Shake general and of the individual in humanity; and, although he steps from time to time across the boundary of human nature, and introduces a multitude of supernatural beings, witches, fairies, spirits, and other creatures of the imagination, even in these his severe consistency and strict verisimilitude do not abandon him. They are, in their own order, infallibly perfect; we realise that such beings exist merely for dramatic purposes, but we know that, did they really exist, they would appear and act precisely as Shakespeare has made them. Their action, proceeding from given points and recognised data, is consistent even in the most remote and trivial details, and defies the gainsaying of analysis. It must be remembered, however, so far as witches go, that the power of witchcraft was still a common belief in the days of Shakespeare, and that his imagination was not wholly left to itself, but was stimulated by contemporary tradition. Again, in his mode of delineating passion and feeling, Shakespeare towers above all other dramatists. Some writers create a personage by accumulating to speare's its making all such traits as, by reading and observa- creation and tion, are found to accompany the fundamental ele- knowledge ment in its constitution. Obviously, the personage character. of human thus created becomes the mere embodiment of some moral peculiarity, the hero of a monograph of ambition, avarice, or hypocrisy. He is, as it were, the creature of a single phrase, like a minor character in Dickens. Moreover, in the expression of their feelings, tragic or comic, such characters almost universally describe the sensations they experience. Men and women in real life never do this: when under the influence of any strong emotion, we leave our sufferings to be inferred by others, indicating more by what we suppress than by what we utter. In this subtle point, which is not always apprehended by the greatest modern writers, the men and women of Shakespeare's stage are pre-eminently human, and separate themselves from the generality of dramatic work. And closely allied with this is his firm grasp of the complexity of human character. If we analyse any prominent character in Shakespeare we may at first sight recognise the predominance of one single quality or passion; but, on a nearer view, we find that, with every new attempt on our part to comprehend the whole extent of its individuality, the complexity of its moral being goes on widening and deepening. Macaulay observes that it is easy to say, for example, that the primary characteristic of Shylock is revengefulness; but a closer insight shows a thousand other qualities in him, whose mutual play and varying intensity go to compose the complex being drawn by Shakespeare in the terrible Jew. Nothing is more childish than the superficial judgment which identifies the great creations of Shakespeare with some prominent moral or intellectual characteristic. His conceptions are as multiform as those of nature herself. This wonderful power of conceiving complex character is at the bottom of another distinctive peculiarity of our great poet, namely, the total absence in his works of any tendency to self-reproduction. To deduce from his dramas any notion of his personal sympathies and tendencies is a task of the utmost hazard and difficulty. He is marvellously impersonal; or, rather, he is all persons in one. It is probable that, if any man other than Shakespeare could conceive Othello's jealousy, he might subsequently attempt a second time what he had done so admirably already. But Shakespeare never again recurs to Othello: that passionate, warm-hearted, credulous paragon of jealous husbands dies on the stage of his own passion, and is never revived to help out another play. There are other jealous husbands in Shakespeare-Leontes, Ford, and Posthumus-but their jealousies are all different from each other: the men in whom they burn are in no way the same. And even more clearly in Shakespeare's women do we see this inexhaustible variety. Much has been said and written about this incomparable band of ladies, beautiful, sincere, robust, plain-spoken, and drawn with an infinite delicacy and fondness of touch. The depth and extent of Shakespeare's creative power is nowhere more visible than in his women; for, in conceiving these exquisitely varied types of female character, he knew that they would be entrusted in representation to boys or young men. No woman acted on the stage till long after the age which witnessed Hermione, Lady Macbeth, Rosalind, and Juliet. While creating marvels of womanly delicacy, grandeur, and passion, he was conscious that they must be personated on the stage by a male actor, and that he himself must feel what he so powerfully expressed in the words of his Cleopatra : "The quick comedians Extemporally will stage us: Antony Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see Surely the power of ideal creation has never undergone a greater trial, or emerged from the ordeal so triumphantly. Emotion in In the expression of strong emotion, as well as in the delineation of character, Shakespeare is superior to all other dramatists and to all other poets. Violent and declamaShakespeare. tory rhetoric is as far below his immeasurable genius in the one case as is any combination of abnormal or unusual qualities in the other. His genius is his faithfulness to nature and the laws of human experience: he shows us the emotions and passions of the world around us, not of any distant and imaginary planet where the divine purpose is worked out in melodrama, with the aid of sentimental assassins, monstrous villains, and prodigies of distorted virtue. He draws his illustrations, where he is at his best, from the most ordinary scenes of life. It seems the veriest platitude to point out that, in his intense simplicity, his pro found wisdom, he proves himself equal to every great occasion. There are, indeed, in his works many passages in which he has allowed his taste for intellectual subtleties to get the better of his judgment, and others in which the enthusiasm raised by the situation or the emotions of the speaker is suddenly chilled by his own strange and incurable delight in punning. This villainous habit was, however, the literary vice of the day. Bacon was not altogether free from it; while the humorous and ingenuous Dekker, an even greater offender than Shakespeare in this respect, seems to follow up every one of his feeble and intricate puns with a happy chuckle of pleasure. But this indulgence in conceits generally disappears in the great culminating moments of intense passion; in the later plays it is far less frequent; and, even if it be reckoned as a grave defect, we must not forget that there are occasions when the most highly-wrought moral agitation is not incompatible with a morbid and feverish activity of the intellect, and that the most violent emotion may sometimes find a vent in the intellectual contortions of a conceit. The grand difficulty of Shakespeare's style arises from his enormously developed intellectual and imaginative faculty, which leads him to weave into Shakeits ordinary tissue metaphor of the boldest kind. speare's Thoughts rose so fast beneath his pen, and generated use of others in their turn with so great a rapidity, that the metaphor. reader must borrow what mite he can from the poet's supernatural vivacity of thought, in order to trace the leading idea through the labyrinth of subordinate illustration. In all figurative writing the metaphor, the image, is an ornament, something extraneous to the thought which it is intended to illustrate; it may be detached from it, and still leave the fundamental idea intact. With Shakespeare, on the other hand, metaphor is the very fabric of the thought itself, and is entirely inseparable from it. Our superficial glance loses itself in these mazes, as we are dismayed, on first entering some great Gothic church, at the immense multiplicity of detail; but a closer examination shows us that every pillar, every ornament, and every moulding is an essential member of the main structure, indivisible from its body, and necessary to its perfection. There is no poet, ancient or modern, whose writings contain such a number of practical and, at the same time, profound observations. Line after line of Shakespeare has passed into a proverb-observations expressed with a casual simplicity, but pregnant with all the wisdom of philosophy. Their perfect textures, clothing so plainly and so sufficiently their inexhaustible meaning, is the secret of their immortality. We may seek for parallel examples in the choice maxims of La Rochefoucauld and in the practical philosophy of Molière's comedies but even to the most fertile thoughts of authors who were never, in the least degree, superficial, we find a limit; a definite line is drawn where we cease to learn anything fresh from the His treatment of abnormal passage; its universal application becomes narrow and constricted. Further, just as, in studying Shakespeare's treatment of supernatural beings, we have conviction forced upon us by its consistency and imaginative veracity, so, in all abnormal situations arising from an intimate connection with these or with equally fantastic human figures, we find the same steadfast coherency in the midst of events which, at first sight, seem altogether to tranpassions. scend ordinary experience. Every grade of folly, for instance, from the verge of idiotcy to the most fantastic eccentricity; every shade of moral perturbation, from the jealous fury of Othello to the pitiful frenzy of Lear or the supremely sorrowful madness of Ophelia, is represented in his plays with a sublime and unanimous realism which never falters in its plighted troth to life and nature, and is never false to its high and splendid aim. Compare these deluded victims of madness with the ungraceful, repulsive, and unreal presences of the lunatics who masquerade in Ford's tragedies and, with a little more success, in Webster's Duchess of Malfi, or the idiots who mop and mow under Dekker's hand, to distract the Duke's attention while his daughter marries Hippolito. These are madmen borrowed from books. Shakespeare, for his early studies of this sublime perversion of passion, and for the subsequent praise and pity of the whole world, went straight to the book of life. The Poems "Venus and Adonis." § 12. The non-dramatic works of Shakespeare consist of two narrative poems, written in stanzas, and entitled Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece; of the volume of beautiful Sonnets, whose significance has excited so much controversy; and of a few uneven and not too creditable lyrics, which are probably due in the very slightest and most elementary degree to Shakespeare himselfthe writer of nothing that is discreditable, and of very little that is uneven. Venus and Adonis exhibits the early flush and voluptuous glow of a fervent imagination, tempered by the laboured meditation of form and style natural to a young and careful artist. The story is founded on the common mythological episode of Venus and the young hunter. The character of its style is essentially luxurious and Italian; it has something of the rich and sensuous manner of Ariosto, and is full of his love for the external beauty of nature-the innocent passion for the springtime and the budding flowers of the garden; for its formality and superb pomposity of diction prefers the garden and the artfully designed "wilderness" to the fields and the woods. In its thought and expression, in the delightfully easy but effeminate melody of its verse, there is literally nothing of that fine Hellenic spirit which gives Marlowe's Hero and Leander the first place in any company: if we are to liken this charming and frail production of Shakespeare's youth to any classical parallel we must refer it to the unsurpassed femininity "Lucrece." The Sonnets. of Propertius' verse at its best. An increased power over passion is found in Lucrece, which is forged of a harder metal; but still the passion is studied, analysed, and laid bare, rather than represented with dramatic force and directness. Lucrece must always remain a somewhat unattractive poem: its subject, eminently fitted for the most robust dramatic treatment, is wasted in the stanzas of a narrative poem, which, at the same time, it robs of their quality of repose, giving back nothing in return. But the praise of the Sonnets will last as long as the world, for each of them is a miracle of intrinsic beauty. And, as long as criticism exists, there will be found scholars to discuss the intensely personal note of injured love and friendship which is unquestionably sounded throughout these hundred and fifty-four poems. They were printed first in 1609; but the allusion, already quoted, in Meres' Palladis Tamia proves that some of them were written before 1598-that is, in all probability; for it does not naturally follow that Shakespeare's "sugred Sonnets among his private friends" are those which we actually possess. Assuming, however, this point, we find-this, at least, is the general conclusion of the critics-that some of the present sonnets are addressed to a youth of noble family, and others to a woman of stained character. The poet bitterly complains of the treachery of his friend and the infidelity of his mistress, while he speaks of both in the most ardent language of passionate and melancholy devotion. Beneath the exquisite surface of these short poems there runs a deep undercurrent of pain and sorrow, bringing to our minds the living Shakespeare as clearly as the same genius raised graphical Hamlet or Leontes before our eyes. Nevertheless, character of there is a school of critics whose part in the controversial game has been to explain away the autobiographical significance of the Sonnets upon the theory that they were written on wholly imaginary themes or in the character, and to serve the occasions, of some of the poet's patrons. It must be owned that there is some reason for this view in the general history of the sonnet. But we must take facts as they meet us, and believe, even if the task is very hard, that there was some share of human nature in its greatest student, and that, being at the same time the greatest of all artists and poets, he expressed his human sorrow in divine song, simply because it was his natural mode of expression. On its first appearance, the volume was dedicated by the publisher, Thomas Thorpe, to "The only begetter of these ensuing Sonnets, Mr. W. H."; and the honours of this inscription are likely to be for ever disputed between Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, whom we know to have been one of Shakespeare's patrons, and William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke. This, however, is something of a side issue. Apart from the existence of this strange and painful enigma, the Sonnets have their place, and a very marked place, in English Autobio the Sonnets. |