III
The beauty and insight of Shakespeare’s finest portrayals of the comedy and the tragedy of love were not reached at once. His conception of love itself was still, at the opening of his career, relatively slight and superficial; his mastery of technique was equally incomplete. The early plays accordingly abound with scenes and situations where from either cause or both the dramatic treatment of love is not yet in the full sense Shakesperean. It will suffice in this sketch to specify two types of each.
The young Shakespeare, as is well known, showed a marked leaning to two apparently incongruous kinds of dramatic device—paradox and symmetry. In the riotous consciousness of power he loved to take up the challenge of outrageous situations, to set himself dramaturgical problems, which he solves by compelling us to admit that the impossible might have happened in the way he shows. A shrew to be ‘tamed’ into a model wife. A widow following her murdered father’s coffin, to be wooed, there and then, and won, by his murderer. A girl of humble birth, in love with a young noble who scorns her, to set herself, notwithstanding, to win him, and to succeed. Paradoxical feats like these were foreign to the profound normality—under whatever romantic disguise—of Shakespeare’s mature art. Richard and Petruchio and Helen carry into the problems of love-making the enterprising audacity of the young Shakespeare in the problems of art. But the audacity of the young Shakespeare showed itself in another way. His so-called taste for ‘symmetry’ had nothing in common with the classical canons of balance and order. It was nearer akin to the boyish humour of mimicry. If he found a pair of indistinguishable twins producing amusing confusion in a Roman play, he capped them with a second pair, to produce confusion worse confounded in the English Comedy of Errors. And so with love. Navarre (in Love’s Labour’s Lost) and his three lords, like the four horses of an antique quadriga, go through the same adventure side by side. All four have forsworn the sight of women; all four fall in love, not promiscuously but in order of rank, with the French princess and her ladies, whose numbers, by good fortune, precisely go round.
But love itself is not, as yet, drawn with any power. Berowne’s magnificent account of its attributes and effects (IV, iii., mainly re-written in 1597) is not borne out by any representation of it in the play. The ‘taffeta phrases’ and ‘silken terms precise,’ the pointed sallies and punning repartees, full of a hard crackling gaiety, neither express passion nor suggest, like the joyous quips of the later Rosalind, that passion is lurking behind. We are spectators of a rather protracted flirtation, a ‘way of love’ which was to occupy a minimal place in his later drama. Armado’s dramatically unimportant seduction of Jaquenetta is likewise a symptom of his ‘apprentice’ phase.
Equally immature is the representation of fickle love in the Two Gentlemen. Proteus is Shakespeare’s only essay in the Don Juan type, but it falls far short in psychological and dramatic force of his portrait of the faithful Julia. Proteus’s speeches are often rhetorical analyses of his situation rather than dramatic expressions of it. His threat to outrage Sylvia (V, iv. 58) is, as he naively declares, ‘’gainst the nature of love,’ and it clashed no less violently with Shakespeare’s rendering of the passion elsewhere. Even the apparent fickleness produced by delusion flourishes only in the magical world of the young Shakespeare’s Midsummer Dream. The inconstancy of the Athenian lovers attests only the potency of the faery juice. No doubt Shakespeare’s denouements, even in some of the maturest comedies, show his lovers accepting with a singular facility a fate in love other than that they had chosen. Olivia accepts Sebastian in default of Viola, and the Duke Viola when Olivia is out of the question. Still less defensible artistically is Isabel’s renunciation of the convent to marry the Duke. But these acquiescences, even if they were not touched with the frequent perfunctoriness of Shakespeare’s finales, are not to be classed with deliberate inconstancy.
A second mark of unripeness in the conception of love is extravagant magnanimity. This, like other kinds of unnatural virtue, was a part of the heritage from mediæval romance, fortified with Roman legend. The antique exaltation of friendship concurred with the Germanic absoluteness of faithful devotion, and for the mediæval mind the most convincing way of attesting this was by the surrender of a mistress. In the tenth book of the Decamerone Boccaccio collects the most admired examples of ‘things done generously and magnificently,’ chiefly in matters of love; one of them is the tale of Tito and Gisippo (Decamerone, X, 8), where, Tito having fallen in love with his friend’s bride, Gisippo ‘generously’ resigns to him all but the name of husband. The story, quoted in Sir T. Elyot’s Governour (1531), was well known in Elizabethan England, and fell in with the fantastical world of Fletcher’s Romanticism. But the humanity and veracity of the mature Shakespeare rejected these extravagances as the cognate genius of the mature Chaucer had done before him. Chaucer lived to mock at the legendary magnanimity of Griselda, so devoutly related in the Clerkes Tale; and it was only the young Shakespeare who could have made Valentine’s astounding offer, in the Two Gentlemen, to resign ‘all his rights’ in his bride to the ‘friend’ from whose offer of violence he has only a moment before rescued her (V, vi. 83).[2]
A second variety of extravagant magnanimity was the recurring situation of the girl, who, deserted by her lover, follows him in disguise, takes service as his page, and in that capacity is employed by him to further his suit to a new mistress. This motive was of the purest romantic lineage; having first won vogue in Europe through Montemayor’s Diana (1558, trans. 1588), and in England by Sidney’s Arcadia (1581, publ. 1590). On the London stage it profited by the special piquancy attaching to the rôles of girls in masculine disguise when the actors were boys, and its blend of audacious adventure and devoted self-sacrifice gave the Elizabethan auditor precisely the kind of composite thrill he loved.
For some forms of sex-confusion Shakespeare throughout his career retained an unmistakable liking. But the finer instincts of his ripening art gradually restricted its scope. Viola, in the original story (Bandello, II, 36) follows a faithless lover; in Twelfth Night, wrecked on the Illyrian coast, she disguises herself merely for safety, takes service with the Duke as a complete stranger, and only subsequently falls in love with him. The change indicates with precision Shakespeare’s attitude at this date (c. 1600) to this type of situation. He was still quite ready to exploit the rather elementary comedy arising out of sex-confusion—to paint with gusto Viola’s embarrassments as the object of Olivia’s passion and Sir Andrew’s challenge, or the brilliant pranks of Rosalind in a like position. But he would not now approach these situations by the romantic avenue of a love-sick woman’s pursuit. In his latest plays he shows disrelish even for the delightful fun evolved from sex-confusion in Twelfth Night and As you like it. The adventures of Imogen in disguise are purely pathetic. Pisanio indeed proposes, and Imogen agrees, to follow her husband to Italy in disguise; but this opening is significantly not followed up. (Cymbeline, III, iv. 150 f.)
But in the Two Gentlemen, the entire motive without curtailment or qualification is presented in the adventures of Julia. Abandoned by Proteus, she follows him in disguise, takes service as his page, and is employed as go-between in his new courtship of Silvia. To the young Shakespeare the situation was still wholly congenial, and he availed himself of its opportunities of pathos without reserve, though with incomplete power. His riper technique, fortified probably by a closer acquaintance with the spirited and high-bred womanhood of the Portias and Rosalinds of his time, withdrew his interest, perhaps his belief, from the risky psychology of Julia’s self-assertion and self-abnegation. Like other strained situations suggested by ‘golden tongued romance,’ it fell away before the consolidated experience, the genial worldliness, the poetized normality, of his riper art.
The case of another devoted pursuer of an unwilling man is more complicated, and calls for closer examination. All’s Well That Ends Well has already been referred to as an example of the paradox-plotting congenial to the young Shakespeare. But Helena’s passion and her sacrifices for the man whose love she seeks ally her also with the Julia type. Yet internal evidence leaves no doubt that this play, though originally written, and therefore planned, in the early nineties, was revised by Shakespeare at a date not far remote from that of Hamlet. If the paradox-subject was the apprentice’s eager choice, the artist at the height of his power did not reject its challenge. In the original story (Decamerone, III, 9) the flavour of paradox was even more pronounced. Like the other tales of the Third Day, it describes one who alcuna cosa molto da lui desiderata con industria acquistasse. Giletta of Narbonne succeeds in effect by sheer audacity and enterprise; and Boccaccio’s readers doubtless enjoyed this inversion of the usual rôles, where a masterful girl captures a reluctant man. Shakespeare’s earlier version was probably the lost Love’s Labour’s Won mentioned by Meres, and the title emphasizes the element of resolute and unhesitating pursuit which marks the original, and was probably more pronounced in the earlier than in the revised play.
For it is plain that precisely the resolute pursuit of a resisting man was uncongenial to Shakespeare’s riper art, because unnatural in the type of high-bred and refined womanhood whose ways in love reflected his ideal of healthy love-making. Helena, as the heroine and predominant figure of the play, had to be of the sisterhood of Portia and Rosalind and Beatrice and Viola. But if the plot forbad this? And clearly, the most hazardous incident of all (the substitution of Helen for Diana) could not be eliminated without breaking up the plot altogether. Why then take up the old play at all? Plainly there must have been in the fundamental theme something which Shakespeare was unwilling to lose as well as something that he would have wished away. This something that attracted him was evidently Helen’s clear-sighted resolution in itself; in this she is, in fact, a true sister of Portia and Rosalind, though her seriousness is not, like theirs, irradiated with laughter. Could she be visibly endowed with this grace of clear sight and will, yet at the same time be rather drawn on by circumstances to the final conquest of Bertram than herself the active agent in it? Somewhat thus must the problem have presented itself to Shakespeare. Did he completely solve it? I think not. But we can to some extent follow his procedure.
Strength and delicacy are from the first blended in Helen. Her famous lines (I, i. 231):
Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie
Which we ascribe to heaven.
strike the keynote of her resolute temper. Yet her love, a maiden’s idolatry, is content without possession; with her, ‘Dian’ is ‘both herself and love’ (I, iii. 218). If she forms plans for showing her merit and thus commending herself in Bertram’s eyes, she takes no step herself; it is the Countess who, having discovered her love, welcomes her prospective daughter-in-law and sends her with all proper convoy to court to ‘cure the king.’ Her choosing of Bertram (II, iii. 109) is an offer of life-long service, not the appropriation of a well-won prize. And when Bertram bluntly declares that he ‘cannot love her nor will strive to do it,’ she proposes, turning to the king, to withdraw her whole claim:
That you are well restored, my lord, I’m glad;
Let the rest go.
The crucial situation, however, for her (and for Shakespeare) begins only with Bertram’s definite departure, and scornful intimation of the conditions on which he will be her husband. Giletta, on receiving the corresponding message, had made up her mind at once what to do; had arranged her affairs and set out on the soi-disant pilgrimage to Florence, where Beltramo she knows will be found. Helena’s procedure is less clear. Two distinct courses were open to her. She might, like Giletta, make direct for Bertram at Florence, under the pretext of going on a pilgrimage. Or she might finally surrender the pursuit of a husband who had decisively shown he did not love her, as she had already proposed to do when he had only declared that he did not. The second was unquestionably more in keeping with Helen’s character. But the first was more in keeping with the plot. It might well be that Shakespeare’s Helen would hesitate between the two. But it is in any case probable that Shakespeare hesitated, and that the marks of his hesitation have not been effaced from the text.
On reading Bertram’s letter she is, like Imogen when she reads Posthumus’s, for the moment overwhelmed. ‘This is a dreadful sentence.’ She hardly speaks, and gives no hint to the Countess of her thoughts. But when she is alone she breaks out in the great passionate monologue of renunciation (III, ii. 102 f.)....
No, come thou home, Rousillon,
Whence honour but of danger wins a scar,
As oft it loses all: I will be gone;
My being here it is that holds thee hence:
Shall I stay here to do’t? no, no, although
The air of paradise did fan the house,
And angels office’d all: I will be gone....
This can only imply, since she is alone, that she sincerely proposes to give up all claim to her nominal husband.
Nevertheless, in Scene iv., the Countess is seen reading a letter from Helen which declares that she has gone as a pilgrim to Saint Jaques, in Florence. She begs the Countess, it is true, to summon Bertram home to live there in peace while she in the far land does penance for her ‘ambitious love.’ Was this a subterfuge, like Giletta’s, or was it her sincere intention as we should infer from the previous monologue? If it is the first, Helena comes nearer to the crafty duplicity of Giletta than anywhere else in the play, and this towards the Countess who has just indignantly renounced her stubborn son, and taken Helena to her heart as her sole child (III, ii. 71). But if it is the second, we cannot but ask why then, if Helena means bona fide to avoid Bertram and leave him free, she chooses for her pilgrimage precisely the one place in the world in which she knows he will be found? And this awkward question remains un-answered, notwithstanding the evident effort to allow us to believe in Helena’s innocent good faith. Giletta, on arriving at Florence, takes up her abode at an inn, ‘eager to hear news of her lord.’ Helena arrives, apparently concerned only to learn the way to St. Jacques, and where the pilgrims bound thither found lodging. Then Bertram is mentioned; she learns that he is known, and has made advances to Diana; presently he passes by, and now at length Helen deliberately and unhesitatingly takes measures to fulfil his ‘impossible’ conditions.
Helena’s conduct appears, then, to fluctuate, without clear explanation, between resolute pursuit and dignified renunciation.
There can be no doubt that the former type of procedure represents the earlier, the latter the riper, mind of Shakespeare, in the treatment of love. The letter to the Countess, of III, iv., is, like all his verse-letters, early work; the great preceding monologue is in the richly imaginative phrase and daringly yet harmoniously moulded verse of the Hamlet period. He set out to fit a character based upon a nobler type of love into a plot based upon a grosser; and even he could not effect this without some straining of the stuff, and here and there a palpable rent.