The comedy which followed Much Ado about Nothing is one of sunshine and dappled shadow under the greenwood of Arden. Landseer's companion pictures, "War" and "Peace," find a parallel in Shakespeare's King Henry V. and As You Like It, which probably belong to the same year; and the scene of both the history and the comedy is laid in France. He would have left untouched a favourite theme of the Renaissance if he had wholly neglected the pastoral; but Shakespeare felt that the conventional pastoral alone, with its cruel shepherdess and sighing swain, however suitable for a piece of poetical tapestry, could not furnish the life and body and movement demanded by the stage. His Silvius and Phœbe, Arcadians of the mode and rhetoricians in verse, are presented with a certain reserved irony; the veritable rustics are William, whose pretty wit chiefly manifests itself in monosyllabic answers, and the wench Audrey, whom the gods did not make poetical. Touchstone, a clown among courtiers, is a courtier among clowns. The other persons of the comedy are of the high-bred class, in the midst of which the dramatist's imagination moved with most pleasure, but here they are transported into a delightful open-air environment, which breathes a freshness and sweetness into their spirits. "Sweet are the uses of adversity," and especially of such adversity as that of Rosalind, which enables her, in her disguise as Ganymede, to assist in her own wooing and to play the part of a benevolent goddess of destiny for several pairs of lovers including Orlando and herself. We learn from a play of Ben Jonson's of the same date that melancholy was a genteel fashion of the day. Shakespeare, on the suggestion of a current affectation, created in Jaques a character which was wholly original. Humourist, sentimentalist, critic, and cynic, he is the self-conscious seeker for new experiences, the dilettante collector of curiosities to be labelled in his museum as states of a human soul.
The midsummer of Shakespeare's comedy is reached in Twelfth Night. Was it his effort to resist the invasion of sadder thought which raised its mirth to the reeling heights of Sir Toby's Illyrian bacchanals? We dare not venture such a surmise, for the light and warmth are at flood-tide. The voluptuous love-languors of the Duke and Olivia's luxury of grief fatten the idle soil for the blossoming of the rose. The disease of overmuch prosperity in the palaces of Illyria seems set over against the sanity of adversity in the forest of Arden. Viola, in her disguises as Cesario, has a harder task than the banished Rosalind; for instead of assisting at her own wooing, she is required to plead as an envoy of love against herself. In place of the dilettante egotist Jaques, who would range through all experiences, we have here the solemn self-lover, Malvolio, pinnacled in his own sense of importance and his code of formal propriety, yet toppling from his heights to so grotesque a fall. Had Shakespeare encountered some starched Elizabethan Puritan, who looked sourly on the theatre, and thought that because he was virtuous there should be no more cakes and ale, and did the dramatist read a humorous lesson to his time on an error more deep-seated in the human heart than the excesses of a joyous temper? Was the comic spirit here a swordsman armed with the blade of reason and good sense? If such was the case, Shakespeare was assuredly no partisan, and Sir Toby Belch is hardly his ideal representative of a liberal humanism.
After the play of Twelfth Night we become aware of the first ebb of summer. It has been suggested that the events shadowed forth in the Sonnets took some of the joy out of Shakespeare's heart. It has been suggested that the fall of Essex, involving the disgrace of the poet's patron Southampton, tended to embitter his spirit. These are conjectures that cannot be verified. What is certain is, that he turned toward tragedy, and that his temper in comedy indicates a gathering of the clouds. The spirit of All's Well that Ends Well is as courageous as is the title of the play; and there is a need for courage, not of the gay and sportive kind, but serious and steadfast. The hero is no gallant Orlando or high-spirited Benedick. He has in him, we must suppose, the possibilities of noble manhood, but these are obscured by the errors and the vices of youth. The heroine is no glad-hearted girl like Rosalind, no scatterer of coruscating jests like Beatrice, but a woman, clear-sighted, strong-willed, and bent on achieving her purpose. She, the poor daughter of a physician, is a healer in a world that stands in need of healing. The bright-winged Cupid of nods and becks and wreathed smiles has been transformed into Love, the physician. Helena, honoured and cherished by all who know her aright, is rejected by the one man on whom her heart is fixed, and whom she rescues from his baser self with something of that maternal protectiveness, which in certain instances constitutes the nucleus of wifely love. The Countess is Shakespeare's creation, and nowhere has he made age more beautiful. The comic business lies chiefly in the unmasking of the pretender, Parolles. It is required both by the action and the ethics of the play, but there is little to afford us pleasure in the humiliation of so paltry a miles gloriosus.
The atmosphere darkens in Measure for Measure. In the city of Vienna corruption boils and bubbles. From the Duke's deputy to the lowest drudge of vice, society is infected with the festering evil. To deal with the subtleties of sin, virtue itself must learn crafty ways; mines must be opposed by countermines. In Claudio the passions of youth, snatching too eagerly at unlicensed satisfaction, are brought into the presence of death; and to life, tender and florid, the vast regions of the grave are full of obscurity and uncertain horror. It is hardly a scene for the joy of love, though to two strong hearts love may come in the end as the sequel of a common struggle for justice and moral reformation. Rather is it a place for the trials and the victory of virgin chastity. The Duke moves through subterranean passages, guided by the dark lantern of moral prudence. Isabella illuminates the gloom with the light of an indignant saintliness. Here it is no pompous formalist who is humiliated; no common pretender who is detected and delivered over to laughter; the deadliest ambushes of evil are attacked; the heart, "deceitful above all things and desperately wicked," is laid bare. Angelo, the self-deceiver, is exposed not merely to others, but to himself; he gazes down appalled into the abyss discovered in his own soul. We have travelled far from the fresh wild-wood paths of Arden and from the glowing gardens of Illyria.
No problems connected with the plays of Shakespeare are more difficult of solution than those offered by the satiric drama, in which matter from the story of Troy is handled in so enigmatic a fashion. Shall we place Troilus and Cressida hard by Measure for Measure, or date it some six years later, regarding it as a successor in comedy to the tragic study of the misanthrope in Timon of Athens? The evidence inclines in favour of the earlier date. Is some of the wood, hay, and stubble of the lost Troilus and Cressida of Dekker and Chettle imbedded in Shakespeare's play? Is it a satire of humanity or of contemporary individuals? Was this the "purge" which Shakespeare administered to Ben Jonson, and, with Jonson disguised as Ajax, and Marston as Thersites, was the play one of those alarums and excursions connected with the war of the theatres, in which Marston, Dekker, and Jonson were the principal combatants?[1949] Is Cressida a malicious portrait of the deceitful enchantress of the Sonnets, and was a satirical presentment of the heroes of Homer a retort upon the rival poet, conjectured to be Chapman, the translator of Homer, who had stolen away the favour of Shakespeare's young friend and patron. These questions remain unanswered. We can only say that the spirit of this comedy of disillusion is alien to that of genuine comedy as conceived by Shakespeare in his happier days. The young love of Troilus is betrayed by the courtesan born. Achilles is a dull-brained fellow, barren of wit, who sulks or wantons in his tent; Ajax is a clumsy elephant; Thersites lives on garbage, and spews his filth; Pandar is a lecher, incapable except by proxy; to fight on account of Helen is to set the world at odds for an harlot, yet on her behalf it is that Hector, knowing the folly of it, dies. Troilus is indeed a gallant youth, but his passion is a greenhorn's infatuation: let him be cured of it by surgical incision, however cruel! Shall we say that Troilus and Cressida and Measure for Measure are connected by a certain contrast and resemblance? In each the world is bubbling with corruption. The mighty persons of the earth in the one play are as ignoble as the mean persons of the other; the confraternity of Mistress Overdone includes the champions of the world and their renowned lady-loves; the worldly wisdom of the Duke is lowered and broadened into the all-embracing but wholly mundane experience of Ulysses; and in this sorry society it is from worldly wisdom alone that we can hope for any rescue or deliverance, for here we find no saintly Isabella, but a Cressida, offering her lips to every solicitor of the Grecian tents.
The spirit of mirth withdrew itself for a time from Shakespeare's art. He could still write comic scenes, but they were used to deepen the effects of tragedy. The grave-diggers of Hamlet, the porter turning the key of hell-gate on the night of murder in Macbeth, Lear's poor fool jesting across the storm upon the heath, the clown whose basket of figs conceals the worm of Nilus—these are humorous figures created in the service of pity and terror. Shakespeare did not return to comedy until his perception of the world and human life had been purified by the tragic katharsis. With every faculty of his mind labouring at its highest, he had pursued a long dramatic inquisition of the evil that is in the world and in the heart of man. He had not retreated into any facile creed of pleasant optimism, but boldly explored the face of night, and night had brought out the stars. Such love as that of Cordelia, such loyalty as that of Kent, could be fully revealed only in and through the darkness. Man pleased Shakespeare and woman also, when he wrote his tragedies, else the players would have had lenten entertainment; for a drama founded upon misanthropy would have been unendurable. In Timon of Athens the poet exhibits misanthropy as the evasion of weakness from the ruins of a self-indulgent optimism, and we may say that in Timon of Athens he bade farewell to gloom.
Shakespeare's latest comedies—Pericles(as far as it is his), Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest—form a group, which is distinguished by a special character. The atmosphere is light and pellucid, like that which follows a thunder-storm. There is a great and wide serenity abroad; the heavens seem more spacious, and they bend down to embrace the margins of the land. The healing influences of nature are felt in the country lanes where Autolycus sings his tirra-lirra, and the meadows where Perdita follows her sheep, on the seacoast of Tarsus where Marina bears her basket of flowers, among the wild Welsh mountains with the gallant sons of Cymbeline, on the enchanted island full of "sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not." The life of cities and courts had lost much of its attraction for one who perhaps was now finding repose and restoration among the Warwickshire fields. But Shakespeare did not plead, in the manner of Rousseau, for a reversion to the primitive conditions of humanity; he could smile at Gonzalo's imaginary commonwealth, where property has no existence; he saw in Caliban the rudimentary man not half informed with soul; he had faith in an art which mends nature, while yet it is an art which nature makes. And nature itself, with all of human life, seems to hang, dreamlike and yet real, in the encompassing power of something that is above nature and that means well, however little we can trace its ways. Dian appears to Pericles in a vision, guiding him to her temple where joy awaits him; the innocence of Hermione is vindicated by the oracle of Apollo; Posthumus in prison is visited by Jupiter, giving him assurance of divine succour—"whom best I love I cross"; Prospero is aided in his beneficent designs by ministering elemental spirits. The growing resources of the Jacobean stage assisted the dramatist in scenic effects, to which he imparted a beautiful significance. The temper of these latest plays is a temper of reconciliation; the wrongs of life are present, but for those who can transcend the baser passions they work for good. Injuries are felt but are forgiven; broken bonds of affection are reunited; the lost are restored to hearts that have loved and suffered. "The oldest hath borne most," says Albany in the closing lines of King Lear. The old are seen in these last romances of Shakespeare as experienced in suffering, caused by the offence of others or by the errors of their own hearts; but they have learnt through suffering a certain detachment from the greed of personal gain, and they lean over the joy of young hearts, still immersed in the innocent egoism of youth, with a fond protectiveness. Cymbeline and his recovered sons, Pericles and Marina, Hermione and Perdita, Prospero and Miranda—it is the same sentiment, varied and repeated, in each of its exemplars. Certain indications that Shakespeare was loosening his connection with the theatre are present in these plays. He could, as in the instance of Pericles and perhaps in those of King Henry VIII. and The Two Noble Kinsmen contribute fragments to a drama in which, as a whole, he took little interest. In plays of which he is the sole author, his dramatic energy flags at times, to be renewed where the subject moved his feelings or charmed his imagination. The versification is breeze-like in its freedom, but sometimes the breeze falls away and sometimes it wanders with too vague an aim. The treatment of time passes from the extreme of romantic license, as in The Winter's Tale, to the strictest observation of the rule of unity in The Tempest. In Pericles, the earliest of these romances, Shakespeare cared only for certain scenes and situations. In Cymbeline, wherever Imogen, the loveliest figure in his gallery of portraits of women appears, we are certain to receive his finest workmanship. Hermione and Perdita wholly possessed his imagination, while a crude sketch sufficed for the jealousy of Leontes. The Tempest, if we set aside the laborious jesting of Antonio and Sebastian (designed to express the barren brain that often accompanies a callous heart), is wrought with equal power from the first scene to the last.
Perhaps the conjecture is well founded that The Tempest, with its masque of wedding blessings, was written for the marriage of Princess Elizabeth to Frederick, Elector Palatine, in February, 1613. Perhaps it was Shakespeare's latest play. And it may not be altogether an idle notion of the poet Campbell, that in Prospero's breaking his magic staff and dismissing his airy spirits we have the farewell to the stage of the great enchanter who had summoned Prospero into being.
Shakespeare found poetic comedy in its rudiments; he left it fully formed. He brought together its various elements and organized them to fulfil the functions of a single living spirit. He made laughter wise, and taught seriousness how to be winning and gracious. Through no ascetic doctrine but by virtue of the spirit of life and beauty he purified the drama from the dulness of what is gross, and kept its temper above the seductions of sentimental morals and a nerveless lubricity. Wit, fancy, grace, constructive dexterity, are found among his successors. Shakespeare's sane outlook upon life as a whole, his gentleness of strength in dealing with the passions, his reserve of power, his moral wisdom, were lost to English comedy when Prospero abjured his magic and retired to the duties of his Stratford lordship of the soil.
Edward Dowden.