That this scepticism of Vincentio is Shakespeare's scepticism appears from the fact that the whole speech is worse than out of place when addressed to a person under sentence of death. Were we to take it seriously, it would show the Duke to be curiously callous to the sufferings of the condemned Claudio; but callous the Duke is not, he is merely a pensive poet-philosopher talking in order to lighten his own heart. Claudio makes unconscious fun of the Duke's argument:
“To sue to live, I find I seek to die,
And seeking death, find life: let it come on.”
This scepticism of Shakespeare which shows itself out of place in Angelo and again most naturally in Claudio's famous speech, is one of the salient traits of his character which is altogether over-emphasized in this play. It is a trait, moreover, which finds expression in almost everything he wrote. Like nearly all the great spirits of the Renaissance, Shakespeare was perpetually occupied with the heavy problems of man's life and man's destiny. Was there any meaning or purpose in life, any result of the striving? was Death to be feared or a Hereafter to be desired?—incessantly he beat straining wings in the void. But even in early manhood he never sought to deceive himself. His Richard II. had sounded the shallow vanity of man's desires, the futility of man's hopes; he knew that man
“With nothing shall be pleased, till he be eased
With being nothing.”
And this sad knowledge darkened all Shakespeare's later thinking. Naturally, when youth passed from him and disillusionment put an end to dreaming, his melancholy deepened, his sadness became despairing; we can see the shadows thickening round him into night. Brutus takes an “everlasting farewell” of his friend, and goes willingly to his rest. Hamlet dreads “the undiscovered country”; but unsentient death is to him “a consummation devoutly to be wished.” Vincentio's mood is half-contemptuous, but the melancholy persists; death is no “more than sleep,” he says, and life a series of deceptions; while Claudio in this same play shudders away from death as from annihilation, or worse, in words which one cannot help regarding as Shakespeare's:
“Claud. Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot....”
A little later and Macbeth's soul cries to us from the outer darkness: “there's nothing serious in mortality”; life's
“a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
And from this despairing gloom come Lear's shrieks of pain and pitiful ravings, and in the heavy intervals the gibberings of the fool. Even when the calmer mood of age came upon Shakespeare and took away the bitterness, he never recanted; Posthumus speaks of life and death in almost the words used by Vincentio, and Prospero has nothing to add save that “our little life is rounded with a sleep.”
It is noteworthy that Shakespeare always gives these philosophic questionings to those characters whom I regard as his impersonations,{1} and when he breaks this rule, he breaks it in favour of some Claudio who is not a character at all, but the mere mouthpiece of one of his moods.