Chapter IX: Motives and Development of Shakespeare's Poetry (3)

_Hamlet_ has generally been considered the tragedy of Shakespearean tragedies, where the poet has put most of himself, given us his philosophy, and with it the key to the other tragedies. But strictly speaking, Shakespeare has not put himself, that is to say his poetry, into _Hamlet,_ either more or less than into any of the others; there is not more philosophy, as judge of reality and of life here than in the others; there is perhaps less, because it is more perplexed and vague than the others, and even the celebrated monologue (_To be or not to be,_) though supremely poetical, is irreducible to a philosopheme or to a philosophic problem. Finally, it is not the key or compendium of the other plays, but the expression of a particular state of the soul, which differs from those expressed in the others. Those who read it in the ingenuous spirit in which it was written and conceived, find no difficulty about taking it for what it is, namely the expression of disaffection and distaste for life; they experience and assimilate that state of the soul. Life is thought and will, but a will which creates thought and a thought which creates will, and when we feel that certain painful impressions have injured and upset us, it sometimes happens that the will does not obey the stimulus of thought and becomes weak as will; then thought, feeling in its turn that it is not stimulated and upheld by the will, begins to wander and fails to make progress: it tries now this and now that, but grasps nothing firmly; it is thought not sure of itself, it is not true and effective thought. There is, as it were, a suspension of the rapid course of the spirit, a void, a losing of the way, which resembles death, and is in fact a sort of death. This is the state of soul that Shakespeare infused into the ancient legend of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, on whom he conferred many noble aptitudes and gifts, and the promise or the beginning of a fervent life. He then interrupted and suspended Hamlet's beginning of life, and let it wander, as though seeking in vain, not only its proper task, but even the strength necessary to propose it to himself, with that firmness which becomes and is, indeed, itself action. Hamlet is a generous and gentle youth, with a disposition towards meditation and scientific enquiry, a lover of the beautiful, devoted to knightly sports, prone to friendship, not averse to love, with faith in the human goodness and in those around him, especially in his father and mother, and in all his relations and friends. He was perhaps too refined and sensitive, too delicate in soul; but his life proceeded, according to its own law, towards certain ends, caressing certain hopes. In the course of this facile and amiable existence, he experienced, first the death of his father, followed soon after by the second marriage of his mother, who seems to have very speedily forgotten her first husband in the allurement of a new love. He feels himself in every way injured by this marriage, and with the disappearance of his esteem for his mother, a horrible suspicion insinuates itself, which is soon confirmed by the apparition of his father's restless ghost, which demands vengeance. And Hamlet will, nay must and will carry it out; he would find a means to do so warily and effectually, if he had not meanwhile begun to die from that shock to his sentiments. That is to say, he began to die without knowing it, to die internally: the pleasures of the world become in his eyes insipid and rancid, the earth and the sky itself lose their colours. Everything that is contrary to the ideal and to the joy of life, injustice, betrayal, lies, hypocrisy, bestial sensuality, greed of power and riches, cowardice, perversity and with them the nullity of worldly things, death and the fearful unknown, gather themselves together in his spirit, round that horrible thing that he has discovered, the assassination of his father, the adultery of his mother; they tyrannise over his spirit and form a barrier to his further progress, to his living with that former warmth and joyous vigour, as indispensable to thought as it is to action. Hamlet can no longer love, for love is above all love of life; for this reason he breaks off the love-idyll that he had begun with Ophelia, whom he loved and whom in a certain way, he still loves infinitely, but as we love one dead, knowing her to be no longer for us. Hamlet can laugh no more: sarcasm and irony take the place of frank laughter on his lips. He fails to coordinate his acts, himself becoming the victim of circumstances, though constantly maintaining his attitude of contempt, or breaking out into unexpected resolves, followed by hasty execution.

Sometimes he still rises to the level of moral indignation, as in the colloquy with his mother, but this too is a paroxysm, not a coordinated action. Joy is needed, not only for love, but also for vengeance; there must be passion for the activity that is being exercised; but Hamlet is in such a condition that he should give himself the same advice as he gives to the miserable Ophelia--to get her to a nunnery and there practice renunciation and restraint. But he is not conscious of the nature of his malady, and it is precisely for this reason that he is ill; instead of combating it by applying the right remedy, he cultivates, nourishes and increases it. At the most, what is taking place within him excites his astonishment and moves him to vain self-rebuke and equally vain self-stimulation, as we observe after his dialogue with the players, and after he has heard the passion, fury and weeping they put into their part, and when he meets the army led by Fortinbras against Poland.

"I do not know
Why yet I live to say 'This thing's to do';
Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means
To do't. Examples, gross as earth exhort me:
Witness this army, of such mass and charge,
Led by a delicate and tender prince;
Whose spirit with divine ambition puff'd,
Makes mouths at the invisible event,
Exposing what is miserable and unsure
To all that fortune death and danger dare
Even for an egg-shell.... O, from this time forth,
My thought be bloody or be nothing worth!"

Finally, he accomplishes the great vengeance, but alas, in how small a way, as though jestingly, as though it were by chance, and he himself dies as though by chance. He had abandoned his life to chance, so his death must be due to chance.

We too have termed the condition of spirit that ruins Hamlet, an illness; but the word is better applied to a doctor or a moralist, whereas the tragedy is the work of a poet, who does not describe an illness, but sings a song of desperate and desolate anguish, and so lofty a song is it, to so great a height does it attain, that it would seem as though a newer and more lofty conception of reality and of human action must be born of it. What was perdition for Hamlet, is a crisis of the human soul, which assumed so great an extension and complexity after the time of Shakespeare as to give its name to a whole historical period. Yet it has more than historical value, because, light or serious, little or great, it returns to live again perpetually.

6

JUSTICE AND INDULGENCE

It would be vain to seek among the songs of Shakespeare for the song of reconciliation, of quarrels, composed of inner peace, of tranquillity achieved, but the song of justice echoes everywhere in his works. He knows neither perfect saints, nor perfect sinners, for he feels the struggle at the heart of reality as necessity, not as accident, artifice, or caprice. Even the good, the brave and the pure have evil, impurity and weakness in them: "fragility" is the word he utters most often, not only with regard to women; and on the other hand, even the wicked, the guilty, the criminal, have glimpses of goodness, aspirations after redemption, and when everything else is wanting, they have energy of will and thus possess a sort of spiritual greatness. One hears that song as a refrain in several of the tragedies, uttered by foes over the foes whom they have conquered. Anthony pronounces this elegy over the fallen Brutus:

"This was the noblest Roman of them all:
All the conspirators, save only he,
Did that they did in envy of great Caesar;
He only in a general honest thought
And common good to all, made one of them.
His life was gentle and the elements
So mix'd in him that nature might stand up
And say to all the world 'This was a man.'"

Octavian, when he hears of the death of Anthony, exclaims:

"O Anthony!
... We could not stall together; but yet let me lament,
With tears as sovereign as the blood of hearts,
That thou, my brother, my competitor
In top of all design, my mate in empire,
Friend and companion in the front of war,
Unreconciliable should divide
Where mine his thoughts did kindle, that our stars
Unreconciliable should divide
Our equalness to this."

It is above all in _Henry VIII_ that this feeling for justice widens into a feeling towards oneself and others. We find a particularly good instance of it in the dialogues between Queen Catherine and her great enemy Wolsey. When the queen has mentioned all the grave misdeeds of the dead man in her severe speech, Griffith craves permission to record in his turn all the good there was in him; and with so persuasive an eloquence does he record this good, that the queen, when she has heard him, concludes with a sad smile:

"After my death I wish no other herald,
No other speaker of my living actions,
But such an honest chronicler as Griffith.
Whom I most hated living thou hast made me,
With thy religious truth and modesty,
Now in his ashes honour: peace be with him!"

One who feels justice in this way, is inclined to be indulgent, and in Shakespeare we find the song of indulgence, in the _Tempest:_ a lofty indulgence, for his discernment of good and evil was acute, his sense alike for what is noble and for what is base, exquisite. He could never be of those who slip into some form of false indulgence, which lowers the standard of the ideal, in order to approach the real, cancelling or rendering uncertain, in greater or lesser measure, the boundaries between virtue and vice. Prospero it is, who is indulgent in the _Tempest,_ the sage, the wise, the injured, the beneficent Prospero.

The _Tempest_ is an exercise of the imagination, a delicate pattern, woven perhaps as a spectacle for some special occasion, such as a marriage ceremony, for it adopts the procedure of some fanciful, jesting scenario from the popular Italian comedy. Here we find islands unknown, aerial spirits, earthly beings and monsters; it is full of magic and of prodigies, of shipwrecks, rescues and incantations; and the smiles of innocent love, the quips of comical creatures, variegate pleasantly its surface. We have already noted the traces of Shakespeare's tendency toward the romantic, and those echoes of the comedy of love, of Romeo and Juliet, who are not unfortunate but fortunate, when they are called Ferdinand and Miranda, with their irresistible impulse towards love and joy. But although the work has a bland tone, there are yet to be found in it characters belonging to tragedy, wicked brothers, who usurp the throne, brothers who meditate and attempt fratricide. In Caliban we find the malicious, violent brute, abounding in strength and rich in possibilities. He listens ecstatically to the soft music, with which the isle often resounds, he knows its natural secrets and is ready to place himself at the service of him who shall aid him in his desire for vengeance and shall redeem him from captivity. Henceforth Prospero has all his enemies in his power; he can do with them what he likes. But he is not on the same plane with them, a combatant among combatants: meditation, experience and science have refined him: he is penetrated with the consciousness of humanity, of its instability, its illusions, its temptations, its miseries. Where others think they see firm foothold, he is aware of change and insecurity; where others find everything clear as day, he feels the presence of mystery, of the unsolved enigma:

"We are such things
As dreams are made of and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."

Will he punish? Finally, even his sprite Ariel, his minister of air, feels compassion for those downcast prisoners, and when asked by Prospero, does not withhold from him, that in his place he would be human.

"And mine shall.
Hast thou, which are but air, a touch, a feeling
Of their afflictions, and shall not myself,
One of their kind, which relish all as sharply,
Passion as they, be kindlier moved than thou art?"

The guilty are pardoned, and finally Caliban, the monstrous Caliban, is pardoned also, promising to behave himself better from that moment onward. Prospero divests himself of his magic wand, which gave him so absolute a power over his like, and while yet in his possession, caused him to incur the risk of behaving towards them in a more than human, perhaps an inhuman way.

Shakespeare can and does attain to indulgence towards men; but since in him the contest between good and evil, positive and negative, remains undecided, he is unable to rise to a feeling of cheerful hope and faith, nor, on the other hand, to submerge himself in gloomy pessimism. In his characters, the love of life is extraordinarily vigorous and tenacious; all of them are agitated by strong passions; they meditate great designs and pursue them with indomitable vigour; all of them love infinitely and hate infinitely. But all of them, almost without exception, also renounce life and face death with fortitude, serenity, and as though it were a sort of liberation. The motto of all is uttered by Edgar, in _King Lear,_ in reply to his old father, Gloucester, who loses courage and wishes to die, when he hears of the defeat of the king and of Cordelia. Edgar reminds his father that men must face "their coming here even as their going hence," and that _"ripeness is all." _ They die magnificently, either in battle, or offering their throats to the assassin or the executioner, or they transpierce themselves with their own hands, when nothing is left but death or dishonour. They know how to die; it seems as though they had all _"studied death,"_ as says a character in _Macbeth,_ when describing one of them.

And nevertheless the ardour of life never becomes lessened or extinguished. Romeo indeed admired the tenacity of life and the fear of death in him who sold him the poison; miserable, hungry, despised, suspected by men and by the law, as he was. In _Measure for Measure,_ in the scene where Claudio is in prison and condemned, the usual order is inverted; first we have the prompt persuasion and decision to accept death with serenity, and a few moments later the will to live returns with furious force. The make-believe friar, who assists the condemned man, sets the nullity of life before him in language full of warm and rich imagery: it is troublous and such as "none but fools would keep," a constant heart-ache for the fear of losing it, a craving after happiness never attained, a falsity of affections, a crepuscular condition, without joy or repose; and Claudio drinks in these words and images, feeling that to live is indeed to die, and wishes for death. But his sister enters, and when she tells him how she has been offered his life as the price of her dishonour, he instantly clutches hold again of life at that glimmer of hope, of hope stained with opprobrium, and dispels with a shudder of horror the image of death:

"To die and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;
This sensible and warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; 'tis too horrible!
The weariest and most loathed worldly life
That age, ache, penury and imprisonment
Can lay on nature is a paradise
To what we fear of death...."

And in the same play the singular personage of Barnadine is placed before us, perfect in a few strokes, Barnadine, the criminal and almost animal, indifferent to life and death, but who yet lives, gets drunk and then stretches himself out and sleeps soundly, and when he is awakened and called to the place of execution, declares firmly, that he is not disposed to go there that day, so they had better leave him alone and not trouble him; he turns his shoulders on them and goes back to his cell, where they can come and find him, if they have anything to say. Here too the feeling of astonishment at an eagerness for life, which does not exclude the tranquil acceptance of death, is accentuated almost to the point of becoming comic and grotesque.

7

IDEAL DEVELOPMENT AND CHRONOLOGICAL SERIES

It is clear that in considering the principal motives of Shakespeare's poetry and arranging them in series of increasing complexity, we have not availed ourselves of any quantitative criterion or rule of measurement, but have considered only the philosophical concept of the spirit, which is perpetual growth upon itself, and of which every new act, since it includes its predecessors, is in this sense more rich than they. We declare in the same way, that prose is more complex than poetry, because it follows poetry, assumes and dominates, while making use of it, and that certain concepts and problems imply and presuppose certain others; we further declare that a particular equality in poetry presupposes other poetry of a more elementary quality, and that a pessimistic song of love or sorrow, presupposes a simple love-song.

Thus, in the succession of his works as we have considered them, which might be more closely defined and particularised, we have nothing less than the ideal development of Shakespeare's spirit, deduced from the very quality of the poetical works themselves, from the physiognomy of each and from their reciprocal relations, which cannot but appear in relations which are serial and evolutionary. The comedies of love and the romantic comedies have the vagueness of a dream, followed by the hard reality of the historical plays, and from these we pass to the great tragedies, which are dream and reality and more than dream and reality. The general line followed by the poet even offered the temptation to construct his development by means of the dialectic triad of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. But we do not recommend this course, or if followed, it should only be with the view of reaching and adopting a compendious and brilliant formula, without suppressing in any way the consciousness of complexity and variety of many effective passages, much less the positive value of individual expressions.

This development does not in any case coincide with the chronological order, because the chronological order takes the works in the order in which they are apprehensible from without, that is to say, in the order in which they have been written, acted or printed, and arranges them in a series that is qualitatively irregular, or in other words, chronicles them. Now this arrangement must not be opposed to or placed on a level with the other, as though it were the real opposed to the ideal development, for the ideal is the only truly real development, while the chronological is fictitious or arbitrary, and thus unreal; that is to say, in clear terms, it does not represent development, but simply a series or succession. To make this point yet more clear, by means of an example taken from common experience, we have all known men, who in their youth have practised or tried to practise some form of activity (music, versification, painting, philosophy, etc.) which they have afterwards abandoned for other activities, more suitable, because in them susceptible of richer development. These men, later on, in their maturity, or when old age is approaching, revert to those earlier occupations, and take delight in composing verses or music, in painting or in philosophising, returning, as they say, to their old loves. Such returns are certainly never pure and simple returns: they are always coloured to some extent by what has occurred in the interval. But they really and substantially belong to the anterior moment; the differences that we observe in them some part of that particular consideration which we have disregarded in considering the development of Shakespeare, while recommending it as a theme for special study. As we find in works which represent a return to the period of youth, echoes of the mature period, so in youthful works we sometimes find anticipations and suggestions of the mature period. This is the case with Shakespeare, not only in certain situations and characters of the historical plays, but also in certain effects of the _Dream,_ the _Merchant of Venice_ and _Romeo and Juliet._

As the result of our argument, we cannot pass from the ideal to the extrinsic or chronological order, and therefore it could only indicate caprice, were we to conclude from the fact that _Titus Andronicus_ represents a literary Shakespeare or a theatrical imitator, that it must chronologically precede _Romeo and Juliet,_ or even _Love's Labour's Lost._ The same applies to the argument that because _Cymbeline,_ the _Winter's Tale_ and _Pericles_ are composed of romantic material similar to that of _All's Well,_ of _Much Ado_ and of _Twelfth Night_ (where we find innocent maidens falsely accused and afterwards triumphant, dead women, who turn out to be alive, women dressed as men, and the like), that they must all have been written at the same time. The same holds good of the historical plays: we cannot argue from the fact that these plays represent a more complex condition of the soul than the love comedies and the romantic plays, that the historical plays are all of them to be dated later than the two groups above-mentioned; or that for the same reasons, _Hamlet,_ the first _Hamlet,_ could not by any means have been composed by Shakespeare in his very earliest period, about 1592, as Swinburne asserts, swears and takes his solemn oath is the case: and who knows but he is right?

In like manner, we cannot pass from the chronological to the ideal order, and since the chronology, documentary or conjectural, places _Coriolanus_ after _Hamlet,_ and also after _Othello, Macbeth, Lear_ and _Anthony and Cleopatra,_ must not, therefore, insist upon finding in it profound thoughts, which it does not contain, or deny that it belongs to the period of the "historical plays" with which it has the closest connection. Again, although the chronology places _Cymbeline_ and the _Winter's Tale,_ as has been said, in the last years of Shakespeare's life, we must not insist upon finding profound meanings in those works, or talk, as some have done, of a superior ethic, a "theological ethic," to which Shakespeare is supposed at last to have attained, or dwell upon the gracious idyllic scenes to be found in them, weighing them down with non-existent mysteries, making out that the Imogens and Hermiones are beings of equal or greater poetic intensity than Cordelia, or Desdemona, or take Leontes for Othello, Jacques for Iago, whereas, in the eyes of those possessed of poetic sentiment, the former stand to the latter in the relation of little decorative studies compared to works by Raphael or Giorgione. Proof of this is to be found in the fact that the latter have become popular and live in the hearts and minds of all, while the former please us, we admire them, and pass on.

All that can be admitted, because comformable to logic and experience, is that the two orders in general--but quite in general, and therefore with several exceptions and disagreements--big and little--correspond to one another. Indeed, if we take the usual chronological order, as fixed by philologists and to be found in all Shakespearean manuals and at the head of the plays, with little variation, we see that the first comedies of love and the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, including the romantic element, which is common to all of them, belong to the first period, between 1591 and 1592. We next find the historical plays, the comedies of love and the romantic dramas, closely associated; then begins the period of the great tragedies, _Julius Caesar_ and _Anthony and Cleopatra;_ then again,--after a return to anterior forms with _Coriolanus, Cymbeline_ and the _Winter's Tale,_--we reach the _Tempest,_ which seems to be the last, or among the last of Shakespeare's works.

Biographers have tried to explain the last period of Shakespeare's poetry in various ways, sometimes as the period of his _"becoming serene,"_ sometimes as that of his _"poetical exhaustion"_ sometimes as _"an attempt after new forms of art"_; but with such utterances as these, we find ourselves among those conjectural constructions, which we have purposely avoided, if for no other reason than that so many people, who are good for nothing else, make them every day, and we do not wish to deprive them of their occupation.

The _biographical_ character of that period can be interpreted, as we please, as one of repose, of gay facility, of weariness, of expectation and training for new works, and so on: but the _poetical_ character of the works in question, is such as we have described, and such as all see and feel that it is. It is too but a biographical conjecture, however plausible,--but certainly most graceful and pleasing--, which maintains that the magician Prospero, who breaks his wand, buries his book of enchantments, and dismisses his aerial spirit Ariel, ready to obey his every nod, symbolizes William Shakespeare himself, who henceforth renounces his art and takes leave of the imaginary world, which he had created for his own delight and in obedience to the law of his own development and where till then he had lived as sovereign.