History of English Literature from "Beowulf" to Swinburne

by Andrew Lang

Of "Hamlet" it is vain to speak briefly, and more than enough of speaking at large has been done by a myriad of commentators. The young prince, full of good qualities, is bound with knots which a real Dane of the Saga time would have cut with the short sword. But Hamlet has "the prophetic soul of the wide world, dreaming" of life, and death, and love, and contrary duties. Thus he, like Œdipus in the Greek tragedy, becomes as fatal to all around him as if he bore the Evil Eye; and while, like David at Ziklag, he is playing the madman, actual madness hangs over him like the sword of Damocles. Thus Shakespeare has left to the world a marvel of subtle and penetrative thought, of tenderness, of humour; to the critics a wrangle over psychological problems.

The same unparalleled powers, the same universality, the same gloomy vision of life, and, in "King Lear," another study of true and of feigned madness, inspire "Lear," "Macbeth," and "Othello," the last the most piteous of all. For in Othello it is not the error of a wavering hero, or the ambition of a man tempted, like Macbeth, by portents and prophecies, but the sheer inborn devilry of a creature in human form, Iago, that "breaks, and brings down death" on the most innocent of victims, Desdemona. "The pity of it" is too awful: the sense of wyrd, of masterful destiny, is too cruel.

Yet, if Shakespeare were to write tragedies, and to write them on the traditional materials which are the bases of these plays, it was inevitable that, as he wrote, he should have regarded life as he does, and human fortunes as the spoil of wayward and cruel fate. Æschylus could not make pretty melancholy pieces out of the materials of the "Agamemnon" and "Eumenides". He, to be sure, tried to justify the ways of the gods to men, and Shakespeare makes no such effort. His characters, in the immortal words of Nicias to his doomed Athenian army, "have done what men may, and endure what men must". "The rest is silence."

Of Troilus and Cressida (1603), printed 1609, we can only say that Shakespeare when he wrote it "was for one hour less noble than himself". The piece makes mockery—save for Odysseus,—of the heroes of Homer, and of Cressida, whom Chaucer treats with such fine chivalry. Thersites is merely loathsome, Aias a fool, Achilles a treacherous procurer of the death of Hector. Shakespeare made an impossible blend of Homer (of whom he clearly knew a little),[11] of Ovid, and of the mediaeval forms of the Tale of Troy. The elements are wholly incompatible, and the mood of the poet, whether he wrote the play early or late, was unenviable.

"Unpleasantness" is also the not undeserved charge against "Measure for Measure"; but Cinthio's Italian tale, on which it is founded, was "a sordid record of lust and cruelty". Shakespeare, altering the plot, redeemed it by the figure of Isabella, and by the sad Mariana in her "moated grange".

It cannot be denied that when Shakespeare added "Timon of Athens," the tragedy of a misanthrope, to "Troilus," and then produced the extremely unpleasant scenes in "Pericles" (which is not in the Folio of 1623, the first edition of his collected plays) he was selecting topics that encourage the belief in his own bitterness of spirit, while in "Antony and Cleopatra" the magnificent study of "the serpent of old Nile," and of the ruin she wrought, he continues his vein of thought on the accidents that bring courage and greatness to the dust.

In "Coriolanus" he contrasts the fickleness of the mob with an heroic soul ruined by its relentless exaggeration of its own merits and overweening greatness; the tragedy of Napoleon is a modern instance. Dating the play in 1608-1609, critics derive the character of the mother of Coriolanus from Shakespeare's thoughts of his own mother, who died in 1608. Of her character, of course, we know absolutely nothing.

The "tranquillity" of "Cymbeline" so rich in poetry, and so recklessly constructed; of the "Winter's Tale," where the poetry is yet more divine, and the plot is as heaven pleases; and of "The Tempest" (1613), where much of the "local colour" is derived from the adventures of English sea-men in the Bermudas (1609-1610), is explained by the resignation of increasing years.

We cannot reason thus with much confidence. Shakespeare could only have produced "The Tempest" in the plenitude of his genius, but he might have created it as it stands at any date after 1596, when he happened to take up the materials.

"Henry VIII" was being played in 1613 when the Globe Theatre was burned. That parts are by Shakespeare, parts by Fletcher, is a theory resting on the elusive internal evidence of style and quality.