The Man Shakespeare and His Tragic Life Story

by Frank Harris

CHAPTER VIII. DRAMAS OF REVENGE AND JEALOUSY: PART II “OTHELLO”

There is perhaps no single drama which throws such light on Shakespeare and his method of work as “Othello”: it is a long conflict between the artist in him and the man, and, in the struggle, both his artistic ideals and his passionate soul come to clearest view. From it we see that Shakespeare's nature gave itself gradually to jealousy and revenge. The fire of his passion burned more and more fiercely for years; was infinitely hotter in 1604, when “Othello” was written, than it had been when “Julius Caesar” was written in 1600. This proves to me that Shakespeare's connection with Mary Fitton did not come to an end when he first discovered her unfaithfulness. The intimacy continued for a dozen years. In Sonnet 136 he prays her to allow him to be one of her lovers. That she was liberal enough to consent appears clearly from the growth of passion in his plays. It is certain, too, that she went on deceiving him with other lovers, or his jealousy would have waned away, ebbing with fulfilled desire. But his passion increases in intensity from 1597 to 1604, whipped no doubt to ecstasy by continual deception and wild jealousy. Both lust and jealousy swing to madness in “Othello,” But Shakespeare was so great an artist that, when he took the story from Cinthio, he tried to realize it without bringing in his own personality: hence a conflict between his art and his passion.

At first sight “Othello” reminds one of a picture by Titian or Veronese; it is a romantic conception; the personages are all in gala dress; the struggle between Iago and the Moor is melodramatic; the whole picture aglow with a superb richness of colour. It is Shakespeare's finest play, his supreme achievement as a playwright. It is impossible to read “Othello” without admiring the art of it. The beginning is so easy: the introduction of the chief characters so measured and impressive that when the action really begins, it develops and increases in speed as by its own weight to the inevitable end; inevitable—for the end in this case is merely the resultant of the shock of these various personalities. But if the action itself is superbly ordered, the painting of character leaves much to be desired, as we shall see. There is one notable difference between “Othello” and those dramas, “Hamlet,” “Macbeth,” and “Cymbeline,” wherein Shakespeare has depicted himself as the protagonist. In the self-revealing dramas not only does Shakespeare give his hero licence to talk, in and out of season, and thus hinder the development of the story, but he also allows him to occupy the whole stage without a competitor. The explanation is obvious enough. Dramatic art is to be congratulated on the fact that now and then Shakespeare left himself for a little out of the play, for then not only does the construction of the play improve, but the play grows in interest through the encounter of evenly-matched antagonists. The first thing we notice in “Othello” is that Iago is at least as important a character as the hero himself. “Hamlet,” on the other hand, is almost a lyric; there is no counterpoise to the student-prince.

Now let us get to the play itself. Othello's first appearance in converse with Iago in the second scene of the first act does not seem to me to deserve the praise that has been lavished on it. Though Othello knows that “boasting is (not) an honour,” he nevertheless boasts himself of royal blood. We have noticed already Shakespeare's love of good blood, and belief in its wondrous efficacy; it is one of his permanent and most characteristic traits. The passage about royal descent might be left out with advantage; if these three lines are omitted, Othello's pride in his own nature—his “parts and perfect soul”—is far more strongly felt. But such trivial flaws are forgotten when Brabantio enters and swords are drawn.

“Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them.”

is excellent in its contemptuous irony. A little later, however, Othello finds an expression which is intensely characteristic of a great man of action:

“Hold your hands,
Both you of my inclining, and the rest;
Were it my cue to fight, I should have known it
Without a prompter.”

This last line and a half is addressed especially to Iago who is bent on provoking a fight, and is, I think, the best piece of character-painting in all “Othello”; the born general knows instinctively the moment to attack just as the trained boxer's hand strikes before he consciously sees the opening. When Othello speaks before the Duke, too, he reveals himself with admirable clearness and truth to nature. His pride is so deep-rooted, his self-respect so great, that he respects all other dignitaries: the Senators are his “very noble and approved good masters.” Every word weighed and effectual. Admirable, too, is the expression “round unvarnished tale.”

But pride and respect for others' greatness are not qualities peculiar to the man of action; they belong to all men of ability. As soon as Othello begins to tell how he won Desdemona, he falls out of his character. Feeling certain that he has placed his hero before us in strong outlines, Shakespeare lets himself go, and at once we catch him speaking and not Othello. In “antres vast and deserts idle” I hear the poet, and when the verse swings to—

“.... men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders,”

it is plain that Othello, the lord and lover of realities, has deserted the firm ground of fact. But Shakespeare pulls himself in almost before he has yielded to the charm of his own words, and again Othello speaks:

“This to hear
Would Desdemona seriously incline,
But still the house-affairs would draw her thence,

and so forth.

The temptation, however, was overpowering, and again Shakespeare yields to it:

“And often did beguile her of her tears
When I did speak of some distressful stroke
That my youth suffered.”

It is a characteristic of the man of action that he thinks lightly of reverses; he loves hard buffets as a swimmer high waves, and when he tells his life-story he does not talk of his “distress.” This “distressful stroke that my youth suffered” is manifestly pure Shakespeare—tender-hearted Shakespeare, who pitied himself and the distressful strokes his youth suffered very profoundly. The characterization of Othello in the rest of this scene is anything but happy. He talks too much; I miss the short sharp words which would show the man used to command, and not only does he talk too much, but he talks in images like a poet, and exaggerates:

“The tyrant Custom, most grave senators,
Hath made the flinty and steel couch of war
My thrice-driven bed of down.”

Even the matter here is insincere; this is the poet's explanation of the Captain's preference for a hard bed and hard living: “has been accustomed to it,” says Shakespeare, not understanding that there are born hunter and soldier natures who absolutely prefer hardships to effeminate luxury. Othello's next speech is just as bad; he talks too much of things particular and private, and the farther he goes, the worse he gets, till we again hear the poet speaking, or rather mouthing:

“No, when light-winged toys
Of feathered Cupid seel with wanton dullness
My speculative and officed instruments,
That my disports corrupt and taint my business,
Let housewives make a skillet of my helm,
And all indign and base adversities
Make head against my estimation.”

Again when he says—

“Come, Desdemona: I have but an hour
Of love, of worldly matters and direction
To spend with thee; we must obey the time,”

I find no sharp impatience to get to work such as Hotspur felt, but a certain reluctance to leave his love—a natural touch which indicates that the poet was thinking of himself and not of his puppet.

The first scene of the second act shows us how Shakespeare, the dramatist, worked. Cassio is plainly Shakespeare the poet; any of his speeches taken at haphazard proves it. When he hears that Iago has arrived he breaks out:

“He has had most favourable and happy speed;
Tempests themselves, high seas, and howling winds,
The guttered rocks and congregated sands—
Traitors ensteeped to clog the guiltless keel—
As having sense of beauty, do omit
Their mortal natures, letting go safely by
The divine Desdemona.”

And when Desdemona lands, Cassio's first exclamation is sufficient to establish the fact that he is merely the poet's mask:

“O, behold,
The riches of the ship is come on shore!”

And just as clearly as Cassio is Shakespeare, the lyric poet, so is Iago, at first, the embodiment of Shakespeare's intelligence. Iago has been described as immoral; he does not seem to me to be immoral, but amoral, as the intellect always is. He says to the women:

“Come on, come on; you're pictures out of doors,
Bells in your parlours, wild cats in your kitchens,
Saints in your injuries, devils being offended,
Players in your housewifery, and housewives in your
beds.”

Iago sees things as they are, fairly and not maliciously; he is “nothing if not critical,” but his criticism has a touch of Shakespeare's erotic mania in it. Think of that “housewives in your beds”! He will not deceive himself, however; in spite of Cassio's admiration of Desdemona Iago does not imagine that Cassio is in love with her; “well kissed,” he says, “an excellent courtesy,” finding at once the true explanation. {Footnote: At the end of this scene Iago says:

“That Cassio loves her I do well believe it,”

but that is merely one of the many inconsistencies in Shakespeare's drawing of Iago. There are others; at one time he talks of Cassio as a mere book soldier, at another equals him with Cæsar. Had Coleridge noted these contradictions he would have declared them to be a higher perfection than logical unity, and there is something to be said for the argument, though in these instances I think the contradictions are due to Shakespeare's carelessness rather than to his deeper insight.}

But having taken up this intellectual attitude in order to create Iago, Shakespeare tries next to make his puppet concrete and individual by giving him revenge for a soul, but in this he does not succeed, for intellect is not maleficent. At moments Iago lives for us; “drown cats and blind puppies ... put money in your purse”—his brains delight us; but when he pursues Desdemona to her end, we revolt; such malignity is inhuman. Shakespeare was so little inclined to evil, knew so little of hate and revenge that his villain is unreal in his cruelty. Again and again the reader asks himself why Iago is so venomous. He hates Othello because Othello has passed him over and preferred Cassio; because he thinks he has had reason to be jealous of Othello, because——-but every one feels that these are reasons supplied by Shakespeare to explain the inexplicable; taken all together they are inadequate, and we are apt to throw them aside with Coleridge as the “motive hunting of motiveless malignity.” But such a thing as “motiveless malignity” is not in nature, Iago's villainy is too cruel, too steadfast to be human; perfect pitiless malignity is as impossible to man as perfect innate goodness.

Though Iago and Othello hold the stage for nine-tenths of the play Shakespeare does not realize them so completely as he realizes Cassio, an altogether subordinate character. The drinking episode of Cassio was not found by Shakespeare in Cinthio, and is, I think, clearly the confession of Shakespeare himself, for though aptly invented to explain Cassio's dismissal it is unduly prolonged, and thus constitutes perhaps the most important fault in the construction of the play. Consider, too, how the moral is applied by Iago to England in especial, with which country neither Iago nor the story has anything whatever to do.

Othello's appearance stilling the riot, his words to Iago and his dismissal of Cassio are alike honest work. The subsequent talk between Cassio and Iago about “reputation” is scarcely more than a repetition of what Falstaff said of “honour.”

Coleridge has made a great deal of the notion that Othello was justified in describing himself as “not easily jealous”; but poor Coleridge's perverse ingenuity never led him further astray. The exact contrary must, I think, be admitted; Othello was surely very quick to suspect Desdemona; he remembers Iago's first suspicious phrase, ponders it and asks its meaning; he is as quick as Posthumus was to believe the worst of Imogen, as quick as Richard II. to suspect his friends Bagot and Green of traitorism, and this proneness to suspicion is the soul of jealousy. And Othello is not only quick to suspect but easy to convince—impulsive at once and credulous. His quick wits jump to the conclusion that Iago, “this honest creature!” doubtless

“Sees and knows more, much more, than he unfolds.”

On hinted imputation he is already half persuaded, and persuaded as only a sensualist would be that it is lust which has led Desdemona astray:

“O curse of marriage!
That we can call these delicate creatures ours,
And not their appetites.”

He is, indeed, so disposed to catch the foul infection that Iago cries:

“Trifles light as air
Are to the jealous confirmations strong
As proofs of holy writ.”

And well he may, for before he uses the handkerchief or any evidence, on mere suspicion Othello is already racked with doubt, distraught with jealousy, maddened with passion; “his occupation's gone”; he rages against Iago and demands proof, Iago answers:

“I do not like the office;
But, sith I am entered in this cause so far
- - - - - - - - - - - -
I will go on.”

This is the same paltry reason Richard III. and Macbeth adduced for adding to the number of their crimes, the truth being that Shakespeare could find no reason in his own nature for effective hatred.

Othello gives immediate credence to Iago's dream, thinks it “a shrewd doubt”; he is a “credulous fool,” as Iago calls him, and it is only our sense of Iago's devilish cleverness that allows us to excuse Othello's folly. The strawberry-spotted handkerchief is not needed: the magic in its web is so strong that the mere mention of it blows his love away and condemns both Cassio and Desdemona to death. If this Othello is not easily jealous then no man is prone to doubt and quick to turn from love to loathing.

The truth of the matter is that in the beginning of the play Othello is a marionette fairly well shaped and exceedingly picturesque; but as soon as jealousy is touched upon, the mask is thrown aside; Othello, the self-contained captain, disappears, the poet takes his place and at once shows himself to be the aptest subject for the green fever. The emotions then put into Othello's mouth are intensely realized; his jealousy is indeed Shakespeare's own confession, and it would be impossible to find in all literature pages of more sincere and terrible self-revealing. Shakespeare is not more at home in showing us the passion of Romeo and Juliet or the irresolution of Richard II. or the scepticism of Hamlet than in depicting the growth and paroxysms of jealousy; his overpowering sensuality, the sensuality of Romeo and of Orsino, has sounded every note of love's mortal sickness:

“Oth. I had been happy if the general camp,
Pioneers and all, had tasted her sweet body,
So I had nothing known.
- - - - - - - -
Damn her, lewd minx! O, damn her!”

We have here the proof that the jealousy of Othello was Shakespeare's
jealousy; it is all compounded of sensuality. But, and this is the
immediate point of my argument, the captain, Othello, is not presented
to us as a sensualist to whom such a suspicion would be, of course, the
nearest thought. On the contrary, Othello is depicted as sober
{Footnote: Shakespeare makes Lodovico speak of Othello's “solid
virtue”—“the nature whom passion could not shake.” Even Iago finds
Othello's anger ominous because of its rarity:
“There's matter in't, indeed, if he be angry."}
and solid, slow to anger, and master of himself and his desires; he
expressly tells the lords of Venice that he does not wish Desdemona to
accompany him:
“To please the palate of my appetite
Nor to comply with heat—the young affects,
In me defunct—and proper satisfaction.”

Shakespeare goes out of his way to put this unnecessary explanation in Othello's mouth; he will not have us think of him as passion's fool, but as passion's master; Othello is not to be even suspicious; he tells Iago:

“'Tis not to make me jealous
To say—my wife is fair, feeds well, loves company,
Is free of speech, sings, plays and dances well;
Where virtue is, these are more virtuous:
Nor from mine own weak merits will I draw
The smallest fear or doubt of her revolt;
For she had eyes and chose me.”

It was all this, no doubt, that misled Coleridge. He did not realize that this Othello suddenly changes his nature; the sober lord of himself becomes in an instant very quick to suspect, and being jealous, is nothing if not sensual; he can think of no reason for Desdemona's fall but her appetite; the imagination of the sensual act throws him into a fit; it is this picture which gives life to his hate. The conclusion is not to be avoided; as soon as Othello becomes jealous he is transformed by Shakespeare's own passion. For this is the way Shakespeare conceived jealousy and the only way. The jealousy of Leontes in “The Winter's Tale” is precisely the same; Hermione gives her hand to Polixenes, and at once Leontes suspects and hates, and his rage is all of “paddling palms {1} and pinching fingers.” The jealousy of Posthumus, too, is of the same kind:

“Never talk on 't;
She hath been colted by him.”

{Footnote 1: Iago's expression, too; cf. “Othello,” II. 1, and “Hamlet,” III. 4.}

It is the imagining of the sensual act that drives him to incoherence and the verge of madness, as it drove Othello. In all these characters Shakespeare is only recalling the stages of the passion that desolated his life.

The part that imagination usually plays in tormenting the jealous man with obscene pictures is now played by Iago; the first scene of the fourth act is this erotic self-torture put in Iago's mouth. As Othello's passion rises to madness, as the self-analysis becomes more and more intimate and personal, we have Shakespeare's re-lived agony clothing itself in his favourite terms of expression:

“O! it comes o'er my memory,
As doth the raven o'er the infected house,
Boding to all,—he had my handkerchief.”

The interest swings still higher; the scene in which Iago uses Cassio's conceit and laughter to exasperate further the already mad Othello is one of the notable triumphs of dramatic art. But just as the quick growth of his jealousy, and its terrible sensuality, have shown us that Othello is not the self-contained master of his passions that he pretends to be and that Shakespeare wishes us to believe, so this scene, in which the listening Othello rages in savagery, reveals to us an intense femininity of nature. For generally the man concentrates his hatred upon the woman who deceives him, and is only disdainful of his rival, whereas the woman for various reasons gives herself to hatred of her rival, and feels only angry contempt for her lover's traitorism. But Othello—or shall we not say Shakespeare?—discovers in the sincerest ecstasy of this passion as much of the woman's nature as of the man's. After seeing his handkerchief in Bianca's hands he asks:

“How shall I murder him, Iago?”

Manifestly, Shakespeare is thinking of Herbert and his base betrayal. Othello would have Cassio thrown to the dogs, would have him “nine years a-killing”; and though he adds that Desdemona shall “rot and perish and be damned to-night,” immediately afterwards we see what an infinite affection for her underlies his anger:

“O, the world hath not a sweeter creature: she might
lie by an emperor's side and command him tasks.”

And then Shakespeare uses his brains objectively, so to speak, to excuse his persistent tenderness, and at once he reveals himself and proves to us that he is thinking of Mary Fitton, and not of poor Desdemona:

“Hang her! I do but say what she is.—So delicate with her needle!—An admirable musician! O, she will sing the savageness out of a bear.—Of so high and plenteous wit and invention.”

Shakespeare himself speaks in this passage. For when has Desdemona shown high and plenteous wit or invention? She is hardly more than a symbol of constancy. It is Mary Fitton who has “wit and invention,” and is “an admirable musician.”

The feminine tenderness in Shakespeare comes to perfect expression in the next lines; no woman has a more enduring affection:

“Iago. She's the worse for all this.

Oth. O! a thousand, a thousand times. And, then of so gentle a condition!

Iago. Ay, too gentle.

Oth. Nay, that's certain:—but yet the pity of it, Iago!—O, Iago, the pity of it, Iago!”

The tenderness shrills to such exquisite poignancy that it becomes a universal cry, the soul's lament for traitorism: “The pity of it, Iago! O, Iago, the pity of it!” Othello's jealous passion is at its height in the scene with Desdemona when he gives his accusations precise words, and flings money to Emilia as the guilty confidante. And yet even here, where he delights to soil his love, his tenderness reaches its most passionate expression:

“O thou weed,
Who art so lovely fair, and smell'st so sweet,
That the sense aches at thee—would thou hadst ne'er
been born!”

As soon as jealousy reaches its end, and passes into revenge, Shakespeare tries to get back into Othello the captain again. Othello's first speech in the bedchamber is clear enough in all conscience, but it has been so mangled by unintelligent actors such as Salvini that it cries for explanation. Every one will remember how Salvini and others playing this part stole into the room like murderers, and then bellowed so that they would have waked the dead. And when the foolish mummers were criticised for thus misreading the character, they answered boldly that Othello was a Moor, that his passion was Southern, and I know not what besides. It is clear that Shakespeare's Othello enters the room quietly as a justicer with a duty to perform: he keeps his resolution to the sticking-point by thinking of the offence; he says solemnly:

“It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul—”

and, Englishman-like, finds a moral reason for his intended action:

“Yet she must die, else she'll betray more men.”

But the reason fades and the resolution wavers in the passion for her “body and beauty,” and the tenderness of the lover comes to hearing again:

“{Kissing her."} O balmy breath, that dost almost persuade
Justice to break her sword!—one more, one more.—
Be thus when thou art dead, and I will kill thee,
And love thee after.—One more, and this the last.
So sweet was ne'er so fatal. I must weep,
But they are cruel tears; this sorrow's heavenly;
It strikes where it doth love.—She wakes.”

So gentle a murderer was never seen save Macbeth, and the “heavenly sorrow” that strikes where it doth love is one of the best examples in literature of the Englishman's capacity for hypocritical self-deception. The subsequent dialogue shows us in Othello the short, plain phrases of immitigable resolution; in this scene Shakespeare comes nearer to realizing strength than anywhere else in all his work. But even here his nature shows itself; Othello has to be misled by Desdemona's weeping, which he takes to be sorrow for Cassio's death, before he can pass to action, and as soon as the murder is accomplished, he regrets:

“O, insupportable! O heavy hour!”

His frank avowal, however, is excellently characteristic of the soldier Othello:

“'Twas I that killed her.”

A moment later there is a perfect poetic expression of his love:

“Nay, had she been true
If Heaven would make me such another world
Of one entire and perfect chrysolite,
I'd not have sold her for it.”

Then comes a revelation of sensuality and physical fastidiousness so peculiar that by itself it proves much of what I have said of Shakespeare:

“Oth. ... Ay 'twas he that told me first;
An honest man he is, and hates the slime
That sticks on filthy deeds.”

For a breathing-space now before he is convinced of his fatal error, Othello speaks as the soldier, but in spite of the fact that he has fulfilled his revenge, and should be at his sincerest, we have no word of profound self-revealing. But as soon as he realizes his mistake, his regret becomes as passionate as a woman's and magical in expression:

“Cold, cold, my girl!
Even like thy chastity.”

Another proof that Shakespeare discards the captain, Othello, in order to give utterance to his own jealousy and love, is to be found in the similarity between this speech of Othello and the corresponding speech of Posthumus in “Cymbeline.” As soon as Posthumus is convinced of his mistake, he calls Iachimo “Italian fiend” and himself “most credulous fool,” “egregious murderer,” and so forth. He asks for “some upright justicer” to punish him as he deserves with “cord or knife or poison,” nay, he will have “torturers ingenious.” He then praises Imogen as “the temple of virtue,” and again shouts curses at himself and finally calls upon his love:

“O Imogen!
My queen, my life, my wife! O Imogen,
Imogen, Imogen!”

Othello behaves in precisely the same manner; he calls Iago that “demi-devil,” and himself “an honourable murderer”; and Iago calls him a “credulous fool.” Othello, too, cries for punishment; instead of “torturers ingenious,” he will have “devils” to “whip” him, and “roast him in sulphur.” He praises Desdemona as chaste, “ill-starred wench,” “my girl,” and so forth; then curses himself lustily and ends his lament with the words:

“O Desdemon! dead, Desdemon! dead! O!”

The same changes in mood, the same words even—the likeness is so close that it can only be explained as I have explained it; from beginning to end of “Cymbeline” Posthumus is Shakespeare, and as soon as jealousy, pity, remorse, or any tender emotion seizes Othello he becomes Shakespeare too, and speaks with Shakespeare's voice.

From here on, it is all good work if not great work to Othello's last speech, which merits particular consideration. He begins as the captain, but soon passes into the poet; and then towards the end talks again in quick measure as the man of action. I quote the whole speech, {Footnote: This speech is curiously like the long speech of Richard II. which I have already noticed; at the beginning Shakespeare speaks as a king for a few lines, then naturally as a poet, and at the end pulls himself up and tries to resume the character.} putting into italics the phrases in which the poet betrays himself:

“Oth. Soft you; a word or two, before you go.
I have done the State some service, and they know it;
No more of that.—I pray you in your letters,
When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,
Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,
Nor set down aught in malice; then must you speak
Of one that loved not wisely, but too well;
Of one not easily jealous, but being wrought
Perplexed in the extreme; of one whose hand,
Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away
Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdued eyes,
Albeit unuséd to the melting mood,
Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees
Their medicinal gum. Set you down this;
And say, besides, that in Aleppo once,
When a malignant and a turban'd Turk
Beat a Venetian, and traduced the State,
I took by the throat the circumcized dog
And smote him—thus.”

All the memorable words here are the words of the gentle poet revealing his own nature ingenuously. The relief given by tears is exquisitely expressed, but the relief itself is a feminine experience; men usually find that tears humiliate them, and take refuge from their scalding shame in anger. The deathless phrases of the poet's grief must be contrasted with the braggart mouthings of the captain at the end in order to realize how impossible it was for Shakespeare to depict a man of deeds.

In the first two acts Shakespeare has tried to present Othello with some sincerity and truth to the dramatic fiction. But as soon as jealousy touches Othello, he becomes the transparent vessel of Shakespeare's own emotion, and is filled with it as with his heart's blood. All the magical phrases in the play are phrases of jealousy, passion, and pity. The character of the captain in Othello is never deeply realized. It is a brave sketch, but, after all, only the merest sketch when compared with Hamlet or Macbeth. We know what they thought of life and death, and of all things in the world and over it; but what do we know of Othello's thoughts upon the deepest matters that concern man? Did he believe even in his stories to Desdemona?—in the men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders? in his magic handkerchief? in what Iago calls his “fantastical lies”? This, I submit, is another important indication that Shakespeare drew Othello, the captain, from the outside; the jealous, tender heart of him is Shakespeare's, but take that away and we scarcely know more of him than the colour of his skin. What interests us in Othello is not his strength, but his weakness, Shakespeare's weakness—his passion and pity, his torture, rage, jealousy and remorse, the successive stages of his soul's Calvary!

[ [!-- H2 anchor --] ]

CHAPTER IX. DRAMAS OF LUST: PART I. Troilus and Cressida

“He probed from hell to hell
Of human passions, but of love deflowered
His wisdom was not....”
—Meredith's Sonnet on Shakespeare.

With “Hamlet” and his dreams of an impossible revenge Shakespeare got rid of some of the perilous stuff which his friend's traitorism had bred in him. In “Othello” he gave deathless expression to the madness of his jealous rage and so cleared his soul, to some extent, of that poisonous infection. But passion in Shakespeare survived hatred of the betrayer and jealousy of him; he had quickly finished with Herbert; but Mary Fitton lived still for him and tempted him perpetually—the lust of the flesh, the desire of the eye, insatiable, cruel as the grave. He will now portray his mistress for us dramatically—unveil her very soul, show the gipsy-wanton as she is. He who has always painted in high lights is now going to paint French fashion, in blackest shadows, for with the years his passion and his bitterness have grown in intensity. Mary Fitton is now “false Cressid.” Pandarus says of her in the first scene of the first act:

“An her hair were not somewhat darker than Helen's—well,
go to—there were no more comparison between
the women.”

Mary Fitton's hair, we know, was raven-black, but the evidence connecting Shakespeare's mistress with “false Cressid” is stronger, as we shall see, than any particular line or expression.

“Troilus and Cressida” is a wretched, invertebrate play without even a main current of interest. Of course there are fine phrases in it, as in most of the productions of Shakespeare's maturity; but the characterization is worse than careless, and at first one wonders why Shakespeare wrote the tedious, foolish stuff except to get rid of his own bitterness in the railing of Thersites, and in the depicting of Cressida's shameless wantonness. It is impossible to doubt that “false Cressid” was meant for Mary Fitton. The moment she appears the play begins to live; personal bitterness turns her portrait into a caricature; every fault is exaggerated and lashed with rage; it is not so much a drama as a scene where Shakespeare insults his mistress.

Let us look at this phase of his passion in perspective. Almost as soon as he became acquainted with Miss Fitton, about Christmas 1597, Shakespeare wrote of her as a wanton; yet so long as she gave herself to him he appears to have been able to take refuge in his tenderness and endure her strayings. But passion in him grew with what it fed on, and after she faulted with Lord Herbert, we find him in a sonnet threatening her that his “pity-wanting pain” may induce him to write of her as she was. No doubt her pride and scornful strength revolted under this treatment and she drew away from him. Tortured by desire he would then praise her with some astonishing phrases; call her “the heart's blood of beauty, love's invisible soul,” and after some hesitation she would yield again. No sooner was the “ruined love” rebuilt than she would offend again, and again he would curse and threaten, and so the wretched, half-miserable, half-ecstatic life of passion stormed along, one moment in Heaven, the next in Hell.

All the while Shakespeare was longing, or thought he was longing for truth and constancy, and at length he gave form and name to his desire for winnowed purity of love and perfect constancy, and this consoling but impalpable ideal he called Ophelia, Desdemona, Cordelia. But again and again Miss Fitton reconquered him and at length his accumulated bitterness compelled him to depict his mistress realistically. Cressida is his first attempt, the first dramatic portrait of the mistress who got into Shakespeare's blood and infected the current of his being, and the portrait is spoiled by the poet's hatred and contempt just as the whole drama is spoiled by a passion of bitterness that is surely the sign of intense personal suffering. Cressida is depicted as a vile wanton, a drab by nature; but it is no part even of this conception to make her soulless and devilish. On the contrary, an artist of Shakespeare's imaginative sympathy loves to put in high relief the grain of good in things evil and the taint of evil in things good that give humanity its curious complexity. Shakespeare observed this rule of dramatic presentation more consistently than any of his predecessors or contemporaries—more consistently, more finely far than Homer or Sophocles, whose heroes had only such faults as their creators thought virtues; why then did he forget nature so far as to picture “false Cressida” without a redeeming quality? He first shows her coquetting with Troilus, and her coquetry even is unattractive, shallow, and obvious; then she gives herself to Troilus out of passionate desire; but Shakespeare omits to tell us why she takes up with Diomedes immediately afterwards. We are to understand merely that she is what Ulysses calls a “sluttish spoil of opportunity,” and “daughter of the game.” But as passionate desire is not of necessity faithless we are distressed and puzzled by her soulless wantonness. And when she goes on to present Diomedes with the scarf that Troilus gave her, we revolt; the woman is too full of blood to be so entirely heartless. Here is the scene embittered by the fact that Troilus witnesses Cressida's betrayal:

“Diomedes. I had your heart before, this follows it.
Troilus. {Aside.} I did swear patience.
Cressida. You shall not have it, Diomed, faith you shall not;
I'll give you something else.
Diomedes. I will have this: whose was it?
Cressida. It is no matter.
Diomedes. Come, tell me whose it was?
Cressida. 'Twas one that loved me better than you will,
But, now you have it, take it.”

The scene is a splendid dramatic scene, a piece torn from life, so realistic that it convinces, and yet we revolt; we feel that we have not got to the heart of the mystery. There is so much evil in Cressida that we want to see the spark of goodness in her, however fleeting and ineffective the spark may be. But Shakespeare makes her attempt at justification a confession of absolute faithlessness:

“Troilus, farewell! one eye yet looks on thee,
But with my heart the other eye doth see.
Ah! poor our sex! This fault in us I find,
The error of our eye directs our mind.”

This is plainly Shakespeare's reflection and not Cressida's apology, and if we contrast this speech with the dialogue given above, it becomes plain, I think, that the terrible scene with Diomedes is taken from life, or is at least Shakespeare's vision of the way Mary Fitton behaved. There's a magic in those devilish words of Cressida that outdoes imagination:

“'Twas one that loved me better than you will,
But, now you have it, take it.”

And then:

“Sweet, honey Greek, tempt me no more to folly:”

The very power of the characterization makes the traitress hateful. If Mary Fitton ever gave any gift of Shakespeare to Lord Herbert, the dramatist should have known that she no longer loved him, had in reality already forgotten him in her new passion; but to paint a woman as remembering a lover, indeed as still loving him, and yet as giving his gift to another, is an offence in art though it may be true to nature. It is a fault in art because it is impossible to motive it in a few lines. The fact of the gift is bad enough; without explanation it is horrible. For this and other reasons I infer that Shakespeare took the fact from his own experience: he had suffered, it seems to me, from some such traitorism on the part of his mistress, or he ascribed to Mary Fitton some traitorism of his own.

In sonnet 122 he finds weighty excuse for having given away the table-book which his friend had given to him. His own confessed shortcoming might have taught him to exercise more lenient judgment towards his frail love.

But when Shakespeare wrote “Troilus and Cressida” a passion of bitterness possessed him; he not only vilified Cressida but all the world, Agamemnon, Nestor, Achilles, Ajax; he seems indeed to have taken more pleasure in the railing of Thersites than in any other part of the work except the scourging of Cressida. He shocks us by the picture of Achilles and his myrmidons murdering Hector when they come upon him unarmed.

One or two incidental difficulties must be settled before we pass to a greater play.

“Troilus and Cressida” has always been regarded as a sort of enigma. Professor Dowden asks: “With what intention and in what spirit did Shakespeare write this strange comedy? All the Greek heroes who fought against Troy are pitilessly exposed to ridicule?” And from this fact and the bitterness of “Timon” some German critics have drawn the inference that Shakespeare was incapable of comprehending Greek life, and that indeed he only realized his Romans so perfectly because the Roman was very like the Briton in his mastery of practical affairs, of the details of administration and of government. This is an excellent instance of German prejudice. No one could have been better fitted than Shakespeare to understand Greek civilization and Greek art with its supreme love of plastic beauty, but his master Plutarch gave him far better pictures of Roman life than of Greek life, partly because Plutarch lived in the time of Roman domination and partly because he was in far closer sympathy with the masters of practical affairs than with artists in stone like Phidias or artists in thought like Plato. The true explanation of Shakespeare's caricatures of Greek life, whether Homeric or Athenian, is to be found in the fact that he was not only entirely ignorant of it but prejudiced against it. And this prejudice in him had an obvious root. Chapman had just translated and published the first books of his Iliad, and Chapman was the poet whom Shakespeare speaks of as his rival in Sonnets 78-86. He cannot help smiling at the “strained touches” of Chapman's rhetoric and his heavy learning. Those who care to remember the first scene of “Love's Labour's Lost” will recall how Shakespeare in that early work mocked at learning and derided study. When he first reached London he was no doubt despised for his ignorance of Greek and Latin; he had had to bear the sneers and flouts of the many who appraised learning, an university training and gentility above genius. He took the first opportunity of answering his critics:

“Small have continual plodders ever won,
Save bare authority from others' books.”

But the taunts rankled, and when the bitter days came of disappointment and disillusion he took up that Greek life which his rival had tried to depict in its fairest colours, and showed what he thought was the seamy side of it. But had he known anything of Greek life and Greek art it would have been his pleasure to outdo his rival by giving at once a truer and a fairer presentation of Greece than Chapman could conceive. It is the rivalry of Chapman that irritates Shakespeare into pouring contempt on Greek life in “Troilus and Cressida.” As Chapman was for the Greeks, Shakespeare took sides with the Trojans.

But why do I assume that “Troilus and Cressida” is earlier than “Antony and Cleopatra?” Some critics, and among them Dr. Brandes, place it later, and they have some reason for their belief. The bitterness in “Troilus and Cressida,” they say rightly, is more intense; and as Shakespeare's disappointment with men and things appears to have increased from “Hamlet” to “Timon,” or from 1602 to 1607-8, they put the bitterer play later. Cogent as is this reasoning, I cannot believe that Shakespeare could have painted Cressida after having painted Cleopatra. The same model has evidently served for both women; but while Cleopatra is perhaps the most superb portrait of a courtesan in all literature, Cressida is a crude and harsh sketch such as a Dumas or a Pinero might have conceived.

It is more than probable, I think, that “Troilus and Cressida” was planned and the love-story at least written about 1603, while Shakespeare's memory of one of his mistress's betrayals was still vivid and sharp. The play was taken up again four or five years later and the character of Ulysses deepened and strengthened. In this later revision the outlook is so piercing-sad, the phrases of such pregnancy, that the work must belong to Shakespeare's ripest maturity. Moreover, he has grown comparatively careless of characterization as in all his later work; he gives his wise sayings almost as freely to Achilles as to Ulysses.

“Troilus and Cressida” is interesting because it establishes the opinion that Chapman was indeed the rival poet whom Shakespeare referred to in the sonnets, and especially because it shows us the poet's mistress painted in a rage of erotic passion so violent that it defeats itself, and the portrait becomes an incredible caricature—that way madness lies. “Troilus and Cressida” points to “Lear” and “Timon.”

[ [!-- H2 anchor --] ]

CHAPTER X. DRAMAS OF LUST: PART II. Antony and Cleopatra

We now come to the finest work of Shakespeare's maturity, to the drama in which his passion for Mary Fitton finds supreme expression.

“Antony and Cleopatra” is an astonishing production not yet fairly appreciated even in England, and perhaps not likely to be appreciated anywhere at its full worth for many a year to come. But when we English have finally left that dark prison of Puritanism and lived for some time in the sun-light where the wayside crosses are hidden under climbing roses, we shall probably couple “Antony and Cleopatra” with “Hamlet” in our love as Shakespeare's supremest works. It was fitting that the same man who wrote “Romeo and Juliet,” the incomparable symphony of first love, should also write “Antony and Cleopatra,” the far more wonderful and more terrible tragedy of mature passion.

Let us begin with the least interesting part of the play, and we shall see that all the difficulties in it resolve themselves as soon as we think of it as Shakespeare's own confession. Wherever he leaves Plutarch, it is to tell his own story.

Some critics have reproached Shakespeare with the sensualism of “Romeo and Juliet”; no one, so far as I can remember, has blamed the Sapphic intensity of “Antony and Cleopatra,” where the lust of the flesh and desire of the eye reign triumphant. Professor Dowden indeed says: “The spirit of the play, though superficially it appear voluptuous, is essentially severe. That is to say, Shakespeare is faithful to the fact.” Antony and Cleopatra kill themselves, forsooth, and thus conventional virtue is justified by self-murder. So superficial and false a judgement is a quaint example of mid-Victorian taste: it reminds me of the horsehair sofa and the antimacassar. Would Professor Dowden have had Shakespeare alter the historical facts, making Antony conquer Caesar and Cleopatra triumph over death? Would this have been sufficient to prove to the professor that Shakespeare's morals are not his, and that the play is certainly the most voluptuous in modern literature? Well, this is just what Shakespeare has done. Throughout the play Caesar is a subordinate figure while Antony is the protagonist and engages all our sympathies; whenever they meet Antony shows as the larger, richer, more generous nature. In every act he conquers Caesar; leaving on us the gorgeous ineffaceable impression of a great personality whose superb temperament moves everyone to admiration and love; Caesar, on the other hand, affects one as a calculating machine.

But Shakespeare's fidelity to the fact is so extraordinary that he gives Caesar one speech which shows his moral superiority to Antony. When his sister weeps on hearing that Antony has gone back to Cleopatra, Caesar bids her dry her tears,

...
But let determined things to destiny
Hold unbewailed their way ...”

This line alone suffices to show why Antony was defeated; the force of imperial Rome is in the great phrase; but Shakespeare will not admit his favourite's inferiority, and in order to explain Antony's defeat Shakespeare represents luck as being against him, luck or fate, and this is not the only or even the chief proof of the poet's partiality. Pompey, who scarcely notices Caesar when Antony is by, says of Antony:

“his soldiership
Is twice the other twain.”

And, indeed, Antony in the play appears to be able to beat Caesar whenever he chooses or whenever he is not betrayed.

All the personages of the play praise Antony, and when he dies the most magnificent eulogy of him is pronounced by Agrippa, Caesar's friend:

“A rarer spirit never
Did steer humanity; but you, Gods, will give us
Some faults to make us men.”

Antony is even permitted at the last to console himself; he declares exultantly that in the other world the ghosts shall come to gaze at him and Cleopatra, and:

“Dido and her Aeneas shall want troops.”

Shakespeare makes conquering Caesar admit the truth of this boast:

“No grave upon the earth shall clip in it
A pair so famous.”

To win in life universal admiration and love, and in death imperishable renown, is to succeed in spite of failure and suicide, and this is the lesson which Shakespeare read into Plutarch's story. Even Enobarbus is conquered at the last by Antony's noble magnanimity. But why does Shakespeare show this extraordinary, this extravagant liking for him who was “the bellows and the fan to cool a gipsy's lust,” for that Marc Antony who might have been the master of the world, and who threw away empire, life, and honour to be “a strumpet's fool?” There is only one possible explanation: Shakespeare felt the most intense, the most intimate sympathy with Antony because he, too, was passion's slave, and had himself experienced with his dark mistress, Mary Fitton, the ultimate degradation of lust. For this reason he took Plutarch's portrait of Antony, and, by emphasizing the kingly traits, transformed it. In the play, as Dr. Brandes sees, Antony takes on something of the “artist-nature.” It is Antony's greatness and weakness; the spectacle of a high intellect struggling with an overpowering sensuality; of a noble nature at odds with passionate human frailty, that endeared him to Shakespeare. The pomp of Antony's position, too, and his kingly personality pleased our poet. As soon as Shakespeare reached maturity, he began to depict himself as a monarch; from “Twelfth Night” on he assumed royal state in his plays, and surely in this figure of Antony he must for the moment have satisfied his longing for regal magnificence and domination. From the first scene to the last Antony is a king of men by right divine of nature.

It is, however, plain that Antony's pride, his superb mastery of life, the touch of imperious brutality in him, are all traits taken from Plutarch, and are indeed wholly inconsistent with Shakespeare's own character. Had Shakespeare possessed these qualities his portraits of men of action would have been infinitely better than they are, while his portraits of the gentle thinker and lover of the arts, his Hamlets and his Dukes, would have been to seek.

The personal note of every one of his great tragedies is that Shakespeare feels he has failed in life, failed lamentably. His Brutus, we feel, failed of necessity because of his aloofness from practical life; his Coriolanus, too, had to fail, and almost forgoes sympathy by his faults; but this Antony ought not to have failed: we cannot understand why the man leaves the sea-battle to follow Cleopatra's flight, who but an act or two before, with lesser reason, realized his danger and was able to break off from his enchantress. Yet the passion of desire that sways Antony is so splendidly portrayed; is, too, so dominant in all of us, that we accept it at once as explaining the inexplicable.

In measure as Shakespeare ennobled Antony, the historical fact of ultimate defeat and failure allowed him to degrade Cleopatra. And this he did willingly enough, for from the moment he took up the subject he identified the Queen of Egypt with his own faithless mistress, Mary Fitton, whom he had already tried to depict as “false Cressid.” This identification of himself and his own experience of passion with the persons and passions of the story explains some of the faults of the drama; while being the source, also, of its singular splendour.

In this play we have the finest possible example of the strife between Shakespeare's yielding poetic temperament and the severity of his intellect. He heaps praises on Antony, as we have seen, from all sides; he loved the man as a sort of superb alter ego, and yet his intellectual fairness is so extraordinary that it compelled him to create a character who should uphold the truth even against his heart's favourite. Dr. Brandes speaks of Enobarbus as a “sort of chorus”; he is far more than that; he is the intellectual conscience of the play, a weight, so to speak, to redress the balance which Shakespeare used this once and never again. What a confession this is of personal partiality! A single instance will suffice to prove my point: Shakespeare makes Antony cast the blame for the flight at Actium on Cleopatra, and manages almost to hide the unmanly weakness of the plaint by its infinitely pathetic wording:

“Whither hast them led me, Egypt?

A little later Cleopatra asks:

“Is Antony or we in fault for this?”

and at once Enobarbus voices the exact truth:

“Antony only, that would make his will
Lord of his reason. What though you fled
. . . . . .
. . . why should he follow?”

Again and again Antony reproaches Cleopatra, and again and again Enobarbus is used to keep the truth before us. Some of these reproaches, it seems to me, are so extravagant and so ill-founded that they discover the personal passion of the poet. For example, Antony insults Cleopatra:

“You have been a boggler ever.”

And the proof forsooth is:

“I found you as a morsel cold upon
Dead Caesar's trencher.”

But to have been Caesar's mistress was Cleopatra's chief title to fame. Shakespeare is here probably reviling Mary Fitton for being deserted by some early lover. Curiously enough, this weakness of Antony increases the complexity of his character, while the naturalistic passion of his words adds enormously to the effect of the play. Again and again in this drama Shakespeare's personal vindictiveness serves an artistic purpose. The story of “Troilus and Cressida” is in itself low and vile, and when loaded with Shakespeare's bitterness outrages probability; but the love of Antony and Cleopatra is so overwhelming that it goes to ruin and suicide and beyond, and when intensified by Shakespeare's personal feeling becomes a world's masterpiece.

We have already seen that the feminine railing Shakespeare puts in the mouth of Antony increases the realistic effect, and just in the same way the low cunning, temper, and mean greed which he attributes to Cleopatra, transform her from a somewhat incomprehensible historical marionette into the most splendid specimen of the courtesan in the world's literature. Heine speaks of her contemptuously as a “kept woman,” but the epithet only shows how Heine in default of knowledge fell back on his racial gift of feminine denigration. Even before she enters we see that Shakespeare has not forgiven his dark scornful mistress; Cleopatra is the finest picture he ever painted of Mary Fitton; but Antony's friends tell us, at the outset, she is a “lustful gipsy,” a “strumpet,” and at first she merely plays on Antony's manliness; she sends for him, and when he comes, departs. A little later she sends again, telling her messenger:

“I did not send you: if you find him sad,
Say, I am dancing; if in mirth, report
That I am sudden sick: quick, and return.”

And when Charmian, her woman, declares that the way to keep a man is to “cross him in nothing,” she replies scornfully:

“Thou teachest, like a fool, the way to lose him.”

She uses a dozen taunts to prevent her lover from leaving her; but when she sees him resolved, she wishes him victory and success. And so through a myriad changes of mood and of cunning wiles we discover that love for Antony which is the anchor to her unstable nature.

The scene with the eunuch Mardian is a little gem. She asks:

“Hast thou affections?
Mar. Yes, gracious madam.
Cleo. Indeed?
Mar. Not in deed, madam; for I can do nothing.
But what indeed is honest to be done;
Yet have I fierce affections, and think
What Venus did with Mars.
Cleo. O, Charmian!
Where think'st thou he is now? Stands he, or sits he?”

She is with her lover again, and recalls his phrase for her, “my serpent of old Nile,” and feeds herself with love's “delicious poison.”

No sooner does she win our sympathy by her passion for Antony than Shakespeare chills our admiration by showing her as the courtesan:

“Cleo. Did I, Charmian,
Ever love Caesar so?
Char. O, that brave Caesar!
Cleo. Be choked with such another emphasis!
Say, the brave Antony.
Char. The valiant Caesar!
Cleo. By Isis, I will give thee bloody teeth
If thou with Caesar paragon again
My man of men.
Char. By your most gracious pardon,
I sing but after you.
Cleo. My salad days,
When I was green in judgement: cold in blood,
To say as I said then!”

Already we see and know her, her wiles, her passion, her quick temper, her chameleon-like changes, her subtle charms of person and of word, and yet we have not reached the end of the first act. Next to Falstaff and to Hamlet, Cleopatra is the most astonishing piece of portraiture in all Shakespeare. Enobarbus gives the soul of her:

“Ant. She is cunning past man's thought.
Eno. Alack, sir, no; her passions are made of nothing
but the finest part of pure love....
Ant. Would I had never seen her!
Eno. O, sir, you had then left unseen a wonderful
piece of work; which not to have been blest withal would
have discredited your travel.”

Here Shakespeare gives his true opinion of Mary Fitton: then comes the miraculous expression:

“Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety. Other women cloy
The appetites they feed; but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies.”

Act by act Shakespeare makes the portrait more complex and more perfect. In the second act she calls for music like the dark lady of the Sonnets:

“Music—moody food of us that trade in love,”

and then she'll have no music, but will play billiards, and not billiards either, but will fish and think every fish caught an Antony. And again she flies to memory:

“That time—O times!—
I laughed him out of patience; and that night
I laughed him into patience; and next morn,
Ere the ninth hour, I drunk him to his bed;
Then put my tires and mantles on him, whilst
I wore his sword Philippan.”

The charm of it all, the deathless charm and the astounding veracity! The messenger enters, and she promises him for good news “gold and her bluest veins to kiss.” When she hears that Antony is well she pours more gold on him, but when he pauses in his recital she has a mind to strike him. When he tells that Caesar and Antony are friends, it is a fortune she'll give; but when she learns that Antony is betrothed to Octavia she turns to her women with “I am pale, Charmian,” and when she hears that Antony is married she flies into a fury, strikes the messenger down and hales him up and down the room by his hair. When he runs from her knife she sends for him:

“I will not hurt him.
These hands do lack nobility, that they strike
A meaner than myself.”

She has the fascination of great pride and the magic of manners. When the messenger returns she is a queen again, most courteous-wise:

“Come hither, sir.
Though it be honest, it is never good
To bring bad news.”

She wants to know the features of Octavia, her years, her inclination, the colour of her hair, her height—everything.

A most veracious full-length portrait, with the minute finish of a miniature; it shows how Shakespeare had studied every fold and foible of Mary Fitton's soul. In the third act Cleopatra takes up again the theme of Octavia's appearance, only to run down her rival, and so salve her wounded vanity and cheat her heart to hope. The messenger, too, who lends himself to her humour now becomes a proper man. Shakespeare seizes every opportunity to add another touch to the wonderful picture.

Cleopatra appears next in Antony's camp at Actium talking with Enobarbus:

“Cleo. I will be even with thee, doubt it not.
Eno. But why, why, why?
Cleo. Thou hast forspoke my being in these wars,
And say'st it is not fit.”

Each phrase of the dialogue reveals her soul, dark fold on fold.

She is the only person who strengthens Antony in his quixotic-foolish resolve to fight at sea.

“Cleo. I have sixty sails, Caesar none better.”

And then the shameful flight.

I have pursued this bald analysis thus far, not for pleasure merely, but to show the miracle of that portraiture the traits of which can bear examination one by one. So far Cleopatra is, as Enobarbus calls her, “a wonderful piece of work,” a woman of women, inscrutable, cunning, deceitful, prodigal, with a good memory for injuries, yet as quick to forgiveness as to anger, a minion of the moon, fleeting as water yet loving-true withal, a sumptuous bubble, whose perpetual vagaries are but perfect obedience to every breath of passion. But now Shakespeare without reason makes her faithless to Antony and to love. In the second scene of the third act Thyreus comes to her with Caesar's message:

“Thyr. He knows that you embrace not Antony
As you did love but as you feared him.
Cleo. O!
Thyr. The scars upon your honour therefore he
Does pity as constrained blemishes,
Not as deserved.
Cleo. He is a god, and knows
What is most right. Mine honour was not yielded,
But conquered merely.
Eno. {Aside.} To be sure of that
I will ask Antony.—Sir, sir, thou'rt so leaky
That we must leave thee to thy sinking, for
Thy dearest quit thee.”

And when Thyreus asks her to leave Antony and put herself under Caesar's protection, who “desires to give,” she tells him:

“I am prompt
To lay my crown at his feet, and there to kneel.”

Thyreus then asks for grace to lay his duty on her hand. She gives it to him with the words:

“Your Caesar's father oft,
When he hath mused of taking kingdoms in,
Bestowed his lips on that unworthy place
As it rained kisses.”

It is as if Antony were forgotten, clean wiped from her mind. The whole scene is a libel upon Cleopatra and upon womanhood. When betrayed, women are faithless out of anger, pique, desire of revenge; they are faithless out of fear, out of ambition, for fancy's sake—for fifty motives, but not without motive. It would have been easy to justify this scene. All the dramatist had to do was to show us that Cleopatra, a proud woman and scorned queen, could not forget Antony's faithlessness in leaving her to marry Octavia; but she never mentions Octavia, never seems to remember her after she has got Antony back. This omission, too, implies a slur upon her. Nor does she kiss Caesar's “conquering hand” out of fear. Thyreus has told her it would please Caesar if she would make of his fortunes a staff to lean upon; she has no fear, and her ambitions are wreathed round Antony: Caesar has nothing to offer that can tempt her, as we shall see later. The scene is a libel upon her. The more one studies it, the clearer it becomes that Shakespeare wrote it out of wounded personal feeling. Cleopatra's prototype, Mary Fitton, had betrayed him again and again, and the faithlessness rankled. Cleopatra, therefore, shall be painted as faithless, without cause, as Cressid was, from incurable vice of nature. Shakespeare tried to get rid of his bitterness in this way, and if his art suffered, so much the worse for his art. Curiously enough, in this instance, for reasons that will appear later, the artistic effect is deepened.

The conclusion of this scene, where Thyreus is whipped and Cleopatra overwhelmed with insults by Antony, does not add much to our knowledge of Cleopatra's character: one may notice, however, that it is the reproach of cold-heartedness that she catches up to answer. The scene follows in which she plays squire to Antony and helps to buckle on his armour. But this scene (invented by Shakespeare), which might bring out the sweet woman-weakness in her, and so reconcile us to her again, is used against her remorselessly by the poet. When Antony wakes and cries for his armour she begs him to “sleep a little”; the touch is natural enough, but coming after her faithlessness to her lover and her acceptance of Caesar it shows more than human frailty. It is plain that, intent upon ennobling Antony, Shakespeare is willing to degrade Cleopatra beyond nature. Then comes Antony's victory, and his passion at length finds perfect lyrical expression:

“O thou day o' the world,
Chain mine armed neck; leap thou, attire and all,
Through proof of harness to my heart, and there
Ride on the pants triumphing.”

At once Cleopatra catches fire with that responsive flame of womanhood which was surely her chiefest charm:

“Lord of lords!
O infinite virtue! Com'st thou smiling from
The world's great snare uncaught?”

What magic in the utterance, what a revelation of Cleopatra's character and of Shakespeare's! To Cleopatra's feminine weakness the world seems one huge snare which only cunning may escape.

Another day, and final irremediable defeat drives her in fear to the monument and to that pretended suicide which is the immediate cause of Antony's despair:

“Unarm, Eros: the long day's task is done,
And we must sleep.”

When Antony leaves the stage, Shakespeare's idealizing vision turns to Cleopatra. About this point, too, the historical fact fetters Shakespeare and forces him to realize the other side of Cleopatra. After Antony's death Cleopatra did kill herself. One can only motive and explain this suicide by self-immolating love. It is natural that at first Shakespeare will have it that Cleopatra's nobility of nature is merely a reflection, a light borrowed from Antony. She will not open the monument to let the dying man enter, but her sincerity and love enable us to forgive this:

“I dare not, dear,—
Dear my lord, pardon,—I dare not,
Lest I be taken....”

Here occurs a fault of taste which I find inexplicable. While Cleopatra and her women are drawing Antony up, he cries;

“O quick, or I am gone.”

And Cleopatra answers:

“Here's sport, indeed!—How heavy weighs my lord!
Our strength has all gone into heaviness,
That makes the weight.”

The “Here's sport, indeed”! seems to me a terrible fault, an inexcusable lapse of taste. I should like to think it a misprint or misreading, but it is unfortunately like Shakespeare in a certain mood, possible to him, at least, here as elsewhere.

Cleopatra's lament over Antony's dead body is a piece of Shakespeare's self-revealing made lyrical by beauty of word and image. The allusion to his boy-rival, Pembroke, is unmistakable; for women are not contemptuous of youth:

“Young boys and girls
Are level now with men; the odds is gone,
And there is nothing left remarkable
Beneath the visiting moon.”

When Cleopatra comes to herself after swooning, her anger is characteristic because wholly unexpected; it is one sign more that Shakespeare had a living model in his mind:

“It were for me
To throw my sceptre at the injurious gods;
To tell them that this world did equal theirs
Till they had stolen our jewel. All's but naught.”

Her resolve to kill herself is borrowed:

“We'll bury him; and then, what's brave, what's noble,
Let's do it after the high Roman fashion,
And make death proud to take us.”

But the resolution holds:

“It is great
To do that thing that ends all other deeds,
Which shackles accidents and bolts up change.”

It is this greatness of soul in Cleopatra which Shakespeare has now to portray. Caesar's messenger, Proculeius, whom Antony has told her to trust, promises her everything in return for her “sweet dependency.” On being surprised she tries to kill herself, and when disarmed shows again that characteristic petulant anger:

“Sir, I will eat no meat, I'll not drink, sir;
. . . . . This mortal house I'll ruin,
Do Caesar what he can.”

And her reasons are all of pride and hatred of disgrace. She'll not be “chastised with the sober eye of dull Octavia,” nor shown “to the shouting varletry of censuring Rome.” Her imagination is at work now, that quick forecast of the mind that steels her desperate resolve:

“Rather on Nilus' mud
Lay me stark nak'd, and let the water-flies
Blow me into abhorring.”

The heroic mood passes. She tries to deceive Caesar as to her wealth, and is shamed by her treasurer Seleucus. The scene is appalling; poor human nature stripped to the skin—all imperfections exposed; Cleopatra cheating, lying, raging like a drab; her words to Seleucus are merciless while self-revealing:

“O slave, of no more trust
Than love that's hired.”

This scene deepens and darkens the impression made by her unmotived faithlessness to Antony. It is, however, splendidly characteristic and I think needful; but it renders that previous avowal of faithlessness to Antony altogether superfluous, the sole fault in an almost perfect portrait. For, as I have said already, Shakespeare's mistakes in characterization nearly always spring from his desire to idealize; but here his personal vindictiveness comes to help his art. The historical fact compels him now to give his harlot, Cleopatra, heroic attributes; in spite of Caesar's threats to treat her sons severely if she dares to take her own life and thus deprive his triumph of its glory, she outwits him and dies a queen, a worthy descendant, as Charmian says, of “many royal kings.” Nothing but personal bitterness could have prevented Shakespeare from idealizing such a woman out of likeness to humanity. But in this solitary and singular case his personal suffering bound him to realism though the history justified idealization. The high lights were for once balanced by the depths of shadow, and a masterpiece was the result.

Shakespeare leaves out Caesar's threats to put Cleopatra's sons to death; had he used these menaces he would have made Caesar more natural in my opinion, given a touch of characteristic brutality to the calculating intellect; but he omitted them probably because he felt that Cleopatra's pedestal was high enough without that addition.

The end is very characteristic of Shakespeare's temper. Caesar becomes nobly generous; he approves Cleopatra's wisdom in swearing falsehoods about her treasure; he will not reckon with her like “a merchant,” and Cleopatra herself puts on the royal robes, and she who has played wanton before us so long becomes a queen of queens. And yet her character is wonderfully maintained; no cunning can cheat this mistress of duplicity:

“He words me, girls, he words me that I should not
Be noble to myself.”

She holds to her heroic resolve; she will never be degraded before the base Roman public; she will not see

“Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness.”

It is, perhaps, worth noting here that Shakespeare lends Cleopatra, as he afterwards lent Coriolanus, his own delicate senses and neuropathic loathing for mechanic slaves with “greasy aprons” and “thick breaths rank of gross diet”; it is Shakespeare too and not Cleopatra who speaks of death as bringing “liberty.” In “Cymbeline,” Shakespeare's mask Posthumus dwells on the same idea. But these lapses are momentary; the superb declaration that follows is worthy of the queen:

“My resolution's placed, and I have nothing
Of woman in me: now from head to foot
I am marble-constant; now the fleeting moon
No planet is of mine.”

The scene with the clown who brings the “pretty worm” is the solid ground of reality on which Cleopatra rests for a breathing space before rising into the blue:

“Cleo. Give me my robe, put on my crown; I have
Immortal longings in me. Now no more
The juice of Egypt's grape shall moist this lip.—
Yare, yare, good Iras! quick.—Methinks I hear
Antony call; I see him rouse himself
To praise my noble act; I hear him mock
The luck of Caesar, which the gods give men
To excuse their after-wrath. Husband, I come,
Now to that name my courage prove my title!
I am fire and air; my other elements
I give to baser life.”

The whole speech is miraculous in speed of mounting emotion, and when Iras dies first, this Cleopatra finds again the perfect word in which truth and beauty meet:

“This proves me base:
If she first meet the curled Antony
He'll make demand of her, and spend that kiss
Which is my heaven to have. Come, thou mortal wretch,
{To the asp, which she applies to her breast.}
With thy sharp teeth this knot intrinsicate
Of life at once untie: poor venomous fool,
Be angry, and despatch. O, could'st thou speak,
That I might hear thee call great Caesar, ass
Unpolicied!”

The characteristic high temper of Mary Fitton breaking out again—“ass unpolicied”—and then the end:

“Peace, peace!
Dost thou not see my baby at my breast,
That sucks the nurse asleep?”

The final touch is of soft pleasure:

“As sweet a balm, as soft as air, as gentle,—
Antony!—Nay, I will take thee too.
{Applying another asp to her arm.}
What should I stay—”

For ever fortunate in her self-inflicted death Cleopatra thereby frees herself from the ignominy of certain of her actions: she is woman at once and queen, and if she cringes lower than other women, she rises, too, to higher levels than other women know. The historical fact of her self-inflicted death forced the poet to make false Cressid a Cleopatra—and his wanton gipsy-mistress was at length redeemed by a passion of heroic resolve. The majority of critics are still debating whether indeed Cleopatra is the “dark lady” of the sonnets or not. Professor Dowden puts forward the theory as a daring conjecture; but the identity of the two cannot be doubted. It is impossible not to notice that Shakespeare makes Cleopatra, who was a fair Greek, gipsy-dark like his sonnet-heroine. He says, too, of the “dark lady” of the sonnets:

“Whence hast thou this becoming of things ill,
That in the very refuse of thy deeds
There is such strength and warrantise of skill,
That, in my mind, thy worst all best exceeds?”

Enobarbus praises Cleopatra in precisely the same words:

“Vilest things,
Become themselves in her.”

Antony, too, uses the same expression:

“Fie, wrangling queen!
Whom everything becomes—to chide, to laugh,
To weep; whose every passion fully strives
To make itself, in thee, fair and admired.”

These professors have no distinct mental image of the “dark lady” or of Cleopatra, or they would never talk of “daring conjecture” in regard to this simple identification. The points of likeness are numberless. Ninety-nine poets and dramatists out of a hundred would have followed Plutarch and made Cleopatra's love for Antony the mainspring of her being, the causa causans of her self-murder. Shakespeare does not do this; he allows the love of Antony to count with her, but it is imperious pride and hatred of degradation that compel his Cleopatra to embrace the Arch-fear. And just this same quality of pride is attributed to the “dark lady.” Sonnet 131 begins:

“Thou art as tyrannous, so as thou art,
As those whose beauties proudly make them cruel.”

Both are women of infinite cunning and small regard for faith or truth; hearts steeled with an insane pride, and violent tempers suited with scolding slanderous tongues. Prolonged analysis is not needed. A point of seeming difference between them establishes their identity. Cleopatra is beautiful, “a lass unparalleled,” as Charmian calls her, and accordingly we can believe that all emotions became her, and that when hopping on the street or pretending to die she was alike be-witching; beauty has this magic. But how can all things become a woman who is not beautiful, whose face some say “hath not the power to make love groan,” who cannot even blind the senses with desire? And yet the “dark lady” of the sonnets who is thus described, has the “powerful might” of personality in as full measure as Egypt's queen. The point of seeming unlikeness is as convincing as any likeness could be; the peculiarities of both women are the same and spring from the same dominant quality. Cleopatra is cunning, wily, faithless, passionately unrestrained in speech and proud as Lucifer, and so is the sonnet-heroine. We may be sure that the faithlessness, scolding, and mad vanity of his mistress were defects in Shakespeare's eyes as in ours; these, indeed, were “the things ill” which nevertheless became her. What Shakespeare loved in her was what he himself lacked or possessed in lesser degree—that dæmonic power of personality which he makes Enobarbus praise in Cleopatra and which he praises directly in the sonnet-heroine. Enobarbus says of Cleopatra:

“I saw her once
Hop forty paces through the public street,
And, having lost her breath, she spoke and panted,
That she did make defect perfection,
And, breathless, power breathe forth.”

One would be willing to wager that Shakespeare is here recalling a performance of his mistress; but it is enough for my purpose now to draw attention to the unexpectedness of the attribute “power.” The sonnet fastens on the same word:

“O, from what power hast thou this powerful might
With insufficiency my heart to sway?”

In the same sonnet he again dwells upon her “strength”: she was bold, too, to unreason, and of unbridled tongue, for, “twice forsworn herself,” she had yet urged his “amiss,” though guilty of the same fault. What he admired most in her was force of character. Perhaps the old saying held in her case: ex forti dulcedo; perhaps her confident strength had abandonments more flattering and complete than those of weaker women; perhaps in those moments her forceful dark face took on a soulful beauty that entranced his exquisite susceptibility; perhaps—but the suppositions are infinite.

Though a lover and possessed by his mistress Shakespeare was still an artist. In the sonnets he brings out her overbearing will, boldness, pride—the elemental force of her nature; in the play, on the other hand, while just mentioning her “power,” he lays the chief stress upon the cunning wiles and faithlessness of her whose trade was love. But just as Cleopatra has power, so there can be no doubt of the wily cunning—“the warrantise of skill”—of the sonnet-heroine, and no doubt her faithlessness was that “just cause of hate” which Shakespeare bemoaned.

It is worth while here to notice his perfect comprehension of the powers and limits of the different forms of his art. Just as he has used the sonnets in order to portray certain intimate weaknesses and maladies of his own nature that he could not present dramatically without making his hero ridiculously effeminate, so also he used the sonnets to convey to us the domineering will and strength of his mistress—qualities which if presented dramatically would have seemed masculine-monstrous.

By taking the sonnets and the play together we get an excellent portrait of Shakespeare's mistress. In person she was probably tall and vain of her height, as Cleopatra is vain of her superiority in this respect to Octavia, with dark complexion, black eyebrows and hair, and pitch-black eyes that mirrored emotion as the lakelet mirrors the ever-changing skies; her cheeks are “damask'd white”; her breath fragrant with health, her voice melodious, her movements full of dignity—a superb gipsy to whom beauty may be denied but not distinction.

If we have a very good idea of her person we have a still better idea of her mind and soul. I must begin by stating that I do not accept implicitly Shakespeare's angry declarations that his mistress was a mere strumpet. A nature of great strength and pride is seldom merely wanton; but the fact stands that Shakespeare makes a definite charge of faithlessness against his mistress; she is, he tells us, “the bay where all men ride”; no “several plot,” but “the wide world's common place.” The accusation is most explicit. But if it were well founded why should he devote two sonnets (135 and 136) to imploring her to be as liberal as the sea and to receive his love-offering as well as the tributes of others?

“Among a number one is reckon'd none
Then in the number let me pass untold.”

It is plain that Mistress Fitton drew away from Shakespeare after she had given herself to his friend, and this fact throws some doubt upon his accusations of utter wantonness. A true “daughter of the game,” as he says in “Troilus and Cressida,” is nothing but “a sluttish spoil of opportunity” who falls to Troilus or to Diomedes in turn, knowing no reserve. It must be reckoned to the credit of Mary Fitton, or to her pride, that she appears to have been faithful to her lover for the time being, and able to resist even the solicitings of Shakespeare. But her desires seem to have been her sole restraint, and therefore we must add an extraordinary lewdness to that strength, pride, and passionate temper which Shakespeare again and again attributes to her. Her boldness is so reckless that she shows her love for his friend even before Shakespeare's face; she knows no pity in her passion, and always defends herself by attacking her accuser. But she is cunning in love's ways and dulls Shakespeare's resentment with “I don't hate you.” Unwilling perhaps to lose her empire over him and to forego the sweetness of his honeyed flatteries, she blinded him to her faults by occasional caresses. Yet this creature, with the soul of a strumpet, the tongue of a fishwife and the “proud heart” of a queen, was the crown and flower of womanhood to Shakespeare, his counterpart and ideal. Hamlet in love with Cleopatra, the poet lost in desire of the wanton—that is the tragedy of Shakespeare's life.

In this wonderful world of ours great dramatic writers are sure to have dramatic lives. Again and again in his disgrace Antony cries:

“Whither hast thou led me, Egypt?”

Shakespeare's passion for Mary Fitton led him to shame and madness and despair; his strength broke down under the strain and he never won back again to health. He paid the price of passion with his very blood. It is Shakespeare and not Antony who groans:

“O this false soul of Egypt! this grave charm,—
- - - - - - - -
Like a right gipsy, hath, at fast and loose,
Beguil'd me to the very heart of loss.”

Shakespeare's love for Mary Fitton is to me one of the typical tragedies of life—a symbol for ever. In its progress through the world genius is inevitably scourged and crowned with thorns and done to death; inevitably, I say, for the vast majority of men hate and despise what is superior to them: Don Quixote, too, was trodden into the mire by the swine. But the worst of it is that genius suffers also through its own excess; is bound, so to speak, to the stake of its own passionate sensibilities, and consumed, as with fire.

[ [!-- H2 anchor --] ]