# Shakespeare of Stratford/The Personality of Shakespeare

Layout 2
New Haven: Yale University Press, pages 136–160
THE PERSONALITY OF SHAKESPEARE
The bard of Avon, most successful perhaps of all the poets of the world, owed much of his success to his care in rendering unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s, while laying up his finest treasures for generations yet unborn. From his own age Shakespeare asked and obtained ‘a fellowship in a cry of players,’ with the solid emoluments thereto appertaining. He obtained his ease at the Boar’s Head, Mermaid, and the gentle hostelries along the Stratford road. He acquired the arms and title of a gentleman, and ultimately broad meadow lands in Warwickshire, with the spacious leisure of New Place. Willingly he relinquished the regal immortality of Westminster, by the side of Chaucer, Spenser, and Ben Jonson, for undisturbed repose in the chancel of his provincial church.
Once in early life Shakespeare vouchsafed a scant dozen lines of compliment to the Virgin Queen; twice, likewise at the opening of his career, he deigned to dedicate a poem to a noble patron. This is almost the whole extent of Shakespeare’s literary concession to his age. The characters of his plays he selected, with what almost seems to us a curious perversity, from Veronese and Frenchmen, Romans, Greeks, Jews, Danes, Moors, and ancient Britons—from every type of people but the subjects of his queen. Of the English of the past he is an unrivaled delineator; of the Englishmen of his own time he hardly tells us directly ​anything except that they dress outrageously, outdrink the Dutch, and are stupidly given to staring at strange monsters.
I
The greatest of the Elizabethan romanticists is, in fact, neither so conspicuously Elizabethan nor so transparently romantic as most of his contemporaries. Shakespeare’s difference from his fellows is apparent, indeed, in the difficulty we encounter when we seek adjectives to qualify his work. For Spenser and Marlowe, Sidney and Ralegh, it is not so hard to find expressive and satisfying characterizations: the critic of Shakespeare is thrown back upon paradox. The greatest English writer is in many ways one of the least literary; the most brilliant constructor of plot one of the least inventive; the most successful searcher of the human heart one of the least obviously subtle. Shakespeare was neither an artist in the sense in which Spenser was, nor a romanticist as Ralegh was, nor an intellectualist as Marlowe was. Wisdom is perhaps the only attribute which we can apply to him without need of qualification.
And Shakespeare’s wisdom was not of the kind which colleges supply. We need no biographical evidence to assure us that the author of the plays was not indebted to the universities; and the academic attitude on the part of his critics has often proved the least profitable of all. Ben Jonson and Samuel Johnson and Dryden, for example, have said splendidly true things of Shakespeare when they spoke, unofficially as it were, from the depth of their robust humanity; and each has ​been signally unfortunate when essaying to write of him from the chair of a literary dictator. The clearest light on this poet has often emanated, not from academic halls, but from the experience of those who have rather taken degrees in what old Gower calls the University of all the world—in Shakespeare’s university.
A chief reason why formal criticism has proved so barren is simply that Shakespeare—more even than most other romantic writers—attained his art by indirection. A straight line, indeed, is seldom the shortest line between a romantic poet’s inspiration and his accomplishment; but in Shakespeare the usual Elizabethan carelessness about rules of poetry may often seem magnified into carelessness about poetry itself. ‘The works of Shakespeare,’ says Coleridge, ‘are romantic poetry revealing itself in the drama.’ But his romanticism requires to be distinguished from that of his great contemporaries. In the sense that the romanticist is one who ignores academic rules for writing, Shakespeare is a very type and pattern of the romantic dramatist; but he has nothing of that other, more advanced, romanticism which marks Spenser and Marlowe as conscious innovators and revolutionists, battling for ideas which they know to be strange and love therefor. He has nothing of the romanticism which produced Hernani. Shakespeare’s romanticism did not lead him to affect originality or to despise precedent; nor did it impel him to establish new rules for dramatic writing. Mr. Munro hardly exaggerates when he says in the preface to the Shakespeare Allusion Book: ‘Shakespeare, like all the great poets of the world, left no school behind him. He was not an initiator; he invented no new style; he introduced no new vogue.’
​Shakespeare was constitutionally incapable of doing what Lyly, Marlowe, and Ben Jonson successively did—of inventing a perfectly characteristic new type of drama, and then consistently illustrating it in his practice. Probably he would have been incapable of offering concerning the dramatist’s art any views as definite as Hamlet expresses about the actor’s. What he created in the way of dramatic style and structure—and it was, of course, a great deal—seems to have come to him as the result of practice rather than speculation. What he borrowed—and it was even more—found its way into his plays by chance more often than by critical choice. In the controversy between classic and romantic theories of drama—between Jonson’s method and Marlowe’s—Shakespeare seems to take no stand and feel no interest. It happens that two particularly romantic plays, The Tempest and Othello, are in their structure nearly as classic (regular) as two of Jonson’s, while two plays of classic atmosphere and story, Julius Cæsar and Antony and Cleopatra, carry to the farthest extreme the romantic irregularities. For these things—for the whole formal side of poetry—Shakespeare doubtless cared as little as Homer. Like Homer, he can hardly be designated as either romantic or classic; and more than any other modern he has succeeded in making his art seem coextensive with life, in arrogating to himself Pope’s fine claim for Homer:
It is the indirectness of Shakespeare’s art that here accounts for its wonderful success. The perfectly clear light in which his men and women are seen implies a perfect lack of self-consciousness in their portrayer, ​and with this we can very safely credit him. Shakespeare was in no way a literary critic. His taste in books does not seem to have been good, if we may judge by some of the poor works he chooses to dramatize and by the many great ones he ignores. Compared with his most worthy contemporaries, Shakespeare rather lacked the literary conscience. Compared, that is, with Lyly, Marlowe, or Jonson, he was not more, but less careful in choosing and developing his plot, in shaping his sentences, and in winding up his conclusions.
II
Had Shakespeare been the sort of man that he is thought to have been by those who identify him with Francis or with Anthony Bacon, or with Ralegh, or with Marlowe, or with Rutland or Southampton, or with Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, or with William Stanley, Earl of Derby—that is, had he been well-bred and college-trained, all this, we may feel sure, would have been different. He would have been more precocious and more clever. In all human probability he would have been much less wise. He would have been more fastidious about accuracy of detail in sentence structure, in plot construction, and in plausibility of incident and local color. He would have sought the appearance of originality more and attained the substance less.
One great strength of Shakespeare’s dramatic art lies in the fact that circumstances made him a great connoisseur of life and a very careless student of literature. He was first an actor, second a practical adapter of old plays, third a company manager. Only fourth and last was he a dramatist proper. No other Eliza​bethan writer had so many and such intimate points of contact with the whole business of the theatre. A very important reason for Shakespeare’s superiority to his contemporaries is that he was not primarily a gentleman author like Lyly, Greene, Peele, Marlowe, but actually, as Greene called him, ‘an absolute Johannes factotum’ of the theatre, a man too absorbed in opening the world’s oyster—in holding the mirror up to life—to feel much the littlenesses and compunctions of the artist.
From these general, and rather trite, remarks two truths can be deduced. One is that Shakespeare is not, as he seems often to be thought, the summation of Elizabethan literary art. The student of Shakespeare will know much of human nature, but not a vast deal about the sixteenth-century mind. Shakespeare was indeed not of one age, and did not supersede Lyly and Spenser and Marlowe and Jonson as exponents of his era.
The other truth is that the problems of Shakespeare’s great plays are not to be settled triumphantly by frontal literary attack, by disquisitions upon his mind and art alone. The personality of Shakespeare has been so dismally disputed that students have sometimes been driven to wish the whole matter buried in Cimmerian gloom. Thus Dr. Furness attempts to lighten ship by merrily bidding the man Shakespeare begone with all his mystery:
‘It is merely our ignorance which creates the mystery. To Shakespeare’s friends and daily companions there was nothing mysterious in his life; on the contrary, it possibly appeared to them as unusually dull and commonplace. It certainly had no incidents so far ​out of the common that they thought it worth while to record them. Shakespeare never killed a man as Jonson did; his voice was never heard, like Marlowe’s, in tavern brawls; nor was he ever, like Marston and Chapman, threatened with the penalty of having his ears lopped and his nose split; but his life was so gentle and so clear in the sight of man and of Heaven that no record of it has come down to us; for which failure I am fervently grateful, and as fervently hope that no future year will ever reveal even the faintest peep through the divinity which doth hedge this king.’
Unfortunately, it is precisely the man Shakespeare—in some circles derisively called the Stratfordian—who carries with him into obscurity the dramatic artist. Without him—ill-bred, ill-lettered, and in some ways perhaps ill-balanced as he was—the plays lose their coherent meaning and disintegrate into picture puzzles, in which mad ladies and gentlemen piece out the names and features of whom they will.
There was once a time when it seemed a mark of daring and original thought to assert the identity of Francis Bacon with the author of the Shakespearean dramas. That time is now past, and the mere Baconian is in sorry plight. His doctrine is as hackneyed as that of the Shakespearean, and it lacks the compensating satisfaction of reason. There are few joys in being illogical, when one must also be flat. Desperate cases produce desperate remedies, and super-Baconians have lately arisen, ready to supplant the pale ineffectual fires of their predecessors by yet brighter blazes of assumption. Such is the late E. G. Harman (Edmund Spenser and the Impersonations of Francis Bacon, 1914), who devotes 592 pages to proving that Bacon wrote not merely Shakespeare, but also all of Spenser. ​Such is Mr. Parker Woodward, who in 1912 included among Francis Bacon’s Works (Acknowledged, Vizarded, or Suspected) those of Lyly, Greene, Spenser, Shakespeare, Kyd, Peele, Marlowe, Gosson, Bright, Burton, Webbe, Nashe, Watson, and others, including a part of Ben Jonson’s. And such is Peter Alvor, who in 1911 (Anthony Bacon: Die Lösung des Shakespeare-Problems) pointed out that the Bacon who wrote Shakespeare was not Francis, but his brother Anthony.
Of late years, however, the preachers of Shakespearean dissent have manifested a tendency to abandon Bacon in order to exploit newer aspirants to the laurel. The revelation of Mr. J. C. Nicol, in The Real Shakespeare, is couched in mystical language: ‘I, Fortinbras, otherwise Posthumus, quarried and on 7th December, 1905, plainly discovered Henry Wriotheslie, third Earl of Southampton, undoubtedly to be the sole Author and begetter of the so-called poems and plays known as Shakespeare’s Works . . . producing innumerable offspring in Art, with other various names, notably (as Marlowe) from the age of 13.’ A contemporary work by Peter Alvor (Das neue Shakespeare-Evangelium, ca. 1907) ascribed Shakespeare to a judicious partnership between the Earls of Southampton and Rutland. In 1912 M. Célestin Demblon (Socialist Deputy from Liège) maintained through 559 pages the thesis: Lord Rutland est Shakespeare. In 1914, the late Henry Pemberton, Jr., did as much for Ralegh in Shakespeare and Sir Walter Ralegh. In 1919 appeared the two impressive volumes of Professor Abel Lefranc, in nomination of another candidate: Sous le Masque de “William Shakespeare”: William Stanley VI° Comte de Derby; and in 1920 the most ​portentous perhaps of all these colossal works, Mr. J. Thomas Looney’s “Shakespeare” Identified in Edward de Vere, the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford.
III
The desire to see the face behind the mask is not only legitimate, but necessary; and, happily, it has not recently been exclusively confined to the Bacon-Ralegh-Oxford-Derby-Rutland-Southampton exponents of critical solitaire. The most priceless hour of the irrecoverable past, says William Archer, would be that in which one might meet the real Shakespeare face to face; and Professor Bradley says: ‘For my own part I confess that, though I should care nothing about the man if he had not written the works, yet, since we possess them, I would rather see and hear him for five minutes in his proper person than discover a new one.’
The author of the Shakespearean plays, we can say with perfect confidence, was not the advanced political thinker that Bacon was, or Ralegh, or Spenser, or even Marlowe. He was distinctly a traditionalist in politics and social theory. His attitude toward the state and sovereign was not Tudor, but Plantagenet; not renaissance, but feudal. It represents the feeling of Stratford much better than that of London.
The King in Shakespeare is nearly always the man ​on horseback. He who rides roan Barbary gets the plaudits of the multitude; and Shakespeare’s voice can generally be heard among the rest, crying with quite old-fashioned vehemence: ‘Le Roi est mort; Vive le Roi!’ Shakespeare’s kings, it has been said, are always kingly; and so they are in the old Plantagenet sense. They go to bed with their crowns on, and sleep with the sceptre under their pillow. They brandish swords and throw down warders, and make polished speeches, which, in a surprising number of the examples, lack moral or psychological sincerity.
Shakespeare’s loyalty was always that of the Tory country-dweller. No length of years in London, no number of performances at court, sufficed to obliterate the country boy’s impression of the vague exotic splendor of the crown. His is not the personal devotion of the cavalier to Charles, nor the imperial ardor of such typical Elizabethans as Spenser and Ralegh, It is rather the old feudal attitude of the Wars of the Roses, the attitude of the Yorkist who would have fought for the crown of England though he found it on a thistle bush. There is every reason for believing that Shakespeare was quite satisfied with the de facto principle of sovereignty which Prince Hal expounds to his father:
Perhaps it is not altogether an accident that in Shakespeare’s biography the careless continuators of the old feudal England—Southampton and Essex and Pembroke—mean a great deal, and the purveyors of ​the new political faith—Burghley, Ralegh, and Walsingham—mean nothing.
Shakespeare’s patriotism also, glowing though it is, is traditional and essentially pre-Elizabethan. He has nothing of the new imperialism so dominant in Ralegh and Spenser, and very little indeed of the sense of the gorgeous Indies and the new world beyond the seas that Marlowe shows everywhere. He was distinctly a ‘little Englander.’ He glories in the thought of the aloofness and self-sufficiency of his island,
His vision stops at the ideal of a hermit kingdom, free from foreign entanglements, safe in the unity of its citizens and in a proudly defensive attitude toward the world:
Wars abroad are for him but sallies from the fortress, heroic, yet of dubious advisability. Henry the Fifth has prudential and legalistic aims in invading France, but no imperial aims. He embarks upon his expedition because his crafty father has advised him to end civil discord in England by busying ‘giddy minds with ​foreign quarrels’; and because the Archbishop of Canterbury has unblushingly ventured an affirmative answer to his question, ‘May I with right and conscience make this claim?’ Shakespeare shirks the real business of the conquest of France, and concentrates attention upon the upset of all sporting predictions in the outcome of the battle of Agincourt. And Agincourt is particularly glorified as a defensive action. Says Henry to the French herald, Montjoy,
If only the French would not insist upon it, there should be no conquest of France. The Jingoes, pray observe, are all in the French camp—all but Captain Macmorris, the Irishman, who by Gower’s account (and his own) is ‘a very valiant gentleman’ and a fire-eater, and for whom we have Fluellen’s unimpeachable authority that ‘he is an ass, as in the world: I will verify as much in his peard: he has no more directions in the two disciplines of the wars, look you . . . than is a puppy-dog.’
Shakespeare learned his patriotism and foreign policy from Holinshed and the other old chroniclers who followed in the train of that prince of sporting-writers, Froissart. They treated warfare as we treat football—as a spectacular, exciting, and fundamentally good-natured pastime, arising from no particular causes except the love of competition and productive of no consequences except the glory of the successful ​athlete. King Henry’s speech before Agincourt is the high-water mark of football oratory:
This was not the spirit in which Queen Elizabeth made war. It was not the spirit of the seven thousand English whom the Earl of Essex led to Rouen in 1591 to aid Navarre’s stern Huguenots against the Catholic League. There is more zeal for national expansion and contemporary foreign policy in the one play of Edward III (I think, by Peele) than in all that Shakespeare wrote.
The very sea, which to Ralegh and Spenser was ever beckoning Englishmen abroad, which was Cynthia’s peculiar domain and highway, is to Shakespeare a de​fensive wall, a moat, whose purpose was to shut off alien lands from
The England he apostrophizes is not the mistress of the ocean, but
What must one of Drake’s sea-dogs, whose home was on the billows, have thought if he blundered into a performance of Richard II and heard John of Gaunt discoursing in so land-lubberish a fashion? There is nothing that would justify us in assuming that Shakespeare’s heart e’er within him burned with desire to board a sea-going vessel, or that he ever cared to join the Elizabethan crowds which flocked down to Deptford to visit Drake’s Golden Hind. There is nothing to show that he caught the oceanic swell and surge which so resounds in the famous note that Drake and his colleagues sent ashore after the first days of the Armada fight (Aug. 1, 1588):
‘We whose names are hereunder written have determined and agreed in council to follow and pursue the Spanish fleet until we have cleared our own coast and brought the Frith west of us, and then to return back again, as well to revictual our ships (which stand in extreme scarcity) as also to guard and defend our own coast at home. With further protestation that if our ​wants of victuals and munitions were supplied we would pursue them to the furthest that they durst have gone.’
After reading the history plays it is with wonder and astonishment that one follows a certain present-day tendency to explain Shakespeare as a literary Talleyrand or Machiavelli, writing for the purpose of shaping public policy and disseminating political propaganda. Strange it is to see one speculative critic defining the plays of Shakespeare as the unique sourcebook of English history betweeen 1588 and 1603, explaining that when Froude closed his narrative at the year 1588 and Gardiner refrained from commencing before 1603, it can only have been because those mere historians realized that they might not hope, without becoming Shakespeare scholars, to understand what really happened in the intervening fifteen years. Strange also it is, and doubtless mirth-provoking to the souls below, to learn that Hamlet was written to explain the murder of Amy Robsart—or, as another tells us, to explain the assassination of Lord Darnley; and to be informed that Love’s Labour’s Lost was written to frustrate the purposes of Lord Burghley, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream to secure the crown of England for the Earl of Derby—or else for the so-called ‘Suffolk heir,’ Lord Hertford’s son.
One fancies that Shakespeare’s soul is surprised at these things, and not a little flattered; for in his mortal days that entrancing, brilliant moss-back, Will Shakespeare, must have been one of the last men in London with whom an up-to-date Elizabethan would have thought of discussing politics, or religion, or geography, or current affairs. Prince Bismarck is said to have characterized his compatriots as political ​dunces: one foresees a day when the German appreciators of Shakespeare (to whom we continue to owe so much) will on this ground also set up a claim to intellectual affinity with our poet.
The prejudices of the country-bred youth persist also in Shakespeare’s treatment of the various classes of English society. He has the old-fashioned rustic’s fondness for lords and ladies and for country squires, and for all the functionaries that go in their train: footmen and porters, hostlers, tapsters, gardeners, and pedlars. The plain tiller of the soil gets loving treatment, from Costard in Love’s Labour’s Lost to the charming Egyptian Clown in Antony and Cleopatra; and he offers conspicuous homage to the Cotswold shepherds in As You Like It and in The Winter’s Tale.
The denizens of the city, on the other hand,—with honorable exception of the tavern drawers,—seldom evoke Shakespeare’s interest. The Lord Mayor and Aldermen, the livery companies, law clerks, and apprentices, the Puritan sectaries, and cut-purses, and street-singers—all the picturesque and bizarrely differentiated types that made up the pride, pomp, and circumstance, as well as the bustle and romantic uncertainties, of Elizabethan London—whom Dekker painted so lovingly and Jonson with such microscopic fidelity—are by Shakespeare referred to little and dispraisingly. The ‘velvet-guards and Sunday citizens’ and the whole shop-keeping class, from the apothecary in Romeo and Juliet down, arouse at best his pity and almost invariably his scorn. They are used most to barb the point of his contemptuous metaphors. The rude mechanicals, or city artisans, are dull and pompous, and the great body of citizens is the mobile vulgus ​and nothing more, an object equally of derision and distrust.
A single striking example may illustrate the point. There was one rough, roystering, and unique set of Londoners who must have come under constant observation of a man doing business on the Bankside. It was the tribe of watermen or scullers, a body numbering its hundreds, if not thousands, and possessed even of its laureate in Taylor the Water-Poet. Indisputably, Shakespeare must have sat téte à téte with dozens of them on the way to Southwark, and his fortune can hardly have been so bad that he met only the dull dogs in so hilarious a fraternity. Yet he never came nearer to a tribute than when in Othello he let drop his casual slur on
Are we not almost justified in thinking that the well-styled Bard of Avon (not Thames) was the converse of Peter Bell? A primrose by the water’s brim was to Shakespeare all that it was to Wordsworth, but the delectable Taylor was to him, I sadly fear, simply ‘a knave of common hire,’ and he was nothing more. We may find in this a reason why Shakespeare never chose to write a city comedy. Here again, then, there is in Shakespeare more of Stratford than of London, more of Plantagenet than of Tudor England.
In religion also Shakespeare evidently did not feel the attraction of the new ideas which so appealed to Spenser, Marlowe, and Ralegh. There is no good reason for believing that he was an actual recusant, a convinced disciple of the Roman faith; but the religious penumbra of his mind was certainly archaic. For poetic purposes at least religion still connoted for him ​friars, masses, vigils, extreme unction, and purgatory. It came natural to him to invoke angels and ministers of grace, to swear by Our Lady and Saint Patrick.
Nor can we doubt, rare as are the authentic expressions of Shakespeare’s personal feeling in his works, that the poet was himself fully aware of the homely and conservative cast of all his thinking. Readers have always, and rightly, recognized the inner voice of the dramatist’s own conviction in the words with which Biron abjures
‘I do forswear them,’ says Biron, ‘and I here protest . . .
The volatile Biron, it is probable, found the vow too hard to keep; but for Shakespeare, who here speaks through him, russet and kersey were to the end the only wear. In his seventy-sixth Sonnet he expresses, with a candid clarity impossible to discount, his realization of the intellectual gulf which separated him from the peacock race of the true Elizabethans:
IV
The reader, therefore, who knows only Shakespeare among the Elizabethans, will get relatively very little of the intellectual atmosphere in which Milton and other Londoners of the next generation grew up. He will get less of this from Shakespeare than from any other eminent writer of the period.
The greatest of modern poets passed a quarter century amid the tremendous intellectual currents—social, religious, and imperial—of Elizabethan London, and his soul through all this time remained a stranger to them. ‘Multum incola fuit anima sua.’ His most apparent efforts to reflect the spirit around him are the relative failures of Love’s Labour’s Lost and The Merry Wives of Windsor. He gave his audiences, to be sure, what they liked immensely, but he gave it with a strange and stubborn indirectness. The Armada comes and goes; Drake and Ralegh light the beacons of a new and potent patriotism; and Shakespeare tunes his native woodland harp to sing, in Henry V, the praises of an obsolete Lancastrian policy. Great Britain has its birth in the union of Scotland and England, and Shakespeare weaves into Macbeth a musty dynastic compliment to the new monarch.
The London bookstalls groan with pamphlets about the discovery of Bermuda and the colonization of Virginia, about cannibals and noble savages, and the Isle of Devils and the Fountain of Perpetual Youth. Drayton, Shakespeare’s contemporary, friend, and neighbor in Warwickshire, writes his ecstatic stanzas, To the Virginian Voyage, urging all
to
In the play of Eastward Ho (1605) even the gravity of Chapman, the local realism of Jonson and Marston, succumb to the infection; and in the speeches of Captain Seagull this comedy of London manners grows iridescent with fanciful hyperboles of Virginian opportunity.
‘I tell thee,’ says Captain Seagull, as he basks in the admiration of his tavern companions, ‘gold is more plentiful there than copper is with us; and for as much red copper as I can bring, I’ll have thrice the weight in gold. Why, man, all their dripping pans . . . are pure gold; and all the chains with which they chain up their streets are massy gold; all the prisoners they take are fettered in gold; and for rubies and diamonds, they go forth on holidays and gather ’em by the seashore, to hang on their children’s coats and stick in their caps, as commonly as our children wear saffron-gilt brooches and groats with holes in ’em.
Scapethrift. And is it a pleasant country withal?
Seagull. As ever the sun shined on; temperate and full of all sorts of excellent viands; wild boar is as common there as our tamest bacon is here, venison as mutton. And then you shall live freely there, without serjeants, or courtiers, or lawyers, or intelligencers.’
Such tavern talk has a veritable ring. The Boar’s Head in Eastcheap must have echoed with it; and one ​wonders what ailed Will Shakespeare that it never found a lodging in his brain. For him El Dorado never ceased to be located somewhere among his native Cotswold hills, and he never conceived a vision of more radiant and infectious felicity than that picture of Master Shallow’s orchard, ‘where, in an arbour, we will eat a last year’s pippin of my own graffing, with a dish of caraways, and so forth;’ while Cousin Silence grows amiably drunk, and the good varlet Davy unfolds the merits of an arrant knave, William Visor of Wincot, who must needs be countenanced against the honest man, Clement Perkes of the Hill.
Spenser’s vision leaps from East to Western Ind, dilating on ‘th’ Indian Peru,’ ‘the Amazon’s huge river,’ or ‘fruitfullest Virginia,’ invoking ceaselessly
In Marlowe, Tamburlaine dreams of
Barrabas of
and Faustus of the ‘huge argosies’ that drag
Shakespeare never mentions Virginia and names America only once, in the early Comedy of Errors. Once, in a bit of comic prose, he lets Maria allude with betraying carelessness to ‘the new map with the aug​mentation of the Indies.’ Contrast the inspirational potency of maps and globes for Marlowe, Hakluyt, and Spenser! Finally Shakespeare offers belated and grudging acquiescence to the spirit of discovery by telling (in his last complete play) how a Duke of Milan and his daughter once went voyaging in the Mediterranean in
and how they found there an enchanted isle—forsooth, not far from Tunis and Algiers!
V
Shakespeare did not bring with him from Stratford a very plastic, or, as we should say, a trained, mind. He brought limitations and prejudices which he never outgrew. He also brought three things that matter more: an unaccountable genius; a tremendous capacity for hard work; and an extraordinary interest in men and women, based on a various, and not impeccable, experience of them.
He did not bring with him, as Horatio did (or said he did), a truant disposition, but one already fixed in the course it must pursue. Undoubtedly the emotionalist and the thinker had at one time struggled within him: Richard the Second with Bolingbroke, Romeo with Mercutio, Hotspur with Falstaff. Undoubtedly the time had been when emotion had held sway, and Shakespeare was both a sadder and wiser man thereby. But that time, we may be sure, was over before ever Shakespeare saw London and commenced dramatist. In all that he wrote for the stage, in the sonnets too, ​and even in the poems, which Hazlitt likens to ‘a couple of ice-houses . . . as hard, as glittering, and as cold,’ thought and reflection transcend emotion. From Biron in Love’s Labour’s Lost to Prospero in The Tempest, Shakespeare elaborates the principle that thought is the very core of life and feeling but its outer husk. ‘There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.’ His two greatest figures, the two who are most truly representative of him, Hamlet and Falstaff, are men of thought, not men of feeling, and not men of action. So in their different ways are Ulysses and Brutus, Henry the Fifth and Iago. In Cleopatra he paints not the witchery that inflames the passions, but that which unhinges the intellect. It is the Serpent, not the Siren, that he sees, and Antony sums her up in the words:
Where Marlowe pictures human aspiration as resulting from the clash of unresting and irreconcilable emotions, and declares:
Shakespeare views human character as the quiet consequence of the ‘godlike reason’ of the thinking animal:
It is again the thinking side of man that Hamlet ​stresses in the words which better than any others explain what attracted Shakespeare to the study of human psychology:
‘What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty . . . in apprehension how like a god.’
Shakespeare was as comparatively little interested in concrete incident as he was in abstract emotion. The overt act generally has no special significance for him. He was no pragmatist, as Bacon was, and would never have agreed with Bacon that ‘good thoughts (though God accept them) yet towards men are little better than good dreams, except they be put in act.’
The spectrum of life, running from dreams through thoughts into acts, was for the true Elizabethans brightest at the two ends. It was the glory and the weakness alike of Sidney, Spenser, and Ralegh, of Tamburlaine and Faustus, that they saw gorgeous emotional dreams passing directly into brilliant acts. The Scythian Shepherd speaks for them all when he says:
Their imaginations, in truth, were all clad in seven-league boots, and made but one careless step of the whole way from the violet of the earliest vision to the red of final accomplishment. It especially distinguishes Shakespeare that he kept his eye upon the middle of the spectrum, on that vital and revealing ‘interim’ of which Brutus speaks,
The deeds themselves mattered much less to Shakespeare. It is doubtful whether he would have cared to consider whether Hamlet actually did too little or Othello too much. Play after play shows in the carelessness of its closing scenes how rapidly his interest cooled when all the good thinking was over and it remained to reveal the tangible consequences of thought.
So in Shakespeare’s actual life he ignored the dreams of El Dorado and imperial England, and he ignored the facts of tobacco and the colonization of Virginia and the Fight of the Revenge, while scrutinizing day by day the thinking minds of the men and women about him. And thereby he gained a wisdom so deep that it concealed his plentiful lack of knowledge—a humanity so immense that we seldom note how completely he had failed to be Elizabethan.
* ↑ Midsummer Night’s Dream, II. i. 155–164.
* ↑ The Sonnets contain, perhaps, a further tribute to Southampton. In Henry V (Act V, Chorus) he flatters Essex; in Macbeth he lauds the progeny of Banquo and offers a testimonial (IV. iii.) to James I’s quackery regarding the ‘King’s evil’; in The Merry Wives of Windsor he may consciously have written himself down to the Queen’s taste.
* ↑ Merchant of Venice, I. ii. 70 ff.; Othello, II. iii. 79 ff.; Tempest, II. ii. 29 ff.
* ↑ Thomas Heywood is his nearest competitor.
* ↑ Preface to Much Ado about Nothing, Variorum edition.
* ↑ ‘If some enchanter should offer to recover for me a single hour of the irrecoverable past, I think I should choose to be placed among the audience at the Globe Theatre, in or about the year 1600, with liberty to run round between the acts and interview the author—actor-manager, Master Shakespeare, in his tiring room. For this I would give—one can afford to be lavish in bidding for the inconceivable—say a year of my life. There is nothing more difficult than to form a vivid and satisfactory picture of the material conditions under which Shakespeare worked; and there is nothing more fascinating than the attempt to do so.’
* ↑ Richard II, V. v. 76–94.
* ↑ 2 Henry IV, IV. v. 219 ff.
* ↑ Richard II, II. i. 40 ff.
* ↑ King John, V. vii. 112 ff.
* ↑ 2 Henry IV, IV. v. 212.
* ↑ Henry V, I. ii. 96.
* ↑ Ibid. III. vi. 151 ff.
* ↑ Ibid. III. ii. 78 ff.
* ↑ Richard II, II. i. 45 ff., 61 ff.
* ↑ Firth of Forth.
* ↑ Note the groom in Richard II.
* ↑ 1 Henry IV, III. i, 260.
* ↑ Love’s Labour’s Lost, V. ii. 407 ff.
* ↑ Eastward Ho, by Marston, Chapman, and Jonson, III. iii.
* ↑ 2 Henry IV, V. iii.
* ↑ Twelfth Night, II. ii. 88
* ↑ Tempest. I. ii. 146.
* ↑ Hamlet, II. ii. 259.
* ↑ Antony and Cleopatra, I. ii. 155.
* ↑ Hamlet, IV. iv. 36 ff.
* ↑ Hamlet, II. ii. 323 ff.
* ↑ Of Great Place.
* ↑ Julius Cæsar, II. i. 63.
Footnotes