Notes on Shakespeare's workmanship

Preface

The following papers were first written as Lectures and so spoken before an audience in the University of Cambridge. Being shy of repeating myself too often in print in the guise of a lecturer, I have turned my second persons plural into third persons singular. But I am sensible that the change will only commend itself by help of the reader's good-will in remembering all the while that these are familiar discourses rather than learned enquiries.

They seek to discover, in some of Shakespeare's plays, just what he was trying to do as a playwright. This has always seemed to me a sensible way of approaching him, and one worth reverting to from time to time. For it is no disparagement to the erudition and scholarship that have so piously been heaped about Shakespeare to say that we shall sometimes find it salutary to disengage our minds from it all, and recollect that the poet was a playwright.

I must thank my brother-in-law, Mr. John Hay Lobban, for reading these pages in proof and making an index for me.

Aethub Quiller-Couch.

Contents

PAGB

PREFACE V

CHAPTER

Chapter I Macbeth

Ways of studying Shakespeare — ^INIethod proposed for these notes — Macbeth to be considered as a piece of workmanship — The Elizabethan Theatre, its audience and its stage — Shakespeare's 'conditions' — His 'material' — The 'material' of Macbeth — The capital difficulty of Macbeth as a tragedy — How Shakespeare might have extenuated it — ^How, rather, before setting to work, he made his problem as hard as possible.

I PEOPOSE to take a single work of art, of admitted excellence, and consider its workmanship. I choose Shakespeare's tragedy of Macbeth as being eminently such a work: single or complete in itself, strongly imagined, simply constructed, and in its way excellent beyond any challenging.

There are, of course, many other aspects from which so unchallengeable a masterpiece deserves to be studied. We may seek, for example, and seek usefully, to fix its date and define its place in order of time among Shakespeare's writings; but this has been done for us, nearly enough. Or we may search it for light on Shakespeare, the man himself, and on his history — so obscure in the main, though here and there lit up by flashes of evidence, contemporary and convincing so far as they go. Por my part, while admitting such curiosity to be human, and suffering myself now and again to be intrigued by it, I could never believe in it as a pursuit that really mattered. All literature must be personal: yet tbe artist — the great artist — dies into his work, and in that survives. What dread hand designed the Sphinx? What dread brain conceived its site, there, overlooking the desert? What sort of man was he who contrived Memnon, with a voice to answer the sunrise? WTiat were the domestic or extra-domestic habits of Pheidias? Whom did Villon rob or Cellini cheat or Moliere mock? Why did Shakespeare bequeath to his wife his second-best bed? These are questions which, as Sir Thomas Browne would say, admit a wide solution, and I allow some of them to be fascinating. " Men are we," and must needs wonder, a little wistfully, concerning the forerunners, our kinsmen who, having achieved certain things we despair to improve or even to rival, have gone their way, leaving so much to be guessed. " How splendid," we say, " to have known them ! Let us delve back and discover all we can about them ! "

Brave lads in olden musical centuries Sang, night by night, adorable choruses,

Sat late by alehouse doors in April, Chaunting in joy as the moon was rising.

Moon-seen and merry, under the trellises, Flush-faced they played with old polysyllables;

Spring scents inspired, old wine diluted, Love and Apollo were there to chorus.

Now these, the songs, remain to eternity, *

Those, only those, the bountiful choristers

Gone — those are gone, those unremembered Sleep and are silent in earth for ever.

Ko: it is no ignoble quarrel we hold with Time over these men. Eut, after all, the moral of it is summed up in a set of verses ascribed to Homer, in which he addresses the Delian Women. " Farewell to you all," he says, " and remember me in time to come : and when any one of men on earth, a stranger from far, shall enquire of you, ' O maidens, who is the sweetest of minstrels here about ? and in whom do you most delight ? ' then make answer modestly, ' Sir, it is a blind man, and he lives in steep Chios.' "

But the shutters are up at The Mermaid: and, after all, it is the masterpiece that matters — the Sphinx herself, the Iliad, the Parthenon, the Perseus, the song of the Old Heaulmieres, Tartufe, Macbeth.

Lastly, I shall not attempt a general criticism of Macheth, because that work has been done, exquisitely and (I think) perdurably, by Dr. Bradley, in his published Lectures on Shakespearian Tragedy, a book which I can hardly start to praise without using the language' of extravagance: a book which I hold to belong to the first order of criticism, to be a true ornament of our times. Here and there, to be sure, I cannot accept Dr. Bradley's judgment : but it would profit my readers little to be taken point by point through these smaller questions at issue, and (what is more) I have not the necessary selfconfidence.

If, however, we spend a little while in considering Macbeth as a piece of worTcmanship (or artistry, if you prefer it), we shall be following a new road which seems worth a trial — perhaps better worth a trial just because it lies off the trodden way; and whether it happen or not to lead us out upon some fresh and lively view of this particular drama, it will at least help us by the way to clear our thoughts upon dramatic vn*iting and its method: while I shall not he false to my belief in the virtue of starting upon any chosen work of literature absolutely, with minds intent on discovering just that upon which the author's mind was intent.

I shall assume that Macbeth is an eminently effective play ; that, by consent, it produces a great, and intended, impression on the mind. It is the shortest of Shakespeare's plays, save only The Comedy of Errors. It is told in just under 2,000 lines — scarcely more than half the length of Hamlet. We may attribute this brevity in part — and we shall attribute it rightly — ^to its simplicity of plot, but that does not matter ; or, rather, it goes all to Macbeth' s credit. The half of artistry consists in learning to make one stroke better than two. ,The more simply, economically, you produce the impression aimed at, the better workman you may call yourself.

]^ow what had Shakespeare to do9 He — a tried and competent dramatist — had to write a play: and if it be answered that everbody knew this without my telling it, I reply that it is the first thing some commentators forget. This play had to be an ^ acting play ' : by which of course I mean a play to succeed on the boards and entertain, for three hours or so,^ an audience which had paid to be entertained. This differentiates it at once from a literary composition meant to he read by the fireside, where the

* In the Prologue to Romeo and Juliet Shakespeare talks of " the two hours' traffic of our stage." But the actual performance must have taken longer than two hours.

kettle does all the hissing. Therefore, to understand what Shakespeare as a workman was driving at, we must in imagination seat ourselves amid the audience he had in mind as he worked.

Moreover we must imagine ourselves in the Globe Theatre, Southwark, different in so many respects from the playhouses we know: because at every point of difference we meet with some condition of which Shakespeare had to take account. The stage, raised pretty much as it is nowadays, was bare and ran out for some way into the auditorium, the central area of which was unroofed. Thus — the fashionable time for the theatre being the afternoon — the action, or a part of it, took place in daylight. When daylight waned, lanterns were called in, and some may agree with me, after studying Shakespeare's sense of darkness and its artistic value, that it were worth while, with this in mind, to tabulate the times of year, so far as we can ascertain them, at which his several plays were first performed. For my part, I am pretty sure that, among other conditions, he worked with an eye on the almanac.

To return to the stage of the Globe Theatre. — ^N"ot only did it run out into the auditorium : the audience returned the compliment by overflowing it. Stools, ranged along either side of it, were much in demand by young gentlemen who wished to show off their fine clothes. These young gentlemen smoked — or, as they put it, " drank " — ^tobacco in clay pipes. So the atmosphere was free and easy; in its way (I suspect) not much unlike that of the old music-halls I frequented in graceless days, where a corpulent chairman called for drinks for which, if privileged to know him and sit beside him, you subsequently paid; where all joined companionably in a chorus; where a wink from the singer would travel — I know not how — around four-fifths of a complete circle.

The Elizabethan theatre had no painted scenery;^ or little, and that of the rudest. At the back of the stage, at some little height above the heads of the players, projected a narrow gallery, or platform, with (as I suppose) a small doorway behind it, and a ' practicable ' ladder to give access to it or be removed, as occasion demanded. Eix the ladder, and it became the stairway leading to Duncan's sleeping-chamber: take it away, and the gallery became the battlements of Dunsinane, or Juliet's balcony, or Brabantio's window, or ShylocVs from which Jessica drops the coffer, or Cleopatra's up to which she hales dying Antony. From the floor of this gallery to the floor of the stage depended draperies which, as they were drawn close or opened, gave you the arras behind which Ealstaff was discovered in slumber, or Polonius stabbed, the tomb of Juliet, Desdemona's bed, the stage for the play-scenes in Hamlet and the Midsummer-NigJifs Dream, the cave of Prosper© or of Hecate.

To right and left of this draped alcove, beyond the pillars supporting the gallery, were two doors giving on

»"The Elizabethan Stage," "the Elizabethan Drama," are terms which actually cover a considerable period of time. It is certain that — say between 1550 and 1620 — the theatre enormously improved its apparatus: upon the masques, as we know, very large sums of money were spent: and I make no doubt that before the close of Shakespeare's theatrical career, painted scenes and tapestries were the fashion.

the back and the green-room — mimorum aedes — ^for the entrances and exits of the players.

Such was the Elizabethan theatre, with an audience so disposed that, as Sir Walter Ealeigh puts it, " the groups of players were sepn from many points of view, and had to aim at statuesque rather than pictorial effect." When we take this into account with the daylight and the lack of scenic background, we at once realise that it miLst have been so, and that these were the conditions under which Shakespeare wrought for success.

I must add another, though without asking it to be

taken into account just here. I must add it because, the

more we consider it, the more we are likely to count it

the heaviest handicap of all. All female parts were

taken by boys. Reflect upon this, and listen to Lady

I have given suck, and know How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me: I would, while it was smiling in my face, Have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums. And dash'd the brains out, had I so sworn as you Have done to thia

That in the mouth of a boy! Shakespeare^s triumph over this condition will remain a wonder, however closely it be studied. ITevertheless, there it was: a condition which, having to lay account with it, he magnificently over-rode.

It were pedantic, of course, to lay upon a modem man the strain of constantly visualising that old theatre on the Bankside when reading Shakespeare, or, when seeing him acted, perpetually reminding himself, " Ho did not write it for this/* He did not, to be sure. But SiO potent was his genius that it has carried his work past the conditions of his own age to reincarnate, to revive, it in unabated vigour in later ages and under new conditions, even as the Iliad has survived the harp and the warriors' feast. This adaptable vitality is the test of first-rate genius ; and, save Shakespeare's, few dramas of the great Elizabethan age have passed it. But as for Shakespeare, I verily believe that, could his large masculine spirit revisit London, it would — ^whatever the dilettante and the superior person may say — rejoice in what has been done to amplify that cage against which we have his own word that he fretted, and would be proud of the care his countrymen, after three centuries, take to interpret him worthily : and this although I seem to catch, together with a faint smell of brimstone, his comments on the ' star ' performer of these daj^s, with the limelight following him about the stage and analysing the rainbow upon his glittering eye. These things, however, Shakespeare could not foresee: and we must seek back to the limitations of his theatre for our present purpose, to understand what a workman he was.

We pass, then, from the conditions under which he built his plays to the material out of which he had to build this particular one. The material of Macbeth, as we know, he found in Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of Scotland, first published in 1578 (but he appears to have read the second edition, of 1587). It lies scattered about in various passages in the separate chronicles of King Duncan, King Duff, King Kenneth, King Macbeth; but we get the gist of it in two passages from the Chronicle of King Duncan. There is no need to quote them in full: but the purport of the first may be gathered from its opening: —

Shortly after happened a strange and uncouth wonder. ... It fortuned as Macbeth and Banquho journeyed towards Fores, where the king as then lay, they went sporting by the way together without other companie save only themselves, passing through the woodes and fieldes, when sodenly, in the middes of a launde, there met them 3 women in strange and ferly apparell, resembling creatures of an elder wo ride; whom they attentively behelde, wondering much at the sight.

Then follow the prophecies: "All hajle, Makbeth, Thane of Glammis," etc., with the promise to Banquho that " contrarily thou in deede shall not reigne at all, but of thee shall be borne which shall governe the Scottish Kingdome by long order of continuall descent." I pause on that for a moment, merely because it gives a reason, if a secondary one, why the story should attract Shakespeare: for James I, a descendant of Banquho, had come to be King of England. Actors and playwrights have ever an eye for ' topical ' opportunity, and value that opportunity none the less if it be one to flatter a reigning house.

I take up the quotation at a later point : —

The same night at supper Banquho jested with him and sayde, Nowe Makbeth thou hast obtayned those things which the two former sisters prophesied, there remayneth onely for thee to purchase that which the thyrd sayd should come to passe. Whereupon Makbeth, revolving the thing in his mind even then, began to devise how he mighte attayne to the kingdome.

!N'ext we read that Duncan, by appointing his young son, Malcolm, Prince of Cumberland, " as it were thereby to appoint him his successor in the Kingdome," sorely troubled Macbeth's ambition, insomuch that he now began to think of usurping the kingdom by force, The Chronicle goes on: —

The wordes of the three weird sisters also (of whome before ye have heard) greatly encouraged him hereunto, but specially his wife lay sore upon him to attempt the thing, as she that was very ambitious, burning in unquenchable desire to beare the name of a Queene. At length, therefore, communicating his proposed intent with his trustie friendes, amongst whom Banquho was the chiefest, upon confidence of their promised ayde, he slewe the king at Envernes (or as some say at Botgosuane) in the VI year of his reygne.

The Chronicle proceeds to tell how Macbeth had himself crowned at Scone; how he reigned (actually for a considerable time) ; how he got rid of Banquho ; how Banquho's son escaped; how Birnam Wood came to Dunsinane, with much more that is handled in the tragedy; and ends (so far as we are concerned) as the play ends: —

But Makduffe . . . answered (with his naked sworde in his hande) saying: it is true, Makbeth, and now shall thine insatiable crueltie have an ende, for I am even he that thy wysards have tolde thee of, who was never borne of my mother, but ripped out of her wombe: therewithall he stept unto him, and slue him in the place. Then cutting his heade from the shoulders, he set it upon a poll, and brought it into Malcolme. This was the end of Makbeth, after he had reigned XVII years over the Scottishmen. In the beginning of his raigne he accomplished many worthie actes, right profitable to the common wealth (as ye have heard), but afterwards, by illusion of the Divell, he defamed the same with most horrible crueltie.

There, in brief, we have Shakespeare's material: and patently it holds one element on which an artist's mind

(if I imderstand the artistic mind) would by attraction at once inevitably seize. I mean the element of the supernatural. It is the element which almost every commentator, almost every critic, has done his best to belittle. I shall recur to it, and recur with stress upon it j because, writing as diffidently as a man may who has spent thirty years of his life in learning to understand how stories are begotten, and being old enough to desire to communicate what of knowledge, though too late for me, may yet profit others, I can make affidavit that what first arrested Shakespeare's mind as he read the Chronicles was that passage concerning the " three weird sisters " — " All hail, Macbeth, Thane of Glamis ! " and the rest.

Let us consider the Chronicle with this supernatural element left out, and what have we ? — ^An ordinary sordid story of a disloyal general murdering his king, usurping the throne, reigning with cruelty for seventeen years, and being overcome at length amid every one's approval. There is no material for tragedy in that. " Had Zimri peace, who slew his master?" — ^Well (if we exclude the supernatural in the Chronicle) , yes, he had ; and for seventeen years: which, for a bloody tyrant, is no short run.

Still, let us exclude the supernatural for a moment. Having excluded it, we shall straightway perceive that the story of the Chronicle has one fatal defect as a theme of tragedy. For tragedy demands some sympathy with the fortunes of its hero : but where is there room for sympathy in the fortunes of a disloyal, self-seeking murderer ?

Just there lay Shakespeare's capital difficulty.

Before we follow his genius in coming to grips with it, let us realise the importance as well as the magnitude of that difficulty. " Tragedy [says Aristotle] is the imitation of an action: and an action implies personal agents, who necessarily possess certain qualities both of character and thought. It is these that determine the qualities of actions themselves : these — thought and character — are the two natural causes from which actions spring: on these causes, again, all success or failure depends." *

But it comes to this — The success or failure of a tragedy depends on what sort of person we represent, and principally, of course, on what sort of person we make our chief tragic figure, our protagonist. Everything depends really on our protagonist: and it was his true critical insight that directed Dr. Bradley, examining the substance of Shakespearian tragedy, to lead off with these words:

Such a tragedy brings before us a considerable number of persons (many more than the persons in a Greek play, unless the members of the Chorus are reckoned among them) ; but it is pre-eminently the story of one person, the ' hero,' or at most of two, the * hero ' and ' heroine.' Moreover, it is only in the love-tragedies, Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, that the heroine is as much the centre of the action as the hero. The rest, including Macbeth, are single stars. So that, having noticed the peculiarity of these two dramas, we may henceforth, for the sake of brevity, ignore it, and may speak of the tragic story as being concerned primarily with one person.

* I quote from Butcher's rendering, which gives the sense clearly enough; though, actually, Aristotle's language is simpler, and for " thought " I should substitute " understanding " as a translation of

6idvoia.

So, it makes no difference to this essential of tragedy whether we write our play for an audience of Athenians or of Londoners gathered in the Globe Theatre, Southwark: whether we crowd our dramatis personce or are content with a cast of three or four. There must be one central figure (or at most two), and on this figure, as the story unfolds itself, we must concentrate the spectators' emotions of pity or terror, or both.

'Now, I must, for handiness, quote Aristotle again, because he lays down very succinctly some rules concerning this ' hero ' or protagonist, or central figure (caU him what we will — I shall use the word ' hero ' merely because it is the shortest). But let us understand that though these so-called ' rules ' of Aristotle are marvellously enforced — though their wisdom is marvellously confirmed — by Dr. Bradley's examination of the ^ rules ' which Shakespeare, consciously or unconsciously, obeyed, they do no more than turn into precept, with reasons given, certain inductions drawn by Aristotle from the approved masterpieces of his time. There is no reason to suppose that Shakespeare had ever heard of them; rather, there is good reason to suppose that he had not.

But Aristotle says this concerning the hero, or protagonist, of tragic drama, and Shakespeare's practice at every point supports him: —

(1) A Tragedy must not be the spectacle of a perfectly good man brought from prosperity to adversity. For this merely shocks us.

(2) Nor, of course, must it be that of a bad man passing from adversity to prosperity: for that is not tragedy at all, but the perversion of tragedy, and revolts the moral sense.

(3) Nor, again, should it exhibit the downfall of an utter villain:

since pity ia aroused by undeserved misfortunes, terror by misfortunes befalling a man like ourselves.

(4) There remains, then, as the only proper subject for Tragedy, the spectacle of a man not absolutely or eminently good or wise who is brought to disaster not by sheer depravity but by some error or frailty.

(5) Lastly, this man must be highly renowned and prosperous— an (Edipus, a Thyestes, or some other illustrious person.

Before dealing with the others, let us get this last rule out of the way; for, to begin with, it presents no diflSculty in Macbeth, since in the original — in Holinshed's Chronicles — ^Macbeth is an illustrious warrior who makes himself a king; and moreover the rule is patently a secondary one, of artistic expediency rather than of artistic right or wrong. It amounts but to this, that the more eminent we make our persons in Tragedy, the more evident we make the disaster — the dizzier the height, the longer way to fall, and the greater shock on our audience's mind. Dr. Bradley goes further, and remarks, " The pangs of despised love and the anguish of remorse, we say, are the same in a peasant and a prince: but (not to insist that they cannot be so when the prince is really a prince) the story of the prince, the triumvir, or the general, has a greatness and dignity of its own. His fate affects the welfare of a whole; and when he falls suddenly from the height of earthly greatness to the dust, his fall produces a sense of contrast, of the powerlessness of man, and of the omnipotence — perhaps the caprice — of Fortune or Fate, which no tale of private life can possibly rival." In this wider view Dr. Bradley may be right, though some modern dramatists would disagree with him. But we are dealing more humbly witH Shakespeare as a worJcman; and for our purpose it is more economical, as well as sufficient, to say that downfall from a high eminence is more spectacular than downfall from a low one; that Shakespeare, who knew most of the tricks of his art, knew this as well as ever did Aristotle, and that those who adduce to us Shakespeare's constant selection of kings and princes for his dramatis personce as evidence of his having been a ' snob,' might as triumphantly prove it snobbish in a Greek tragedian to write of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, or of Cadmus and Harmonia, because

The gods had to their marriage come, And at the banquet all the Muses sang:

But, touching the other and more essential rules laid down by Aristotle, let me, — ^very fearfully, knowing how temerarious it is, how impudent, to offer to condense so great and close a thinker, — suggest that, after all, they work down into one : — that a hero of Tragic Drama must, whatever else he miss, engage our sympathy; that, however gross his error or grievous his frailty, it must not exclude our feeling that he is a man like ourselves ; that, sitting in the audience, we must know in our hearts that what is befalling him might conceivably in the circumstances have befallen us, and say in our hearts, " There, but for the grace of God, go I."

I think, anticipating a little, I can drive this point home by a single illustration. When the ghost of Banquo seats itself at that dreadful supper, who sees it? ISTot the company. Not even Lady Macbeth. Whom does it accuse? 'Not the company, and, again, not even Lady

Macbeth. Those who see it are Macbeth and you and I. Those into whom it strikes terror are Macbeth and you and I. Those whom it accuses are Macbeth and you and I. And what it accuses is what, of Macbeth, you and I are hiding in our own breasts.

So, if this be granted, I come back upon the capital difficulty that faced Shakespeare as an artist.

(1) It was not to make Macbeth a grandiose or a conspicuous figure. He was already that in the Chronicle.

(2) It was not to clothe him in something to illude us with the appearance of real greatness. Shakespeare, with his command of majestic poetical speech, had that in his work-bag surely enough, and knew it. When a writer can make an imaginary person talk like this : —

She should have died hereafter;

There would have been a time for such a word.

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death —

I say, when a man knows he can make his Macbeth talk like that, he needs not distrust his power to drape his Macbeth in an illusion of greatness. Moreover, Shakespeare — artist that he was — ^had other tricks up his sleeve to convince us of Macbeth's greatness. One of these I hope to discuss in a subsequent chapter.

But (here lies the crux) how could he make us sympathise with him — ^make us, sitting or standing in the Globe Theatre some time (say) in the year 1610, feel that

.Macbeth was even such a man as you or I? He was a murderer, and a murderer for his private profit — a combination which does not appeal to most of us, to unlock the flood-gates of sympathy, or indeed (I hope) as striking home upon any private and pardonable frailty. The Chronicle does, indeed, allow just one loop-hole for pardon. It hints that Duncan, nominating his boy to succeed him, thereby cut off Macbeth from a reasonable hope of the crown, which he thereupon (and not until then) by process of murder usurped, " having," says Holinshed, " a juste quarrell so to do (as he took the mater)."

Did Shakespeare use that one hint, enlarge that loop-hole? He did not.

The more I study Shakespeare as an artist, the more I worship the splendid audacity of what he did, just here, in this play.