Shakspeare and His Times

by François Guizot

Thus man alone occupies the stage; his existence is displayed upon it, animated and aggrandized by the events which are connected with it, and which owe their theatrical character to this connection alone. In comedy, events, being of less magnitude than the passion which they excite in man, derive a laughable importance from this passion; in tragedy, being more powerful than the means which man has at his disposal, they move us by the exhibition of his grandeur and his weakness. The comic poet invents them freely, for his art consists in originating, in man himself and his absurdities, those events by which man is agitated. This invention is rarely a merit in the tragic poet, for his work is to discern and exhibit man and his soul in the midst of the events to which he is subjected. If it be generally requisite that the subject of tragedy should be taken from the history of the great and powerful, it is because the strong impressions which it aims at producing upon us can only be communicated to us by strong characters, incapable of succumbing beneath the blows of an ordinary destiny. It is in the development of high fortune and its terrible vicissitudes that the whole man appears, with all the wealth and energy of his nature. Thus the spectacle of the world, concentrated in an individual, is revealed to us upon the stage; thus, by the medium of the soul which receives their impress, events reach us through sympathy, the source of dramatic illusion.

If material illusion were the aim of the arts, the wax-figures of Curtius would surpass all the statues of antiquity, and a panorama would be the ultimate effort of painting. If their object were to impose upon the reason, and to impart to the imagination a shock sufficiently powerful to pervert the judgment to such a degree that a theatrical representation could be taken for the accomplishment of a real and actual fact, a very few scenes would suffice to work up the spectators to such a pitch of excitement that its effect would soon be to interrupt the performance by the violence of their emotions. If even it were desired that, in presence of objects imitated by art of any kind, the soul, affected at least by the reality of the impressions which it receives from them, should really experience those feelings of which the image is produced in it by a fictitious representation, the labor of genius would have succeeded only in multiplying, in this world, the pains of life and the exhibition of human miseries. These feelings, however, occupy and pervade us, and on their existence depends the effect which the poet aims to produce upon us. We must believe in them in order to yield to them; and we could not believe in them unless we assigned to them a cause worthy to awaken them. When our tears flow before Raphael's picture of Christ bearing his cross, before we can allow them to flow, we must believe that we bestow them upon that sorrowful compassion which we should feel at really beholding such dreadful sufferings. If, in the emotions with which we are inspired by the sight of Tancred dying on the stage, we did not think we could recognize the emotions which we should feel for Tancred dying in reality, we should be displeased with ourselves for indulging in a pity which was not rendered legitimate by its application to sorrows that at least were possible. And yet we deceive ourselves; that which we then discern in our breasts is not that power which is awakened at the aspect of the suffering of our fellows—a power full of bitterness if reduced to inactivity, but full of activity if it be allowed liberty and hope to render assistance. It is not this power, but its shadow—the image of our features repeated with striking accuracy, but without life, in a mirror. Moved at the aspect of what we should be capable of experiencing, we give up our imagination to it without having any demands to make upon our will. No one is tormented with an irrepressible desire to shout out to Tancred, Orosmane, or Othello, that they are laboring under a mistake; no one suffers through not being able to rush to the assistance of Gloster against the execrable Duke of Cornwall. The unendurable painfulness of the position of the spectators of such a scene is removed by the idea that it is utterly unreal; an idea which is presented to our minds, and which we retain without clearly perceiving its presence, because we are absorbed by the contemplation of the more vivid impressions which crowd upon our brain. If this idea were clearly present to our thoughts, it would dissipate the whole cortège of illusions which surround us, and we should summon it to our assistance to deaden their effect, if they should change into a subject for real grief. Bat so long as the spectator takes delight in forgetting it, art should studiously avoid every thing that might remind him that the spectacle which he contemplates is not real. Hence arises the necessity of bringing all the parts of the performance into harmonious unison, and of not diffusing unequally the force of the illusion, which loses strength as soon, as it allows itself to be perceived. This is what would happen if, at the moment when he is indulging in feelings which are familiar to him, the spectator were disconcerted by the presentation of forms of manners entirely foreign to his experience. Hence also arises the necessity of giving a certain amount of attention to the accessories not in order to increase the illusion, but in order not to interfere with it. The actor alone is expected to produce that moral illusion which is aimed at by the drama. Where could we find means equal to those which he possesses for so doing? What imitation could stand beside his? What object in nature could be so well represented as man, when it is man himself who represents it? Let not dramatic art, therefore, seek assistance from other imitations which are far inferior to that which man can offer it; all that the machinist and the decorator have to do with the moral illusion is to remove every thing that might injure its effect. Perhaps even art would have reason to dread too great efforts on their part to do it service; who can tell whether a too brilliant magic of painting, employed to enhance the effect of the decorations, would not weaken the dramatic effect by diverting the attention to the enchantments of another art?

These accesssory imitations are dangerous auxiliaries, whether, by their perfection, they usurp the effect to which they ought merely to contribute, or whether they destroy it by their inefficiency. In England, as we have seen, the early stage was entirely unacquainted with the art of decoration, a recent homage paid to probability, which becomes really useful to the dramatic illusion when, without pretending to increase it, it simply prevents it from having to surmount obstacles of too uncouth a nature, and enables the mind of the spectator to picture to itself with greater distinctness the position into which it is required to transport itself. Imaginations more susceptible than they were delicate, and more easily affected than undeceived, had no need of that management which is now demanded by a restless reason, incessantly occupied in exercising surveillance over even our pleasures. Those spectators, who exacted so little with regard to the decoration of the theatre, exacted a great deal in reference to the material movement of the scene; though indulgent to the insufficiency and rudeness of theatrical imitations, they were fond of variety, and scarcely perceived the improprieties which resulted therefrom. Just as a man might, without diminishing their emotion, represent to them the sensitive Ophelia or the delicate Desdemona, they could see stationed at one end of the stage the cannon which was to kill the Duke of Bedford at the opposite end, and this great event did not strike them less forcibly on account of the poverty of the arrangement; indeed, they could receive with all the force of dramatic illusion the touching impression of the death of the two Talbots on a field of battle, which was animated, by the movements of four soldiers!

When the illusion becomes at once more difficult and more necessary to imaginations less quickly seduced, and to minds less easily amused, it is the study of art to remove every object that might prove injurious to it; and, as the representation of material objects becomes more perfect, it interferes less in the action of the drama, which is almost exclusively reserved for man, who alone can impart to it the appearance of reality. It was to man that, notwithstanding the habits of his time, Shakspeare felt that he must look for the production of this great effect. The movement of the stage, which, before his time, had constituted the chief interest of dramatic works, became in his plays a simple accessory which the taste of his age did not allow him to omit, and which, perhaps, his own taste did not require him to sacrifice, but which he reduced to its true value. It matters little, therefore, that, in his dramas, the moral illusion may still be sometimes disturbed by the imperfect representation of objects which theatrical imitation could not compass; Shakspeare did not the less discern the true source of this illusion, and did not seek the means of producing it elsewhere.

He was equally well acquainted with its nature also; he felt that an illusion of this kind, akin to no error of the senses or the reason, but the simple result of a disposition of the soul, which forgets all extraneous things in order to contemplate itself, could only be sustained by the perpetual consent of the spectator to the seduction which the poet is desirous to exercise over him, and that this seductive influence must therefore be maintained unintermittingly. Whatever might be the power of a dramatic representation, it could not, from the outset, obtain a sufficient hold upon us to deliver us over in a defenseless state to all the feelings which will take possession of us in proportion as we advance in the position in which it has placed us. The imagination must lend itself gradually to this new position, and the soul must accustom itself to it, and accept the sway of the impressions which must arise from it, just as, when we experience an unexpected piece of good or bad fortune, we require some time to bring our feelings to a level with our fate. But if, after having obtained our consent to this position, and after having moved us by the impressions which accompany it, the poet imprudently attempts to make us pass into a new position, attended by new impressions, the work must be begun over again, and will require all the more effort, because it will be necessary to efface the traces of a work already accomplished. Then the imagination becomes chilled and disturbed; the spectator refuses to lend himself to a movement from which he is diverted after having been desired to yield himself unresistingly to its influence. The illusion vanishes, and with it the interest also; for dramatic interest, in common with dramatic illusion, can only be attached to impressions which are continued and renewed in one and the same direction.

Unity of impression, that prime secret of dramatic art, was the soul of Shakspeare's great conceptions, and the instinctive object of his assiduous labor, just as it is the end of all the rules invented by all systems. The exclusive partisans of the classic system believed that it was impossible to attain unity of impression, except by means of what are called the three unities. Shakspeare attained it by other means. If the legitimacy of these means were recognized, it would greatly diminish the importance hitherto attributed to certain forms and rules, which are evidently invested with an abusive authority, if art, in order to accomplish its designs, does not need the restrictions which they impose upon it, and which often deprive it of a portion of its wealth.

The mobility of our imagination, the variety of our interests, and the inconstancy of our inclinations, have given to times, and even to places, a power which should not be lost sight of by the poet who is desirous to make use of the affections of man in order to excite the sympathy of his fellows. If he presents his hero to them at intervals too widely distant in the duration of his existence, they will inquire, "What has become of the man whom we knew six months ago?" just as naturally as, when meeting a friend six months after the occurrence of an event which has plunged him into grief, we begin by inquiring discreetly into the state of that grief which we once saw so painfully manifested, for fear lest we should enter into communication with his soul before we know what feeling we shall have to participate. If compelled to give an account of the changes which have occurred during the course of six months or a year, to spectators who, only a short time previously, saw him disappear from the stage, would not the tragic hero present a strange incongruity with himself? would not the thread of his identity be broken? and, far from feeling the same interest in him, should we not have some difficulty in avowing him to be the same person?

From this condition of human nature has been derived the true motive of the unities of time and place, which have often been most preposterously founded upon a pretended necessity of satisfying the reason by accommodating the duration of the real action to that of the theatrical representation; as if the reason could consent to believe that, during the interval of a few minutes between the acts, the persons of the drama had passed from evening to morning without having slept, or from morning to evening without having eaten; and as if it were more easy to take three hours for a day than for a week, or even for a month!

Nevertheless, it can not be denied that the mind feels a certain repugnance to behold intervals of time and place disappear before it, without its being able to account for their departure, or receiving any modification from it. The more these intervals are prolonged, the more does this discontent increase, for the mind feels that many things are thus concealed from its knowledge of which it is its province to dispose, and it would not like to be told too often, as Crispin says to Géronte, "C'est votre lethargie." But these difficulties are not insurmountable by the skill of art; if the mind becomes easily alarmed at that which, without its consent, disturbs the settled habits of its character, it is easy to make it forget them. Place it in view of the object toward which you have succeeded in directing its desires, and, in its forward spring to reach it, it will no longer care to measure the space which you compel it to traverse. When reading an interesting work, our strongly-excited attention transports us without difficulty from one time to another; our thought concentrates itself upon the event at which we expect to arrive, and sees nothing in the interval which separates us from it; and as it enables us to reach it, without having, as it were, changed our place, we are scarcely conscious that we have been obliged to change the time. When Claudius and Laertes have agreed together upon the duel in which Hamlet is to be slain, between that moment and the consummation of their plans we care little to know whether two hours or a week have elapsed.