Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare: Twelve Essays

by John Weiss

calls the weapon his sweetheart, and, when Bardolph tries to turn him out, snatches it up, and seems to sharpen it upon horrid threats:

"What! shall we have incision? shall we imbrue?
Why then, let grievous, ghastly, gaping wounds
Untwine the sisters three! Come, Atropos, I say!"

Fate comes in the person of Falstaff, who declares, "An a' do nothing but speak nothing, a' shall be nothing here;" for Falstaff has the virtue of a keen appreciation of the appositeness of words.

You have your choice to regard these people as whimsical disenchantments of Falstaff by a satirical demon, or to consider Falstaff as an aggregate of these people invested with the illusion of wit. Pistol is the raw article of poltroonery done in fustian instead of a gayly slashed doublet. Bardolph is the capaciousness for sherry without the capacity to make it apprehensive and forgetive: it goes to his head, but, finding no brain there, is provoked to the nose, where it lights a cautionary signal. Nym is the brag stripped of resources, shivering in prosiness. Dame Quickly is the easy virtue in reduced circumstances, dropped out of its fashionable quarter to keep a bar and be a procuress,—all the fine phrases pawned clear down to vulgar gossip.

Thus brawling, boasting, tippling, thieving, silly tricks and waggery come strolling behind Falstaff into the company of kings and nobles, no chamberlain to announce them, no crossed halberts to repel.

The second part of "King Henry IV." opens nobly with the conflicting rumors which travel from the lost field of Shrewsbury, where the flame of rebellion was quenched, towards the castle of the Earl of Northumberland, who hopes to hear that it has prospered. There is nothing insignificant in the characters who have ranged themselves on either side of the great question of their times. Rebellion may be a blunder, but it levies on manhood a tax as heavy as loyalty. So we are admitted to the society of great politicians, full of an idea, who blossom on the top of their epoch whence the sap that feeds them is derived. They venture life and fortune upon the moment when their tendency opens and exhales. They are impersonations of that quality in the soil of their country which has grown up to them, to claim and put them forth to triumph or suffer with the ideas which are involved. They risk hereditary honor and estate, send their eldest sons and heirs of titles into the field which two political tendencies select to strive for precedence. The whole spirit of the scene is noble and unselfish: lands, luxuries, and quiet are forsworn; and a preference, be it only of passion, be it a humor of the times mixed of equal parts of honor and vanity, be it alloyed with disappointments and galled ambitions, is yet virile enough to stake its own aggrandizement rather than let inglorious caution strangle the chance of supremacy. The style is elevated and sincere. Rumors of a conflicting nature, making post-horses of the wind, come like cross-tides to dash the feelings to and fro; now lifting them upon a wave of promise, now letting them drop into the trough of despondency. The decisive drift is soon announced, and the father of Hotspur has to accept the tidings of his son's fate. In vain the sanguine-tempered Lord Bardolph discredits and tries to explain away the news. But his spirit rises to the tide-mark of the disaster:

"We all, that are engaged to this loss,
Knew that we ventur'd on such dangerous seas,
That, if we wrought our life, 'twas ten to one:
And yet we ventur'd, for the gain propos'd
Chok'd the respect of likely peril fear'd;
And, since we are o'erset, venture again.
Come; we will all put forth,—body, and goods."

It seems as if these high resolves ought to fill the horizon and extrude every thing irrelevant. But not so: something quite as capacious, but fertilized by not one dot of grandeur, comes vaporing on the scene.

Down to a period quite late in the history of literature, the French were unable to understand how we could accept the confusion of moods in Shakspeare's tragedies, and their abrupt introduction into the nobler sentiment of the scene, as comedy races after gravity to overtake and strangle it, and the gravity quite as unexpectedly recurs. This appeared to their æsthetic criticism as an absurd and grotesque wrong done to the unity of impression which a play ought to make by developing and depending upon a single idea, and to this end admitting only the feelings which belong to it.[5] Without this, no tragedy can have its effect of gravity, but rather, to use Falstaff's quip in parrying the Chief Justice, its effect of gravy,—to leave in the palate a taste of a mixture of sauce and drippings. But Shakspeare runs the coulter of unity deeper than the obvious idea which the plot of his tragedy develops; for it passes at once through soils of diverse elements, driven by a sure but vigorous instinct to turn them all up to the fructifying light. Instead of the unity of a single strand, he weaves all the threads of human nature into the cable which holds our hearts at anchor on his spring-tide.

This rotund earth that goes wallowing eastward is an aboriginal Falstaff, and carries all sorts of humors in its unbounded stomach. It puts off night and slips into the garments of the day not more easily than its vein changes from hour to hour, as the tone of its daylight does, rolling along the whole gamut from gloom to garishness. The mood must be very solemn and absorbing to be exempt from the sudden interruption of jollities which may be even ribald in their bearing. If nothing is too cheap for Nature it is precious enough for Shakspeare. Whatever a Creator has permitted to take lodgings in the human breast is not turned out by him; for he lodges there too, claiming the shelter of the same impartial roof beneath which we have to learn to tolerate each other. So the first impression which his plays make is this complaisance towards the most discrepant moods, just as life has it on the stage of the world; for he is not so concerned to develop a single motive by nice and consecutive gradations as he is to show the world's swift alternations of all the motives and tempers of mankind. The French complained that the result is like a road built of smooth pavement, corduroy, rutted mud, jarring heaps of cobble-stones; and that the feeling is transferred without warning along all the discrepancies of this route, to be jolted and racked till self-preservation becomes more absorbing than the landscape. But the structure of the Teutonic mind is well adapted to this journey by its robust manifoldness, sired by a primitive vigor of Nature, that propagates her turbulence, her jest and earnest, her nobleness and indecorum, the infinite variety which age cannot dim nor custom stale, the instincts of her animals and the intuitions of her men. Above all, the races which appreciate the deeper unity of Shakspeare, and bear without discontent its fusion of elements which seem to have only harsh antipathies, have drawn from Nature the mental quality of humor, and that is a flux which no substances can withstand. Nothing is uncouth or recluse enough to stay outside of its reconcilement.