Shakspere; an address, delivered on April 23, 1916, in Sanders theatre at the request of the president and fellows of Harvard college

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
AT LOS ANGELES

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SHAKSPERE

AN ADDRESS

LONDON : HUMPHREY MILFORD

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

SHAKSPERE

AN ADDRESS

DELIVERED ON APRIL 23, 1916

IN SAUNDERS THEATRE AT THE REQUEST OF

THE PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF

HARVARD COLLEGE

BY

GEORGE LYMAN KITTREDGE

CAMBRIDGE

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1930

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SHAKSPERE

Dr. JOHNSON was a wise man and a four-
square, though not an intolerant, moralist.
Incidentally he has proved himself one of
the most sensible and serviceable in that long
array of professed Shakspereans that bids
fair to stretch out to the crack of doom. In
all of these capacities I think the more of
him, the older I grow; and such, it seems,
is the common experience of Uterary men.
To-day, and on this occasion, he sustains me
— nay, he comes to my rescue — with one of
the most pregnant and unforced, yet most
searching, of his many admirable truisms,
to the effect that men need, in general, not
so much to be informed as to be reminded.
But for that supporting adage, I know
not how I should have mustered courage to
approach this hour. For I have neither
conceit enough to fancy that I can say any-
thing new; nor stodginess enough to re-
hearse old saws with the self-con\dction of

8 SHAKSPERE

Sir Oracle; nor sophistry enough to turn
commonplaces into paradoxes by standing
them on their heads; nor enough of the
philosopher or the modern critic in mc to
parade them as novelties by draping their
shrunk shanks in the ample robes of an
esoteric jargon.

I am not here to rationalize the miracle of
Shakspere, or to define poetry, or to account
for its emergence, or the emergence of genius
either, in the history of mankind at large,
or in any particular period in the annals
of a given race, a given nation, or a given
language.

My liege and madam, to expatiate
What majesty should be, what duty is,
Why day is day, night night, and time is time —
Were nothing but to waste night, day, and time.

Frankly, I can solve none of these problems.
I am quite as much amazed at the splendid
accident of genius in the supreme dramatic
poet, as I am aghast at the same splendid
accident in the skin-clad savage (name and
date unknown) who first invented the fish-
hook or the blowgun or the fire-drill, or dis-

SHAKSPERE 9

covered that a dugout is a handier craft
than a solid log. Of Shakspere's life we
know a good deal, but nothing that explains
him. Nor should we be better off in this
regard if we had his pedigree to the twen-
tieth generation, with a record of everything
that his forbears did and said and thought
and imagined and dreamed. God is great,
and from time to time his prophets come
into the world. " The wind bloweth where
it listeth — and thou hearest the sound there-
of, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and
whither it goeth. So is everyone that is born
of the spirit."

Still, I can analyze Shakspere roughly,
though I cannot account for him. He had
the ability to put himself in your place, and
then — to speak. Sympathetic knowledge
9f human nature we call it, and the gift of
expression. Rarely, very rarely, do they
hunt in couples. William Shakspere of
Stratford and London, actor, poet, good
fellow, dramatist, theatrical proprietor, and
Englishman of the most thorough and in-
dubitable breed — like Geoffrey Chaucer,

lo SHAKSPERE

burgher of London, poet, diplomatist, com-
missioner of dykes and ditches, M.P. for
Kent, and Englishman in blood and marrow
— could enter at will into the thoughts and
feelings of a wide range of human beings in
a multitude of experiences and under cir-
cumstances of infinite variety, and then he
could make them speak, not as they would
have spoken in real life, — for most of us
are dumb or tongue-tied, particularly when
we have anything to say, — but as they
would have spoken if they had been Shak-
spere, if they had been endowed by heaven
with his power to express. In addition, he
had the gift of poetry — define it if you can.
And, to close the account, he had learned
the trade or art or craft of bringing plays to
pass, or, in other words, of representing life
and thought in action in a mimic world.
That is all there is to Shakspere. It is simple
enough to tell, but not so easy to be!

It is a commonplace to say that the poet
creates; but it is one of those oracular com-
monplaces that need to be often repeated,
and continually irbterpreted in the process of

SHAKSPERE 1 1

repetition. And such constant reinterpreta-
tion of the oracle is notably imperative in
the case of the supreme dramatist. For
his creatures are like those of God. They
move and think and act by virtue of the
inherent vitality which he breathed into
them when they became each a Uving crea-
ture. We see them, and associate with
them, as with our fellow-mortals. Only in
part are they revealed to us by observation
for we can observe them only at disjointed
intervals, as their hnes of Hfe intersect our
own. They cross our path and disappear,
and by-and-by we discern them in the dis-
tance, or they surprise us by appearing once
more at our elbow, in the crowd, on another
day. What they think and do in the mean-
time— like what they have thought and
done before we saw them first — is not re-
vealed to us. That we must learn, if at
all, by inference from the segments of their
lives that we have seen, from the fractions
of their talk that we have heard. We must
plot the curve by the isolated points that
we are casually able to fix.

12 SHAKSPERE

As with our fellow-creatures in real life,
so is it with our fellow-creatures in Shak-
spere. There neither is nor can be any exclu-
sive or orthodox interpretation. Each of us
must read the riddle of motive and person-
ality for himself. There will be as many
Hamlets or Macbeths or Othellos as there
are readers or spectators. For the impres-
sions are not made, or meant to be made,
on one uniformly registering and mechani-
cally accurate instrument, but on an infinite
variety of capriciously sensitive and unac-
countable individualities — on us, in short,
who see as we can, and understand as we
are. Your Hamlet is not my Hamlet, for
your ego is not my ego. Yet both your
Hamlet and mine are really existent; and
mine is as much to my life as yours to yours
— and both are justifiable, if your personal-
ity and mine have any claim to exist. You
shall convert me if you can, for I am docile
and accessible to reason; but, when all is
said, and you have taught me whatever is
teachable, there must still remain, in the
last analysis, a difference that is beyond

SHAKSPERE 1 3

reconciliation, except in the universal sol-
vent of our common humanity. Otherwise
you and I and Hamlet are not individuals, .
but merely t}pes and symbols, or (worst
of worst) stark formulas, masquerading as
God's creatures in a world that is too full
of formulas already.

These principles, however, give no license
to capricious propaganda. For there is one
corrective and restraining proviso. Some-
where there exists, and must be discov-
erable, the soUd fact — and that fact is
Shakspere's Hamlet or Macbeth or Othello.
And this actual being is not to be confused,
in your apprehension or in mine, with any
of the figures that we have constructed,
each for himself, by the instinctive reac-
tion of our several personahties under the
stimulus of the poet's art. Each of us has
a prescriptive right to his own Hamlet;
but none of us has a charter to impose it
either upon his neighbor or upon himself as
the poet's intent. We should recognize it
rather, and cherish it, as our private prop-
erty — as something that we have ourselves

14 SHAKSPERE

achieved when our minds and hearts have
been kindled by a spark from his altar or a
tongue of flame from his Promethean fire.

If much of what I have said sounds like
sentimentality, I cannot help it. It is not
sentimentality: it is plain, hard matter of
fact. Indeed, I am not quite sure but it is
science (I speak with bated breath) — and I
am quite certain that it is psychology. Per-
haps it may even be criticism, but I hardly
think so.

The actor's problem is quite difTerent.
His duty — and it is also his high privilege
— is to energize the character. He must let
the conception possess him, so that the two
personalities are merged, are as completely
coincident as possible; and then, when he
has forgotten himself in the part, he must
act. But, of course, though he ceases for
the time being to represent his own ego, he
need not — nay, he cannot — abolish or
annihilate it, any more than he can abolish
or annihilate his hands or his eyes. He is,
or should be, the part he plays. That is
obvious and fundamental. But — no less

SHAKSPERE 15

truly, though to a less degree — the part is
he. The actor, then, is not a puppet, of
which Shakspere or some critic pulls the
strings. He is co-creator with the poet,
translating derived impulses into action —
but originating impulses too, so that the
outcome of it all is Shakspere's man or
woman expressed in terms of this actor's
art, but also in terms of this actor's nature.
What is given, set down, clearly expressed,
he is not at liberty to alter or blindly to mis-
construe, but the connecting links must be
forged by his genius. And thus it is that
we may disagree, but we may not condemn.
For his embodiment of the character is a
fact, an entity, a concrete denizen of the
imaginative world, that wins a right to exist
by its own lifelikeness, its own fidelity to
human nature, whether or not it accords
in all particulars with what Shakspere in-
ferentially meant. Shakspere planted, the
critic watered, but — not to speak it pro-
fanely — God giveth the increase ; for all
genius is of God, nor can any amount of
psychological finessing define it otherwise.

1 6 SHAKSPERE

If the player cannot thus embody the part,
his hour to strut and fret will be brief in-
deed. Let him sink to the ranks of the
more wooden t^pe of scholar, or join the
chorus of irresponsible, indolent reviewers.
The interpretative critic has still a dif-
ferent function. His primal duty is mani-
fest: it is to understand. And when he has
understood, he must expound — expound
what Shakspere meant. This requires some
self-control, lest the disciple mistake him-
self for the master. The temptation is al-
most compulsive, now and then, to close the
book and dream away at a tangent, un-
aware that one has left the track. This
another poet may do, and so we have Childe
Roland to the Dark Tower Came or Caliban
upon Setebos: not Shakspere's dark tower
or Shakspere's Caliban, but Browning's —
new creations, not interpretations at all.
Such, however, is not a critic's privilege.
He must never close the book until he is
sure that he has read to the end. For it is
Shakspere that he professes, and he should
keep the faith.

SHAKSPERE 1 7

Let me illustrate. The subject is Cali-
ban, and the critic is no less a personage
than the great Schlegel. " Caliban," writes
Schlegel, " has picked up everything dis-
sonant and thorny in language, to compose
out of it a vocabulary of his own ; and of the
whole variety of nature, the hateful, repul-
sive, and pettily deformed have alone been
impressed on his imagination. The magical
world of spirits, which the staff of Prospero
has assembled on the island, casts merely a
faint reflection into his mind, as a ray of
light which falls into a dark cave, incapable
of communicating to it either heat or illumi-
nation, and serves merely to set in motion
the poisonous vapours." This is beautiful.
It stimulates and satisfies at the same time.
But, as with other stimulants, there comes
the reaction. " Was the hope drunk," cries
Lady Macbeth, " wherein you dressed your-
self ? Hath it slept since ? And wakes it
now to look so green and pale at what it did
so freely?" The reaction comes when we
test the critic's dictum by the facts of Shak-
spere. What of the words of CaUban when
he hears the mysterious music ?

1 8 SHAKSPERE

Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt

not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices,
That if I then had wak'd after long sleep
Will make me sleep again : and then, in dream-
ing.
The clouds methought would open, and show riches
Ready to drop upon me; that, when I wak'd,
I cried to dream again.

Is this a dissonant vocabulary, made up of
all that is thorny in language ? Does this
show that " of the whole variety of nature,
the hateful, repulsive, and pettily deformed
have alone been impressed on Caliban's im-
agination"? The truth is, that Schlegel,
like Browning, has invented his own Cali-
ban: it may be better than Shakspere's, it
may be worse, but Shakspere's it is not.

And, speaking of Caliban, we may note
how little attention has been paid to what
Shakspere has emphasized, subtly but un-
mistakably—his reformation, or, to be more
precise, the dawn of morality in his soul.
For in one point the gross Caliban is su-
perior to the delicate and charming Ariel-

SHAKSPERE 1 9

he has a soul, and is therefore capable of
moral development, whereas Ariel is but an
elemental spirit, without heart, or consci-
ence, or human motives, whose aversion to
the earthy and abhorred commands of Sy-
corax is but the instinctive recoil of opposites.
Caliban's father may have been a devil, but
his mother was human — and he can be
saved. Thus it comes that, at the end of
the play, he is like a child who has made his
first self-adjustment to the intellectual and
moral forces of the world. " Ay, that I
will! " he rephes, in hearty obedience to
Prospero's command:

Ay, that I will! and I'll be wise hereafter,
And seek for grace. What a thrice-double ass
Was I, to take this drunkard for a god
And worship this dull fool!

In his exposition Shakspere always fol-
lows the established Elizabethan method,
which was, to make every significant point
as clear as daylight, and to omit nothing
that the writer regarded as of importance.
However much the dramatis personae mys-
tify each other, the audience is never to be

^

20 SHAKSPERE

perplexed: it is invariably in the secret.
Edgar enters disguised as Poor Tom. We
know him at a glance, for he has already
announced his intention thus to masquer-
ade, and has described in detail the appear-
ance and manners of these Bedlam beggars
of whom " the country gives him proof and
precedent." But, that there may be no
possibility of confusion in the barrenest-
witted groundling, the transformed man no
sooner comes upon the stage than he re-
peats the name by which he has declared
that he will call himself.

This is t>pical of Shakspere's procedure.
And what is true of the mechanics of dis-
guising, holds just as well with regard to
the motives of the persons, the main fea-
tures of their character, and any sudden
change in their conduct, so far as this might
shock or confuse the beholders. Macbeth
at Dunsinane is very different from the
Macbeth that we have come to knoiv. True,
we have seen him in moments of strange
agitation, but never before in this half-fran-
tic state — raging and depressed by turns,

SHAKSPERE 21

railing at his attendants with more than a
touch of BilHngsgate, yet instantly soaring
to heights of imaginative poetry, tormented
by a physical restlessness that will not let
him stand still long enough to finish arming.
However, we are not unprepared for the
spectacle. In the scene that precedes, Caith-
ness informs us with satisfying particularity
that the tyrant has lost his self-control:

Some say he's mad. Others, that lesser hate him,
Do call it valiant fury.

Hamlet is going to his mother's closet. It

is his purpose to upbraid her in no measured

terms — to bear himself so roughly that she

shall confess her guilt if, as he still suspects,

she had any cognizance of her husband's

crime. Indeed, when the time comes, his

mien is so threatening that she shrieks for

help. But it is essential that the audience

shall not share her alarm. We must never

for a moment fearthat Hamlet is in danger

of murdering his mother. Hence the soUl-

oquy that comes before:

Let not ever
The soul of Nero enter this firm bosom;

22 SHAKSPERE

Let me be cruel, not unnatural.

I will speak daggers to her, but use none!

This method of exposition carries a mo-
mentous corollary, too often missed, though
the principle is a commonplace, by those
critics who wish to know more than Shak-
spere has chosen to tell them : — Nothing
that is omitted is of any significance. We
are not at liberty, therefore, to enrich the
plot with our own inventions, or to substi-
tute anything whatever for the plain state-
ment of an expository passage.

In Macbeth, for instance, two points in
the king's history are exactly designated:
the moment at which the thought of kill-
ing Duncan enters his mind for the first
time, only to be put aside with horror; and
the moment when the thought recurs and
ripens into a purpose. These two points
are fixed and immutable; they are not to
be ignored, and they cannot be ex-plained
away. And they exclude the rather preva-
lent theory that Macbeth had planned the
murder, or dallied with the thought of it,
before the opening scene of the play. The

SHAKSPERE 23

importance of this consideration in deter-
mining the character of Macbeth needs no
emphasis. It has also its bearing on the
role of the Weird Sisters. These are in no
sense abstractions, or mere visible symbols
of the criminal impulse. They are concrete
supernatural beings, as actually existent as
the Eumenides in ^Eschylus, with whom,
indeed, they challenge comparison. They
are the Fates who control Macbeth's des-
tiny, and against whom his will is powerless.
Is there a contradiction — a clash between
necessity and free will ? Be it so. Mac-
beth's guilt is not diminished. Shakspere
sets forth life and character in action. It is
not his office to reconcile the everlasting
antinomies. As for you and me, we may do
so if we can; but we must not distort the
drama.

If we would interpret Shakspere, —
whether as actors, or as public critics, or
merely for our private enHghtenment and
behoof, — we must comprehend his media
of expression: which were, first, dramatic;
and second, Elizabethan. And the second

24 SHAKSPERE

medium, the Elizabethan, includes two
elements, the times and the language, with
neither of which is it quite easy for us to
get into intimate relations. For in such an
enterprise we moderns, we Americans, have
much to learn, and scarcely less to unlearn.
We enjoy, to be sure, the enormous advan-
tage of distance, both in time and space. In
some ways we can see the better because
our eyes are not close to the object. But
distance is deceptive, too; and there are
clouds between, and some shadows, and
much smoke from heretical altars, and the
fumes of incense from many ill-swung
censers.

In his own day, Shakspere was one of the
best-known figures in England. He was
held in high esteem, both as a man and as
a poet, while in his capacity of dramatic
author he was not only immensely popu-
lar, but was rated at something like his true
value by most persons of taste and judg-
ment. In the century and a half that fol-
lowed, criticism was busy: some voices were
raised in outspoken condemnation, many in

SHAKSPERE 25

doubt or anxiety or oddly qualified praise.
Still, his reputation and popularity suffered
no eclipse; and, as we approach the nine-
teenth century, we find ourselves moving
forward both with wind and stream. The
age was at hand that should deify Shak-
spere, be it for good or ill. He was becom-
ing, not the poet of a nation or a race or
even a language,— which is more than either,
— but of the world at large, of all human-
ity, of our common and indefeasible nature.

The eighteenth century is a curious com-
pound of the urbane and the pedantic. It
admires Shakspere and, what is more, it
likes him. But it insists on regarding him
as an untaught genius; it is almost child-
ish in its attitude toward his supposed im-
proprieties; and it cannot rid itself of the
feeling that he would have been even greater
if he had known the rules of the game.

These utterances have a vox exigiia, a
certain thin and reedy quality. Yet, inade-
quate as they are, and ludicrously in con-
trast with the robustness of the age they
criticise, they are free, at all events, from

26 SHAKSPERE

the absurdities of idolatry. And idolatry, in
one form or other, was the vice of the so-
called Romantic criticism of Shakspere that
followed. I shall neither quarrel with the
word Romantic nor shall I define it. For
life is too short to split hairs over termin-
ology, and as for definition, I freely admit
that I cannot grapple with it in the present
instance. Romantic let it remain, then: it
will serve to designate, and each of you may
attach to the term whatever connotations
are dearest to his heart.

To the Romantic writers Shakspere ap-
peared as a liberator. He was the arch-
rebel who had triumphed, the Prometheus
whom no tyrant Zeus could bind. There-
fore they worshipped him as a kind of deity,
creating him anew in their own image. Once
more he emerged as the untaught genius,
but not this tune as the singer of unpremed-
itated lays: he was the divine philosopher,
the inexhaustible fountain of all wisdom, the
serene and perfectly balanced nature. In
him imagination and insight were merged
in one great fiat of creative power. He

SHAKSPERE 27

eluded analysis because he was too magnifi-
cently simple for the analytic process.

The criticism of this period busied itself
extensively with the great tragic characters
or, when turning aside to comedy, it treated
the more intellectually significant among
the comedy group with a touch of serious-
ness which too often robbed them of their
lighthearted irresponsibility. Laughter was
not the gift of the Romanticist. This tend-
ency to what may be called the portentous
happened to fit the Anglo-Saxon temper,
ever propense to revel in seriousness and
plunge into debauches of the dismal. It
suited our idiosyncrasy also in another way:
it opened the door to the deadliest kind of
obvious morahzing.

Heaven forbid that I should ascribe all
these dreadful things to the Romanticists
themselves ! They have sins enough of their
own to answer for; nor am I undertaking to
chronologize sharply, or to control my gen-
eralities by the square and plumb-line of
footnotes. My point is this: Under their
lead, their contemporaries and successors,

28 SHAKSPERE

down to very recent times, and in many
quarters even now, became more and more
inclined to talk about Shakspere, and less
inclined to read him; more and more dis-
posed to take his characters as texts, as
points from which to wander into the land
of many inventions. His works were re-
garded, not as plays written for immediate
performance, with an eye to contemporary
spectators and their tastes and conventions
and preconceived ideas, but rather as dark
oracles, pronounced with eternity alone in
mind ; not as dramas constructed with more
or less artistic skill, but as revelations, or
mere sermons, cast into dramatic form,
either because that form came easiest (as
being the most generally cultivated in Shak-
spere's age) or because it gave best opportu-
nity for impressing the lesson or driving home
the moral.

Let us study the disease in a symptom.
Take the soliloquy of the drunken porter in
Macbeth. Here there is no mystery at all,
nor much chance for moralizing, provided
the play is looked upon as a play. Shak-

SHAKSPERE 29

spere needed a short scene to fill an interval
between the exit of Macbeth and his wife
immediately after the murder, and Mac-
beth's re-entrance with the blood washed ofif
his hands, and the air of one called up from
bed by an early knock at the portal.
Obviously he could not utilize any of the
principal characters for the purpose. Ob-
viously, too, the scene could not be allowed
to advance the action. Obviously, again,
the spectators needed relief. Their emo-
tions had just been strung to the highest
tension. Yet another moment was soon to
come of tension equally terrific, when the
deed should be discovered, and the mur-
derers should have to face their crime. For
Shakspere — profoundly and practically
versed in stagecraft, and intimately ac-
quainted with the audience from the actor's
point of view — there was but one method
of filling such a gap : by comic relief. And
the comedy had to be low, so that the
laughter might be full-throated. A drunken
porter, philosophizing on human society as
he rubbed the sleep from his eyes — cata-

30 SHAKSPERE

loguing the stock of traditional sinners when
he ought to have been opening the door —
and coming at last to be broad awake, as
his body realized that the place was " too
cold for hell" and his mind reasserted itself
sufficiently to ask for his tip (" I pray you
remember the porter ") ! What lay readier
at hand, particularly since the whole thing
would be a realistic touch ? For there was a
porter, of course, and of course he had been
carousing with his fellows until the second
cock. For had not the gracious Duncan
sent forth great largess to the servants ? A
simple passage, assuredly! safe, one might
suppose, in its strict conformity to method,
its manifest adaptation to the emergencies
of the curtainless Elizabethan stage!

But how was it dealt with ? Why, vari-
ously, variously — on the quol homines prin-
ciple. Some demanded its excision. Away
with it! it is mere foolery, and not good
foolery either. Argal, it is spurious and
out it should go. This dictum was, after
all, but an idolatrous variant of the eight-
eenth-century manner. Instead of censuring

SHAKSPERE 3 1

Shakspere for mixing drollery with tragedy
(a stricture which, be it right or wrong,
was at least intelligible and regular), this
idolatrous variant, though condemning the
passage equally and on much the same
grounds, absolved the author by assuming
an interpolation. Yet, after all, one phrase
was too Shaksperean to reject: "the prim-
rose way to the everlasting bonfire." That
could not be the coinage of any clownish
player, or jog-trot fabricator of counter-
feit speeches. What then ? Why, we must
save that phrase and delete the residue.
The passage, we are told, was "written for
the mob by some other hand, perhaps with
Shakspere's consent; and, finding it take,
he, with the remaining ink of a pen other-
wise employed, just interpolated the words "
in question. "Of the rest, not one syllable
has the ever-present being of Shakspere."
Now this subjective and impressionistic
tinkering with the text is not, as one might
fancy, the toilsome trifling of some aca-
demic pedant, one of those humble scholiasts
whose lives are spent in piling up junk-

32 SHAKSPERE

heaps for a Variorum to sort and sift. By
no means. It is the handiwork of a noble
poet and a profound, if somewhat misty-
thinker — of no less a man than Coleridge.
Yet what could be more futile ? Not a word
of the real pertinency of the passage! Not
a hint of the place it occupies in the struc-
tural economy of the drama as a drama —
as a play to be performed, that is, on an
actual stage, by human beings, who have
their exits and their entrances, for which it
is the business of the pla>"vvright to provide
in a workmanlike manner.

Still, a worse thing was possible; and of
course it was duly perpetrated — this time
by a constructive reviser. Schiller trans-
forms the character of the rough porter com-
pletely. Under his refining hand he becomes
a lyric personage, who might be singing an
aubade to Romeo: — "The gloomy night
has departed; the lark is carolHng; the day
awakes; the sun is rising in splendor; he
shines alike on the palace and the cottage.
Praise be to God, who watches over this
house! " O most gentle pulpiter! what a

SHAKSPERE 33

tedious homily have you wearied your par-
ishioners withal, and never cried, '' Have
patience, good people! "

I am anxious not to be misunderstood.
Mere scholarship should not be arrogant.
The reaction of a mind like Coleridge's, or
of a mind like Schiller's, under the Shak-
sperean goad is by no means negligible.
For it is a fact in and for itself, one of the
phenomena to be accounted for, a part of
the res gestae of the case. And now and
then there emerges, even from the chaos
and welter of sheer impressionism, a created
and symmetrical judgment. Such, for in-
stance, is the remark of Bodenstedt about
our low comedian: "He never dreams,
while imagining himself a porter of hell-
gate, how near he comes to the truth!"
That is fine; that is indeed illuminating.
That is enough to rehabilitate the passage,
to make us ashamed that we have ever
presumed to cast suspicion on its paternity.

We who are assembled in this room to-
day cannot think our own thoughts about
Shakspere. We are the unconscious inheri-

34 SHAKSPERE

tors of a vast array of preconceived ideas —
good and bad, clever and stupid, judicious
and enthusiastic. Wriggle as we may, we
cannot shuffle ofT our ancestry. We still in-
sensibly regard Shakspere as an untrained
miracle of genius, even when we are em-
phasizing the significance of that best of all
training, the training that comes of doing
things in competition with one's fellows.
We still revert to Aristotle and his French
disciples, even if we have never read them.
We never tire of reviving the idle contest
between the two halves of our own tempera-
ment, which we strangely personify as
classicism and romanticism, much as if, in
Hotspur's phrase, we should each divide
himself and go to buffets.

And perhaps the most unsightly of our
critical heirlooms is the disposition — part
classic, part romantic, and altogether hu-
man — to take some leading personage in a
tragedy as a walking formula of rudimen-
tary ethics: as if there were no plot, no
circumstances; as if, in short, the character
were not a man among men, but an abstrac-

SHAKSPERE 35

tion declaiming in the wilderness, a chimaera
homhinans in vacuo.

To how many is Othello merely a type of
the jealous man, rather than an heroic and
simple nature, putting full trust in two
friends, both of whom betray him^ the one
in angry malice, the other by weakness and
self-seeking. Brutus, to such an apprehen-
sion, is the statuesque model of Roman vir-
tue, rather than what Shakspere made him
— virtuous indeed, high-minded, patriotic—
but mistaking his virtue for abihty, most
serenely stubborn when he is wrong in his
opinion, forcing his associates into measure
after measure that thwarts their cause and
ruins it at the last.

The most terrifying instance of what this
one-man one-idea policy can accomphsh in
the way of darkening counsel may be seen
in the case of Hamlet. This is commonly
treated as a one-part tragedy. We have
even achieved a proverb that anything that
lacks or loses its chief reason for existence
is " like the play of Hamlet with Hamlet
left out." That is an immensely significant

36 SHAKSPERE

saying. It demonstrates in a flash the
blind and naive perversity of three-quarters
of our Shaksperean criticism.

In the first place, the subject of Hamlet is
not the tragedy of the Prince of Denmark;
it is not the tragedy of any individual: it is
the tragedy of a group, of the whole royal
family; and their fate involves the destruc-
tion of the family of Polonius, which is very
close to the royal line, so close that the
Danish mob sees nothing extraordinary in
the idea of seating Laertes upon the throne.

Caps, hands, and tongues applaud it to the clouds,
" Laertes shall be king — Laertes kingl "

The tragic complex is abnost indescrib-
ably entangled, despite the simplicity of the
main plot; yet it is brought out with per-
fect clearness. The moving cause is not the
murder: it is the guilty passion of Gertrude
and Claudius, to which the murder is inci-
dental. Claudius did not kill his brother,
merely, or even chiefly, to acquire the king-
dom: he killed him to possess the queen.
That was his leading motive, though of
course the other is not excluded. Nothing

SHAKSPERE 37

is more striking in the story than the pas-
sionate attachment of the guilty pair. And
to cHnch the matter, we have the words of
Claudius himself in that matchless soUloquy
when he tries to pray and only succeeds in
reasoning hunself , with pitiless logic and an
intellectual honesty of which only the great-
est minds are capable, into assurance of his
own damnation.

But O what form of prayer
Can serve my turn ? Forgive me my foul murther ?
That cannot be, since I am still possess'd
Of those effects for which I did the murther —
My crown, mine own ambition, and my queen 1

Mark the ascending series — and the queen
is at the top of the cUmax. That is where
Claudius puts her when he strips his soul
bare, and forces it to appear, naked and
shivering, before the all-seeing eye.

Again, consider the situation of the queen.
Conscious of adultery, but innocent of all
compHcity in the murder, she is torn asun-
der by her love for her husband and her
love for her son. She would have peace,
peace, when there is no peace. And so

41'r!f)15

38 SHAKSPERE

would Claudius, for his wife's sake, until he
learns that somehow Hamlet has found out
the truth, and that it must be war to the
knife. Yet he must destroy the son without
alienating the mother. And so he becomes
his own Nemesis, for the queen drinks to
Hamlet from the chalice prepared by Clau-
dius for his enemy. Two lines condense the
tragedy of Claudius and Gertrude:

Gertrude, do not drink!
It is the poisoned cup — it is too late!

In this web of crisscross tragic entangle-
ments Polonius is meshed — Polonius, be-
nevolent diplomatist and devoted father —
and with him the son and daughter whom
he loves with the pathetic tenderness of an
old and failing man, and who return his
affection as it deserves. The details need
no rehearsal, but one point calls for em-
phasis: the deliberate parallelism of situa-
tion which makes Laertes the foil to
Hamlet.

They have the same cause at heart:
vengeance for a father is their common
purpose. But their characters are sharply

SHAKSPERE 39

contrasted. For Laertes strikes on head-
long impulse, without balancing and with-
out scruple. If those critics are right who
censure Hamlet for alleged inaction, for
weakness of will, for being unequal to his
task, then Laertes should be commended.
For he does precisely what they seem to
require of Hamlet. But I hear no praise
of Laertes, even from the sternest of Ham-
let's judges. How can they praise him, in-
deed ? For his rash singleness of purpose
makes him false to his own code of honor
and degrades him to the basest uses. Yet
there is no alternative in logic. Laertes, I
repeat, is Hamlet's foil; and if Hamlet is
wrong, Laertes must be right.

Veritably, we are at a nonplus if we
regard this complex and tangle of tragic
situations as a one-part play, or — what is
much the same thing — as a mystery of
temperament to which the sole character of
the hero is the master-key.

No. Hamlet is not the tragedy of a weak-
willed procrastinator, of the contemplative
nature challenged by fate to fill the role of a

40 SHAKSPERE

man of action. On the contrary, it is the
tragedy not of an individual but of a group;
and in its structure it is balanced, in the
most delicate and unstable equilibrium, be-
tween two great personages — Hamlet and
the King. It is a duel to the death between
well-matched antagonists; so well-matched
indeed, that neither triumphs, but they
destroy each other in the end. Almost
everything that has been written about
this drama is out of focus. For Claudius
is either belittled or disregarded; and —
Hamlet's real obstacle being thus cleared
from his path by a complete misrepresenta-
tion of the facts — a new obstacle is called
into being to account for his delay: namely,
a complete misrepresentation of his mental
and moral character.

The most emphatic protest against taking
Shakspere's men and women as types or
formulas, as embodiments of this or that
ethical concept, is recorded by the poet
himself, not in set terms — though utter-
ances of that tendency are by no means
absent — but in a striking point of his

SHAKSPERE 41

practice. How to put this matter in ad-
vance of the examples, I scarcely know.
For the thing is so utterly obvious that any
statement of it sounds insufferably trite.
Let the examples come first, then; and they
shall be Oswald, Claudius, and lago.

Oswald in Lear has been described by a
great writer as the one utterly base char-
acter in all Shakspere. The phrase should
give us pause; for I have a notion that no-
body in Shakspere is utterly anything;
while, as for perfect baseness, that would
make a man a monster. In fact, now,
Oswald is a fine example of blind fideHty —
he is pathetically dog-like in his devotion
to his wicked mistress. Kent, indeed, up-
braids him for it — for the phrase is none
of mine: — " Knowing naught, like dogs,
but following! " And when Oswald has
been struck down, he spends his last breath
in urging Edgar to carry on the letter. It
is a bad letter, and ought never to have been
written or delivered; but fidehty of any
kind is not selfishness, and only selfishness
can be utterly base.

42 SHAKSPERE

King Claudius has fared hard at the
hands of both the moralizing critics and the
actors. The former have either ignored or
denounced; the latter have cut out most of
his lines, and have reduced him (on many
stages) to the role of a poor, strutting,
mouthing creature — a cross between Uriah
Heep and the villain of melodrama. Yet
Shakspere's Claudius is superbly royal. He
confronts the armed mob with serene dis-
dain when it breaks into his palace, o'er-
bears his officers, and comes howhng for
vengeance to the very door of his chamber.
As to Laertes, who is doubly dangerous in
that he has the rioters under control — him
Claudius subdues with a glance and a calm
word, as one might quiet a fractious child.
The thing is magnificent. Here is indeed
a born ruler of men; nor are we surprised
that to him is assigned, in this very scene,
the ultimate expression — now accepted as
proverbial — of the divinity that doth
hedge a king. Yet this is the same Claudius
who, in lawless love for his brother's crown
and his brother's wife, crept into the garden

SHAKSPERE 43

with juice of cursed hebenon in a vial. It
is likewise the same Claudius who felt such
pity for poor Opheha, divided from herself
and her fair reason, "without the which we
are pictures or mere beasts " — the same
Claudius who could not pray because his
intellect was so pitilessly honest that self-
deceit was beyond his power — the same
Claudius who faced his own damnation
knowing he was the son of wrath, because
he could not give up his crown or his queen
and was too sublime to juggle with his con-
science. Here is no inconsistency, but har-
monious synthesis of discordant elements.
We have a man before us — a very great
man, though an enormous malefactor.

As to lago, the critics seem to agree in
three points only: that he is bad, that he
is clever, and that his years are eight and
twenty. Such unanimity is enough, per-
haps, for our immediate object, though I
would fain dwell for a moment on his cyni-
cal malignity — long enough, at all events,
to deny that it is " motiveless," as one
eminent writer has averred. Motiveless

44 SHAKSPERE

anything is un-Shaksperean, and motiveless
malice is not even human: it is either
devilish or maniacal. Besides, lago's plot
is progressive: it " breeds itself out of cir-
cumstance " as he goes on, until it has so
ensnared the contriver that there is no
escape: he must see the thing through, or
perish. In its inception, however, his plan
of vengeance had involved no tragedy, and
(what is more to our purpose) it was
prompted by two of the keenest motives
that ever stung to action the least resentful
of human creatures — sexual jealousy, and
the consciousness that pure favoritism had
advanced a professional inferior over his
head. This is enough, no doubt, by way of
proof that lago is not Mephistopheles, but a
human being — a proposition that would
need no argument, were it not for the
lengthening chain of romantic and impres-
sionistic fallacies that we drag after us at
each remove we make from the very text of
Shakspere.

Being human, then, however depraved,
lago is usable, on Shakspere's theory of

SHAKSPERE 45

humanity, for the utterance of great truths.
Nor are these mere ornamental patches of
Euripidean sententiousness: they are quite
as intrinsic to his character as his biting
satire or his cynical frankness. Indeed,
they appear to be somehow the outgrowth
or product of his highly intellectuaUzed
cynicism, as if he were the toad with the
precious jewel in its head. Of all these the
most remarkable is his sublime assertion
(to Roderigo) of the supremacy of will and
reason in the cultivation of the moral
faculties. " Vhtue! a fig! 'tis in ourselves
that we are thus or thus. Our bodies are
our gardens, to the which our wills are
gardeners. So that if we will plant nettles,
or sow lettuce; set hyssop, and weed up
thyme — supply it with one gender of
herbs, or distract it with many — either to
have it sterile with idleness, or manured
with industry — why, the power and corri-
gible authority of this hes in our wills. If
the balance of our Hves had not one scale
of reason to poise another of sensuality, the
blood and baseness of our natures would

46 SHAKSPERE

conduct us to most preposterous conclu-
sions." That is a saying of which Hamlet
himself might be proud, and to which the
noble Brutus would assent with enthusiasm.
But neither Hamlet nor Brutus could by
any freak of possibility have uttered it.
Somehow it is purely and simply lago —
lago cap-a-pie.

And so my examples have spoken for me
— they have called up in your minds the
phrases that I feared to use on account of
their apparent banality: Shakspere is the
great assertor of the ineradicable soundness
of human nature.

Of all methods and ideals in the study of
Shakspere's dramas, the most desperately
wrong is that which seeks, exclusively or
principally, to read the riddle of person-
ality — to discover the man in his works.

A little of this kind of thing is harmless,
and may be stimulating, provided we know
what we are doing; for there is no reason
why we should not now and then "let our
frail thoughts dally with false surmise."
But to adopt the idea as a guiding principle,

SHAKSPERE 47

as the end and aim of all Shakspereanism,
is certainly villanous, and " shows a most
pitiful ambition in the [critic] that uses it."
Pitiful for two reasons: first, because it is
wasted effort, except, perhaps, for the men-
tal gymnastics of it; and secondly, because
it is presumptuous beyond all limits of per-
missible audacity.

Unquestionably the man is there; the real
Shakspere is somehow latent in his plays:
but how is one to extract him ? For if he
lurks somewhere in the heart of Othello, so
likewise he lurks somewhere in the brain
of lago: if Hamlet is Shakspere, so also is
Claudius, and so are Banquo and Fluellen,
Falstaff and Prince Hal, Benedick and Hot-
spur, Dogberry and Mark Antony, Polonius
and Touchstone and Lear and Rosalind,
Dame Quickly as well as Cleopatra and
Cassius, Pistol and Osric as well as Ulysses
and Prospero and CaHban. All are authen-
tic, all are genuine, all are sincere — I use
the regular jargon, the consecrated cant-
words so full of sound and fury. Each,
therefore, contains some fragment of Shak-

48 SHAKSPERE

spere's nature, or registers some reaction of
his idiosyncrasy. That is most certain. But
how shall we tackle this stupendous problem
in biochemistry ? Who is the necromancer
who shall evoke these demons, or, having
evoked them, shall control and organize
their multifarious manifestations ?

Yet the impossible is ever alluring. The
attempt has been made, and the results are
before the world. The outcome is its own
refutation. It is either a compendium of
humanity, a composite photograph, quite
destitute of salient features, or else it is a
creature shifting and intangible, a kaleido-
scopic monster, " everything by turns and
nothing long." Assuredly this is not Shak-
spere. Why, it is not even an individual!

You may think me malicious in the selec-
tion of characters. If so, I wish to repel the
insinuation; and I will repel it by example,
for the list has no guile in it. Every per-
sonage has been chosen under the lash of an
almost meticulous conscience. My example
shall be Ancient Pistol — surely as unprom-
ising a candidate for the office of Shak-

SHAKSPERE 49

sperean representative as any of the rout.
And my passage shall be an outrageous
example of frantic Pistolese:

Shall packhorses
And hollow pamper'd jades of Asia,
Which cannot go but thirty mile a day,
Compare with Caesars and with Cannibals,
And Trojan Greeks ? Nay, rather damn them

with
King Cerberus — and let the welkin roar!
Shall we fall foul for toys ?

" By my troth, captain," interjects the
anxious hostess, " these are very bitter
words! "

Bitter indeed! but for my present pur-
pose " they rob the Hybla bees and leave
them honeyless." For they fit my demon-
stration to a nicety. Shakspere loved words :
that is axiomatic, for he accumulated, some-
how, the most enormous vocabulary ever
used by mortal man. Further, he loved
words for their sound, and not for their
sense alone. Otherwise he could not have
been a poet, unless it were in a singularly
qualified application. And here we have him
— the real Shakspere — luxuriating in pure

50 SHAKSPERE

prodigality of vocal reverberation— borrow-
ing Gargantua's mouth, — anglicizing Jwno-
rificahilitudinilalihus.

Ilacc fahitla docet — but it would be
shameless pedantry to indite the moral.
We remember that Shakspere's " genius
[i.e. his temperament] was jocular " (so
stands the record) " and inclining him to
festivity." We are not Hkely to forget the
Mermaid Tavern. Wit-combats took place
there — and was there no humor extant ?
no wild verbal foolery ? no declamatory
outbursts of glorious nonsense ?

Have I not proved my point ? If Pistol is
Shakspere, and Hamlet is Shakspere, what
becomes of the hunt for the poet's person-
ality? "///c el ubique? then we'll shift our
ground." Let us dismiss the huntsmen and
disperse the pack in the phrase of Queen
Gertrude, who was a good sportswoman,
whatever her faults, and unterrified by the
howls of Laertes' mob :

How cheerfully on the false trail they cryl
0, this is counter, you false Danish dogs!

^

SHAKSPERE 51

BafHed in their attempts to discover the
undiscoverable, to isolate that which per-
vades and vivifies the whole but eludes
analysis and defies extraction — puzzled
and thwarted by a personaHty that is
present and active as truly in lago and
Macbeth and Claudius as in Hamlet and
Prospero and Ulysses, and that speaks
and moves in Hotspur and Falstaff alike —
these inquisitive spirits, with one or two
robust exceptions, have retired from their
assaults upon the dramas of Shakspere, and
fallen furiously, in unabashed discomfiture,
upon the defenceless Sonnets. Defenceless
indeed! for what Ues so bare of protection
and concealment as a poor Uttle lyric poem
in which, both from its very nature and
from the conventions that attend it, the
author must appear to unlock his heart ?
A sonnet (if it would not fail of its purpose,
would not falsify the end for which it comes
into being) must seem to be veracious and
actual; it must seem to express authentic
emotion, and — most perilous of qualities !
— it must speak in the first person. In a

52 SHAKSPERE

word, a sonnet must be either patently
artificial (and then it is bad) or good (and
then it sounds like autobiography). There
is no escape: a good sonnet appears to be
a confession. These are terms from which
not even the supreme genius can be ex-
empt. He must either refrain, or run the
risk of a literal (that is, a personal) interpre-
tation. It follows, then, that the testimony
of the sonnets must ever remain ambiguous.
Nothing can prove them autobiographical
except the discovery of outside evidence
that they accord with facts of the poet's hfe:
and no such evidence is forthcoming.

Here is no chance to appeal to the twice-
battered catchword " sincerity." Are not
Hamlet's soliloquies sincere ? and lago's
cynical revelations of his code ? and Mac-
beth's poetic imaginings that visualize to
the edge of delirium ? And what of Clau-
dius when he tries to pray, and of Dame
Quickly when she recites the oath sworn
upon the parcel-gilt goblet ? Each of these
speeches is in equal measure the outbreak
of the person's character: all are sincere.

SHAKSPERE 53

then; and all, of course, are in the first
person. Yet the / is nowhere William
Shakspere. What warrant, then, have we
for assuming other than a dramatic sin-
cerity in the sonnets, unless we are wilhng
to argue in the most vicious of circles ?
unless we are abject enough to substitute
dehberately the yearnings of our own sen-
timental curiosity for the operations of
reason and conscience ?

Let us therefore be humble. We may
fancy what we choose to fancy, for that is
our prerogative. But we have no right to
dignify our idle reveries with the name of
biographic fact. Shakspere is not Hamlet
— neither is he Falstaff or lago or Edmund
or Lear or Touchstone. So much we know.
And the lesson should be easy to learn.
Perhaps Shakspere is the man or the men
of the sonnets — perhaps he is not. Asser-
tion either way is equally fallacious, equally
presuming. Nor would knowledge either
way profit us if we could obtain it. For
what is any one of us that he should think
to read the riddle of another's personality ?

54 SHAKSPERE

Here again the great assertor of human
nature speaks a truth through the lips of a
bad man. " By heaven! " cries Othello, —
baffled as we are baffled — " by heaven, I'll
know thy thoughts! " And mark the
answer:

You cannot, if my heart were in your hand;
Nor shall not wliilst 'tis in my custody.

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