If the plays do not throw a clear light on matters of conduct and exercise of the will, they certainly tell Personality of Shakespeareof no lack of self-control and no weakness or feverishness of action. The traditions of conviviality and the records of a life of constant industry that secured wealth and social position are both in accord with the impressions derived from the plays of an eagerness for experience controlled by a self-mastery and a serenity of purpose. If one were to search for a modern writer most like Shakespeare, one would select Scott, rather than Shelley, or Byron, or Wordsworth. As to the intellectual quality of the author of the plays, it is clear that he was not a Galileo or a Bacon. If we judge intellectual power by its creation of system or synthesis, we shall probably estimate Shakespeare less highly than if we remember that intellect of the highest order is often displayed by maintaining openness and largeness of view in face of the solicitations of theory or prejudice. No one can read the plays in connection with the literature of the time, or of any time, without marveling at their freedom from vulgarity, pettiness, or narrowness of mental attitude. If they do not afford evidences of a profound culture in philosophy, letters, or science, they offer no trace of intellectual blindness or conceit, and they leave no doubt that their author had thought greatly and freely. Even more certain is their assurance of the range and intensity of his emotional life. In these respects again, no one can compare his work with that of other writers without feeling the effect of his personality. Fletcher, perhaps next to him among the Elizabethans in a versatile expression of a wide range of emotions, gives no sign of the sincere, profound, and searching interest in humankind which we are sure was Shakespeare's. Bacon, surpassing him perhaps in intellectual curiosity and thoroughness, manifestly gives no evidence in his writings of the warmth of sympathy, the quickness of emotional response, the fire of passion which we find in the author of Shakespeare's plays. It is difficult to disbelieve that their imaginative participation in the height and breadth of human feeling was the creation of a man who united intellectual greatness with an emotional susceptibility of extraordinary range and delicacy, and with a sympathy, genial, wide, tolerant, but also heartfelt, deep, and passionate. Such is the ineffaceable impression of the man which has been shared by many generations of readers, and which found expression two hundred and fifty years ago in Dryden's carefully considered estimate, "The man who of all Moderns, and perhaps Ancient Poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul."
What of the plays themselves? Is there any fixed and universal estimate of their quality and significance as literature? In this volume we have been concerned in reviewing our knowledge about them rather than in their interpretation or evaluation. We have noted the sources from which their plots were drawn, the conditions under which they were produced in the playhouses, the influences at work in the contemporary drama which determined in some measure their subjects Qualities of the Playsand treatment. Starting with the probable dates of their composition, we have traced them from the theater to the printer, through the hands of many editors, and through the long history of their effects on theatergoers and readers. In their history they have played a part in the changes of taste and opinion of three centuries, and if they have grown greatly in men's estimation, this has not been without much variability of appreciation and uncertainty as to their value. What, then, are the qualities of the plays that raised them at once above the measure of contemporary influence and rivalry? Are these the qualities that have continued to win the most general appreciation? Despite all the stress we are to-day taught to place on change, growth, evolution, are there qualities in these plays which insure them a continued preëminence in literature?
Differences of opinion testify, indeed, to the comprehensive appeal of the plays to different minds, nations, or epochs, but they have not greatly affected the essential elements in men's admiration. If some critic brings into new prominence a quality that has partly escaped attention, his discovery is not likely to affect the more permanent elements of their reputation. If for a time attention is turned to the plays as plays rather than as poems and to the merits of Shakespeare as a dramatist, this criticism does not lead to any lasting disregard of their poetic quality or to the permanent acceptance of skill in dramatic structure as a chief element in their literary preëminence. Nor is such an element discoverable in their philosophical synthesis or their incidental wisdom, although some of the most brilliant criticism has exalted that wisdom or sought to formulate and expound their view of life. Concerning the essential elements of their greatness no real difference of opinion has arisen from the time they were written down to the present day. They were lifted at once above the level of contemporary endeavor, and they have continued to grow in reputation chiefly because of their poetry and their characterization.
Concerning the nature and quality of these there is little difference of opinion, though critics may vary in estimating their beauty or value. One may prefer the verse of Homer or of Milton, but he will not deny the traits that distinguish Shakespeare's. Another may prefer the well-ordered study of human motives in Sophocles, or the realistic analysis of a modern realist like Turgenieff, but he will recognize the qualities in Shakespeare's characterization that are the basis of general admiration. Still another may condemn that admiration, but he will not differ from us as to the chief sources of its existence.
These two sources are hardly to be separated, for the persons are revealed through the beauty of the verse, and the poetry is ever adapted to the speakers. In the early plays the poet's fancy often refuses to be bound by the requirements of his characters and escapes in lyric or descriptive excursions; but as his art becomes Poetry of the Playsmore masterly, the poetry adapts itself with increasing devotion to the dramatic task, discarding the limitations of the verse form and even at times sacrificing clarity and harmony of expression in its effort to make a few lines significant of the thought and emotion of some individual. An enormous vocabulary is treated with daring freedom; words are coined, changed, or restamped in order to let nothing of significance escape. The effect is not primarily that of finished workmanship or elaborate harmony, though these may be found in many passages and notably in the greatest of the sonnets. Broken rather than completed images, richness of suggestion rather than unity of impressiveness, surprise and novelty in words rather than their delicate adjustment, make up an effect of bewildering enchantment rather than of perfected form. This is true even in an early play like Romeo and Juliet, where the verse becomes undramatic in order to make the most of every opportunity for fancy or melody, and it is true also in Othello, where poetry and characterization are wedded with consummate art. The reader's pleasure is not in finding each idea finally developed or each motive given full elaboration. It is rather in the flow of words which endow each person and moment with their wealth of color and suggestion, and somehow carry on to the reader both their impression of life and the transforming power of their dignity and splendor.
In a last analysis the quality of the poetry is less dependent on the music of line or passage than on the imagery of the words themselves. It seems as if the imagination had hurried on Ariel's wing around the universe in order to freight each phrase with a fresh trope and an unexpected meaning. Sometimes, to be sure, there results an excess or mixture of figures; but restrained to character and situation, bound by the measure of the pentameter, the carnival of words becomes a gorgeous yet ordered pageant, the very spectacle of beauty.
Let us take but one passage, not from the great crises of passion, nor from those unsurpassable revelations of the tortured spirit, but from the opening of a play where the purpose is chiefly expository, and where indeed the language is not free from that mixture of figures which some condemn. The wonderful first scene of Antony and Cleopatra, which within the compass of its sixty-two lines presents the two protagonists and their background of empire and war, opens thus in the speech of a subordinate.
Nay, but this dotage of our general's
O'erflows the measure. Those his goodly eyes,
That o'er the files and musters of the war
Have glow'd like plated Mars, now bend, now turn
The office and devotion of their view
Upon a tawny front; his captain's heart,
Which in the scuffles of great fights hath burst
The buckles on his breast, reneges all temper,
And is become the bellows and the fan
To cool a gipsy's lust.
CharacterizationA few lines further on Antony speaks thus, as he embraces Cleopatra.
Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch
Of the rang'd Empire fall! Here is my space.
Kingdoms are clay; our dungy earth alike
Feeds beast as man; the nobleness of life
Is to do thus, when such a mutual pair
And such a twain can do't, in which I bind,
On pain of punishment, the world to wit
We stand up peerless.