Shakespeare's Roman plays and their background

by Sir Mungo William MacCallum

In both series then, English and Roman alike, Shakespeare on the one hand loyally accepted his authorities and never deviated from them on their main route, but on the other he treated them unquestioningly from his own point of view, and probably never even suspected that their own might be different. This is the double characteristic of his attitude to his documents, and it combines pious regard for the assumed facts of History with complete indifference to critical research. He is as far as possible from submitting to the dead hand of the past, but he is also as far as possible from allowing himself a free hand in its manipulation. His method, in short, implies and includes two principles, which, if separated, may easily become antagonistic, and which, in point of fact, have led later schools of the historic drama in quite opposite directions. A short examination of these contrasted tendencies may perhaps help to throw a clearer light on Shakespeare’s own position.

The one that lays stress on the artist’s right to take counsel with his own ideas has been explained by Lessing in a famous passage of the Hamburg Dramaturgy, which is all the more interesting for the present purpose, that throughout it tacitly or expressly appeals to the practice of Shakespeare. Lessing starts with Aristotle’s doctrine that poetry is more pregnant than history, and asks why, when this is so, the poet does not keep within the kingdom of his imagination, why more especially the dramatist descends to the lower artistic level of the historian to trespass on the domain of prosaic fact. And he answers that it is merely a matter of convenience. There is advantage to be gained from illustrious position and impressive associations; and moreover the playwright finds it helpful that the audience should already have some idea of the story to be told, that they should, as it were, meet him half way, and bring to the understanding of his piece some general knowledge of the persons. He gains his purpose if he employs famous names which appear in a nimbus of associations, and saves time in describing their characters and circumstances; and thus they attune our minds for what is to come and serve as so many labels by means of which, when we see a new play, we may inform ourselves what it is all about. The initial familiarity and the prestige it implies are fulcra for moving the interest of the beholders. The historical dramatist, therefore, must be careful not to alter the current conceptions of character; but, with that proviso, he has almost unlimited powers, and may omit or recast or invent incidents, or forge an entirely new story, just as he pleases, so long, that is, as he leaves the character intact and does not interfere with our idea of the hero. In that case the historic label would be more of a hindrance than a help to our enjoyment.

Lessing’s view of the Historic Drama (and there is no doubt that he thought he was describing the method of Shakespeare) is therefore that it is a free work of fiction woven around characters that are fairly well known. He was certainly wrong about Shakespeare, and his theory strikes us nowadays as strangely inadequate, but it had very important results. It directly influenced the dramatic art of Germany, and it would be hard to overestimate the share it had in determining Schiller’s methods of composition. It was in the air at the time of the Romantic Movement in France, and is really the principle on which Hugo constructs his more important plays in this kind. Schiller’s treatment of history is very free; he invents scenes that have no shadow of foundation in fact, and yet are of crucial importance in his idealised narrative; he invents subordinate persons who are hardly less conspicuous than the authentic principals, and who vitally affect the plot and action. All his plays contain these licenses. Such episodes as the interview between Mary and Elizabeth, of Jeanne Darc’s indulgence of her pity illustrate the first, such figures as Mortimer or Max and Thekla illustrate the second; but what would Mary Stuart or the Maid of Orleans or Wallenstein be without them? And with Victor Hugo this emancipation from authority is pushed to even greater lengths. Plays like Le Roi s’amuse or Marion de Lorme might recall the vagaries of early Elizabethan experiments like Greene’s James IV., were it not that they are works of incomparably higher genius. Hugo has accepted the traditional view of a French king and a French court, but all the rest is sheer romance on which just here and there we detect the trail of an old mémoire.

Now, some of the extreme examples suggest a two-fold objection to Lessing’s account as a quite satisfactory explanation of the species.

In the first place, when the poet carries his privilege of independence so far, why should he not go a step further and invent his entire drama, names and all? As it is, we either know something of the real history or we do not. If we do not, what is the advantage of appealing to it? If we do, will not such lordly disregard of facts stir up the same recalcitrance as disregard of traditional character, and shall we not be rather perplexed than aided by the conflict between our reminiscences and the statements of the play?

And, in the second place, is the portrayer of human nature to take his historical persons as once for all given and fixed, so that he must leave the accepted estimate of them intact without attempting to modify it? Surely that would be to deprive the dramatist of his greater privilege and the drama of its greatest opportunity. For then we should only see a well-known character illustrated or described anew, displaying its various traits in this or that set of novel surroundings. But there would be little room for the sort of work that the historic drama is specially fitted to do, viz. the exposition of ambiguous or problematic natures, which will give us a different conception of them from the one we have hitherto had.

Hence there arose in Germany a view directly opposed to that of Lessing, and Lotze does not hesitate to recommend the most painstaking investigation and observance of the real facts. The poet, he thinks, will find scope enough in giving a new interpretation of the career and individuality of the hero, after he has used all the means in his power to bring home to his imagination the actual circumstances from which they emerged. Probably little was known in England of this theory of Lotze’s, though utterances to the same effect occur in Carlyle, especially in his remarks on Shakespeare’s English Histories; yet it seems to give a correct account of the way in which most English historical dramas were constructed in the nineteenth century. Sir Henry Taylor, while calling Philip van Artevelde “a dramatic romance,” is careful to state that “historic truth is preserved in it, as far as the material events are concerned.” Mr. Swinburne, in his trilogy on Mary Stuart, versifies whole pages of contemporary writers (e.g. in the interview of Mary and Knox taken almost verbatim from Knox’s History of the Reformation), and in his prose essay seems specially to value himself on his exact delineation of her career, and his solution of the problem of her strange nature. But the prerogative instance is furnished by Tennyson. In his dedication of Harold, he writes to Lord Lytton: “After old-world records like the Bayeux Tapestry and the Roman de Rou, Edward Freeman’s History of the Norman Conquest and your father’s historical romance treating of the same theme have been mainly helpful to me in writing this drama.” He puts his antiquarian researches first, his use of the best modern critical authorities second, and only in the third place an historical romance, to which for the rest Freeman has said that he owes something himself. Nor would it be difficult to show that in Queen Mary and Becket he has followed the same lines. And on such lines it is clear that the historical dramatist’s only aim must be to present in accurate though artistic form a selection of the incidents and circumstances of the hero’s life and times, and place them in such mutual relation that they throw new light on the nature and destiny of the man.

But from this point of view the functions of the poet and the historian will tend to coalesce, and it is just this that at first sight rouses suspicion. After all can we so reproduce the past as to give it real immediate truth? It is hardly possible by antiquarian knowledge quickened by ever so much poetic power to galvanise into life a state of things that once for all is dead and gone. And meanwhile the mere effort to do so is apt to make the drama a little frigid, as Tennyson’s dramas are. We are seldom carried away on a spontaneous stream of passion; for after all the methods of the historian and the poet are radically different, and the painful mosaic work of the one is almost directly opposed to the complete vision, the creation in one jet, which may be rightly expected of the other.

But it is noteworthy that though the two schools which we have just discussed, make appeal to Shakespeare, his own procedure does not precisely agree with that of one or other. He is too much of the heaven-born poet for the latter; he has too genuine a delight in facts for the former. He has points of contact with both, but in a way he is more naïf and simple-minded than either. He at the same time accepts the current conception of character with Lessing, and respects the allegations of history with Carlyle. But though he begins with the ordinary impression produced by his hero, he does not stop there. Such an impression is bound to be incoherent and vague. Shakespeare probes and defines it; he tests it in relation to the assumed facts on which it is based; he discovers the latent difficulties, faces them, and solves them, and, starting with a conventional type, leaves us with an individual man. In doing this he treats the facts as a means, not as an end, but he does not sophisticate them. We hardly ever find fictitious persons and scenes in Schiller’s style, and when we do the exception proves the rule, for they have not the same function as in Schiller’s theatre. Falstaff plays his part aside, as it were, from the official history, he belongs to the private life of Prince Hal, and is impotent to affect the march of public events. People like Lucius in Julius Caesar, or Nicanor in Coriolanus, or Silius in Antony and Cleopatra do not interfere in the political story; they are present to make or to hear comments, or at most to assist the inward interpretation. No unhistorical person has historical work to do, and no unhistorical episode affects the historical action.[74] Yet he quite escapes from the chill and closeness of the book-room. He engages in no critical investigations to sift out the genuine facts. He does not study old tapestry or early texts. Unhampered by the learned apparatus of the scholar, undistracted by the need of pausing to verify or correct, he speeds along on the flood-tide of his own inspiration, which takes the same course with the interests of the nation. For it is the reward of the intimate sympathy which exists between him and his countrymen, that he goes to work, his personal genius fortified and enlarged by the popular enthusiasms, patriotic or cosmopolitan. And nothing can withstand the speed and volume of the current. There is a great contrast between the broad free sweep of his Histories, English or Roman, that lift us from our feet and carry us away, and the little artificial channels of the antiquarian dramas, on the margin of which we stand at ease to criticise the purity of the distilled water. Yet none the less he is in a sense more obedient to his authorities than any writer of the antiquarian school. Just because, while desiring to give the truth as he knows it, he is careless to examine the accuracy or estimate the value of the documents he consults; and just because, while determined to give a faithful narrative, he spares himself all labour of comparison and research and takes a statement of Holinshed or Plutarch as guaranteeing itself, he is far more in the hands of the guide he follows than a later dramatist would be. He takes the text of his author, and often he has not more than one: he accepts it implicitly and will not willingly distort it: he reads it in the light of his own insight and the spirit of the age, and tries to recreate the agents and the story from the more or less adequate hints that he finds.

Now, proceeding in this way it is clear that while in every case Shakespeare’s indebtedness to his historical sources must be great, it will vary greatly in quality and degree according to the material delivered to him. The situations may be more or less dramatic, the narrative more or less firmly conceived. And among his sources Plutarch occupies quite an exceptional place. From no one else has he ‘conveyed’ so much, and no one else has he altered so little. And the reason is, that save Chaucer and Homer, on whom he drew for Troilus and Cressida, but from whom he could assimilate little that suited his own different ideas, no other writer contained so much that was of final and permanent excellence. To put it shortly, in Plutarch’s Lives Shakespeare for the first and almost the only time was rehandling the masterpieces of a genius who stood at the summit of his art. It was not so in the English Histories. One does not like to say a word in disparagement of the Elizabethan chronicles, especially Holinshed’s, on which the maturer plays are based. They are good reading and deserve to be read independently of the dramatist’s use of them. But they are not works of phenomenal ability, and they betray the infancy of historical writing, not only in scientific method, which in the present connection would hardly matter, but in narrative art as well. Cowley in his Chronicle, i.e. the imaginary record of his love affairs, breaks off with a simile and jest at their expense. If, he says, I were to give the details,