Ariosto, Shakespeare and Corneille

by Benedetto Croce

"Nay, if you read this line, remember not
The hand that writ it; for I love you so,
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot,
If thinking on me then should make you woe."

For this reason, when we read in Brandes's book (which we select for quotation here, because it has been widely circulated), such statements as that Richard III, the deformed dwarf, whom we feel to be superior in intellect, adumbrates Shakespeare himself, obliged to adopt the despised profession of the actor, but full of the pride of genius, it is not a case of rejecting or accepting his statements, but of simply looking upon them as so many conjectures founded upon air and as such, devoid of interest. This criterion can also be applied in the following cases: that the pitiful death of the youthful Prince Arthur, in King John, shows traces of the loss of one of his sons, sustained by the author at the moment when he was composing that drama; that the riotous youth of Henry V is a symbol of the youth of Shakespeare during his first years in London; that Brutus, in Julius Caesar, has reference to the persons of Essex and Southampton, protectors of the poet and unsuccessful conspirators against the queen; that Coriolanus, disdainful of praise, is Shakespeare in the attitude that it suited him to take up towards the public and the critics; that the feeling of King Lear, appalled with ingratitude, is that of the poet, appalled at the ingratitude he experienced at the hands of his colleagues, of the impresarii and of his pupils; and finally that Shakespeare must have written those terrible dramas in the nocturnal hours, although he most probably worked as a rule in the early morning; together with many other fancies of a similar sort; it is not a case of accepting or of confuting them, but of just taking them for what they are, conjectures based upon air, and as such of no interest.

The like may be said of another volume, which has also been much discussed, that of Harris. Here, in a view based upon the inspection of his lyrics and dramas, he is represented as sensual and neuropathic, almost affected with erotic mania, weak of will, attracted and tyrannised over during almost the whole of his life, by a fascinating and faithless dark lady, named Mary Fitton. Hence the origin of his most poignant tragedies, and the mystery that conceals his last years, when he withdrew to Stratford, by no means with the intention of there enjoying the peace of the country as a foenerator Appuis, but because, ruined in body and soul, he wished there to nurse his ills, or rather to die there, as soon afterwards he did.

The period of the great tragedies, especially, has been connected with circumstances in the private life of the author and with events in English public life. This too may or may not be true: Shakespeare may or may not have been extremely excitable, both in personal and practical matters; he may on the other hand have remained perfectly calm and watched the tossing sea from the shore, with that tone of feeling proper to artists, described by psychologists as Scheingefühle, a feeling of appearance and dream. No value also is to be attributed to conjectures as to the models that Shakespeare sometimes had before him: for Shylock in the shape of some adventurer of his time, or for Prospero in the person of the Emperor Rudolph II, who was interested in science and magic, and the like, because the relation between art and its model is incommensurable. In reading the works of Shakespeare, one is sometimes inclined to think (as for that matter in the case of other poets), that some affection or incident of the life of the author is to be found in the words of this or that character, as for example in Cymbeline, where Posthumus says,

"Could I find out
The woman's part in me! But there's no motion
That tends to vice in man, but I affirm
It is the woman's part!"

or in those others of Troilus and Cressida:

"Lechery, lechery; still, wars and lechery; nothing
else holds fashions: a burning devil take them!"

in the same way as some have suspected a personal memory in the case of Dante, in the Francesca episode of the reading and inebriation. But there is nothing to be done with this suspicion and the thought that suggested it. Nor is there anything to be built upon in those rare passages, where it may seem that the poet breaks the coherence and aesthetic level of his work, in order to lay stress upon some real or practical feeling of his own, by over-accentuation; because, even if we admit that there are such passages in Shakespeare, it always remains doubtful whether for him, as for other poets, the true motive for this inopportune emphasis, is to be found in the eruption of his own powerful feelings, or rather in some other accidental motive.

We may also save ourselves from wonder and invective of the "Baconian hypothesis," by means of this indifference of the poetical work towards biography. This hypothesis maintains that the real author of the plays, which pass under the name of Shakespeare, was Francis Bacon. We are likewise preserved from those others of more recent date and vogue, which maintain that the author was Roger, fifth Earl of Rutland, or that Rutland collaborated with Southampton, or that there really existed a society of dramatic authors, (Chettle, Heywood, Webster, etc.) with the final revision entrusted to Bacon, or finally (the latest discovery of the sort) that he was William Stanley, sixth Earl >of Derby. A thousand or more volumes, opuscules and articles have been printed to deal with these conjectures, and although—to the severe eye of the trained philologist—they may justly seem to be extravagant, yet they retain the merit of being a sort of involuntarily ironic treatment of the purely philological method and of its abuse of conjecture.

But even if we grant the unlikely contention that in the not very great brain of the philosopher Bacon, there lodged the brain of a very great poet, from which proceeded the Shakespearean drama, nothing would thereby have been discovered or proved, save a singular marvel, a joke, a monstrosity of nature. The artistic problem would remain untouched, because that drama remains always the same; Lear laments and imprecates in the same manner, Othello struggles furiously, Hamlet meditates and wavers before the problem of humanity and the action that he is called upon to take, and in the same manner, all are enwrapped in the veil of Eternity, It is a good thing to shake off this weight of erroneous philology (another philology exists alongside of it, which is not erroneous, since it preserves the probably genuine text, and interprets the vocabulary and the historical references with a genuine feeling for art), not only because, whether or no it attain the end of biography, it distracts attention from the right and proper object of artistic criticism, but also because it employs the biography, true or false, for the purpose of clouding and changing the artistic vision. Confounding art and document, it transports into art whatever it has discovered or believes itself to have discovered by means of research, turning the serene compositions of the poet into a series of shudders, cries, restless motions, convulsions, ferocious springs, manifestations, now of sentimental rapture, now of furious desire.