"We are not the first
Who with best meaning have incurred the worst.
For thee, oppressed king, am I cast down.
Shall we not see these daughters and these sisters?"
Lear.—No, no, no, no! Come let's away to prison;
We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage;
When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness."
Here, clearly enough, is regret for his injury to Cordelia, but quite as clearly, no general state of repentance; and in the very few other words uttered by the old king before the play ends surely nothing indicating such a state appears. Of all the instances suggested only one involves anything like the process of character-change which I have called a repentance, such as Gwendolen Harleth's for example; but this one, unfortunately, is not drawn by Shakspeare: it is only mentioned as having occurred. This is the repentance of Duke Frederick in As you Like it. Just at the end of that play, when Orlando and Rosalind, Oliver, and Celia and all the rest have unraveled all their complications, and when everything that can be called plot in the play is finished, the son of old Sir Rowland appears before the company in the wood and calls out:
"Let me have audience for a word or two.
Duke Frederick hearing how that every day
Men of great worth resorted to this forest
Addressed a mighty power
purposely to take
His brother here and put him to the sword,
And to the skirts of this wild wood he came,
Where meeting with an old religious man,
After some questions with him was converted
Both from his enterprise and from the world;
His crown bequeathing to his banished brother,
And all their lands restored to them again
That were with him exiled."
Here we have indeed a true repentance, but this is all we have of it; the passage I have read contains the whole picture.
If we now go on and ask ourselves why these fascinating phenomena of repentance, which George Eliot has treated with such success, never engaged Shakspeare's energy, we come at the very first step upon a limitation of the drama as opposed to the novel which, in the strongest way, confirms the view I was at such pains to set forth in my earlier lectures of that necessity for a freer form than the dramatic, which arises from the more complete relations between modern personalities and which has really developed the novel out of the drama.
How, for instance, could Shakspeare paint the yeas and nays, the twists, the turns, the intricacies of Gwendolen Harleth's thought during the long weeks while she was debating whether she should accept Grandcourt? The whole action of this drama, you observe, is confined within the small round head of the girl herself. How could such action be brought before the audience of a play? The only hope would be in a prolonged soliloquy, for these are thoughts which no young woman would naturally communicate to any one; but what audience could stand so prolonged a soliloquy, even if any character could be found in whom it would be natural? And sometimes, too, the situation is so subtly complex that Gwendolen is soliloquizing in such a manner that we, the audience, hear her while Grandcourt, who is standing by, does not.
"I used to think archery was a great bore," Grandcourt began. He spoke with a fine accent, but with a certain broken drawl, as of a distinguished personage with a distinguished cold in his chest.