Shakspeare and His Times

by François Guizot

This arises from the fact that the chain of the impressions has not been broken, and the position of the characters has not been changed; their places have continued the same; their ardor is not less energetic; time has not acted upon them; it counts for nothing in the feelings with which they inspire us; it finds them, and us with them, in the same disposition of soul; and thus the two periods are brought together by that unity of impression which makes us say, when thinking of an event which occurred long ago, but the traces of which are still fresh in our memory, "It seems as though it had happened only yesterday."

In fact, what care we about the time which elapses between the actions with which Macbeth fills up his career of crime? When he commands the murder of Banquo the assassination of Duncan is still present to our eyes, and seems as though it had been committed only yesterday; and when Macbeth determines upon the massacre of Macduff's family, we fancy we see him still pale from the apparition of Banquo's ghost. None of his actions has terminated without necessitating the action which follows it; they announce and involve each other, thus forcing the imagination to go forward, full of trouble and sad expectation. Macbeth, who, after having killed Duncan, is urged, by the very terror which he feels at his crime, to kill the chamberlains, to whom he intends to attribute the murder, does not permit us to doubt the facility with which he will commit new crimes whenever occasion requires. The witches, who, at the opening of the play, have taken possession of his destiny, do not allow us to hope that they will grant any respite to the ambition and the necessities of his crimes. Thus all the threads are laid open to our eyes from the beginning; we follow, we anticipate the course of events; we stint no haste to arrive at that which our imagination devours beforehand; intervals vanish with the succession of the ideas which should occupy them; one succession alone is distinctly marked in our mind, and that is, the succession of the events which compose the absorbing spectacle which sweeps us onward in its rapidity. In our view, they are as closely connected in time as they are intimately linked together in thought; and any duration that may separate them is a duration as empty and unperceived as that of sleep—as all those epochs in which the soul is manifested by no sensible symptom of its existence. What, in our mind, is the connection of the hours in comparison with this train of ideas? and what poet, subjecting himself to unity of time, would deem it sufficient to establish, between the different parts of his work, that powerful bond of union which can result only from unity of impression? So true is it that this alone is the object, whereas the others are only the means.

These means may, undoubtedly, sometimes have their efficiency; the rapidity of a great action executed, or a great event accomplished, within the space of a few hours, fills the imagination, and animates the soul with a movement to which it yields with ardor. But few actions really permit so sudden an action; few events are composed of parts so exactly connected in time and space; and, without alluding to the improbabilities which are consequent upon their forced cohesion, the surprises which result from it very often disturb the unity of impression, which is the rigorous condition of dramatic illusion. Zaire, passing suddenly from her devoted love for Orosmane to entire submission to the faith and will of Lusignan, has some difficulty in restoring to us, in her new position, as much illusion as she has made us lose by so abrupt a change. Voltaire sought his effects in the contrast of perfectly happy love with love in despair; a powerful means, it is true, but less powerful, perhaps, than the preoccupation of a constant and unchanging position, which develops itself only to redouble the feeling which it has at first inspired. When we have thoroughly established ourselves in an affection, it is far from prudent to attempt to move us in favor of an opposite affection. Corneille has not shown us Rodrigue and Chimène together before the quarrel between their fathers; he felt so little desire to impress us with the idea of their happiness, that Chimène, when told of it, can not believe it, and disturbs by her presentiments the too delightful position of which the poet is exceedingly careful not to put us in possession, lest we should afterward find it too difficult to sacrifice it to that duty which will soon command us to leave it. In the same manner we have become associated with the feelings of Polyeucte, and have trembled for him before becoming aware of the love of Pauline for Sévère; if our first interest had been attached to this love, perhaps it would have been difficult for us afterward to feel much for Polyeucte, whose presence would be importunate. Thus, when Zaire has awakened our emotion as a lover, we are inclined to think that she abandons the position in which she has placed us rather too easily, in order to fulfill her duty as a daughter and a Christian. The philosophical indifference which Voltaire has imparted to her in the first scene, in order to facilitate her subsequent conversion, renders still more improbable the devotedness with which she so quickly enters upon a duty so recently discovered. If, on the other hand, at the outset, Voltaire had described her to us as troubled with scruples, and disquieted with regard to her happiness, fear would have prepared us beforehand to comprehend in all its extent, at its first appearance, the misfortune which threatens her, and to see her yield to it with that abandonment which is improbable because it is too sudden.

The employment of sudden changes of fortune, by which it is attempted to disguise, beneath a great alteration in circumstances, the too sudden transitions which the rule of unity in point of time may impose, frequently renders the inconveniences of this rule more striking, by depriving it of the means of making preparation for the different impressions which it accumulates within too limited a space. It is, on the contrary, by a single impression that Shakspeare, at least in his finest compositions, takes possession at the very outset, of our thought, and, by means of our thought, of space also. Beyond the magic circle which he has traced, he leaves nothing sufficiently powerful to interfere with the effect of the only unity of which he has need. Change of fortune may exist in reference to the persons of the drama, but never to the spectator. Before we are informed of Othello's happiness, we know that Iago is preparing to destroy it; the Ghost which is to devote the life of Hamlet to the punishment of a crime, appears on the stage before he does; and before we have seen Macbeth virtuous, the utterance of his name by the Witches tells us that he is destined to become guilty. In the same manner, in "Athalie," the whole idea of the drama is displayed, in the first scene, in the character and promises of the high-priest; the impression is begun, and it will continue and increase always in the same direction. Thus, who could say that an interval of eight days, interposed, if necessary, between the promises of Joad and their performance, would have broken the unity of impression which results from the invariable constancy of his plans?

To constancy of character, feelings, and resolutions exclusively belongs that moral unity which, braving time and distance, includes all the parts of an event in a compact action, in which the gaps of material unity are no longer perceptible. A violently excited passion could not aim at such an effect; it has its momentary storms, the course of which, being subject to external and variable causes, must in a short time reach its term. As soon as jealousy has seized upon the heart of Othello, if any interval separated that moment from the time which witnesses the death of Desdemona, the unity would be broken; nothing would attest to us the link which must unite the first transports of the Moor to his final resolution; the action must therefore hasten rapidly forward, and must hurry him onward to his destruction, which a day's reflection would perhaps prevent him from consummating. In the same manner, the simple description of events, unless the presence of a great individual character should, by dominating over them, impress upon them its own unity, will make us feel the want of the material unities; and the efforts which Shakspeare has made, in his historical dramas, to approximate to them, or to disguise their absence, are a new homage paid to that moral unity which is sufficient for every thing when the poet possesses it, and which nothing can replace when he has it not. In "Hamlet" and "Macbeth," Shakspeare, inattentive to the course of time, allows it to pass unnoticed. In his historical plays, on the other hand, he conceals and dissembles its lapse by all the artifices that can deceive us in reference to its duration; the scenes follow and announce each other in such a way, that an interval of several years seems to be included within a few weeks, or even a few days. All the probabilities are sacrificed to this theatrical unity, which time would break too easily between events which are not linked together by a uniform principle. The scene in which Richard II. learns from Aumerle the departure of Bolingbroke into exile, is that in which he announces that he is himself about to go to Ireland; and it is not yet thoroughly known at court whether he has actually embarked on this voyage, when the news is received of the disembarkation of Bolingbroke, returning with an army, under the pretext of asserting his rights to the succession of his father, who has died in the interval, but, in reality, to take possession of the crown; in which attempt he has almost succeeded before Richard, cast by a tempest upon the coasts of England, can have been informed of his arrival. And we are told at the end of the play, which, dating from the banishment of Bolingbroke, can not have lasted more than fifteen days, that Mowbray, who was exiled at the same time, has made several journeys to the Holy Land during the interval, and is at last dead in Italy.

These monstrous extravagances would assuredly not be numbered among the proofs of Shakspeare's genius, if they did not attest the empire assumed over him by the great dramatic thought to which he sacrificed all beside. Whether in his historical plays, he multiplies improbabilities and impossibilities in order to conceal the flight of time, or whether, in his finest tragedies, he allows it to pass without the slightest notice, he invariably pursues and attempts to maintain unity of impression, the great source of dramatic effect. We may see in "Macbeth," the true type of his system, with what art he overcomes the difficulties which arise from it, and links together in the soul of the spectator the chain of places and times which is constantly being broken in reality. Macbeth, when resolved on the destruction of Macduff, whom he fears, learns that he has taken flight into England; and he leaves the stage, announcing his intention to surprise his castle, and to put to death his wife, his children, and all who bear his name. The next scene opens in Macduff's castle, by a conversation between Lady Macduff and her relative, Rosse, who has come to inform her of her husband's departure, and to express his fears for her own safety. The two scenes, thus closely connected in thought, seem to be so in time also; distance has disappeared; and who would think of pointing out, as an interval of which some recount should be given, the leagues which separate Macduff's castle from Macbeth's palace, and the time that would be required to traverse them. We have entered without effort into this new part of the position; it follows its course; the assassins appear; the massacre commences. We pass into England; we behold the arrival of Macduff in that country; the terrible events of which he is ignorant fill up, for us, the interval which must separate his departure from his arrival. Rosse appears some time after him, and informs him of his misfortune. Both describe to Malcolm the desolation of Scotland, and the general hatred which Macbeth has incurred. The army which is destined to overthrow the tyrant is collected together, and the order for departure is given. But, while the army is on its road, the poet recalls our imagination toward Macbeth; with him we prepare for the approach of the troops, whose march is effected without any thing occurring to inform us of its duration, or to lead us to make inquiries about it. Scarcely ever, in Shakspeare, do the personages of the drama arrive immediately in the place for which they have set out; so abrupt a conjunction would be contrary to the natural order of the succession of ideas. We have seen Richard II. set out for the castle of John of Gaunt; it is therefore in John of Gaunt's castle that we await the arrival of Richard, whose journey has taken place without our mind being able to complain of not having been consulted with regard to the time which it occupied. In the same manner, between two events evidently separated by an interval long enough for us not to like to see it disappear without taking some part in it, Shakspeare interposes a scene which may belong with equal propriety to either the first or the second epoch, and he makes us pass from one to the other without shocking us by its intimate connection with the scene which immediately precedes or follows it. Thus, in "King Lear," between the time when Lear divides his kingdom among his daughters, and the moment when Goneril, already tired of her father's presence, determines to get rid of him, the scenes at Gloster's castle, and the commencement of Edmund's intrigue, are interposed. Guided by that instinct which is the science of genius, the poet knows that our imagination will traverse without effort both time and space with him, if he spares those moral improbabilities which could alone arrest its progress. With this view, he sometimes accumulates material unlikelihoods, and sometimes exhausts the ingenuity of his art; but, ever attentive to the object at which he aims, he can reduce to unity of action those artifices and preparatory means which he employs to remove every thing that could interfere with the dramatic illusion, and to dispose freely of our thought.

Unity of action, being indispensable to unity of impression, could not escape Shakspeare's notice. But how, it may be asked, could he maintain it in the midst of so many events of so changeful and complicated a nature—in that immense field which includes so many places, so many years, all conditions of society, and the development of so many positions? Shakspeare succeeded in maintaining it, nevertheless: in "Macbeth," "Hamlet," "Richard III.," and "Romeo and Juliet," the action, though vast, does not cease to be one, rapid and complete. This is because the poet has seized upon its fundamental condition, which consists in placing the centre of interest where he finds the centre of action. The character which gives movement to the drama is also the one upon which the moral agitation of the spectator is bestowed. Duplicity of action, or at least of interest, has been urged against Racine's tragedy of "Andromaque," and the charge is not without foundation; it is not that all the parts of the action do not work together toward the same end, but the interest is divided, and the centre of action is uncertain. If Shakspeare had had to treat of such a subject, which, it must be said, is not in great conformity to the nature of his genius, he would have made Andromache the centre of the action as well as of the interest. Maternal love would have pervaded the entire drama, displaying its courage as well as its fears, its strength as well as its sorrows. Shakspeare, indeed, would not have hesitated to introduce the child upon the stage, as Racine subsequently did in "Athalie," when he had grown more bold. All the emotions of the spectator would have been directed toward a single point: we should have beheld Andromache, with greater activity, trying other means to save Astyanax than "the tears of her mother," and constantly riveting upon her son and herself an attention which Racine has too often diverted to the means of action which he was constrained to derive from the vicissitudes of the destiny of Hermione. According to the system imposed upon our dramatic poets in the seventeenth century, Hermione should be the centre of the action; and so, in fact, she is. Upon a stage which daily became more subject to the authority of the ladies and of the court, love seemed destined to take the place of the fatality of the ancients: a blind power, as inflexible as fatality, and, like it, leading its victims toward an object defined from the very outset, love became the fixed point around which all things should revolve. In "Andromaque," love makes Hermione a simple personage, swayed by her passion, referring to it every thing that occurs beneath her view, and careful to bring events into subjection to herself, in order to make them serve and satisfy her affection. Hermione alone directs and gives movement to the drama; Andromaque only appears to suffer the agony of a position as powerless as it is painful. Such an idea may admit of admirable developments of the passive affections of the heart; but it does not constitute a tragic action; and in those developments which do not lead immediately to action, our interest runs the risk of wandering astray, and returns afterward with difficulty into the only direction in which it can be maintained.