Divisions of his work.
The work of Shakespeare falls into two classes—the pure poetry and the drama. The second is, indeed, intensely poetic, both in form and spirit, so that the division becomes unintelligent if we push it too far. But when his poetry is dramatic—when it is employed to set forth an action by talk—it is used for another purpose, and is found in combination with other qualities than are to be found in the pure poems. These are the Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, the sonnets, and the lyrics, which are mostly to be found in the plays, but can be detached from them. |The poems.| It is a sufficient proof of the vast sweep of Shakespeare’s genius that if we had nothing of him but these, the loss to the literature of the world would be irreparable, but he would still be a great poet. The Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece are greater poems than Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, more intense in passion, more uniformly magnificent in expression. Marlowe may reach their level when he is speaking to the full extent of his power, but he is not always there. Shakespeare always leaves the impression that he is within the limit of what he could do. The lyrics are the most perfect achievements of an age of lyric poetry. It is the presence of this note which atones for the much that is wanting in Lyly, Peele, and Greene. But if their best is put beside Shakespeare it suffers, as a pretty water-colour would suffer if hung by the side of a Velasquez. They lose colour by the comparison. The age was rich in sonnets. It produced the passion and melody of Sidney, the beauty of Spenser, the accomplishment of Daniel, and the vigour of Drayton. Yet Shakespeare’s sonnets are no less distinctly the greatest than his lyrics. It is even here that his pre-eminence is the most marked, for he has triumphed over more. The lyric is free and is brief. The sonnet is bound by rigid laws, and a cycle of sonnets is peculiarly liable to become monotonous, to be redundant, to be mechanical and frigid. But Shakespeare’s sonnets, whether or no they be in the order in which he would have put them, or were written to fall into any particular order, gave a varied yet consistent play of thought and passion, overshadowed by the ever-present consciousness of “the barren rage of death’s eternal cold.” In them, too, we always feel the superiority of the faculty to the work done. There is no toil, no struggle to express. What would have made another poet immortal, if said with manifest effort, is all poured out in “a first fine careless rapture.”
The dramas.
And beyond this ample forecourt and noble portico lies the far-spreading palace of the plays. The dramatic work of Shakespeare is greater than the purely poetic, mainly because of its vastly greater scope. It contains all that is in the poems, and so much more that they are, as it were, lost in the abundance. In this stately pleasure-house there are no doubt parts which diligent examination will show to bear the traces of inexperience in the builder, fragments of the work of others, and ornaments in the passing taste of the time. Shakespeare laboured for the Globe Theatre. He rearranged stock plays, and now and then he passed what he found in them, not because it was good but because it would suffice. He was an Elizabethan, and like others, he let his spirits and his energies relax in mere playing with words, in full-mouthed uproarious noise, and the quibbles which made Dr Johnson shake his head. In common with every other dramatist from Sophocles downwards, he had to consider his theatre and his audience. The mere man of letters writing “closet” plays can forget the stage, and be punished by the discovery that his masterpiece won’t act. Shakespeare aimed at being acted. His stage had no change of scenery, and his audience loved action. Therefore he could put in more words than can be admitted when time must be found for the operations of the stage-carpenter and the scene-shifter. Therefore also he could allow himself a licence in the change of scene, which is impossible when it carries with it a change of scenery. But all this is either easily separable or can be amended by rearrangement. And therein lies the absolute difference between Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The Jew of Malta could not be made an acting play by any process of manipulation. Take from the best of the others—even from Ben Jonson—what was purely Elizabethan, and how much remains? They are excellent to read, and were good to act before an audience which accepted their convention, but before that only. For purely stage purposes, too, their convention is inferior to the Spanish. The Dama Melindrosa would be easily intelligible and interesting to any audience to-day, but not Every Man in his Humour, or Epicene. With Shakespeare, when the suppressions have been made and the scenes have been adapted to new mechanical conditions, there still remains—not in all cases, indeed, but in most—a play—that is, a consistent action—carried on by possible characters, behaving and speaking differently from us in those things which are merely external, but in perfect agreement in all the essentials, both with themselves and with unchanging human nature.
The reality of Shakespeare’s characters.
It is this inner bond of life which gives to Shakespeare’s plays their unity and their enduring vitality. The superb verse, the faultless expression of every human emotion, from the love of Romeo or the intrepid despair of Macbeth down to the grotesque devotion of Bardolph, “Would I were with him wheresome’er he is, either in Heaven or in Hell,” are the outward and visible signs of this inward and spiritual truth to nature. Henry IV. and Henry V. may seem to be but straggling plays when they are compared with the exactly fitted plots of Lope de Vega or the arranged, selected, concentrated action of Racine. So the free-growing forest-tree is less trim and balanced than the clipped yew. But it has a higher life and the finer unity. The Henry V. who meets Falstaff with—
“I know thee not, old man: fall to thy prayers;
How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!”
is the same man as he who said—
“I know you all, and will awhile uphold