CHAPTER VI
SHAKESPEARE
Our study has perhaps already made it evident that Shakespeare's tragedies were in many ways the product of a rapid and complex evolution. At the same time it is clear that, until Shakespeare, Elizabethan tragedy with all its genius and innovations had failed to attain finality of art, or to mark out any sure pathway thither. It was still in its formative period when he created out of it something new and immortal, and its development continued after his death mainly in response to forces not of his initiating. For the past two centuries, to a constantly increasing body of spectators and readers, his tragedies have had a life entirely unconnected with the works of his contemporaries, an existence that has dominated our theatres and our conceptions of tragedy, and become a part of the daily living and the permanent ideals of the race. It is therefore necessary to separate his plays from the mass of tragedies, and to review them for a moment as the creations of a genius that was the chief creator as well as the glory of English tragedy.
Two points of view that have been largely maintained in nineteenth century criticism of Shakespeare may, however, be neglected in our summary. His plays have been viewed as the reflection of his personal experiences and emotions; and his return to tragic themes about 1600 and his occupation with them for the next eight years have been connected with a supposed period of spiritual depression in his own life. Again, the generalization of experience and the abundant wisdom of his tragedies have been viewed as the result of a conscious and rather systematic philosophy of life. Much might be said for these attitudes of criticism. Any attempt to describe the plays in terms of our emotions as readers is likely to result in the attribution of those emotions to the author, an interesting process of analogy and one hardly to be disproved. Any attempt to survey his work as a whole and to relate its parts is likely to result in the systemization of his message and philosophy. But for students of the growth of his dramatic art under the peculiar conditions of the reigns of Elizabeth and James, these nineteenth century points of view involve dangerous critical anachronisms. Shakespeare does not seem to have been a lyric Shelley or Byron, making poetry out of his changing moods, or a Tennyson or Browning generalizing life in the persons of his men and women. There seems no reason for separating him from his companion poets and playwrights. Like them he was in the first place telling a story for the stage; like them he found in these plays opportunity for the expression of his knowledge of human motives in the guise of beautiful verse; and like them, when he chose tragic themes, he became absorbed in the presentation of the tragic facts and problems of life. Our attempt to determine his relations to them is not to discover indebtedness large or minute, but rather by the safest approach to arrive at a right appreciation of his genius and its transcendent contribution to tragedy.
For the purpose of our survey we may have the four great tragedies chiefly in mind. The early tragedies are manifestly the products of an experimental period and the precursors of the latter plays; and the three Roman histories have a subordinate and contributory rather than an essential and preëminent part in his achievement in tragedy. Whatever can be said of the four great tragedies applies in its essentials to all.
All these plays taken together illustrate the extraordinary amalgamation of the medieval and classical inheritances that English tragedy had received as a birthright. No play escapes from its narrative sources, and some are bound closely by them; yet the choice of sources often indicates the influence of the Senecan formula, sensational externals giving opportunity for an introspective analysis of emotional crises, notably in the stories of crime, revenge, and retribution. Their enormous variety of incident, their mingling of the comic and the tragic, their admission of physical horrors, deaths, and spectacles mark the survival of the medieval tradition, while the aphoristic and heightened style, the ghosts and the soliloquies are derivatives from Seneca. The freedom of the medieval stage to the presentation of all sorts of matters accounts in part for their splendid comprehensiveness, while classical theory is partly responsible for their restriction to momentous events and supernormal persons. Their structure remains epic and popular, but progress toward dramatic unity seems conditioned by the Senecan five-act scheme. The medieval idea of the pagan deity Fortune is preserved; and conceptions of good and evil, like those of the morality, stand side by side with classical conceptions of the struggle between the individual and fate. The union of these diverse elements has become too close for disentanglement. "Macbeth," based upon Holinshed's chronicle, comes nearest in conception and treatment to classical tragedy; "Antony and Cleopatra" in structure and method reverts the nearest to medieval models.
More distinct contemporary influences reappear similarly amalgamated and transformed. In "Hamlet" we have a play closely related to those of a particular species; but in the other plays of Shakespeare's maturity nothing like close relationship can be found to the great examples of Marlowe, to the peculiar type introduced by Kyd and developed by Marston, or to the contemporary efforts of Chapman and Jonson. Any one play doubtless responded to a tangle of influences not now to be separated. Current popular plays, practices on the stage, the personalities of the actors, Shakespeare's own preceding plays, contemporary non-dramatic literature, current events such as the Essex rebellion or the Gunpowder Plot, and hosts of other influences were at work directing the development of an old story into a tragedy. Taking the plays as a body, some of the more important of these limiting and directing influences still remain discernible in the transformed result.
All the tragedies but "Othello" and "Romeo and Juliet," only partial exceptions, relate the falls of princes and the revolutions of kingdoms. These stories of princes are of the same kind as in other Elizabethan tragedy. In a setting of court and camp they place sensational crimes, and trace the accompaniments and consequences. Their themes are revenge, madness, tyranny, conspiracy, lust, adultery, and jealousy. They abound in villany, intrigue, and slaughter. They avoid Senecan atrocities and the abnormal phases of lust; but the tearing out of Gloster's eyes recalls the horrors of the early plays; while revenge, conspiracy, and villany are as prominent as in the contemporary tragedies of Marston, Jonson, and Chapman. Three of the stories include ghosts, while in "Macbeth" the weird sisters offer an opportunity for a most original treatment of the supernatural. Comedy is always combined with tragedy, and the medieval tradition and the popular taste for an emotional contrast receive artistic vindication in the grotesqueness of "Hamlet" and "Lear." Each plot, like those of Marlowe's plays, centres about a great personality and illustrates a temperament dominated by passion. It traces the course of folly, mistake, or sin to the wages of death as in "Lear," "Othello," and "Antony and Cleopatra"; or it begins with a murder and records its progeny of crime and death as in "Julius Cæsar," "Hamlet," and "Macbeth."
Shakespeare's choice of stories was clearly determined by the Elizabethan conception of tragedy and by the current tastes of the theatre. And by these stories his imagination was directed and limited. However absorbed he became in character or ethics, he never neglected the plot or the theatre. Consequently the great revelation of tragic fact which he gave to posterity was limited by these stories of crime and hampered by their improbabilities and stage effects. The tragedy of ambition is limited to the story of a murderer who sees a ghost; and the tragedy of ingratitude is joined to a relation of senile folly, crime, and the humors of Tom of Bedlam. Even his interpretation of human motives suffers, for the bloodthirstiness of Hamlet and the perverse reticence of Cordelia belong to the old plots as much as to the characters. Yet Shakespeare's greatness of mind no less than his responsiveness to contemporary taste appears in his very choice of material. Whether he took the oft-told tragedies of Cæsar, Brutus, Antony and Cleopatra, or the old plays of Hamlet and Lear, or the neglected themes of Othello and Macbeth, he chose always stories of great dramatic interest and those that presented the range and vicissitudes of human passion. His attraction for each story was evidently in the emotional conflict that made each protagonist a great acting part and also a fascinating study of human motive.
Moreover, in his general treatment of this material there is a uniformity that gives some hint of a Shakespearean definition of tragedy. In each play a man of great attainments is presented as involved in a moral conflict that results in his death. This conflict is two-fold, internal between opposing desires, and external against some persons of the counter-actions. Conflicting forces contend for mastery in the hero's breast, and from their confusion he drives on to action that is disastrous. The unusual powers, the best potentialities, of his nature are opposed and thwarted by the forces of chance and circumstance beyond his control; by the force of evil, whether in his own breast or represented by the crime and intrigue of others; and still further, by a defect or deficiency in his own personality. The force of chance, equivalent to the Greek Fate, plays a part in all tragic story and drama; the power of evil without or within was the counter-force in medieval drama, and was the theme most powerfully dwelt upon by Shakespeare's immediate contemporaries. The fateful power of incompatibility of temperament with conditions of life seems to have been Shakespeare's own conception.
In Sophocles, arrogance and audacity are accounted evil; in Marlowe and Chapman, it is intensity of desire that drives to disaster; but in Shakespeare the melancholy and reflective temper of Hamlet and the generous and credulous magnanimity of Othello are the allies of untoward circumstance and designing villany in bringing suffering to the good and failure to the potent. The greatness of Shakespeare's conception, however, results from the massing of all these combatants against the hero. The conflict thus gains in the comprehensiveness of its presentation of life; and human nature in the face of such odds becomes magnificent even in failure. Hero wars with villain; human intrepidity and wisdom with chance and destiny; conscience with sin; greatness of purpose with crippling defects of temperament.
Such a conception of tragedy involves a recognition of the blindness of chance that cannot be squared with any theory of poetic justice or theological view of the rewards due to virtue. But it also involves a recognition of moral law that results in the punishment of its violators. The villains never escape as they do in comedy. The wages of sin are always death, though the reward of virtue is not happiness. The vastness of evil in the world, its malignant influence, its temporary triumphs are conceived in a manner not different from that of contemporary thought. The doctrines of total depravity and of moral responsibility go side by side as in medieval drama, theology, and psychology. In the depiction of the waste of effort, the expense of spirit, the crippling of greatness by weakness, the ineffectually of virtue, Shakespeare gave a far more comprehensive and a far more penetrating representation of tragic fact than the world had yet known, but without professing any solution of its mysteries.
Such a conception gives unity to the action of each play, but not always a unity that governs details of structure. The structure of a tragedy cannot be described in terms of a system, for the dramatic presentation of each play differs from the others and conforms to the story it relates. There are many survivals of the early epic lawlessness, as in "Antony and Cleopatra" and "Lear"; and in no play is the main action kept entirely free from intruding incongruities. Neither act nor scene receives much regard as an integral unit of structure. The most noticeable structural division is due to an event of extraordinary importance reached somewhere in the middle of the play. This point, to which the terms climax or crisis are sometimes applicable, brings to an end one important development of the action, and thus divides the play into two parts. Cæsar's murder, Duncan's murder, Lear's madness complete one course of tragic incident and introduce us to another.
The effectiveness of Shakespeare's construction, however, was not due to a formulation of system or rule but to his intuition and experience. His sense of what parts of a narrative should be acted and what parts not, had developed beyond that of most of his contemporaries. In comparison with his own earlier plays the tragedies contain little, whether comic, spectacular, or essential to the main tragic action, which had not a manifest value on the stage. His ability to create great dramatic situations was also at its height, and the great scenes are prepared for and emphasized by what precedes, so that they gain all the effect possible from the dramatic construction. Thus, the appearance of the ghost, the play within the play, the funeral of Ophelia, and the final slaughter are given a value in the mere narration of the story for which there is no parallel in the many other treatments of similar stories. Of far more importance is his use of the developments of character as the determining factors of the progress of the dramatic narrative. The rapidity with which the first two acts of "Macbeth" hurry us to the murder of Duncan, the tremendous climactic pressure of the first three acts of "Lear," are extraordinary examples of his power to compel incidents to reveal the course of motive convincingly. In each play the order of incidents becomes a logical development from the characters of the actors; each deed, thought, or speech has its sequence. There are no tricks, no surprises, no sudden conversions of character. Once admit the premises, a person of a certain temperament, facing a certain situation, and subject to a certain accident, mistake, or folly, and we cannot escape the conclusion. The dramatic necessities of character are never violated. From the clear exposition of the first scene, the progress is inevitable to the end.
The persons of the plays spring from the old stories, and by these the study of their motives is in many ways limited. It is limited again by the types and conditions of stage-land. The bloody tyrant, the hesitating avenger, the Machiavellian villain come hence. The acts which they commit, their moods, motives, their very language depend in part on the representatives of these types that had long been familiar to the audiences of the theatres. Yet the host of individual personalities are the result of a most profound and fresh observation of an almost boundless range of life. That interest in characterization which distinguishes the early drama and finds its main illustration in Shakespeare's own practice in the preceding decade here comes to its culmination. Not only the main actor, but the most conventional part, the most absurd business, the merest supernumerary, receives its touch of truth. And something more than truth to life or knowledge of motive is manifest. The great characters are cast in large moulds. They represent the courses of the master passions. Smallness of horizon, triviality of design, feebleness of mind or body are absent. Momentous crises that try men's souls are the real subjects of the tragedies. The accidents of dress, or manner, or time, or race, the incidents of action, are forgotten as revenge, jealousy, irresolution, and lust seize their splendid prey. The greatness of human nature, the power of the human will, the responsibility of the individual remain. There is no belittling of reason even when it breaks under the crash of the storm. Iago is no mere stage villain, though he has all the characteristics of the type; nor is he merely a transcript from life, though he has all the variety and plausibility of a human being. He is the embodiment of our countless evil impulses, the incarnation of depravity. So with all the others. They are human in their truth; they are magnificent idealizations in the range and value of their manifold suggestiveness; they leave the stage to become the habitants of our imaginations, contributing to our reflections their embodiments of good and evil, folly and reason, resolution and doubt.
They speak a language all their own, though with resemblances to their kinsmen in the other Elizabethan tragedies. The blank verse, far more flexible than in the early plays, presents a triumphant union of the conflicting tendencies toward decoration and naturalness observed in the other dramatists; and it is freely mingled with hardly less masterly prose. Marvelous in comparison with preceding verse is its extreme condensation in spite of its opulence of figures and aphorisms. Although crowded with thought and image, it is nevertheless, in its response to the varying persons and moods, superbly dramatic. A critic who is both a poet and a philosopher[21] objects to Macbeth's dagger "unmannerly breech'd with gore" as violent and crude in comparison with the historical reminiscences with which Homer might have made Achilles describe the weapon. But recall the scene. Macbeth has murdered the grooms and rushes from the chamber to confront the fearful suspicions of Duncan's sons and friends. Surely, his false and frenzied excuses must be over-fanciful, violent, and crude.
"Here lay Duncan,
His silver skin laced with his golden blood,
And his gash'd stabs look'd like a breach in nature
For ruin's wasteful entrance: there, the murderers,
Steep'd in the colours of their trade, their daggers
Unmannerly breech'd with gore."
Such a style, however, does not readily give up opportunities for aphorism or beauty for the sake of absolute truth to situation or character. Still less does it mimic actual speech. It does give a potency to the stories, otherwise hardly conceivable; and it adds to truth of character the allurement of music and picture, and the idealization of a magnified suggestiveness. A father has reason to curse his daughter—gesture and incoherent words might correctly represent life; a plain sentence of Ibsen's might convey the tragedy of the situation—but it is the extravagant and terrible imprecation of Lear that has for centuries made men's imaginations shudder. Style such as this the drama will never recover. We shall sooner find another Shakespeare to blend its diverse elements than a host of dramatists, like the Elizabethans, fascinated by a newly discovered world of poetry and daringly adventurous in search of melody of verse, wealth of aphorism, luxury of fantasy, and truth to character.
The effect of Shakespeare's tragedies on spectator or reader is so complex as to defy analysis. Incidental wisdom, effective scene, immortal story all contribute; but the main sources of their abiding impressiveness have surely been the characterization and the poetic style. If we must continue to seek for a katharsis, do not they supply it? The great tragedies are full of disaster, wrong, and suffering. The world they reveal is not the abode of happiness, but of darkness and remorse. Though the bad are punished, the good are not rewarded. Sweetness and innocence suffer and perish along with foulness and malevolence. The noblest spirits are broken; the wages of mortal effort are failure. There are many "breaches in nature for ruin's wasteful entrance." Nor does the life hereafter offer a promise of compensation. Death ends all,—that is the great catastrophe toward which human endeavor precipitates itself. This is not Shakespeare's view of life, but it is his view of the tragedy of life, and its effect upon us is gloomy, overpowering, heartrending. But everywhere this tragedy of life is revealed in verse infinitely appealing to intellectual analysis and to imaginative exhilaration. Everywhere there are men and women, not dead but living, representative of much that is most intensely and universally interesting in life, and the permanent guests of our reflection. The old ethical adage that it does not so much matter what men do as what they are has a particular truth when applied to the people of Shakespeare. That they do this or that, love, murder, die, is in the story; what they are remains the possession of humanity. Our horror at the successful villany of Iago finds a certain relief in the intellectual pleasure and admiration at the creator's achievement; it accomplishes a certain purification in its application to the Iago in ourselves. Still more do the persons who most excite our sympathy survive the intolerable emotions that first greet their misfortunes. When we read "Othello" we feel an overwhelming pity, a fierce resentment, but we would not erase from our possession the memory of Desdemona and her Moor. The misery and wrong and death go to make up in our reflection the beings whom we love and cherish. It is Lear's fivefold "never" that completes for us the loveliness of Cordelia.
A comparison of the tragedies with the masterpieces of other national dramas might disclose their faults but would not diminish their glories. Faults in plenty there surely are, whether judgment be taken of classicists or realists, or of the best standards of the Elizabethans. There are many quibbles or fantasies of diction that might be criticised, many bits of dialogue or stage spectacle that might be omitted without detracting from the total impressiveness. How many minor inconsistencies of plot or characterization might be corrected. How complicated and bewildering is "Hamlet" in comparison with the simpler harmony of "Antigone." How involved and cumbrous, and how undignified in its appeal to the emotions, is much of "Antony and Cleopatra" in comparison with "Phèdre." How impossible and fantastic is much of "Lear" in comparison with "Ghosts." But Shakespeare's defects and deficiencies belong to his time and to his methods. They are inseparable, indeed, from the very means on which depend his consummate results. Not in response to literary tradition, but to the public theatre; not by a refined but by a daring art; not by simplicity and unity, but by complexity and opulence of effect; not by devotion to creed or science or fact, but by the idealization and sublimation of man's emotional nature, did Shakespeare give to his dramas their imperishable wealth of life.
FOOTNOTES:
[21] George Santayana, Reason in Art, p. 113.