A Study of Shakespeare

by Algernon Charles Swinburne

I thought it at one time far from impossible, if not very nearly probable, that the author of Arden of Feversham might be one with the author of the famous additional scenes to The Spanish Tragedy, and that either both of these “pieces of work” or neither must be Shakespeare’s. I still adhere to Coleridge’s verdict, which indeed must be that of all judges capable of passing any sentence worthier of record than are

Fancies too weak for boys, too green and idle
For girls of nine:

to the effect that those magnificent passages, wellnigh overcharged at every point with passion and subtlety, sincerity and instinct of pathetic truth, are no less like Shakespeare’s work than unlike Jonson’s: though hardly perhaps more unlike the typical manner of his adult and matured style than is the general tone of The Case is Altered, his one surviving comedy of that earlier period in which we know from Henslowe that the stout-hearted and long struggling young playwright went through so much theatrical hackwork and piecework in the same rough harness with other now more or less notable workmen then drudging under the manager’s dull narrow sidelong eye for bare bread and bare shelter. But this unlikeness, great as it is and serious and singular, between his former and his latter style in high comedy, gives no warrant for us to believe him capable of so immeasurable a transformation in tragic style and so indescribable a decadence in tragic power as would be implied in a descent from the “fine madness” of “old Jeronymo” to the flat sanity and smoke-dried sobriety of Catiline and Sejanus.—I cannot but think, too, that Lamb’s first hypothetical ascription of these wonderful scenes to Webster, so much the most Shakespearean in gait and port and accent of all Shakespeare’s liege men-at-arms, was due to a far happier and more trustworthy instinct than led him in later years to liken them rather to “the overflowing griefs and talking distraction of Titus Andronicus.”

We have wandered it may be somewhat out of the right time into a far other province of poetry than the golden land of Shakespeare’s ripest harvest-fields of humour. And now, before we may enter the “flowery square” made by the summer growth of his four greatest works in pure and perfect comedy “beneath a broad and equal-blowing wind” of all happiest and most fragrant imagination, we have but one field to cross, one brook to ford, that hardly can be thought to keep us out of Paradise. In the garden-plot on whose wicket is inscribed All’s Well that Ends Well, we are hardly distant from Eden itself

About a young dove’s flutter from a wood.

The ninth story of the third day of the Decameron is one of the few subjects chosen by Shakespeare—as so many were taken by Fletcher—which are less fit, we may venture to think, for dramatic than for narrative treatment. He has here again shown all possible delicacy of instinct in handling a matter which unluckily it was not possible to handle on the stage with absolute and positive delicacy of feeling or expression. Dr. Johnson—in my humble opinion, with some justice; though his verdict has been disputed on the score of undeserved austerity—“could not reconcile his heart to Bertram”; and I, unworthy as I may be to second or support on the score of morality the finding of so great a moralist, cannot reconcile my instincts to Helena. Parolles is even better than Bobadil, as Bobadil is even better than Bessus; and Lafeu is one of the very best old men in all the range of comic art. But the whole charm and beauty of the play, the quality which raises it to the rank of its fellows by making it loveable as well as admirable, we find only in the “sweet, serene, skylike” sanctity and attraction of adorable old age, made more than ever near and dear to us in the incomparable figure of the old Countess of Roussillon. At the close of the play, Fletcher would inevitably have married her to Lafeu—or rather possibly, to the King.

At the entrance of the heavenly quadrilateral, or under the rising dawn of the four fixed stars which compose our Northern Cross among the constellations of dramatic romance hung high in the highest air of poetry, we may well pause for very dread of our own delight, lest unawares we break into mere babble of childish rapture and infantile thanksgiving for such light vouchsafed even to our “settentrional vedovo sito” that even at their first dawn out of the depths

Goder pareva il ciel di lor fiammelle.

Beyond these again we see a second group arising, the supreme starry trinity of the Winter’s Tale, the Tempest, and Cymbeline: and beyond these the divine darkness of everlasting and all-maternal night. These seven lamps of the romantic drama have in them—if I may strain the similitude a little further yet—more of lyric light than could fitly be lent to feed the fire or the sunshine of the worlds of pure tragedy or comedy. There is more play, more vibration as it were, in the splendours of their spheres. Only in the heaven of Shakespeare’s making can we pass and repass at pleasure from the sunny to the stormy lights, from the glory of Cymbeline to the glory of Othello.

In this first group of four—wholly differing on that point from the later constellation of three—there is but very seldom, not more than once or twice at most, a shooting or passing gleam of anything more lurid or less lovely than “a light of laughing flowers.” There is but just enough of evil or even of passion admitted into their sweet spheres of life to proclaim them living: and all that does find entrance is so tempered by the radiance of the rest that we retain but softened and lightened recollections even of Shylock and Don John when we think of the Merchant of Venice and Much Ado about Nothing; we hardly feel in As You Like It the presence or the existence of Oliver and Duke Frederick; and in Twelfth Night, for all its name of the midwinter, we find nothing to remember that might jar with the loveliness of love and the summer light of life.