Arms, take your last embrace! and lips, O you,
The doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss,
A dateless bargain to engrossing death.
Nothing could be more un-Catholic and un-Protestant than this parting of Shakespeare's best lovers. Juliet, who has often knelt before the priest, dies without one appeal to religion for comfort or support. She has no faith, now, in the hour of her greatest need, in prayer, crucifix, Bible or church. "Go, get thee hence," she cries to the friar when he approaches to minister to her in her crushing sorrow. She follows Romeo without uttering one word about God, or the future. In the same spirit, "The rest is silence," murmurs Hamlet as he sinks to the ground, and we may announce with considerable assurance that the words are Shakespeare's as much as they are Hamlet's. **
But the naturalism of the poet as opposed to the supernaturalism of the religion of his day is further brought out by the free and uninterrupted operation in his plays of the law of action and reaction, of cause and consequence. It is no angel of heaven, as we read of in Scripture, that exalts or strikes down the people in Shakespeare's world; but by their own acts they rise or fall. Intemperance brings Timon of Athens to the dust; folly ruins Othello; insolence cuts Corialanus' career short; ambition and superstition strangle Macbeth; hypocrisy subjects Angello to the contempt of his fellows; hatred and revenge blight the life of Shylock. Heaven plays no part on Shakespeare's stage. Man reaps as he sows, and no gods are necessary to enforce cause and effect. If Nature's laws defy the power of man, do they bend or break when gods command? Pride, shame, intemperance, greed, hate—these can never lead to happiness, all the gods to the contrary. Nor can all the powers of heaven and hell turn self-restraint, moderation, justice, contentment, courage, love and peace, into demons of hell. Nature is sound; Nature is all-sufficient, and in Shakespeare Nature occupies the stage so completely as to leave neither room nor necessity for any other power.
* Midsummer's Night's Dream.
** We are neither recommending nor condemning Shakespeare's
attitude toward the question of another life, but simply
endeavoring to represent it.
Nothing is so certain and so effective in Shakespeare as his criticism of the ways of Providence. When Othello, for instance, awakens to a sense of his irreparable loss—when the pity of Desdemona's death, like the incoming tide of the sea, sweeps over him and takes his breath away, he gasps out these significant words with his eyes searching the abysses of space over his head: "Methinks there should now be a huge eclipse of sun and moon, and the affrighted earth should yawn at altercation." He can not understand how "any God" could look down with unmoistened eyes upon such a tragedy. What does God do with his powers if he will not interfere to save men such as Othello from committing ignorantly so heinous a crime? Again he stammers out, "Are there no stones in heaven but what serve for the thunder?" Is God only a spectacular being? Is all he can do to thunder in the clouds and dazzle with his lightning? Where is the God of help? Is he real? Does he exist?
To make effective this indifference or helplessness of the gods, Shakespeare contrasts their stolid unconcern with human sympathy. Emelia, the wife of the man who poisoned Othello's mind, breaks into a heart-rending lamentation when she learns of the death of her innocent mistress, which shames the silent and tearless gods:
I'll kill myself for grief,
she sobs as she sees stretched at her feet the victim of human folly and crime. How eloquent, and how melting are these words! She does not care to live if she can not protect innocence and virtue, beauty and goodness against hate and envy. And this from a woman whose character was not above reproach! How admirable is the seething passion in her human soul compared with the dumbness of the almighty gods!