“Voltaire,” says M. Guizot, “was the first person in France who spoke of Shakespeare's genius; and although he spoke of him merely as a barbarian genius, the French public were of the opinion that he had said too much in his favor. Indeed, they thought it nothing less than profanation to apply the words genius and glory to dramas which they considered as crude as they were coarse.”
Guizot was one of the first of his nation to approach Shakespeare in the right spirit—that is, in the spirit in which he could hope for any enlightenment; and in his admirable essay on “Shakespeare and His Times,” he pointed out the exact way in which any piece or period of literature should be studied, that is worth studying at all. He inquired into English civilization, into the habits, manners, and modes of thought of the people for whom Shakespeare wrote. This method, this inquiry into popular sources, has been carried much further since Guizot wrote, and it is now considered the most remunerative method, whether the object of study is literature or politics. By it not only is the literature of a period for the first time understood, but it is given its just place as an exponent of human life and a monument of human action.
The student who takes up Shakespeare's plays for the purpose of either amusement or cultivation, I would recommend to throw aside the whole load of commentary, and speculation, and disquisition, and devote himself to trying to find out first what was the London and the England of Shakespeare's day, what were the usages of all classes of society, what were the manners and the character of the people who crowded to hear his plays, or who denounced them as the works of the devil and the allies of sin. I say again to the student that by this means Shakespeare will become a new thing to him, his mind will be enlarged to the purpose and scope of the great dramatist, and more illumination will be cast upon the plays than is received from the whole race of inquisitors into his phrases and critics of his genius. In the light of contemporary life, its visions of empire, its spirit of adventure, its piracy, exploration, and warlike turmoil, its credulity and superstitious wonder at natural phenomena, its implicit belief in the supernatural, its faith, its virility of daring, coarseness of speech, bluntness of manner, luxury of apparel, and ostentation of wealth, the mobility of its shifting society, these dramas glow with a new meaning, and awaken a profounder admiration of the poet's knowledge of human life.
The experiences of the poet began with the rude and rural life of England, and when he passed into the presence of the court and into the bustle of great London in an age of amazing agitation, he felt still in his veins the throb of the popular blood. There were classic affectations in England, there were masks and mummeries and classic puerilities at court and in noble houses—Elizabeth's court would well have liked to be classical, remarks Guizot—but Shakespeare was not fettered by classic conventionalities, nor did he obey the unities, nor attempt to separate on the stage the tragedy and comedy of life—“immense and living stage,” says the writer I like to quote because he is French, upon which all things are represented, as it were, in their solid form, and in the place which they occupied in a stormy and complicated civilization. In these dramas the comic element is introduced whenever its character of reality gives it the right of admission and the advantage of opportune appearance. Falstaff appears in the train of Henry V., and Doll Tear-Sheet in the train of Falstaff; the people surround the kings, and the soldiers crowd around their generals; all conditions of society, all the phases of human destiny appear by turns in juxtaposition, with the nature which properly belongs to them, and in the position which they naturally occupy. . . .
“Thus we find the entire world, the whole of human realities, reproduced by Shakespeare in tragedy, which, in his eyes, was the universal theatre of life and truth.”
It is possible to make a brutal picture of the England of Shakespeare's day by telling nothing that is not true, and by leaving out much that is true. M. Taine, who has a theory to sustain, does it by a graphic catalogue of details and traits that cannot be denied; only there is a great deal in English society that he does not include, perhaps does not apprehend. Nature, he thinks, was never so completely acted out. These robust men give rein to all their passions, delight in the strength of their limbs like Carmen, indulge in coarse language, undisguised sensuality, enjoy gross jests, brutal buffooneries. Humanity is as much lacking as decency. Blood, suffering, does not move them. The court frequents bull and bear baitings; Elizabeth beats her maids, spits upon a courtier's fringed coat, boxes Essex's ears; great ladies beat their children and their servants. “The sixteenth century,” he says, “is like a den of lions. Amid passions so strong as these there is not one lacking. Nature appears here in all its violence, but also in all its fullness. If nothing has been softened, nothing has been mutilated. It is the entire man who is displayed, heart, mind, body, senses, with his noblest and finest aspirations, as with his most bestial and savage appetites, without the preponderance of any dominant passion to cast him altogether in one direction, to exalt or degrade him. He has not become rigid as he will under Puritanism. He is not uncrowned as in the Restoration.” He has entered like a young man into all the lusty experiences of life, every allurement is known, the sweetness and novelty of things are strong with him. He plunges into all sensations. “Such were the men of this time, Raleigh, Essex, Elizabeth, Henry VIII himself, excessive and inconstant, ready for devotion and for crime, violent in good and evil, heroic with strange weaknesses, humble with sudden changes of mood, never vile with premeditation like the roisterers of the Restoration, never rigid on principle like the Puritans of the Revolution, capable of weeping like children, and of dying like men, often base courtiers, more than once true knights, displaying constantly, amidst all these contradictions of bearing, only the overflowing of nature. Thus prepared, they could take in everything, sanguinary ferocity and refined generosity, the brutality of shameless debauchery, and the most divine innocence of love, accept all the characters, wantons and virgins, princes and mountebanks, pass quickly from trivial buffoonery to lyrical sublimities, listen alternately to the quibbles of clowns and the songs of lovers. The drama even, in order to satisfy the prolixity of their nature, must take all tongues, pompous, inflated verse, loaded with imagery, and side by side with this vulgar prose; more than this, it must distort its natural style and limits, put songs, poetical devices in the discourse of courtiers and the speeches of statesmen; bring on the stage the fairy world of opera, as Middleton says, gnomes, nymphs of the land and sea, with their groves and meadows; compel the gods to descend upon the stage, and hell itself to furnish its world of marvels. No other theatre is so complicated, for nowhere else do we find men so complete.”
M. Taine heightens this picture in generalizations splashed with innumerable blood-red details of English life and character. The English is the most warlike race in Europe, most redoubtable in battle, most impatient of slavery. “English savages” is what Cellini calls them; and the great shins of beef with which they fill themselves nourish the force and ferocity of their instincts. To harden them thoroughly, institutions work in the same groove as nature. The nation is armed. Every man is a soldier, bound to have arms according to his condition, to exercise himself on Sundays and holidays. The State resembles an army; punishments must inspire terror; the idea of war is ever present. Such instincts, such a history, raises before them with tragic severity the idea of life; death is at hand, wounds, blood, tortures. The fine purple cloaks, the holiday garments, elsewhere signs of gayety of mind, are stained with blood and bordered with black. Throughout a stern discipline, the axe ready for every suspicion of treason; “great men, bishops, a chancellor, princes, the king's relations, queens, a protector kneeling in the straw, sprinkled the Tower with their blood; one after the other they marched past, stretched out their necks; the Duke of Buckingham, Queen Anne Boleyn, Queen Catherine Howard, the Earl of Surrey, Admiral Seymour, the Duke of Somerset, Lady Jane Grey and her husband, the Duke of Northumberland, the Earl of Essex, all on the throne, or on the steps of the throne, in the highest ranks of honor, beauty, youth, genius; of the bright procession nothing is left but senseless trunks, marred by the tender mercies of the executioner.”
The gibbet stands by the highways, heads of traitors and criminals grin on the city gates. Mournful legends multiply, church-yard ghosts, walking spirits. In the evening, before bedtime, in the vast country houses, in the poor cottages, people talk of the coach which is seen drawn by headless horses, with headless postilions and coachmen. All this, with unbounded luxury, unbridled debauchery, gloom, and revelry hand in hand. “A threatening and sombre fog veils their mind like their sky, and joy, like the sun, pierces through it and upon them strongly and at intervals.” All this riot of passion and frenzy of vigorous life, this madness and sorrow, in which life is a phantom and destiny drives so remorselessly, Taine finds on the stage and in the literature of the period.
To do him justice, he finds something else, something that might give him a hint of the innate soundness of English life in its thousands of sweet homes, something of that great force of moral stability, in the midst of all violence and excess of passion and performance, which makes a nation noble. “Opposed to this band of tragic figures,” which M. Taine arrays from the dramas, “with their contorted features, brazen fronts, combative attitudes, is a troop (he says) of timid figures, tender before everything, the most graceful and love-worthy whom it has been given to man to depict. In Shakespeare you will meet them in Miranda, Juliet, Desdemona, Virginia, Ophelia, Cordelia, Imogen; but they abound also in the others; and it is a characteristic of the race to have furnished them, as it is of the drama to have represented them. By a singular coincidence the women are more of women, the men more of men, here than elsewhere. The two natures go to its extreme—in the one to boldness, the spirit of enterprise and resistance, the warlike, imperious, and unpolished character; in the other to sweetness, devotion, patience, inextinguishable affection (hence the happiness and strength of the marriage tie), a thing unknown in distant lands, and in France especially a woman here gives herself without drawing back, and places her glory and duty in obedience, forgiveness, adoration, wishing, and pretending only to be melted and absorbed daily deeper and deeper in him whom she has freely and forever chosen.” This is an old German instinct. The soul in this race is at once primitive and serious. Women are disposed to follow the noble dream called duty. “Thus, supported by innocence and conscience, they introduce into love a profound and upright sentiment, abjure coquetry, vanity, and flirtation; they do not lie, they are not affected. When they love they are not tasting a forbidden fruit, but are binding themselves for their whole life. Thus understood, love becomes almost a holy thing; the spectator no longer wishes to be malicious or to jest; women do not think of their own happiness, but of that of the loved ones; they aim not at pleasure, but at devotion.”
Thus far M. Taine's brilliant antitheses—the most fascinating and most dangerous model for a young writer. But we are indebted to him for a most suggestive study of the period. His astonishment, the astonishment of the Gallic mind, at what he finds, is a measure of the difference in the literature of the two races as an expression of their life. It was natural that he should somewhat exaggerate what he regards as the source of this expression, leaving out of view, as he does, certain great forces and currents which an outside observer cannot feel as the race itself feels. We look, indeed, for the local color of this English literature in the manners and habits of the times, traits of which Taine has so skillfully made a mosaic from Harrison, Stubbes, Stowe, Holinshed, and the pages of Reed and Drake; but we look for that which made it something more than a mirror of contemporary manners, vices, and virtues, made it representative of universal men, to other causes and forces-such as the Reformation, the immense stir, energy, and ambition of the age (the result of invention and discovery), newly awakened to the sense that there was a world to be won and made tributary; that England, and, above all places on the globe at that moment, London, was the centre of a display of energy and adventure such as has been scarcely paralleled in history. And underneath it all was the play of an uneasy, protesting democracy, eager to express itself in adventure, by changing its condition, in the joy of living and overcoming, and in literature, with small regard for tradition or the unities.