Furthermore, this impossible mis-descent is assumed by all the persons of the drama to be a mere matter of course, and the younger Hamlet’s entire calamity is pictured as being his loss of his father, with no allusion whatever to his loss of a throne.
It is not indicated whether the queen had been a queen jointly regnant with the elder Hamlet or a queen consort to him; but the assumption of the text is that her entire dignity had been derived through her husband, not that she was queen regnant in her own right nor that these successive husbands were mere kings consort, deriving their positions through her. The new king assumes all the attributes of a monarch, as if his brother’s death were absolutely all that was needed to make him king. He sends commissioners to Norway, and, according to the words of Rosencrantz, this king was assumed to have power to assure the crown to Hamlet at his death, and had done so before discovering whether his own incestuous marriage to his brother’s widow would have issue.
It was impossible that the Ghost should have assumed that his demise would have devolved the crown on his brother, impossible that young Hamlet should assume it, impossible that any portion of the people of Denmark or of any other kingdom on earth should have assumed it, and therefore impossible that the murder should be assumed to be commissible with the motive assigned, viz., of succeeding to the throne or the queen. She would have been only dowager queen and young Hamlet would have been king.
In “Macbeth” we have the like assumption on the part of a Scottish captain who has just won in a recent skirmish the title of “Thane,” that if he can assassinate his king, Duncan, though Duncan’s two athletic sons, Malcolm and Donalbain, survive and are in full health, yet Macbeth will then become king. No election or proclamation by the army, no renunciation by the heirs-apparent, no concurrence of the nobles is called for. To Lady Macbeth the succession appears assured as soon as she learns that Duncan is about to sleep under their roof. Nothing but murder is required to win a crown for a person between whom and the throne there stand two male heirs, both on the ground, one General Banquo, as distinguished as himself, and many earls and notables. Succession by assassination was at all times as foreign to the Scotch character and history as cannibalism. Hospitality to guests, and especially at night, is an inborn and deeply felt religion among the Scotch people. In a country where hospitality is thus sacred and assassination is a thing unknown, the hideousness of murdering a king by night to get his throne is a foreign travesty on its face. Such crimes might occur in Northern Africa or Southern Asia, and even in Italy. During the invasion of Italy by the Lombards events occurred from which the criminal atrocity and ferocity of Macbeth might have been drawn. But to locate them in Scotland at any period is simply to transfer to the atmosphere of the Highlands a kind and form of depravity which, while it never existed in its fulness anywhere, never found any type or suggestion among the Scots.
The tremendous energy of Shakespeare’s tragedies lifts them above dramatic criticism, and makes them the standard. Their heroes are not men, their heroines are not women. Both are survivals over into the modern stage-life of the artist-made gods of the mythological pantheon. Richard III. is a better Satan than Milton drew. Macbeth is a better Belial. It is a proof of the moral advance of this age that the good taste of society revolts from the notion that Shakespeare’s men were human. It does not greatly care for monstrosities of any kind in fiction, any more than for tortures in a theory of destiny. It prefers a drama whose characters are not revolting and do not rape for the graceful form of History.
The three plays cited furnish strong proofs, if any were needed, that the author of the plays could not have looked at his plots through a legalist imagination like that of Lord Bacon, the first lawyer in his day of the kingdom. They are the product of an imagination in which the descent of a throne to a brother, or to a successful chieftain in preference to a son, creates no sense of incongruity.
The Bacon Humbug
In the course of a newspaper discussion of the authorship of the poems and plays attributed to Shakespeare, the assertion that present day scholarship is almost unanimous in discrediting the editors of the First Folio (1623) brought out from Mr. William Winter, the accomplished dramatic critic, the following sharp reply:
“There is no disposition on the part of the defenders of Shakespeare to make use of ‘intemperate language.’ Indeed, considering their provocation, they have displayed uncommon patience. The most ‘intemperate language’ that has been used in the Shakespeare-Bacon controversy, has been used by Baconians, such as the late Mr. Donnelly and the present Mr. W. H. Edwards. A little acerbity, as remarked by Andrew Lang, is, perhaps, unavoidable in such a discussion. To those who believe—having every reason to believe, and no reason whatever to doubt—that the plays were written by Shakespeare, the attempt to ruin his renown seems nothing less than a criminal desecration.
“It has not been said and it is not thought, by any person acquainted with the subject, that the First Folio of Shakespeare was thoroughly edited, or that it is free from defects; but it is confidently maintained that Heminge and Condell, in their association with that book, were entirely disinterested and absolutely honest, and that without compensation and probably at a pecuniary loss, they rendered a service to literature such as entitles them to everlasting gratitude and esteem.