Chapter IX: Motives and Development of Shakespeare's Poetry (1)

I

THE "COMEDY OF LOVE"

What we have hitherto described as the sentiment of Shakespeare corresponds to the Shakespeare carven in the general consciousness, that which is Shakespeare in an eminent degree, almost, we might say, a symbol of his greater self, the poet of the great tragedies _(Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet)_ and of the tragic portions of those that are less intense and less perfect. But the work that bears his name is far more varied in tones and personalities and in order to prepare the way for the passage of more particular characteristics, we must distinguish (and here the students of Shakespeare have always been industrious) the various configurations and degrees, or sources of inspiration of the poet, and make of them groups, which may then be arranged in a series of relations, an ideal succession.

On casting the eye over the rich extent of his works, the attention is at once drawn to certain of them, whose fresh, smiling colours indicate that their principal and proper theme is love. Not the love that becomes joined to other graver passions and unified with them, forms a complex, as in the _Othello,_ or in _Antony and Cleopatra,_ thus acquiring a profoundly tragic quality, but love and love alone, love considered in itself. These passions then are to be found rather in the _comedy of love_ than in the tragedies or dramas: in love, regarded certainly with affectionate sympathy, but also with curiosity, instinct with softness and tenderness, indeed, one might almost say, with the superiority of an expert mind and thus with delicate irony. The mind that accompanies this amorous heart, observes the caprices and illusions, recognising their inevitability and their necessity, but yet knowing them for what they are, imaginings, however irresistible and delicious they be, caprices, though noble and beautiful, weaknesses, deserving of indulgence and of gentle treatment, because human, and belonging to man as he passes through the happy and stormy season of youth. This mode of experiencing love is something that manifests itself only episodically in the Greek, Latin and medieval poets. With them we find love represented, sometimes as a pleasant, a sensual strife, or as a furious blind passion, fearless of death, or as a spiritual cult of lofty and superhuman beauty. Sometimes indeed, as in the comedy of Menander and its long suite of descendants and posterity among the Latins and the Italians, it gives rise to a general and rather cold psychological simplification, in which love is not found to differ much from any other passion or desire, such as avarice, courage or greed. In the form we have described, it belongs entirely to the mode of feeling of the Renaissance, to one of those attitudes which the anti-ascetic and realistic view of human affairs developed and bequeathed in a perfected form to modern times. Here we must again note the similarity between Shakespeare and Ariosto, for both painted the eternal comedy of love in the same manner.

That love is sincere, yet deceives and is deceived; it imagines itself to be firm and constant, and turns out to be fragile and fleeting; it claims to be founded upon a dispassionate judgment of the mind and upon luminous moral choice, whereas, on the contrary, it is guided in an altogether irrational manner by impressions and fancies, fluctuating with these. Sometimes, too, it is represented as repugnance and aversion, whereas it is really irresistible attraction; it is content to suppress itself with deliberate humbleness before works and thoughts that are more austere, but reappears on the first occasion, more vehement, tenacious and indomitable than ever.

"In his men, as in his women," says Heine, with his accustomed grace, when talking of the Shakespearean comedy, "passion is altogether without that fearful seriousness, that fatalistic necessity, which it manifests in the tragedies. Love does in truth wear there, as ever, a bandage over his eyes and bears a quiver full of darts. But these darts are rather winged than sharpened to a deadly point, and the little god sometimes stealthily and maliciously peeps out, removing the bandage. Their flames too rather shine than burn; but they are always flames, and in the comedies of Shakespeare, love always preserves the character of truth." Of truth, and for this reason, none of these comedies descends altogether to the level of farce, not even those that most nearly approach it, such as _Love's Labour Lost, The Taming of the Shrew,_ nor even _The Comedy of Errors,_ where some element of human truth always leads us back to the seriousness of art. Still less is there satire there, intellectual and angular satire, constructor of types, exaggerates in the interest of polemic; always we find there suavity of outline, the soft veil of poetry. Even in the most feeble, as _The Two Gentlemen of Verona,_ we enjoy the fresh love scenes, mingled with the saltatory course of the narrative, the abundant dialogues, the misunderstandings and the verbal witticisms. Even in those that are developed in a somewhat mechanical and superficial manner, which we should now describe as being _à thèse,_ there is vivacity, joking, festivity, and an eloquence so flowery (for instance in the scene where Biron defends the rights of youth and of love) that it has almost lyrical quality.

In this last comedy there is a king and his three gentlemen, who, in order to devote themselves to study and to attain to fame and immortality, have sworn to one another that they will not see a woman for three years. All three of them fail of this and fall in love almost as soon as the Princess of France arrives with her three ladies. These ladies, when they have received the most solemn declarations of love from the four of them, each one faithless to himself, punish them in their turn for their levity by condemning them to wait for a certain period, before receiving a reply to their offers. Thus it was that Angelica, in the Italian poems of chivalry, succeeded in setting the hearts of the most obdurate cavaliers aflame with love, even of those who held severest discourse. She made them all follow the queen of love, whom no mortal could resist.

In the _Taming of the Shrew,_ Petruchio the male, who knows what he wants and wants his own ease and comfort, hits immediately upon the right line of conduct, a line that is, however, altogether spiritual, because based upon psychological knowledge and volitional resolve. He espouses the terrible Catherine and reduces her to lamblike obedience, afraid of her husband, no longer able not only to say, but even to think, anything save what he has forced her to think. Yet who can tell that she does not love him who maltreats and tyrannises over her?

In _Twelfth Night,_ we behold the Duke vainly sighing for the beautiful widow Olivia, and the love that suddenly blossoms in her for the intermediary sent by the Duke, a woman dressed as a man; while the steward Malvolio, the Puritan, the pedantic Malvolio, is urged on to the most ridiculous acts, by hope and the illusion of being loved. Finally, fortune in this case making the single beloved into two, a man and a woman (in a more modest but identical manner to that in the adventure of Fiordispina with Bradamante and Ricciardetto) brings about a happy ending for all.

In _All's Welly_ the Countess of Roussillon, receives the discovery that poor Helena, the orphan child of the family doctor, is in love with her son, rather with benevolence than with hostility and reflects:

"Even so it was with me when I was young:
If we are nature's, these are ours;...
By our remembrance of days foregone,
Such were our faults though then we thought them none."

The amorous couples of princesses, exiles or fugitives, and of exile and fugitive gentlemen, wander about the forest of Arden, in _As You Like It,_ alternating and mingling with the couples of rustic lovers.

Perhaps the best example of this "comedy of love" is the fencing of the two unconscious lovers, Beatrice and Benedick, in _Much Ado About Nothing._ This young couple seek one another only to measure weapons, to sneer and to fence, with the fine-pointed swords of biting jest and disdain, they believe themselves to be antipathetic, disbelieve one another; yet the simplest little intrigue of their friends suffices to reveal each to each as whole-heartedly loving and desiring the adversary. The union of the two is sealed, when they find themselves united in the same sentiment to defend their friend, who has been calumniated and rejected, thus discovering that their perpetual following of one another to engage in strife, had not concealed the struggle, which implies affinity of sex, but the spiritual affinity of two generous hearts.

_Benedick._ And, I pray thee now, tell me for which of my bad faults
didst thou first fall in love with me?...

And the other, speaking with tenderness and ceasing to carry on the pinpricking:

"Suffer love,--a good epithet!
I do suffer love indeed, for I love thee against my will."

A light touch permeates the treatment of these characters and suffices to animate them and make them act. The dramatic or indeed tragic situations, which at times arise, are treated as it were with the implied consciousness of their slight gravity and danger, which shall soon be evident and dispel all the apprehensions of those who doubt. They sometimes consist of nothing but an external action or occurrence, suited to the theatre, and more frequently a decorative background. Parallelism of personages and symmetry of events also abound in these plays, suitable to the merry teaching that pervades them.

The quintessence of all these comedies (as we may say of _Hamlet_ in respect of the great tragedies) is the _Midsummer Night's Dream._ Here the quick ardours, the inconstancies, the caprices, the illusions, the delusions, every sort of love folly, become embodied and weave a world of their own, as living and as real as that of those who are visited by these affections, tormented or rendered ecstatic, raised on high or hurled downward by them, in such a way that everything is equally real or equally fantastic, as you may please to call it. The sense of dream, of a dream-reality, persists and prevents our feeling the chilly sense of allegory or of apology. The little drama seems born of a smile, so delicate, refined and ethereal it is. Graceful and delicate to a degree is also the setting of the dream, the celebration of the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta and the theatrical performance of the artisans, for these are not merely ridiculous in their clumsiness; they are also childlike and ingenuous, arousing a sort of gay pity: we do not laugh at them: we smile. Oberon and Titania are at variance owing to reciprocal wrongs, and trouble has arisen in the world. Puck obeys the command of Oberon and sets to work, teasing, punishing and correcting. But in performing this duty of punishing and correcting, he too makes mistakes, and the love intrigue becomes more complicated and active. Here we find a resemblance to the rapid passage into opposite states and the strange complications that arose in Italian knightly romances, as the result of drinking the water from one of two opposite fountains whereof one filled the heart with amorous desires, the other turned first ardours to ice. In Titania, who embraces the Ass's head and raves about him, caressing and looking upon him as a graceful and gracious creature, the comedy creates a symbol so ample and so efficacious as rightly to have become proverbial. Puck meanwhile, astonished at the effect upon men of the subtle intoxication that he has been himself distributing, exclaims in his surprise "Lord, what fools these mortals be!"; and Lysander, one of the madmen who are constantly passing from one love to another, from one thing to its opposite, is nevertheless perfectly convinced that

"The will of man is by his _reason_ sway'd;
And _reason says_ you are the _worthier_ maid."

Yet the individual reality of the figures appears through this exquisite version of the eternal comedy, as though to remind us that they really belong to life. Helena follows the man she loves, but who does not love her, like a lapdog, which, the more it is beaten, the more it runs round and round its master; she trembles at the outbreak of furious jealousy in her little friend Hermia, who threatens to put out her eyes, believing her to be capable of it, when she remembers the time when they were at school together:

"O, when she's angry, she is keen and shrewd!
She was a vixen when she went to school:
And though she be but little she is fierce."

When we read _Romeo and Juliet,_ after the _Dream,_ we seem not to have left that poetical environment, to which Mercutio expressly recalls us, with his fantastic embroidery around Queen Mab, above all, when we consider the style, the rhyming and the general physiognomy of the little story. All have inclined to suave and gentle speech and metaphor, when speaking of _Romeo and Juliet._ For Schlegel it was scented with "the perfumes of springtide, the song of the nightingales, the freshness of a newly budded rose." Hegel too found himself face to face with that rose: "sweet rose in the valley of the world, torn asunder by the rude tempest and the hurricane." Coleridge too speaks of that sense of spring: "The spring with its odours, its flowers and its fleetingness." All have looked upon it as the poem of youthful love and have remarked that the play reaches its acme in the two love scenes in the garden at night, and in the departure after the nuptial night, in which some have seen the renovation of the traditional forms of love poetry, "the epithalamium," "the dawn." This play is not only closely connected with the _Dream,_ but also with the other comedies of love; Romeo passes there with like rapidity, indeed suddenness to the personages of those comedies from love of Rosalind to love of Juliet. At the first sight of Juliet he is conquered and believes that he then loves for the first time:

"Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight!
For I ne'er saw true beauty till this night."

Saintly Friar Laurence, a mixture of astonishment, of being scandalised and of good nature, sometimes almost plays there the part of Puck. When he learns that Romeo no longer loves Rosalind, about whom he had been so crazy; he says:

"So soon forsaken! Young men's love there lies
Not truly in their hearts, but in their eyes.
Jesu Maria!"

When Juliet enters her cell, the friar remarks with admiration her lightsome tread, which will never wear out the pavement, and reflects that a lover "may bestride the gossamer that idles in the wanton summer air, and yet not fall; so light is vanity." Is it tragedy or comedy? It is another situation of the eternal comedy: the love of two young people, almost children, which surmounts all social obstacles, including the hardest of all, family hatred and party feud, and goes on its way, careless of these obstacles and as though they had no importance for their hearts, no existence in reality. And in truth those obstacles seem to yield before their advance, or rather their winged flight, like soft clouds. Certainly, those obstacles reappear solidly enough later on, asserting their value and taking their revenge, so much so, that the young lovers are obliged to separate and Romeo goes into exile. But it will be only for a little while, for Friar Laurence has promised to interest himself in their affairs, to obtain the pardon of the Prince, to reconcile the parents and the other relations, and to obtain sanction for their secret marriage. And if nothing of all this happens, if the subtle previsions and the acuteness of Friar Laurence turn out to be fallacious, if a sequence of misunderstandings makes them lose their way and take a wrong turning, if the two young lovers perish, it is the result of chance, and the sentiment that arises from it is one of compassion, of compassion not divorced from envy, a sorrow, which, as Hegel said, is "a dolorous reconciliation and an unhappy beatitude in unhappiness." This too then is tragedy, but tragedy in a minor key, what one might call the tragedy of a comedy.

"A greater power than we can contradict
Hath thwarted our intents."

But that power is not the mysterious power, something between destiny and providence and moral necessity, which weighs upon the great tragedies; rather is it Chance, which Friar Laurence hardly succeeds in dignifying with the words of religion:

"So hath willed it God."

There is a metaphor which is repeated in the terrible accents of _King Lear,_ and which is itself able to reveal the difference between the two tragedies. Romeo, whose life has been spared and who has been sent into exile, thinks that what has been done for him, is torture rather than pardon, because Paradise is only where Juliet lives:

"And every cat, and dog,
And little mouse, every unworthy thing,
Live here in heaven, and may look on her;
But Romeo may not!"

Juliet, who is preparing to drink the medicine that may be poisonous, is the shy and timid young girl of Leopardi's _Amore e Morte,_ who "feels her hair stand on end at the very name of death," but when she has fallen in love "dares meditate at length on steel and on poison." The very sepulchral cave shines, and Romeo after having stabbed Paris at the feet of Juliet, whom he believes to be dead, feels that he is a companion in misfortune and wishes to bury him there "In a triumphant grave."

"A grave, O no, a lantern, slaughtered youth,
For here lies Juliet, and her beauty makes
This vault a feasting presence full of light."

Such words of admiration for love and for the youthful lovers are found in other poets, for instance in Dante's words for Beatrice: "Death, I hold thee very sweet: Thou must ever after be a noble thing, since thou hast been in my lady."

If we find love in rather piteous guise in _Romeo and Juliet,_ comedy reappears in the wise Portia, bound to the promise of allowing, her fate to be decided by means of a guess, because although she submits to selection by chance, she has already chosen in her heart, not among the dukes and princes of the various nationalities, indeed of various continents, who are competing for her hand, but a youthful Venetian, something between a student and a soldier, half an adventurer, but courteous and pleasing in address, who has contrived to please, not only mistress, but maid, which shows, in this agreement of feminine choice, where feminine taste really lies. "By my troth, Nerissa, my little body is a-weary of this great world" (she sighs, with gentle coquettishness toward herself), perhaps with that languor, which is the desire of loving and of being loved, the budding of love; weary, as those amorous souls feel, weary, who vibrate with an exquisite sensibility. And indeed she is most sensible to music and to the spectacles of nature; and the music that she hears in the night causes her to stay and listen to it, and it seems to her far sweeter than when heard in the daytime. Nocturnal moonlight gives her the impression of a day that is ailing, of a rather pallid day when the sun is hidden.

In the _Merchant of Venice,_ there is also the couple of Jessica and Lorenzo, those two lovers who do not feel the want of moral idealisation, nor, one would be inclined to say, any solicitude for the esteem of others. The man steals without scruple from the old Jew his daughter and his jewels, and the girl has not even a slight feeling of pity for the father, both alike plunged in the happy egotism of their pleasure. Jessica is unperturbed, sustaining and exchanging epigrams with her husband and the salacious jesting and somewhat insolent familiarity of the servant Lancellotto, though abandoning herself all the time to ecstasy, a sensual ecstasy, for she too is sensible to music and attains by means of it to a melancholy of the only sort that she is capable of experiencing, namely, the sensual.

There is malice, almost mockery, though tempered with other elements, in the portrayal of these loves of the daughter of Shylock. But in those of Troilus and Cressida, we meet at once with sarcasm, a bitter sarcasm. The same background, the doings of the Trojan war, which in other comedies has the superficial charm of a decoration, is here also a decoration, but treated with sarcasm and bitterness. Thersites fills the part of the cynic among the Greek warriors, in the relations between Troilus and Cressida, as does Pandarus in Troy. The hastening of the last scenes should be noted, the large amount of fighting, the tumult: the world is dancing as in a puppet show, while the story of Troilus and Cressida is drawing to its close, amid the imprecations of the nauseated Troilus and the grotesquely burlesque lamentations of Pandarus. Another great artist of the Renaissance comes to mind, in relation to this play: not Ariosto, but Rabelais. The theme is still, however, the comedy of love, but a comedy bordering on the faunesque, the immoral, the baser instinct, upon lust and feminine faithlessness. Pandarus is ever the go-between; he laughs and enjoys himself, for he is an expert at this sort of business, a battle-stained warrior, as it were, bearing traces of that long amorous warfare, if not in his soul, in his old bones; he is the living destruction of love, of the credulous, sensual cupidity of man and of the non-credulous, frivolous vanity of woman. His too is the obsession of love-making: he is unable to extricate himself from it, taking an almost devilish delight in involving those who have recourse to him. Troilus does not displease Cressida, on the contrary, he pleases her greatly, yet she fences with him, because she is already in full possession of feminine wisdom and philosophy. She knows that women are admired, sighed after and desired as angels, while being courted, but once they have said yes, all is over. She knows that the true pleasure lies _in the doing,_ in the act and not in the fact, in the becoming, not in the become. She knows that in yielding, she is committing a folly, by breaking the law, which is known to her, but she puts everything she now undertakes upon Pandarus: "Well, uncle, what folly I commit, I dedicate to you." How different is her union with her lover, to that of Romeo and Juliet! There is an ironic-comic solemnity in the rite performed by the pander uncle and in the oaths of constancy and loyalty, which all three of them exchange, while the uncle intones: "Say amen," and the two reply, "Amen," and are then pushed into the nuptial chamber by the profane priest. How different too is "the dawn," their separation in the morning!

"But that the busy day,
Waked by the lark, hath raised the ribald crows
And dreaming night will hide our joys no longer,
I would not from thee."

Whereupon the uncle begins to utter improper epigrams and plays upon words, which the impatient Cressida repays, by sending him to the devil. Cressida begins the new intrigue with Diomede, as soon as she is face to face with him alone, in spite of this scene and the numerous oaths that preceded and followed it. She is perfectly aware that she is betraying her love for Troilus and that she has no excuse for doing so. She gives to Diomede the gift of Troilus and when he asks her to whom it belongs, she replies:

"'Twas one that lov'd me better than you will,
But now you have it, take it."

Here we find consciousness of her own feminine levity, looked upon not merely as a natural force dragging her after it, but almost as a right, as the exercise of a mission or vocation. Cressida can even be sentimental, as she abandons herself to another!

"Troilus farewell, one eye yet looks on thee;
But with my heart the other eye doth see.
Ah! poor our sex!"

Troilus is meanwhile indignant, not from a sense of injured morality, for that sort of love does not admit of such a thing: he is mad with masculine jealousy. "Was Cressida here?" ... and further on: "Nothing at all, unless that they were she ..."

The figures of Ferdinand and Miranda bring us back to love, youthful and pure, all the more pure, because it reveals itself, not in the midst of a great court or city, but in a desert island. The young man comes there ship-wrecked, cut off from the world that once was his, born as it were anew; the maiden has been brought up in solitude. Yet her love is awakened at first sight, in the beautiful phrase of Marlowe, which Shakespeare was so fond of quoting: "Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?" It is love, law of beings as of things, which returns eternally new and fresh as the dawn, making his Goddess appear to the youth, her God to the maiden, each to each as beings without their equal upon earth:

"I might call him
A thing divine, for nothing natural
I ever saw so noble." "Most sure, the goddess,
On whom these airs attend," says Ferdinand.

The choice is soon made, firm, resolute and determined. When Prospero tells her that there are men in the world, compared with whom, the youth she admires would seem a monster, Miranda replies:

"My affections
Are then most humble; I have no ambition
To see a goodlier man."

All noble things that can be imagined surround and elevate their loves: misfortune, compassion, chaste desire, virginal respect. These things, though infinitely repeated in the world's history seem new, as the two live through them, "surprised withal," surprised and ravished at the mystery, which in them is celebrated once more.

2

THE LONGING FOR ROMANCE

Another motive, related to the preceding, may be described as the longing for romance, but this expression must be taken with all due limitations.

Amorous damsels don the travesty of masculine attire, in order to follow their faithless or cruel lovers, to escape persecution, or to perform wondrous deeds; brothers, or brothers and sisters, who resemble one another, are taken for one another, and thus form a centre for the most curious adventures; with like objects in view, princes travesty themselves as shepherds; gentlemen are discovered in forests with bandits and are themselves bandits; children of royal blood, ignorant of their origin, live like peasants, yet are moved by inclinations, which make them impatient of their quiet, humble lives, urging them on to great adventures; sovereigns move, disguised and unknown, among their subjects, listening to the free speech around them and observant of everything; rustic or city maidens become queens and countesses, or are discovered to be of royal stock; brothers, who are enemies, become reconciled; those who are innocent and having been wrongfully accused and condemned, are believed to have died or been put to death, survive, to reappear at the right moment, thus gratifying the long-cherished hopes of those who had once believed them guilty and had mourned their loss.

Strange rules and compacts are imposed, strange understandings come to, such as the winning of husband or wife upon the solution of an enigma, or upon the discovery of some object; then there is the bet as to the virtue of a woman, won with a trick by the punster or by the perfidious accuser; the betrothed or unwilling husband, finally obtained by the substitution of another person; there are miraculous events, dreams, magical arts, work of spirits of earth and sky ... Men and women are tossed from land to sea, from city to forest and desert, from court to country, from a civil and cultured, to a rustic and simple life. These latter situations are peculiar to romance in the form of the idyll, which is really the most romantic of romanticisms, though it may seem to be the opposite. This is so true that even Don Quixote, when he saw the way closed for the time being to the performance of chivalrous feats of knight errantry, thought of retiring to the country, there to pasture herds and to pipe songs to the beloved, in the company of Sancho Panza.

Several of Shakespeare's plays derive both plot and material from suchlike things and persons, as for instance, _As You Like It, Twelfth Night, All's Well That Ends Well, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, Pericles, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Much Ado About Nothing, The Merchant of Venice, Measure for Measure._ These plays may be said to be altogether or in part, of literary origin, or suggested by books, in a sense different from that in which Shakespeare treated the other plays, where, although not bookish, he gathered his raw materials from the English chroniclers, from ancient historians, or Italian novelists, breathing upon it a new spirit and thus making of it something altogether new to the world. Here on the other hand, he found the spirit itself, the general sentiment, in the literature of his time. Italy had worked upon the ancient poetry of Greece and Rome, upon Hellenistic and Byzantine romances, upon mediaeval romances, upon poems and plays, novels and comedies, and with Italy was also Spain, whose _Amadigi_ and _Diane_ were known throughout Europe. The genesis of these themes and of his attraction towards them, is to be sought, therefore, rather in the times than in Shakespeare himself, and for this reason we shall not delay our progress, to show how the play of sentiment within made dear to him that wandering away in imagination to the idyllic life of the country, far from pomp and artifice, the deceits and the delusions of courts; though this idyllic life itself became in its turn refined and artificial at his hand, a pastoral theme. It is important to note, too, that all the above-mentioned material of situations and adventures had already been fashioned and arranged for the theatre, in the course of the second half of the century. This was especially due to the Italian theatre of improvisation or of "art," as it was called. This literature, so often of a most romantic and imaginative kind, has had but little attention at the hand of investigators into Shakespeare's sources of inspiration.

Both material derived from books and literary inspiration combine to throw light upon certain of Shakespeare's works, which have given great trouble to the historians of his art. It is quite natural that writers should draw upon what they have done before and should execute variations upon it, particularly in their earlier years, but also later in the course of their lives, when they have afforded far greater proofs of their capacity. Shakespeare was no exception to this, any more than the great contemporary poet of _Don Quixote,_ who was also the author of the _Galatea_ and of _Persiles y Sigismunda. The Comedy of Errors,_ as we know, consists of a motive from Plautus, repeated and rearranged innumerable times by the dramatists of the Renaissance. In treating this theme, Shakespeare rendered it on the one hand yet more artificial, while on the other, he endowed it with a more marked tendency towards the romantic, and notwithstanding the frivolity and frigidity of misunderstandings arising from identity of appearance, he yet revived them here and there according to his wont with a touch of the reality of life. The intrigue of the Menecmi, or of very close resemblance, pleased him so much that he introduced it in _Twelfth Night,_ where the pair are of different sex. This variation was first employed by Cardinal Bibbiena in his _Calandria,_ but the Cardinal made use of it to increase the lubricity of the intrigue, while Shakespeare drew from it a theme for most graceful poetic inspiration.

One would think that the tragic theme of _Titus Andronicus_ (which many critics would like to say was not by Shakespeare, but dare not, because here the proofs of authenticity are very strong), was also born of a love for literary models, for the tragedy of horrors, so common in Italy in those days of the _Canaci_ and the _Orbecchi,_ which were rather imitations of Seneca than of Sophocles and Euripides, and had already inspired plays to the predecessors of Shakespeare, with slaughter for their theme. What more natural then, than that Shakespeare as a young man should strike this note? The splendid eloquence with which he adorned the horrible tale is Shakespearean.

His two poems, _Venus and Adonis_ and _The Rape of Lucrèce,_ are to be attributed to this same literary taste for favorite models. These poems received much praise from contemporaries, but are so far from the "greater Shakespeare," that they might almost appear not to be his, always, that is to say, if the greater Shakespeare be turned into a rigidly historical and conventional personage. Their literary origin is evident, not only to those who know well the English literature of the period of the Renaissance (when Marlowe was composing _Hero and Leander)_, but yet more to those versed in the Italian literature of the same period, where the themes of the two little poems were in great favour. As regards the first of these, Giambattista Marino, who was destined to expand it into a long and celebrated poem, was already born at Naples. Shakespeare here flaunts his virtuosity like our Italian composers of melodious and voluptuous octaves, revelling in a wealth of flowery image phrase, in his abundant, rhetorical capacity and in a formal beauty which contains something of aesthetic voluptuousness.

The _Sonnets_ are also based upon Italian models, where we find exhortations addressed to admired youth set upon a pinnacle, similar to those that passed between Venus and Adonis. The beautiful youth, posing as Adonis, and treated like him, became very common in our lyric poetry of the time of Marino, in the seventeenth century, as were also love sonnets addressed to ladies, possessing some peculiar characteristic, such as red hair or a dark complexion, or even something different or unfamiliar in their beauty, such as too lofty or too diminutive a stature.

Notwithstanding this literary tendency in his inspiration, Shakespeare does not cease to be a poet, because he is never altogether able to separate himself from himself, everywhere he infuses his own thoughts and modes of feeling, those harmonies, peculiar to himself, those movements of the soul, so delicate and so profound. This has endowed the _Sonnets_ with the aspect of a biographical mystery, of a poem containing some hidden moral and philosophical sense. When we read verses such as these:

The canker-blooms have full as deep a dye
As the perfumed tincture of the roses,
Hang on such thorns, and play as wantonly
When summer's breath their masked buds discloses.
But, for their virtue only is their show,
They live unwoo'd and unrespected fade;
Die to themselves. Sweet roses do not so;
Of their sweet deaths are sweetest odours made....

we feel the commonplace of literature, revived with lyric emotion. Note too in the _Sonnets_ their pensiveness, their exquisite moral tone, their wealth of psychological allusions, in which we often recognise the poet of the great plays. Sometimes there echoes in them that malediction of the chains of pleasure, which will afterwards become _Anthony and Cleopatra_[1]; at others we hear Hamlet, tormented and perplexed; yet more often we catch glimpses of reality as appearance and appearance as reality, as in the _Dream_ or the _Tempest._ The truth is that the soul of Shakespeare, poured into a fixed and therefore inadequate mould, his lyrical impulse confined to the epigrammatic, cause the poetry to flow together there, but deny to it complete expansion and unfolding. To note but one example, the celebrated sonnet LXVI ("Tired with all these for restful death I cry"), is in the manner of Hamlet, but developed analytically, by means of enumerations and parallelisms, and in obedience to literary usage, and is obliged to terminate on the cadence of a madrigal, in the last rhymed couplet. The soft, flexible verse of the early _Venus and Adonis_ is also free of Marino's cold ingenuity, of his external sonority and melody, and is inspired rather with a sense of voluptuousness, a grace, an elegance, which recall at times the stanzas of Politian:

The night of sorrow now is turned to day;
Her two blue windows faintly she upheaveth,
Like the fair sun, when in his fresh array
He cheers the morn, and all the earth relieveth:
And as the bright sun glorifies the sky,
So is her face illumined with her eye.

In Shakespeare is nothing of the cold literary exercise; he takes a vivid interest even in the play of fancy, in the bringing about of marvellous coincidences, of unexpected meetings, in the romantic and the idyllic. He loves all these things, composing them for his own enjoyment and fondling them with the magic of his style. He cannot of course make them what they are not, he cannot change their intimate qualities into something different from what they are; he cannot destroy their externality, since they came to him from without. What he can and does put into them is above all their attractiveness as images. For this reason, the poetry that we find here is of necessity rather superficial and tenuous, far more so than the poetry of the love dramas, where his powers have a wider scope for observation, for reflexion and for meditation upon human affections.

What has been said above as to the inventions and fables, which serve as a decorative background to certain of the comedies of love, is also applicable to these romantic and idyllic plays, in which the decorative background takes the first place and becomes the principal theme. For the rest, it goes without saying that the plots or decorations referred to are also to be included (as has been done) in the present argument, because it turns upon the different motives of Shakespeare's poetry, not upon the works that are materially distinct, where several motives usually meet and are sometimes so very loosely connected, as to form no more intimate a unity than the rather capricious one, of general tone.

A sense of _unreality_ is therefore diffused upon the romantic plays, not of falsity, but just of unreality, such as we experience in the play of fancy, when we recount a fairy tale, well aware that it is a fairy tale, yet greatly enjoying the passage to and fro before us of the prince, the beauty, the ogre and the fairy. A proof of this is to be found in the summary treatment of the characters and the turning-points or crises of the action, the easy pardoning and making of peace, and the bizarre expedients adopted to bring the intrigue to an end. Instances of the second sort are the adventure of the lion in the Forest of Arden the reconciliation of the two enemy brothers in _As You Like It,_ the dream of Posthumus in _Cymbeline,_ the advent of the bear and the ship-wreck in the _Winter's Tale,_ and the like. And as regards summary treatment, where could we find a more off-hand Iago than the Hyacinth of _Cymbeline,_ guilty of the most audacious and perverse betrayals, as though by chance, yet later on, when he, confesses his sins, he is forgiven and starts again, so far as we can see, a gentleman and perfect knight. We do not speak of Posthumus, of Cloten, of King Cymbeline and of so many personages in this and others of the romantic plays. The wicked turn out to be all the more harmless, the greater their wickedness; the good are good _nunc et semper,_ without intermission, exactly as introduced at the beginning of the play; the most desperate situations, the most terrible passes, are speedily and completely overcome, or one foresees that they will be overcome. Here romance has no intention whatever of ending unhappily or in pensive sadness; it wishes to stimulate the imagination, but at the same time to keep it agile and happy and to leave it contented. Indeed, in those rare cases when we do meet with painful or terrible motives, which are not easily overcome in the course of the imaginative development of the work, we are sensible of being slightly jarred, and this is perhaps the reason for that "displeasure," which such fine judges as Coleridge note in _Measure for Measure,_ so rich, nevertheless, in splendid passages, worthy of Shakespeare. Not only does this comedy verge upon tragedy, but here and there it becomes immersed in it, vainly attempting to return to the light romantic vein and end like a fairy story, with everyone happy.

Another element which adds to the imaginative unreality and the gay lightsomeness of the romantic dramas, is to be found in the clown, the burlesque incidents, which abound in all of them: Malvolio and Uncle Toby in _Twelfth Night,_ Parolles in _All's Well,_ the watch in _Much Ado_ and so on. Certain personages also, who might seem to be characters, such as the melancholy Jacques in _As You Like It_ or Autolycus in the _Winter's Tale,_ are treated rather as character studies.

These comedies excel in the weaving of intricate incidents, they are replete with grace and winsomeness, melodious with songs inspired by idyllic themes. They are far superior in emotional quality, as is the rustic, woodland, pastoral poetry of Shakespeare, to that of Italy and of Spain, not only to the _Pastor Fido,_ but also to the _Aminta,_ because Shakespeare succeeds in grafting his gay and gentle heart upon his artificial and conventional models. Take for instance in _As You Like It_ the scenes in the third act, between Rosalind and Celia, Rosalind and Orlando, Corin and Touchstone, and in general, the whole life led by the young men and maidens, the shepherds and gentlemen, in that idyllic Forest of Arden; or the open air banquet, in the _Winter's Tale,_ at which the king surprises his son on the point of marrying Perdita; or in _Cymbeline,_ Hyacinth's contemplation of the chaste and tender beauty of the sleeping Imogen; and in the same play, all the scenes among the mountains between Bellario and the two refugee sons of the king, Guiderio and Arviragus.

They correspond to that most beautiful utterance in exquisite verse of Tasso's Hermione Among the Shepherds. His thoughts come back in such lines as the following:

"O, this life
Is nobler than attending for a check,
Richer than doing nothing for a bribe,
Prouder than rustling in unpaid for silk:
Such gain the cap of him that makes 'em fine...."

or

"Come, our stomachs
Will make what's homely savoury: weariness
Can snore upon the flint, when rusty sloth
Finds the down pillow hard. Now, peace be here,
Poor house that keepest thyself!"

But Shakespeare can rise yet higher, to that most tender of songs by the two brothers over Imogene, whom they believe to be dead.

[Footnote 1: See Sonnet CXXIX: "The expense of spirit in a waste of shame."]

3

SHAKESPEARE'S INTEREST IN PRACTICAL ACTION

The third conspicuous aspect of Shakespeare's genius corresponds to what are known as the "historical plays." Only here and there do we find a critic who takes them to be the loftiest form of Shakespearean poetry, while the majority on the other hand hold them to be merely a preparatory form for other poetry, and the general view (always worthy consideration) is that they are less happy or less intense than the "great tragedies."

It is also said of them that they represent the period of the "historical education," which Shakespeare undertook, with a view to acquiring a full sense of real life and the capacity for drawing personages and situations with firmness of outline. One critic has defined them as a series of "studies," studies of "heads," of "physiognomies," of "movements," taken from historical life or reality, in order to form the eye and the hand, something like the sketch-books and collections of designs of a future great painter.

The defect of such critical explanations lies in continuing to conceive of the artistic process as something mechanical, and the unrecognised but understood presumption of some sort of "imitation of nature." Had Shakespeare intended to educate himself "historically," by writing the historical plays, (assuming, but not admitting, that to run through the English chronicles, and even Plutarch's lives, can be called historical education), he would have developed and formed his historical thought and become a thinker and a critic, he would not have conceived and realised the scenes and personages of the plays. Neither Shakespeare nor any other artist can ever attempt to reproduce external nature or history turned into external reality (since they do not exist in a concrete form) even in the period of first attempts and studies; all he can do is to try to produce and recognise his own sentiment and to give it form. We are thus always brought back and confined to the study of sentiment, or, as in the present case, to the sentiment which inspired what are known as the historical plays.

Among these are to be numbered all those that deal with English history, _The Life and Death of King John, Richard II, Henry IV, V, VI,_ and _Richard III,_ setting aside for certain reasons _Henry VIII,_ but including among the plays from Roman history (or from Plutarch as they are also called), _Coriolanus,_ while _Julius Caesar_ and _Anthony and Cleopatra_ are connected with the great tragedies. The historical quality of the material, in like manner, with every other material determination, is not conclusive as to the quality of the poetic works, and is therefore not independently valid in the estimation of the critic, as a criterion for separation or conjunction. A reconsideration of the plays mentioned above and their prominent characteristics, does not lead to accepting them as a kind of "dramatised epic," or as "works which stand half way between epic and drama" (Schlegel, Coleridge), not that there is any difficulty in the appearance of epic quality in the form of theatrical dialogue, but just because epic quality is absent in those dramas. It would indeed be strange to see epic quality appearing in an episodic manner in an author, during the period of youth alone. Epicity, in fact, means feeling for human struggles, but for human struggles lit with the light of an aspiration and an ideal, such as one's own people, one's own religious faith and the like, and therefore containing the antitheses of friends and foes, of heroes on both sides, some on the side finally victorious, because protected by God or justice, others upon that which is to be discomfited, subjected, or destroyed. Now Shakespeare, as has already been said and is universally recognized, is not a partisan; he marches under no political or religious banner, he is not the poet of particular practical ideals, _non est de hoc mundo,_ because he always goes beyond, to the universal man, to the cosmic problem.

Commentators have, it is true, laboured to extract from these and others of his plays, the ideals which they suppose him to have cultivated, concerning the perfect king, the independence and greatness of England, the aristocracy, which in their judgment was the main-stay and glory of his country. They have discovered his Achilles (in the double form of "Achilles in Sciro" and of "Achilles at Troy") in Prince Henry, and his _pius Aeneas,_ in the same prince become Henry V, who, grown conscious of his new duties, resolutely and definitely severs himself, not from a Dido, but from a Falstaff. They have discovered his paladins in the great representatives of the English aristocracy, and as reflected in the Roman aristocracy, by a Coriolanus, and on the other hand the class which he suspected and despised, in the populace and plebeians of all time, whether of those that surrounded Menenius Agrippa or who created tumult for and against Julius Caesar in the Forum, or those others who bestowed upon Jack Cade a fortune as evanescent as it was sudden. Finally, his Trojans or Rutulians, enemies of his people, are supposed by them to be the French. But if the epic ideal had possessed real force and consistency in the mind of Shakespeare, we should not have needed industrious interpreters to track it down and demonstrate it. On the other hand, it is clear that the author of _Henry VI,_ in treating as he did Talbot and the Maid of Orleans, and the author of _Henry V,_ in his illustration of the struggles between the English and the French and the victory of Agincourt, restricted himself to adopting the popular and traditional English view, without identifying that with his spiritual self, or taxing it as his guide to the conception of the English and Roman plays.

Nor is there any value in another view, to the effect that Shakespeare in these plays set the example and paved the way for what was afterwards called historical and romantic drama. Had he sought this end, he would not only have required some sort of political, social and religious ideal, but also historical reflection, the sense of what distinguishes and gives character to past times in respect to present, and also that nostalgia for the past, which both Shakespeare and the Italian and English Renaissance were altogether without. About two centuries had to elapse before an imitator of Shakespeare, or rather of some of his external forms and methods, arose, in the composer of _Goetz von Berlichingen._ He had assimilated the new historical curiosity and affection for the rude and powerful past, and there provided the first model of what was soon afterwards developed as historical romance and drama, especially by Walter Scott.

Whoever tries to discover the internal stimulus, the constructive idea, the lyrical motive, which led Shakespeare to convert the Chronicles of Holinshed and the Lives of Plutarch into dramatic form, when his possession of the epic ideal and nostalgia for the past have been excluded, finds nothing save an interest in and an affection for practical achievement, for action attentively followed, in its cunning and audacity, in the obstacles that it meets, in the discomfitures, the triumphs, the various attitudes of the different temperaments and characters of men. This interest, finding its most suitable material in political and warlike conflicts, was naturally attracted to history and to that especial form of it, which was nearest to the soul and to the culture of the poet of his people and of his time, English and Roman history. This material had already been brought to the theatre by other writers and was in this way introduced to the attention and used by the new poet. A psychological origin of this sort explains the vigour of the representations, which Shakespeare derived from history, incomprehensible, if as philologists maintain, he had simply set himself to cultivate, a "style" that was demanded in the theatre and known as _chronicle plays,_ or had there set himself a merely technical task, with a view to attaining dexterity.

That psychological interest, too, in so far as separated from a supreme end or ideal, towards which actions tend, or rather in so far as it remains uncertain and vague in this respect, limiting itself to questions of loss or gain, of success or failure, of living or dying, is not a qualitative, but a _formal_ interest. It can also be called political, if you will, but political in the sense of Machiavelli and the Renaissance, in so far as politics are considered for themselves, and therefore only formally. Hence the impression caused by the historical plays of Shakespeare, of being now "a gallery of portraits," now "a series of personal experiences," which the poet is supposed to have achieved in imagination.

It is certain that their richness, their brilliancy, their attraction, lie in the emotional representation of practical activity. Bolingbroke ascends the throne, by the adoption of violent and tortuous means, knowing when to withdraw himself and when to dare. Later he recounts to his son how artfully he composed and maintained the attitude, which caused him to be looked upon with sympathy and reverence by the people, affecting humility and humanity, but preserving at the same time the element of the marvellous, so that his presence, _like a robe pontifical,_ was _ne'er seen but wondered at._ He causes the blood of the deposed king to be shed, while protesting after the deed his great grief _that blood should sprinkle me to make me grow,_ and promising to undertake a voyage of expiation to the Holy Land. Facing him is the falling monarch, Richard II, in whose breast consciousness of his own sacred character as legitimate sovereign and of the inviolable dignity attached to it, the sense of being to blame, of pride humiliated, of resignation to destiny or divine decree, of bitterness, of sarcasm towards himself and towards others, succeed, alternate and combat one another, a swarm of writhing sentiments, an agony of suffocated passions.