Brief History of English and American Literature

by Henry A. Beers

"This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in a silver sea,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land,
England, bound in with the triumphant sea!"

His English histories are ten in number. Of these King John and Henry VIII. are isolated plays. The others form a consecutive series, in the following order: Richard III., the two parts of Henry IV., Henry V., the three parts of Henry VI., and Richard III. This series may be divided into two, each forming a tetralogy, or group of four plays. In the first the subject is the rise of the house of Lancaster. But the power of the Red Rose was founded in usurpation. In the second group, accordingly, comes the Nemesis, in the civil wars of the Roses, reaching their catastrophe in the downfall of both Lancaster and York, and the tyranny of Gloucester. The happy conclusion is finally reached in the last play of the series, when this new usurper is overthrown in turn, and Henry {112} VII., the first Tudor sovereign, ascends the throne, and restores the Lancastrian inheritance, purified, by bloody atonement, from the stain of Richard II.'s murder. These eight plays are, as it were, the eight acts of one great drama; and if such a thing were possible, they should be represented on successive nights, like the parts of a Greek trilogy. In order of composition, the second group came first. Henry VI. is strikingly inferior to the others. Richard III. is a good acting play, and its popularity has been sustained by a series of great tragedians, who have taken the part of the king. But, in a literary sense, it is unequal to Richard II., or the two parts of Henry IV. The latter is unquestionably Shakspere's greatest historical tragedy, and it contains his master-creation in the region of low comedy, the immortal Falstaff.

The constructive art with which Shakspere shaped history into drama is well seen in comparing his King John with the two plays on that subject, which were already on the stage. These, like all the other old "Chronicle histories," such as Thomas Lord Cromwell and the Famous Victories of Henry V., follow a merely chronological, or biographical, order, giving events loosely, as they occurred, without any unity of effect, or any reference to their bearing on the catastrophe. Shakspere's order was logical. He compressed and selected, disregarding the fact of history oftentimes, in favor of the higher truth of fiction; bringing together a crime and its punishment, as cause and effect, even {113} though they had no such relation in the chronicle, and were separated, perhaps, by many years.

Shakspere's first two comedies were experiments. Love's Labour's Lost was a play of manners, with hardly any plot. It brought together a number of humors, that is, oddities and affectations of various sorts, and played them off on one another, as Ben Jonson afterward did in his comedies of humor. Shakspere never returned to this type of play, unless, perhaps, in the Taming of the Shrew. There the story turned on a single "humor," Katherine's bad temper, just as the story in Jonson's Silent Woman turned on Morose's hatred of noise. The Taming of the Shrew is, therefore, one of the least Shaksperian of Shakspere's plays; a bourgeois, domestic comedy, with a very narrow interest. It belongs to the school of French comedy, like Moliere's Malade Imaginaire, not to the romantic comedy of Shakspere and Fletcher.

The Comedy of Errors was an experiment of an exactly opposite kind. It was a play, purely of incident; a farce, in which the main improbability being granted, namely, that the twin Antipholi and twin Dromios are so alike that they cannot be distinguished, all the amusing complications follow naturally enough. There is little character-drawing in the play. Any two pairs of twins, in the same predicament, would be equally droll. The fun lies in the situation. This was a comedy of the Latin school, and resembled the Menaechmi of Plautus. Shakspere never returned to this type of {114} play, though there is an element of "errors" in Midsummer Night's Dream. In the Two Gentlemen of Verona he finally hit upon that species of romantic comedy which he may be said to have invented or created out of the scattered materials at hand in the works of his predecessors. In this play, as in the Merchant of Venice, Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Winters Tale, All's Well that Ends Well, Measure for Measure, and the Tempest, the plan of construction is as follows. There is one main intrigue carried out by the high comedy characters, and a secondary intrigue, or underplot, by the low comedy characters. The former is by no means purely comic, but admits the presentation of the noblest motives, the strongest passions, and the most delicate graces of romantic poetry. In some of the plays it has a prevailing lightness and gayety, as in As You Like It and Twelfth Night. In others, like Measure for Measure, it is barely saved from becoming tragedy by the happy close. Shylock certainly remains a tragic figure, even to the end, and a play like Winter's Tale, in which the painful situation is prolonged for years, is only technically a comedy. Such dramas, indeed, were called, on many of the title-pages of the time, "tragi-comedies." The low comedy interlude, on the other hand, was broadly comic. It was cunningly interwoven with the texture of the play, sometimes loosely, and by way of variety or relief, as in the episode of {115} Touchstone and Audrey, in As You Like It; sometimes closely, as in the case of Dogberry and Verges, in Much Ado about Nothing, where the blundering of the watch is made to bring about the denouement of the main action. The Merry Wives of Windsor is an exception to this plan of construction. It is Shakspere's only play of contemporary, middle-class English life, and is written almost throughout in prose. It is his only pure comedy, except the Taming of the Shrew.

Shakspere did not abandon comedy when writing tragedy, though he turned it to a new account. The two species graded into one another. Thus Cymbeline is, in its fortunate ending, really as much of a comedy as Winter's Tale—to which its plot bears a resemblance—and is only technically a tragedy, because it contains a violent death. In some of the tragedies, as Macbeth and Julius Caesar, the comedy element is reduced to a minimum. But in others, as Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet, it heightens the tragic feeling by the irony of contrast. Akin to this is the use to which Shakspere put the old Vice, or Clown, of the moralities. The Fool in Lear, Touchstone in As You Like It, and Thersites in Troilus and Cressida, are a sort of parody of the function of the Greek chorus, commenting the action of the drama with scraps of bitter, or half-crazy, philosophy, and wonderful gleams of insight into the depths of man's nature.

The earliest of Shakspere's tragedies, unless Titus Andronicus be his, was, doubtless, Romeo and {116} Juliet, which is full of the passion and poetry of youth and of first love. It contains a large proportion of riming lines, which is usually a sign in Shakspere of early work. He dropped rime more and more in his later plays, and his blank verse grew freer and more varied in its pauses and the number of its feet. Romeo and Juliet is also unique, among his tragedies, in this respect, that the catastrophe is brought about by a fatality, as in the Greek drama. It was Shakspere's habit to work out his tragic conclusions from within, through character, rather than through external chances. This is true of all the great tragedies of his middle life, Hamlet, Othello, Lear, Macbeth, in every one of which the catastrophe is involved in the character and actions of the hero. This is so, in a special sense, in Hamlet, the subtlest of all Shakspere's plays, and if not his masterpiece, at any rate the one which has most attracted and puzzled the greatest minds. It is observable that in Shakspere's comedies there is no one central figure, but that, in passing into tragedy, he intensified and concentrated the attention upon a single character. This difference is seen, even in the naming of the plays; the tragedies always take their titles from their heroes, the comedies never.

Somewhat later, probably, than the tragedies already mentioned, were the three Roman plays, Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, and Antony and Cleopatra. It is characteristic of Shakspere that he invented the plot of none of his plays, but took {117} material that he found at hand. In these Roman tragedies, he followed Plutarch closely, and yet, even in so doing, gave, if possible, a greater evidence of real creative power than when he borrowed a mere outline of a story from some Italian novelist. It is most instructive to compare Julius Caesar with Ben Jonson's Catiline and Sejanus. Jonson was careful not to go beyond his text. In Catiline he translates almost literally the whole of Cicero's first oration against Catiline. Sejanus is a mosaic of passages, from Tacitus and Suetonius. There is none of this dead learning in Shakspere's play. Having grasped the conception of the characters of Brutus, Cassius, and Mark Anthony, as Plutarch gave them, he pushed them out into their consequences in every word and act, so independently of his original, and yet so harmoniously with it, that the reader knows that he is reading history, and needs no further warrant for it than Shakspere's own. Timon of Athens is the least agreeable and most monotonous of Shakspere's undoubted tragedies, and Troilus and Cressida, said Coleridge, is the hardest to characterize. The figures of the old Homeric world fare but hardly under the glaring light of modern standards of morality which Shakspere turns upon them. Ajax becomes a stupid bully, Ulysses a crafty politician, and swift-footed Achilles a vain and sulky chief of faction. In losing their ideal remoteness, the heroes of the Iliad lose their poetic quality, and the lover of Homer experiences an unpleasant disenchantment.

{118}

It was customary in the 18th century to speak of Shakspere as a rude though prodigious genius. Even Milton could describe him as "warbling his native wood-notes wild." But a truer criticism, beginning in England with Coleridge, has shown that he was also a profound artist. It is true that he wrote for his audiences, and that his art is not every-where and at all points perfect. But a great artist will contrive, as Shakspere did, to reconcile practical exigencies, like those of the public stage, with the finer requirements of his art. Strained interpretations have been put upon this or that item in Shakspere's plays; and yet it is generally true that some deeper reason can be assigned for his method in a given case than that "the audience liked puns," or, "the audience liked ghosts." Compare, for example, his delicate management of the supernatural with Marlowe's procedure in Faustus. Shakspere's age believed in witches, elves, and apparitions; and yet there is always something shadowy or allegorical in his use of such machinery. The ghost in Hamlet is merely an embodied suspicion. Banquo's wraith, which is invisible to all but Macbeth, is the haunting of an evil conscience. The witches in the same play are but the promptings of ambition, thrown into a human shape, so as to become actors in the drama. In the same way, the fairies in Midsummer Night's Dream are the personified caprices of the lovers, and they are unseen by the human characters, whose likes and dislikes they control, save in the instance where {119} Bottom is "translated" (that is, becomes mad) and has sight of the invisible world. So in the Tempest, Ariel is the spirit of the air and Caliban of the earth, ministering, with more or less of unwillingness, to man's necessities.