Chapter XIII: Part 13

This would be the natural place to discuss Shakespeare's politics if we were to discuss them at all. But even if the question whether he shows any interest in the political differences of his time, or any sympathies or antipathies in regard to them, admits of an answer, it could be answered only by an examination of details; and I must pass it by, and offer only the briefest remarks on a wider question. Shakespeare, as we might expect, shows no sign of believing in what is sometimes called a political 'principle.' The main ideas which, consciously or unconsciously, seem to govern or emerge from his presentation of state affairs, might perhaps be put thus. National welfare is the end of politics, and the criterion by which political actions are to be judged. It implies of necessity 'degree'; that is, differences of position and function in the members of the body politic.[28] And the first requisites of national welfare are the observance of this degree, and the concordant performance of these functions in the general interest. But there appear to be no further absolute principles than these: beyond them all is relative to the particular case and its particular conditions. We find no hint, for example, in _Julius Caesar_ that Shakespeare regarded a monarchical form of government as intrinsically better than a republican, or _vice versa_; no trace in _Richard II._ that the author shares the king's belief in his inviolable right, or regards Bolingbroke's usurpation as justifiable. We perceive, again, pretty clearly in several plays a dislike and contempt of demagogues, and an opinion that mobs are foolish, fickle, and ungrateful. But these are sentiments which the most determined of believers in democracy, if he has sense, may share; and if he thinks that the attitude of aristocrats like Volumnia and Coriolanus is inhuman and as inexcusable as that of the mob, and that a mob is as easily led right as wrong and has plenty of good nature in it, he has abundant ground for holding that Shakespeare thought so too. That Shakespeare greatly liked and admired the typical qualities of the best kind of aristocrat seems highly probable; but then this taste has always been compatible with a great variety of political opinions. It is interesting but useless to wonder what his own opinions would have been at various periods of English history: perhaps the only thing we can be pretty sure of in regard to them is that they would never have been extreme, and that he would never have supposed his opponents to be entirely wrong.

We have tried to conjecture the impulses, passions, and errors with which Shakespeare could easily sympathise, and the virtues and types of character which he may have approved without much sympathy. It remains to ask whether we can notice tendencies and vices to which he felt any special antipathy; and it is obvious and safe to point to those most alien to a gentle, open, and free nature, the vices of a cold and hard disposition, self-centred and incapable of fusion with others. Passing over, again, the plainly hideous forms or extremes of such vice, as we see them in characters like Richard III., Iago, Goneril and Regan, or the Queen in _Cymbeline_, we seem to detect a particular aversion to certain vices which have the common mark of baseness; for instance, servility and flattery (especially when deliberate and practised with a view to self-advancement), feigning in friendship, and ingratitude. Shakespeare's _animus_ against the dog arises from the attribution of these vices to him, and against them in men are directed the invectives which seem to have a personal ring. There appears to be traceable also a feeling of a special, though less painful, kind against unmercifulness. I do not mean, of course, cruelty, but unforgivingness, and even the tendency to prefer justice to mercy. From no other dramatic author, probably, could there be collected such prolonged and heart-felt praises of mercy as from Shakespeare. He had not at all strongly, I think, that instinct and love of justice and retribution which in many men are so powerful; but Prospero's words,

they being penitent,
The sole drift of my purpose doth extend
Not a jot further,

came from his heart. He perceived with extreme clearness the connection of acts with their consequences; but his belief that in this sense 'the gods are just' was accompanied by the strongest feeling that forgiveness ought to follow repentance, and (if I may so put it) his favourite petition was the one that begins 'Forgive us our trespasses.' To conclude, I have fancied that he shows an unusual degree of disgust at slander and dislike of censoriousness; and where he speaks in the Sonnets of those who censured him he betrays an exceptionally decided feeling that a man's offences are his own affair and not the world's.[29]

Some of the vices which seem to have been particularly odious to Shakespeare have, we may notice, a special connection with prosperity and power. Men feign and creep and flatter to please the powerful and to win their own way to ease or power; and they envy and censure and slander their competitors in the race; and when they succeed, they are ungrateful to their friends and helpers and patrons; and they become hard and unmerciful, and despise and bully those who are now below them. So, perhaps, Shakespeare said to himself in those years when, as we imagine, melancholy and embitterment often overclouded his sky, though they did not obscure his faith in goodness and much less his intellectual vision. And prosperity and power, he may have added, come less frequently by merit than by those base arts or by mere fortune. The divorce of goodness and power was, to Shelley, the 'woe of the world'; if we substitute for 'goodness' the wider word 'merit,' we may say that this divorce, with the evil bred by power, is to Shakespeare also the root of bitterness. This fact, presented in its extreme form of the appalling cruelty of the prosperous, and the heart-rending suffering of the defenceless, forms the problem of his most tremendous drama. We have no reason to surmise that his own sufferings were calamitous; and the period which seems to be marked by melancholy and embitterment was one of outward, or at least financial, prosperity; but nevertheless we can hardly doubt that he felt on the small scale of his own life the influence of that divorce of power and merit. His complaint against Fortune, who had so ill provided for his life, runs through the Sonnets. Even if we could regard as purely conventional the declarations that his verses would make his friend immortal, it is totally impossible that he can have been unaware of the gulf between his own gifts and those of others, or can have failed to feel the disproportion between his position and his mind. Hamlet had never experienced

the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,

and that make the patient soul weary of life; the man who had experienced them was the writer of Sonnet 66, who cried for death because he was tired with beholding

desert a beggar born,
And needy nothing trimmed in jollity,

--a beggarly soul flaunting in brave array. Neither had Hamlet felt in his own person 'the insolence of office'; but the actor had doubtless felt it often enough, and we can hardly err in hearing his own voice in dramatic expressions of wonder and contempt at the stupid pride of mere authority and at men's slavish respect for it. Two examples will suffice. 'Thou hast seen a farmer's dog bark at a beggar, and the creature run from the cur? There thou mightst behold the great image of authority. A dog's obeyed in office': so says Lear, when madness has cleared his vision, and indignation makes the Timon-like verses that follow. The other example is almost too famous for quotation but I have a reason for quoting it:

man, proud man,
Drest in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he's most assured,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As makes the angels weep; who, with our spleens,
Would all themselves laugh mortal.

It is Isabella who says that; but it is scarcely in character; Shakespeare himself is speaking.[30]

It is with great hesitation that I hazard a few words on Shakespeare's religion. Any attempt to penetrate his reserve on this subject may appear a crowning impertinence; and, since his dramas are almost exclusively secular, any impressions we may form must here be even more speculative than usual. Yet it is scarcely possible to read him much without such speculations; and there are at least some theories which may confidently be dismissed. It cannot be called absolutely impossible that Shakespeare was indifferent to music and to the beauty of Nature, and yet the idea is absurd; and in the same way it is barely possible, and yet it is preposterous, to suppose that he was an ardent and devoted atheist or Brownist or Roman Catholic, and that all the indications to the contrary are due to his artfulness and determination not to get into trouble. There is no absurdity, on the other hand, nor of necessity anything hopeless, in the question whether there are signs that he belonged to this or that church, and was inclined to one mode of thought within it rather than to another. Only the question is scarcely worth asking for our present purpose, unless there is some reason to believe that he took a keen interest in these matters. Suppose, for example, that we had ground to accept a tradition that he 'died a papist,' this would not tell us much about him unless we had also ground to think that he lived a papist, and that his faith went far into his personality. But in fact we receive from his writings, it appears to me, a rather strong impression that he concerned himself little, if at all, with differences of doctrine or church government.[31] And we may go further. Have we not reason to surmise that he was not, in the distinctive sense of the word, a religious man--a man, that is to say, whose feelings and actions are constantly and strongly influenced by thoughts of his relation to an object of worship? If Shakespeare had been such a man, is it credible that we should find nothing in tradition or in his works to indicate the fact; and is it likely that we should find in his works some things that we do find there?[32]

Venturing with much doubt a little farther I will put together certain facts and impressions without at once drawing any conclusion from them. Almost all the speeches that can be called pronouncedly religious and Christian in phraseology and spirit are placed in the mouths of persons to whom they are obviously appropriate, either from their position (_e.g._ bishops, friars, nuns), or from what Shakespeare found in histories (_e.g._ Henry IV., V., and VI.), or for some other plain reason. We cannot build, therefore, on these speeches in the least. On the other hand (except, of course, where they are hypocritical or politic), we perceive in Shakespeare's tone in regard to them not the faintest trace of dislike or contempt; nor can we find a trace anywhere of such feelings, or of irreverence, towards Christian ideas, institutions, or customs (mere humorous irreverence is not relevant here); and in the case of 'sympathetic' characters, living in Christian times but not in any decided sense religious, no disposition is visible to suppress or ignore their belief in, and use of, religious ideas. Some characters, again, Christian or heathen, who appear to be drawn with rather marked sympathy, have strong, if simple, religious convictions (e.g. Horatio, Edgar, Hermione); and in others, of whom so much can hardly be said, but who strike many readers, rightly or wrongly, as having a good deal of Shakespeare in them (_e.g._ Romeo and Hamlet), we observe a quiet but deep sense that they and other men are neither their own masters nor responsible only to themselves and other men, but are in the hands of 'Providence' or guiding powers 'above.'[33]

To this I will add two remarks. To every one, I suppose, certain speeches sound peculiarly personal. Perhaps others may share my feeling about Hamlet's words:

There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will;

and about those other words of his:

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy;

and about the speech of Prospero ending, 'We are such stuff as dreams are made on.'[34] On the other hand, we observe that Hamlet seems to have arrived at that conviction as to the 'divinity' after reflection, and that, while he usually speaks as one who accepts the received Christian ideas, yet, when meditating profoundly, he appears to ignore them.[35] In the same way the Duke in _Measure for Measure_ is for the most part, and necessarily, a Christian; yet nobody would guess it from the great speech, 'Be absolute for death,' addressed by a supposed friar to a youth under sentence to die, yet containing not a syllable about a future life.[36]

Without adducing more of the endless but baffling material for a conclusion, I will offer the result left on my mind, and, merely for the sake of brevity, will state it with hardly any of the qualifications it doubtless needs. Shakespeare, I imagine, was not, in the sense assigned to the word some minutes ago, a religious man. Nor was it natural to him to regard good and evil, better and worse, habitually from a theological point of view. But (this appears certain) he had a lively and serious sense of 'conscience,' of the pain of self-reproach and self-condemnation, and of the torment to which this pain might rise.[37] He was not in the least disposed to regard conscience as somehow illusory or a human invention, but on the contrary thought of it (I use the most non-committal phrase I can find) as connected with the power that rules the world and is not escapable by man. He realised very fully and felt very keenly, after his youth was past and at certain times of stress, the sufferings and wrongs of men, the strength of evil, the hideousness of certain forms of it, and its apparent incurability in certain cases. And he must sometimes have felt all this as a terrible problem. But, however he may have been tempted, and may have yielded, to exasperation and even despair, he never doubted that it is best to be good; felt more and more that one must be patient and must forgive;[38] and probably maintained unbroken a conviction, practical if not formulated, that to be good is to be at peace with that unescapable power. But it is unlikely that he attempted to theorise further on the nature of the power. All was for him, in the end, mystery; and, while we have no reason whatever to attribute to him a belief in the ghosts and oracles he used in his dramas, he had no inclination to play the spy on God or to limit his power by our notions of it. That he had dreams and ponderings about the mystery such as he never put into the mouths of actors I do not doubt; but I imagine they were no more than dreams and ponderings and movings about in worlds unrealised.

Whether to this 'religion' he joined a more or less conventional acceptance of some or all of the usual Christian ideas, it is impossible to tell. There is no great improbability to me in the idea that he did not, but it is more probable to me that he did,--that, in fact, though he was never so tormented as Hamlet, his position in this matter was, at least in middle life (and he never reached old age), much like Hamlet's. If this were so it might naturally happen that, as he grew older and wearier of labour, and perhaps of the tumult of pleasure and thought and pain, his more personal religion, the natural piety which seems to gain in weight and serenity in the latest plays, came to be more closely joined with Christian ideas. But I can find no clear indications that this did happen; and though some have believed that they discovered these ideas displayed in full, though not explicitly, in the _Tempest_, I am not able to hear there more than the stream of Shakespeare's own 'religion' moving with its fullest volume and making its deepest and most harmonious music.[39]

This lecture must end, though its subject is endless, and I will touch on only one point more,--one that may to some extent recall and connect the scattered suggestions I have offered.

If we were obliged to answer the question which of Shakespeare's plays contains, not indeed the fullest picture of his mind, but the truest expression of his nature and habitual temper, unaffected by special causes of exhilaration or gloom, I should be disposed to choose _As You Like It_. It wants, to go no further, the addition of a touch of Sir Toby or Falstaff, and the ejection of its miraculous conversions of ill-disposed characters. But the misbehaviour of Fortune, and the hardness and ingratitude of men, form the basis of its plot, and are a frequent topic of complaint. And, on the other hand, he who is reading it has a smooth brow and smiling lips, and a heart that murmurs,

Happy is your grace,
That can translate the stubbornness of fortune
Into so quiet and so sweet a style.

And it is full not only of sweetness, but of romance, fun, humour of various kinds, delight in the oddities of human nature, love of modesty and fidelity and high spirit and patience, dislike of scandal and censure, contemplative curiosity, the feeling that in the end we are all merely players, together with a touch of the feeling that

Then is there mirth in heaven
When earthly things made even
Atone together.

And, finally, it breathes the serene holiday mood of escape from the toil, competition, and corruption of city and court into the sun and shadow and peace of the country, where one can be idle and dream and meditate and sing, and pursue or watch the deer as the fancy takes one, and make love or smile at lovers according to one's age.[40]

If, again, the question were put to us, which of Shakespeare's characters reveals most of his personality, the majority of those who consented to give an answer would answer 'Hamlet.' This impression may be fanciful, but it is difficult to think it wholly so, and, speaking for those who share it, I will try to trace some of its sources. There is a good deal of Shakespeare that is not in Hamlet. But Hamlet, we think, is the only character in Shakespeare who could possibly have composed his plays (though it appears unlikely, from his verses to Ophelia, that he could have written the best songs). Into Hamlet's mouth are put what are evidently Shakespeare's own views on drama and acting. Hamlet alone, among the great serious characters, can be called a humorist. When in some trait of another character we seem to touch Shakespeare's personality, we are frequently reminded of Hamlet.[41] When in a profound reflective speech we hear Shakespeare's voice, we usually hear Hamlet's too, and his peculiar humour and turns of phrase appear unexpectedly in persons otherwise unlike him and unlike one another. The most melancholy group of Sonnets (71-74) recalls Hamlet at once, here and there recalls even his words; and he and the writer of Sonnet 66 both recount in a list the ills that make men long for death. And then Hamlet 'was indeed honest and of an open and free nature'; sweet-tempered and modest, yet not slow to resent calumny or injury; of a serious but not a melancholy disposition; and the lover of his friend. And, with these traits, we remember his poet ecstasy at the glory of earth and sky and the marvellous endowments of man; his eager affectionate response to everything noble or sweet in human nature; his tendency to dream and to live in the world of his own mind; his liability to sudden vehement emotion, and his admiration for men whose blood and judgment are better commingled; the overwhelming effect of disillusionment upon him; his sadness, fierceness, bitterness and cynicism. All this, and more: his sensitiveness to the call of duty; his longing to answer to it, and his anguish over his strange delay; the conviction gathering in his tortured soul that man's purposes and failures are divinely shaped to ends beyond his vision; his incessant meditation, and his sense that there are mysteries which no meditation can fathom; nay, even little traits like his recourse to music to calm his excitement, or his feeling on the one hand that the peasant should not tread on the courtier's heels, and on the other that the mere courtier is spacious in the possession of dirt--all this, I say, corresponds with our impression of Shakespeare, or rather of characteristic traits in Shakespeare, probably here and there a good deal heightened, and mingled with others not characteristic of Shakespeare at all. And if this is more than fancy, it may explain to us why Hamlet is the most fascinating character, and the most inexhaustible, in all imaginative literature. What else should he be, if the world's greatest poet, who was able to give almost the reality of nature to creations totally unlike himself, put his own soul straight into this creation, and when he wrote Hamlet's speeches wrote down his own heart?[42]

1904.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Unquestionably it holds in a considerable degree of Browning, who
in _At the Mermaid_ and _House_ wrote as though he imagined that
neither his own work nor Shakespeare's betrayed anything of the inner
man. But if we are to criticise those two poems as arguments, we must
say that they involve two hopelessly false assumptions, that we have
to choose between a self-revelation like Byron's and no
self-revelation at all, and that the relation between a poet and his
work is like that between the inside and the outside of a house.

[2] Almost all Shakespearean criticism, of course, contains something
bearing on our subject; but I have a practical reason for mentioning
in particular Mr. Frank Harris's articles in the _Saturday Review_
for 1898. A good many of Mr. Harris's views I cannot share, and I had
arrived at almost all the ideas expressed in the lecture (except some
on the Sonnets question) before reading his papers. But I found in
them also valuable ideas which were quite new to me and would
probably be so to many readers. It is a great pity that the articles
are not collected and published in a book. [Mr. Harris has published,
in _The Man Shakespeare_, the substance of the articles, and also
matter which, in my judgment, has much less value.]

[3] He is apologising for an attack made on Shakespeare in a pamphlet
of which he was the publisher and Greene the writer.

[4] It was said of him, indeed, in his lifetime that, had he not
played some kingly parts in sport (_i.e._ on the stage), he would
have been a companion for a king.

[5] Nor, _vice versa_, does the possession of these latter qualities
at all imply, as some writers seem to assume, the absence of the
former or of gentleness.

[6] Fuller may be handing down a tradition, but it is not safe to
assume this. His comparison, on the other hand, of Shakespeare and
Jonson, in their wit combats, to an English man-of-war and a Spanish
great galleon, reads as if his own happy fancy were operating on the
reports, direct or indirect, of eye-witnesses.

[7] See, for example, Act IV. Sc. v., to which I know no parallel in
the later tragedies.

[8] I allude to Sonnet 110, Mr. Beeching's note on which seems to be
unquestionably right: 'There is no reference to the poet's profession
of player. The sonnet gives the confession of a favourite of
society.' This applies, I think, to the whole group of sonnets (it
begins with 107) in which the poet excuses his neglect of his friend,
though there are _also_ references to his profession and its effect
on his nature and his reputation. (By a slip Mr. Beeching makes the
neglect last for three years.)

[9] It is perhaps most especially in his rendering of the shock and
the effects of _disillusionment_ in open natures that we seem to feel
Shakespeare's personality. The nature of this shock is expressed in
Henry's words to Lord Scroop:

I will weep for thee;
For this revolt of thine, methinks, is like
Another fall of man.

[10] There is nothing of this semi-reality, of course, in the
_passion_ of love as portrayed, for example, in men so different as
Orlando, Othello, Antony, Troilus, whose love for Cressida resembles
that of Romeo for Juliet. What I have said of Romeo's 'love' for
Rosaline corresponds roughly with Coleridge's view; and, without
subscribing to all of Coleridge's remarks, I believe he was right in
finding an intentional contrast between this feeling and the passion
that displaces it (though it does not follow that the feeling would
not have become a genuine passion if Rosaline had been kind). Nor do
I understand the notion that Coleridge's view is refuted and even
rendered ridiculous by the mere fact that Shakespeare found the
Rosaline story in Brooke (Halliwell-Phillipps, _Outlines_, 7th ed.,
illustrative note 2). Was he compelled then to use whatever he found?
Was it his practice to do so? The question is always _why_ he used
what he found, and _how_. Coleridge's view of this matter, it need
hardly be said, is far from indisputable; but it must be judged by
our knowledge of Shakespeare's mind and not of his material alone. I
may add, as I have referred to Halliwell-Phillipps, that Shakespeare
made changes in the story he found; that it is arbitrary to assume
(not that it matters) that Coleridge, who read Steevens, was unaware
of Shakespeare's use of Brooke; and that Brooke was by no means a
'wretched poetaster.'

[11] _Hamlet_, _Measure for Measure_, _Othello_, _Troilus and
Cressida_, _King Lear_, _Timon of Athens_. See _Shakespearean
Tragedy_, pp. 79-85, 275-6. I should like to insist on the view there
taken that the tragedies subsequent to _Lear_ and _Timon_ do not show
the pressure of painful feelings.

[12] It is not implied that these scenes are certainly Shakespeare's;
but I see no sufficient ground for decisively rejecting them.

[13] That experience, certainly in part and probably wholly, belongs
to an earlier time, since sonnets 138 and 144 were printed in the
_Passionate Pilgrim_. But I see no difficulty in that. What bears
little fruit in a normal condition of spirits may bear abundant fruit
later, in moods of discouragement and exasperation induced largely by
other causes.

[14] _The Sonnets of Shakespeare with an Introduction and Notes._
Ginn & Co., 1904.

[15] I find that Mr. Beeching, in the Stratford Town edition of
Shakespeare (1907), has also urged these considerations.

[16] I do not mean to imply that Meres necessarily refers to the
sonnets we possess, or that all of these are likely to have been
written by 1598.

[17] A fact to be remembered in regard to references to the social
position of the friend.

[18] Mr. Beeching's illustration of the friendship of the sonnets
from the friendship of Gray and Bonstetten is worth pages of
argument.

[19] In 125 the poet repudiates the accusation that his friendship is
too much based on beauty.

[20] This does not imply that the Sonnets are as early as the _Two
Gentlemen of Verona_, and much less that they are earlier.

[21] This seems to be referred to in lines by John Davies of
Hereford, reprinted in Ingleby's _Shakespeare's Centurie of Prayse_,
second edition, pp. 58, 84, 94. In the first of these passages, dated
1603 (and perhaps in the second, 1609), there are signs that Davies
had read Sonnet 111, a fact to be noted with regard to the question
of the chronology of the Sonnets.

[22] 'Mistress Tearsheet' too 'would fain hear some music,' and
'Sneak's noise' had to be sent for (2 _Henry IV._, II. iv. 12).

[23] It is tempting, though not safe, to infer from the _Tempest_ and
the great passage in _Pericles_ that Shakespeare must have been in a
storm at sea; but that he felt the poetry of a sea-storm is beyond
all doubt. Few moments in the reading of his works are more
overwhelming than that in which, after listening not without
difficulty to the writer of the first two Acts of _Pericles_,
suddenly, as the third opens, one hears the authentic voice:

Thou god of this great vast, rebuke these surges
That wash both heaven and hell.... The seaman's whistle
Is as a whisper in the ears of death,
Unheard.

Knowing that this is coming, I cannot stop to read the Prologue to
Act III., though I believe Shakespeare wrote it. How it can be
imagined that he did more than touch up Acts I. and II. passes my
comprehension.

I may call attention to another point. Unless I mistake, there is
nothing in Shakespeare's authorities, as known to us, which
corresponds with the feeling of Timon's last speech, beginning,

Come not to me again: but say to Athens,
Timon hath made his everlasting mansion
Upon the beached verge of the salt flood:

a feeling made more explicit in the final speech of Alcibiades.

[24] The lily seems to be in almost all cases the Madonna lily. It is
very doubtful whether the lily of the valley is referred to at all.

[25] But there is something disappointing, and even estranging, in
Sonnet 50, which, promising to show a real sympathy, cheats us in the
end. I may observe, without implying that the fact has any personal
significance, that the words about 'the poor beetle that we tread
upon' are given to a woman (Isabella), and that it is Marina who
says:

I trod upon a worm against my will,
But I wept for it.

[26] Three times in one drama Shakespeare refers to this detestable
trait. See _Shakespearean Tragedy_, p. 268, where I should like to
qualify still further the sentence containing the qualification 'on
the whole.' Good judges, at least, assure me that I have admitted too
much against the dog.

[27] Nor can I recall any sign of liking, or even approval, of that
'prudent, _cautious_, self-control' which, according to a passage in
Burns, is 'wisdom's root.'

[28] The _locus classicus_, of course, is _Troilus and Cressida_, I.
iii. 75 ff.

[29] Of all the evils inflicted by man on man those chosen for
mention in the dirge in _Cymbeline_, one of the last plays, are the
frown o' the great, the tyrant's stroke, slander, censure rash.

[30] Having written these paragraphs, I should like to disclaim the
belief that Shakespeare was habitually deeply discontented with his
position in life.

[31] Allusions to puritans show at most what we take almost for
granted, that he did not like precisians or people hostile to the
stage.

[32] In the Sonnets, for example, there is an almost entire absence
of definitely religious thought or feeling. The nearest approach to
it is in Sonnet 146 ('Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth'),
where, however, there is no allusion to a divine law or judge.
According to Sonnet 129, lust in action is

The expense of spirit in a waste of shame;

but no word shows that it is also felt as alienation from God. It
must be added that in 108 and 110 there are references to the Lord's
Prayer and, perhaps, to the First Commandment, from which a decidedly
religious Christian would perhaps have shrunk. Of course I am not
saying that we can draw any _necessary_ inference from these facts.

[33] It is only this 'quiet but deep sense' that is significant. No
inference can be drawn from the fact that the mere belief in powers
above seems to be taken as a matter of course in practically all the
characters, good and bad alike. On the other hand there may well be
something symptomatic in the apparent absence of interest in
theoretical disbelief in such powers and in the immortality of the
soul. I have observed elsewhere that the atheism of Aaron does not
increase the probability that the conception of the character is
Shakespeare's.

[34] With the first compare, what to me has, though more faintly, the
same ring, Hermione's

If powers divine
Behold our human actions, as they do:

with the second, Helena's

It is not so with Him that all things knows
As 'tis with us that square our guess by shows;
But most it is presumption in us when
The help of heaven we count the act of men:

followed soon after by Lafeu's remark:

They say miracles are past; and we have our philosophical persons
to make modern and familiar things supernatural and causeless.
Hence it is that we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves
into seeming knowledge, when we should submit ourselves to an
unknown fear.

[35] It is worth noting that the reference, which appears in the
First Quarto version of 'To be or not to be,' to 'an everlasting
judge,' disappears in the revised versions.

[36] The suggested inference, of course, is that this speech, thus
out of character, and Hamlet's 'To be or not to be' (though that is
in character), show us Shakespeare's own mind. It has force, I think,
but not compulsory force. The topics of these speeches are, in the
old sense of the word, commonplaces. Shakespeare may have felt, Here
is my chance to show what I can do with certain feelings and thoughts
of supreme interest to men of all times and places and modes of
belief. It would not follow from this that they are not 'personal,'
but any inference to a non-acceptance of received religious ideas
would be much weakened. ('All the world's a stage' is a patent
example of the suggested elaboration of a commonplace.)

[37] What actions in particular _his_ conscience approved and
disapproved is another question and one not relevant here.

[38] This does not at all imply to Shakespeare, so far as we see,
that evil is never to be forcibly resisted.

[39] I do not mean to reject the idea that in some passages in the
_Tempest_ Shakespeare, while he wrote them with a dramatic purpose,
also thought of himself. It seems to me likely. And if so, there
_may_ have been such a thought in the words,

And thence retire me to my Milan, where
Every third thought shall be my grave;

and also in those lines about prayer and pardon which close the
Epilogue, and to my ear come with a sudden effect of great
seriousness, contrasting most strangely with their context. If they
_had_ a grave and personal under-meaning it cannot have been intended
for the audience, which would take the prayer as addressed to itself.

[40] It may be added that _As You Like It_, though idyllic, is not so
falsely idyllic as some critics would make it. It is based, we may
roughly say, on a contrast between court and country; but those who
inhale virtue from the woodland are courtiers who bring virtue with
them, and the country has its churlish masters and unkind or uncouth
maidens.

[41] This has been strongly urged and fully illustrated by Mr.
Harris.

[42] It may be suggested that, in the catalogue above, I should have
mentioned that imaginative 'unreality' in love referred to on p. 326.
But I do not see in Hamlet either this, or any sign that he took
Ophelia for an Imogen or even a Juliet, though naturally he was less
clearly aware of her deficiencies than Shakespeare.

I may add, however, another item to the catalogue. We do not feel
that the problems presented to most of the tragic heroes could have
been fatal to Shakespeare himself. The immense breadth and clearness
of his intellect would have saved him from the fate of Othello,
Troilus, or Antony. But we do feel, I think, and he himself may have
felt, that he could not have coped with Hamlet's problem; and there
is no improbability in the idea that he may have experienced in some
degree the melancholia of his hero.

SHAKESPEARE'S THEATRE AND AUDIENCE.

SHAKESPEARE'S THEATRE AND AUDIENCE.

Why should we concern ourselves with Shakespeare's theatre and audience? The vast majority of his readers since the Restoration have known nothing about them, and have enjoyed his plays enormously. And if they have enjoyed without fully understanding, it was for want of imagination and of knowledge of human nature, and not from ignorance of the conditions under which his plays were produced. At any rate, such ignorance does not exclude us from the _soul_ of Shakespearean drama, any more than from the soul of Homeric epic or Athenian tragedy; and it is the soul that counts and endures. For the rest, we all know that Shakespeare's time was rough, indecorous, and inexpert in regard to machinery; and so we are prepared for coarse speech and primitive stage-arrangements, and we make allowance for them without thinking about the matter. Antiquarians may naturally wish to know more; but what more is needed for intelligent enjoyment of the plays?

I have begun with these questions because I sympathise with their spirit. Everything I am going to speak of in this lecture is comparatively unimportant for the appreciation of that which is most vital in Shakespeare; and if I were allowed my choice between an hour's inspection of a performance at the Globe and a glimpse straight into his mind when he was planning the _Tempest_, I should not hesitate which to choose. Nevertheless, to say nothing of the intrinsic interest of antiquarian knowledge, we cannot make a clear division between the soul and body, or the eternal and the perishable, in works of art. Nor can we lay the finger on a line which separates that which has poetic interest from that which has none. Nor yet can we assume that any knowledge of Shakespeare's theatre and audience, however trivial it may appear, may not help us to appreciate, or save us from misapprehending, the 'soul' of a play or a scene. If our own souls were capacious and vivid enough, every atom of information on these subjects, or again on the material he used in composing, would so assist us. The danger of devotion to such knowledge lies merely in our weakness. Research, though toilsome, is easy; imaginative vision, though delightful, is difficult; and we may be tempted to prefer the first. Or we note that in a given passage Shakespeare has used what he found in his authority; and we excuse ourselves from asking why he used it and what he made of it. Or we see that he has done something that would please his audience; and we dismiss it as accounted for, forgetting that perhaps it also pleased _him_, and that we have to account for _that_. Or knowledge of his stage shows us the stage-convenience of a scene; and we say that the scene was due to stage-convenience, as if the cause of a thing must needs be single and simple. Such errors provoke the man who reads his Shakespeare poetically, and make him blaspheme our knowledge. But we ought not to fall into them; and we cannot reject any knowledge that may help us into Shakespeare's mind because of the danger it brings.

I cannot attempt to describe Shakespeare's theatre and audience, and much less to discuss the evidence on which a description must be based, or the difficult problems it raises. I must confine myself for the most part to a few points which are not always fully realised, or on which there is a risk of misapprehension.

1.

Shakespeare, we know, was a popular playwright. I mean not only that many of his plays were favourites in his day, but that he wrote, mainly at least, for the more popular kind of audience, and that, within certain limits, he conformed to its tastes. He was not, to our knowledge, the author of masques composed for performance at Court or in a great mansion, or of dramas intended for a University or one of the Inns of Court; and though his company for some time played at the Blackfriars, we may safely assume that the great majority of his works were meant primarily for a common or 'public' theatre like the Globe. The broad distinction between a 'private' and a 'public' theatre is familiar, and I need only remind you that at the former, which was smaller, provided seats even in the area, and was nowhere open to the weather, the audience was more select. Accordingly, dramatists who express their contempt for the audience, and their disapproval of those who consult its tastes, often discriminate between the audiences at the private and public theatres, and reserve their unmeasured language for the latter. It was for the latter that Shakespeare mainly wrote; and it is pretty clear that Jonson, who greatly admired and loved him, was still of opinion that he condescended to his audience.[1]

So far we seem to be on safe ground; and yet even here there is some risk of mistake. We are not to imagine that the audience at a private theatre (say the Blackfriars) accepted Jonson's dramatic theories, while the audience at the Globe rejected them; or that the one was composed chiefly of cultured and 'judicious' gentlemen, and the other of riotous and malodorous plebeians; and still less that Shakespeare tried to please the latter section in preference to the former, and was beloved by the one more than by the other. The two audiences must have had the same general character, differing only in degree. Neither of them accepted Jonson's theories, nor were the 'judicious' of one mind on that subject. The same play was frequently offered to both. Both were very mixed. The tastes to which objection was taken cannot have been confined to the mob. From our knowledge of human nature generally, and of the Elizabethan nobility and gentry in particular, we may be sure of this; and Jonson himself implies it. Nor is it credible that an appreciation of the best things was denied to the mob, which doubtless loved what we should despise, but appears also to have admired what we admire, and to have tolerated more poetry than most of us can stomach. Neither can these groundlings have formed the majority of the 'public' audience or have been omnipotent in their theatre, when it was possible for dramatists (Shakespeare included) to say such rude things of them to their faces. We must not delude ourselves as to these matters; and in particular we must realise that the mass of the audience in both kinds of theatre must have been indifferent to the unities of time and place, and more or less so to improbabilities and to decorum (at least as we conceive it) both in manners and in speech; and that it must have liked excitement, the open exhibition of violent and bloody deeds, and the intermixture of seriousness and mirth. What distinguished the more popular audience, and the more popular section in it, was a higher degree of this indifference and this liking, and in addition a special fondness for certain sources of inartistic joy. The most prominent of these, perhaps, were noise; rant; mere bawdry; 'shews'; irrelevant songs, ballads, jokes, dances, and clownage in general; and, lastly, target-fighting and battles.[2]

We may describe Shakespeare's practice in broad and general terms by saying that he neither resisted the wishes of his audience nor gratified them without reserve. He accepted the type of drama that he found, and developed it without altering its fundamental character. And in the same way, in particular matters, he gave the audience what it wanted, but in doing so gave it what it never dreamed of. It liked tragedy to be relieved by rough mirth, and it got the Grave-diggers in _Hamlet_ and the old countryman in _Antony and Cleopatra_. It liked a 'drum and trumpet' history, and it got _Henry V._ It liked clowns or fools, and it got Feste and the Fool in _King Lear_. Shakespeare's practice was by no means always on this level, but this was its tendency; and I imagine that (unless perhaps in early days) he knew clearly what he was doing, did it deliberately, and, when he gave the audience poor stuff, would not seriously have defended himself. Jonson, it would seem, did not understand this position. A fool was a fool to him; and if a play could be called a drum and trumpet history it was at once condemned in his eyes. One can hardly doubt that he was alluding to the _Tempest_ and the _Winter's Tale_ when, a few years after the probable date of their appearance, he spoke of writers who 'make nature afraid in their plays,' begetting 'tales, tempests, and such like drolleries,' and bringing in 'a servant-monster' or 'a nest of antiques.' Caliban was a 'monster,' and the London public loved to gape at monsters; and so, it appears, that wonderful creation was to Jonson something like the fat woman, or the calf with five legs, that we pay a penny to see at a fair. In fact (how could he fail to take the warning?) he saw Caliban with the eyes of Trinculo and Stephano. 'A strange fish!' says Trinculo: 'were I in England now, as once I was, and had but this fish painted, not a holiday fool there but would give a piece of silver.' 'If I can recover him,' says Stephano, 'and keep him tame and get to Naples with him, he's a present for any emperor that ever trod on neat's-leather.' Shakespeare understood his monster otherwise; but, I fancy, when Jonson fulminated at the Mermaid against Caliban, he smiled and said nothing.

But my present subject is rather the tastes of the audience than Shakespeare's way of meeting them.[3] Let me give two illustrations of them which may have some novelty. His public, in the first place, dearly loved to see soldiers, combats, and battles on the stage. They swarm in some of the dramas a little earlier than Shakespeare's time, and the cultured dramatists speak very contemptuously of these productions, if not of Shakespeare's historical plays. We may take as an example the First Part of _Henry VI._, a feeble piece, to which Shakespeare probably contributed touches throughout, and perhaps one or two complete scenes. It appears from the stage directions (which may be defective, but cannot well be redundant) that in this one play there were represented a pitched battle of two armies, an attack on a city wall with scaling-ladders, two street-scuffles, four single combats, four skirmishes, and seven excursions. No genuine play of Shakespeare's, I suppose, is so military from beginning to end; and we know how in _Henry V._ he laments that he must disgrace the name of Agincourt by showing four or five men with vile and ragged foils

Right ill-disposed in brawl ridiculous.

Still he does show them; and his serious dramas contain such a profusion of combats and battles as no playwright now would dream of exhibiting. We expect these things perhaps in the English history-plays, and we find them in abundance there: but not there alone. The last Act in _Julius Caesar_, _Troilus and Cressida_, _King Lear_, _Macbeth_, and _Cymbeline_; the fourth Act of _Antony and Cleopatra_; the opening Acts of _Coriolanus_,--these are all full of battle-scenes. If battle cannot be shown, it can be described. If it cannot be described, still soldiers can be shown, and twice in _Hamlet_ Fortinbras and his army march upon the stage.[4] At worst there can be street-brawls and single fights, as in _Romeo and Juliet_. In reading Shakespeare we scarcely realise how much of this kind is exhibited. In seeing him acted we do not fully realise it, for much of it is omitted. But beyond doubt it helped to make him the most popular dramatist of his time.

If we examine Shakespeare's battles we shall observe a certain peculiarity, which is connected with the nature of his theatre and also explains the treatment of them in ours. In most cases he does not give a picture of two whole armies engaged, but makes a pair of combatants rush upon the stage, fight, and rush off again; and this pair is succeeded by a second, and perhaps by a third. This hurried series of single combats admitted of speech-making; perhaps it also gave some impression of the changes and confusion of a battle. Our tendency, on the other hand, is to contrive one spectacle with scenic effects, or even to exhibit one magnificent tableau in which nobody says a word. And this plan, though it has the advantage of getting rid of Shakespeare's poetry, is not exactly dramatic. It is adopted chiefly because the taste of our public is, or is supposed to be, less dramatic than spectacular, and because, unlike the Elizabethans, we are able to gratify such a taste. But there is another fact to be remembered here. Few playgoers now can appreciate a fencing-match, and much fewer a broad-sword and target fight. But the Elizabethan public went to see performances of this kind as we go to see cricket or football matches. They might watch them in the very building which at other times was used as a playhouse.[5] They could judge of the merit of the exhibition when Hotspur and Prince Henry fought, when Macduff 'laid on,' or when Tybalt and Mercutio used their rapiers. And this was probably another reason why Shakespeare's battles so often consist of single combats, and why these scenes were beloved by the simpler folk among his audience.

Our second illustration concerns the popular appetite for musical and other sounds. The introduction of songs and dances[6] was censured as a corrupt gratification of this appetite. And so it was when the songs and dances were excessive in number, irrelevant, or out of keeping with the scene. I do not remember that in Shakespeare's plays this is ever the case; but, in respect of songs, we may perhaps take Marston's _Antonio and Mellida_ as an instance of abuse. For in each of the two Parts of that play there are directions for five songs; and, since not even the first lines of these songs are printed, we must suppose that the leader of the band, or the singing actor in the company, introduced whatever he chose. In addition to songs and dances, the musicians, at least in some plays, performed between the Acts; and the practice of accompanying certain speeches by low music--a practice which in some performances of Shakespeare now has become a pest--has the sanction of several Elizabethan playwrights, and (to a slight extent) of Shakespeare. It seems clear, for example, that in _Twelfth Night_ low music was played while the lovely opening lines ('That strain again') were being spoken, and also during a part of the dialogue preceding the song 'Come away, come away, death.' Some lines, too, of Lorenzo's famous speech about music in the _Merchant of Venice_ were probably accompanied; and there is a still more conspicuous instance in the scene where Lear wakes from his long sleep and sees Cordelia standing by his side.

But, beyond all this, if we attend to the stage-directions we shall realise that in the serious plays of Shakespeare other musical sounds were of frequent occurrence. Almost always the ceremonial entrance of a royal person is marked by a 'flourish' or a 'sennet' on trumpets, cornets, or hautboys; and wherever we have armies and battles we find directions for drums, or for particular series of notes of trumpets or cornets appropriate to particular military movements. In the First Part of _Henry VI._, to take that early play again, we must imagine a dead march, two other marches, three retreats, three sennets, seven flourishes, eighteen alarums; and there are besides five directions for drums, one for a horn, and five for soundings, of a kind not specified, by trumpets. In the last three scenes of the first Act in _Coriolanus_--scenes containing less than three hundred and fifty lines--there are directions for a parley, a retreat, five flourishes, and eight alarums, with three, less specific, for trumpets, and four for drums. We find about twenty such directions in _King Lear_, and about twenty-five in _Macbeth_, a short play in which hautboys seem to have been unusually favoured.[7] It is evident that the audience loved these sounds, which, from their prevalence in passages of special kinds, seem to have been intended chiefly to stimulate excitement, and sometimes to heighten impressions of grandeur or of awe.