certain that "The Rape of
Lucrece" and Edward III both spring from the same
emotional experience as the sonnets, and accordingly
conclude that the experience was over and done with
toward the end of 1593; and that it was to this ex-
is Edward III, IV. 4. M. for M., III. 1.
52
DISILLUSIONMENT
perience that the poetaster of "Willobie's Avisa" was
referring when in the summer of 1594 he described the
"old player," "W. S./' as "newly recovered" from
the infection.
But this was no ordinary emotional experience if,
indeed, Shakespeare ever had an emotional experience
that was ordinary. It shattered Shakespeare, and turned
him from the aggressive, ambitious poet of the Henry
VI plays, with his traveling salesman's view of love,
into the poet of Richard II and A Midsummer Night's
Dream.
53
4. The Early Plays
THE antithesis of the reflexive conceit seems to
have satisfied some fundamental contradiction in
Shakespeare's own nature because all through the son-
nets he is doing with the personal situation exactly
what he is doing with the words. He is breaking down
the terms. I do not mean only those sonnets in which
he openly uses the conceit : "Thou of thyself thy sweet
self dost deceive" and "That 'gainst thyself thou
stick'st not to conspire/' I mean principally those in
which he identifies the Lady and the Friend with him-
self and himself with both; the same identification we
find in The Comedy of Errors and The Two Gentlemen of
Verona. This identification looks literary; it certainly
began by being literary, but somewhere along the line
it became true.
He asks the Dark Lady :
Can'st thou, O cruel, say I love thee not
When I against myself with thee partake ?
He says more or less the same thing to the Friend.
O how thy worth with manners may I sing
When thou art all the better part of me ?
What can mine own praise to mine own self bring
And what is't but mine own when I praise thee ?
Within a short time he is suspecting the Friend of
infidelity with the Dark Lady and using precisely the
same conceit.
64
THE EARLY PLAYS
When thou shalt be disposed to set me light
And place my merit in the eye of scorn
Upon thy side against myself I'll fight,
And prove thee virtuous though thou art forsworn.
Then the Friend becomes the lover of the Dark
Lady and we get it again.
Thy adverse party is thy advocate
And 'gainst myself a lawful plea commence.
At the same time he applies the formula to the wom-
an, and on the ground that the Friend is also himself
consoles himself half jocosely, half sentimentally with
the idea that since she loves his Friend, "she loves but
me alone/' To admit any blame, the reflexive conceit
must be duplicated and negate itself, making a typical
bit of early Shakespearean logic, quite absurd but per-
fectly lucid.
Then if for my love thou my love receivest,
I cannot blame thee since my love thou usest,
But yet be blamed if thou thyself decei vest
By wilful taste of what thyself refusest.
Whatever this is, it is not all jocosity. It reads more
like the description of a profoundly subjective nature
which tends to regard other people merely as exten-
sions of itself, and tears itself asunder in the attempt to
argue that there are no extensions of human personality,
that from the beginning to the end it remains forever
alone and aloof. It is the little death we must ah face,
but fortunately for us, we usually face it when we are
still adolescent. It is not often that we find it occurring
in a man of thirty.
65
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
The work reveals this change in a most startling
way. First we see the English Ovid at the beginning of
his career, the man who knows all about women.
She's beautiful and therefore to be wooed;
She is a woman, therefore to be won.
A little later we see him again in Titus Andronicus.
She is a woman, therefore may be wooed.
She is a woman, therefore may be won. 1
And again in Richard III ':
Was ever woman in this humour wooed ?
Was ever woman in this humour won ? 2
We see him as others saw him, in "Willobie's
Avisa," still clutching his Ovid.
She is no saint, she is no nun;
I think in time she may be won.
And then comes the revelation of the sonnets, the
sudden cry of the man in the snare :
Gentle thou art, and therefore to be won;
Beauteous thou art, therefore to be assailed ;
And when a woman woos what woman's son
Will sourly leave her till she have prevailed ?
Ay, me, but yet thou might'st my seat forbear . . .
In that last line, am I wrong in thinking that we can
hear, in the words of the lovely Welsh epigram, "the
sound of the little heart breaking" ?
Take one final example from the noble sonnet on
self-love ("the most inhibited sin in the canon") with
* T. A., II. 1. 2 Richard III, I. 2.
56
THE EARLY PLAYS
its profound statement of the narcissism that is at the
base of all Elizabethan life and art, and notice how the
love of self, to evade the contradiction in itself, diverts
itself outward (the opposite of the contradiction in
Richard II "Love loving not itself none other can").
But when my glass shows me myself indeed,
Beated and chopped with tanned antiquity,
Mine own self-love quite contrary I read;
Self so self-loving were iniquity.
"Tis thee, myself, that for myself I praise,
Painting my age with beauty of thy days.
Is it not certain that at this point Shakespeare, from
mere convention and jocosity, has worked down to a
fundamental contradiction in his own personality; an
egotism so overweening that it can only transcend it-
self and become abnegation; a subjectivity so over-
powering that it can only break free and objectivize
itself; that this is the cracking of the shell, the splitting
of the personality by which Richard III becomes Richard
II, and Aaron, Shylock ; Falstaffthe hero and Prince Hal
the butt ? At this period I feel in Shakespeare a duality
that is almost neurotic, as though he might quite easily
have walked into a room and found himself sitting
there. To me it is as though at last the antithesis has
become flesh; I does not cease to think and feel with
the same blind human passion, but on the very summit
of frenzy, / suddenly becomes you and between them a
universe is born.
The change can be seen at once in the half-dozen
plays that follow : the three "learned" comedies, The
Comedy of Errors, written at some time before Christ-
mas, 1594, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and Love's
57
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
Labour's Lost, with their companion histories, Edward
III (1593-94), Richard II, and King John. A fourth
comedy, Love's Labour's Won, referred to in 1598 by
Francis Meres, has been lost; it was probably the
original version of All's Well That Ends Well, and the
one surviving scene from the old play shows that it
was related thematically to the Marriage sonnets. The
prose of this scene on the subject of "Virginity destroys
itself" is almost a transcription of the sonnets. I know
no way of assigning certain dates to any of these plays
or determining in what order they were written. They
form one group, all done with great care, and with the
spidery, almost old-maidish neatness of the sonnet
period ; but my impression is that Richard HI, Edward
III 9 and Richard II were written in that order, at a
lick, and almost without an interval.
It may be only a fancy that the earliest is Love's
Labour's Lost, which is the last word in literary artifice.
Sir Edmund Chambers dates it 1 595 ; Professor Wilson
1593. The latter is probably right, but the play bears
clear evidence of later revision. The most interesting
effect of this has been a change in the last act. The
Quarto prints at the end of the play the mysterious
phrase "The words of Mercury are harsh after the
songs of Apollo/' to which the Folio adds the still more
mysterious "You that way; we this way/' Of the for-
mer, Professor Wilson can only suggest that it "may
conceivably have been a comment on the play by some-
one to whom he [Shakespeare]] had lent it for perusal/'
But obviously "The words of Mercury are harsh after
the songs of Apollo" is the entry line for an ambassador,
and it would seem that in the original production the
clowns and comedians ended their little masque and
58
THE EARLT PLATS
sang their two charming songs before the arrival of
the ambassador, Mercade. The play then ended with
the separation of the pairs of lovers "You that way;
we this way" but the wistful, inconclusive ending
was unpopular, so Shakespeare broke up the masque by
the quarreling of the comedians in order to give them
a re-entry at the end of the play, which thus closes on a
happier note.
Another example is a speech of Costard's at the end
of IV. 1 "Armado to th f one side, O a most dainty
man." The irrelevance of this has troubled several
commentators. Actually, it belongs immediately after
the exit of Armado and Moth in III. 1, and has found
its way here owing to an amusing mistake of Shake-
speare himself. He remembered that the cue contained
the word "incony" "my incony Jew!" and inserted
it after a couplet referring to "most incony vulgar
wit." It should precede "Now will I look to his re-
muneration," but like other misplaced passages in the
play it strongly suggests that there was a complete
revision, and that the jokes about "remuneration" and
"guerdon" were written in for Kempe.
Apparently Love's Labour's Lost is immensely top-
ical, and the various allusions have been read as a
lighthearted criticism of the academy established in
his home by Sir Walter Ralegh under the tutorship of
the astronomer, Harriot. Ralegh himself is supposed
to be caricatured as Armado, Nashe as Moth, Chap-
man or Gabriel Harvey as Holofernes. Undoubtedly,
the members of this group, Lord Strange and Sir
George Carey, were people Shakespeare might be ex-
pected to be friendly with, but I am quite certain that
neither Ralegh nor Harvey is hinted at in any way : the
39
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
former because it would not have been safe, the latter
because such a vindictive man, who was fully aware of
everything that went on in London, would never have
written as he did of Shakespeare's work if Shakespeare
had caricatured him. Love's Labour's Lost was pro-
duced at court at Christmas, 1597 imagine producing
a satire on Ralegh before the Queen!
The only topical reference that has been identified
with anything approaching certainty is Holofernes'
"Piercing a hogshead!" which is generally accepted
as an echo of Nashe's "Piers Penniless" and Harvey's
gibe about piercing a hogshead "She knew what she
said that entitled Piers the hogshead of wit: Penniless
the tosspot of eloquence : and Nashe the very inventor
of asses. She it is that must broach the barrel of thy
frishing conceit . . ." 3 Undoubtedly, Shakespeare was
interested in this literary free-for-all because there are
other echoes of it in his work, but I am not sure that the
jokes if you can call them jokes about "piercing"
and "purse" and "hogshead" would not have been
equally topical during the controversy about Martin
Marprelate (1588-89), in which a Dissenting pam-
phleteer attacked the Anglican bishops, particularly
with the appearance of "Ha' Ye Any Work for
Cooper ?" which gave rise to a lot of wisecracks about
tubs and hogsheads. The joke about Judas hanging
himself on an Elder would certainly refer better in a
discussion about the dissenting groups, as might the
mysterious joke about Holofernes and the Fathers.
There is a clear echo of it in :
the corner-cap of society
The shape of Love's Tyburn that hangs up simplicity. 4
3 Harvey, "Piers' Supererogation." 4 L. L. L., IV, 3.
SO
THE EARLY PLATS
Here the last word should almost certainly be "im-
piety/' and the reference to the corner-cap of Tyburn
must be a contrast to the four-cornered cap of the
bishops ; or, as Lilly puts it : "There's one with a lame
wit which will not wear a four-cornered cap, then let
him put on Tyburn which hath but three corners/' 6
This probably refers to the execution of John Penry,
the supposed Martin Marprelate, on June 2, 1593.
The play deals lightheartedly with a group of young
men who forswear love for culture and instantly break
their vows, and gives Shakespeare a magnificent op-
portunity for indulging his passion for casuistry. The
keynote is the word "forsworn," which rings out here
as it does in King John ; there are masses of logic-
chopping and contradictions in terms, and a remarkable
identification of the author and the Dark Lady with
Berowne and Rosaline. This is beyond question, for
though it might have been a coincidence that Rosaline,
like the Dark Lady, should be "a whitely wanton with
a velvet brow and two pitch-balls stuck in her face for
eyes," and an extreme of coincidence that in the almost
contemporary Romeo and Juliet, Romeo should be
"stabbed with a white wench's black eye" (also be-
longing to a lady called Rosaline), no comic dramatist
in his senses, would, unless he were indulging in a
private joke, deliberately destroy his heroine's char-
acter as Shakespeare does Rosaline's :
Ay, and by Heaven, one that will do the deed
Though Argus were her eunuch and her guard. 6
This is very like the writing of a man who knows
that the girl and her friends are in the theater and will
5 Lilly, "Pap with a Hatchet." L. L. L., III. 1.
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
laugh louder than anyone. Berowne, I have always
suspected, is a part that Shakespeare wrote for himself.
One might also guess that the Dark Lady's name was
some form of Rose.
All the comedies have what seem to be echoes of
that entanglement. The identification of the poet with
the Friend, which is the theme of the personal sonnets,
is repeated in the love scenes of The Comedy of Errors.
O, how comes it
That thou art then estranged from thyself?
Thyself I call it, being strange to me. 7
As take me from thyself and not me too. 8
We also get the echo of "When thou art all the
better part of me" in:
It is thyself, mine own self's better part. 9
Apart from a few passages, says one editor, "it
[The Comedy of Errors^ might have been written by
anybody/' though "anybody" here must, I feel sure,
refer to the actor who, according to Dowden, wrote
the vision scene in Cymbeline. If Anybody can produce
evidence of his identity he may be certain of a substan-
tial check on account from any theater in the world.
The Comedy of Errors is a brilliant adaptation; the
cutting in of the subplot is done with dazzling skill
the skill of the beginning genius for whom literary
creation is not yet the business of doing new things but
of doing old ones better than they have ever been done
before. The play is full of lovely clean strokes of com-
edy like "God and the ropemaker bear me witness that
7 C. of ., II. 2. s C.of .,!!. 2. C. ofK, III. 2.
62
EARLY PLATS
I was sent for nothing but a rope" ; and from few of
Shakespeare's plays do I get the same impression that
I can hear the writer's own happy laughter as he wrings
another squeeze from the dramatic blue-bag.
What one may say in criticism of it is that, like all
classical theater, it is unsuitcd to the Elizabethan stage
and is probably more effective in our day than it was
in Shakespeare's. The Elizabethan actors, sealed off
by the audience like boxers or fencers, were their own
background, properties, and lighting. Since in art
every liberty implies a restriction, the poet had to
shift his scene and lighting as frequently as a film pro-
ducer. The platform stage, like the screen, demanded a
certain apparent casualness: it made its effects by a
series of brief scenes, all with a slight air of incon-
sequence, as though they had been written in to fill
out the time, and by sharp, poetic contrasts of gravity
and farce, night and dawn, woodland and town, suc-
ceeding one another without a break. In Troilus and
Cressida a man walks across the stage exchanging a few
gloomy reflections with his brother; in / Henry IV a
group of carters we have never seen before and will
never see again chatter in an imaginary innyard about
the absence of chamber pots. It is a mistake in reading
Tudor plays to seek for qualities that are not there; a
grievous mistake, for example, to imagine that Ilidwrd
II improves, or ever was intended to improve, upon
the haphazard structure of the chronicle. Chronicle is
the essence of the matter.
The Two Gentlemen of Verona ought to be a more
interesting play than it is, as quite apart from recol-
lections of the sonnets such as we find in T/ie Comedy of
Errors it has a distinctly personal note. It must be
63
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
almost contemporary with The Comedy of Errors, for
it is shaped exactly like it, and, though romantic in
content, has the same urbane lack of romantic color.
It may be based on an older play, but at another remove
is certainly based on the story of Felix and Felismena
in Montemayor's endless and pointless romance, Diana
in Love. In that story Felismena (Shakespeare's Julia)
is courted by Felix (Proteus) with the help of her
maid. Felix leaves and Felismena, disguised as a boy,
goes in pursuit. She puts up at an inn in the town where
she knows him to be. Late that night she is summoned
by the landlord to listen to a serenade that is being
given to Lady Celia (Shakespeare's Sylvia) and rec-
ognizes the voice of her faithless lover's serving man.
Later she becomes Felix' page and courts Celia on his
behalf. Like Olivia in Twelfth Night, Celia falls in love
with Felismena and dies of grief. Felismena takes to
the road again, and after many adventures finds a man
being attacked by several knights. When she has
rescued him she discovers that it is Felix, and he
penitently marries her.
The later development of the plot was abandoned by
Shakespeare as it did not suit the subplot he tagged on
to it. His Proteus not only deceives Julia, but also his
friend, Valentine, who is Sylvia's sweetheart. If one
accepts at all the view that there is a factual element in
the sonnets (and I see no way of escaping it), one is
bound to admit that the subplot identifies Proteus with
the Tarquin of the Dark Lady sonnets the third lit-
erary work in which Shakespeare went over the ground
and to spare some sympathy for the unfortunate
young nobleman who happened to cross the thin-
skinned and exacting poet in his love affair.
64
THE EARLY PLATS
In spite of a wretched text, the play moves beauti-
fully up to the last act, and then goes to pieces. The last
act is not Shakespeare's, for whoever cut down the
play for indoor performance did not think it exciting
enough and substituted an ending of his own. Sylvia's
father, the Duke, wishes her to marry Thurio, also a
duke, and exiles Valentine, who takes refuge with
some outlaws in the woods. Sylvia, escorted by the
gallant Sir Eglamour, sets out to join him, and is pur-
sued by the faithless Proteus, Julia (still disguised as
a page), the Duke, and Thurio. Sylvia and her escort
are attacked by the outlaws, and Sir Eglamour myste-
riously runs away. She is rescued by Proteus who,
finding her at his mercy, decides to rape her, and she
is saved only by the appearance of Valentine. Then
Proteus repents and Valentine generously says "All
that was mine in Sylvia I give thee"; Julia faints as
well she might her identity is revealed, and every-
thing ends happily for everybody except the audience,
who for two hours have been patiently waiting for
somebody to break Proteus' neck.
That the play was cut and the last act botched is
shown by Professor Wilson in the New Cambridge
edition of the play, and his conclusions are substantially
correct. Sir Edmund Chambers does not think that any
scenes or incidents have been omitted, but at least one,
overlooked even by Professor Wilson, will be obvious
to anyone who understands the theater. In the last
scene of the so-called second act, we see Julia deriding
to dress up as a man and go in search of Proteus. In
the second scene of the fourth act ( an exceedingly wide
gap) we find Proteus, Thurio, and the musicians ready
to serenade Sylvia. There enter two figures, a man
65
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
and a boy, and the following brief dialogue ensues,
immediately before "Who is Sylvia ?" For the purpose
of the illustration I conceal the identity of the pair.
Now, my young guest, methinks you're allycholy :
I pray you, why is it ?
Marry, mine host, because I cannot be merry.
Come, we'll have you merry : I'll bring you where
you shall hear music, and see the gentleman you
asked for.
But shall I hear him speak ?
Ay, that you shall.
That will be music.
Hark! Hark!
Is he among these ?
Ay; but peace! let's hear 'em. 10
Now, from this snatch of dialogue, if we accept Sir
Edmund Chambers' view, an Elizabethan audience
tumbled to the fact that the boy was Julia, whom they
had previously seen only as a girl ( a much more serious
difficulty then than now as the audience had no means
of knowing whether a boy represented a real boy or a
girl masquerading as a boy) ; that she was no longer
in Verona, where they had last seen her; that she had
put up at an inn where she had inquired for Proteus,
and that the gentleman escorting her was in fact the
landlord of that inn! All that from a casual "my young
guest" and an equally casual "mine host/' This is the
sort of thing that makes a theater man smile ; his points
have to be made so much more brutally. Even with a
cast that needed no doubling of parts, and a woman to
play the part of Julia, it would still be impossible to
convey all the information that the scenario requires
"> r. G. K, IV. 2.
66
THE EARLY PLATS
in a few lines like these. The source shows what has
happened : the scene in the inn has been awkwardly
telescoped into the scene under Sylvia's window, and
the whole carefully built-up structure of emotion lead-
ing to Julia's disillusionment has been demolished.
A glance through Diana in Love shows what the
original ending must have been. Sylvia and Sir Egla-
mour must have been taken prisoner by the outlaws
in the absence of Valentine. Then the outlaws must
have attacked Proteus and Julia and been driven off by
Julia. Only then would Valentine and Sylvia have ap-
peared, and in explaining his pursuit of her, Proteus
would have had to admit his treachery. It may be that
at this point Valentine did actually use the line "All
that was mine in Sylvia I give thee," which is far too
close an echo of "Take all my loves, my love, yea, take
them all" to be lightly discarded as an invention of
the botcher.
Again, what has happened is that the botcher, having
to cut down the play for performance in a private house
or an indoor theater, realized that only Sir Eglamour's
character stood between him and the possibility of tele-
scoping the two scenes that tied up the two original
plots independently, as well as giving the play the
added beauty of a projected rape. A man of the theater
with a facility for writing verse could undo a lot of the
damage, and I suspect that careful restoration would
show The Two Gentlemen as a play of great charm and
a worthy companion piece to The Comedy of Errors.
5. The Early Tragedies
WHEN he had written Richard ///, Shakespeare
had come to the end of the York and Lancaster
series so far as he could handle it, and I feel sure that
without a break he switched back and began again at
the other end with Edward HI and Richard II. As I
have said, there is no doubt in my mind that the first
two acts of the former play, dealing with the courtship
of the Countess of Salisbury, were inspired by the Dark
Lady episode and are contemporary with the treatment
of the same subject in "The Rape of Lucrece."
But the contrast with Richard III is startling. The
dramatic method is a rudimentary form of the method
that Shakespeare was to stick to off and on for the next
ten years. He throws over the playboy type of hero
exemplified in Richard II I. In literature, character can-
not be expressed through pure feeling. By its very
nature character is ambiguous and can be represented
only by the focusing of two independent pictures in one.
Usually, one gets this stereoscopic effect when the
tragic image blends with the comic one "Reality is
expressed through contradiction," as Yeats used to
quote. We can see this very clearly if we compare the
wooing of Anne in Richard III with the wooing of the
Countess of Salisbury in Edward III. Anne and Richard
are cut from the same piece of material. It is only an
accident that Anne is the widow of Richard's victim,
and she does no violence to her own nature when she
becomes the murderer's wife. The typical Ovidian
THE EARLr TRAGEDIES
figure of the early Shakespeare, "she is no saint, she
is no nun." But the Countess is a very different sort of
person from Edward, and though Edward, like Richard,
is willing to wade through rivers of blood to get what
he wants, he is also capable of absurdity, tenderness,
and even nobility. At the very height of his love-making,
the Black Prince enters and makes Edward think of the
Black Prince's black mother, so that the dream of pas-
sion is dissipated for a moment.
I see the boy, O how his mother's face,
Modelled in his, corrects my strayed desire! 1
Even at the most intense part of the action, Shake-
speare is not afraid to stand back and poke fun at him,
a liberty one could hardly take with Richard. According
to Tucker Brooke the play does not contain "a vestige
of comedy," but there are few scenes in the early Shake-
speare so amusing as that in which the King, having
ordered his secretary to write sonnets to the Countess,
rejects the first sonnet because it seems to him inade-
quate. This is not only excellent comedy ; it is auto-
biographical comedy.
Unfortunately, Edward HI \s impossible in a modern
theater unless we treat the first two acts as an inde-
pendent play ; for they contain an absolutely magnif-
icent part for a star actress, whose very existence is
forgotten after the second act, and scenes equal in
power to any in the great tragedies. No modern audi-
ence would tolerate such an anticlimax. But Shakespeare
was not writing for a modern audience ; he was writing
for one that paid its pennies to hear all about its ancestors
and how they had given hell to the Scots and French.
i Edward III, II. 2.
69
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
Indeed, the most Shakespearean scene of all is that
before the battle of Poitiers. The Black Prince's speech,
as Shakespeare got it from Froissart, was a typical bit
of military rhetoric. "Now, my gallant fellows, what
though we be but a small body compared to the army
of our enemies, do not let us be cast down on that ac-
count, for victory does not always follow numbers, but
where the Almighty God pleases to bestow it," etc. etc.
Audley's speech is the same sort of stuff. "Dear sir, I
must now acquaint you that formerly I made a vow, if
ever I should be engaged in any battle where the king
your father or any of his sons were, that I should be
foremost in the attack, and the best combatant on his
side or die in the attempt/'
Shakespeare's mood at the time can be seen perfectly
in his treatment of this material. There was no difficulty
in turning Froissart into blank verse ; he could do it on
his head, and if certain speeches in Henry ^can be con-
sidered a fair example, he frequently did. Instead of
doing that he suddenly withdraws himself completely
from the action, and, thinking of his beloved contradic-
tion in terms, breaks into pure lyric poetry.
PRINCE. Thou art a married man in this distress
But danger wooes me as a blushing maid :
Teach me an answer to this perilous time.
AUDLE Y. To die is all as common as to live :
The one inchwise, the other holds in chase ;
For from the instant we begin to live
We do pursue and hunt the time to die :
First bud we, then we blow, and after seed,
Then presently we fall; and as a shade
Follows the body, so we follow death.
70
THE EARLY TRAGEDIES
This is not the method of Richard IH\ clearly it is
the method of Richard II. Some supposed borrowings
by Daniel between two editions of his great poem/ 'The
Civil Wars/' have caused the latter play to be dated
1595, but since Professor Wilson exploded this theory
it is hard to see how Shakespeare's play could have
been written after Daniel's poem, since historically and
critically it immediately follows Edward III, probably
in the spring of 1594. It is a sequel to an excellent play
about Thomas of Woodstock, which is probably the
work of Shakespeare's friend, Michael Drayton. The
characters are still rather stiff: there is a Welsh captain
to whom Holinshed's lines on the withering of the bay
trees are given, but nothing else shows him to be a
fellow countryman of Glendower ; we meet Hotspur
for the first time, but, so far as the audience is con-
cerned, his name might as well be Coldspur. Nowhere
does the treatment compare with Daniel's masterly
narrative. In the poem the popular hero, Bolingbroke,
approaches Richard's favorite, Norfolk, with com-
plaints of the government that Bolingbroke hopes
Norfolk may help to remedy. Instead, Norfolk repeats
the complaints to Richard, who takes them personally
and confronts Bolingbroke with them. Bolingbroke
returns the accusations of disloyalty on Norfolk, and
the stage is set for their single combat at Coventry
when Richard, realizing that a victory for Bolingbroke
will only increase his already dangerous popularity,
resolves the problem by exiling enemy and frienc' alike.
Instead of this admirable intrigue, Shakespeare has
only the empty pageantry of Holinshed.
But halfway through the play there is a remarkable
change of mood. Richard, the silly ruffian who had
71
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
taunted an old man on his deathbed, becomes in defeat
the image of a great man cast down. The delicate
political situation required some literary acrobatics.
The popular imagination identified Queen Elizabeth
with Richard and Essex with Bolingbroke, and it was
dangerous to commit oneself too completely to either.
But Shakespeare went farther than was necessary.
Exactly as he did in Edward III, he read into Richard
the processes of his own elaborate and very curious
mind. In the Dark Lady sonnets he had imagined him-
self the advocate of the Dark Lady and the Friend,
pleading the case against himself, and in the same way
Richard tells the rebels :
Nay, if I turn my eyes upon myself
I find myself a rebel with the rest. 2
The identification is complete when we find Richard
fascinated by the contradiction in terms that fascinated
Shakespeare himself.
My brain I'll prove the female of my soul,
My soul the father : and these two beget
A generation of still-breeding thoughts ;
And these same thoughts people this little world
In humours, like the people of this world
For no thought is contented. The better sort
(As thoughts of things divine) are intermixed
With scruples, and do set the Word itself
Against the Word. 8
Setting the word itself against the word is, as I have
said, a development of the simple conceit "Myself my-
self confound" and it is something much more than a
2 Richard II, IV. 1. Richard //, V. 5.
72
THE EARLY TRAGEDIES
mere literary ornament. It is its application to a
psychological problem that gives Richard II its aston-
ishing quality. In this play, from the critic's point of
view, subject and treatment are never fully equated;
the emotion portrayed has no full formal equivalent,
and the blinding self-pity with which Richard is in-
vested always transcends the dramatic content and
spills over like honey from a pot. The abdication scene
is not an abdication, but a crucifixion and was so
regarded by Shakespeare and if the producer is not
to embarrass an audience he must at any cost repress
his principal actor.
The method here is crude; it is almost a theatrical
confidence trick, but it comes off', and in doing so
makes the rest of Elizabethan tragedy look like the
hope of orphans and unfathered fruit. What it does in
practice is to lower the key of tragedy by several pegs,
as comedy lowers it in Edward III, and so bring tragic
poetry within Shakespeare's lyric compass. One can
immediately detect the difference in quality. This is
verse in which the meaning of the words has been
sifted, in which Shakespeare has "set the word itself
against the word." No one really wants to know the
meaning of the adjectives in lines like "The gaudy,
blabbing and remorseful day" or "To find the empty,
vast and wandering air" or "Of the old, feeble and day-
weary sun." They are aimed at the midriff, not the
head. It would seem as though Shakespeare had not
yet reached the point of Mercutio's Queen Mab speech
in Romeo and Juliet or Berowne's women-and-learning
speech in Love's Labour's Lost, for their feathery, idio-
matic, prosaic lightness of touch depends on a char-
acterization that is still largely absent from Richard II.
73
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
But one can see how the pitch has been lowered
between
That raught at mountains with outstretched arms
Yet parted but the shadow with his hands
and Richard's speech as he looks in the mirror :
A brittle glory shineth in this face,
As brittle as the glory is the face. 4
One can feel it again between the noble rhetoric of
Warwick's dying speech in 3 Henry VI \
My parks, my walks, my manors that I had
Even now forsake me, and of all my lands
Is nothing left me but my body's length 5
and the pathos of Richard's speech with its tremulous
repetitions, first indications of the mature style :
And my large kingdom for a little grave,
A little, little grave, an obscure grave. 6
Probably one can see it best in the difference between
two almost identical lines : one from 3 Henry VI, the
other from Richard II. When York is captured after
the battle near Wakefield, Queen Margaret makes
him stand on a molehill, wearing a paper crown, and
thrusts into his hand a handkerchief steeped in his
son's blood. "Now looks he like a king!" she snarls.
When Richard II appears on the battlements of Flint
Castle in defeat, York murmurs in almost identical
words, "Yet looks he like a king."
4 Richard //, IV. 1. 5 3 Henry VI, V. 2. 6 Richard II, III. 3.
74
THE EARLY TRAGEDIES
One can feel the stereoscopic effect of the second
line, the way in which it makes Richard stand out from
his background and fills the stage with air and light.
We are no longer suffocated by the claustrophobic
subjectivity of the Henry VI plays. The images are
not as big, but they are in focus ; the voice is not as
powerful but it is in tune, and it is the sweetest voice
in literature.
Why, having written two parts of the new historical
sequence, Shakespeare interrupted it to write King
John, or why he lingered years before resuming it, I
cannot imagine, unless for all its delicacy Richard II
was still too close to the historical knuckle. ( When it
was published in 1597 the abdication scene had to be
omitted. It was produced by Shakespeare's company
at the request of Essex' friends on the eve of their re-
bellion, apparently to rouse public feeling in favor of
Elizabeth's deposition.) The theory that Shakespeare
wrote* King John to replace the uproariously anti-
Catholic Troublesome Reign is probably correct. Profes-
sor Wilson argues that it is a revision made in 1594
of an earlier play, basing his conclusions mainly on a
standing crux in the text. In III. 4. 68, King Philip's
reference to Constance's disordered hair provokes her
to reply in an even more disorderly manner "To Eng-
land if you will." Both Professor Wilson and the Arden
editor assume that this is an ironic reply to an earlier
line of his "I prithee, lady, go away with me" and that
what lies between is an interpolation, but in *act the
line does not belong to Conjtance at all and it repre-
sents a simple typographical error. It is really the last
line of the scene, Lewis' reply to the Cardinal's "For
England, go!"
75
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
Professor Wilson also believes that Shakespeare
worked on a prompt copy of The Troublesome Reign of
King John, an old play of the Queen's Men, published
in 1 59 1 , which he may have brought with him from the
company. Shakespeare certainly did not work from a
prompt copy, nor could he have been a member of the
Queen's Men at any time when the play was in their
repertory, for it is plain that he was as puzzled as
Professor Wilson by it. The printed play contains two
separate and mutually contradictory versions of the
"discovery" of Philip the Bastard. Clearly this occurred
during a revival of the play in which some well-known
dramatist was invited to contribute a new and striking
scene to attract fresh audiences. In the original version,
placed second by the typesetter, Philip merely asked
his mother:
Then, madam, thus ; your ladyship sees well
How that my scandal grows by means of you
In that report hath rumoured up and down
I am a bastard and no Faulconbridge.
The revised version of this "discovery " scene, placed
first by the typesetter, is one of the greatest things in
English dramatic literature. In this the two Faulcon-
bridge brothers, Philip the elder and Robert, are ar-
rested for rioting, and, accompanied by their mother,
are brought before King John and Queen Eleanor.
Philip in his manly way refuses to plead in a matter
concerning his mother's honor, but Robert proclaims
him a bastard, incapable of inheriting the family estate.
Asked who was Philip's father, Robert says that he
believes him to have been Richard the Lion-Hearted.
76
THE EARLY TRAGEDIES
Richard spent much time at their home in the absence
of his real father; Philip arrived six weeks before his
time : his appearance answers for the rest. Angered by
the charge against their famous kinsman, both the King
and the Queen take Philip's side and declare that no
proof has been offered. In spite of Robert's protests,
the King decides that he will be satisfied by a mere
declaration from Lady Faulconbridge and Philip. Lady
Faulconbridge then takes an oath that Philip is her
husband's rightful son. Philip himself begins to take
an oath that he believes himself to be so, but, suddenly
realizing the great blood he is forswearing, refuses to
go on and abandons all claim on his inheritance. He is
thereupon knighted by the King and accepted as
Richard's son.
This magnificent scene, masterly in its writing, its
timing, and its mounting tension, is quite complete in
itself, but, as placed by the typesetter before the scene
between Philip and his mother, it is certainly puzzling.
Shakespeare, baffled by the inconsistency, and lacking
a proper training on Shakespearean texts, assumed that
Lady Faulconbridge 's presence in the scene before the
King and Queen must have been a mistake. Accordingly
he deferred her entry until after the actual knighting,
thus sacrificing the tremendous dramatic effect of her
perjury. In her absence, the element of reasonable
doubt which is the mainspring of the scene disappears,
so he also altered the six weeks of the original to
fourteen, which is absurd. For all the brilliance of his
writing, he never for an instant gets within miles of the
inspiration of his predecessor, whoever that may have
been.
The weakness of King John is not that it is a mere
77
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
chronicle play, but that, apart from Faulconbridge, it
is not a very interesting one. Faulconbridge's part,
however, is fascinating. Here and also, I suspect, in
the part of Berowne in Love's Labour's Lost we have
the beginning of a series of character parts written
for an actor of extraordinary temperament with a
considerable gift for mimicry. They range through
Berowne, Faulconbridge, Mercutio, and Gratiano to
the Hotspur of Henry IV. The type remains the same
the bluff, breezy, witty critic of worshipful society, the
hater of ceremony and poetry talk, always with a con-
temporary extravagance spitted on his rapier's point.
Here he is in Love's labour's Lost :
'A can carve too, and lisp : why, this is he
That kissed his hand away in courtesy;
This is the ape of form, Monsieur the nice
That when he plays at tables chides the dice
In honourable terms. 7
And here in Romeo :
The pox of such antic, lisping, affecting fantasies, these
new tuners of accents : 'by Jesu, a very good blade, a very
tall man, a very good whore! ' 8
King John :
'My dear sir/
Thus leaning on my elbow I begin,
'I shall beseech you' this is Question now,
And then comes Answer like an Absey book:
'O sir,' says Answer, 'at your best command;
At your employment, at your service, sir/ 9
7 L. L. L., V. 2. 8 R. and J., II. 4. 9 King John, I. 1.
78
THE EARLT TRAGEDIES
The Merchant of Venice :
There are a sort of men whose visages
Do cream and mantle like a standing pond,
And do a wilful stillness entertain
With purpose to be dressed in an opinion
Of wisdom, gravity, profound conceit,
As who should say 'I am Sir Oracle,
And when I ope my lips let no dog bark/ 10
1 Henry IF:
Heart, you swear like a comfit-maker's wife! 'Not you
in good sooth!' and 'As true as I live,' and 'As God shall
mend me' and 'As sure as day.' 11
It is with this character that we first get the Shake-
spearean soliloquy, a form which, so far as I know, is
peculiar to Shakespeare. Usually it is only faintly
dramatized, or as in the Queen Mab speecli or Ham-
let's meditation on suicide not dramatized at all. It
corresponds to the Aristophanic parabasis, a personal
appearance, a piece of simple essay writing, or a solo
on whatever subject happened to interest the author at
the time. I cannot help wondering whether the brilliant
actor for whom these parts were written was not
Shakespeare himself.
This is a part of his career of which we know little.
The recorded traditions are worse than useless because
they contradict the little we do know. That little con-
sists of the actor lists for t\vo plays by Ben Jonson,
Sejanus and Every Man in His Humour. As I find myself
in complete disagreement with almost everybody who
has written about these lists, let me reproduce them
10 M. ofV., 1.1. 1J Henry IV, III. 1.
79
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
so that the reader can decide for himself. Here is the
list for Sejanus :
Ric. Burbadge Will. Shakespeare
Aug. Philips Joh. Hemings
Will. Sly Hen. Condel
Joh. Lowin Alex. Cooke
"How big was his [[Shakespeare's]] part?" asks Mr.
Ivor Brown in his book on Shakespeare. "The number-
ing suggests the fifth largest."
But now let the reader study the second actor list.
Will. Shakespeare Ric. Burbadge
Aug. Philips Joh. Hemings
Hen. Condel Tho. Pope
Will. Slye Chr. Beeston
Will. Kempe Joh. Duke
Whatever that list may suggest it cannot possibly
suggest that Burbadge, the idol of the Globe Theatre,
played the sixth largest part. We do not know where
Jonson got his actor lists from, and playbills of the
period have all disappeared, but these lists strongly
suggest playbills and must certainly be read as such
that is, across, not down.
It is quite plain that in Every Man in His Humour
Shakespeare played the lead, probably Bobadill, while
Burbadge played second lead, and that in Sejanus Bur-
badge played the title part while Shakespeare probably
played Tiberius. It would seem from the lists that
Burbadge and Shakespeare were the two stars of the
Globe, and from the alternation of leads I get the im-
pression that Burbadge was principal tragedian, Shake-
80
THE EARLY rRAGEDIES
speare principal comedian. Besides, none of Burbadge's
known successes was in comedy.
Dryden records the tradition that when an admirer
asked Shakespeare why he had killed off Mercutio so
soon, Shakespeare replied that he did it in order not
to be killed himself. As a reply from the author of
Romeo and Juliet this does not make much sense, which
is probably why no one has paid attention to it. As a
reply from the actor who played Mercutio it would be
perfect.
81
6. Masterpieces
WITH Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's
Dream, and The Merchant of Venice we reach the
period of the great masterpieces.
Romeo is a betwixt-and-between play, of a rather
curious kind, which at one extreme approximates less
to the lyrical plays than to the earlier Richard III and
at the other even surpasses the maturity of The Mer-
chant of Venice. The reason may be that it was revised
more than once. Of the textual disturbance in at least
two scenes I am not competent to judge, but it is ob-
vious that between the first and second quarto there
was some rewriting; the marriage scene has been
entirely rewritten, and the dying Mercutio (probably
rightly) has been shorn of some of his bitter puns: I
regret the loss of his proposed epitaph
Tybalt came and broke the Prince's laws
And Mercutio was slain for the first and second cause.
But the real test for a literary man is the obviously
archaic style of some scenes and the equally obvious
mastery of others. Never did undergraduate so dread-
fully display his ingenuity as Shakespeare does in the
delighted dissection of lines like "Beautiful tyrant,
fiend angelical"; "Come Montague for thou art early
up to see thy son and heir now early down"; or the
ghastly "This may flies do while I from this must fly."
As in the Henry VI group we get the heaping up of
useless words as in "Beguiled, divorced, wronged,
82
MASTERPIECES
spited, slain," and we seem "to hear the lamentations
of poor Anne" in the Nurse's "O woe, O woeful, woeful,
woeful day," which rivals anything in the dramatic line
of Bottom the weaver. On the other hand, there is the
infallible sign of maturity we find in the love scenes ;
the length of the poetic phrase. In Mercutio's Queen
Mab speech, using only his half voice, Shakespeare can
produce marvels of delicacy and sweetness, but no
momentary inspiration could account for the faultless
phrasing of the full concert voice.
O speak again, bright angel, for thou art
As glorious to this night being o'er my head,
As is a winged messenger of heaven
Unto the white-upturned wondering eyes
Of mortals that fall back to gaze on him
When he bestrides the lazy puffing clouds
And sails upon the bosom of the air. 1
I think that here, as certainly in The Merchant of
Venice, the main influence on his work is Marlowe's.
One whole scene in Tlie Merchant of Venice is cribbed
directly from Tamburlaine. Marlowe's "The moon
sleeps with Endymion every day," becomes Portia's
"Peace ho! the moon sleeps with Endymion." He has
rid himself entirely of his fondness for choplogic, and,
tired of the tight, trim, niggling verse he had been
writing, tries for great splashes of color. In the other
two plays of the group the vivid, incantatory classi-
cisms of Marlowe throw a smoky torchlight upon the
scene.
Did'st thou not lead him through the glimmering night
From Perigenia whom he ravished,
1 R. and J., II. 2.
83
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
And make him with fair Aegles break his faith,
With Ariadne and Antiopa? 2
Or from The Merchant of Venice
With no less presence but with much more love
Than young Alcides when he did redeem
The virgin tribute paid by howling Troy
To the sea-monster. 3
Or, once more, from the same play
In such a night
Stood Dido with a willow in her hand
Upon the wild sea-banks and waft her love
To come again to Carthage. 4
Like all actors, Shakespeare had an uncannily reten-
tive ear which could not only recollect a cadence but
embalm an error. In Soliman and Perseda, which he
must have played in in his younger days, there is a line
about "Juno's goodly swans" a mistake, for the
swans are Venus', not Juno's but he saved them up
for As Ton Like It: "Like Juno's swans still we went
coupled and inseparable." 6 He must have been a born
mimic; he loves to break up his speeches with parody,
and has a kind of chameleon quality which makes him
seize on any opportunity for a change of style. Those
who believe his works were written for him by Mar-
lowe, Greene, Peele, Kyd, and Chapman, have plenty
of stylistic grounds, for just as mA Midsummer Night 's
Dream he can cheerfully plunge into a parody of a
group of village mummers, he can adapt himself to
2 M. JV. D., I. 2. 3M.O/F., III. 2. 4M.o/F.,V. 1.
*A.T.L.,L3.
84
MASTERPIECES
almost any style. At the same time, being a man of
original genius, he never stays adapted.
Even in The Merchant of Venice he does not stay
adapted. In the second act there is a scene between two
garrulous Venetian merchants, Salarino and Salanio.
They describe the frenzy of Shylock after Jessica's
elopement in a passage clearly modeled on Marlowe's
Jewof Malta "Ogirl! Ogold! Obeauty! Omy bliss!"
My daughter, O my ducats, O my daughter!
Fled with a Christian, O my Christian ducats! 6
Then Salarino tells how on the previous day he had
met a Frenchman
Who told me in the narrow seas that part
The French and English there miscarried
A vessel of our country richly fraught.
So far Marlowe's influence. But now we pass to the
next scene but one, where again we meet the same two
chatterboxes, but this time talking prose, and again we
are informed that "Antonio hath a ship of rich lading
wracked in the narrow seas ; the Goodwins I think they
call the place, a very dangerous flat and fatal, where the
carcases of many a tall ship lie buried." Shylock appears
and we get a characteristic Shakespearean scene of the
period with its shattering repetitions "a beggar that
was used to come so smug on the mart let him look
to his bond! He was wont to call me usurer let him
look to his bond! He was wont to lend money for a
Christian courtesy let him look to his bond!" The
chatterboxes go off, and to his fellow Jew, Tubal, Shy-
lock bursts out in a terrific speech, and it is no longer a
M.o/F.,II. 8.
85
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
mere report of what has happened off stage, but the
thing itself.
Why there, there, there, there, a diamond gone cost me
two thousand ducats in Frankfort the curse never fell on
our nation till now; I never felt it till now two thousand
ducats in that and other precious, precious jewels : I would
my daughter were dead at my foot and the jewels in her ear;
would she were hearsed at my foot and the ducats in her
coffin. 7
Now, whether or not there was any interval between
the writing of these two scenes, one does not have to be
a literary critic to realize that they are the same scene,
and that all Shakespeare has done is to take the hint
contained in the Marlovian blank verse and expand it
into the prose which by this time was becoming his
favorite medium. They make an interesting contrast,
for they show the direction in which he was moving.
Though he might be lured into writing blank verse
fantasy, his ultimate aim was a closer realism. He
refused to stay adapted.
The part of Antonio is the last lingering echo of the
Dark Lady episode. As Sir Edmund Chambers and
others have pointed out, his melancholy is inexplicable
unless we regard it as produced by Bassanio's forth-
coming marriage. The melancholia broods over the
play which has remarkably little cleverness. For the
first and only time Shakespeare, in one dangerous line,
says what Montaigne had already been saying in
France that tortured men will say anything. Was he
thinking of Kyd, whose heartbroken preface to Cornelia
he must have read ?
7 M. ofV., III. i.
86
MASTERPIECES
But the most striking echo of the Dark Lady tangle
escapes all the commentators. Bassanio has always
been unpopular with them. He has no visible means of
subsistence; he borrows money from Antonio, and his
only notion of repairing his fortunes is by a wealthy
marriage. What they have failed to note is that it is
precisely his peculiar, half-loverlike relationship with
Antonio which explains his fortune hunting. They see
that Bassanio is a reflection of the young nobleman of
the sonnets but they fail to see that this relationship of
rank is also maintained in the play ; and that an aristo-
crat in Bassanio's position could not have done other-
wise than seek his fortune in marriage.
I think the distinction in rank has probably been
somewhat obscured by rewriting. It is inevitably ob-
scured for the modern reader and playgoer since he is
entirely unaware of the light and shade represented
for an Elizabethan by the changes rung on the formal
second-person plural and the intimate second-person
singular. As with ourselves and our use of Christian
and surnames, the distinction was breaking down, but
it never broke down to the point where a gardener
called the lord of the manor by his first name or the
mistress addressed the maid with the equivalent of
"Miss Smith/' Everyone in court must have known
what Ralegh's fate was to be when Coke shouted, "I
thou thee, thou traitor!" There are many episodes in
Shakespeare where it is used with stunning effect, and
whole scenes have lost their point by our modern in-
ability to detect these changes of key. Half the fun of
Malvolio's advances to Olivia is in the fact that he
"thous" her; when Henry V dons Sir Thomas Erping-
ham's cloak to make his tour of the camp, his real dis-
87
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
guise is not the cloak but the fact that even when
"thoued" by Pistol he never forgets himself so far as
to drop the formal "you"; when Falstaff accosts the
young King on his procession through London his real
offense is not that he claims intimacy with him but that
he dares to "thou" him in public, which to any Eliz-
abethan must have seemed like a capital offense. Here,
I fancy, a foreigner could probably get more sense
from Shakespeare than we can, for on the Continent
this tradition is still very much alive.
There are two passages in 'The Merchant of Venice
which reveal its significance. In the scene between An-
tonio and Bassanio the two friends use the formal* 'you"
for the greater portion of the time. Then Bassanio men-
tions Portia, and it is as if a quiver of pain runs through
Antonio. In his next speech he bursts out "Thou
know'st that all my fortunes are at sea/' and the whole
scene becomes suffused with emotion. The second is
the scene between Antonio and Shylock. Again An-
tonio uses the formal "you" until Shylock rates him
for his anti-Semitism and Antonio snarls back "I am
as like to call thee so again."
Anyone who reads the Belmont scenes with care will
notice how Bassanio is addressed as "Your Honour,"
and though he "thous" Gratiano ( a friend of Antonio's ) ,
is never "thoued" by him.
GRA. My lord Bassanio and my gentle lady,
I wish you all the joy that you can wish,
For I am sure you can wish none from me :
And when Your Honours mean to solemnize
The bargain of your faith, I do beseech you
Even at that time I may be married too.
88
MASTERPIECES
BASS. With all my heart so thou can'st get a wife.
GRA. I thank your Lordship, you have got me one.
My eyes, my Lord, can look as swift as yours. 8
But Antonio is only one part of Shakespeare, the
part that loved a lord. The other is Shylock. Shylock
engaged the real contradiction in his nature, for he
is the underdog out for revenge. Shakespeare takes
great care to confine his aim to revenge. Though like
Marlowe's Jew he is the villain of the play he is never
allowed to say the sort of things Barabas says :
As for myself, I walk abroad at night
And kill sick people groaning under walls :
Sometimes I go about and poison wells.
Undoubtedly, Shakespeare has taken great pains to
see that he never becomes a really unsympathetic
character : in us, as in Shakespeare, there is an under-
dog who has felt "the insolence of office and the spurns
that patient merit of the unworthy takes," and we know
what it is to desire revenge, even to the extreme of
murder. Heine tells the story of the English girl who
sat near him during a performance, and who at the
trial scene burst out with "O, the poor man is wronged ! "
That, of course, is the risk which Shakespeare ran :
Shylock, like Falstaff after him, is the secondary
character who steals the play, which tends to turn into
the tragedy of the innocent Jew wrongfully deprived
of his hard-earned pound of flesh ; and it takes the whole
subplot of the rings, the serenade, and the music to
restore the key of comedy.
89
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
The greatness of this very great play is that it
searches out the Shylock in each of us, and makes us
bring in a verdict against judgment and conscience.
"The poor man is wronged/'
90
7. Falstaffand Hal
OHYLOCK is drawn with careful realism, and, as in
O all the plays of the realistic period, Shakespeare
tends to fall back on prose as the subtler instrument, a
tendency even more marked in the two parts of Henry
IV. But realism is a word we must use with great care.
P'or seven or eight years Shakespeare conceived it his
task as an artist to "hold as 'twere the mirror up to
Nature/' but he never understood realism as a mere
copying of Nature. With him the reflecting medium,
whether prose or verse, always came first. Character
modifies and enriches it, but is never allowed to replace
it, as it frequently does in modern realistic writing.
That is to say, Falstaff, Shylock, Benedick, and Beatrice
are encouraged to speak in their own way, always pro-
vided that it is not less striking than Shakespeare's
way. "I will live in thy heart, die in thy lap and be
buried in thy eyes ; and moreover I will go with thee
to thy uncle's/' 1 The phrase is the important thing.
The realistic ambiguity of The Merchant of Venice is
nothing to that of Henry IV. Prince Henry is a heroic
figure drawn with such asperity that critics have ac-
cused him of insensibility; Falstaff' a comic ruffian
drawn with such lyric tenderness that he steals the
play, and whole books have been written to deplore the
young King's shabby behavior in casting him off. "The
1 M. A. JV. f V. 2.
91
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
poor man is wronged." One is glad to know that the
balance is being redressed by Professor Wilson.
But surely, the important thing to remember is that
there is a Falstaff in each of us, and that it is to this
Falstaffthat Shakespeare appeals. There was certainly
a Falstaff in himself. Wherever in literature we find
those great doubles : Quixote and Sancho, Bouvard and
P6cuchet, Daedalus and Bloom, Morell and March-
banks in Shaw's Candida, or Laevsky and Von Koren
in Chekhov's The Duel, they are never different char-
acters, but different aspects of the same character,
usually the author's, and usually externalizing a con-
flict within himself.
When Hotspur cries "To pluck bright honour from
the pale-faced moon!" and Falstaff gloomily asks
"What is Honour ?" Falstaff, as Dr. Harrison points
out, is guying Hotspur, but even more, Shakespeare is
guying Shakespeare. Realism is the artistic equivalent
of logical thought, and while the poet in Shakespeare
reveled in the thought of war, the realist, shrinking
from its horrors, was bitterly conscious of the disparity
between its causes and effects. One image in particular
seems to have haunted him. "The soldiers," says
Margaret, "should have tost me on their pikes"; the
poor countryfolk of Edward III "fall numberless upon
the soldiers' pikes," while Hippolyta in The Two Noble
Kinsmen speaks of "babes broached on the lance." And
so, in Troilus and Cressida we find the conflict between
the young enthusiast, Troilus, and his elder brother,
Hector, over Helen of Troy, whose "youth and fresh-
ness," in Troilus' lovely phrase, "wrinkles Apollo's
and makes stale the morning," while to Hector she
is merely "a thing not ours, nor worth to us, had it
92
FALSTAFF AND HAL
our name, the value of one ten." We find the same
conflict in Hamlet between the firebrand, Fortinbras,
and the philosopher, Hamlet, with his lament for "the
imminent death of twenty thousand men, who for
a fantasy, for a trick of fame, go to their graves like
beds."
It is not only Falstaffwho asks "What is Honour ?"
Shakespeare at the time was asking it too, and, distrust-
ing romanticism, turning away from poetry to prose,
and delighting in the bluff violence of his Mercutios
and Hotspurs, was in the humor for guying any form
of extravagance. In Pistol he indulges in a bout of
malicious gibing at the heroic convention in poetry
which reveals him in the Cervantes humor, and in the
next play he went even further and invented Nym in
order to have a fling at the academic realism of Chap-
man and Ben Jonson.
In Henry IV and Henry V there are two Englands,
marvelously balanced ; the one romantic, remote, medie-
val, the other realistic, intimate, prosaic ; an England
which starts off about its business at dawn with a good
grouse at the inn. "They will allow us ne'er a Jordan,
and then we leak in your chimney, and your chamber-
lie breeds fleas like a loach." 2 Dramatically, it has
little significance; it establishes only the atmosphere;
the man awake behind the curtains of the big Tudor
bed, watching the lantern flicker on the ceiling and
listening to the rustic voices echoing under the wooden
posts of the innyard. Scholars have pointed out how
full these plays are of Cotswold names and places.
This balance, unerringly sustained throughout the
first two plays, is magically symbolized in the third
2 1 Henry 7K, II. 1.
93
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
when the disguised King visits his troops on the night
before Agincourt and learns their views of him. "As
cold a night as 'tis he could wish himself in Thames up
to the neck, and so I would he were and I by him/' 3
Realism, which throughout the earlier plays performed
the part of bass to the treble of poetry Mercutio and
the Nurse supporting Romeo and his sweetheart in
these plays sweeps up and drowns the note of the
violins.
Just as Shylock speaks for the underdog in each of
us, so Falstaff speaks for the average sensual man. In
a modern play he would begin every second sentence
with "As a matter of fact." The phrase which does
identify him like a character in Dickens is "If I'm not
speaking the truth, may I drop down dead!" and on
this he continues to ring the changes till the carriers
and even the Prince catch it from him, and we see how
Shakespeare must have lived the part while writing
the play, testing out every phrase with the intonation
and gesture of the old man. "If I fought not with fifty
of them, I am a bunch of radish : if there were not three
and fifty upon poor old Jack, then am I no two-legged
creature/' 4 But like Robin Greene, of whom he fre-
quently reminds me, he is a nonconformist preacher
gone wrong; a man once much given to churchgoing
and psalm-singing; and even at his worst he is still full
of good resolutions, for tomorrow if not for tonight.
"I must give over this life, and I will give it over; by
the Lord, an' I do not, I am a villain." 5 But like the rest
of us, he has been swearing the same thing off and on
"any time this two and twenty years"; he does it to
the familiar pattern of all his other asseverations, and
* Henry V, IV. 1. M Henry IV, II. 4. * / Henry IV, I. 2.
94
FALSTAFF AND HAL
when the Prince slyly asks where they shall take a
purse next day, he instantly brightens up and says
"Zounds, where thou wilt, lad; I'll make one; an' I do
not, call me a villain and baffle me/' 6
The great trilogy (for I regard Henry Fas a third
part of the play) is very uneven. The second part,
which to judge from its abundance of legal allusions
was written for performance at the Inns of Court, is
already a decline, and Henry V, though it contains
magnificent scenes, is a fiasco. Shakespeare must have
been badly rattled when he wrote Falstaff s lines in
the second part, for he gets nothing right. We scarcely
hear the familiar peal of "An* I do not, call me a vil-
lain!" and not once does the old rascal swear to amend
his ways. This may do very well for a substitute Fal-
staff, but it doesn't permit us to identify ourselves with
the character even the poor Civil Servant has hopes
of salvation. Yet, inadequate as he may be, he is still a
Hercules of a man, and his total disappearance brings
down the curtain.
The mystery of his disappearance from Henry Fhas
never been solved. Professor Wilson accepts the theory
that the actor who played the part had left the theater,
and identifies him with William Kempe, who certainly
did leave the theater in 1599, the year when Henry V
was produced, and whose name Professor Wilson
thinks he recognizes in an entry for one "Will" in the
Quarto of Part 2. From the parts Kempe is known to
have acted, I do not see how he could have played the
part of Falstaff, and the entry Professor Wilson relies
on is clearly for the actor who played Dame Quickly.
Dr. Harrison seems to think that Shakespeare had lost
6 1 Henry IV, I. 2.
95
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
the knack of writing about Falstaff, and, seeing how
much he had lost grip between the first and second
parts, and between the second part and The Merry
Wives of Windsor, this is a far more likely supposition.
With a purely instinctive writer like Shakespeare it
is never safe to push such a question too far; he ex-
hausted a subject or method with extraordinary rapid-
ity, and then left the premises by the window; but my
own belief is that he was compelled to drop Falstaff.
There was certainly some censorship. Falstaff began
as Sir John Oldcastle, but Shakespeare was forced to
change the name. It is a reasonable assumption that
Lord Cobham, whose family had intermarried with
that of Oldcastle, was responsible, since Broome, the
name adopted by Ford in The Merry Wives of Windsor,
was originally "Brook" (the family name of the Cob-
hams), and Shakespeare was forced to change that too.
Furthermore, while Henry IF was being performed by
Shakespeare's company, a whitewashing play, Sir John
Oldcastle, was produced by the rival theater, and
largesse to the tune often shillings (say 5) was dis-
tributed among the authors, an item in Henslowe's
accounts which always fills me with mild curiosity.
It is quite certain that Shakespeare conceived the
plays as a trilogy with Falstaff accompanying the King
to France, and that the scene in which the King casts
him off, far from being the climax, as so many emo-
tional commentators assume, is merely dramatic prep-
aration for a reconciliation there, "where for anything
I know," as the Epilogue says, "Falstaff shall die of a
sweat, unless already 'a be killed with your hard
opinions; for Oldcastle died a martyr and this is not
the man." Curiously, Falstaff does die, and "of a
96
FALSrAFF AND HAL
sweat/' but in England, not in France, and his death
is merely reported, not shown on the stage.
I may be unduly suspicious, but to my mind there is
something very fishy about all this. The impression I
get from that magnificent and moving bit of reporting
in which we are told of FalstafPs death is that his part
in the third play had already been written, and that
Shakespeare was compelled to cut it out. To me the
words of the Epilogue "unless already 'a be killed with
your hard opinions" suggest not an appeal for clem-
ency, but, in conjunction with the following clause,
"for Oldcastle died a martyr and this is not the man,"
a warning to the audience that their belief that Shake-
speare had been attacking the memory of a Protestant
martyr might make it impossible for him to continue
the play as he intended.
Apparently it did, and because of it the play is a
failure. "Banish not him thy Harry's company," old
Falstaffhad said, almost as though he already sniffed
danger. "Banish not him thy Harry's company. Banish
plump Jack and banish all the world!"
97
8 . Before Hamlet
IT was a period of serious change for Shakespeare.
Unless Measure for Measure (in an earlier form)
intervened, Much Ado About Nothing must have been
the last play he wrote for William Kempe. It seems to
be a rewriting of an older play since the most important
scene required by the scenario is entirely omitted an
unlikely event in a new play. Actually, the reason is
that Shakespeare was finding it more and more difficult
to adjust his mature realism to the demands made on
it by the theatrical conventions of his day, grossly im-
probable from the realist's point of view, outrageously
improper from the moralist's. The Elizabethan theater
was a folk theater, and apart from Jonson's work re-
mained so, and its influence constricted, while it en-
riched, an author's work.
The main plot of Much Ado About Nothing concerns
a girl called Hero, engaged to a young man named
Claudio. By some means, which in the play is never
made quite clear, the villain, Don John, bastard brother
of the Duke, arranges that on the night before the
wedding Claudio shall apparently see Borachio enter
Hero's bedroom. Next morning at the altar he re-
pudiates her, and she is left in a swoon. Her family give
her out for dead, and when Borachio is "reprehended"
and the truth emerges, the repentant Claudio is per-
suaded by Hero's family to marry another girl, who
of course turns out to be his own true love, returned
from the dead.
98
BEFORE HAMLET
The devices which Shakespeare resorts to so as to
make this nonsense palatable are copybook craftsman-
ship. He attaches a subplot of his own devising about
a cousin of Hero's, Beatrice, who is a shrew, and a
friend of Claudio's, Benedick, who is a misogynist, and
induces each to fall in love with the other through over-
hearing that the other is in love with him (or her).
That is to say, he attaches a realistic subplot, which lie
writes for all he is worth, and, so far as a dramatist can,
diverts the main drama into the new channel he has
dug for it. We are not asked to share the highly im-
probable sentiments of a devoted family keeping Hero
concealed ; instead we are shown Beatrice eating her
heart out with fury at the insult to her friend, egging
on Benedick to kill his friend. Furthermore, by intro-
ducing the clowns as watchmen, and making them
"reprehend" the "benefactor" of the bedroom plot
while he tells an accomplice about it, Shakespeare
succeeds in cutting out entirely the most embarrassing
scene of the old romance; and by showing us the watch
carrying out their investigations in their own en-
lightened way, he kids us gently along through a couple
of enchanting scenes, almost unaware of the abysses of
balderdash opening on either hand. It is a superb bit of
craftsmanship, and, in spite of the gap in nature left by
the missing scene afaire, it keeps the old comedy as
fresh as a daisy.
At least half the play is carried by the clowns, and
that is a risk which Shakespeare could never again have
taken, for, in spite of the digs in the pirated version
of Hamlet, Kempe must have been a fine artist. We
seem to trace him from the first skimpy outlines in
Costard and Launce to his apotheosis in Dogberry and
99
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
Pompey Bum. He was obviously the type of melan-
choly clown who comes on the stage slowly, with his
trousers hanging down, to take the audience into his
confidence in trouble again. He never sees the point
of any remark, as his limited acquaintance with the
English language causes him to misinterpret and mis-
represent everything, and he jogs mournfully on
through a series of misunderstandings and malaprop-
isms, wrapped in an impenetrable cloud of conceit until
the supreme moment when some misunderstanding no
more spectacular than the last induces him to regard
himself as insulted. Then his rage is magnificent:
I am a wise fellow, and which is more, an officer, and
which is more, a householder, and which is more, as pretty
a piece of flesh as any is in Messina, and one that knows the
Law, go to! and a rich fellow enough, go to! and a fellow
that hath had losses, and one that hath two gowns, and
everything handsome about him: bring him away! O that
I had been writ down an ass! 1
His sudden illuminations are one of his great jojs,
as when Costard exults in the delicate bawdry of his
superiors or Launce flares up after the departure of
Speed : "Now will he be swinged for reading my letter
an unmannerly slave that will thrust himself into
secrets." 2
But on the whole he is a warmhearted fellow, and
full of sympathy for neighbors who lack the benefits of
intellect which "Fortune" has showered on him.
"Goodman Verges, sir, speaks a little off' the matter,
an old man, sir, and his wits are not so blunt as God
help I would desire they were, but in faith, honest, as
* M. A. JV., IV. 2. 2 r . G . K, III. 1.
100
BEFORE HAMLET
the skin between his brows." 3 "lie is a marvellous
good neighbour, faith, and a very good bowler : but for
Alisander alas, you see how 'tis a little o'erparted." 4
He obviously set the key for all the low comedy parts
in the earlier plays, for it is not only those clearly
written for him like Costard, Bottom, Dogberry, and
Pompey Bum which exploit his characteristics, but
others like Mrs. Quickly which apparently were writ-
ten for other actors. They help us to accept the limita-
tions of a folk art like the Elizabethan theater because
they are themselves so obviously folk types.
These parts form a startling contrast to those for
Robert Annin who took Kempe's place in the theater
in 1599. Armin was equally clearly the slick clown who
bounces on to the stage with a hop, skip, and jump,
and a merry cry of "Here we are again!" Jonson in
The Poetaster gives us a partial and unflattering picture
of him.
Your fat fool ... let him not beg rapiers nor scarves in
his over-familiar playing face, nor roar out his barren bold
jests, with a tormenting laughter, between drunk and dry.
. . . Give him warning, admonition, to forsake his saucy,
glavering grace, and his goggle eye : it does not become
him, sirrah : tell him so. 5
He had a good voice and could write his own songs.
He had an absolute passion for the work of Shakespeare ;
not so much for the comedy parts, which he probably
thought he could do better himself, but for the great
tragic roles. Again it is the old story of the clown with
the painted face who watches with jealous rage while
s M. A. X., III. 5. 4 JL. L. L., V. 2. * The Poetaster, III. 4. 300.
101
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
Hamlet comes off, still lost in the cloud of his passion.
When ten years later Armin wrote a play himself, it
was about a young man whose sensibilities were out-
raged by his mother's adultery (only apparent this
time, one is glad to say). His name was Humil! That
preposterous play of his, T/ie Two Maids of Mortlake,
is to me the most moving of all Shakespearean docu-
ments, for it reveals all that the historical documents
conceal; the tremendous impact on the imaginations
of simple men that was produced by Shakespeare's
daily presence : it is like the splashing of waves on the
shore after the great ship of literature has sailed silently
by.
As Tou Like It ( 1599 ) was actually begun for Kempe,
"the roynish clown," and hastily adapted for Armin.
The play presented few difficulties except the usual one
of the girl in boy's clothes, which never troubled Shake-
speare since he hadn't seen a real actress. Rosalind is an
enchanting bit of part-writing for the quick-tongued
lad who had played Beatrice : but apart from her the
play is something of a rag bag. A part has been pro-
vided for a mysterious satirist called Jacques who has
nothing at all to do and, like Pistol and Nym, seems to
have been dragged in merely to ridicule some con-
temporary figure or extravagance. Shakespeare found
it impossible to fit Armin in, and his part, like Jacques',
remains outside the action and could be suppressed with
little damage to the play. He has a mistress called
Audrey, a rival called William, and a hedge parson
called Oliver Martext to marry him, but his lines never
rise above the level of deft patter, and they cast a cold
deliberate light over the whole play which is absent
from its weaker but more human predecessor.
102
BEFORE HAMLET
I press iii here, sir, amongst the rest of the country cop-
ulatives to swear and to forswear, according as marriage
binds and blood breaks : a poor virgin, sir, an ill-favoured
thing, sir, but mine own; a poor humour of mine, sir, to take
that that no man else will : rich honesty dwells like a miser,
sir, in a poor house, as your pearl in your foul oyster. 6
The slick, bloodless, homosexual patter refuses to
take dramatic coloring like Kempe's robuster buffoon-
ery ; nor did Shakespeare ever succeed in dramatizing
it, for in Twelfth Night and All's Well That Ends Well
Armin remains the court clown. Contrary to the usual
view, I feel that the former play is again a decline on
As Ton Like It. It is, of course, excellent theater, but
the lyric quality is fitful and slight, and Armin's icy
slickness invests all the characters in an impenetrable
armor of allusiveness. The compositor probably added
to this because I cannot help feeling that Sir Toby's
"My lady's a Catalan; we are politicians" 7 does less
than justice to Olivia's character; I fancy Shakespeare
meant her to be a "Catonian" (i.e., My lady's a
woman of principle; we are opportunists). The weak-
ness is the weakness of all cleverness : the glassy sur-
face, the lack of interior perspective. The epigrams, all
to one tune, are rolled offsuavely like those in a Wilde
play, but though one thinks of the epigrams themselves
one never thinks of who said them or in what connec-
tion. Gilbert ridiculed them neatly in his "I would as
lief be thrust through a quicket hedge as cry Pooh to a
callow throstle." Only in Lear, where the peculiarly
eerie quality of cleverness gives it a kind of ghostly
music, does Shakespeare get near dramatizing it. So
far as I recollect, malapropism as a source of fun
*A. T L.,V.4. 7 r. JV., II. 3. 77.
103
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
practically disappears from the plays, and its place is
taken by patter and repartee ; and something of warmth,
of kindness, of the poetry of the inn and the village
green disappears with it. We no longer hear the music
of "He is a marvellous good neighbour, faith, and a
very good bowler." It is as though the lights were
going out in Shakespeare's mind.
I feel that none of the plays of this period really
comes off'. The Merry Wives of Windsor is a good rough
comedy but without a glimmer of distinction. The
Fcnton and Windsor Park scenes are in a distinctly
un-Shakespearean style, and believers in the transmi-
gration of plays have no difficulty in proving that the
soul of his grandam inhabits Falstaflf. I suggest that they
may be the work of the man who wrote the couplets in
All's Well That End's Well and that, instead of being
the hypothetical author of "Old Plays," he may have
been a scenarist who prepared the groundwork for this
and other plays.
Julius Caesar ( 1599) is a very strange play in a very
strange style. It is purely political and apparently in-
tended to discourage would-be revolutionists by em-
phasizing the lesson of Henry IV: "An habitation giddy
and unsure hath he that builds upon the vulgar heart."
On that dubious text Shakespeare could preach till
doomsday without a hint of unorthodox, let alone
original, thinking: "preordinance and first decree,"
"the primogenitive and due of birth," "prerogative
and tithe of knees" (the balance of Latin and English
synonyms is characteristic of the period) never admit
a rival, so that the play is necessarily satirical. In the
scene of Mark Antony's speech the satire is brilliant,
but satire dragged out for five acts is desperately tire-
104
BEFORE HAMLET
some, and, as if to emphasize this, it is written in a
deplorable style. Sir Edmund Chambers, following
Bradley, suggests that Shakespeare "was deliberately
experimenting in a classical manner with an extreme
simplicity of vocabulary and phrasing," which seems
a rather inadequate description of the style to which
he was condemned. The characters all tend to address
one another and refer to themselves in the lachrymose
third-person singular, a trick which Shakespeare with
his idiomatic style used sparingly, and which reduces
everything to the dead level of "Little Julie wants a
doll/' There is also a superfluity of auxiliary verbs
and one wearies of learning how "I did mark how he
did shake/' while the oratorical repetitions make us
far too conscious of the platform stage and of actors
moving in a circle. At the same time, in other plays
of the period Shakespeare does show a certain weakness
for the third-person singular and for auxiliary verbs,
even if to nothing like the same degree.
There are several signs that at this period Shake-
speare was dissatisfied with his work and trying to
escape from the folk drama. And there is little doubt
that the principal influence making for this was Ben
Jonson's. In the choice of two classical subjects like
Julius Caesar and Troilus we have evidence that
Shakespeare was seriously attempting to give his
plays the classical unity and consistency of Jonson's.
We know Jonson jeered at one line in Julius Caesar,
"Caesar doth never wrong but with just cause" wl dch
incidentally is perfectly correct and we know Shake-
speare got rid of it. Jonson was Joyce to Shakespeare's
Yeats, the literary theorist as opposed to the natural
instinctive writer, and might have said, as Joyce is
103
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
supposed to have said to Yeats, "We have met too
late; you are too old to be influenced by me/' for, in
spite of his experiments, Shakespeare remained a folk
dramatist and in his last plays an obstinate and
incorrigible one.
Still, Troilus and Cressida is a marvelous play, the
first complete and consistent work of art Shakespeare
had written in which even the antics of the clown have
been fused with the main action. If, as I feel sure, Jon-
son instigated the high seriousness with which it is
written, he is fully justified in it.
It has been variously interpreted as a comedy of dis-
illusionment, an attack on Jonson and Marston, a
warning to Essex, and a satire on Chapman's Homer,
while some editors lean to the belief that Thersites
represents Shakespeare's considered view of human
existence as "Wars and lechery" though not for
long, one is glad to know.
There is, of course, something radically wrong with
a play which leaves itself open to such a variety of
misinterpretations, and we can accept it as proved. The
main trouble is that for a play with such a title we see
far too little of the lovers, and it looks far more like
the first part of a history dealing with the fall of Troy.
The main problem discussed is why Troy took so long
to capture. Like all Shakespeare's political work it is
tendentious and satirical, though the characters are
much more clearly differentiated than in Julius Caesar
and the political thought is on a far higher plane. The
quotation from Aristotle, however anachronistic, shows
that Shakespeare had picked up some of his ideas from
that source. It is interesting to see Justice treated not
as an absolute but as a mean between Wrong and
106
BEFORE HAMLET
Right ; Choice as a mean between Will and Judgment ;
and as in Nestor's warning that the success or failure
of an elected representative has an important effect on
the character of the community the thought is some-
times profound. The language is a development of the
stylistic experiment in the great choruses of Henry V.
It may be that to write the French scenes in that play
Shakespeare had started to read French again, because
in quick succession he gives us a number of Gallicisms
and semi-Gallicisms like "rivage," "sternage," "vaul-
tage," and "farced." As well as this, he seems to have
read some metaphysics, and between Gallicisms and
Latinisms, the style of Troilus and Cressida frequently
degenerates into mere jargon. There is wholesale
coinage of words ending in "-ure" and "-ive": words
like "flexure" and "tortive"; queer words like "mir-
able" and "convive"; and ugly words like "propugna-
tion" and "oppugnancy" ; and even Troilus is bound
to become an unsympathetic character when he tells
us about
a credence in my heart
An esperance so obstinately strong. 8
But the enduring charm of the play is its suggestive-
ness. Few plays say less and suggest more. The use of
the double plot is brilliant. The disillusionment of
Troilus with Cressida is subtly and most movingly
harmonized by the growing disillusionment of the
warring armies whose great causes have begun to
decline into mere personalities, vanities, and private
attachments. Both armies are affected ; the Trojans be-
cause though young Troilus, in love himself, believes
s T. C., V. 2.
107
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
that honor requires the retention of Helen, his maturer
brothers, Hector and Helenus, remember the words of
Lucrece when she sees the strumpet Helen in the picture
of Troy :
Why should the private pleasure of some one
Become the public plague of many moe ?
Let sin, alone committed, light alone
Upon his head that hath transgressed so. 9
But Shakespeare's main interest lay in the attackers.
They are meeting with no success for the usual statu-
tory reasons : "degree is shaked," "the odds is gone/'
"preordinance and first decree," "the primogenitive
and due of birth," "prerogative and tithe of knees"
are, as usual, in a shocking state. The statesmen are
at loggerheads with the military leaders, and Shake-
speare's treatment of the generals passes all the bounds
of satire and becomes mere scurrility. Achilles and
Ajax, the first with his effeminate friend Patroclus, are
beasts and idots, who cannot be stirred except by ap-
pealing to their vanity and jealousy. Wise Ulysses sees
that the only hope of getting Achilles to fight is to set
up Ajax as a rival commander. The great plan meets
with some success, but finally collapses when Hector
refuses to fight Ajax on the ground that he is "his
father's sister's son," while Achilles, subordinating
his vanity to his lust, goes to keep an appointment with
Polyxena in the enemy's camp! Here the irony is more
reminiscent of Voltaire than Shakespeare.
It becomes even more blistering when the problem
of the Greeks is settled not by the wisdom of Ulysses
but by the thoughtlessness of Achilles' boy friend
9 "Rape of Lucrece."
108
BEFORE HAMLET
Patroclus, who gets himself killed by Hector while
Ajax's friend loses his life at the hands of Troilus. At
this point the generals decide that the thing is going
too far and take the field. As Achilles is totally incap-
able of defeating Hector in fair fight, he has him
murdered. This startling scene is the climax of the
disillusionment in the underplot; the harmonic back-
ground to Cressida's betrayal of Troilus, which is
murder on a different plane the murder of the heart.
The two themes are most ingeniously linked by the
clown, Thersites, who is there as chorus on every oc-
casion, even when Cressida is deceiving Troilus with
Diomedes, and whose comments are always the same
"Wars and lechery! Still wars and lechery!" Editors
ask incredulously, can this be Shakespeare ? Of course,
Thersites is a pure O'Casey figure Shakespeare's
reply to the libels of the liberal wits and a satire on
the satirists whose perpetual chorus of criticism in his
view sapped the state. Ten years earlier, Gabriel Har-
vey had used Thersites as a symbol for the same thing,
and Shakespeare may actually have been thinking of
Harvey's words
ButTitius or rather Zoilus in his spiteful vein will so long
flurt at Homer, and Thersites in his peevish moods so long
fling at Agamemnon that they will become extremely odious
and intolerable to all good learning and civil government;
and in attempting to pull down or disgrace other without
order, must needs finally overthrow themselves without
relief. 10
Apart from what appears to be a recollection of the
Dark Lady episode, I see no personal disillusionment
10 Harvey, Four Letters.
109
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
in the play; nothing which links it in my mind with the
tragedies that follow. I cannot for the life of me see
where Dr. Harrison gets a Troilus who is "lust-mad"
or a Cressida who is "a whore." It is a play of the ice-
brook's temper, cold and bright like a frosty day, and
with none of the Nordic glooms and fogs of the trag-
edies.
A great deal of the suggestiveness which gives the
play its beauty must have come from Shakespeare's
realization that the subject itself was dynamite. When
the principal object of a writer is to cover up his tracks,
it is useless to try and identify contemporary allusions,
but surely, at the end of the sixteenth century only a
political innocent could have failed to draw a parallel
between Ulysses and Nestor, Ajax and Achilles on the
one hand and Cecil and Bacon, Essex and Ralegh on
the other. I find it impossible to believe that any
Elizabethan could have seen (if any Elizabethan did
see) so vicious a caricature of the military leaders of
the Grecian army without thinking of his own military
leaders, one of whom, compared by his admirers with
Achilles, as Dr. Harrison has shown, sulked in a way
distinctly reminiscent of that hero ; while the remark-
able passage about Ulysses' intelligence service must,
I feel, have pointed the analogy to any Londoner. If
the play ever was produced, which is uncertain, it must
have been when Achilles-Essex was already a doomed
man.
This would fully explain its strange eventful history.
On February 7, 1603, it was entered for publication by
James Roberts "as it is acted by my Lord Chamberlain's
men" but never published by him. In 1609 it was pub-
lished by an entirely different publisher with a state-
110
BEFORE HAMLET
merit to the effect that it had never been produced at
all. This proves that by that time it had been long
dropped from the repertory, if it ever was really in it.
What happened after February 7, 1603, which made it
inadvisable either to publish or produce it, was clearly
the Queen's death on March 24. Already, in the cor-
respondence between Henry Howard, Earl of North-
ampton, and James VI, the destruction of Essex*
enemies, Ralegh, Lord Cobham (who had apparently
kicked up all the fuss about Falstaff) , and Lord Grey de
Wilton, was being prepared. On April 7(1 follow Dr.
Harrison's admirable "Jacobean Journal") Cecil re-
fused to allow Cobham to act as Ralegh's substitute
Captain of the Guard. On April 10, Southampton and
Neville, the two survivors of the Essex conspiracy,
were released; on April 23, on his way south, James
promised the Bishop of Durham, Toby Matthew, to
restore the alienated property of his bishopric (Dur-
ham House, which Elizabeth had presented to Ralegh) .
On May 8, exactly one day after his arrival in London,
James dismissed Ralegh from his position as Captain
of the Guard ; at some time before June 7 he ordered
him to quit Durham House. On July 1, in the presence
of the Queen, Southampton insulted Grey de Wilton
during an argument about the Essex Rebellion. On
July 14, Ralegh, Cobham, his brother, and Grey de
Wilton were arrested on a charge of treason, Ralegh's
treason being alleged to have taken place on June 9
long after a babe in arms might have seen he was due
for destruction.
It was a bad time for enemies of Essex. Toward the
end of May, Shakespeare's company produced Jonson's
Sejanus. We have Jonson's own statement that "North-
111
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
ampton Henry Howard]] was his mortal enemy for
brawling on a St. George's Day one of his attenders, he
was called before the Council for his 'Sejanus' and
accused both of popery and treason by him." The
editors of the Oxford Jonson suggest that Howard,
who was himself a Catholic, attempted to injure a co-
religionist in order to conceal his own activities, but I
am afraid that Jonson's statement is simply not true.
The real reason why Howard hauled him before the
Privy Council is revealed in a note by Dr. Harrison :
"Ben Jonson, in the margin of his copy of Greenaway's
translation of The Annals of Tacitus, noted opposite
the account of the fall of Sejanus 'The Earl of Essex/" 11
Jonson had already attacked Essex in Cynthia's Revels
at a time when Essex no longer had any power.
Howard was scarcely likely to forget that. In the fol-
lowing year Samuel Daniel was also haled before the
Council for a slander on Essex. It was certainly not a
good time for publishing a play like Troilus and Cressida,
with all its echoes of the Essex conspiracy.
But apart altogether from this, some of the scenes
are miracles of dramatic tact, of the deliberate refusal
to underline a situation. We see early in the play that
Hector wishes to send Helen back to her husband,
Menelaus. Then Pandar, arranging for Troilus to
spend the night with his niece, calls to Paris to make
Troilus' excuses at supper; Helen makes fun of him;
he goes, and Paris asks her to come and unbuckle
Hector's armor. She agrees, and as they go out he sud-
denly throws his arms about her and murmurs, "Sweet,
above thought I love thee." Not by a word has Shake-
speare emphasized his fears that Hector may have his
11 A Companion to Shakespeare Studies, p. 167.
112
BEFORE HAMLET
way. Remember, too, that unforgettable little scene I
have mentioned already when the two brothers, Paris
and Troilus, the one the happy, the other the unhappy,
lover, come to warn Cressida that she must leave the
city. They utter just a few lines of verse which almost
succeed in expressing the inexpressible. Last of all,
consider the scene between Troilus and Hector on the
morning of the final battle. Troilus has just had his
own bitter experience of Cressida's falsity, Hector is
going out to die by Achilles' treachery. By a supreme
touch of dramatic irony, this is the moment when the
lofty young idealist, Troilus, chooses to reprove his
brother for showing pity to the vanquished.
HECTOR. Oh, 'tis fair play.
TROILUS. Fool's play, by Heaven, Hector.
HECTOR. How now! How now!
TROILUS. For the love of all the gods
Let's leave the hermit pity with our mothers,
And when we have our armours buckled on
The venomed vengeance ride upon our swords,
Spur them to ruthful work, rein them from ruth.
HECTOR. Fie, savage, fie!
TROILUS. Hector, then 'tis wars. 12
The exploration of the mind of a romantic young
man who has experienced his first disillusionment
could go no further. And like everything else through
this great play it is stated without comment, almost as
though its implications had never even occurred to the
author.
Dramatic tact could go no further.
12 T. C. 9 V. 3.
113
9. Hamlet
THE realistic period stops dead with Hamlet ( 1601-
2), which is a play with two faces. One, with its
delightful portrait of Polonius, as delicate as anything
in Jane Austen, looks back to the lyrical plays; the
other, with its gloomy soliloquies and the macabre
humor of the Gravediggers' scene, written in for
Armin, looks forward to Othello and Lear.
It is also a play of two styles. The first is smooth,
lucid, and stately, its unit the couplet, or extensions of
the couplet.
We do it wrong, being so majestical,
To offer it the show of violence ;
For it is as the air invulnerable,
And our vain blows malicious mockery. 1
The second is nervous, harsh, and vibrant, its unit
the couplet between two half-lines.
O such a deed
As from the body of contraction plucks
The very soul, and sweet Religion makes
A rhapsody of words ;
Heaven's face doth glow,
Yea, this solidity and compound mass,
With tristful visage, as against the Doom,
Is thoughtsick at the act. 2
"This solidity and compound mass" is one of the
"dictionary" lines which identify the Shakespeare of
I. 1. * Ham., III. 4.
114
HAMLET
the Hamlet period and after : it is a reversion to weight
as against grace. The dictionary line, originally an
ornament of early Tudor prose, became something of
an obsession with Shakespeare. In Henry V ( 1599) he
wrote " 'Tis no sinister nor no awkward claim," 3 than
which no more sinister nor more awkward combination
seems possible, but the twin of "sinister" haunted him
for years until in Sir Thomas More, which must be at
least five years later in date, he got in "To give the
smooth and dexter way to me/' 4 Frequently it is as
though he were working with a dictionary, and testing
both the Latin and English form of a word to see which
was the better. "It is a nipping and an eager air/' "The
inaudible and noiseless foot of Time." "The primo-
genitive and due of birth." "The stroke and line of his
great virtue." But sometimes with a nervous jerk he
gives us not the translation but an apparently unrelated
word which breaks the logical development with a snap
and floods the line with pure association. "The ex-
pectancy and rose of the fair state."
There was an old play of Hamlet, probably by Kyd,
but we can only guess what it was like. There is also a
German Hamlet, unfortunately drastically cut, but
whether this is derived from Kyd's or Shakespeare's
play is hard to say. Sir Edmund Chambers believes it is
merely a corruption of Shakespeare's.
Like Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, it opens with a Senecan
prologue which is spoken by Night and the Furies.
The first scene takes place on the battlements of Elsi-
nore, and unlike Hamlet, in which the Ghost appears on
two successive nights, the episode is closed in the first
scene : the Ghost appears first to Horatio, then to Ham-
3 Henry V, II. 4. 87. 4 Sir Thomas More, III. 2.
115
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
let, to whom he recounts the story of his murder.
Hamlet, interrupted by the Ghost while he tries to
repeat the story to his companions, finally tells Horatio
only, and explains that he intends to sham madness to
get an opportunity of killing his uncle.
Laertes (here called Leonhard) is permitted to go to
France while Hamlet is persuaded to remain at home.
He first shams madness before Ophelia, and the King
and Polonius (called Corambis) overhear the conver-
sation in which he tells her to "go to a nunnery." The
Players appear, and Hamlet, having given them some
advice on acting, asks them to perform a play about
the murder of King (he forgets the name) Pyr Pyr
Pyrrhus. The Dumb Show only is performed ; the King
is shocked into betraying himself; Hamlet visits his
mother's room and bids her "look upon this picture
and on this," and kills Polonius who has been listening.
He is sent to England, and Ophelia goes mad and makes
bawdy overtures to a courtier. Hamlet, on his way to
England, is attacked by two banditti, and kills both by
dropping flat as they discharge their pistols at him.
Laertes returns from France, demanding revenge, and
Hamlet is killed with a foil poisoned by the King.
Besides this, we have also a shorthand version of
Shakespeare's Hamlet pirated by a printer. This is sub-
stantially like Hamlet as we know it, but there are two
major differences. In this version, in which, as in the
German, Polonius is called Corambis, the two scenes,
Hamlet-Ophelia and Hamlet-Rosencrantz and Guild-
enstern, are transposed; and instead of the two scenes
in which Horatio receives a letter from Hamlet and
then discusses his escape with him, we have one scene
only in which Horatio tells the Queen of his escape. Sir
116
HAMLET
Edmund Chambers believes that both the German play
and this derive from a performance of Hamlet in which,
for some reason of prudence, "Polonius" was changed
to "Corambis," and the two scenes, Hamlet-Ophelia
and Hamlet-Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, were trans-
posed, though he admits that "why the change should
have been made is not clear."
The transposition of the two scenes might be ac-
cidental, though I think not. These shorthand piracies
of popular plays were made under very difficult condi-
tions, certainly by two men; sometimes, I suspect, by
a teacher and his class. Each could write only for a few
minutes without attracting attention, and though some
of them were very indifferent reporters, their real
problem was in fitting together the jig-saw of their
separate notes into something resembling consecutive
speech. Under such circumstances transposition was
the rule, though not, so far as I can tell, transposition
of whole scenes. The shorthand Hamlet is principally
interesting because it sometimes preserves Shake-
speare's words when he had forgotten them himself,
as in "for he doth keep you as an ape doth nuts, in the
corner of his jaw," and sometimes it gives us the actor's
intonation as in "O your loves! your loves! as mine
to you."
To return to the German version. The only serious
blot on it is the comic treatment of Ophelia's madness
which is usually considered to be the work of the Ger-
man adapter. I believe it to be the earliest of the three
versions, merely because it is by far the most workman-
like scenario of the three, and I find it hard to imagine
that a text can be clarified in corruption. Consider, for
instance, the simple matter of the Ghost's repeated
117
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
"Swear!" I do not think I am abnormally dense, but
until I read the German text I had always taken that
for a piece of romantic color, and never understood
that the Ghost was uneasy at the thought of strangers
learning the secret of his murder; that Hamlet broke
off on his account, but merely deferred repeating the
story till later. Of course, from the fact that at the time
of the Play Scene Horatio knows the story, we may
deduce that Hamlet told him, but why he delayed in
telling him is certainly not clear from the play. One
line in the German makes the whole thing plain. "The
spirit of my father is perturbed that I should make this
matter known."
Again, the scene of Hamlet's escape from his would-
be murderers, however crudely it is treated, is a neces-
sary scene which Shakespeare dropped to his own great
confusion. He made two shots at covering up its ab-
sence, neither successful. It is not good craftsmanship
to make the audience aware of a plot against your
hero's life and then bring him back a quarter of an hour
later to tell how he escaped it. It is bad craftsmanship
when, as in Hamlet y the burial of Ophelia has to take
place before he can tell the story at all, for by that time
Hamlet's existence is taken for granted, and nobody
gives a button how he escaped. The much-discussed
question of whether or not the King saw the Dumb
Show is answered in a rather remarkable way, for it
seems that the King saw nothing else. The whole story
is simple and clear with none of the redundancies and
inconsistencies of Shakespeare's play, though exactly
how far this may be accounted for by cutting is not clear.
There are no Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, no Mar-
cellus, no Fortinbras, except in a casual reference, no
118
HAMLET
gravediggers, no Hecuba scene nor, indeed, is there
any apparent need for them. The story is pure Dead-
wood Dick. Perhaps Shakespeare's most miraculous
achievement was to take a Deadwood Dick story,
which the audience knew as well as he did, and trans-
form it into one of the great myths of the world.
His method unsatisfactory from the artistic point
of view was to shift the emphasis. Hamlet of the
German play is a Renaissance man of action, bold and
cunning ; and both the boldness and cunning have left
their traces on Hamlet, notably in the scene where
Hamlet apologizes to Laertes almost entirely in the
third person singular (as suspicious here as in Julius
Caesar) and excuses himself on the ground of his sup-
posed madness. Sham madness as a dramatic conven-
tion was already as dead as Queen Anne Shakespeare's
Queen Anne. "It may appear to some ridiculous/' 6
says the sham madman in Webster's play, with a
nervous glance at the young gentlemen from the Inns
of Court. Shakespeare's Hamlet is an intellectual af-
flicted with melancholia; so that even if there were no
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in the original play ( and
I see no reason to think there were), one can see how
necessary it would have been to invent them, merely
to balance the sham madness which Hamlet assumes
before Ophelia and Polonius with the real melancholy
which Shakespeare was now trying to graft on him.
Notice in particular how before the mad scene with
Ophelia he interpolated the great meditation on suicide
clearly interpolated it, because, contrary to the con-
vention of Elizabethan playwriting, the King and
Polonius overhear the scene with Ophelia but not the
* The White Devil, IV. 2.
119
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
soliloquy. And if you assume as I do that the German
version is the earliest of the three, you can see exactly
why it was that between the pirated version of 1603
and the official version of 1604, Shakespeare found it
so necessary to transpose the Hamlet-Ophelia and the
Hamlet-Rosencrantz and Guildenstern scenes to cor-
rect any false impression and present his audience first
with a Hamlet suffering from real melancholia rather
than with one shamming madness.
The fundamental inconsistency between the scenario
and the treatment is the cause of almost all the muddle
in the play. Forgetting the limitations of his Deadwood
Dick theme, Shakespeare tends to throw the emphasis
too much on the intellectual side, and then is brought
up dead by the limitations of the plot. The introduction
of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern involves him in a
typical difficulty. In the German version the whole
thing is plain sailing; the players are strolling mum-
mers; they appear, Hamlet instantly gets the idea of
the Play Scene and gives them a lecture on acting. But
then Shakespeare had the inspiration for the mighty
Hecuba scene probably from the same source as so
many other things in Hamlet Montaigne's Essays
for, according to Montaigne,
Quintilian relates that he saw actors who entered so
deeply into a tragic part that they still wept after reaching
home ; and of himself he tells us that having undertaken to
work upon others' feelings he was so carried away by his
own that he detected himself not only in tears but with the
paleness of countenance and behaviour of a man really over-
whelmed with grief. 6
6 Montaigne's Essays, tr. Trechman.
120
HAMLET
Accordingly, for the purposes of the scene, the mum-
mers become the tragedians of the city (and perish any
mummer who adopts Dr. Harrison's suggestion that
the scene should be clowned!), on tour because of the
vogue of child actors, and encountered on their way by
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Now, Hamlet's advice
to the players is merely in the way of the great scene,
so, like the mad scene with Ophelia, it has to be pushed
back to its present position; but even this doesn't
entirely solve Shakespeare's problem, since with
Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and I'olonius on the stage,
it is impossible for Hamlet to arrange the details of
the plot for making the King betray himself yet, if
he doesn't, he leaves the players with no dramatic
carry-over. So in spite of the presence of the others
Hamlet calls the chief Player aside and slips in a few
lines about an imaginary speech which he is to write
for the play next evening, and to this speech Shake-
speare skillfully pegs the now homeless and destitute
advice to the players. And even this leaves a very awk-
ward moment, for the emotional effect of the Hecuba
scene compels Shakespeare to follow up at once with
the great monologue on irresolution and reserve the
actual detail of the plot, which in the German play
precedes the Players' entrance, for the very end of the
scene. Only the very suspicious notice that Hamlet has
arranged for the speech which he is to write into the
play before the idea of the Play Scene occurs to him at
all. Shakespeare makes the same mistake as when he
allows Hamlet to explain his escape after the burial of
Ophelia, and for the same reason; that he has inter-
polated something into the text. It is exceedingly skill-
ful but patchy.
121
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
I do not suggest that all the alterations were made
at different times; they may represent no more than
the ordinary changes of intention visible in the manu-
scripts of most writers ; but some were certainly made
between the appearance of the two Quartos, in 1603
and 1604, and I have a strong feeling that the whole
mysterious Fortinbras business may be an interpola-
tion connected with the old Queen's death and the
problem of the succession.
Just consider how it is dragged in. In the very first
scene Marcellus asks what is afoot in Denmark, and
Horatio (elsewhere referred to as a stranger) explains
in a long speech that a Norwegian prince called Fortin-
bras is raising an army to invade Denmark. Fortinbras
appears again a few scenes later when two ambassadors,
who have no other earthly business in the play, are
dispatched to Norway to protest. Later they return
with the information that Fortinbras had intended to
invade Denmark, but that the King of Norway has now
persuaded him to invade Poland instead. Will the
Danes object to his crossing Danish territory with an
army ? No, the Danes have no objection, so Fortinbras
makes another appearance, this time on his way to
Poland with his army, and Shakespeare makes a gallant
attempt to anchor him in the play, as he had already
anchored the Hecuba scene, by contrasting Fortinbras'
resolution with Hamlet's weakness. Nor is this all. At
the precise moment when Hamlet has been stabbed with
the poisoned foil, he and his army return, and, hearing
him approach, Hamlet, who has been dying in a cloud
of the most exquisite poetry, sits up to give him his
vote for the succession to the throne.
This is absurd enough for anything, but we reach
122
II AM LET
craziness when Fortinbras, without asking anyone's
leave, announces that he proposes to annex Denmark
anyway, and Horatio, forgetting all about his dead
friend, hurriedly begs him to do it quickly before any-
one can anticipate him
Even while men's minds are wild, lest some mischance
On plots, and errors happen. 7
This is the point in his work where Shakespeare's
anxiety about the future becomes almost hysterical. He
had written immediately before it two other plays,
both dealing with the danger of internal dissension and
revolution. We know that Hamlet was produced at
Oxford and Cambridge; I am inclined to share Sir
Edmund Chambers' view that Troths and Cressida was
produced there, and I feel sure that the gagging pas-
sages between Hamlet and Polonius refer to a similar
occasion.
HAM. You played once i' th' university, you say ? . . .
POL. I did enact Julius Caesar; I was killed i' the Capitol :
Brutus killed me.
HAM. It was a brute part of him to kill so capital a calf. 8
I can make nothing of this unless I assume that
Polonius was played by the fat comedian who also took
the parts of Sir Toby and Falstaff "the fatted calf "
and that he also played Caesar ( "let me have men about
me that are fat") to Burbadge's Brutus at a university
production. I should guess that the fat comedian was
Heminges, and that there is another private joke in Sir
Toby's "We are politicians." Heminges was "politi-
cian," or spokesman, of the company.
7 Ham.,V. 1. *IIam.> III. 2.
123
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
You may notice, besides, how Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern expatiate on the dangers attending "the
cease of majesty" 9 and how Laertes arrives on the scene
accompanied by a mob howling "Laertes shall be king!
Laertes king!" 10 You may notice the prosaic solder
with which the Fortinbras scenes are joined in, such as
"I think it be no other but e'en so" and "this business
is very well ended," and perhaps agree with me that
the date of those passages is probably the winter of
1602-3 when the old Queen lay dying and Cecil was
trying to prepare public opinion for the accession of a
most unpopular and unpleasant foreign prince, who,
like Fortinbras, had in his time sketched invasions on
the English border. It may be too much to assume that
behind the tendentiousness of Troilus and Cressida and
Hamlet was a certain understanding between Cecil and
Shakespeare, but it certainly seems strange that one
of James* first public acts on reaching London was to
appoint Shakespeare's company his personal players
with the rank of Grooms of the Chamber.
Shakespeare is never a critical, consistent writer, as
Jonson is, and nowhere was his consistency so sorely
tested as in Hamlet, for his view of life seems to have
been darkening even as he worked over it. In his early
plays and poems the attitude to death was a simple con-
tradiction in terms "Death is the end of Death"
but from the moment Hamlet begins his meditation on
suicide a subject which was afterward never very far
from Shakespeare's thought we know that it has no
vestige of connection with the play ; that it has been
spatclicocked into the scene where it stands ; that it is
not the ghost-ridden Hamlet who speaks of "the un-
Ham., III. 3. Ham. 9 IV. 5.
124
HAMLET
discovered country from whose bourne no traveller
returns" or the heir to the throne who has felt "the
insolence of office and the spurns that patient merit of
the unworthy takes"; in fact, they have been gummed
by a glaring non sequitur to the end of a speech on ir-
resolution. We know that this, like the sonnets, and
Audley 's speech before Poitiers, and Richard's in prison,
is personal poetry, and that a shadow has come over
Shakespeare's mind. He was so obsessed by suicide
that, though Ophelia's death is a mere accident, she is
buried as though she had been a suicide. The Play
Scene, with its delightful air of parody, and the high
comedy of Polonius give place to this and to the grave-
yard scene for Armin and his zany in which for the first
time we find Shakespeare indulging a passion for
macabre humor. In the graveyard scene there is a
horror of the charnel house, stifled until the present
moment, which would yet frame the pathetic inscrip-
tion on his grave.
It is futile to speculate on the precise occasion of this
melancholia. It may have been a dangerous illness. He
was absent from the cast of a Jonson play in 1600. And
it is interesting that Dr. Caroline Spurgeon has noticed
in Hamlet the prevalence of images dealing with in-
ternal tumors ; n but this, at the best, can be only guess-
work. What we can do is put our finger on passage
after passage which seems to echo the work of Mon-
taigne; his acrophobia in "the cliff that beetles o'er his
base"; 12 his views on fashions in handwriting in "I
once did hold it as our Statists do a baseness to write
fair"; 13 his quotation of Quintilian in the Player's
tears; Etienne de la Boetie's phrase on death "'Tis
11 Spurgeon, Shakespeare's Imagery. 12 Ham., 1.4. 13 Ham., V. 2.
125
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
coming or 'tis past but present never" in "If it be now
'tis not to come, if it be not to come it will be now" ; 14
most of all perhaps in that terrible phrase which Shake-
speare was later to versify in Lear and Cymbeline "I
believe that which Plato says to be true that man was
made by the gods to sport and play withal."
Atheism was no new thing in Elizabethan England.
Ralegh, Chapman, Harriot, Marlowe, and Kyd were
probably all freethinkers, but theirs was not the sort
of disbelief which would have been likely to affect
Shakespeare. Marlowe's atheism is that of the outlaw;
it is antisocial rather than antireligious, and Shake-
speare was never antisocial. Montaigne's was the first
compendium of classical philosophy which Shakespeare
could have read, and he was a rationalist who did not
leave one shred of traditional belief in the mind of a
sympathetic reader; nothing but that sense of the utter
futility of human existence by which Hamlet is haunted.
At bottom rationalism and realism are aspects of the
same frame of mind and, sooner or later, both are
bound to come up against the supreme test of the ir-
rationality of the universe. All classical civilization is
summed up in that line of Sophocles, "Never to have
lived were best," or Madame de Sevigne's thought
that the best of all fates had been to die in her nurse's
arms, or Housman's "O it was well with me in days
ere I was born." No rationalism which fails to allow
for a missing sense in humanity can escape it. For more
than ten years Shakespeare had given himself to the
view that the business of the artist was "to hold as
'twere a mirror up to Nature," and he was at the age
when a realist who thinks at all is bound to ask himself
"Ham.,V. 2.
126
HAMLET
if reality itself be real. I see no reason to suppose that
any personal disillusionment such as the infidelity of a
second Dark Lady caused the change in him. On the
contrary, I feel that any explanation of that sort is not
adequate to explain the change, and, given his genius,
I do not see how he could possibly have escaped a
religious crisis; or how the marvels of the imaginative
universe which he had created could have failed to
throw him back on the thought of his own extinction.
"Even the powerful mind of Johnson seemed foiled by
futurity/' Bos well tells us, and the meditation on
suicide expresses the horror of that shuddering sen-
sibility before "the Great Doom's image." It sets the
key for Claudio's "Ay, but to die, and go we know not
where/' 15 and the Gaoler's "for look you, sir, you
know not which way you shall go/' 16 and it is the very
dizziness of the realistic height from which Shakespeare
views it which gives him the tendency toward suicide,
that longing to plunge at once into the abyss, "to rush
into the secret house of Death" and "encounter Dark-
ness like a bride and hug her in my arms!" a strange
distorted memory of Chapman's great line on the
marriage night
Fear fills the chamber, darkness decks the bride. 17
After Hamlet the attitude to death is perceptibly dif-
ferent. Shakespeare is no longer satisfied with the con-
tradiction in terms, which he uses only once, and that
in Measure for Measure, a play that seems as though it
had existed in an earlier form. There is the revulsion
against what to the rationalist appears to be the end of
all, and then (merely because if it is the end of all, life
M.for M., III. 1. 1C Cym., V. 4. " "Hero and Leander."
127
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
itself is meaningless and we can merely shrink from its
murderous claws) he is driven back upon death as the
only thing "which shackles accident and bolts up
change" and sings its praises. Again and again we hear
this contradiction set forth, and grow accustomed, first
to the spasm of revulsion, and then the constrained
celebration of the only power which can quit us of the
contradictions, the burnings and freezings-
Fear no more the heat o' the sun,
Nor the furious winter's rages. 18
It is the presence of this new attitude to death which
gives Hamlet its dual nature. In Polonius the antithesis
is still open; there is still "I" and "you/' but in the
shuddering sensibility of Hamlet's reproaches to his
mother and the morbid humor of the graveyard scene
the jaws of the antithesis begin to close, and we revert
to the Shakespeare of Henry VI and a drama which takes
place only in the theater of the poet's mind.
But what a difference there is in that mind!
'8 Cym., IV. 2.
128
10. The Breakthrough
OTHELLO is the first play in which the excess of
personal emotion which we notice in Hamlet is
allowed to swing the action, and in Lear it rages like a
storm. These two plays are among the greatest dra-
matic poems in the world ; they are the work of a theater
man whose skill is almost supernatural ; yet they seem
to me failures.
first of all, we must dismiss the idle speculation
which finds in Othello's jealousy a key to Shakespeare's
gloom. The flightiness of Cressida, the facility of I lam-
let's mother, the doubts of Desdemona's virtue, do not
mean that Shakespeare had met with another Dark
Lady. They are part of a general abandonment of hu-
man values, aspects of a despair with human existence
which can only be described as misanthropy.
The technical trouble with Othello is that it is high
tragedy based on the scenario of a comic opera. It is
not improved by Shakespeare's treatment, for in the
original story lago had been in love with Desdcmona
himself; excellent motivation, had he chosen to use it,
but he did not, and left lago, like Richard III, a mere
inexplicable figure of evil. The handkerchief is a motif
from court comedy, Portia's ring all over again, and
quite insufficient to support the weight of the tragedy
he builds on it. The scene in which Othello overlooks a
meeting between lago and Cassio and translates Cas-
sio's gestures and laughter into a comment on his sup-
129
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
posed affair with Desdemona is another and cruder
example. In court comedy it is possible that it might
pass muster as a bit of good-humored extravagance,
but the convention is farcical, not tragic. The curious
staginess of these tragedies reminds us of Hardy's
novels, and the purpose seems to be the same. Shake-
speare puts the Almighty on trial for murder and then
fakes the evidence. Now, it is the essence of high
tragedy that the more demands the author makes on
our emotions, the more he will concede to our intel-
ligence ; the higher he keys his tragedy and flings his
scepter at the injurious gods, the more he will try to
convince us, as Sophocles and Racine do, that his state-
ments are true and his conclusions inescapable, and
that is the test Othello will not stand up to. There is
more of the inescapable feeling of high tragedy in the
scene from Troilus and Cressida in which Ulysses and
Troilus overhear the love-making of Diomedes and
Cressida than in anything in Othello up to the actual
climax.
At the same time it would be foolish not to appreciate
the way in which the abandonment of realism, the
bursting of the dikes, releases a flood of passion and
poetry. Undoubtedly, for years the poet in Shakespeare
had been half strangled by his theoretical realism; the
filter of human beings through whom it had to pass
before reaching the audience had let through only a
trickle from the vast reservoir of his imagination.
Now it tears out, inundating and fertilizing great
tracts of country. The moment the wretched machinery
which precipitates the crisis has served its purpose, the
play leaps on to a new plane.
One can see it best in the astonishing silences and
130
rHE BREAKTHROUGH
half silences of the text. There are the stunned repeti-
tions. "He echoes me as if there were some monster in
his thought too hideous to be shown/'
OTHELLO. Thy husband knew it all.
EMILIA. My husband.
OTHELLO. Thy husband.
EMILIA. That she was false to wedlock ?
OTHELLO. Ay, with Cassio. . . .
EMILIA. My husband.
OTHELLO. Ay, 'twas he that told me first:
An honest man he is, and hates the slime
That sticks on filthy deeds.
EMILIA. My husband! 1
Time and again it is as though the mind were so
stunned that it could not respond, and then it leaps out
in blazing hypersensibility, too vivid to remain for
long upon the level of conscious thought and diving
back into itself again so that we are bewildered by its
responses. "And good lieutenant, I think you think I
love you?" says lago. "I have well approved it, sir,"
replies Cassio. "I drunk!" And there is Othello's:
Sir, she can turn and turn, and yet go on,
And turn again; and she can weep, sir, weep;
And she's obedient as you say, obedient,
Very obedient. Proceed you in your tears.
Concerning this, sir O well-painted passion!
I am commanded home. Get you away;
I'll send for you anon. Sir, I obey. . . . 2
But the fundamental weakness of the play is simply
that it is not interesting. In tragedy we know what the
V. 2. *O/A., IV. 1.
131
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
end must be, but the dramatic interest is in the details
of the fight between destiny and a character not un-
matched with it; the way in which destiny is foiled and
recovers ; in which the original simple doom is thwarted .
But in Othello there is no fight, and there is no dramatic
interest in watching through round after round the
suffering of someone who cannot hit back, and Othello,
Desdemona, and Cassio are all passive figures, and the
only active figure in the play is an abstraction. If lago,
after playing the trick of the handkerchief had realized
the danger in which he had involved himself by goading
Othello too far, if then in terror he had set about trying
to avert the inevitable catastrophe, we should have had
drama and Othello would have ceased to be a passive
figure, but I do not think that such a scenario would
have satisfied Shakespeare at all. He was not interested
in tragedy as such; he was interested only in saying
what he had to say, and lago, the puppet, was the only
medium through which he could say it.
The same is true of King Lear. Even as a child I al-
ways found it impossible to stomach the first scene in
this play, and had the feeling, fatal to the appreciation
of tragedy, "the man's a fool." A king divides his king-
dom up among his three daughters, and then disinherits
the favorite for refusing to join in a competition of
flattery. Kent, the honest courtier who has defended
her, is exiled. That opening scene would damn any
play. But as it was part of his source material, we had
better pass it and see what Shakespeare added to it.
The King's follower, Gloucester, then disinherits and
banishes his son, Edgar, on the unsupported allega-
tions of his natural son, Edmund, and we are presented
with a double plot involving two baneful and deluded
132
THE BREAKTHROUGH
old fathers, two sets of wicked children, and two sets
of dutiful ones. Kent returns to the King's service in
disguise in time to see Lear's wicked children drive
him from their homes, insane, while Gloucester's son,
Edmund, conspires with them to murder his own father.
Regan and her husband between them tear out the old
man's eyes. The two dutiful children set about restor-
ing the balance. Edgar, pretending to be a madman
"it may appear to some ridiculous" to escape his
father's vengeance, meets the old man with his eye
sockets still bleeding after his mutilation. He wants to
commit suicide and asks Edgar to lead him to a certain
high cliff. Instead, Edgar leads him to a hillock which
he describes as a huge cliff, and the old man hurls him-
self oflfit, and is of course uninjured. Then Edgar comes
up, this time in his proper person, and persuades his
father that the hillock really had been a cliff, his guide
a fiend trying to lure him to destruction, his escape a
miracle. Then he goes out to challenge his wicked
brother who, with his last dying kick, orders the hang-
ing of Cordelia.
Now, seriously, what are we to make of this tissue
of nonsense masquerading as tragedy? There is some-
thing dreadfully wrong with that particular scene be-
tween Edgar and his father. The playwright may show
his hand too soon the beginner's mistake or too
late the journeyman's. If Shakespeare really was
responsible for the scenario of Lear he shows it too late.
The moment is past when we can be moved by the
meeting between the deluded father and his wronged
son, and no tragic dramatist in his right mind would
ever deliberately have sacrificed such a scene merely
to extract another rabbit from the dramatic hat. There
133
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
is a second example of a delayed climax at the end of
Measure for Measure which is even clumsier.
In the presence of a crude collaborator we may, if we
choose, bring in a verdict of "not proven" regarding
the bloodthirsty tomfoolery of Barnardine and Rog-
gazine in Measure for Measure , and the bringing in
of Macbeth's head on a pole; but we cannot acquit
Shakespeare of the same sort of tomfoolery over Clo-
ten's body in Cymbelim or the stamping out of Glou-
cester's eyes in Lear. They are part of the psychological
wantonness of which the later plays are full. When
Shakespeare opened the dikes, something more than
poetry came in. Cymbeline banishes Posthumus in a
childish frenzy like Lear's or Gloucester's ; Posthumus,
himself banished, in a childish frenzy like Othello's,
believes some nonsense about Imogen's fidelity and
orders her murdered. A Winter's Tale opens with a
king who, for no particular reason, imagines that his
wife has deceived him with Polixenes, and orders the
murder of Polixenes, the trial of his wife, and first the
burning and then abandonment of his newborn baby
Perdita. ( In this welter of neuroticism it is merely a
detail that the kind old courtier who is compelled to
expose her is eaten by a bear presumably Shake-
speare's company had a bear.) Perdita in turn falls in
love with Polixenes' son, whereupon Polixenes orders
the execution of her supposed father and the banish-
ment of everybody. And even stranger than the phan-
tasmagoria of men mad with jealousy and power is the
fantasy of girls with pretty-pretty names Cordelia,
Perdita, Miranda, and Imogen; the passive principle
opposed to the active one. There is no trace of the
ambiguity which defines the characters of Richard II,
134
THE BREAKTHROUGH
Shylock, or Falstaff. Nothing opposes the storm of
misanthropy which blows through these later plays,
and we can hardly escape the feeling that the image of
the burst seed pod which we find for the first time in
Lear and again in Macbeth, Timon of Athens, and A
Winter's ^Tale y represents Shakespeare's own thought.
Crack Nature's moulds, all gennens spill at once
That make ungrateful man. 3
The misanthropy is, of course, common to other
writers. European civilization, as reintroduced by
James I, had some features which must have appeared
unfamiliar to Englishmen. Thanks to their virtual isola-
tion during Elizabeth's long reign they were in some
ways far ahead of their contemporaries on the Conti-
nent, but generally far behind. The Renaissance had
influenced them deeply, but they were still medieval,
almost Catholic in outlook; and this came out when-
ever they tried to express themselves in architecture,
prose, or drama. The Elizabethan theater with its
canopied stage, half a picture stage, half a platform set
up in an innyard, is typically transitional in character;
something which must change immediately. The typi-
cal Tudor building, full of memories of Gothic and
rumors of the Renaissance, is merely a temporary
compromise.
Elizabeth, as wise as James was foolish, realized
that absolute monarchy in a country politically as
mature as England was a risky business, and for a
woman it might have been fatal. She steered a clever
middle course, ruling as she said (not altogether in-
sincerely) by her people's love. Middle-class opinion
3 Lear, III. 2.
135
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
counted for a good deal. Shakespeare and his company
were still what the middle classes considered them :
rogues and vagabonds. One of James' first acts was to
make them Grooms of the Chamber. "Kings/' he ex-
plained, "are not only God's lieutenants upon earth and
sit upon God's throne, but even by God himself they
are called gods." Shakespeare versified it in Sir Thomas
More, a play by a team of writers, into which he wrote
two scenes, probably about 1603-4, and one of which
some famous scholars believe is in his own handwriting.
hath not only lent the King His figure,
His throne and sword, but given him His own name,
Calls him a god on earth. 4
"I think the King is but a man as I am," said the dis-
guised Henry on the night before Agincourt, and here
Shakespeare was expressing the humane and pitiful
Elizabethan view of the monarch who, in Daniel's
noble lines
Environed with deceit, hemmed in with guile,
Soothed up in flattery, fawned on of all,
Within his own living as in exile,
Hears but with others' ears or not at all. 5
Absolutism had come in and with it its character-
istic art. "Princes' images on their tombs do not lie
as they were wont," says Webster, "seeming to pray
up to Heaven, but with their hands under their cheeks,
as if they died of the toothache." 6 Othello and Lear
are Baroque tragedies as Measure for Measure and
Cymbeline are Baroque comedies. They have all the
4 Sir Thomas More, II. 4. 5 Civil Wars.
The Duchess of Malfi, IV. 2.
136
THE BREAKTHROUGH
characteristics of Baroque art : the sensationalism, the
extravagant emotional attitudes, "as if they had died
of the toothache"; the sentimentality, particularly in
the portraits of women ; even the desire to shock. Shake-
speare leads the fashion rather than follows it, for the
"romances" do not begin with Philaster or Pericles but
with Othello and Lear. Evade the physical catastrophe
of Lear and you have a Baroque comedy ; add the final
catastrophe to A Winter's Tale and you have a Baroque
tragedy.
But one cannot place the responsibility entirely on
any form of art, however fashionable it may have been.
That must rest on Shakespeare himself and the blind
tyrannous strength which would not be satisfied with
anything but inhuman abstractions like lago and Ed-
mund as the instruments of destiny, and which uses
them in an overmastering impulse to crush and destroy,
even to the very seed in the womb.
137
1 1 . The Bad Texts
HPHE commentators suggest that there is a lighten-
JL ing of the misanthropic gloom in Macbeth and
Antony and Cleopatra, but this is merely the rounding
off of a sentimental romance composed by themselves
of which the hero is not Shakespeare but Beethoven.
If these two plays are outstanding among the tragedies
it is because they are histories, and since Shakespeare
had merely to tell a familiar story over again, he could
not wreak his misanthropy on them.
In them the nervous disintegration of language that
was hinted at in earlier plays becomes marked. Hamlet
and Troilns and Cressida, apart from their classicisms
and Gallicisms, contain a number of grammatical per-
versions; nouns are used as verbs, adjectives as nouns,
and so forth: a verb like "to business" in Hamlet is
typical. Again, Hamlet contains the lines "No, let the
candied tongue, lick absurd pomp, and crook the preg-
nant hinges of the knee." Because these read peculiarly
all editors carefully correct them to "No, let the candied
tongue lick absurd pomp, and crook the pregnant hinges
of the knee" which is insane. Shakespeare punctuated
the passage quite correctly because he intended "can-
died" as a noun and "tongue" as a verb.
In King Lear we get rather more of it : verbs like
"stranger,""monster,""worthy,""hovel,"and"knee,"
and adjectives like "looped," "windowed," and "hus-
banded." In Antony and Cleopatra it becomes a land-
slide : verbs like "ballad," "boy," "antick," "spaniel,"
138
THE BAD TEXTS
"lackey," "boot," "bark," "safe," and "demure"; as
well as the even more characteristic nouns in "er" like
"sworder," "master-leaver," "hater," "equaliser,"
"feeder," and "homager," particularly in harsh com-
pounds like "putter-out." There is a fondness for
the verbal noun because of its ambiguity, and so we
get "seeming" for "appearance," "becomings" for
"charms," "having" for "possessions," and "contain-
ing" for "contents," while the verbal noun does double
service as an adjective as in "not-fearing Britain" and
"rebelling coasts." Transitive verbs become intran-
sitive and the other way round, while on the analogy
of "honour" ("the honours were even") abstract
nouns are given plural forms as in "shames" and
"decays."
In meter there is an even greater disintegration, the
midline stop of Hamlet giving place to a full close in the
middle of a line, sometimes produced by a harsh com-
bination of assonance and alliteration, sometimes by a
powerful heaping up of qualified nouns.
Her brother's ghost his paved bed would break
And take her hence in horror. 1
In Antony and Cleopatra there is even a looseness of
meter like that of Fletcher with his abuse of the feminine
ending, that is, the ending of the line with a word of
two syllables. The trouble with this is that by infection
the feminine ending spreads to the middle of the line,
and when the two disyllables move together, as they
often do in Fletcher, the five-beat measure of blank
verse breaks down and we get one of four beats that
jogs happily on like an old pony. Shakespeare's ear was
139
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
too sensitive to make this mistake often, and when he
collaborates with Fletcher a simple glance at the line
endings is usually sufficient to tell us who the author
is, but still he does make it in Cymbeline and Antony
and Cleopatra.
In a group of plays written somewhere about 1605
Macbeth, certain scenes from Measure for Measure, and
odd speeches in that extraordinary medley of authors
and styles All's Well That Ends Well Shakespeare's
dramatic style was at its greatest. Experiment in these
has gone as far as it can go without injuring the texture
of the verse. In Macbeth particularly the peculiar mood
of exaltation is expressed in the fondness for the word
"great" used for color rather than for sense "the
great Doom's image," "in the great hand of God/'
"our great quell."
Macbeth is a tragedy not of crime but of ambition.
An ambitious man himself, Shakespeare was haunted
by the idea of power ; its seizure by Macbeth, its abuse
by Angelo, its achievement by More.
Good God! Good God!
That I from such an humble bench of birth
Should step as 'twere up to my country's head,
And give the law out there! 2
Macbeth himself is not so much a good man gone
wrong as an ambitious one who has discovered the
mockery of power. Death, the ultimate horror, he has
inflicted on Duncan, but Duncan in his grave has the
peace Macbeth has lost: "steel nor poison, malice do-
mestic, foreign levy, nothing can touch him further."
This is no longer the death which to the young Shake-
speare had seemed almost as natural as life; it is
2 Sir Thomas More, Addition IIL
140
THE BAD TEXTS
the death of the oversensitive man, the death of the
suicide, the only panacea for the horrors of life.
"Fear no more the frown of the great, thou art past
the tyrant's stroke/' The same misanthropy appears
in the repetition of the theme of the broken seed
pod:
though the treasure
Of Nature's germens tumble all together
Even till Destruction sicken. 3
Unfortunately, these three plays have come down to
us in abominable texts, and we can only guess at what
the original plays were like. For instance, on April 2O,
161 1 , a quack doctor and astrologer named Simon For-
man saw Macbeth at the Globe Theatre and later wrote
a fairly full account of it. "Macbeth and Banquo, two
noblemen of Scotland, riding through a wood, there
stood before them three women fairies or nymphs."
Later, "When Macbeth had murdered the King, the
blood on his hands would not be washed off by any
means, nor from his wife's hands, which handled the
bloody daggers in hiding them."
The play itself was not printed until the Folio of
1623 and in this, our only text, occur two concerted
numbers, mentioned only by name, which also occur
in Middleton's The Witch. Since they contain refer-
ences to characters in Middleton's play they clearly
belong to it, not to Macbeth, and as they require the
presence of Hecate it is plain that they are the sole
reason for her appearance in Shakespeare's play. Ac-
cordingly, it is generally agreed that the Hecate speech
and the concerted numbers are interpolations and that
they were introduced by Thomas Middleton himself;
3 Macb., IV. 1.
141
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
that he also tampered with the second scene and that
he or someone else cut the play.
I am not satisfied with this conclusion because it
seems to me to ignore the principal difficulty: the
Holinshed print of the three respectable ladies, the
passage in Holinshed that describes how Macbeth and
Banquo, "passing through the woods and fields," came
upon three women, "either the weird sisters, that is
(as ye would say) the goddesses of destiny, or else
some nymphs or fairies," and Simon Forman's de-
scription of the performance of Macbeth he saw in which
Macbeth and Banquo, "riding through a wood," saw
"three women fairies or nymphs." What one wants to
know is how the three woodland nymphs became
translated into the three witches of the blasted heath
in the Stewpan scenes. This is important because the
sort of Macbeth Forman describes would be suitable
for an open-air theater like the Globe while the Stew-
pan episodes would be highly impracticable in any but
an indoor one.
Again, Forman, an astrologer as well as a quack,
never refers to the apparitions scene. Is this not because
there was no such scene in the original Macbeth 9 since
it would have been difficult and ineffective on an
open-air stage ? And what on earth has happened to the
scene in which Macbeth and his wife tried to wash their
hands after the murder? "A little water clears us of
this deed," but it does not clear the text of lines like
"Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood clean
from my hand?" and its echoes in Lady Macbeth' s
sleepwalking.
The text, as I have said, is atrocious : the line "we
have scorched the snake not killed it" seems to have
been lifted from a scene which took place after the
142
THE BAD TEXTS
murder of Banquo and to refer to the escape of Fleance
rather than to the murder of Duncan. The entrance of
the Murderers during the banquet scene ( almost im-
possible to stage) seems to have been dragged in for
effect, while it must be obvious to the meanest intel-
ligence that neither Shakespeare nor Burbadge could
be responsible for the off-stage death of the principal
character and the appearance of his head on a pole.
Clearly, this is the work of a stage director. The stage
director had a head and needed a part for it.
The text is as corrupt as Measure for Measure. Poor
school children are compelled to work their way
through lines like the following though no scholar I
know of even dares to suggest what they mean.
7/"th' assassination
Could trammel up the consequence and catch
With his surcease, success; that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all, here
But here upon this bank and shoal of time
We'd jump the life to come. 4
"Be-all" and "end-all," though sanctified by gene-
rations of hardworking journalists, look very like
ghost words ; "here but here" is plain nonsense ; "bank
and shoal" Theobald's emendation of "Banke and
schoole" is a scholar's idea of poetry. As the image
appears to be from a court of oyer and terminer, one can
only surmise that Shakespeare wrote something like :
Might be the trial and the endal, heard
But here upon this bank and stool of time.*
*Macb.,l.7.
* At the risk of adding another ghost word to the canon, I would
suggest that "be-all" should be "abeyal" for "abeyance," meaning
"the contemplation of law."
143
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
It seems to me that editors have ignored the most
flagrant signs of revision. One scene opens like this :
LADY M. Is Banquo gone from court ?
SERV. Ay, madam, but returns again tonight.
LADY M. Say to the King I would attend his leisure
For a few words.
SERV. Madam, I will. (Exit SERVANT.)
LADY M. Nought's had all's spent
Where our desire is got without content :
"Tis safer to be that which we destroy
Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy.
(Enter MACBETH.) 6
There are some remarkable things about this pas-
sage. One is the extraordinary clumsiness of the prep-
aration for Macbcth's entrance; the Servant has been
introduced merely to summon him, and the couplets to
fill the gap while Lady Macbeth "attends his leisure."
As I shall show, this particular weakness is not confined
to Macbeth. Another remarkable thing is that the
couplets occur in a vastly superior blank verse form in
Macbeth's first speech after his entrance.
Better be with the dead
Whom we to gain our peace have sent to peace
Than on the torture of the mind to lie
In restless ecstasy. 6
At first sight it would seem as if some reviser had
translated Shakespeare's blank verse into rhymed cou-
plets to fill a gap in a scene of his own. But is this what
did happen ? Is the rhyme between "lie" and "ecstasy"
a mere accident? All's Well That Ends Well, at least
so far as the verse goes, must be almost contemporary
Macb., III. 2. 6 Macb., III. 2.
144
THE BAD TEXTS
with Macbeth. It is a play about a poor girl who, having
got herself married to a nobleman, tricks him into
consummating the marriage by acting as substitute
for an Italian girl he is in love with. As in Macbeth
there is a lot of dull rhymed verse, but the peculiar
feature of this is that it seems to be Shakespeare who
translates the rhymed couplets into blank verse, trans-
forming them by a few strokes into magnificent poetry.
But O strange men!
That can such sweet use make of what they hate
When saucy trusting of the cozened thoughts
Defiles the pitchy night : so lust doth play
With what it loathes for that which is away. 7
Or this, with its characteristic repetition of the
"Ne'er loved till lost" theme that haunted him.
Love that comes too late
Like a remorseful pardon slowly carried
To the great sender turns a sour offence
Crying 'That's good that's gone.' Our rash faults
Make trivial price of serious things we have
Not knowing them until we know their grave :
Oft our displeasures to ourselves unjust
Destroy our friends and after weep their dust. 8
The translation has been so swiftly done that Shake-
speare sometimes leaves the rhymes sticking out like
fossils in his text.
that can'st not dream
We poising us in her defective scale,
Can weigh thee to the beam\ that wilt not know
It is in us to plant thine honour where
We please to have itgrozv. 9
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
The scene from which the latter passage is taken is
an extraordinary bit of work. It opens with Bertram,
Lafeu, and Parolles discussing Helena's restoration of
the King to health, though Bertram's sole contribution
to the discussion is "And so 'tis." The King and Helena
appear, accompanied by courtiers and taking no notice
of Lafeu and Parolles, while Bertram, with no leave-
taking, is presently discovered among the wards whom
the King summons so that Helena may choose herself
a husband. When she has done this, Lafeu and Parol-
les "stay behind, commenting of this wedding/' as a
curious stage direction informs us. It seems clear that
Bertram's presence at the opening of the scene is an
error, that his real entrance is with the other wards,
and that the scene in verse has been spatchcocked into
a prose scene between Lafeu and Parolles. Further-
more, the author of the prose scene, who has worked
over the verse and given an occasional line to Lafeu to
link him with the action, must be Shakespeare. The
"dictionary" line he gives to Lafeu "In a most weak
and debile minister" is typically Shakespearean. So
is the verse when it is released from its strait jacket
of rhyme.
KING. Fair maid, send forth thine eye: this youthful
parcel
Of noble bachelors stand at my bestowing,
O'er whom both sovereign power and father's voice
I have to use : thy frank election make ;
Thou'st power to choose and they none to forsake.
HEL. To each of you one fair and virtuous mistress
Fall when love please! marry, to each but one!
LAP. I'd give bay Curtal and his furniture
146
THE BAD TEXTS
My mouth were no more broken than these boys'
And writ as little beard.
KING. Peruse them well
Not one of these but had a noble father.
HEL. Gentlemen,
Heaven hath through me restored the king to health.
ALL. We understand it and thank Heaven for you.
HEL. I am a simple maid and therein wealthiest
That I protest I simply am a maid.
Please it your majesty, I have done already :
The blushes in my cheeks thus whisper me,
'We blush that thou should'st choose; but be refused
Let the white death sit on thy cheek forever;
We'll ne'er come there again.'
KING. Make choice ; and see
Who shuns thy love shuns all his love in me. 10
No one can doubt that this is a scene in rhymed verse
that has been hastily revised, or doubt that the reviser
of it was Shakespeare. It contains some fine verse, but
the couplets stick up through it, not only in the obvious
rhymes but also in the suppressed ones like "parcel
(band)-stand" and "election (choice)-voice."
But somebody else must have been at work on it,
because at the end of the verse scene we get the note
that "Parolles and Lafeu stay behind commenting of
this wedding/' which, as Professor Wilson has pointed
out, is not a stage direction at all and can only be ex-
plained as an instruction to a collaborator. He takes
the view that it is Shakespeare who is giving the
instruction, but if Shakespeare wrote the scene be-
tween Lafeu and Parolles why should he give instruc-
tions to himself?
One might, of course, assume that the rhymed verse
10 A. W. E. W., II. s.
147
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
comes from the early play, Love's Labour's Won, of
which All's Well is generally supposed to be a revision.
There is certainly one speech that comes from a Shake-
speare play of the early 1590's and indubitably links it
with the Marriage sonnets. That is the tirade on
Virginity "Out with it! within ten year it will make
itself ten, which is a goodly increase, and the principal
itself not much the worse : away with it!" But this, too,
has been tampered with, for at this point Helena is
made to ask : "How might one do, sir, to lose it to her
own liking ?" and Parolles replies, "Let me see : marry,
ill to like him that ne'er it likes." After which piece of
fatuity, the tirade swings on as before. And how, if
Shakespeare really was the author of the rhymed verse,
did he come to make the mistake he makes in this
scene ? It continues in this way :
HEL. Now, Dian, from thy altar do I fly,
And to imperial Love, that god most high,
Do my sighs stream. Sir, will you hear my suit ?
1 ST LORD. And grant it.
HEL. Thanks, sir; all the rest is mute.
LAP. I had rather be in this choice than throw ames
ace for my life.
HEL. The honour, sir, that flames in your fair eyes
Before I speak too threateningly replies :
Love make your fortune twenty times above
Her that so wishes and her humble love.
2ND LORD. No better, if you please.
HEL. My wish receive,
Which great Love grant! and so I take my
leave.
LAP. Do all they deny her? An' they were sons of
mine I'd have them whipped ; or I would send
them to the Turk to be made eunuchs of.
148
THE BAD TEXTS
HEL. Be not afraid that I your hand should take;
I'll never do you wrong for your own sake :
Blessings upon your vows, and in your bed
Find fairer fortune if you ever wed.
LAP. These boys are boys of ice, they'll none have
her : sure they are bastards to the English ;
the French ne'er got 'em. 11
Now, as Professor Wilson points out, the meaning
of this is that all the lads except Bertram are eager to
marry Helena, and Helena, like the great lady she is,
lets them down lightly by affecting to think that they
are alarmed at the prospect an admirable piece of
comedy if the author had taken the trouble to write it.
But the curious thing is that Lafeu also believes that
none of them wants to marry Helena. Professor Wilson
puts him and Parolles "at a distance," but I cannot
imagine any stage distance that would make this point
clear to an audience. Just think of the difficulties the
producer faces! He must make it plain that each of the
young lords is eager to be chosen as Helena's partner
though none of them has a line that makes this un-
equivocally clear; that Helena doesn't want to marry
any of them, at the same time expressing her belief
that none of them wants to marry her, and that Lafeu,
acting as chorus and completely misinterpreting the
whole scene, is just making a mistake. Without testing
it in rehearsal, I should say it would result in chaos.
Surely what has happened is that in his careless revision
of the scene he has been partially revising, Shakespc are
has made the same mistake Professor Wilson accuses
Lafeu of making.
A. W. E. W., II. 3.
149
12. Measure for Measure
IT is only with Measure for Measure that we get suf-
ficient material for textual criticism. The New Cam-
bridge editor, Professor Wilson, has produced a most
brilliant analysis of the text, but the conclusions he
draws from it are disappointing. They are that the play
was abridged for Court performance on December 26,
1604, and some time after November, 1606, expanded
again into prose, Shakespeare not being consulted in
either operation. He credits Shakespeare with 1,865
lines; "of these 1,604 are in blank verse, and no one
we think will be inclined to doubt that all this, whether
its style be early or late, is from Shakespeare's hand/'
The rest of the play is the "reviser's."
The story is roughly this : the Duke of Vienna retires
to a monastery, leaving the government of the city in
the hands of the puritanical Angelo, who re-enacts the
laws against fornication, and condemns Claudio to
death. Claudio's sister, Isabella, a novice in a convent,
pleads for him, and Angelo offers to reprieve him if she
becomes his mistress. The Duke, now acting as chap-
lain of the prison, overhears her telling this to Claudio,
and persuades her to allow a lady jilted by Angelo, one
"Mariana of the Moated Grange/' to keep the tryst
instead of her. Angelo, believing he has possessed
Isabella and afraid of her brother's vengeance, orders
Claudio's execution. The Duke has the head of another
150
MEASURE FOR MEASURE
prisoner sent to him instead, and then stages a show-
down in which Isabella accuses Angelo, who gives her
the lie; Mariana of the Moated Grange denies Isa-
bella's charges and claims Angelo for herself, only to
be repudiated in her turn (all, scene for scene, very
much in the manner of All's Well 'That Ends Well),
till finally the Duke himself, returning in his monk's
habit, makes a fresh charge before revealing his iden-
tity, resurrecting Claudio, and proposing to Isabella.
There is nothing wrong with the main theme. It
might have made a magnificent tragedy in the manner
of Othello; a fine study of a weak man in the manner of
Promos and Cassandra, on which it is based, or a satiric
comedy like Tartufe. All these possibilities were barred,
because onto the original powerful tale was grafted the
fanciful theme of All's Well That Ends Well, and the
introduction of Mariana of the Moated Grange made
it necessary that Angelo should be pardoned and there-
fore robbed the play of all dramatic impulse. It is not
that there is anything inherently wrong with the theme
of All's Well That Ends Well. If one assumes that it is
a reworking of Love's Labour's Won and was originally
written at the same time as the Marriage sonnets, one
can see that Shakespeare, whose patron, the Earl of
Southampton, was at the time kicking against his pro-
posed marriage to the granddaughter of the Secretary,
Lord Burghley, could have got considerable fun out of
the subject of a ward of the court who refuses to marry
the commoner that the King has chosen as his wife, and
who is finally outwitted by her. But no total conception
of a play can combine in one moral perception the theme
of a governor who forces a pious girl into his bed and
that of a clever girl who tricks a wayward man into
131
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
hers. Measure for Measure is not one play but two, and
the two do not blend; they do not even collide with
one another; they merely meet and back away.
The problem is how did Shakespeare ever come to
write such a play ? In fact, did he really write such a
play, or is there, behind Measure for Measure, an
entirely different sort of play ? That revision or col-
laboration took place there is no doubt at all. The
evidence for this is of a different kind from that in All's
Well That Ends Well. There are rhymed couplets in
Measure for Measure and some of them are clearly not
Shakespeare's, but there is far more impressive evi-
dence than this. In III. 1. there is a change from verse
to prose of which the New Cambridge editors write
with commendable restraint that "the two halves of
this scene cannot be made of a piece by anyone posess-
ing even a rudimentary acquaintance with English prose
and poetry. We will not say they could not have been
written an interval granted by the same man. But
we say confidently that they could not have been writ-
ten by the same man at one spell, on one inspiration,
or with anything like an identical or even continuous
poetic purpose." To this the editor of the Temple
Shakespeare replies by saying that "Shakespeare wrote
the scene with a deliberately ^continuous dramatic
purpose" whatever that may mean.
Shakespeare did not write the scene at all, at any
time, and the evidence is not in the difference of style
though heaven knows that is obvious enough for
anyone; it is in two passages that I must quote in full.
The act opens in the prison with the Duke (disguised
as a friar), Claudio, and the Provost. (We shall see
later what the Provost is doing here. ) The Duke com-
168
MEASURE FOR MEASURE
forts Claudio in the great speech on death, and then
Isabella's voice is heard outside.
ISAB. What ho! Peace here; grace and good company!
PRO v. Who's there ? come in : the wish deserves a welcome.
DUKE. Dear sir, ere long I'll visit you again.
CLAUD. Most holy sir, I thank you. ( Enter ISABELLA.)
ISAB. My business is a word or two with Claudio.
PRO v. And very welcome. Look, signior, here's your sister.
DUKE. Provost, a word with you.
PROV. As many as you please.
DUKE. Bring me to hear them speak where I may be con-
cealed. ( Exeunt DUKE and PROVOST. ) l
Now, this is a remarkable passage in itself; a fussy,
confused, and undramatic passage, but nothing like so
bad as one that occurs later. In one of the greatest
scenes in literature Isabella tells Claudio of Angelo's
proposal; he breaks down and begs her to accept it,
and she pours scorn on him. Her speech is interrupted
by the sudden emergence of the Duke from hiding, and
it is of this joint between verse and prose that the New
Cambridge editors say that "the two halves of this
scene cannot be made of a piece by anyone possessing
even a rudimentary acquaintance with English prose
and poetry/' It is curious that they fail to notice that
the style of this scene is identical with that of the brief
passage I have quoted.
DUKE. Vouchsafe a word, young sister, but one word.
ISAB. What is your will ?
DUKE. Might you dispense with your leisure, I would by
and by have some speech with you : the satisfac-
tion I would require is likewise your own benefit.
1 M.for M., III. 1.
153
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
i SAB. I have no superfluous leisure; my stay must be
stolen out of other affairs ; but I will attend you
awhile. (Walks apart.}
DUKE. Son, I have overheard what hath passed between
you and your sister. Angelo had never the pur-
pose to corrupt her; only he hath made an assay
of her virtue to practice his judgment with the
disposition of natures ; she, having the truth of
honour in her, hath made him that gracious
denial which he is most glad to receive. I am
confessor to Angelo, and I know this to be true;
therefore prepare yourself to death; do not
satisfy your resolution with hopes that are fal-
lible ; tomorrow you must die ; go to your knees
and make ready.
CLAUD. Let me ask my sister pardon. I am so out of love
with life that I will sue to be rid of it.
DUKE. Hold you there: farewell. (Exit CLAUDIO.) Pro-
vost, a word with you! (Re-enter PROVOST.)
PRO v. What's your will, father ?
DUKE. That now you are come you will be gone. Leave
me awhile with the maid: my mind promises
with my habit no loss shall touch her by my
company.
PROV. In good time. 2
The curious points about this passage are numerous.
First, there is the phrase I have italicized and to which
I shall return. Second, there is the fact that the Duke is
not only masquerading as a friar, but even hearing con-
fessions and ostensibly revealing the substance of them,
a piece of Protestant legend that would come ill from
the friend of Strange and Southampton. Third, there
is the deliberate and cruel lying of the Duke; fourth,
* M. for M., III. i.
154
MEASURE FOR MEASURE
the fact that Claudio, having asked leave to beg his
sister's pardon, goes out without saying a word to her.
But all these become unimportant beside the one glar-
ing fact that the author has not the remotest idea of
how to get people on and off the stage. He has had to
get Isabella to "walk apart" while the Duke tells her
brother lies ; he has had to get Claudio out of the con-
demned cell unaccompanied by any gaoler so that the
Duke can talk to Isabella : worst of all, he has had to
withdraw the Provost from their common hiding place
and dismiss him. Beyond question, this is the writing
of a man who did not know the theater.
But why has he tied himself up into this extraor-
dinary knot? The explanation is, I think, fairly clear.
Neither the Duke nor the Provost has any business on
the stage at all. In Shakespeare's version of the scene
Claudio and Isabella fought their battle to a conclusion,
whatever that was. Then the Duke met Isabella com-
ing from her brother's cell, and learned her story. Pre-
sumably she was accompanied by the Provost because
"no loss shall touch her by my company" is good
Shakespeare. At first the Duke was incredulous; we
get a brief fragment of his part irrelevantly intruded
upon a later scene.
his life is paralleled
Even with the stroke and line of his great justice:
He doth with holy abstinence subdue
That in himself which he spurs on his power
To qualify in others : were he mealed with that
Which he corrects, then were he tyrannous ;
But this being so he's just. 3
3A/./orM., IV. 2.
155
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
When the Duke realized the truth of what Isabella
was saying, there was the Shakespearean peripateia.
Alas, that scene exists only in a murdered form in the
reviser's prose, but we can still get some small idea of
what it was like.
The hand that hath made you fair hath made you good :
The goodness that is cheap in beauty makes
(Its) beauty brief in goodness, but (His) grace,
Being the soul of your complexion,
Shall keep the body of it ever fair. 4
Not wishing to repeat the scene between Claudio
and Isabella, the hack intruded the Duke and Provost
upon it. That is why I remarked upon the presence of
the Provost at the opening of the scene. He must be
there to show the Duke a hiding place, and when the
Duke leaves it, and Claudio, whom he is supposed to
be guarding, has wandered off, he must be summoned
and dismissed in the most ridiculous lines in dramatic
literature. "What's your will, father?" "That now
you are come you will be gone/' Here one can go
considerably further than the New Cambridge editors
and say that no one possessing a rudimentary acquaint-
ance with the theater can possibly suppose that this
is the work of a dramatist.
But what is he ? Professor Wilson believes he is the
man who revised and expanded the play at some time
after November, 1606, but in this scene we have posi-
tive proof that he was not expanding but telescoping,
in the manner of the man who seems to have telescoped
two different scenes in The Two Gentlemen of Verona.
The problem we have to ask ourselves now is, why was
156
MEASURE FOR MEASURE
he telescoping? To cut the repetition of Isabella's
complaint, undoubtedly, but there must have been a
further reason. If the plot had developed as we now
have it; if Angelo was to have been fobbed off with
Mariana of the Moated Grange instead of Isabella,
there would have been no reason why, once having
established his cut, the "reviser" should not have al-
lowed the plot to be revealed in Shakespeare's own
words instead of going to all the trouble of composing
his own dreary speeches, such as "This forenamed
maid hath yet in her the continuance of her first affec-
tion : his unjust kindness, that in all reason should have
quenched her love, hath, like an impediment in the
current, made it more violent and unruly." 5
The reason why the reviser could not make use of
Shakespeare's speeches was that Shakespeare never
wrote them. Shakespeare never conceived of the exist-
ence of Mariana of the Moated Grange, even if she
was a character in his scenario. The whole point of the
tremendous tragedy that Shakespeare was writing was
that Angelo had had no experience of women. The
Angelo he imagined was a saint, and his tragedy was
that he could be tempted only by a saint. That is the
meaning of his terrible cry
O cunning Enemy, that, to catch a saint,
With saints dost bait thy hook! Most dangerous
Is that temptation that doth goad us on
To sin in loving virtue. . . . 6
Whether as I most often think, Shakespeare had
written a play called Measure for Measure, of which our
present text is merely a parody, or whether he had
M. for M. 9 III. 1. e M.for M. t II. 2.
157
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
collaborated at a distance with a man who was com-
pletely incapable of fulfilling his intentions, there is no
doubt in my mind that Mariana of the Moated Grange
had no real place in it.
So long as the scenario follows the original one of
Promos and Cassandra there is no problem. The first
part of the play is masterly. The scenes between Angelo
and Isabella and the scene between Isabella and Claudio
are for me among the greatest things in Shakespearean
drama. Criticism of Isabella and Angelo is usually
fatuous, because commentators fail to realize that both
are saints and their standards are not ours. The indict-
ment is not of piety but of power, Acton's belief that
absolute power corrupts absolutely. But the reviser, or
collaborator, was obsessed by the theme of All's Well
That Ends Well and could not see that the introduction
of Mariana of the Moated Grange would inevitably
result in a reconciliation scene that would call off
the dogs of drama; and from the moment the lady's
name is mentioned the play goes to pieces. All the
prose of the prison scene in which we are told her sad
story is the hack's. Need we ask who was the author
of the scene in which we meet her first ? This scene,
which editors love to place confidently at "the Moat-
ed Grange at St. Luke's," begins with the heavenly
"Take O take those lips away" and the singer is
dismissed as the Duke enters to a volley of rhymed
couplets.
MAR. Let me excuse me, and believe me so,
My mirth it much displeased, but pleased my woe.
DUKE. 'Tis good; though music oft hath such a charm
To make bad good, and good provoke to harm.
I pray you, tell me, hath any body inquired for me
158
MEASURE FOR MEASURE
here to-day ? much upon this time have I promised
here to meet.
MAR. You have not been inquired after: I have sat here
all day. (Enter ISABELLA.)
DUKE. I do constantly believe you. The time is come even
now. I shall crave your forbearance a little : may
be I will call upon you anon, for some advantage to
yourself.
MAR. I am always bound to you. (Exit MARIANA. ) 7
The first thing that needs to be pointed out to all
editors of Measure for Measure is that in this extraordi-
nary scene not one word indicates who the strange lady
is, or for what purpose the Duke has visited her. The
fact that they deal so much in stage directions and
speech entries blinds them to the fact that these are not
visible to an audience. Anyhow, Mariana's exit at this
point is the low-water mark of dramatic incompetence.
But surely we have met before this man who finds
such inordinate difficulty in exits and entrances and
tries to cover up the huggermugger in which he in-
volves himself by making his characters say myste-
riously "It shall be for your good." Here he comes again,
now that Isabella has explained the details of her ar-
rangement for meeting Angelo.
DUKE. 'Tis well borne up.
I have not yet made known to Mariana
A word of this. What ho! within! come forth!
(Re-enter MARIANA.)
I pray you, be acquainted with this maid ;
She comes to do you good.
ISAB. I do desire the like.
DUKE. Do you persuade yourself that I respect you ?
7 M.for M., IV. 1.
159
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
MAR. Good friar, I know you do, and have found it.
DUKE. Take then, this your companion by the hand,
Who hath a story ready for your ear.
I shall attend your leisure : but make haste ;
The vaporous night approaches.
MAR. Will't please you walk aside ? ( Exeunt MARIANA and
ISABELLA.)
DUKE. O place and greatness! millions of false eyes
Are stuck upon thee ; volumes of report
Run with these false and most contrarious quests
Upon thy doings : thousand scapes of wit
Make thee the father of their idle dreams
And rack thee in their fancies. (Re-enter MARIANA
and ISABELLA.) Welcome! How agreed?
ISAB. She'll take the enterprise upon her, father,
If you advise it. 8
Now every Shakespearean student has noticed one
thing about this scene: that the speech on place and
greatness does not belong here; it belongs in III. 2.,
where Lucio traduces the Duke to the supposed Friar
and the Duke says :
No might or greatness in mortality
Can censure scape ; back-wounding calumny
The whitest virtue strikes. What king so strong
Can tie the gall up in the slanderous tongue ? 9
Professor Wilson believes that the two passages are
continuous and have been chopped up in this way be-
cause the reviser wished to cover up a cut. Sir Edmund
Chambers believes they are not continuous and I feel
sure he is right because I don't for an instant believe
that the couplets are Shakespeare's. Remember that
we have already met with precisely the same thing in
8 M. for M., IV. 1. o M. for M., III. 2.
16*0
MEASURE FOR MEASURE
Macbeth, even to the similarity of phrasing between
"I would attend his leisure" and "I shall attend your
leisure," only that in Macbeth the reviser used his own
couplets to plug up a hole in the scene, while here he
uses Shakespeare's blank verse. Why? To cover up
a cut, replies Professor Wilson. But is this the only
reason ?
It is true that, if, as I have suggested, the machin-
ery of Angelo's downfall was differently planned by
Shakespeare, there must at this point have been drastic
cutting. To judge by the way the scene is written here,
it seems unlikely that Isabella and her substitute met
at all. The Duke must have taken the whole contrivance
upon himself, learning the details of the tryst from
Isabella and repeating them to Isabella's substitute.
But for me the most important thing about the scene
is that here again we have our old friend who "comes
to do us good" and finds such difficulty about getting
in and out to do it; and that the reason he has used
Shakespeare's lines as a stopgap is that he has tied
himself into one of his usual knots. We must remember
that we are seeing Mariana for the first time and that
she is seeing Isabella for the first time, and that some
&ort of exposition scene is necessary. The time for this
is immediately after Isabella's entrance, but as Isabella
has to reveal the arrangements for her tryst with
Angelo, which in the original must have been an in-
dependent scene that probably took place at Isabella's
convent, and the reviser has no notion of how to weld
the two scenes together, he gets Mariatia off-stage
with his usual promise of an improvement in her
fortunes. But now, after Isabella has spoken, he is in a
worse plight than ever, for the Duke or Isabella must
161
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
now explain it all over again to Mariana, with the ad-
dition of her own proposed part in the tryst; and as
this is entirely beyond his powers, he cuts the Gordian
knot by letting his ladies "walk apart" while he uses
six lines of Shakespeare quite irrelevantly to fill up the
interval of forty seconds in which Isabella may be sup-
posed to tell the other woman the story of her life.
Once more, we can put our finger on this scene and
say that it must be obvious to anyone who has the
remotest acquaintance with the theater that it was not
written by a dramatist. With these clues to the capacity
of the hack we can easily test other scenes for his pres-
ence. Here is one scene where it is very obvious. It is
just before Angelo sends the order for Claudio's
execution.
DUKE. The best and wholesomest spirits of the night
Envelop you, good Provost! Who called here of late ?
PROV. None since the curfew rung.
DUKE. Not Isabel?
PROV. No.
DUKE. They will then ere't be long.
PROV. What comfort is for Claudio ?
DUKE. There's some in hope.
PROV. It is a bitter deputy.
DUKE. Not so, not so; his life is paralleled
Even with the stroke and line of his great justice:
He doth with holy abstinence subdue
That in himself which he spurs on his power
To qualify in others : were he mealed with that
Which he corrects, then were he tyrannous;
But this being so he's just. (Knocking within.)
Now are they come.
(aside) This is a gentle provost: seldom when
162
MEASURE FOR MEASURE
The steeled gaoler is the friend of men. (Knocking
within. )
How now! What noise ? That spirit's possessed with
haste
That wounds the unsisting postern with these
strokes.
PROV. There he must stay until the officer
Arise to let him in : he is called up.
DUKE. Have you no countermand for Claudio yet ? 10
Here once more we have an entrance handled with
childlike incompetence. It is made still more incom-
petent by editors who give the Provost an exit and
immediate re-entrance when the knocking is heard. As
in the scene at the Moated Grange we have the Duke
asking whether someone hasn't inquired for him and
when told that no one has, giving assurance that some-
body soon will. Again we have a speech "his life is
paralleled" of pure Shakespearean texture, even to
the dictionary line. "Even with the stroke and line of his
great justice" in a con text where it is dramatically mean-
ingless, since the Duke already knows that Angelo's
"holy abstinence" no longer exists; and once more we
can say confidently that the speech has been taken from
its real context, which was either the scene between
the Duke and Isabella in which the Duke learned for
the first time of Angelo's backsliding or that between
the Duke and Lucio in III. 2. placed here with grotesque
clumsiness to lengthen the interval between two suc-
cessive entrances. If any reader has followed me so far
he will probably agree either that Shakespeare was
writing "with a deliberately rfw-continuous dramatic
purpose" or that Professor Wilson's view that "no
10 M. for M., IV. 2.
163
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
one . . . will be inclined to doubt that all this, whether
its style be early or late, is from Shakespeare's hand"
is overoptimistic.
By this time the tragic and farcical themes have be-
come so hopelessly confused that it is difficult to see
exactly what purpose the hack had in writing this
particular scene at all. Judging by the previous two
scenes where we can detect his hand, I would guess
that the Duke was not supposed to be in the prison.
It seems to me probable that Angelo's order for
Claudio's execution did not demand the production of
Claudio's head at all, but that the hack wanted a head
brought on stage. He certainly revised the last act of
Macbeth with no other purpose than to have Macbeth's
head brought on, probably believing it to be highly
dramatic. The bloodthirsty tomfoolery in which the
Duke (supposedly a mere chaplain) orders the execu-
tion of Barnardine, and then, when Barnardine refuses
to make his confession to the Duke, relents and has the
head of a dead prisoner cut off instead, contains a
solecism that would have irritated an Elizabethan
audience more than it irritates us. Pompey, now a
hangman's apprentice, summons Barnardine to be
hanged, but the hangman asks "Is the axe upon the
block, sirrah?" To an Elizabethan this would have
been absurd. Beheading would have been the fate of a
nobleman like Claudio, hanging the fate of a common
thief like Barnardine. There is something dreadfully
out of key about these scenes, and I cannot help wonder-
ing if Shakespeare did not intend that Claudio should
be saved from the block not by the Duke but by the
friendly Provost, and if Claudio's appearance in the
last scene was not intended to be as much a surprise to
164
MEASURE FOR MEASURE
the Duke as to everyone else. It is very suspicious that
the Duke's later speeches all imply his belief in
Claudio's death, and it is really too much to ask us to
accept them as a gentle leg-pulling of Isabella. It is
still more suspicious that, when Claudio is finally
produced, he has not a single word to say for himself.
I am afraid this is as far as criticism of the text can
go. There is no doubt that, early or late, there was a
complete Measure for Measure in Shakespeare's hand.
I suspect that it was early ; I have noted certain similari-
ties between it, "the Rape of Lucrece," and Edward
HI. I have also a strong impression that the glorious
scene of Pompey's examination before the magistrates
is really early Shakespeare, written not for Armin but
for Kempe. The urbanity and detachment of Escalus'
advice to Constable Elbow "because he hath some
offences in him that thou would'st discover if thou
could'st, let him continue in his courses till thou know-
est what they are" has all the sunny quality of the
early plays. But a large part of the play as we have it
now, particularly the first two acts, is in Shakespeare's
later manner, and we can say of the first two acts at
least that even if there had never been a reviser, even
if the last three acts had not been metamorphosed into
a silly and often disgusting farce, no play built on the
scenario that Shakespeare seems to have been using
would have stood up to them. They are Shakespeare
at his very gravest and most passionate, preoccupied
from the first moment with the problem of power, its
relation to God and its proneness to evil. This is largely
obscured by the editors' perpetuation of the meaning-
less Jacobean "Heaven" when Shakespeare clearly
wrote "God."
165
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
Which sorrow is always towards ourselves, not God
Showing we would not spare God as we love Him
But as we stand in fear. 11
So too in the blasphemous bowdlerization of "God's
image" and more obviously (since the hack neglected
to change the pronoun) in
God in my mouth
As if I only did but chew His name. 12
The hack wanted merely a ballet of monks and nuns
in the manner of The Merry Devil of Edmonton, though
that enchanting little play has a wit and grace which
the hack could never have understood ; his is a slightly
salacious and exceedingly sacrilegious masquerade in
which the disguised Duke hears everybody's confes-
sion and reports the substance of it to anyone willing
to listen, and the characters enter to cheerful bursts of
"What ho! Peace ho!" It is to be noted that the opening
of the scene between Isabella and Lucio in the convent
of "the Votarists of St. Clare" is in this style, which is
marked by the use of un-Shakespearean words like
"manifested," "affianced," and "unsisting" (whatever
that may mean), and an extraordinarily stiff use of
common words like "constantly" and "combine" : "I
do constantly believe you," "I am combined by a sacred
vow," and "combinate husband."
Whoever the hack was he had the last word, and, as
in Macbeth, the text of Shakespeare's work is crudely
cut and carelessly transcribed. The two great scenes
between Isabella and Angelo are in ruin. "We cannot
weigh our brother with ourself " should be "You can-
" M.for M., II. 3. 12 M. for M., II. 4.
166
MEASURE FOR MEASURE
not weigh our brother with yourself," and "If not a
fedary but only he owe and succeed thy weakness" is
an obvious error, since not only does Isabella know
nothing of Angelo's weakness, but she is speaking in
the formal second-person plural and breaks into the
contemptuous singular only when she understands the
full meaning of his proposal.
Who the hack was is another matter. I have no
doubt that the same man worked on Macbeth, an im-
pression that he worked also on The Merry Wives of
Windsor, All's Well That Ends Well, and Pericles, and
a suspicion that is little more than a fancy that he also
had something to do with the scenarios of King Lear
and Cymbeline. There is not sufficient of his work in any
of these to identify him beyond doubt, and similarities
of vocabulary, such as "manifested," which occurs only
in the suspect portion of Merry Wives and Measure for
Measure, and "vaporous," which occurs only in the
Hecate scene of Macbeth and the Moated Grange scene
of Measure for Measure, are slender. On the other hand,
though it may be only a coincidence that the first
dreary part of Pericles contains a few magnificent lines
that everyone recognizes as Shakespeare's "the blind
mole casts copped hills towards heaven, to tell the
earth is thronged by man's oppression" interpolated
with utter disregard of their meaning, it can scarcely
be an accident that again we get these cheerful explo-
sions of "Joy and all comfort in your sacred breast!"
"Peace to the lords of Tyre!" and "Peace be at your
labours!" or that the exit of an obviously Shakespear-
ean scene should be prepared for with "If thou dost
hear from me it shall be for thy good." By an extraor-
dinary coincidence we actually have external evidence
167
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
that Shakespeare did not write "it shall be for thy
good/' George Wilkins, the supposed collaborator in
Pericles, who Professor Wilson believes was also a
collaborator in Measure for Measure, wrote a novel on
the subject after the production of the play. Sir Edmund
Chambers notes that in a few places Wilkins used scraps
of blank verse from the play, but points out that Wil-
kins also used scraps of blank verse which are not in
the play, at least as we know it. One of these scraps
that Sir Edmund isolates is actually the end of the
bawdyhouse scene, and instead of "If thou dost hear
from me it shall be for thy good" it runs "If you but
send to me I am your friend/'
It may have been Wilkins who, after Shakespeare's
semiretirement from the theater, took on the job of
theater poet, and with it the mass production job of
adapting popular plays of the Globe Theatre to the
indoor theater at Blackfriars. But whatever his func-
tion, the man who worked on these plays must also
have been a stage director. I can imagine no one else
who would have had the last word, as he so clearly had,
not only against Shakespeare but against Burbadge.
Any tragic actor would have thrown a fit of hysterics
at the cutting of his death scene in Macbeth, merely to
oblige someone who wanted Macbeth's head brought
on stage. The last act of The Merry Wives of Windsor,
the Witches' scenes in Macbeth, and a considerable part
of Pericles look very like the work of someone whose
principal task was the production of spectacular effects,
and in this he must have had approval from Shake-
speare, who would seem to have written in the ap-
paritions scene in Macbeth merely to oblige him.
The success that brought Shakespeare's company to
168
MEASURE FOR MEASURE
the Blackfriars was the beginning of the end for the
company and for Shakespeare. The common people
who had paid their pennies in the innyards and at the
Globe liked poetry; the moneyed upper classes liked
dancing and theatrical machinery. Yeats summed it up :
Life scarce can rast a fragrance on the wind,
Scarce spread a glory to the morning beams,
But the torn petals strew the garden plot. . . .
169
13. Antony and Cleopatra
WITH these two plays, Macbeth and Pericles, I
should feel inclined to agree with Sir Edmund
Chambers that Shakespeare suffered a nervous break-
down, and assume that he had been compelled to call
in the assistance of a hack, but that they seem to be
followed by the perfectly normal Antony and Cleopatra,
which for me has always been the greatest of the
tragedies. In this, as in Troilus and Cressida, he has
escaped from the limitations of the folk theater. I have
no doubt that Shakespeare intended it, like Coriolanus
and Timon of Athens, as satire, because his misanthropy
was steadily gaining on him, and the central figure is
not so much Antony or Cleopatra as Enobarbus, the
mocker. Antony himself is deliberately caricatured in
the scene in which he addresses his "sad captains" with
the intention of making them weep the old charmer
of Julius Caesar having a final fling. But in the process
Shakespeare fell in love with Cleopatra himself, and by
playing upon the antithesis in himself succeeded in
transforming her into a universal figure like Shylock
or Falstaff; so that while in Coriolanus and Timon the
storm of misanthropy blows itself out, Cleopatra stands
up to it and when she falls, falls like a tower.
She may be drawn from the same model as Cressida;
I am inclined to think that Shakespeare imagined an
Egyptian proper a gypsy. Never was there a less
170
AND CLEOPATRA
queenly queen: she is as common as dirt; she lies,
wheedles, deceives, screams, sulks, bites, and makes
love with the tireless, un-self-conscious abandonment
of an old tinker woman, yet never forfeits our sym-
pathy. If she is not played in this way, as a character
part, there is no play. She jokes her way to the highest
peaks of tragic poetry, and even an all-merciful God
will scarcely forgive an actress who omits to smile at
the last "Peace! Peace! Dost thou not see my baby at
my breast that sucks the nurse asleep?" Cleopatra is
not being acted at all unless the actress hears the
magnificent poetry from far away, as though it were
being spoken by someone else. Let her try to take
advantage of it and illusion vanishes. To herself Cleo-
patra is simply "a pore girl what's had rotten bad luck
with her gentleman friends" : it is only to the rest of the
world that she is "a lass unparalleled."
In fact, the only rule for any production of Antony
and Cleopatra is to look after the comedy and let the
tragedy look after itself as it will. Whenever the play
fails it is because unconsciously the actors are playing
against the lines instead of at once throwing themselves
heart and soul into the comedy of the opening scenes.
There is no other way to get an audience to accept a
tragic heroine who bolts from the battlefield with the
gadfly on her, "like a cow in June," 1 and a middle-aged
lover who bolts after her "and leaves his navy gazing." 2
Even in phrases like these one can hear the harsh,
satiric quality of the verse. Though the romantic in
Shakespeare glories in it all, the realist, thinking, as
in Troilus and Cressida and Hamlet, of the absurdity of
the reasons for war, keeps reiterating those images of
1 A. and C. 9 III. 9. 2 A. and C., III. 13.
171
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
"the three-fold world divided/' balancing the ecstasies
and rages of the middle-aged lovers with the cosmic
consequences of their behavior. "Let Rome in Tiber
melt and the wide arch of the ranged empire fall" ; "so
half my Egypt were submerged and made a cistern for
scaled snakes" ; Antony with "superfluous kings to be
his messengers"; Caesar, "the universal landlord/'
with his army, "the world's great snare," and "a
Queen to be his beggar" never until the last great
shriek of "The crown of the world has fallen" does the
roar of mockery cease.
It was certainly at this time that Shakespeare began
to scribble in the prose revisions of the quarrel scene
in Julius Caesar. In the original play Brutus and Cassius
had quarreled about Cassius' weakness for graft;
Shakespeare, rightly considering the motive too ab-
stract for tragedy, revised with the idea of making
Brutus hear first of Portia's death. In his later work he
had a great fondness for words repeated dully as though
the hearer could not quite grasp their full significance
or was too full for speech as in Emilia's inert "My
husband ?" 3 But in the Roman plays the repetition is
even duller, like a roll of muffled drums. At its humblest
( in Timon of Athens) it is :
FIRST LORD. Alcibiades is banished ; hear you of it ?
FIRST AND SECOND LORD. Alcibiades banished! 4
In Coriolanus it is :
COR. At Antium lives he ?
LAR. At Antium. 5
3 Oth., V. 2. * Tim., III. 6. * Cor., III. 1.
172
CLEOPATRA
And again :
VOLSCE. Coriolanus banished!
ROMAN. Banished, sir. fi
In Antony and Cleopatra the echo has been developed
until it has a sinister sound which is like distant thunder.
AI^T. Dead then?
MAR. Dead. 7
Or most striking of all :
ANT. Fulvia is dead.
KNO. Sir?
ANT. Fulvia is dead.
ENO. Fulvia?
ANT. Dead. 8
The revision of the fourth act of Julius Caesar con-
sists mainly of echoes which almost look as though
they had Jiierely been scribbled on the margin of the
playbook and incorporated by the printer. There is first
the false echo of the quarrel scene ( I have italicized
what I think to be revision ) .
CAS. You wrong me every way, you wrong me, Brutus,
I said an elder soldier, not a better.
Did I say better?*
Immediately on top of this comes a roll of echoes.
CAS. When Caesar lived he durst not thus have moved
me.
BRU. Peace, peace, you durst not so have tempted him.
Cbr., IV. 3. 7 A. and C., IV. 14.
8 A. and C., I. 2. J. C. 9 IV. 3.
173
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
CAS. I durst not?
BRU. JVb.
CAS. What ? Durst not tempt him ?
BRU. For your life you durst not.
Then the scene draws to a close with an echo of
Fulvia's death but more cunningly done.
BRU. Portia is dead.
CAS. Ha? Portia?
BRU. She is dead.
CAS. How 'scaped I whipping when I crossed you so?
After one minor repetition ( And died so ?
Even so) the drink goes round. Messala and Titinius
arrive and Shakespeare drops his echo, a mere whisper
but a marvel of dramatic subtlety Portia, art thou
gone? But still the little tune continues to run in his
head, and when Brutus makes his report it breaks out
again. Notice how it seems to revolve about the idea
of death, as though Shakespeare found the wonder of
it inexhaustible.
BRU. Mine speak of seventy senators that died
By their proscription, Cicero being one.
CAS. Cicero one?
MES. Cicero is dead.
For the fanciful, there is plenty of material in Shake-
speare's work at this period. In 1609, whoever was
responsible, the sonnets were published, and when
Coriolanus says "Like a dull actor now I have forgot
my part" it is as though he were echoing "the unper-
fect actor on the stage who with his fear is put beside
his part/' and when Volumnia cries "for how can we,
774
AJYTOJYT AMD CLEOPATRA
alas, how can we for our country pray ?" it is as though
the cadence of "How can it, oh, how can love's eye be
true ?" were ringing in Shakespeare's head. Coriolanus,
thanks to the fact that it is history, can only half express
Shakespeare's loathing for humanity in the mass, but
in Timon of Athens all hell breaks loose. It is a curious
text, more draft than playbook, with passages in
Shakespeare's maturer style oddly intermixed with
rhymed verse in the manner of Macbeth and the other
doubtful plays, but however it came to be written it
could never have been successfully produced, for every-
thing in it flows in the same direction. The misanthropy
which up to this we have seen only in particular man-
ifestations as hatred of the populace, of sex, and of
society, reveals itself as hatred of life. Timon eggs on
the whores, "that their activity may defeat and quell
the source of all erection"; Nature is told to "ensear
her fertile and conceptious womb" that it may "no
more bring out ungrateful man"; man is to be utterly
destroyed "that beasts may have the world in empire."
There is a similar outburst of misanthropic frenzy
in Swift after Stella's death, and at the risk of being
fanciful, I cannot help wondering whether the loss of
someone who had been dear to him had not left that
drum roll in Shakespeare's mind which he heard and
reheard in the tone of every voice.
Fulvia is dead.
Sir?
Fulvia is dead.
Fulvia ?
Dead.
173
14. The Baroque Plays
AFTER that rattle of muffled drums in Julius Caesar,
JL\. Shakespeare's place is with the poets rather than
with the dramatists. What the two great masters of the
Elizabethan theater had sought was realism of one sort
or the other. Shakespeare sought a poetic, humorous
realism of which the perfection is to be found in the
portraits of Shylock and FalstafF, Dogberry and Pom-
pey Bum ; Jonson sought a satiric Renaissance realism
such as he achieved in his own gigantic "constructions"
which were the Ulysses of his own day. Baroque drama
cut across both tendencies, for it demanded not realism
but expressiveness, and Shakespeare, by drawing upon
his own fastidiousness and misanthropy, had made him-
self the supreme master of Baroque tragedy. Only
Beaumont had either the poetic or dramatic gift to
approach him in that, but whereas the great scene
between Melantius and Calianax in The Maid's Trag-
edy is comparable even with the sleepwalking scene in
Macbeth, it is naturally Baroque as Shakespeare's is
not. Take, for instance, the tapestry scene from the
same play, with its ravishing sentimentality, its lan-
guorous attitudes, its tremulous repetitions; it is like
a piece of Baroque statuary on one of those monuments
that John Webster referred to, with real tears carved
upon the lovely cheeks.
Do it by me,
Do it again by me, the lost Aspasia,
And you shall find all true but the wild island.
176
THE BAROQUE PLAYS
I stand upon the sea-beach now, suppose,
Mine arms thus, and mine hair blown with the wind,
Wild as that desert, and let all about me
Tell that I am forsaken. 1
Beaumont, with his "take this little prayer" type of
sentimentality, is the pure Baroque virtuoso, delight-
ing in the effectiveness of his own situations, whereas
Shakespeare can write only out of his own heart, by
drawing upon his own experience, and when the storm
of misanthropy blows itself out, as it does in Coriolanus
and Timon of At/tens, he has exhausted his dramatic
capital. Something of the kind had happened to him
before, toward the end of the sixteenth century, when
his realistic mood, driving him more and more toward
observation and away from his personal emotions, was
petering out in a sort of brittle comedy. Now, after
another ten years in which he had abandoned realism,
his own emotions too were failing him.
The disintegration of the dramatic personality is
reflected in the continuing disintegration of language.
In Timon ofAtfiens and the Baroque comedies it verges
upon incoherence ; titles and pronouns are swept into
the wild rush to the abyss; we get "sirs" and "shes";
the inversion of the negative an early trick of his
becomes commoner, and there are characteristic words
like "pinched," "choked" (both early favorites),
"ebbed," "dungy," and "earthy." So many lines end
in words like "and," "but," "if," and "that" that the
verse seems to jolt
O, if thou couch
But one night with her, every hour in't will
1 The Maid's Tragedy, II. 2.
177
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
Take hostage of thee for a hundred, and
Thou shalt remember nothing more than what
That banquet bids thee to. 2
It is hard to believe that any audience understood more
than a fraction of the dialogue which races along, well
below the level of conscious thought, so that we can
trace it only by its sudden rises.
The final group of plays is certainly the most difficult
thing in Shakespeare to understand or explain. They
are a complete reversion to a folk theater but with the
folk quality left out. All have certain features in com-
mon. To begin with, they were written exclusively for
an indoor theater, and with an instinctive artist like
Shakespeare, not controlled, as Jonson was, by a theo-
retical approach to literature, apparently unimportant
external details count for a lot. Exactly as Kempe's
departure from the theater had encouraged the anti-
realistic vein in him, so the change from the popular
open-air theater with its audience of apprentices and
housewives to the darkness and candlelight of the
Blackfriars with its audience of courtiers is reflected in
the lack of reality, either objective like FalstafTs or
subjective like Lear's. The change did not pass un-
noticed by the writers, for though he was still popular,
his reputation was on the decline as we see from
Webster's malicious introduction to The Duchess of
Malfi, where he is dismissed as a mere hack like Hey-
wood, and Jonson's reference to "a mouldy tale like
Pericles" and his request to the audience that "they
who had graced monsters might like men/'
As the creative impulse is withdrawn from the drama
a r. JV. K., i. 1.
178
THE BAROQUE PLATS
we see more clearly the symbolic skeleton behind. It is
possible that all literature is in origin subconscious and
based upon fantasias of dreams with which the con-
scious, intellectual mind wrestles until it has given
them "a local habitation and a name" ; but certainly
with poets and instinctive writers, like Shakespeare,
Dickens, and Ibsen, any decline in creative power at
once causes the shadows of the fantasia to take over
control and reduce the writer almost to a state of
somnambulism. In the later comedies it is not the
fantastic nature of the themes which produces the sense
of unreality, but the subjective unreality which makes
the themes appear so fantastic. After all, there are
wilder improbabilities in Twelfth Night or The Mer-
chant of Venice than in Cymbeline, but whereas the first
have been passed through a realistic filter, the other
has been set down with no attempt to find models in
nature for Cymbeline, Posthumus, the Queen, or
Imogen, so that it scarcely rises above the level of
daydreaming. With a sort of dreadful neatness the
characters divide themselves not so much into bad and
good as into active and passive; the active, Cymbeline,
Posthumus, Leontes, Polixenes, Prospero, all stamped
with cruelty and hypersensibility ; the passive partic-
ularly the girls, Imogen, Perdita, and Miranda
transfigured by the blinding light of sentimentality
which Shakespeare throws on them.
The pattern stands out clearly in Cymbeline, the least
happy of the last plays. Here Cymbeline, egged on by
his "fiendlike" Queen, banishes Posthumus, a young
man secretly married to his daughter Imogen, whom
the Queen wishes to marry to her own son, Cloten.
Posthumus, as the result of a bet with a Frenchman
179
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
about Imogen's faithfulness, becomes convinced of her
guilt and orders his servant Pisanio to murder her.
Pisanio decoys her to Milford Haven and then relents.
Cloten follows her and is beheaded by outlaws (really
the sons of the king, kidnapped in childhood by Belarius) .
Imogen, waking to find the headless body beside her,
believes it is Posthumus', and, disguised as a boy, takes
service with the Roman ambassador. A Roman army
comes to Britain, and the outlaws assist in defeating
it, while Posthumus is captured and sentenced to death.
After a recognition scene during which Cymbeline
sentences practically everyone to death, all ends happily.
Except for one amusing and sardonic little scene
between Cloten and Imogen, nothing in the play has
been visualized, and its unreality is accentuated rather
than otherwise by the stream of echoes from the great
tragedies. But then occurs one scene of dreadful inten-
sity when Posthumus is awaiting death in prison.
"Hanging is the word, sir/'wheezes the Gaoler. "If you
be ready for that you are well cooked," and suddenly
Shakespeare's interest becomes engaged. In a dreadful
parody of the Duke's speech in praise of Death "which
makes these odds all even" and Cleopatra's paean to
that "Which shackles accidents and bolts up change,
which sleeps and never palates more the dung, the
beggar's nurse and Caesar's," the Gaoler cries, "But
the comfort is you shall be called to no more payments ;
fear no more tavern bills, which are often the sadness
of parting as the procuring of mirth. ... Of this con-
tradiction you shall now be quit. O the charity of a
penny cord!" It is the Panacea once again; the icy
music which blows through all the later plays with its
burden of "No more, no more."
180
THE BAROQUE PLAYS
Fear no more the frown of the great
Thou art past the tyrant's stroke.
And suddenly we realize that the Gaoler with his
macabre jokes is Hamlet, Macbeth, Cleopatra, and
Claudio, all rolled into one. "Look you, sir, you know
not which way you are going. . . . You must either be
directed by some that take upon them to know, or to
take upon yourself that which I am sure you do not
know, or jump the after enquiry on your own peril and
how you shall speed in your journey's end, I think you'll
never return to tell one/' 3
I can rarely avoid a shudder at the realization that
this is Shakespeare, stirred to vitality only by the
symbol of the whore and hangman; that the terrible
crisis of soul which had produced Hamlet, Macbeth, and
Antony and Cleopatra has spent itself and descended,
like the nobleman's clothes to the actor, from Hamlet
to the Gaoler. It is a measure of how the storm of
misanthropy has blown itself out.
The pattern repeats itself almost exactly in A
Winter's Tale. Here Leontes, the King, suspects his
wife with another king, Polixenes, and after attempt-
ing to have Polixenes murdered, he orders the trial of
his wife, and first the burning and then abandonment
of his newborn baby, Perdita. Antigonus, the kindly
old courtier who is compelled to expose her, is eaten
by a bear. The Queen is cleared by the intervention of
the Oracle of Apollo (about the only thing which over
could convince one of Shakespeare's jealous husbands)
and is then given out for dead. Perdita, growing up as
the child of a peasant in Polixenes' country, is courted
3 Cym., V. 4.
181
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
by his son, Florizel, and Polixenes, who shares his
fellow monarch's irascibility, neatly repeats the pattern
by threatening everyone with execution. The lovers
take refuge with the repentant Leontes, but are fol-
lowed by Polixenes. The supposedly dead queen, made
up as a statue, is then restored to her repentant hus-
band, but this time the recognition scene is omitted.
The title suggests indifference if not contempt, and the
evasion of the recognition scene is flagrant, and em-
phasized by the weary abandonment of dramatic illu-
sion in passages like "There's such a deal of wonder
broke out within this last hour that ballad-makers
cannot be able to express it." When a dramatist writes
like this he is throwing in his hand. There is a certain
liveliness about the part of Autolycus, yet even this
does not pass without a touch of morbidity, for he tells
us how the old man's son "shall be flayed alive; then
'nointed over with honey, set on the head of a wasp's
nest; then stand till he be three quarters and a dram
dead; then recovered again with aqua-vitae or some
other hot infusion ; then raw, as he is, and in the hottest
day prognostication proclaims, shall he be set against
a brick wall, the sun looking with a southward eye
upon him, where he is to behold him with flies blown
to death/' 4 We need not take the clown too seriously,
but after all, Antigonus is eaten by a bear!
A Winter's Tale is as much better than Cymbeline as
The Tempest than A Winter's Tale, for as Shakespeare
abandoned the attempt at drama, he gave himself more
and more to poetry, and A Winter's Tale is already
halfway toward Tlie Tempest. Drama is of a younger
house.
4 w. r., IV. 3.
182
THE BAROQUE PLATS
The Tempest, one of the most beautiful poems in the
world, abandons all pretense to drama; inevitably
since the hero is a magician, exiled from his kingdom,
who causes the shipwreck of the usurping Duke and
his son; causes the son to fall in love with his own
daughter, Miranda, and marries them in spite of the
rather hopeless plots of Antonio and Caliban. The main
difference between this and the earlier romances is that
the active principle has not only absolute power in
this world but in the next as well ; yet even so, Prospero
has still something of the hypersensibility of the tyrant
and behaves in a quite ungentlemanly way with Ariel
and Caliban. The great speech in which he forswears
his magic is generally accepted as Shakespeare's fare-
well to the theater, though, as in the next twelve
months he produced no less than three new plays in
collaboration with John Fletcher, his farewell must be
taken in the spirit of the "positively last appearance"
of other eminent members of his profession.
Personally, I do not think he had any such idea in
mind. That in Prospero's magic he saw something of
his own is possible, but principally he saw in it a micro-
cosm of the great magic of the universe, and in Prospero
areflection of the Creator whom, in his despair ing creed,
he saw as one bringing life into the world merely to
destroy it. "A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and
fury, signifying nothing" 5 was what it had meant to
him in Macbeth\ now it was merely "such stuff as
dreams are made on." 6 The real difference is not of
temper but of distance. The voice of Prospero is the
voice of Macbeth, but it has disengaged itself from the
coil of ambition and sin, and speaks as if from far away.
*Macb.,V.5. Tern., IV. 1.
183
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
In all these later plays it is the remoteness which
strikes us most forcibly. Of the three plays he wrote in
collaboration with Fletcher, Cardenio has been lost.
Henry VIII is merely a job of work in which Shake-
speare's part is always the more vivid, but it is, as any
historical play dealing with a period so close had to be,
mere spectacle. There was no reason on earth why The
Two Noble Kinsmen should have been mere spectacle,
but that is all it is.
There are still scholars like Tucker Brooke who
refuse to admit Shakespeare's part in this play, but
that seems to me the mere negation of critical judg-
ment. Apart from the splendor of the poetry, unequaled
in any other Elizabethan writer, the style has all the
characteristics of the later Shakespeare. There is a
bumper crop of nouns in "er": "purger," "quarter-
carrier," "approacher," "charmer" (not a girl but a
magician), "offerer," "abandoner," "confessor," "de-
fier," "rejoicer," "decider," "corrector," and one
triumphant synonym for the Creator, "Limiter" ; there
are abstracts in the plural like "shames" and "decays" ;
verbs formed of nouns like "chapel" ( to take to church ) ,
"skiff," "bride" (marry), "ear," "jaw," and "mope-
used passively, "I am moped." As usual there is the
inversion of the negative as in "If he not answered."
But the play is undoubtedly a failure. The theme of
the two friends in love with the same girl is one which
the Shakespeare of fifteen years before would have
handled with passion and certainty, but in this play he
is not even interested in it. Apart from the masque scene
in which the two friends and Emilia invoke Mars,
Venus, and Diana (which appealed to him merely be-
cause it provided a magnificent opportunity for pure
184
THE BAROQUE PLATS
poetry) the only situation in the play which roused him
to creative passion was the Antigone theme of the
three queens to whom Creon refuses permission to
bury their husbands. He had lost interest in lovers but
was fascinated by the picture of the corpses, "showing
the sun their teeth, grinning at the moon/' and he who
had shuddered at Yorick's skull and was to leave a
curse on anyone who touched his own bones could
write passionately of the three widows pleading with
Hippolyta and Theseus on their wedding day (sex and
death in equal balance).
He will not suffer us to burn their bones,
To urn their ashes, nor to take the offence
Of mortal loathsomeness from the blest eye
Of holy Phoebus, but infects the winds
With stench of our slain lords. 7
But the one mistake we must avoid when consider-
ing these last plays is that of imagining that they ex-
press "optimism" as Sir Edmund Chambers (who
frankly dislikes them) calls it, or "reconciliation" as
the editors of the New Cambridge Shakespeare are so
fond of describing it. The story of the man who, having
emerged from the dark pit of Lear, turned his eyes
toward the sunlit peace of The Tempest (see any critical
work on Shakespeare) is a pretty tale invented orig-
inally to explain to nonmusical people the difference
between the Rasumowsky Quartets and the last quar-
tets of Beethoven, and whether or not it explains that,
has nothing whatever to do with Shakespeare.
On the contrary, the late comedies carry on the
7 r. jv. K. 9 i. 1.
185
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
gloomy imagery of Lear and Macbeth and to it they
add a still gloomier imagery of their own. Though for
Belarius, "reverence, that angel of the world" still
makes distinctions, it has almost ceased to exist else-
where; "the odds is gone/' "all mannerly distinguish-
ment left out," and the end of the world is just round
the next corner. The terrible image of the broken
seed pod and the destruction of fertility which we find
in Lear, Macbeth, and Timon is repeated in A Winter's
Tale with its "Let Nature crush the sides of the world
together and mar the seeds." 8 Shakespeare is still
haunted by the thought of
Those that with cords, knives, drams, precipitance,
Weary of this world's light have to themselves
Been death's most horrid agents. . . . 9
Hamlet's meditation on suicide personal poetry if
ever there was such the cry of "That the Everlasting
had not fixed his canon against self-slaughter !" 10 echoed
by Cleopatra with her "Is it sin to rush into the secret
house of death!" 11 is repeated in Imogen's "Against
self-slaughter there is a prohibition so divine that
cravens my weak hand" 12 and Posthumus' "My con-
science, thou art fettered more than my shanks and
wrists." 13 It is the temptation of the abyss; the "dark-
ness my bride" theme of Lear, Measure for Measure,
and Antony and Cleopatra. The "flies to wanton boys"
of Lear is repeated in the invocation to Jove in Cymbe-
line that written according to Dowden by an actor
(the breed unfortunately is extinct).
8JF.r.,IV.3. r.JV./f.,I.l. ">H0m.,I.2. nA.andC. 9 lV.15.
Cym., III. 4. * cyrn., V. 4.
186
THE BAROQUE PLATS
No more, thou Thunder-master, show
Thy spite on mortal flies. 14
In all of them there is, apart from the poetry, an
appalling note of weariness, of which the most charac-
teristic word is probably "ebbed," as though Shake-
speare felt that the high tide of life had receded from
him and left only mud behind. It occurs frequently, and
with it words like "ooze" and "mud," "bottom," and
"dungy" and not always in Tlie Tempest where the
vicinity of the sea lends it a fictitious relevance.
And the ebbed man, ne'er loved till nothing worth
Comes deared by being lacked. 15
Ebbing men indeed
Most often do so near the bottom run. . . , 16
O melancholy,
Whoever yet could sound thy bottom ? find
The ooze to show what coast thy sluggish crare
Might easiest harbour in ? 17
Therefore my son i' th'ooze is bedded and
I'll seek him deeper than e'er plummet sounded
And with him there lie mudded. 18
I wish
Myself were mudded in that oozy bed. 19
With Prospero's casting of his book "deeper than
did ever plummet sound" they make me think less of
the brisk voice of the converted pessimist than of the
thud of rain in a gloomy landscape after the storm has
gone by. "I like to think how Shakespeare pruned his
14 Cym., V. 4. A. and C., I. 4. w fern., II. 1.
17 Cym., IV. 2. w Tern., II. 3. rent., V. 1.
187
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
rose and ate his pippin in his orchard close" sings the
greatest of Shakespearean scholars, but whenever I
think of him in those last years at Stratford it is as a
man like the Sibyl whom Rilke compared to an old
castle "high and hollow and burnt-out." Emotionally
he was dead years before they took him from New Place
to Holy Trinity ; a wraith of a man with inward looking
eyes.
What those plays may be said to represent is
stoicism; the stoicism of the old fighter with his back
to the wall. It is as though the last drop of Christian
feeling, of faith in a hereafter, and in the ultimate
justification of truth and mercy had been squeezed out
and replaced by that shadow of classical philosophy he
had found in Montaigne with its good-humored Latin
shrug of the shoulders which Shakespeare, the island-
man, half Celt, half Teuton, could never emulate. It is
probably no accident that from Othello onward he
showed a preference for pagan and prehistoric themes
which permitted him either to fling his scepter at the
injurious gods or stoic-fashion to endure their wanton-
ness. It was scarcely merely because the Blackfriars
permitted such spectacular effects that he wrote :
Laud we the gods,
And let the crooked smoke climb to their nostrils
From our blest altars. 20
And:
Let the temples
Burn bright with sacred fires, and the altars
In hallowed clouds commend their swelling incense
To those above us. 21
ao Cym. 9 V. 5. 21 r. JV. K., V. 1.
188
THE BAROQUE PLATS
It may be merely a fancy of mine, but I do feel there
is some change in the two plays he wrote in collabora-
tion with Fletcher, though it may be only another step
in that growing remoteness from life which in The Two
Nobk Kinsmen made him choose for his first act the
largely irrelevant theme of the unburied bodies. This
play seems to reveal almost a fellow feeling with the
gods. They are no longer the wanton boys who kill us
for their sport, but respectable huntsmen for whose
pleasures any true follower of the chase like Shakespeare
must show respect. There is something of the old humor
in the way he addresses Venus, linking her with memo-
ries of his own larks in the Warwickshire deer parks.
O thou that from eleven to ninety reignest
In mortal bosoms, whose chase is this ( Pgreat) world
And we in herds thy game. 22
And again :
The impartial gods who from their mounted heavens
View us their mortal herd. 23
In the character of Palamon with all his innocence
and idealism it is as though the ghost of his own youth
were rising before him, a Troilus still undisillusioned
by Cressida's lightness. Curiously, it seems to be of
Troilus that he was thinking, because Troilus f cry of
agony when he realizes the unfaithfulness of Cressida
"Think, we had mothers!" is Palamon's fiery reply
to rakes and cynics.
I have been harsh
To large confessors, and have hotly asked them
. JV./f.,V. 1. 23 <r. JV. tf., 1. 4.
189
SHAKESPEARE'S PROGRESS
If they had mothers ? I had one, a woman,
And women 'twere they wronged. 24
The bitterness against women too has gone, and the
wonderful poetry, clear, calculated, and full of muscle,
is the nearest he ever reached to true classical quality,
as in that unforgettable epitaph on a girl :
25
Who made too proud the bed took leave of the moon.
Or the First Queen's wild balancing of the marriage
night with the corpses on the field of Thebes.
When her arms
Able to lock Jove from a synod, shall
By warranting moonlight corslet thee, O when
Her twinning cherries shall their sweetness fall
Upon thy tasteful lips, what wilt thou think
Of rotten kings or blubbered queens ? what care
For what thou feel'st not, what thou feel'st being able
To make Mars spurn his drum ? 26
As I say, it may be only fancy, but for me it is as
though once more the rock of personality had split ;
the old huntsman has become the stag at bay, remem-
bering his own youth and all the joys of the chase, and
forgives the gods even as they strike him. Once more
the ghost of Tarquin is with him, and the theme of the
faithless friend is mingled with that of the impartial
gods, but by now Shakespeare's spirit is so remote that
even ingratitude and unfaithfulness are no more than
the sport of children playing under his window in the
light that fades over the Malvern Hills. The voice we
**r. jv./r.,v. i. 2 r. jv. #., i. s. 26 r. jv. K., 1. 1.
190
THE BAROQUE PLAYS
hear is Shakespeare's but it seems to come from an
immense distance, until it too fades forever.
O you heavenly charmers,
What things you make of us! For what we lack
We laugh; for what we have are sorry, still
Are children in some kind. Let us be thankful
For that which is. . . , 27
r. JV. K. 9 V. 4.
191
About the Author
Frank O'Connor (pseudonym of Michael O'Donovan) was
born in Cork, Ireland, in 1903. Though he says that he re-
ceived no education worth mentioning and has had no am-
bitions except to write, he is nevertheless widely respected
for his professional abilities as a librarian, for his knowledge
of architecture and music as well as of numerous languages,
and for his accomplishments as a dramatist.
Mr. O'Connor's first published book was Guests of the
Nation, a volume of short stories. He later published novels,
serveral additional volumes of tales, The Mirror in the Road-
way (a study of the modern novel), verse, travel books, and
a study of Michael Collins and the Irish Revolution. He has
lived in the United States since 1952 and taught at Harvard
as well as at Northwestern University. Readers of The
New Yorker, Holiday, and Esquire are familiar with Mr.
O'Connor's stories and sketches.
This book was set in English Monotype Bell
by Clarke & Way, Inc.
It was printed and bound by The Haddon Craftsmen.
Design is by Bert Clarke.
This book is a gift to the library by
Dr.Pasupuleti Gopala Krishnayya,
President, Krishnayya's News
Service and Publications, New York
City, as part of a collection of
American books given in memory of
His Beloved Twin Brothers
Rama (Med.Stu.) & Bala Krishnayya
(Eng.)