Book First (part 2 of 2)
The two cousins, Rosalind and Celia, seem at first glance like variations of the two cousins, Beatrice and Hero, in the play Shakespeare has just finished. Rosalind and Beatrice in particular are akin in their victorious wit. Yet the difference between them is very great; Shakespeare never repeats himself. The wit of Beatrice is aggressive and challenging; we see, as it were, the gleam of a rapier in it. Rosalind's wit is gaiety without a sting; the gleam in it is of "that sweet radiance" which Oehlenschläger attributed to Freia; her sportive nature masks the depth of her love. Beatrice can be brought to love because she is a woman, and stands in no respect apart from her sex; but she is not of an amatory nature. Rosalind is seized with a passion for Orlando the instant she sets eyes on him. From the moment of Beatrice's first appearance she is defiant and combative, in the highest of spirits. We are introduced to Rosalind as a poor bird with a drooping wing; her father is banished, she is bereft of her birth-right, and is living on sufferance as companion to the usurper's daughter, being, indeed, half a prisoner in the palace, where till lately she reigned as princess. It is not until she has donned the doublet and hose, appears in the likeness of a page, and wanders at her own sweet will in the open air and the greenwood, that she recovers her radiant humour, and roguish merriment flows from her lips like the trilling of a bird.
Nor is the man she loves, like Benedick, an overweening gallant with a sharp tongue and an unabashed bearing. This youth, though brave as a hero and strong as an athlete, is a child in inexperience, and so bashful in the presence of the woman who instantly captivates him, that it is she who is the first to betray her sympathy for him, and has even to take the chain from her own neck and hang it around his before he can so much as muster up courage to hope for her love. So, too, we find him passing his time in hanging poems to her upon the trees, and carving the name of Rosalind in their bark. She amuses herself, in her page's attire, by making herself his confidant, and pretending, as it were in jest, to be his Rosalind. She cannot bring herself to confess her passion, although she can think and talk (to Celia) of no one but him, and although his delay of a few minutes in keeping tryst with her sets her beside herself with impatience. She is as sensitive as she is intelligent, in this differing from Portia, to whom, in other respects, she bears some resemblance, though she lacks her persuasive eloquence, and is, on the whole, more tender, more virginal. She faints when Oliver, to excuse Orlando's delay, brings her a handkerchief stained with his blood; yet has sufficient self-mastery to say with a smile the moment she recovers, "I pray you tell your brother how well I counterfeited." She is quite at her ease in her male attire, like Viola and Imogen after her. The fact that female parts were played by youths had, of course, something to do with the frequency of these disguises.
Here is a specimen of her wit (iii. 2). Orlando has evaded the page's question what o'clock it is, alleging that there are no clocks in the forest.
"Rosalind. Then, there is no true lover in the forest; else sighing every minute, and groaning every hour, would detect the lazy foot of Time as well as a clock.
"Orlando. And why not the swift foot of Time? had not that been as proper?
"Ros. By no means, sir. Time travels in divers paces with divers persons. I'll tell you, who Time ambles withal, who Time trots withal, who Time gallops withal, and who he stands still withal.
"Orl. I pr'ythee, who doth he trot withal?
"Ros. Marry, he trots hard with a young maid, between the contract of her marriage, and the day it is solemnised: if the interim be but a se'nnight, Time's pace is so hard that it seems the length of seven years.
"Orl. Who ambles Time withal?
"Ros. With a priest that lacks Latin, and a rich man that hath not the gout; for the one sleeps easily, because he cannot study; and the other lives merrily, because he feels no pain....
"Orl. Who doth he gallop withal?
"Ros. With a thief to the gallows; for though he go as softly as foot can fall, he thinks himself too soon there.
"Orl. Who stays it still withal?
"Ros. With lawyers in the vacation; for they sleep between term and term, and then they perceive not how Time moves."
She is unrivalled in vivacity and inventiveness. In every answer she discovers gunpowder anew, and she knows how to use it to boot. She explains that she had an old uncle who warned her against love and women, and, from the vantage-ground of her doublet and hose, she declares--
"I thank God, I am not a woman, to be touched with so many giddy offences, as he hath generally taxed their whole sex withal.
"Orl. Can you remember any of the principal evils that he laid to the charge of women?
"Ros. There were none principal: they were all like one another, as half-pence are; every one fault seeming monstrous, till its fellow fault came to match it.
"Orl. I pr'ythee, recount some of them.
"Ros. No; I will not cast away my physic but on those that are sick. There is a man haunts the forest, that abuses our young plants with carving Rosalind on their barks; hangs odes upon hawthorns, and elegies on brambles; all, forsooth, deifying the name of Rosalind: if I could meet that fancy-monger, I would give him some good counsel, for he seems to have the quotidian of love upon him."
Orlando admits that he is the culprit, and they are to meet daily that she may exorcise his passion. She bids him woo her in jest, as though she were indeed Rosalind, and answers (iv. I):
"Ros. Well, in her person, I say--I will not have you.
"Orl. Then, in mine own person, I die.
"Ros. No, 'faith, die by attorney. The poor world is almost six thousand years old, and in all this time there was not any man died in his own person, videlicet, in a love-cause. Troilus had his brains dashed out with a Grecian club; yet he did what he could to die before, and he is one of the patterns of love. Leander, he would have lived many a fair year, though Hero had turned nun, if it had not been for a hot midsummer night; for, good youth, he went but forth to wash him in the Hellespont, and, being taken with the cramp, was drowned, and the foolish chroniclers of that age found it was--Hero of Sestos. But these are all lies: men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love."
What Rosalind says of women in general applies to herself in particular: you will never find her without an answer until you find her without a tongue. And there is always a bright and merry fantasy in her answers. She is literally radiant with youth, imagination, and the joy of loving so passionately and being so passionately beloved. And it is marvellous how thoroughly feminine is her wit. Too many of the witty women in books written by men have a man's intelligence. Rosalind's wit is tempered by feeling.
She has no monopoly of wit in this Arcadia of Arden. Every one in the play is witty, even the so-called simpletons. It is a festival of wit. At some points Shakespeare seems to have followed no stricter principle than the simple one of making each interlocutor outbid the other in wit (see, for example, the conversation between Touchstone and the country wench whom he befools). The result is that the piece is bathed in a sunshiny humour. And amid all the gay and airy wit-skirmishes, amid the cooing love-duets of all the happy youths and maidens, the poet intersperses the melancholy solos of his Jaques:--
"I have neither the scholar's melancholy, which is emulation; nor the musician's, which is fantastical; nor the courtier's, which is proud; nor the soldier's, which is ambitious; nor the lawyer's, which is politic; nor the lady's, which is nice; nor the lover's, which is all these; but it is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects."
This is the melancholy which haunts the thinker and the great creative artist; but in Shakespeare it as yet modulated with ease into the most engaging and delightful merriment.
[1] Reprinted in Hazlitt's Shakespeare's Library, ed. 1875, part i. vol. ii.
XXIX
CONSUMMATE SPIRITUAL HARMONY--TWELFTH NIGHT--JIBES AT PURITANISM--THE LANGUISHING CHARACTERS--VIOLA'S INSINUATING GRACE--FAREWELL TO MIRTH
If the reader would picture to himself Shakespeare's mood during this short space of time at the end of the old century and beginning of the new, let him recall some morning when he has awakened with the sensation of complete physical well-being, not only feeling no definite or indefinite pain or uneasiness, but with a positive consciousness of happy activity in all his organs: when he drew his breath lightly, his head was clear and free, his heart beat peacefully: when the mere act of living was a delight: when the soul dwelt on happy moments in the past and dreamed of joys to come. Recall such a moment, and then conceive it intensified an hundredfold--conceive your memory, imagination, observation, acuteness, and power of expression a hundred times multiplied--and you may divine Shakespeare's prevailing mood in those days, when the brighter and happier sides of his nature were turned to the sun.
There are days when the sun seems to have put on a new and festal splendour, when the air is like a caress to the cheek, and when the glamour of the moonlight seems doubly sweet; days when men appear manlier and wittier, women fairer and more delicate than usual, and when those who are disagreeable and even odious to us appear, not formidable, but ludicrous--so that we feel ourselves exalted above the level of our daily life, emancipated and happy. Such days Shakespeare was now passing through.
It is at this period, too, that he makes sport of his adversaries the Puritans without bitterness, with exquisite humour. Even in As You Like It (iii. 2), we find a little allusion to them, where Rosalind says, "O most gentle Jupiter!--what tedious homily of love have you wearied your parishioners withal, and never cried, 'Have patience, good people!'" In his next play, the typical, solemn, and self-righteous Puritan is held up to ridicule in the Don Quixote-like personage of the moralising and pompous Malvolio, who is launched upon a billowy sea of burlesque situations. Of course the poet goes to work with the greatest circumspection. Sir Toby has made some inquiry about Malvolio, to which Maria answers (ii. 3):--
"Maria. Marry, sir, sometimes he is a kind of Puritan.
"Sir Andrew. O! if I thought that, I'd beat him like a dog.
"Sir Toby. What, for being a Puritan? thy exquisite reason, dear knight?
"Sir And. I have no exquisite reason for't, but I have reason good enough.
"Mar. The devil a Puritan that he is, or anything constantly but a time-pleaser; an affectioned ass, that cons state without book, and utters it by great swarths."
Not otherwise does Molière expressly insist that Tartuffe is not a clergyman, and Holberg that Jacob von Tyboe is not an officer.
A forged letter, purporting to be written by his noble mistress, is made to fall into Malvolio's hands, in which she begs for his love, and instructs him, as a sign of his affection towards her, always to smile, and to wear cross-gartered yellow stockings. He "smiles his face into more lines than are in the new map [of 1598] with the augmentation of the Indies;" he wears his preposterous garters in the most preposterous fashion. The conspirators pretend to think him mad, and treat him accordingly. The Clown comes to visit him disguised in the cassock of Sir Topas the curate. "Well," says the mock priest (not without intention on the poet's part), when Maria gives him the gown, "I'll put it on, and I will dissemble myself in't; and I would I were the first that ever dissembled in such a gown."
It is to Malvolio, too, that the merry and mellow Sir Toby, amid the applause of the Clown, addresses the taunt:--
"Sir Toby. Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?
"Clown. Yes, by Saint Anne; and ginger shall be hot i' the mouth too."
In these words, which were one day to serve as a motto to Byron's Don Juan, there lies a gay and daring declaration of rights.
Twelfth Night, or What you Will, must have been written in 1601, for in the above-mentioned diary kept by John Manningham, of the Middle Temple, we find this entry, under the date February 2, 1602: "At our feast wee had a play called Twelve Night, or what you will, much like the commedy of errores, or Menechmi in Plautus, but most like and neere to that in Italian called Inganni. A good practise in it to make the steward beleeve his lady widdowe was in love with him," &c. That the play cannot have been written much earlier is proved by the fact that the song, "Farewell, dear heart, since I must needs be gone," which is sung by Sir Toby and the Clown (ii. 3), first appeared in a song-book (The Booke of Ayres) published by Robert Jones, London, 1601. Shakespeare has altered its wording very slightly. In all probability Twelfth Night was one of the four plays which were performed before the court at Whitehall by the Lord Chamberlain's company at Christmastide, 1601-2, and no doubt it was acted for the first time on the evening from which it takes its name.
Among several Italian plays which bore the name of Gl'Inganni there is one by Curzio Gonzaga, published in Venice in 1592, in which a sister dresses herself as her brother and takes the name of Cesare--in Shakespeare, Cesario--and another, published in Venice in 1537, the action of which bears a general resemblance to that of Twelfth Night. In this play, too, passing mention is made of one "Malevolti," who may have suggested to Shakespeare the name Malvolio.
The matter of the play is found in a novel of Bandello's, translated in Belleforest's Histoires Tragiques; and also in Barnabe Rich's translation of Cinthio's Hecatomithi, published in 1581, which Shakespeare appears to have used. The whole comic part of the action, and the characters of Malvolio, Sir Toby, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, and the Clown, are of Shakespeare's own invention.
There occurs in Ben Jonson's Every Man out of his Humour a speech which seems very like an allusion to Twelfth Night; but as Jonson's play is of earlier date, the speech, if the allusion be not fanciful, must have been inserted later.[1]
As was to be expected, Twelfth Night became exceedingly popular. The learned Leonard Digges, the translator of Claudian, enumerating in his verses, "Upon Master William Shakespeare" (1640), the poet's most popular characters, mentions only three from the comedies, and these from Much Ado and Twelfth Night. He says:--
"Let but Beatrice And Benedicke be seene, loe in a trice The Cockpit, Galleries, Boxes, all are full To hear Malvoglio, that crosse garter'd Gull."
Twelfth Night is perhaps the most graceful and harmonious comedy Shakespeare ever wrote. It is certainly that in which all the notes the poet strikes, the note of seriousness and of raillery, of passion, of tenderness, and of laughter, blend in the richest and fullest concord. It is like a symphony in which no strain can be dispensed with, or like a picture veiled in a golden haze, into which all the colours resolve themselves. The play does not overflow with wit and gaiety like its predecessor; we feel that Shakespeare's joy of life has culminated and is about to pass over into melancholy; but there is far more unity in it than in As You Like It, and it is a great deal more dramatic.
A. W. Schlegel long ago made the penetrating observation that, in the opening speech of the comedy, Shakespeare reminds us how the same word, "fancy," was applied in his day both to love and to fancy in the modern sense of the term; whence the critic argued, not without ingenuity, that love, regarded as an affair of the imagination rather than of the heart, is the fundamental theme running through all the variations of the play. Others have since sought to prove that capricious fantasy is the fundamental trait in the physiognomy of all the characters. Tieck has compared the play to a great iridescent butterfly, fluttering through pure blue air, and soaring in its golden glory from the many-coloured flowers into the sunshine.
Twelfth Night, in Shakespeare's time, brought the Christmas festivities of the upper classes to an end; among the common people they usually lasted until Candlemas. On Twelfth Night all sorts of sports took place. The one who chanced to find a bean baked into a cake was hailed as the Bean King, chose himself a Bean Queen, introduced a reign of unbridled frivolity, and issued whimsical commands, which had to be punctually obeyed. Ulrici has sought to discover in this an indication that the play represents a sort of lottery, in which Sebastian, the Duke, and Maria chance to win the great prize. The bibulous Sir Toby, however, can scarcely be regarded as a particularly desirable prize for Maria; and the second title of the play, What you Will, indicates that Shakespeare did not lay any stress upon the Twelfth Night.
This comedy is connected by certain filaments with its predecessor, As You Like It. The passion which Viola, in her male attire, awakens in Olivia, reminds us of that with which Rosalind inspires Phebe. But the motive is quite differently handled. While Rosalind gaily and unfeelingly repudiates Phebe's burning love, Viola is full of tender compassion for the lady whom her disguise has led astray. In the admirably worked-up confusion between Viola and her twin brother Sebastian, an effect from the Comedy of Errors is repeated; but the different circumstances and method of treatment make this motive also practically new.
With a careful and even affectionate hand, Shakespeare has elaborated each one of the many characters in the play.
The amiable and gentle Duke languishes, sentimental and fancy-sick, in hopeless enamourment. He is devoted to the fair Countess Olivia, who will have nothing to say to him, and whom he none the less besieges with his suit. An ardent lover of music, he turns to it for consolation; and among the songs sung to him by the Clown and others, there occurs the delicate little poem, of wonderful rhythmic beauty, "Come away, come away, death." It exactly expresses the soft and melting mood in which his days pass, lapped in a nerveless melancholy. To the melody abiding in it we may apply the lovely words spoken by Viola of the melody which preludes it:--
"It gives a very echo to the seat Where love is throned."
In his fruitless passion, the Duke has become nervous and excitable, inclined to violent self-contradictions. In one and the same scene (ii. 4) he first says that man's love is
"More giddy and unfirm, More longing, wavering, sooner lost and worn"
than woman's; and then, a little further on, he says of his own love--
"There is no woman's sides Can bide the beating of so strong a passion As love doth give my heart; no woman's heart So big to hold so much: they lack retention."
The Countess Olivia forms a pendant to the Duke; she, like him, is full of yearning melancholy. With an ostentatious exaggeration of sisterly love, she has vowed to pass seven whole years veiled like a nun, consecrating her whole life to sorrow for her dead brother. Yet we find in her speeches no trace of this devouring sorrow; she jests with her household, and rules it ably and well, until, at the first sight of the disguised Viola, she flames out into passion, and, careless of the traditional reserve of her sex, takes the most daring steps to win the supposed youth. She is conceived as an unbalanced character, who passes at a bound from exaggerated hatred for all worldly things to total forgetfulness of her never-to-be-forgotten sorrow. Yet she is not comic like Phebe; for Shakespeare has indicated that it is the Sebastian type, foreshadowed in the disguised Viola, which is irresistible to her; and Sebastian, we see, at once requites the love which his sister had to reject. Her utterance of her passion, moreover, is always poetically beautiful.
Yet while she is sighing in vain for Viola, she necessarily appears as though seized with a mild erotic madness, similar to that of the Duke: and the folly of each is parodied in a witty and delightful fashion by Malvolio's entirely ludicrous love for his mistress, and vain confidence that she returns it. Olivia feels and says this herself, where she exclaims (iii. 4)--
"Go call him hither.--I am as mad as he If sad and merry madness equal be."
Malvolio's figure is drawn in very few strokes, but with incomparable certainty of touch. He is unforgetable in his turkey-like pomposity, and the heartless practical joke which is played off upon him is developed with the richest comic effect. The inimitable love-letter, which Maria indites to him in a handwriting like that of the Countess, brings to light all the lurking vanity in his nature, and makes his self-esteem, which was patent enough before, assume the most extravagant forms. The scene in which he approaches Olivia, and triumphantly quotes the expressions in the letter, "yellow stockings," and "cross-gartered," while every word confirms her in the belief that he is mad, is one of the most effective on the comic stage. Still more irresistible is the scene (iv. 2) in which Malvolio is imprisoned as a madman in a dark room, while the Clown outside now assumes the voice of the Curate, and seeks to exorcise the devil in him, and again, in his own voice, converses with the supposed Curate, sings songs, and promises Malvolio to carry messages for him. We have here a comic jeu de théâtre of the first order.
In harmony with the general tone of the play, the Clown is less witty and more musical than Touchstone in As You Like It. He is keenly alive to the dignity of his calling: "Foolery, sir, does walk about the orb like the sun: it shines everywhere." He has many delightful sayings, as for example, "Many a good hanging prevents a bad marriage," or the following demonstration (v. I) that one is the better for one's foes, and the worse for one's friends:--
"Marry, sir, my friends praise me, and make an ass of me; now, my foes tell me plainly I am an ass: so that by my foes, sir, I profit in the knowledge of myself, and by my friends I am abused: so that, conclusions to be as kisses, if your four negatives make your two affirmatives, why then, the worse for my friends, and the better for my foes."
Shakespeare even departs from his usual practice, and, as though to guard against any misunderstanding on the part of his public, makes Viola expound quite dogmatically that it "craves a kind of wit" to play the fool (iii. I):--
"He must observe their mood on whom he jests, The quality of persons, and the time, And, like the haggard, check at every feather That comes before his eye. This is a practice As full of labour as a wise man's art."
The Clown forms a sort of connecting-link between the serious characters and the exclusively comic figures of the play--the pair of knights, Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek, who are entirely of Shakespeare's own invention. They are sharply contrasted. Sir Toby, sanguine, red-nosed, burly, a practical joker, always ready for "a hair of the dog that bit him," a figure after the style of Bellman;[2] Sir Andrew, pale as though with the ague, with thin, smooth, straw-coloured hair, a wretched little nincompoop, who values himself on his dancing and fencing, quarrelsome and chicken-hearted, boastful and timid in the same breath, and grotesque in his every movement. He is a mere echo and shadow of the heroes of his admiration, born to be the sport of his associates, their puppet, and their butt; and while he is so brainless as to think it possible he may win the love of the beautiful Olivia, he has at the same time an inward suspicion of his own stupidity which now and then comes in refreshingly: "Methinks sometimes I have no more wit than a Christian or an ordinary man has; but I am a great eater of beef, and, I believe, that does harm to my wit" (i. 3). He does not understand the simplest phrase he hears, and is such a mere reflex and parrot that "I too" is, as it were, the watchword of his existence. Shakespeare has immortalised him once for all in his reply when Sir Toby boasts that Maria adores him (ii. 3), "I was adored once too." Sir Toby sums him up in the phrase:
"For Andrew, if he were opened, and you find so much blood in his liver as will clog the foot of a flea, I'll eat the rest of the anatomy."
The central character in Twelfth Night is Viola, of whom her brother does not say a word too much when, thinking that she has been drowned, he exclaims, "She bore a mind that envy could not but call fair."
Shipwrecked on the coast of Illyria, her first wish is to enter the service of the young Countess; but learning that Olivia is inaccessible, she determines to dress as a page (a eunuch) and approach the young unmarried Duke, of whom she has heard her father speak with warmth. He at once makes the deepest impression upon her heart, but being ignorant of her sex, does not dream of what is passing within her; so that she is perpetually placed in the painful position of being employed as a messenger from the man she loves to another woman. She gives utterance to her love in carefully disguised and touching words (ii. 4):--
"My father had a daughter lov'd a man, As it might be, perhaps, were I a woman, I should your lordship. Duke. And what's her history? Vio. A blank, my lord. She never told her love,-- But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud, Feed on her damask cheek: she pin'd in thought: And, with a green and yellow melancholy, She sat like Patience on a monument, Smiling at grief."
But the passion which possesses her makes her a more eloquent messenger of love than she designs to be. To Olivia's question as to what she would do if she loved her as her master does, she answers (i. 5):--
"Make me a willow cabin at your gate, And call upon my soul within the house; Write loyal cantons of contemned love, And sing them loud even in the dead of night; Holla your name to the reverberate hills, And make the babbling gossip of the air Cry out, Olivia! O! you should not rest Between the elements of air and earth, But you should pity me."
In short, if she were a man, she would display all the energy which the Duke lacks. No wonder that, against her own will, she awakens Olivia's love. She herself, as a woman, is condemned to passivity; her love is wordless, deep, and patient. In spite of her sound understanding, she is a creature of emotion. It is a very characteristic touch when, in the scene (iii. 5) where Antonio, taking her for Sebastian, recalls the services he has rendered, and begs for assistance in his need, she exclaims that there is nothing, not even "lying vainness, babbling drunkenness, or any taint of vice," that she hates so much as ingratitude. However bright her intelligence, her soul from first to last outshines it. Her incognito, which does not bring her joy as it does to Rosalind, but only trouble and sorrow, conceals the most delicate womanliness. She never, like Rosalind or Beatrice, utters an audacious or wanton word. Her heart-winning charm more than makes up for the high spirits and sparkling humour of the earlier heroines. She is healthful and beautiful, like these her somewhat elder sisters; and she has also their humorous eloquence, as she proves in her first scene with Olivia. Yet there rests upon her lovely figure a tinge of melancholy. She is an impersonation of that "farewell to mirth" which an able English critic discerns in this last comedy of Shakespeare's brightest years.[3]
[1] There is some (ironic) discussion of a possible criticism that might be brought against a playwright: "That the argument of his comedy might have been of some other nature, as of a duke to be in love with a countess, and that countess to be in love with the duke's son, and the son to love the lady's waiting-maid; some such cross wooing, with a clown to their serving-man...."
[2] See the footnote 7 in chapter XXII:
"A dance of all the gods upon Olympus, With fauns and graces and the muses twined."
From a poem by Tegnér on Bellman, the Swedish convivial lyrist.
[3] "It is in some sort a farewell to mirth, and the mirth is of the finest quality, an incomparable ending. Shakespeare has done greater things, but he has never done anything more delightful."--Arthur Symons.
XXX
THE REVOLUTION IN SHAKESPEARE'S SOUL--THE GROWING MELANCHOLY OF THE FOLLOWING PERIOD--PESSIMISM, MISANTHROPY
For the time is now approaching when mirth, and even the joy of life, are extinguished in his soul. Heavy clouds have massed themselves on his mental horizon--their nature we can only divine--and gnawing sorrows and disappointments have beset him. We see his melancholy growing and extending; we observe its changing expressions, without knowing its causes. This only we know, that the stage which he contemplates with his mind's eye, like the material stage on which he works, is now hung with black. A veil of melancholy descends over both.
He no longer writes comedies, but sends a train of gloomy tragedies across the boards which so lately echoed to the laughter of Beatrice and Rosalind.
From this point, for a certain period, all his impressions of life and humanity become ever more and more painful. We can see in his Sonnets how even in earlier and happier years a restless passionateness had been constantly at war with the serenity of his soul, and we can note how, at this time also, he was subject to accesses of stormy and vehement unrest. As time goes on, we can discern in the series of his dramas how not only what he saw in public and political life, but also his private experience, began to inspire him, partly with a burning compassion for humanity, partly with a horror of mankind as a breed of noxious wild animals, partly, too, with loathing for the stupidity, falsity, and baseness of his fellow-creatures. These feelings gradually crystallise into a large and lofty contempt for humanity, until, after a space of eight years, another revolution occurs in his prevailing mood. The extinguished sun glows forth afresh, the black heaven has become blue again, and the kindly interest in everything human has returned. He attains peace at last in a sublime and melancholy clearness of vision. Bright moods, sunny dreams from the days of his youth, return upon him, bringing with them, if not laughter, at least smiles. High-spirited gaiety has for ever vanished; but his imagination, feeling itself less constrained than of old by the laws of reality, moves lightly and at ease, though a deep earnestness now underlies it, and much experience of life.
But this inward emancipation from the burthen of earthly life does not occur, as we have said, until about eight years after the point which we have now reached.
For a little time longer the strong and genial joy of life is still dominant in his mind. Then it begins to darken, and, after a short tropical twilight, there is night in his soul and in all his works.
In the tragedy of Julius Cæsar there still reigns only a manly seriousness. The theme seems to have attracted him on account of the analogy between the conspiracy against Cæsar and the conspiracy against Elizabeth. Despite the foolish precipitancy of their action, the leaders of this conspiracy, men like Essex and his comrade Southampton, had Shakespeare's full personal sympathy; and he transferred some of that sympathy to Brutus and Cassius. He created Brutus under the deeply-imprinted conviction that unpractical magnanimity, like that of his noble friends, is unfitted to play an effective part in the drama of history, and that errors of policy revenge themselves at least as sternly as moral delinquencies.
In Hamlet Shakespeare's growing melancholy and bitterness take the upper hand. For the hero, as for the poet, youth's bright outlook upon life has been overclouded. Hamlet's belief and trust in mankind have gone to wreck. Under the disguise of apparent madness, the melancholy life-lore which Shakespeare, at his fortieth year, had stored up within him, here finds expression in words of spiritual profundity such as had not yet been thought or uttered in Northern Europe.
We catch a glimpse at this point of one of the subsidiary causes of Shakespeare's melancholy. As actor and playwright he stands in a more and more strained relation to the continually growing Free Church movement of the age, to Puritanism, which he comes to regard as nothing but narrow-mindedness and hypocrisy. It was the deadly enemy of his calling; it secured, even in his lifetime, the prohibition of theatrical performances in the provinces, a prohibition which after his death was extended to the capital. From Twelfth Night onwards, an unremitting war against Puritanism, conceived as hypocrisy, is carried on through Hamlet, through the revised version of All's Well that Ends Well, and through Measure for Measure, in which his wrath rises to a tempestuous pitch, and creates a figure to which Molière's Tartuffe can alone supply a parallel.
What struck him so forcibly in these years was the pitifulness of earthly life, exposed as it is to disasters, not allotted by destiny, but brought about by a conjunction of stupidity with malevolence.
It is especially the power of malevolence that now looms large before his eyes. We see this in Hamlet's astonishment that it is possible for a man "to smile and smile and be a villain." Still more strongly is it apparent in Measure for Measure (v. I):--
"Make not impossible That which but seems unlike. 'Tis not impossible, But one, the wicked'st caitiff on the ground, May seem as shy, as grave, as just, as absolute, As Angelo; even so may Angelo, In all his dressings, characts, titles, forms, Be an arch-villain."
It is this line of thought that leads to the conception of Iago, Goneril, and Regan, and to the wild outbursts of Timon of Athens.
Macbeth is Shakespeare's first attempt, after Hamlet, to explain the tragedy of life as a product of brutality and wickedness in conjunction--that is, of brutality multiplied and raised to the highest power by wickedness. Lady Macbeth poisons her husband's mind. Wickedness instils drops of venom into brutality, which, in its inward essence, may be either weakness, or brave savagery, or stupidity of manifold kinds. Whereupon brutality falls a-raving, and becomes terrible to itself and others.
The same formula expresses the relation between Othello and Iago.
Othello was a monograph. Lear is a world-picture. Shakespeare turns from Othello to Lear in virtue of the artist's need to supplement himself, to follow up every creation with its counterpart or foil.
Lear is the greatest problem Shakespeare had yet proposed to himself, all the agonies and horrors of the world compressed into five short acts. The impression of Lear may be summed up in the words: a world-catastrophe. Shakespeare is no longer minded to depict anything else. What is echoing in his ears, what is filling his mind, is the crash of a ruining world.
This becomes even clearer in his next play, Antony and Cleopatra. This subject enabled him to set new words to the music within him. In the history of Mark Antony he saw the deep downfall of the old world-republic--the might of Rome, austere and rigorous, collapsing at the touch of Eastern luxury.
By the time Shakespeare had written Antony and Cleopatra, his melancholy had deepened into pessimism. Contempt becomes his abiding mood, an all-embracing scorn for mankind, which impregnates every drop of blood in his veins, but a potent and creative scorn, which hurls forth thunderbolt after thunderbolt. Troilus and Cressida strikes at the relation of the sexes, Coriolanus at political life; until all that, in these years, Shakespeare has endured and experienced, thought and suffered, is concentrated into the one great despairing figure of Timon of Athens, "misanthropos," whose savage rhetoric is like a dark secretion of clotted blood and gall, drawn off to assuage pain.