The norm of love lent itself both to comic and to tragic situation, but only within somewhat narrow limits. The richness, depth and constancy of the passion precluded a whole world of comic effects. It precluded the comedy of the coquette and the prude, of the affected gallant and the cynical roué, of the calf-lover and the doting husband; the comedy of the fantastic tricks played by love under the obsession of pride, self-interest, meticulous scruple, or superstition. Into this field Shakespeare made brilliant incursions, but it hardly engaged his rarest powers, and to large parts of it his ‘universal’ genius remained strange. We have only to recall, among a crowd of other examples, Moreto’s Diana (El Desden con el Desden), Molière’s Alceste and Célimène, Congreve’s Millamant, in Shakespeare’s century; or, in the modern novel, a long line of figures from Jane Austen to The Egoist and Ibsen’s Love’s Comedy—to recognize that Shakespeare, with all the beauty, wit and charm of his work, touched only the fringes of the Comedy of love.
The normal love, not being itself ridiculous, could thus yield material for the comic spirit only through some fact or situation external to it. It may be brought before us only in ludicrous parody. We laugh at the ‘true love’ of Pyramus and Thisbe in the ‘tedious brief’ play of the Athenian artisans, or at that of Phœbe and Silvius, because Shakespeare is chaffing the literary pastoral of his day. Hamlet’s love, itself moving, even tragic, becomes a source of comedy in the solemn analysis of Polonius. Or again, the source of fun lies in the wit and humour of the lovers themselves. Some of them, like Rosalind and Beatrice, virtually create and sustain the wit-fraught atmosphere of the play single-handed. But Shakespeare habitually heightens this source of fun by some piquancy of situation—almost always one arising from delusion, particularly through confusion of identity. It is a mark of the easy-going habits of his art in comedy that he never threw aside this rather elementary device, though subjecting it, no doubt, to successive refinements which become palpable enough when we pass from the Two Gentlemen to Cymbeline. But his genius made perennially delightful even the crude forms of confusion which create grotesque infatuations like those of Titania, Malvolio, Phœbe, Olivia. More refined, and yet more delightful, are the confusions which bring true and destined lovers together, like the arch make-believe courtship with which Rosalind’s wit amuses and consoles her womanhood, and that other which liberates the natural congeniality of Beatrice and Benedict from their ‘merry war.’ In cases like these, Shakespeare’s humour has the richer and finer effluence which derives from a hidden ground of passion or tears. Rosalind’s wit is that of a woman many fathoms deep in love; Beatrice’s ears tingle with remorse at the tale of Benedick’s secret attachment; Viola’s gallant bravado to Olivia conceals her own unspoken maiden love. And Portia crowns her home-coming to her husband and her splendid service to his friend with the madcap jest of the rings. Such jesting is in Shakespeare a part of the language of love; and like its serious or lyrical speech, is addressed with predilection to love’s object.
Again, the normal love offered in itself equally little promise of tragedy. No deformed or morbid passion, but the healthy and natural self-fulfilment of man and woman, calling heart and wit and senses alike into vigorous play, it provided equally little hold for the criminal erotics in which most of Shakespeare’s contemporaries sought the tragic thrill, and for the bitter disenchantment and emotional decay which generate the subtle tragedy of Anna Karénina or Modern Love. Tragic these healthy lovers of themselves will never become; they have to be led into the realm of pity and fear, as into that of laughter and mirth, by the incitement or the onthrust of alien forces. Here, too, Shakespeare’s habitual instrument is delusion; only now it is not the delusion which deftly entangles and pleasantly infatuates, but that which horribly perplexes and rends apart. The blindness, of Claudio, of Othello, of Posthumus, of Leontes, is provoked by circumstances of very various cogency, but in each case it wrecks a love relation in which we are allowed to see no flaw. The situation of innocent, slandered, heart-stricken womanhood clearly appealed strongly to him, and against his wont he repeated it again and again. Even after leaving the stage, he was allured by the likeness of the story of Henry VIII’s slandered queen to his Hermione, to reopen the magic ‘book’ he had ‘drowned.’ He was no sentimentalist; his pathos is never morbid; but it is in imagining souls of texture fine and pure enough to be wrought upon to the most piteous extreme by slander from the man they love, that Shakespeare found most of his loveliest and most authentically Shakesperean characters of women. Hermione and Hero, Desdemona and Imogen, are to his graver art what Rosalind and Beatrice and Portia are to his comedy.
But while the tragic issue is directly provoked by the alien intervention, it is clear that almost all its tragic quality springs, not from the operations of Iachimo or Iago, but from the wonderful presentment of the love they wreck. Shakespeare’s supreme command of pity springs from his exalted faith in love. The poet of the Sonnets is implicit in the poet of Othello. And the dramas themselves abound in lyric outbursts, often hardly called for by the situation, in which his ideal of wedded love is uttered with the poignant insight of one who was probably far from having achieved or observed it himself. One need but think of France’s reply to Burgundy (King Lear, I, i. 241):
Love’s not love
When it is mingled with regards that stand
Aloof from the entire point.
Or of Imogen, blind to all but the path of light and air that divides her from Milford Haven:
I see before me, man; nor here, nor here,
Nor what ensues, but have a fog in them,