Three plays of Shakespeare

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HARPER'S LIBRARY of LIVING THOUGHT

THREE
PLAYS

OF

SHAKESPEARE

BY

ALGERNON

CHARLES
SWINBURNE

HARPER X
BROTHERS
NEtfYOKKXLONDON

REE PLAYS

OF

SHAKESPEARE

ALGERNON CHARLES
SWINBURNE

NEW YORK AND LONDON

HARPER <5r» BROTHERS

1909

Copyright, 1902, 1903, 1904, 1909, by
HARPBR & BROTHERS.

All rights reserved.
Published March, 1909.

CONTENTS

PAGE

PUBLISHERS' PREFACE ix

KING LEAR 3

OTHELLO 27

KING RICHARD II 59

PUBLISHERS' PREFACE

TJARPER'S Library of Living
*• * Thought is intended as a re-
sponse to what appears to be the
special demand of the century now
opening. Just as in the organic world
every organism is, we are told, a
growth of cells springing from the
parent cell, so every good book is
nothing more than a synthetic ex-
pansion of a single, central, living
thought. Bacon's entire system of
philosophy is nothing more than
a development of one great thought:
"We conquer nature by obeying
her." Again, before Darwin and Wal-
lace simultaneously announced a new

IX

PUBLISHERS' PREFACE

cosmogony of growth, the living
thought at the heart of that great
revolutionary system was expressed in
a footnote to an article in the "West-
minster Review" by Herbert Spencer.
That brief footnote was of more im-
portance to the world than most of
the books published in that year. The
twentieth century is and must needs
be in a hurry, and what it asks for is
the central living thought of every
intellectual movement without delay.
Its energies are so enormously active
that new living thoughts are jost-
ling each other daily. The conse-
quence is that when a writer feels
that he has a new living thought to
express, he does not wait to develop it
fully — he does not pause to write a
book, as he would have done in times
past — he sends the suggestive article

PUBLISHERS' PREFACE

to one of the great reviews or maga-
zines. Before getting into permanent
form, this suggestive article has to wait
until the creator of the thought has
the opportunity of developing it, of ex-
panding it into a book, or else until he
republishes it in a collection of miscel-
laneous essays upon all kinds of other
subjects. This is why it is no un-
common thing to see in the careful
student's library single numbers of a
review, or magazine, preserved; while
in libraries of other careful students
we see a single article cut out of a
review and made by the binder into a
queer-looking little volume. Now, it
is our purpose to furnish such students
as these with the living central thought
in permanent book form as soon as
it is born, and at a low price. The
student will find that for the same
xi

PUBLISHERS' PREFACE

price which he would give for the re-
view containing the one desired article
he can obtain a beautifully printed
little volume, well bound, and an orna-
ment to his library.

Having explained the raison d'etre
of the series, we have now only a word
or two to say upon the eminent
writers whom we have invited to
further our views — Mr. Algernon
Charles Swinburne, Count Leo Tol-
stoy, and Professor William Flinders
Petrie. As regards the first of these
writers and the subject upon which
he has chosen to write, it will be con-
ceded that there is no literary ques-
tion in which the twentieth century is
more deeply concerning itself than
that of Shakespeare and his art. And
it will be conceded that the foremost
living poet of the world, who is also

PUBLISHERS' PREFACE

acknowledged to be the greatest Shake-
spearean student, is, above all men,
adequately equipped for treating such
a subject. The ''Three Plays of
Shakespeare" upon which he dis-
courses are "King Lear," "Othello,"
and "King Richard II." In the first
he has given us a new living thought
indeed — the thought that King Lear
is an expression of the most advanced
doctrine as to the absolute equality of
man confronted by nature, and of the
futility of the monarchical idea, which
was never more rampant than in the
age in which Shakespeare lived. In
the second, in comparing and contrast-
ing Shakespeare's treatment of the
jealousy of Othello with the treatment
of the same passion in the novel upon
which it is based — the seventh story
of the third decade of the Hecatom-

xiii

PUBLISHERS' PREFACE

mithi of M. Giovanbattista Giraldi
Cinthio — he has been equally bold.
He has shown that, while the great
dramatist has undoubtedly trans-
figured the story to the most pathetic
of tragedies, he has in one case — that
of lago's stealing of the handkerchief —
missed the most pathetic feature of the
"tragic mischief." In "King Richard
II" he for the first time shows the
struggle in the mind of Shakespeare
between the influence of Marlowe and
the influence of Robert Greene. A
more interesting analysis of Shake-
speare's dramatic, as well as metrical,
art has never been given to the world.
By comparing Mr. Swinburne's vol-
ume with that of Professor Petrie, it
will be observed that it does not reach
the average length of the books in
this series. But we feel sure that the

xiv

PUBLISHERS' PREFACE

reader will think it of no less value
and of no less importance on account
of its brevity.

With regard to Count Tolstoy's
contribution, at this moment a great
and passionate attention is being given
to religious questions. " New theolo-
gies" are springing up like mushrooms.
The character of the teachings of Christ
is being discussed with an absolute free-
dom such as was not possible in pre-
vious times. There is no more com-
manding figure in the realm of religious
thought to-day than Count Tolstoy.
He impresses the modern imagination
with the majesty of a prophet. By
the suffrages of the Christian world he
would be the one above all others
chosen to tell once more the old, old
story. He has done this with the
eloquence of grand simplicity in "The

XV

PUBLISHERS' PREFACE

Teaching of Jesus." It is based, as
he tells us in his preface, on talks to
the children of the village near his
home. All "who become as little
children" before the great mysteries
must feel its power.

Professor William Flinders Petrie,
the eminent Egyptologist and philos-
opher, contributes a remarkable vol-
ume on " Personal Religion in Egypt
before Christianity." It is an exami-
nation of the "old bottles into which
the new wine was poured" that he
gives the reader with all the resources
of his unrivalled knowledge of that im-
portant epoch.

These volumes are the precursors of
volumes of a like vital character.

A volume entitled "Poetic Ade-
quacy in the Twentieth Century" will
be contributed by Mr. Theodore Watts-

xvi

PUBLISHERS' PREFACE

Dunton, who stands in the foremost
line of great English critics by right of
subtle and profound insight, which
is his, perhaps, because he is himself
a creator.

Science will naturally claim special
attention in the Library of Living
Thought. Among the early volumes
in this department Professor Svante
Arrhenius, the distinguished Swedish
savant, has written a deeply interest-
ing account of the conceptions which
man has formed from the earliest to the
latest times of the origin and formation
of the universe. No more important
contribution to the expounding of the
problem of the universe has been made
than his own previous work, " Worlds
in the Making."

February, /pop.

xvii

KING LEAR

KING LEAR

IF nothing were left of Shakespeare
but the single tragedy of King
Lear, it would still be as plain as it
is now that he was the greatest man
that ever lived. As a poet, the author
of this play can only be compared
with ^Eschylus: the Hebrew proph-
ets and the creator of Job are some-
times as sublime in imagination and
in passion, but always quite incom-
parably inferior in imaginative in-
telligence. Sophocles is as noble, as
beautiful, and as kindly a thinker
and a writer: but the gentle Shake-
speare could see farther and higher
and wider and deeper at a glance
than ever could the gentle Sophocles.
3

THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE

Aristophanes had as magnificent a
power of infinitely joyous wit and
infinitely inexhaustible humour: but
whom can he show us or offer us to be
set against Falstaff or the Fool ? It is
true that Shakespeare has neither the
lyric nor the prophetic power of the
Greeks and the Hebrews: but then
it must be observed and remembered
that he, and he alone among poets and
among men, could well afford to dis-
pense even with such transcendent gifts
as these. Freedom of thought and
sublimity of utterance came hand in
hand together into English speech:
our first great poet, if loftiness and
splendour of spirit and of word be
taken as the test of greatness, was
Christopher Marlowe. From his dead
hand the one man born to excel him,
and to pay a due and a deathless

4

KING LEAR

tribute to his deathless memory, took
up the heritage of dauntless thought,
of daring imagination, and of since
unequalled song.

The tragedy of King Lear, like the
trilogy of the Oresteia, is a thing
incomparable and unique. To com-
pare it with Othello is as inevitable
a temptation as to compare the Aga-
memnon with the Prometheus of the
one man comparable with Shakespeare.
And the result, for any reader of
human intelligence and decent humil-
ity in sight of what is highest in
the spiritual world, must always be a
sense of adoring doubt and exulting
hesitation. In Othello and in Prome-
theus a single figure, an everlasting
and godlike type of heroic and human
agony, dominates and dwarfs all others
but those of the traitor lago and the
5

THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE

tyrant God. There is no Clytaem-
nestra in the one, and there is no
Cordelia in the other. "The gentle
lady married to the Moor" is too
gentle for comparison with the most
glorious type of womanhood which
even Shakespeare ever created before
he conceived and brought forth Imo-
gen. No one could have offered to
Cordelia the tribute of so equivocal a
compliment as was provoked by the
submissive endurance of Desdemona—
"Truly, an obedient lady." Antigone
herself — and with Antigone alone can
we imagine the meeting of Cordelia
in the heaven of heavens — is not so
divinely human as Cordelia. We love
her all the more, with a love that at
once tempers and heightens our wor-
ship, for the rough and abrupt repeti-
tion of her nobly unmerciful reply
6

KING LEAR

to her father's fond and fatuous appeal.
Almost cruel and assuredly severe in
its uncompromising self-respect, this
brief and natural word of indignantly
reticent response is the key-note of all
that follows — the spark which kindles
into eternal life the most tragic of all
tragedies in the world. All the yet
unimaginable horror of the future
becomes at once inevitable and assured
when she shows herself so young and
so untender — so young and true. And
what is the hereditary horror of doom
once imminent over the house of
Atreus to this instant imminence of
no supernatural but a more awfully
natural fate ? Cursed and cast out, she
leaves him and knows that she leaves
him in the hands of Goneril and Regan.
Coleridge, the greatest though not
the first great critic and apostle or
7

THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE

interpreter of Shakespeare, has noted
" these daughters and these sisters"
as the only characters in Shakespeare
whose wickedness is ultranatural—
something outside and beyond the
presumable limits of human evil. It
would be well for human nature if it
were so; but is it? xThey are "re-
.mofseies?rtreacherous, lecherous, kind-
i less*'; hot and hard, cold and cun-
) ning, savage and subtle as a beast of
• the field or the wilderness or the
jungle. But such dangerous and
vicious animals are not more excep-
tional than the very noblest and
purest of their kind. An lago is
abnormal: his wonderful intelligence,
omnipotent and infallible within its
limit and its range, gives to the un-
clean and maleficent beast that he
is the dignity and the mystery of a
8

KING LEAR

devil. Goneril and Regan would be
almost vulgarly commonplace by com-
parison with him if the conditions of
their life and the circumstances of
their story were not so much more
extraordinary than their instincts and
their acts. " Regan," according to
Coleridge, "is not, in fact, a greater
monster than Goneril, but she has
the power of casting more venom."
A champion who should wish to enter
the lists on behalf of Goneril might
plead that Regan was so much more
of a Gadarean sow than her elder
sister as to be, for all we know, inca-
pable of such passion as flames out in
Goneril at the thought of foreign
banners spread in a noiseless land.

"Where's thy drum?

France spreads his banners in our noiseless
land ;

THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE

With plumed helm thy slayer begins [his]

threats ;
Whiles thou, a moral fool, sit'st still, and

criest
* Alack, why does he so?"'

Beast and she-devil as she is, she
rises in that instant to the level of
an unclean and a criminal Joan of
Arc. Her advocate might also in-
voke as an extenuating circumstance
the fact that she poisoned Regan.

Francois- Victor Hugo, the author
of the best and fullest commentary
ever written on the text of which he
gave us the most wonderful and
masterly of all imaginable transla-
tions, has perhaps unwittingly en-
forced and amplified the remark of
Coleridge on the difference between
the criminality of the one man chosen
by chance and predestined by nature

IO

KING LEAR

I

as the proper paramour of either
sister and the monstrosity of the
creatures who felt towards him as
women feel towards the men they
love. Edmund is not a more true-
born child of hell than a true-born
son of his father. Goneril and Regan
are legitimate daughters of the pit;
the man who excites in them such
emotion as in such as they are may
pass as the substitute for love is but
a half-blooded fellow from the infer-
nal as well as the human point of
view. His last wish is to undo the
last and most monstrous of his crimes.1
Such a wish would have been im-
possible to either of the sisters by
whom he can boast with his dying
breath that Edmund was beloved.

" I pant for life: some good I mean to do,
Despite of mine own nature. Quickly send,
1 See note on page 24.

IX

THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE

Be brief in it, to the castle; for my writ
Is on the life of Lear and on Cordelia;
Nay, send in time."

The incomparable genius of the
greatest among all poets and all men
approved itself incomparable for ever
by the possibly unconscious instinct
which in this supreme work induced
or compelled him to set side by side
the very lowest and the very highest
types of imaginable humanity. Kent
and Oswald, Regan and Cordelia, stand
out in such relief against each other
that Shakespeare alone could have
wrought their several figures into one
perfect scheme of spiritual harmony.
Setting aside for a moment the reflec-
tion that outside the work of ^Eschylus
there is no such poetry in the world,
we must remember that there is no
such realism. And there is no discord

12

KING LEAR

between the supreme sublimities of
impassioned poetry and the humblest
realities of photographic prose. In-
credible and impossible as it seems,
the impression of the one is enhanced
and intensified by the impression of
the other.

That Shakespeare's judgment was
as great and almost as wonderful as
his genius has been a commonplace of
criticism ever since the days of Cole-
ridge; questionable only by such dirty
and dwarfish creatures of simian in-
tellect and facetious idiocy as mistake
it for a sign of wit instead of dullness,
and of distinction instead of degrada-
tion, to deny the sun in heaven and
affirm the fragrance of a sewer. But
I do not know whether his equally
unequalled skill in the selection and
composition of material for the con-
is

THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE

struction of a masterpiece has or has
not been as all but universally recog-
nized. No more happy and no more
terrible inspiration ever glorified the
genius of a poet than was that which
bade the greatest of them all inweave
or^fuse together the legend of Lear
and his daughters with the story
\ot Gloucester and his sons. It is
possible that an episode in Sidney's
Arcadia may have suggested, as is
usually supposed or usually repeated,
Xifife notion or conception of this more
than tragic underplot; but the stu-
dent will be disappointed who thinks
to find in the sweet and sunbright
work of Sidney's pure and happy
genius a touch or a hint of such
tragic horror as could only be con-
ceived and made endurable by the
deeper as well as higher, and darker
14

KING LEAR

as well as brighter, genius of Shake-
speare. And this fearful understudy
in terror is a necessary, an indispen-
sable, part of the most wonderful
creation ever imagined and realized
by man. The author of the Book of
Job, the author of the Eumenides,
can show nothing to be set beside the
third act of King Lear. All that is
best and all that is worst in man
might have been brought together
and flashed together upon the mind's
eye of the spectator or the student
without the intervention of such ser-
vile ministers as take part with Goneril
and Regan against their father. Storm
and lightning, thunder and rain, be-
come to us, even as they became to
Lear, no less conscious and respon-
sible partners in the superhuman in-
humanity of an unimaginable crime.
15

THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE

The close of the Prometheus itself
seems less spiritually and overpower-
ingly fearful by comparison with a
scene which is not the close and is less
terrible than the close of King Lear.
And it is no whit more terrible than
/ it is beautiful. The splendour of
the lightning and the menace of the
thunder serve only or mainly to re-
lieve or to enhance the effect of
suffering and the potency of passion
on the spirit and the conscience of a
The sufferer is transfigured:
but he is not transformed. Mad or
sane, living and dying, he is passionate
and vehement, single-hearted and self-
willed. And therefore it is that the
fierce appeal, the fiery protest against
the social iniquities and the legal
atrocities of civilized mankind, which
one before the greatest of all English-

16

KING LEAR

men had ever dreamed of daring to
utter in song or set forth upon the
stage, comes not from Hamlet, but
from Lear. The young man whose
infinite capacity of thought and whose
delicate scrupulosity of conscience at
once half disabled and half deified
him could never have seen what was
revealed by suffering to an old man '
who had never thought or felt more
deeply or more keenly than an average
labourer or an average king. Lear's
madness, at all events, was assuredly
not his enemy, but his friend. /

The rule of Elizabeth and her suc-
cessor may have been more arbitrary
than we can now understand how the
commonwealth of England could ac-
cept and could endure; but how
far it was from a monarchy, from a
government really deserving of that
17

THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE

odious and ignominious name, we may
judge by the fact that this play could
be acted and published. Among all
its other great qualities, among all the
many other attributes which mark it
for ever as matchless among the works
of man, it has this above all, that it is
the first great utterance of a cry from
the heights and the depths of the
human spirit on behalf of the outcasts
of the world — on behalf of the social
sufferer, clean or unclean, innocent or
criminal, thrall or free. To satisfy
the sense of righteousness, the craving
for justice, as unknown and unimagin-
able by Dante as by Chaucer, a change
must come upon the social scheme
of things which shall make an end of
the actual relations between the judge
and the cutpurse, the beadle and the
prostitute, the beggar and the king. i

18 J

KING LEAR

All this could be uttered, could be
prophesied, could be thundered from
the English stage at the dawn of the
seventeenth century. Were it within
the power of omnipotence to create a
German or a Russian Shakespeare,
could anything of the sort be whispered
or muttered or hinted or suggested
from the boards of a Russian or a
German theatre at the dawn of the
twentieth? When a Tolstoi or a
Sudermann can do this, and can do
it with impunity in success, it will be
allowed that his country is not more I
than three centuries behind England
in civilization and freedom. Not po-
litical reform, but social revolution as
beneficent and as bloodless, as abso-
lute and as radical, as enkindled the
aspiration and the faith of Victor
Hugo, is the key-note of the creed
19

THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE

and the watchword of the gospel
according to Shakespeare. Not, of
course, that it was not his first and
last aim to follow the impulse which
urged him to do good work for its
own sake and for love of his own art:
but this he could not do without
delivery of the word that was in him
— the word of witness against wrong
done by oversight as well as by cruelty,
by negligence as surely as by crime. _
These things were hidden from the
marvellous wisdom of Hamlet, and
revealed to the more marvellous in-
sanity of Lear.

There is nothing of the miraculous
in this marvel: the mere presence
and companionship of the Fool should
suffice to account for it; Cordelia
herself is but a little more adorably
worthy of our love than the poor

20

KING LEAR

fellow who began to pine away after
her going into France and before
his coming into sight of reader or
spectator. Here again the utmost
humiliation imaginable of social state
and daily life serves only to exalt and
to emphasize the nobility and the
manhood of the natural man. The
whip itself cannot degrade him; the
threat of it cannot change his attitude
towards Lear; the dread of it cannot
modify his defiance of Goneril. Being,
if not half-witted, not altogether as
other men are, he urges Lear to return
and ask his daughters' blessing rather
than brave the midnight and the
storm: but he cleaves to his master
with the divine instinct of fidelity
and love which is not, though it
should be, as generally recognized *
in the actual nature of a cat as in '

21

THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE

^^.

the proverbial nature of a dog. And
when the old man is trembling on the
very verge of madness, he sees and
understands the priceless worth of
such devotion and the godlike wisdom
of such folly. In the most fearfully^
pathetic of all poems the most divinely
pathetic touch of all is the tender
\ thought of the houseless king for the
\uffering of such a fellow-sufferer as
his fool. The whirlwind of terror and
pity in which we are living as we read
may at first confuse and obscure to
the sight of a boyish reader the
supreme significance and the^unutter-
able charm of it. But if any elder does
not feel it too keenly and too deeply
for tears, it is a pity that he should
waste his time and misuse his under-
standing in the study of Shakespeare.
There is nothing in all poetry so

22

KING LEAR

awful, so nearly unendurable by the
reader who is compelled by a natural
instinct of imagination to realize and
believe it, as the close of the ChoephofG,
except only the close of King Lear.
The cry of Ugolino to the earth that
would not open to swallow and to
save is not quite so fearful in its
pathos. But the skill which made
use of the stupid old chronicle or
tradition to produce this final master-
piece of tragedy is coequal with the
genius which created it. The legen-
dary Cordelia hanged herself in prison,
long after her father's death, when
defeated in battle by the sons of
Goneril. And this most put id and
contemptible tradition suggested to
Shakespeare the most dramatic and the
most poetic of all scenes and all
events that ever bade all men not
23

THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE

devoid of understanding understand
how much higher is the genius of man
than the action of chance: how far
the truth of imagination exceeds and
transcends at all points the accident
of fact. That an event may have
happened means nothing and matters
nothing; that a man such as ^schylus
or Shakespeare imagined it means
this: that it endures and bears wit-
ness what man may be, at the highest
of his powers and the noblest of his
nature, for ever.

1 A small but absurd and injurious misprint in this
passage (see page n) has hitherto escaped attention.
From Butter's edition downward the word Cordelia
has been allowed to stand, where it should have been
obvic'is that the sign of the genitive case was re-
quired and had been dropped out by accident. Of
course we should read,

.... my writ
Is on the life of Lear, and on Cordelia's.

The present reading, "my writ is — on Cordelia,"
is pure and patent nonsense.

OTHELLO

OTHELLO

IN the seventh story of the third
* decade of the Hecatommiihi of M.
Giovanbattista Giraldi Cinthio, "nobile
Ferrarese," first published in 1565,
there is an incident so beautifully
imagined and so beautifully related
that it seems at first inexplicable how
Shakespeare, when engaged in trans-
figuring this story into the tragedy of
Othello, can have struck it out of his
version. The loss of the magic hand-
kerchief which seals the doom of the
hero and his fellow victim is far less
plausibly and far less beautifully ex-
plained by a mere accident, and a
most unlikely accident, than by a
device which heightens at once the
27

THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE

charm of Desdemona and the atrocity
of lago. It is through her tenderness
for his little child that he takes oc-
casion to destroy her.

The ancient or ensign, who is name-
less as every other actor in the story
except the Moor's wife,1 is of course,
if compared with lago, a mere shadow
cast before it by the advent of that
awful figure. But none the less is
he the remarkably powerful and origi-
nal creature of a true and tragic

1 From her name of Disdemona, a curious cor-
ruption of the Greek word dvadaifjuuv, Cinthio, with
a curious anticipation of one of the finest and
most delightful touches in one of the finest and
most delightful characters ever created by the
very genius of creative humour, deduces the
Shandean moral that her father was the first
person blameworthy for having given her a name
of unhappy augury. "And it was resolved among
the company, that the name being the first gift
that the father gives his son, he ought to bestow
on him one both magnificent and fortunate, as
though he wished thus to presage for him good
and greatness."

28

OTHELLO

genius. Every man may make for
himself, and must allow that he can-
not pretend to impose upon any other,
his own image of the most wicked man
ever created by the will of man or
God. But Cinthio's villain is dis-
tinctly and vividly set before us: a
man "of most beautiful presence,
but of the wickedest nature that ever
was man in the world." Less ab-
normal and less inhumanly intellectual
than lago, who loved Desdemona
"not out of absolute lust" (perhaps
the strangest and subtlest point of all
that go to make up his all but inscru-
table character), this simpler villain,
"no whit heeding the faith given to
his wife, nor friendship, nor faith,
nor obligation, that he might have
to the Moor, fell most ardently in
love with Disdemona. And he set
29

THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE

all his thought to see if it might
become possible for him to enjoy
her."

This plain and natural motive would
probably have sufficed for any of
those great contemporaries who found
it easier to excel all other tragic or
comic poets since the passing of
Sophocles and Aristophanes than to
equal or draw near to Shakespeare.
For him it was insufficient. Neither
envy nor hatred nor jealousy nor
resentment, all at work together in
festering fusion of conscious and con-
templative evil, can quite explain
lago even to himself; yet neither
Macbeth nor even Hamlet is by nature
more inevitably introspective. But
the secret of the abyss of this man's
nature lies deeper than did ever plum-
met sound save Shakespeare's. The
30

OTHELLO

bright and restless devil of Goethe's
invention, the mournfuller and more
majestic devil created by Marlowe,
are spirits of less deep damnation
than that incarnate in the bluff plain-
spoken soldier whose honesty is the
one obvious thing about him, the one
unmistakable quality which neither
man nor woman ever fails to recog-
nize and to trust.

And what is even the loftier Faust,
whose one fitting mate was Helen, if
compared with the subjects of lago's
fathomless and bottomless malice?
This quarry cries on havoc louder
than when Hamlet fell. Shakespeare
alone could have afforded to cancel
the most graceful touch, to efface the
loveliest feature, in the sketch of
Cinthio's heroine. But Desdemona
can dispense with even this.
31

THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE

"The Moor's wife went often, as I
have said, to the ancient's wife's
house, and abode with her a good
part of the day. Whence this man
seeing that she sometimes bore about
her a handkerchief which he knew
that the Moor had given her, the
which handkerchief was wrought in
Moorish wise most subtly, and was
most dear to the lady, and in like
wise to the Moor, he bethought him
to take it from her secretly, and
thence to prepare against her her
final ruin. And he having a girl of
three years old, which child was much
beloved of Disdemona, one day that
the hapless lady had gone to stay at
the house of this villain, he took the
little girl in his arms and gave her to
the lady, who took her and gathered
her to her breast: this deceiver,
32

OTHELLO

who was excellent at sleight of hand,
reft from her girdlestead the handker-
chief so cunningly that she was no
whit aware of it, and departed from
her right joyful. Disdemona, know-
ing not this, went home, and being
busied with other thoughts took no
heed of the handkerchief. But some
days thence, seeking for it and not
finding it, she was right fearful lest
the Moor should ask it of her, as he
was often wont to do/'

No reader of this terribly beautiful
passage can fail to ask himself why
Shakespeare forbore to make use of it.
The substituted incident is as much
less probable as it is less tragic. The
wife offers to bind the husband's
aching forehead with this especially
hallowed handkerchief: "he puts it
from him, and it drops," unnoticed by

33

THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE

either, for Emilia to pick up and
reflect, "I am glad I have found this
napkin."

What can be the explanation of
what a dunce who knows better than
Shakespeare might call an oversight?
There is but one: but it is all-suffi-
cient. In Shakespeare's world as in
nature's it is impossible that monsters
should propagate: that lago should
beget, or that Goneril or Regan should
bring forth. Their children are creat-
ures unimaginable by man. The old
chronicles give sons to Goneril, who
vanquish Cordelia in battle and drive
her to suicide in prison: but Shake-
speare knew that such a tradition
was not less morally and physiologi-
cally incongruous than it was poeti-
cally and dramatically impossible. And
Lear's daughters are not monsters

34

OTHELLO

in the proper sense: their unnatural
nature is but the sublimation and
exaggeration of common evil qualities,
unalloyed, untempered, unqualified by
any ordinary admixture of anything
not ravenously, resolutely, mercilessly
selfish. They are devils only by dint
of being more utterly and exclusively
animals — and animals of a lower and
hatefuller type — than usual. But any
one less thoroughly intoxicated with
the poisonous drug of lifelong power
upon all others within reach of his
royal hand would have been safe
from the convincing and subjugating
influence of Goneril and Regan. That
is plain enough: but who will be fool
enough to imagine that he would have
been safe against the more deadly
and inevitable influence of lago?
The most fearful evidence of his

35

THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE

spiritual power — for it would have been
easy for a more timid nature than his
wife's to secure herself beforehand
against his physical violence by a
warning given betimes to either of
his intended victims — was necessarily
suppressed by Shakespeare as unfit
for dramatic service. Emilia will not
believe Othello's assurance of her hus-
band's complicity in the murder of
Desdemona: the ancient's wife in
Cinthio's terrible story "knew all,
seeing that her husband would fain
have made use of her as an instrument
in the lady's death, but she would
never assent, and for dread of her
husband durst not tell her anything."
This is not more striking and satis-
fying in a tale than it would have
been improper and ineffectual in a
tragedy. So utter a prostration of
36

OTHELLO

spirit, so helpless an abjection of soul
and abdication of conscience under
the absolute pressure of sheer terror,
would have been too purely dreadful
and contemptible a phase of debased
nature for Shakespeare to exhibit
and to elaborate as he must needs
have done throughout the scenes in
which lago's wife must needs have
figured: even if they could have been
as dramatic, as living, as convincing
as those in which the light, unprin-
cipled, untrustworthy, loving, lying,
foolish, fearless and devoted woman
is made actual and tangible to our
imagination as none but Shakespeare
could have made her: a little afraid,
it may be, of her husband, when she
gives him the stolen handkerchief,
but utterly dauntless when his
murderous hand is lifted against

37

THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE

her to silence her witness to the
truth.

The crowning mark of difference
between such a nature as this and
such a nature as that of the mistress
for whose sake she lays down her
life too late to save her is less obvious
even in their last difference of opinion
—as to whether there are or are not
women who abuse their husbands as
Othello charges his wife with abusing
him — than in the previous scene when
Emilia most naturally and inevitably
asks her if he has not just shown him-
self to be jealous, and she answers:

Who, he ? I think the sun where he was born
Drew all such humours from him.

This would be a most noble stroke
of pathos if the speaker were wrong
— misled by love into loving error;
38

OTHELLO

but the higher Shakespearean pathos,
unequalled and impossible for man
to conceive as ever possibly to be
equalled by man, consists in the fact
that she was right. And the men of
Shakespeare's age could see this: they
coupled together with equally assured
propriety and justice of epithet

Honest lago and the jealous Moor.

The jealousy of the one and the
honesty of the other must stand or
fall together. Othello, when over-
mastered by the agony of the sudden
certitude that the devotion of his
love has been wasted on a harlot who
has laid in ashes the honour and the
happiness of his life, may naturally
or rather must inevitably so bear
himself as to seem jealous in the eyes
of all — and they are all who know

39

THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE

him — to whom lago seems the living
type of honesty: a bluff, gallant,
outspoken fellow, no conjurer and
no saint, coarse of speech and cynical
of humour, but true and tried as steel:
a man to be trusted beyond many a
far cleverer and many a more refined
companion in peril or in peace. It is
the supreme triumph of his superb
hypocrisy so to disguise the pride
of intellect which is the radical in-
stinct of his nature and the central
mainspring of his action as to pass
for a man of rather inferior than
superior intelligence to the less blunt
and simple natures of those on whom
he plays with a touch so unerring
at the pleasure of his merciless will.
One only thing he cannot do: he
cannot make Desdemona doubt of
Othello. The first terrible outbreak

40

OTHELLO

of his gathering passion in a triple
peal of thunder fails to convince her
that she has erred in believing him
incapable of jealousy. She can only
believe that he has vented upon her
the irritation aroused by others, and
repent that she should have charged
him even in thought with unkind-
ness on no more serious account than
this. "Nay, we must think men are
not gods": and she had been but
inconsiderate and over-exacting, an
"unhandsome warrior" unfit to bear
the burden and the heat of the day —
of a lifelong union and a fellowship
in battle and struggle against the
trials and the tests of chance, to
repine internally for a moment on
such a score as that.

Were no other proof extant and
flagrant of the palpable truth that
41

THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE

Shakespeare excelled all other men of
all time on record as a poet in the
most proper and literal sense — as a
creator of man and woman, there
would be overflowing and overwhelm-
ing proof of it in the creation and
interaction of these three characters.
In the more technical and lyrical
sense of the word, no less than in
height of prophetic power, in depth
of reconciling and atoning inspiration,
he is excelled by ^Eschylus; though
surely, on the latter score, by ^Eschy-
lus alone. But if the unique and
marvellous power which at the close
of the Oresteia leaves us impressed
with a crowning and final sense of
high spiritual calm and austere con-
solation in face of all the mystery of
suffering and of sin — if this supreme
gift of the imaginative reason was
42

OTHELLO

no more shared by Shakespeare than
by any poet or prophet or teacher
of Hebrew origin, it was his and his
alone to set before us the tragic
problem of character and event, of
all action and all passion, all evil and
all good, all natural joy and sorrow
and chance and change, in such full-
ness and perfection of variety, with
such harmony and supremacy of jus-
tice and of truth, that no man known
to historic record ever glorified the
world whom it would have been so
utterly natural and so comparatively
rational to fall down before and wor-
ship as a God.

For nothing human is ever for a
moment above the reach or beyond
the scope or beneath the notice of his
all but superhuman genius. In this
very play he sets before mankind

43

THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE

for ever not only the perfect models
of heroic love and honour, of womanly
sweetness and courage, of intelligent
activity and joyous energy in evil,
but also an unsurpassable type of the
tragicomic dullard. Roderigo is not
only lago's but (in Dry den's mas-
terly phrase) "God Almighty's fool."
And Shakespeare shows the poor devil
no more mercy than lago or than
God. You see at once that he was
born to be plundered, cudgelled, and
killed — if he tries to play the villain
—like a dog. No lighter comic relief
than this rather grim and pitiless
exhibition of the typic fool could
have been acceptable or admissible on
the stage cff so supreme a tragedy.

Such humourous realism — and it is
excellent of its kind — as half relieves
and half intensifies the horror of

44

-

OTHELLO

Cinthio's tale may serve as well as
any other point of difference to show
with what matchless tact of trans-
figuration by selection and rejection
the hand of Shakespeare wrought
his will and set his mark on the
materials left ready for it by the hand
of a lesser genius. The ancient way-
lays and maims the lieutenant on a
dark night as he comes from the house
of a harlot "with whom he was wont
to solace himself"; and when the
news gets abroad next morning, and
reaches the ears of Disdemona, "she,
who was of a loving nature, and
thought not that evil should thence
befall her, shewed that she had right
great sorrow for such a mishap. Here-
of the Moor took the worst opinion
that might be, and went to find the
ancient, and said to him, 'Thou

45

THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE

knowest well that my ass of a wife
is in so great trouble for the
lieutenant's mishap that she is like
to run mad.' 'And how could you,'
said he, 'deem otherwise, seeing that
he is her soul?' 'Her soul, eh?'
replied the Moor. ' I will pluck — that
will I — the soul from her body."

Shakespeare and his one disciple
Webster alone could have afforded to
leave this masterly bit of dialogue un-
used or untranslated. For they alone
would so have elevated and ennobled
the figure of the protagonist as to
make it unimaginable that he could
have talked in this tone of his wife
and her supposed paramour with the
living instrument of his revenge.
Could he have done so, he might have
been capable of playing the part
played by the merciless Moor who
46

OTHELLO

allows the ancient to thrash her to
death with a stocking stuffed with
sand. No later master of realistic
fiction can presumably have surpassed
the simple force of impression and
effect conveyed by this direct and
unlovely narrative.

"And as they debated with each
other whether the lady should be
done to death by poison or dagger,
and resolved not on either the one or
the other of these, the ancient said,
'A way there is come into my mind
whereby you shall satisfy yourself,
and there shall be no suspicion of
it whatever. And it is this. The
house wherein you dwell is very old,
and the ceiling of your chamber has
many chinks in it. I will that with a
stocking full of sand we smite Disde-
mona so sore that she die thereof,

47

THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE

whereby there may seem on her no
sign of blows: when she shall be dead,
we will make part of the ceiling fall,
and will shatter the lady's head;
feigning that a beam as it fell has
shattered it and killed her: and in
this wise there shall be no one who
may conceive any suspicion of you,
every man believing that her death
has befallen by accident.' The cruel
counsel pleased the Moor, and after
abiding the time that seemed con-
venient to him, he being one night
with her abed, and having already
hidden the ancient in a little chamber
that opened into the bedchamber,
the ancient, according to the order
taken between them, made some man-
ner of noise in the little chamber:
and, hearing it, the Moor said, sud-
denly, to his wife, 'Hast thou heard
48

OTHELLO

that noise?' 'I have heard it,'
said she. 'Get up,' subjoined the
Moor, 'and see what is the matter.'
Up rose the hapless Disdemona, and,
as soon as she came near the little
chamber, forth came thereout the
ancient, who, being a strong man,
and of good muscle, with the stocking
which he had ready gave her a cruel
blow in the middle of her back,
whereby the lady instantly fell, with-
out being able wellnigh to draw
breath. But with what little voice
that she could get she called on the
Moor to help her, and he, risen out
of bed, said to her, 'Most wicked
lady, thou hast the wage of thine
unchastity: thus fare those women,
who, feigning to love their husbands,
set horns on their heads.' The
wretched lady, hearing this, and feel-

49

THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE

ing herself come to her end, inasmuch
as the ancient had given her another
blow, said that in witness of her faith
she called upon the divine justice,
seeing that the world's failed her.
And as she called on God to help her,
when the third blow followed, she
lay slain by the villainous ancient.
Then, having laid her in bed, and
shattered her head, he and the Moor
made the rooftree of the chamber
fall, as they had devised between
them, and the Moor began to call for
help, for the house was falling: at
whose voice the neighbours came run-
ning, and having uncovered the bed,
they found the lady under the roof-
beams dead."

We are a long way off Shakespeare
in this powerfully dramatic and realis-
tic scene of butchery: it is a far cry
5°

OTHELLO

from Othello, a nature made up of
love and honour, of resolute righteous-
ness and heroic pity, to the relentless
and deliberate ruffian whose justice
is as brutal in its ferocity as his
caution is cold - blooded in its fore-
sight. The sacrificial murder of Des-
demona is no butchery, but tragedy
—terrible as ever tragedy may be,
but not more terrible than beautiful;
from the first kiss to the last stab,
when the sacrificing priest of retribu-
tion immolates the victim whose blood
he had forborne to shed for pity of
her beauty till impelled to forget his
first impulse and shed it for pity of
her suffering. His words can bear
no other meaning, can imply no other
action, that would not be burlesque
rather than grotesque in its horror.
And the commentators or annotators
51

THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE

who cannot understand or will not
allow that a man in almost unimagin-
able passion of anguish may not be
perfectly and sedately mindful of con-
sistency and master of himself must
explain how Desdemona manages to
regain her breath so as to speak three
times, and utter the most heavenly
falsehood that ever put truth to
shame, after being stifled to death.
To recover breath enough to speak,
to think, and to lie in defence of her
slayer, can hardly be less than to
recover breath enough to revive and
live, if undespatched by some sharper
and more summary method of homi-
cide. The fitful and intermittent lack
of stage directions which has caused
and perpetuated this somewhat short-
sighted oversight is not a more obvious
evidence of the fact that Shakespeare's
52

OTHELLO

text has lost more than any other
and lesser poet's for want of the
author's revision than is the mis-
placing of a letter which, as far as I
know, has never yet been set right.
When Othello hears that lago has
instigated Roderigo to assassinate Cas-
sio, he exclaims, "O villain!" and
Cassio ejaculates, "Most heathenish,
and most gross!" The sense is im-
proved and the metre is rectified when
we perceive that the original printer
mistook the word "villanie" for the
word "villaine." Such corrections of
an unrevised text may seem slight
and trivial matters to Englishmen
who give thanks for the like labour
when lavished on second-rate or third-
rate poets of classical antiquity: the
toil bestowed by a Bentley or a Por-
son on Euripides or Horace must natu-

53

THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE

rally, in the judgment of universities,
seem wasted on Shakespeare or on
Shelley.

One of the very few poets to be
named with these has left on ever-
lasting record the deliberate expres-
sion of his judgment that Othello
combines and unites the qualities of
King Lear, "the most tremendous
effort of Shakespeare as a poet" (a
verdict with which I may venture to
express my full and absolute agree-
ment), and of Hamlet, his most tre-
mendous effort "as a philosopher or
meditator/' It may be so: and
Coleridge may be right in his estimate
that "Othello is the union of the two."
I should say myself, but with no
thought of setting my opinion against
that of the man who at his best was
now and then the greatest of all

54

OTHELLO

poets and all critics, that the fusion
of thought and passion, inspiration
and meditation, was at its height in
King Lear. But in Othello we get the
pure poetry of natural and personal
emotion, unqualified by the righteous
doubt and conscientious intelligence
which instigate and impede the will
and the action of Hamlet. The col-
lision and the contrast of passion and
intellect, of noble passion and infernal
intellect, was never before and can
nevef be again presented and verified
as in this most tragic of all tragedies
that ever the supreme student of
humanity bequeathed for the study
of all time. As a poet and a thinker
-.^Eschylus was the equal, if not the
superior, of Shakespeare; as a creator,
a revealer, and an interpreter, infinite
in his insight and his truthfulness,
55

THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE

his tenderness and his wisdom, his
justice and his mercy, no man who
ever lived can stand beside the author
of Othello.

KING RICHARD II

KING RICHARD II

IT is a truth more curious than
difficult to verify that there was
a time when the greatest genius ever
known among the sons of men was
uncertain of the future and unsure
of the task before it; when the one
unequalled and unapproachable mas-
ter of the one supreme art which
implies and includes the mastery of
the one supreme science perceptible
and accessible by man stood hesitat-
ing between the impulsive instinct
for dramatic poetry, the crown and
consummation of all philosophies, the
living incarnation of creative and in-
telligent godhead, and the facile seduc-
tion of elegiac and idyllic verse, of

59

THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE

meditative and uncreative song: be-
tween the music of Orpheus and the
music of Tibullus. The legendary
choice of Hercules was of less mo-
ment than the actual choice of Shake-
speare between the influence of Robert
Greene and the influence of Christopher
Marlowe.

The point of most interest in the
tragedy or history of King Richard II
is the obvious evidence which it gives
of the struggle between the worse
and the better genius of its author.
" 'Tis now full tide 'tween night and
day." The author of Selimus and
Andronicus is visibly contending with
the author of Faustus and Edward II
for the mastery of Shakespeare's poetic
and dramatic adolescence. Already
the bitter hatred which was soon to
vent itself in the raging rancour of
60

KING RICHARD II

his dying utterance must have been
kindled in the unhappy heart of
Greene by comparison of his original
work with the few lines, or possibly
the scene or two, in his unlovely
though not unsuccessful tragedy of
Titus Andronicus, which had been
retouched or supplied by Shakespeare;
whose marvellous power of transfigura-
tion in the act of imitation was never
overmatched in any early work of a
RafTaelle while yet the disciple of a
Perugino. There are six lines in that
discomfortable play which can only
have been written, if any trust may
be put in the evidence of intelligent
comparison, by Shakespeare; and yet
they are undoubtedly in the style of
Greene, who could only have written
them if the spirit of Shakespeare had
passed into him for five minutes or so :

61

THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE

King, be thy thoughts imperious, like thy

name.

Is the sun dimmed that gnats do fly in it ?
The eagle suffers little birds to sing,

And is not careful what they mean thereby,
Knowing that with the shadow of his wing

He can at pleasure stint their melody.

There is nothing so fine as that in
the elegiac or rhyming scenes or pas-
sages of King Richard II. And yet it
is not glaringly out of place among the
sottes monstruosites — if I may borrow
a phrase applied by Michelet to a
more recent literary creation — of the
crazy and chaotic tragedy in which a
writer of gentle and idyllic genius
attempted to play the part which his
friend Marlowre and their supplanter
Shakespeare were born to originate
and to sustain. To use yet another
and a most admirable French phrase,
the author of Titus Andronicus is
62

KING RICHARD II

evidently a mouton enrage. The mad
sheep who has broken the bounds of
his pastoral sheepfold has only, in his
own opinion, to assume the skin of a
wolf, and the tragic stage must ac-
knowledge him as a lion. Greene, in
his best works of prose fiction and
in his lyric and elegiac idyls, is as
surely the purest and gentlest of
writers as he was the most reckless
and disreputable of men. And when
ambition or hunger lured or lashed
him into the alien field of tragic
poetry, his first and last notion of the
work in hand was simply to revel and
wallow in horrors after the fashion,
by no means of a wild boar, but
merely of a wether gone distracted.

Nevertheless, the influence of this
unlucky trespasser on tragedy is too
obvious in too much of the text of
63

THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE

King Richard II to be either ques-
tioned or overlooked. Coleridge, whose
ignorance of Shakespeare's predeces-
sors was apparently as absolute as it is
assuredly astonishing in the friend of
Lamb, has attempted by super-subtle
advocacy to explain and excuse, if not
to justify and glorify, the crudities and
incongruities of dramatic conception
and poetic execution which signalize
this play as unmistakably the author's
first attempt at historic drama: it
would perhaps be more exactly accu-
rate to say, at dramatic history. But
they are almost as evident as the
equally wonderful and youthful genius
of the poet. The grasp of character
is uncertain: the exposition of event
is inadequate. The reader or specta-
tor unversed in the byways of his-
tory has to guess at what has already
64

KING RICHARD II

happened — how, why, when, where,
and by whom the prince whose mur-
der is the matter in debate at the
opening of the play has been mur-
dered. He gets so little help or light
from the poet that he can only guess
at random, with blind assumption or
purblind hesitation, what may be
the right or wrong of the case which
is not even set before him. The
scolding-match between Bolingbroke
and Mowbray, fine in their primitive
way as are the last two speeches of
the latter declaimer, is liker the work
of a pre-Marlowite than the work of
Marlowe's disciple. The whole scene
is merely literary, if not purely aca-
demic: and the seemingly casual in-
terchange of rhyme and blank verse
is more wayward and fitful than even
in Romeo and Juliet. That the finest
65

THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE

passage is in rhyme, and is given
to a character about to vanish from
the action of the play, is another sign
of poetical and intellectual immatur-
ity. The second scene has in it a
breath of true passion and a touch
of true pathos: but even if the sub-
ject had been more duly and def-
initely explained, it would still have
been comparatively wanting in depth
of natural passion and pungency of
natural pathos. The third scene, full
of beautifully fluent and plentifully
inefficient writing, reveals the pro-
tagonist of the play as so pitifully
mean and cruel a weakling that no
future action or suffering can lift him
above the level which divides and
purifies pity from contempt. And
this, if mortal manhood may venture
to pass judgment on immortal god-

66

KING RICHARD II

head, I must say that Shakespeare
does not seem to me to have seen.
The theatrical trickery which masks
and reveals the callous cruelty and
the heartless hypocrisy of the his-
trionic young tyrant is enough to
remove him once for all beyond reach
of manly sympathy or compassion
unqualified by scorn. If we can ever
be sorry for anything that befalls so
vile a sample of royalty, our sorrow
must be so diluted and adulterated
by recollection of his wickedness and
baseness that its tribute could hardly
be acceptable to any but the most
pitiable example or exception of man-
kind. But this is not enough for
the relentless persistence in spiritual
vivisection that seems to guide and
animate the poet's manipulation and
evolution of a character which at
67

THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE

once excites a contempt and hatred
only to be superseded by the loath-
ing and abhorrence aroused at thought
of the dastardly ruffian by the death-
bed of his father's noble and venerable
brother. The magnificent poetry which
glorifies the opening scene of the
second act, however dramatically ap-
propriate and effective in its way, is
yet so exuberant in lyric and elegiac
eloquence that readers or spectators
may conceivably have thought the
young Shakespeare, less richly en-
dowed by nature as a dramatist than
as a poet. It is not of the speaker
or the hearer that we think as we
read the most passionate panegyric
on his country ever set to hymnal
harmonies by the greatest of patriotic
poets but ^Eschylus alone: it is simply
of England and of Shakespeare.

68

KING RICHARD II

The bitter prolongation of the play
upon words which answers the half-
hearted if not heartless inquiry, " How
is't with aged Gaunt?" is a more dra-
matic touch of homelier and nearer
nature to which Coleridge has done
no more than exact justice in his ad-
mirable comment: "A passion there
is that carries off its own excess
by plays on words as naturally, and
therefore as appropriately to drama,
as by gesticulations, looks, or tones."
And the one thoroughly noble and
nobly coherent figure in the poem
disappears as with a thunderclap or
the sound of a trumpet calling to
judgment a soul too dull in its base-
ness, too decrepit in its degradation,
to hear or understand the summons.

Live in thy shame, but die not shame with thee !
These words hereafter thy tormentors be!
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THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE

But the poor mean spirit of the hearer
is too narrow and too shallow to feel
the torment which a nobler soul in
its adversity would have recognized
by the revelation of remorse.

With the passing of John of Gaunt
the moral grandeur of the poem passes
finally away. Whatever of interest
we may feel in any of the surviving
figures is transitory, intermittent, and
always qualified by a sense of ethical
inconsistency and intellectual inferi-
ority. There is not a man among
them: unless it be the Bishop of
Carlisle: and he does but flash across
the action for an ineffectual instant.
There is often something attractive
in Aumerle; indeed, his dauntless and
devoted affection for the king makes
us sometimes feel as though there
must be something not unpitiable or
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KING RICHARD II

unlovable in the kinsman who could
inspire and retain such constancy of
regard in a spirit so much manlier
than his own. But the figure is too
roughly and too thinly sketched to be
thoroughly memorable as a man's: and
his father's is an incomparable, an in-
credible, an unintelligible and a mon-
strous nullity. Coleridge's attempt to
justify the ways of York to man — to
any man of common sense and com-
mon sentiment — is as amusing in Cole-
ridge as it is amazing in any other and
therefore in any lesser commentator.

In the scene at Windsor Castle be-
tween the queen and her husband's
minions the idyllic or elegiac style
again supplants and supersedes the
comparatively terse and dramatic
manner of dialogue between the noble-
men whom we have just seen lashed
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THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE

into disgust and goaded into revolt
by the villainy and brutality of the
rascal king. The dialogue is beautiful
and fanciful: it makes a very pretty
eclogue: none other among the count-
less writers of Elizabethan eclogues
could have equalled it. But if we look
for anything more or for anything
higher than this, we must look else-
where: and we shall not look in vain
if we turn to the author of Edward
the Second. When the wretched York
creeps in, we have undoubtedly such
a living and drivelling picture of hys-
terical impotence on the downward
grade to dotage and distraction as
none but Shakespeare could have
painted. When Bolingbroke reappears
and Harry Percy appears on the stage
of the poet who has bestowed on him
a generous portion from the inexhaust-
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KING RICHARD II

ible treasure of his own immortal life,
we find ourselves again among men,
and are comforted and refreshed by
the change. The miserable old re-
gent's histrionic attempt to play the
king and rebuke the rebel is so admi-
rably pitiful that his last unnatural and
monstrous appearance in the action of
the play might possibly be explained
or excused on the score of dotage — an
active and feverish fit of impassioned
and demented dotage.

The inspired effeminacy and the
fanciful puerility which dunces at-
tribute to the typical character of a
representative poet never found such
graceful utterance as the greatest of
poets has given to the unmanliest of
his creatures when Richard lands in
Wales. Coleridge credits the poor
wretch with "an intense love of his

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THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE

country," intended to "redeem him
in the hearts of the audience" in
spite of the fact that "even in this
love there is something feminine and
personal." There is nothing else in
it: as anybody but Coleridge would
have seen. It is exquisitely pretty
and utterly unimaginable as the utter-
ance of a man. The two men who
support him on either side, the loyal
priest and the gallant kinsman, offer
him words of manly counsel and
manful cheer. He answers them with
an outbreak of such magnificent poe-
try as might almost have been utter-
ed by the divine and unknown and
unimaginable poet who gave to eter-
nity the Book of Job: but in this case
also the futility of intelligence is as
perfect as the sublimity of speech.
And his utter collapse on the arrival

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KING RICHARD II

of bad tidings provokes a counter-
change of poetry as splendid in utter-
ance of abjection and despair as the
preceding rhapsody in expression of
confidence and pride. The scene is
still rather amoebaean than dramatic:
it is above the reach of Euripides,
but more like the imaginable work
of a dramatic and tragic Theocritus
than the possible work of a Sophocles
when content to give us nothing more
nearly perfect and more compara-
tively sublime than the Trachimia.
And it is even more amusing than
curious that the courtly censors who
cancelled and suppressed the scene
of Richard's deposition should not
have cut away the glorious passage
in which the vanity of kingship is
confronted, by the grovelling repent-
ance of a king, with the grinning
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THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE

humiliation of death. The dramatic
passion of this second great speech is
as unmistakable as the lyric emotion
of the other. And the utter collapse
of heart and spirit which follows on
the final stroke of bad tidings at once
completes the picture of the man, and
concludes in equal harmony the finest
passage of the poem and the most
memorable scene in the play.

The effect of the impression made
by it is so elaborately sustained in the
following scene as almost to make a
young student wonder at the interest
taken by the young Shakespeare in
the development or evolution of such
a womanish or semivirile character.
The style is not exactly verbose, as we
can hardly deny that it is in the less
passionate parts of the second and
third acts of King John: but it is
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KING RICHARD II

exuberant and effusive, elegiac and
Ovidian, in a degree which might well
have made his admirers doubt, and
gravely doubt, whether the future
author of Othello would ever be compe-
tent to take and hold his place beside
the actual author of Faustus. Mar-
lowe did not spend a tithe of the words
or a tithe of the pains on the presenta-
tion of a character neither more worthy
of contempt nor less worthy of com-
passion. And his Edward is at least
as living and convincing, as tragic
and pathetic a figure as Shakespeare's
Richard.

The garden scene which closes this
memorable third act is a very pretty
eclogue, not untouched with tragic
rather than idyllic emotion. The
fourth act opens upon a morally
chaotic introduction of incongruous

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THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE

causes, inexplicable plaintiffs, and in-
comprehensible defendants. Whether
Aumerle or Fitzwater or Surrey or
Bagot is right or wrong, honourable
or villainous, no reader or spectator
is given a chance of guessing: it is a
mere cockpit squabble. And the scene
I of deposition which follows, full as
it is of graceful and beautiful writing,
need only be set against the scene of
deposition in Edward the Second to
show the difference between rhetori-
cal and dramatic poetry, emotion and
passion, eloquence and tragedy, litera-
ture and life. The young Shake-
• speare's scene is full to superfluity
\of fine verses and fine passages: his
young compeer's or master's is from
end to end one magnificent model of
tragedy, "simple, sensuous, and pas-
sionate" as Milton himself could have
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KING RICHARD II

desired: Milton, the second as Shake-
speare was the first of the great
English poets who were pupils and
debtors of Christopher Marlowe. It
is pure poetry and perfect drama:
the fancy is finer and the action more
lifelike than here. Only once or
twice do we come upon such a line
as this in the pathetic but exuberant
garrulity of Richard: " While that
my wretchedness doth bait myself."
That is worthy of Marlowe. And
what follows is certainly pathetic:
though certainly there is a good deal
of it.

The last act might rather severely
than unfairly be described as a series
of six tragic or tragicomic eclogues.
The first scene is so lovely that no
reader worthy to enjoy it will care
to ask whether it is or is not so lifelike

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THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE

as to convey no less of conviction
than all readers must feel of fascina-
tion in the continuous and faultless
melody of utterance and tenderness
of fancy which make it in its way an
incomparable idyl. From the dramat-
ic point of view it might certainly be
objected that we know nothing of the
wife, and that what we know of the
husband does not by any means tend
to explain the sudden pathos and
sentimental sympathy of their part-
ing speeches. The first part of the
next scene is as beautiful and blame-
less an example of dramatic narrative
as even a Greek poet could have given
at such length: but in the latter
part of it we cannot but see and
acknowledge again the dramatic im-
maturity of the poet who in a very
few years was to reveal himself as
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KING RICHARD II

beyond all question, except from the
most abject and impudent of dunces,
the greatest imaginable dramatist or
creator ever born into immortality.
Style and metre are rough, loose, and
weak: the dotage of York becomes
lunacy. Sa folie en furie est tournee.
The scene in which he clamours for
the blood of his son is not in any
proper sense tragic or dramatic: it
is a very ugly eclogue, artificial in ;
manner and unnatural in substance. I
No feebler or unlovelier example exists
of those " jigging veins of rhyming
mother-wits" which Marlowe's im-
perial rebuke should already have
withered into silence on the lips of the
veriest Marsyas among all the amoe-
baean rhymesters of his voluble and
effervescent generation.

The better nature of the young

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THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE

Shakespeare revives in the closing
scenes: though Exton is a rather
insufficient ruffian for the part of so
important an assassin. We might
at least have seen or heard of him
before he suddenly chips the shell
as a full-fledged murderer. The last
soliloquy of the king is wonderful in
its way, and beautiful from any point
of view: it shows once more the in-
fluence of Marlowe's example in the
curious trick of selection and tran-
scription of texts for sceptic medita-
tion and analytic dissection. But we
see rather more of the poet and less
of his creature the man than Marlowe
might have given us. The interlude
of the groom, on the other hand,
gives promise of something different
in power and pathos from the poetry
of Marlowe: but the scene of slaughter
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KING RICHARD II

which follows is not quite satisfactory:
it is almost boyish in its impetuosity
of buffeting and bloodshed. The last
scene, with its final reversion to rhyme,
may be described in Richard's own
previous words as good, "and yet
not greatly good."

Of the three lines on which the
greatest genius that ever made earth
more splendid, and the name of man
more glorious, than without the pas-
sage of its presence they could have
been, chose alternately or successively
to work, the line of tragedy was that
on which its promise or assurance of
future supremacy was first made mani-
fest. The earliest comedies of Shake-
speare, overflowing with fancies and
exuberant in beauties as they are,
gave no sign of inimitable power:
their joyous humour and their sun-
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THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE

bright poetry were charming rather
than promising qualities. The im-
perfections of his first historic play,
on which I trust I have not touched
with any semblance of even the most
unwilling or unconscious irreverence,
are surely more serious, more obvious,
more obtrusive, than the doubtless
undeniable and indisputable imper-
fections of Romeo and Juliet. If the
style of love-making in that loveliest
of all youthful poems is fantastically
unlike the actual courtship of modern
lovers, it is not unliker than is the
style of love-making in favour with
Dante and his fellow-poets of juvenile
and fanciful passion. Setting aside
this objection, the first of Shake-
speare's tragedies is not more beau-
tiful than blameless. There is no
incoherence of character, no incon-
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KING RICHARD II

sistency of action. Aumerle is hardly
so living a figure as Tybalt: Capulet
is as indisputably probable as York
is obviously impossible in the part of
a headstrong tyrant. There is little
feminine interest in the earliest come-
dies: there is less in the first history.
In the first tragedy there is nothing
else, or nothing but what is so sub-
servient and subordinate as simply
to bring it out and throw it into re-
lief. In the work of a young poet
this difference would or should be
enough to establish and explain the
fact that though he might be greater
than all other men in history and
comedy, he was still greater in tragedy.

THE END

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University of Toronto Roberts

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PR

2976
S86

Swinburne, Algernon Charles
Three plays of Shakespeare