The meaning is too manifest to need or indeed to admit a word of comment, and it is brought out by this emphasis: "One touch of nature makes the whole world kin"—that one touch of their common failing being an uneasy love of novelty. Was ever poet's or sage's meaning so perverted, so reversed! And yet it is hopeless to think of bringing about a change in the general use of this line and a cessation of its perversion to sentimental purposes, not to say an application of it as the scourge for which it was wrought; just as it is hopeless to think of changing by any demonstration of unfitness and unmeaningness a phrase in general use—the reason being that the mass of the users are utterly thoughtless and careless of the right or the wrong, the fitness or the unfitness, of the words that come from their mouths, except that they serve their purpose for the moment. That done, what care they? And what can we expect, when even the "Globe" edition of Shakespeare's works has upon its very title-page and its cover a globe with a band around it, on which is written this line in its perverted sense, that sense being illustrated, enforced, and deepened into the general mind by the union of the band-ends by clasped hands. I absolve, of course, the Cambridge editors of the guilt of this twaddling misuse of Shakespeare's line; it was a mere publisher's contrivance; but I am somewhat surprised that they should have even allowed it such sanction as it has from its appearance on the same title-page with their names.
The undramatic character of "Troilus and Cressida," which has been already mentioned, appears in its structure, its personages, and its purpose. We are little interested in the fate of its personages, not merely because we know what is to become of them, for that we know in almost any play which has an historical subject; but the play is constructed upon such a slight plot that it really has neither dramatic motive nor dramatic movement. The loves of "Troilus and Cressida" are of a kind which are interesting only to the persons directly involved in them; Achilles's sulking is of even less interest; and the death of Hector affects us only like a newspaper announcement of the death of some distinguished person, so little is he really involved in the action of the drama. There is also a singular lack of that peculiar characteristic of Shakespeare's dramatic style, the marked distinction and nice discrimination of the individual traits, mental and moral, of the various personages. Ulysses is the real hero of the play; the chief, or at least the great purpose of which is the utterance of the Ulyssean view of life; and in this play Shakespeare is Ulysses, or Ulysses Shakespeare. In all his other plays Shakespeare so lost his personal consciousness in the individuality of his own creations that they think and feel as well as act like real men and women other than their creator, so that we cannot truly say of the thoughts and feelings which they express, that Shakespeare says thus or so; for it is not Shakespeare who speaks, but they with his lips. But in Ulysses, Shakespeare, acting upon a mere hint, filling up a mere traditionary outline, drew a man of mature years, of wide observation, of profoundest cogitative power, one who knew all the weakness and all the wiles of human nature, and who yet remained with blood unbittered and soul unsoured—a man who saw through all shams and fathomed all motives, and who yet was not scornful of his kind, not misanthropic, hardly cynical except in passing moods; and what other man was this than Shakespeare himself? What had he to do when he had passed forty years but to utter his own thoughts when he would find words for the lips of Ulysses? And thus it is that "Troilus and Cressida" is Shakespeare's wisest play. If we would know what Shakespeare thought of men and their motives after he reached maturity, we have but to read this drama; drama it is, but with what other character who shall say? For, like the world's pageant, it is neither tragedy nor comedy, but a tragi-comic history, in which the intrigues of amorous men and light-o'-loves and the brokerage of panders are mingled with the deliberations of sages and the strife and the death of heroes.
The thoughtful reader will observe that Ulysses pervades the serious parts of the play, which is all Ulyssean in its thought and language. And this is the reason or rather the fact of the play's lack of distinctive characterization. For Ulysses cannot speak all the time that he is on the stage; and therefore the other personages, such as may, speak Ulyssean, with, of course, such personal allusion and peculiar trick as a dramatist of Shakespeare's skill could not leave them without for difference. For example, no two men could be more unlike in character than Achilles and Ulysses, and yet the former, having asked the latter what he is reading, he, uttering his own thought, says as follows with the subsequent reply:
Ulyss.—A strange fellow here
Writes me: That man, how dearly ever parted,[9]
How much in having, or without or in,
Cannot make boast to have that which he hath
Nor feels not what he owes but by reflection,
As when his virtues shining upon others
Heat them, and they retort that heat again
To the first giver.
Achil.—This is not strange, Ulysses.
The beauty that is borne here in the face
The bearer knows not, but commends itself
To others' eyes; nor doth the eye itself,
That most pure spirit of sense, behold itself,
Not going from itself; but eye to eye opposed,
Salutes each other with each other's form,
For speculation turns not to itself
Till it hath travelled and is mirror'd there
Where it may see itself. This is not strange at all.
Now these speeches are made of the same metal and coined in the same mint; and they both of them have the image and superscription of William Shakespeare. No words or thoughts could be more unsuited to that bold, bloody egoist, "the broad Achilles," than the reply he makes to Ulysses; but here Shakespeare was merely using the Greek champion as a lay figure to utter his own thoughts, which are perfectly in character with the son of Autolycus. Ulysses thus flows over upon the whole serious part of the play. Agamemnon, Nestor, Æneus, and the rest all talk alike, and all like Ulysses. That Ulysses speaks for Shakespeare will, I think, be doubted by no reader who has reached the second reading of this play by the way which I have pointed out to him. And why, indeed, should Ulysses not speak for Shakespeare, or how could it be other than that he should? The man who had written "Hamlet," "King Lear," "Othello," and "Macbeth," if he wished to find Ulysses, had only to turn his mind's eye inward; and thus we have in this drama Shakespeare's only piece of introspective work.
But there is another personage who gives character to this drama, and who is of a very different sort. Thersites sits with Caliban high among Shakespeare's minor triumphs. He was brought in to please the mob. He is the Fool of the piece, fulfilling the functions of Touchstone, and Launce, and Launcelot, and Costard. As the gravediggers were brought into "Hamlet" for the sake of the groundlings, so Thersites came into "Troilus and Cressida." As if that he might leave no form of human utterance ungilded by his genius, Shakespeare in Thersites has given us the apotheosis of blackguardism and billingsgate. Thersites is only a railing rascal. Some low creatures are mere bellies with no brain. Thersites is merely mouth, but this mouth has just enough coarse brain above it to know a wise man and a fool when he sees them. But the railings of this deformed slave are splendid. Thersites is almost as good as Falstaff. He is of course a far lower organization intellectually, and somewhat lower, perhaps, morally. He is coarser in every way; his humor, such as he has, is of the grossest kind; but still his blackguardism is the ideal of vituperation. He is far better than Apemantus in "Timon of Athens," for there is no hypocrisy in him, no egoism, and, comfortable trait in such a personage, no pretence of gentility. For good downright "sass" in its most splendid and aggressive form, there is in literature nothing equal to the speeches of Thersites.
"Troilus and Cressida" is also remarkable for its wide range of style, because of which it is a play of great interest to the student of Shakespeare, who here adapted his style to the character of the matter in hand. The lighter parts remind us of his earlier manner; the graver are altogether in his later. He did this unconsciously, or almost unconsciously, we may be sure. None the less, however, is the play therefore valuable in a critical point of view, but rather the more so. It is a standing and an undeniable warning to us not to lean too much upon any one special trait of style in estimating the time in Shakespeare's life at which a play was produced. Moreover it illustrates the natural course of style development, showing that it is not only gradual, but not by regular degrees; that is, that a writer does not pass at one period absolutely from one style to another, dropping his previous manner and taking on another, but that he will at one time unconsciously recur to his former manner or manners, and at a late period show traces of his early manner. Strata of his old fashion thrust themselves up through the newer formation. "Troilus and Cressida" is so remarkable in this respect that the chief of the absolute-period critics, the Rev. Mr. Fleay, has been obliged to invent a most extraordinary theory to account for it. His view is that there are three plots interwoven, each of which is distinct in manner of treatment, and, moreover, that each of these was composed at a different time from the other two. He would have us believe that the parts embodying the Troilus and Cressida story were written in Shakespeare's earliest period, those concerning Hector in his middle period, and the Ajax parts in the last. That these three stories were interwoven is manifest; but they came naturally together in this Greek historical play—for it is that—and their interweaving was hardly to have been avoided; the manner of each is not distinct from that of the other, although there is, with likeness, a noticeable unlikeness; but the notion that therefore Shakespeare first wrote the Troilus and Cressida part as a play, and then years afterward added the Hector part, and again years afterward the Ajax and Ulysses part, seems to me only a monstrous contrivance of an honest and an able man in desperate straits to make his theory square with fact. As to detail upon this subject, I shall only notice one point. Tag-rhymes, or rhymed couplets ending a scene or a speech in blank verse or in prose, are regarded by the metre-critics (and justly within reason) as marks of an early date of composition. Now in "Troilus and Cressida" these abound. It contains more of them than any other play, except one or two of the very earliest. The important point, however, is that these rhymes appear no less in the Ulysses and Ajax scenes of the play than in the others—a sufficient warning against putting absolute trust in such evidence.
Among those few of Shakespeare's plays which are least often read is "All's Well that Ends Well." This one, however, is to the earnest student one of the most interesting of the thirty-seven which bear his name; not only because it contains some of his best and most thoughtful work, but because, being Shakespeare's all through, it is written in two distinct styles—styles so distinct that there can be no doubt that as it has come down to us it is the product of two distinct periods of his dramatic life, and those the most distant, the first and the last. Its singularity in this respect gives it a peculiar value to the student of Shakespeare's style and of his mental development. There is not an interweaving of styles as in "Troilus and Cressida"; the two are distinctly separable; and there is external historical evidence which supports the internal.
We have a record in Francis Meres's "Palladis Tamia" of a play by Shakespeare called "Love's Labor's Won"; and there is no reasonable doubt that that was the first name of "All's Well that Ends Well." As the "Palladis Tamia" was published in 1598, this play was produced before that year, and all the evidence, internal and external, goes to show that Shakespeare wrote it soon after "Love's Labor's Lost," and as a counterpart to that comedy. The difference of its style in various parts had been remarked upon in general terms; but I believe that this difference was first specially indicated in the following passage, which I cannot do better here than to quote from the introduction to my edition of the play published in 1857; and I do so with the greater freedom because the particular traits which it discriminated have been lately, in the present year, insisted upon by the Rev. Mr. Fleay, in his very useful and suggestive, but not altogether to be trusted "Shakespeare Manual," to which I have before referred.