The unyoked humour of your idleness....
I’ll so offend, to make offence a skill;
Redeeming time when men think least I will.”
Nor is he altered when he seeks a complacent archbishop to provide him with an excuse for a war of aggression, and so having provided for both worlds, takes advantage of his own wrong to throw the responsibility for the miseries of the war on the French. In the tavern, in the council-chamber, on the battlefield, by the sick-bed of his father, he is always the same Henry of Monmouth, a foundation of cold able selfishness, a surface of valour and showy magnanimity which costs him nothing—a perfect portrait of the “unconscious hypocrite.” The circumstances may change but not the man. He only adapts the outward show to them. The incomparably more honest nature of Falstaff is as consistent as the king’s. He is a Bohemian who is not vicious nor cruel, but who simply follows the lusts of the flesh spontaneously, and is lovable for his geniality, his wit, and his perfect sincerity. Falstaff is not, properly speaking, immoral. He is only exterior to morals. If he were cruel or treacherous he would be horrible, but he is neither. He is only a humorous, fat, meat-, drink-, and ease-loving animal. Given these two, and around them a crowd of others, heroic, grotesque, or even only commonplace, all doing credible things on the green earth, and the result is a coherent action, not made on the model of a Chinese puzzle, but yet consistent, because being real and true to life, the characters act intelligibly, and do nothing uncaused, unnatural, or inconsequent.
The mere fact that it is possible to differ as to the real nature of some of Shakespeare’s characters is a tribute to their reality. We are never in the least doubt as to the meaning of the heroes of Corneille or Racine, or the galanes, damas, and jealous husbands of Lope and Calderon. In them we have certain qualities, certain manifestations of character, selected and kept so well before us that they explain themselves, as a Spaniard might say, a crossbow-shot off. Even Molière, who comes nearest to Shakespeare, is simple and transparent, because he also is, in comparison, narrow and arbitrary. We may differ as to his purpose in writing Don Juan or Tartuffe. Was he only drawing infidelity and hypocrisy to make them hateful? Was he speaking for the libertins of the seventeenth century, the forerunners of the philosophy of the eighteenth, who were in revolt against the claim of religion to be a guide of life and to control conduct? But the personages explain themselves. Again, when we meet one of those sudden, unexplained, or insufficiently explained alterations of the whole nature of a man or woman, so common with the other Elizabethan dramatists, and not very rare with the Spaniards, we know it to be false to life, and put it down at once as a clumsy playwright’s device. But the characters of Shakespeare are like the great figures of history, real, and yet not always to be understood at once, because they have the variety, the complexity, and the mystery of nature.
The men who grew up around Shakespeare in the last years of the sixteenth century, and who outlived him, do not belong to our subject. It is enough to point out how unlikely it was that they would continue him. Ben Jonson, who was by far the strongest of them, tacitly confessed that there could be no Shakespearian drama without Shakespeare, when he deliberately sacrificed character to the convenient simplicity of the “humour,” and looked for the structural coherence of his plays to the unities. Other men who were less wise preferred to keep the freedom which they had not the strength to bear.
CHAPTER IX.
THE ELIZABETHAN PROSE-WRITERS.
ELIZABETHAN PROSE—TWO SCHOOLS OF WRITERS—ROGER ASCHAM—HIS BOOKS AND STYLE—WEBBE AND PUTTENHAM—THE SENTENCE—EUPHUISM—THE ‘ARCADIA’—SIDNEY’S STYLE—SHORT STORIES—NASH’S ‘UNFORTUNATE TRAVELLER’—NASH AND THE PAMPHLETEERS—MARTIN MARPRELATE—ORIGIN OF THE MARPRELATE TRACTS—THE ‘DIOTREPHES’—COURSE OF THE CONTROVERSY—ITS PLACE IN LITERARY HISTORY—HOOKER—‘THE ECCLESIASTICAL POLITY.’