All noble things that can be imagined surround and elevate their loves: misfortune, compassion, chaste desire, virginal respect. These things, though infinitely repeated in the world's history seem new, as the two live through them, "surprised withal," surprised and ravished at the mystery, which in them is celebrated once more.
2
THE LONGING FOR ROMANCE
Another motive, related to the preceding, may be described as the longing for romance, but this expression must be taken with all due limitations.
Amorous damsels don the travesty of masculine attire, in order to follow their faithless or cruel lovers, to escape persecution, or to perform wondrous deeds; brothers, or brothers and sisters, who resemble one another, are taken for one another, and thus form a centre for the most curious adventures; with like objects in view, princes travesty themselves as shepherds; gentlemen are discovered in forests with bandits and are themselves bandits; children of royal blood, ignorant of their origin, live like peasants, yet are moved by inclinations, which make them impatient of their quiet, humble lives, urging them on to great adventures; sovereigns move, disguised and unknown, among their subjects, listening to the free speech around them and observant of everything; rustic or city maidens become queens and countesses, or are discovered to be of royal stock; brothers, who are enemies, become reconciled; those who are innocent and having been wrongfully accused and condemned, are believed to have died or been put to death, survive, to reappear at the right moment, thus gratifying the long-cherished hopes of those who had once believed them guilty and had mourned their loss.
Strange rules and compacts are imposed, strange understandings come to, such as the winning of husband or wife upon the solution of an enigma, or upon the discovery of some object; then there is the bet as to the virtue of a woman, won with a trick by the punster or by the perfidious accuser; the betrothed or unwilling husband, finally obtained by the substitution of another person; there are miraculous events, dreams, magical arts, work of spirits of earth and sky ... Men and women are tossed from land to sea, from city to forest and desert, from court to country, from a civil and cultured, to a rustic and simple life. These latter situations are peculiar to romance in the form of the idyll, which is really the most romantic of romanticisms, though it may seem to be the opposite. This is so true that even Don Quixote, when he saw the way closed for the time being to the performance of chivalrous feats of knight errantry, thought of retiring to the country, there to pasture herds and to pipe songs to the beloved, in the company of Sancho Panza.
Several of Shakespeare's plays derive both plot and material from suchlike things and persons, as for instance, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, All's Well That Ends Well, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, Pericles, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Much Ado About Nothing, The Merchant of Venice, Measure for Measure. These plays may be said to be altogether or in part, of literary origin, or suggested by books, in a sense different from that in which Shakespeare treated the other plays, where, although not bookish, he gathered his raw materials from the English chroniclers, from ancient historians, or Italian novelists, breathing upon it a new spirit and thus making of it something altogether new to the world. Here on the other hand, he found the spirit itself, the general sentiment, in the literature of his time. Italy had worked upon the ancient poetry of Greece and Rome, upon Hellenistic and Byzantine romances, upon mediaeval romances, upon poems and plays, novels and comedies, and with Italy was also Spain, whose Amadigi and Diane were known throughout Europe. The genesis of these themes and of his attraction towards them, is to be sought, therefore, rather in the times than in Shakespeare himself, and for this reason we shall not delay our progress, to show how the play of sentiment within made dear to him that wandering away in imagination to the idyllic life of the country, far from pomp and artifice, the deceits and the delusions of courts; though this idyllic life itself became in its turn refined and artificial at his hand, a pastoral theme. It is important to note, too, that all the above-mentioned material of situations and adventures had already been fashioned and arranged for the theatre, in the course of the second half of the century. This was especially due to the Italian theatre of improvisation or of "art," as it was called. This literature, so often of a most romantic and imaginative kind, has had but little attention at the hand of investigators into Shakespeare's sources of inspiration.
Both material derived from books and literary inspiration combine to throw light upon certain of Shakespeare's works, which have given great trouble to the historians of his art. It is quite natural that writers should draw upon what they have done before and should execute variations upon it, particularly in their earlier years, but also later in the course of their lives, when they have afforded far greater proofs of their capacity. Shakespeare was no exception to this, any more than the great contemporary poet of Don Quixote, who was also the author of the Galatea and of Persiles y Sigismunda. The Comedy of Errors, as we know, consists of a motive from Plautus, repeated and rearranged innumerable times by the dramatists of the Renaissance. In treating this theme, Shakespeare rendered it on the one hand yet more artificial, while on the other, he endowed it with a more marked tendency towards the romantic, and notwithstanding the frivolity and frigidity of misunderstandings arising from identity of appearance, he yet revived them here and there according to his wont with a touch of the reality of life. The intrigue of the Menecmi, or of very close resemblance, pleased him so much that he introduced it in Twelfth Night, where the pair are of different sex. This variation was first employed by Cardinal Bibbiena in his Calandria, but the Cardinal made use of it to increase the lubricity of the intrigue, while Shakespeare drew from it a theme for most graceful poetic inspiration.
One would think that the tragic theme of Titus Andronicus (which many critics would like to say was not by Shakespeare, but dare not, because here the proofs of authenticity are very strong), was also born of a love for literary models, for the tragedy of horrors, so common in Italy in those days of the Canaci and the Orbecchi, which were rather imitations of Seneca than of Sophocles and Euripides, and had already inspired plays to the predecessors of Shakespeare, with slaughter for their theme. What more natural then, than that Shakespeare as a young man should strike this note? The splendid eloquence with which he adorned the horrible tale is Shakespearean.