Is there no intention, for instance, in placing Prospero, who forsook the duties of his dukedom for the study of magic, in a desert island, with just three subjects; one, a monster below humanity; the second, a creature etherealized beyond it; and the third a complete embodiment of human perfection? Is it not that he may learn how to rule, and, having learned, return, by the aid of his magic wisely directed, to the home and duties from which exclusive devotion to that magic had driven him?
In “Julius Caesar,” the death of Brutus, while following as the consequence of his murder of Caesar, is yet as much distinguished in character from that death, as the character of Brutus is different from that of Caesar. Caesar’s last words were Et tu Brute? Brutus, when resolved to lay violent hands on himself, takes leave of his friends with these words:
“Countrymen,
My heart doth joy, that yet, in all my life,
I found no man, but he was true to me.”
Here Shakspere did not invent. He found both speeches in Plutarch. But how unerring his choice!
Is the final catastrophe in “Hamlet” such, because Shakspere could do no better?—It is: he could do no better than the best. Where but in the regions beyond could such questionings as Hamlet’s be put to rest? It would have been a fine thing indeed for the most nobly perplexed of thinkers to be left—his love in the grave; the memory of his father a torment, of his mother a blot; with innocent blood on his innocent hands, and but half understood by his best friend—to ascend in desolate dreariness the contemptible height of the degraded throne, and shine the first in a drunken court!
Before bringing forward my last instance, I will direct the attention of my readers to a passage, in another play, in which the lesson of the play I am about to speak of, is directly taught: the first speech in the second act of “As You Like It,” might be made a text for the exposition of the whole play of “King Lear.”
The banished duke is seeking to bring his courtiers to regard their exile as a part of their moral training. I am aware that I point the passage differently, while I revert to the old text.
“Are not these woods
More free from peril than the envious court?
Here feel we not the penalty of Adam—
The season’s difference, as the icy fang,
And churlish chiding of the winter’s wind?
Which, when it bites and blows upon my body,
Even till I shrink with cold, I smile and say—
This is no flattery; these are counsellors
That feelingly persuade me what I am.
Sweet are the uses of adversity.”
The line Here feel we not the penalty of Adam? has given rise to much perplexity. The expounders of Shakspere do not believe he can mean that the uses of adversity are really sweet. But the duke sees that the penalty of Adam is what makes the woods more free from peril than the envious court; that this penalty is in fact the best blessing, for it feelingly persuades man what he is; and to know what we are, to have no false judgments of ourselves, he considers so sweet, that to be thus taught, the churlish chiding of the winter’s wind is well endured.
Now let us turn to Lear. We find in him an old man with a large heart, hungry for love, and yet not knowing what love is; an old man as ignorant as a child in all matters of high import; with a temper so unsubdued, and therefore so unkingly, that he storms because his dinner is not ready by the clock of his hunger; a child, in short, in everything but his grey hairs and wrinkled face, but his failing, instead of growing, strength. If a life end so, let the success of that life be otherwise what it may, it is a wretched and unworthy end. But let Lear be blown by the winds and beaten by the rains of heaven, till he pities “poor naked wretches;” till he feels that he has “ta’en too little care of” such; till pomp no longer conceals from him what “a poor, bare, forked animal” he is; and the old king has risen higher in the real social scale—the scale of that country to which he is bound—far higher than he stood while he still held his kingdom undivided to his thankless daughters. Then let him learn at last that “love is the only good in the world;” let him find his Cordelia, and plot with her how they will in their dungeon singing like birds i’ the cage, and, dwelling in the secret place of peace, look abroad on the world like God’s spies; and then let the generous great old heart swell till it breaks at last—not with rage and hate and vengeance, but with love; and all is well: it is time the man should go to overtake his daughter; henceforth to dwell with her in the home of the true, the eternal, the unchangeable. All his suffering came from his own fault; but from the suffering has sprung another crop, not of evil but of good; the seeds of which had lain unfruitful in the soil, but were brought within the blessed influences of the air of heaven by the sharp tortures of the ploughshare of ill.