Shakespeare as a dramatic thinker; a popular illustration of fiction as the experimental side of philosophy

Front matter

• 40. •:

4<>* :

)* .1-

Preface

The present work is supplementary to my former book, Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist, originally published (by the Clarendon Press, Oxford) in 1885, and now (third edition, 1893) in extensive use amongst private readers and in schools and universities. It illustrates an entirely different view point of literary study. Necessarily, however, two books treating the same author must have some points in common. Where this is the case, I have usually in the present work given the briefest treatment consistent with clearness, the reader being referred by footnotes to the other book for fuller discussion.

In what is intended primarily for the general reader I have wished to exclude technical discussion from the text. Believing, however, that precise analysis of structure is the best foundation for the fullest appreciation of literary beauty, I have added an Appendix, which gives formal schemes of plot for each of the Shakespearean plays. By this combination of general discussion in the text with formal analysis in the Appendix I have tried to make what may serve as a text-book of Shakespeare for students of literary clubs or scholastic institutions.

This work is a re-issue of the book published four years ago under the title The Moral System of Shakespeare. I have reason to believe that that title has been misunderstood, and, in spite of my disclaimer, has created an expectation of systematization in what was really a protest against the over-systematization of others. The Introduction has been entirely re-written, so as to make the argument clearer. Apart from this, there has been no change, except occasional slight alterations of phraseology.

RICHARD G. MOULTON.

April, 1907.

Introduction

PAGE

What is implied in "The Moral System of Shakespeare" . i

BOOK I Root Ideas of Shakespeare's Moral System

CHAPTER

I. Heroism and Moral Balance : The first four Histories . . 13

II. Wrong and Retribution : The second four Histories ... 33

III. Innocence and Pathos : The Tragedy of A'<7W(?o a«df _/«/»<?/ . 46

IV. Wrong and Restoration : The Comedies of Winter's Tale and

Cymbeline 65

V. The Life Without and the Life Within : The Mask-Tragedy of

Henry the Eighth 89

BOOK II Shakespeare's World in its Moral Complexity

VI. The Outer and Inner in Application to Roman Life , . .Ill

VII. Moral Problems Dramatised 141

VIII. Comedy as Life in Equilibrium 158

IX. Tragedy as Equilibrium Overthrown 185

X. The Moral Significance of Humour 195

vii

Vlll CONTENTS

BOOK III The Forces of Life in Shakespeare's Moral World

CHAPTER PAGE

XI. Personality and its Dramatic Expression in Intrigue and Irony . 209

XII. The Momentum of Character and the Sway of Circumstance . 242

XIII. The Pendulum of History 269

XIV. Supernatural Agency in Shakespeare's Moral World . . . 297 XV. Moral Accident and Overruling Providence . . . • 311

Appendix

Plot Schemes of Shakespearean Dramas 327

Index to the Plays 375

SHAKESPEARE AS A DRAMATIC THINKER

INTRODUCTION

THE DRAMATIC PRESENTATION OF THOUGHT

Shakespeare is supreme as a dramatist : what is he as a thinker ? and what is his philosophy of hfe and the universe? This is the inquiry proposed in the present work.

The inquiry is in no way affected by the questions which modern analysis has raised in reference to the authorship of the plays. In the earlier dramas collaboration has been shown to obtain to a large extent ; Shakespeare's part in the collaboration in some cases seems to have been small ; and in some cases he seems to have worked over a previous play. Even a later play, the masterpiece of Henry the Eighth, has been traced to joint authorship ; with the curious result that the famous passages of that poem, which we learned by heart at school, and recited as among the choicest Shakespearean gems, must all be attributed to Fletcher. Besides these results of orthodox Shakespearean scholarship, a certain type of mind, more sensitive to paradox than to evidence, is fascinated with the conviction that the dramas in question were the work of Bacon. But the authorship with which we are here concerned is the authorship actually at the back of the plays, whether that authorship be proved eventually to be individual or collective, and whether the individuality hails from Stratford on Avon or from the Inns of Court. ' Shakespeare ' is simply a convenient name for a well-known collection of plays : the thinking impHed in the content of these plays, however it may have got there, is here credited to Shakespeare.

No doubt there is to be found, more among men of affairs than among literary students, a certain scepticism as to the value of such inquiry as is here proposed. Plays, it is urged, are a form of amusement : is it worth while to spoil good sport in order to make doubtful philosophy? The objection rests upon a wholly inadequate conception of poetry, such as is betrayed in the antithesis often made between poetry and philosophy. But poetry is simply creative philosophy. The philosopher and the poet are alike thinkers, but they express their thinking in different forms ; the philosopher thinks in abstract principles and arguments, the poet expresses his thoughts in the concrete, in the illustrative examples he creates. The two types meet in physical science. Now, the physicist is a philosopher, conveying what he has observed of nature in laws and inductions. At another time, in what he calls experiments, the physicist creates : he contrives, at his arbitrary will, peculiar combinations, which would not be brought into existence but for him, and obedient nature exhibits what her working would do under these conditions. In a similar way poetry and fiction are an experimental side to the philosophy of human hfe. History, biography, psychology, ethics, correspond to the physicist's mere observation of nature ; these studies limit the material they use to what happens to have happened. Poetry and fiction use the same material of human life without limiting it to what has chanced actually to occur; all that would naturally happen in the conditions contrived makes the material of creative literature, which can thus give to its treatment of human life all the range of crucial experiment.

I say boldly, that the study of human life will never hold its own, in comparison with the study of physical nature, until we recognise the true position of poetry and fiction in philosophy. Our present confinement of moral studies to histories and abstract ethics holds the humanities back in the elementary stage of observation without experiment. More than this, the survey of life that bounds itself by facts is not even the best kind of observation : it is like the timid examination of nature by one who will use nothing but the naked eye. The life that is close around observers is an eddying whirl of unrelated particulars ; what more is wanted to make particulars into the general ideas we call truth is either too far off to be seen, or so near as to be out of perspective. The same difficulty in the observation of nature we meet by the use of the telescope and the microscope ; it is true that when we look through these we do not see things, but the images of things, yet it is only by aid of such images that we can get nature at the proper distance for observation. The poetic mind is the lens provided by nature for human life ; ' works of imagination ' are so called because they give us the ' images ' of human things, cleared from the vagueness of too great distance, or the obscurity caused by irrelevant details. The Shakespearean Drama constitutes a vast body of such creative observations in human life, made through a peerless instrument ; they invite arrangement and disposition into general truths.

The same consideration disposes of another type of doubters, who meet any attempt at careful analysis of a play with the ironic question whether Shakespeare really intended to convey such subtle conceptions; whether the traditional personality of the poet suggests the slightest inclination to psychology and ethics; further, if it were otherwise, must not his psychology and ethics be hopelessly out of date ? But Shakespeare is not here presented as a psychologist at all, elementary or advanced, in the sense in which the word is used by the objector. The poet's work is to project upon the screen of our imagination pieces of human Hfe, which it is for psychology and ethics to analyse ; and if a modern psychology cannot bear confronting with the life revealed in Shakespeare, it is so much the worse for the psychology. And the question what a poet is consciously thinking about and intending when he is making his poem is a curious speculation that belongs to biography, and not to literary criticism. He has constructed his drama, and it is before us : whatever thinking is found to be latent in this drama, that is for us the thought of Shakespeare.

It is altogether too late in the day to question the existence of a philosophy of Shakespeare ; almost from the time of the poet himself the subject has maintained itself in literature, and attracted to itself the greatest minds. Samuel Johnson and Coleridge,

Goethe and Victor Hugo, have devoted their great powers to elucidation of the thought of Shakespeare. Systems of Shakespearean philosophy have been elaborated, in Germany by such as Gervinus and Ulrici, in America by Mr. Denton J. Snider; if British scholarship has been less partial to the theme, yet Professor Dowden has examined the Mind as well as the Art of Shakespeare. It is impossible even to name the lesser authorities in this field ; and it has always been a standard theme for the pulpit, the lecture platform, and the magazine. In the universities of Germany and the United States no small section of their hterary studies is occupied with the philosophical analysis of this one dramatist. The study of Shakespearean philosophy has fully estabUshed itself: the sole question can be. Is the method of this study sound?

The beUef that the currently accepted treatment of Shakespeare is in important respects unsound is the motive of the present work. Two fallacies are prominent, affecting different orders of mind. One may be Ccilled the Fallacy of Quotations : the attempt so constantly found to give us the mind of Shakespeare on any topic by means of copious quotations from the scenes of the plays. Yet it is obvious enough that, in dramatic literature, no amount of quoted passages can give us the ideas of the dramatist, or anything else but ideas appropriate to the imaginary speakers. Shakespeare did not say, as many people suppose, ' Frailty, thy name is woman ' : he merely suggested that an irritated lover might say so. In one play we read —

Conscience is but a word that cowards use, Devised at first to keep the strong in awe. In another —

This conscience doth make cowards of us all !

Is Shakespeare responsible for both, or either, of these contradictory sentiments? or are they anything more than the natural thoughts of such men as Richard the Third and Hamlet? Yet it seems almost impossible to eliminate from the popular discussion of the dramatist this mere stringing together of quotations. The fallacy is not confined to the popular treatment of literature. Classical scholars are still to be found repeating the patent absurdity that Euripides was a woman hater, on the strength of diatribes against the sex cited from his plays : the acumen that would distinguish the finest shades of difference in the uses of ou and TTfe being careless as to the broad difference there is between being a misogynist and painting misogyny. And the same fallacy runs riot in the treatment of the Bible : Divine authority will be claimed for the saying that * Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward/ in spite of the fact that, in the drama of /^^, the words are uttered by a speaker whom God repudiates, declaring that he has not spoken that which is right.

How then, it will be asked, are we to arrive at the thought of Shakespeare ? The position here taken is that it is the construction of the plot, not the dialogue of the scenes, that contains a dramatist's philosophy. The ideas underlying the dialogue are put forward, not as true, but as relative to the speakers. But for the plot the dramatist himself is responsible : he has created a story, or modified a traditional story, in such a way as to excite certain reflections and emotions; and in those reflections and emotions the thinking of the dramatist is to be traced. This of course does not mean that the matter of the scenes is ignored ; but such matter can be truly interpreted only when seen in the perspective of the whole plot. For plot is dramatic perspective : the harmony of all details in a unity of design. It is in fiction like providence in the world of reality : every play is a microcosm, of which the poet is the creator, and the plot is its providential scheme. Thus the fundamental principle of the present treatment of the subject is that Shakespeare's plots are the key to Shakespeare's thought, and that in story construction philosophy is dramatically presented.

To this general position I would add that a special conception of plot must be recognised for Shakespeare. I find myself out of sympathy with the current analysis of dramatic technique, which, however able in detail, seems in method to be no more than an attempted adaptation of Aristotle's principles to new matter. But Aristotle's criticism was based on only a single dramatic species; it is treason against Aristotle — the most inductive of ancient philosophers — to foist his scheme upon a type of literature at the opposite pole of dramatic development from himself. Greek tragedy was the drama of situation : stage influences and the unities suppressed all of the single story except its crisis, and for such drama the development and solution of a crisis must constitute the whole of plot. Between Aristotle and Shakespeare the literary history of many centuries was piling up aggregations of the most varied stories into the vast edifice of Romance. Shakespeare's is Romantic Drama, and in this combination Romance is the dominant partner ; the single situation stretches to the prolonged interest of story, and the interest of story itself becomes complex with story multiplication. Thus while irony, nemesis, and the like, which made up a whole plot for the Greeks, are conspicuously illustrated in Shakespeare, yet in analysis these fall into a subordinate place, and it is the harmony and balance of correlated stories that here comes to the front.

To take a simple example. In the perspective of such a plot as that of the Merchant of Venice the dominant impression is the combination of two distinct stories, taken originally from two different books of romance : the Story of the Cruel Jew, and the Caskets Story. They are interwoven into a single scheme by the simple device that Bassanio, hero of the Caskets Story, is the complicating force which brings about all the trouble in the Story of Antonio and Shylock ; while the heroine of the Caskets, Portia, is the resolving force which in the other story sets all right. But if this were all there would be a flaw in the scheme : the spectacle of Portia, in male attire before the public of Venice, rescuing the state from a judicial murder, is grand, but a touch too masculine. Accordingly, a third story from a third book of romance is interwoven with the other two — the Story of the Betrothal Ring : the eifect of which is to show how the heroic woman is also a girl brimming over with good natured mischief. Again : the Story of the Jew, if developed at full length, involves an interval of waiting, while the bond is running its course of three months ; instead of the action being allowed to drag, Shakespeare brings in a fourth story, the Elopement of Jessica and Lorenzo, to fill up with its eleven scenes the interval, and change a weakness into an additional interest. Thus by a sort of dramatic counterpoint four stories move on side by side, interwoven like a treble, alto, tenor, and bass. The action is continually satisfying the ancient dramatic interest of the development and solution of situations. But in the harmony of the plot these effects are secondary to the antithesis of the two main stories. In the one, we see the strong yet opposite personalities of Antonio and Shylock successively exalted and depressed by the most casual of chances : as if human character were at the mercy of accident. But in the other story, upon what seems the elaborately contrived accident of the choosing of the caskets the whole fate of Portia is to depend : yet, as we Hsten to the soliloquies of the wooers, we see how it is their inmost characters, and not, as they think, their judgment, that is swaying their choice : here character dominates accident.^

The plan of this work then is twofold. I reserve to an Appendix, interesting only to students, a formal scheme of plot for each play of Shakespeare, based on the fundamental principle of the interrelation of stories. In the body of the book, for the general reader, I seek to unfold the philosophy of Shakespeare obtained on the basis of such plot analysis.

In the application of such a plan another fallacy is to be avoided, of a most seductive kind : indeed, it is the most profound of the interpreters of Shakespeare's thought who have fallen most deeply into this error. It might be called the Ethical Fallacy : for it would seem that preoccupation with some ethical system has warped the straightforward reading of the facts of the story as they are presented in the plays. Such interpreters will set up principles Hke these: that 'the deed returns upon the doer ' j that ' character determines fate ' ; and the details of the 1 This is discussed more at length below, pages 168-169, 3 ^ 5-317* dramas will unconsciously be twisted until they yield a consistent moral scheme of which such principles are the basis. Cordelia is a devoted daughter sacrificing everything to save her father, yet, in the providence of Shakespeare's play, she comes to the ignoble death of hanging. To save this discordance between character and fate a theory is set up as to the relations of family duty and duty to the state, and Cordelia is made a sinner against patriotism, in that she uses a foreign army to rescue her father. But there is nothing in the details of Shakespeare's play to which any such theory could attach itself : it is purely a modern idea read into a poem of a different era. There are abundant illustrations in Shakespeare of the suggested connection of character and fate : but to make this a universal principle is as false to Shakespeare as it is to real life. Such treatment is as it were the homoeopathy of critical science : in the poetic as in the physiological field a single principle, and that a valuable one, is illegitimately stretched into a universal system. It is the fallacy that Bacon formulates as premature methodisation.

Against such dangers of interpretation the only defence is the purpose of rigid inductive observation for the detailed facts of the plays. But it is just here that literary study shows at its worst : it lags behind other studies in being the last even to attempt inductive observation. I have no logical subtilty in mind when I use the word * inductive.' I merely mean that literary questions, hke other questions, should be decided upon evidence. A common idea is that literary criticism means brilliant writing upon literary topics ; the preHminary stage of weighing detailed evidence before one starts to write brilliantly does not seem to count for much. The great commentaries upon Shakespeare seem cogent while they are being read apart from the text. Yet upon examination it will often be found that their relevancy is to the traditional stories, which in fact Shakespeare never fails to modify ; or to the stage version, a selection based on histrionic opportunities rather than dramatic construction ; or a comment which is exhaustive in what it actually touches will be found to have ignored altogether some fifty lines of the scene, which the commentator has forgotten, or skipped as tiresome, but which when thought out will be seen to present an aspect of the situation where Shakespeare has seen further than his critics. And the cause for these lapses in writers of undoubted power is not far to seek : it lies in the unfortunate tradition of Shakespeare as a 'rugged genius,' sublime in his master strokes, but untutored in art, and so filling out his sketches with tawdry or irrelevant details. We are, at this late date, learning, first, that a poem is a crystallization rather than a constmction, to be realised as a unity and not bluepencilled like a school exercise; secondly, that Shakespeare's * artlessness ' was an art more complex than the world had yet seen, so that his would-be interpreters must commence by being his diligent scholars. When the literary analyst shall become as conscientious as the philologist in his reading of the text, I am persuaded that such fallacies as I have indicated will not maintain themselves. And here again is seen the advantage of taking plot for the starting point of dramatic analysis : it is in feeling after the harmony of all parts of a whole that one-sided impressions tend to counteract one another.

One more caution must be added. I have so far spoken as if there were no difference between life as it is depicted in the drama and the Hfe of reality. And indeed the common idea that the two are identical has been assisted by a certain image — attributed, by the usual Fallacy of Quotations, to Shakespeare, but in reality carrying only the authority of Hamlet — the description of the stage as " holding up the mirror to nature." The comparison is apt enough for the purpose of Hamlet's speech. But that the drama is not merely a reflection of real life every reader may satisfy himself, by imagining his own life and the life of his household on the day on which he reads these lines reproduced without flaw upon some stage : would this be drama ? Obviously something would be lacking to make the reproduction of real life into drama, something of the nature of sifting, selection, adaptation. It appears, then^ that drama is not a reflection, but an arranged spectacle. Now a spectacle implies a spectator ; and the whole arrangement is contrived with regard to the spectator's point of view. This standpoint of the spectator enters fundamentally into all dramatic analysis. When we use such elementary terms as ' tragic,' ' comic,' we assume in their use the spectator's view point; we call the experience of Malvolio comic, yet it would be the reverse of comic to Malvolio. When Aristotle gives his famous definition of tragedy, as purifying the emotions of pity and terror by a healthy exercise of them, it is obviously the spectator's emotions with which his definition is concerned. Similarly the present inquiry, besides plot, must give attention to dramatic * tone ' — the technical expression for such differences as tragic, comic, humorous, and all their varieties and shadings. The conceptions of Shakespeare must be sought alike in plot, the course of events appearing in the play, and in tone, the sympathetic response of the spectator.

With these preliminary observations the chapters that follow may be left to explain themselves. The inquiry falls into three natural parts. In the first, particular dramas will be presented to illustrate what may be recognised as root ideas in the philosophy of Shakespeare. Then the inquiry will widen, and survey the world of Shakespeare's creation in its moral complexity. , In the third part will be considered the forces of life in Shakespeare's moral world, so far as these express themselves in dramatic froms, from personal will at one end of the scale to overruling providence at the other end.

Chapter V: The Life Without and the Life Within: The Mask- Tragedy of Henry the Eighth HEROISM AND MORAL BALANCE: THE FIRST FOUR HISTORIES

Without doubt Henry of Monmouth is to be regarded as the grand hero of the Shakespearean world. It is in approaching this theme that the dramatist feels the limitations of dramatic form.

O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend

The brightest heaven of invention,

A kingdom for a stage, princes to act

And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!

Then should the warlike Harry, like himself,

Assume the port of Mars ; and at his heels,

LeashM in like hounds, should famine, sword and fire

Crouch for employment.

The historic materials Hmit what follows to a picture of war. But wise counsellors of the King — not speaking in the presence, which might suggest flattery, but in secret conference with one another — indicate the universal genius of Henry.

Hear him but reason in divinity,

And all-admiring with an inward wish

You would desire the King were made a prelate :

Hear him debate of commonwealth affairs.

You would say it hath been all in all his study :

List his discourse of war, and you shall hear

A fearftil battle rendered you in music :

Turn him to any cause of policy.

The Gordian knot of it he will unloose,

Familiar as his garter : that, when he speaks,

The air, a charter'd libertine, is still.

And the mute wonder lurketh in men's ears,

To steal his sweet and honey'd sentences.^

1 Henry the Fifth .• I. i. 38. 13

Thus the great dramatist must needs borrow from a sister art, and narrative poems fill up the intervals between the acts, epic combining with drama to make a medium wide enough for the presentation of the complete hero.

Yet at first sight it might seem as if a great exception would have to be made to the moral greatness of Henry. This kingly figure has been, in his youth, the grief of his father's heart, the prodigal son of court life ; affections holding a wing " quite from the flight of all his ancestors " have kept him wasting his years in the riotous living of low taverns and street brawls. But a closer examination of Henry as he is seen developing through the series of plays will put quite another face upon this matter. The truancy of the prince is no more than the wider and fuller nature rebelling against the limitations of worn-out ideals. Bolingbroke and those about him belong to the past ; theirs is a life bounded by the narrow horizon of feudalism. Their business is war, and their justice is judicial combat ; the war moreover is a war of feudal parties for feudal power. The divinity of kingship is a sentiment with them, but only while it is on their side. Bolingbroke, while he is weak, bends the knee before Richard ; when unexpected powers have flocked to his standard he overturns Richard's throne and appropriates the divine kingship to himself. The Percies have been his chief backers in this ; the moment the new King turns against their family they discover that Richard was a " sweet rose " and Bolingbroke its "canker." Now Henry of Monmouth has been born into a new era, when the one-sided structure of feudahsm is to break down, and society is to find a new equilibrium ; his youthful freshness has caught the new interest of human nature itself, the interest of fife outside feudal conceptions. ResponsibiHty and the call to action have not yet come ; Henry can afford to stand aside, and let the factions eat up one another. Meanwhile, what are attractions to the men of the time have no zest for him : a mere show of feudal life in mimic spectacle as a relief from feudal life in dull earnest. When they tell the prince of the " Oxford triumphs " that were to celebrate successful treason —

His answer was, he would unto the stews, And from the commonest creature pluck a glove, And wear it as a favour ; and with that He would unhorse the lustiest challenger. 1

All this is but the breath of change stirring, that is to mark a new generation. But curiosity grows in time to be something deeper ; slowly observers of Henry come to see that he is " obscuring his contemplation under the veil of wildness." ^

This is not an afterthought, put forward to excuse a life that has been misspent. The first scene in which we view Henry surrounded by the Falstaff crew ends with a soliloquy.^

I know you all, and will a while uphold The unyoked humour of your idleness : Yet herein will I imitate the sun.

Who doth permit the base contagious clouds To smother up his beauty from the world.

That, when he please again to be himself.

Being wanted, he may be more wonder'd at, By breaking through the foul and ugly mists Of vapours that did seem to strangle him.

Meanwhile, it is not a case of a Haroun al Raschid viewing low life under protection of night and disguise : Henry casts off all his rank, and meets human nature on its own level. He matches himself against the prince of humorists, and Falstaff can never get the better of him. He goes on to " sound the base-string of humility," and can out-trifle " a leash of drawers."

They take it already upon their salvation, that though I be but Prince of Wales, yet I am the king of courtesy ; and tell me flatly I am no proud Jack, like Falstaff", but a Corinthian, a lad of mettle, a good boy, by the Lord, so they call me, and when I am king of England I shall command all the good lads in Eastcheap.'*