SHAKESPEARE

‘It is a sad thing,’ said she, ‘that so kind and good a man should be an infidel.’ ‘It is a sad thing to me,’ said her terrible sister, ‘that an infidel should be what you call kind and good.’

Plus sapit vulgus,quia tantum,quantum opus est,sapit.[254]Quoted by Montaigne (Of Presumption) from Lactantius. Characteristic of Montaigne and true, so far that a man can know nothing thoroughly unless the knowledge be a necessity.

‘Certainty of knowledge,’ says Dr. Johnson in theIdler(No. 84), ‘not only excludes mistake, but fortifies veracity. . . . That which is fully known cannot be falsified but with reluctance of understanding, and alarm of conscience: of understanding, the lover of truth; of conscience, the sentinel of virtue.’

At the present day we are chiefly taken up with that which is beyond our grasp. Our literature is the newspapers, and nine-tenths of what we read in them morning and evening we do not understand. Everybody is expected to take sides in politics, but not one person in a thousand can give an intelligible account of political questions. The difficulty of so doing is much increased by the absence of systematic information. We get leading articles and columns of telegrams, but seldom concise exposition or carefully edited and connected history.

An object is of importance to us in inverse proportion to the square of the distance, but men worry themselves about the news from China and will not give five minutes’ thought in a week to their own souls or to those of wife or child. It is pathetic to see how excited they become about remote events which cannot affect their happiness one iota. Why should we not occupy ourselves with that which is definite when there is so much of it? Political problems confront us, but if they are too big for us, let us avoid them by every means in our power. If we are in doubt we ought not to vote. The question which we are incapable of settling will be settled better by Time than by the intermeddling of ignorance.

In religion, and science also, we dare not sayI do not know. We must always be dabbling in matters on which we can come to no conclusion worth a rotten nut. We busy ourselves with essays on the dates and composition of the books of the Old Testament and cannot tell the story of Joshua or Saul; we listen to lectures on radium, or the probable exhaustion of the sun’s energy, and have never learned the laws of motion. Few people estimate properly the evil of habitual intercourse with that which is vague and indeterminate. The issues before us not being clearly cut and comprehensible, the highest faculties of our minds are not exercised. We lazily wander over the surface without coming to a definite conclusion. Perhaps we pick up by chance some irrational notion, which we defend with obstinacy, for we are more dogmatic concerning that which we cannot prove than we are concerning a truth which is incontrovertible. The former is our own personal property, the latter is common. One step further, and by constantly affirming and denying when we have no demonstration, lying becomes easy.

There is much which is called criticism that is poisonous, not because it is mistaken, but because it invites people to assert beyond their knowledge or capacity. A popular lecturer discusses the errors of Sir Walter Scott, Charlotte Bronte, or George Eliot before an audience but superficially acquainted with the works of these great authors and not qualified to pass judgment upon them. He is considered ‘cheap’ if he does not balance

‘His wit all see-saw between that and this,Now high, now low, now master up, now miss.’

If we will be content with admiring, we are on much surer ground. It is by admiration and not by criticism that we live, and the main purpose of criticism should be to point out something to admire, which we should not have noticed. One great advantage of studying Nature is that we are not tempted to criticise her. We go to the Academy, and for a whole morning contrast faults with merits. If the time so spent had been passed in the fields with the clouds we should have gone home less conceited.

It is an awful thought that behind human speech, incapable by its very nature of anything but approximate expression, and distorted by weakness and wilfulness, lies theTRUTHas it is, exact without qualification.

The long apprenticeship has ended in little or nothing. What I was fifty years ago I am now; certainly no better, with no greater self-control, with no greater magnanimity. How much I might have gained had I taken life as an art I cannot say.

I have been looking at a cabinet of flies. Hundreds of them, each different, were arranged in order and named. Some I had to examine through a microscope. Their beauty was marvellous, but more marvellous was their variety. The differences, although the type was preserved, seemed inexhaustible, and all reasons for them broke down. If a particular modification is an advantage, why is it confined to one species? Why this range of colour? Why these purely fantastic forms? The only word we can say with certainty is that Nature is infinite and tends to infinite expression.Verum ego me satis clare ostendisse puto,a summa Dei potentia sive infinita natura infinita infinitis modis,hoc est,omnia necessario effluxisse,vel semper eadem necessitate sequi;eodem modo,ac ex natura trianguli ab æterno et in æternum sequitur ejus tres angulos æquari duobus rectis.Quare Dei omnipotentia actu ab æterno fuit et in æternum in eadem actualitate manebit.

Johnson is religious through and through, but there are passages in theRamblerandIdlerdark as starless, moonless midnight. ‘None would have recourse to an invisible power, but that all other subjects have eluded their hopes . . . That misery does not make all virtuous, experience too certainly informs us; but it is no less certain that of what virtue there is, misery produces far the greatest part.’

There is seldom in life any occasion for great virtues, and we must not be disappointed if it passes without great passion. We must expect to be related to one another by nothing more than ordinary bonds and satisfied if human beings give us pleasure without excitement.

I have good reason to believe that I am passing on life’s journey through what almost all wayfarers therein have had to pass through, but nobody has told me of it.

How wonderful is the withdrawal of heat! It silently departs, the iron grows cold, but the heat spreads and lives!

‘Who knows, though he sees the snow-cold blossom shed,If haply the heart that burned within the rose,The spirit in sense, the life of life be dead?If haply the wind that slays with storming snowsBe one with the wind that quickens?’swinburne,A Reminiscence.

swinburne,A Reminiscence.

With increase of reading we have fallen into a fireside, dilettante culture of ideas as an intellectual pleasure. Amos and Isaiah do not deal in ideas. Their strength lies in love and hatred, in the keenness and depth of their division between right and wrong. They repeat the work of God the Creator: chaotic sameness becomes diverse; the heavenly firmament mounts on high; there is Light and there is Darkness.

‘Glory to thee in the highest, thou confidant of our Creator!’ (Landor,Imaginary Conversations, Delille and Landor).

2Henry VI.iii. 3.—The lines beginning with the one which follows are not in the old play and are Shakespeare’s own:

‘O thou eternal Mover of the heavens,’ etc.

Johnson’s note is: ‘This is one of the scenes which have been applauded by the criticks, and which will continue to be admired when prejudices shall cease, and bigotry give way to impartial examination. These are beauties that rise out of nature and of truth; the superficial reader cannot miss them, the profound can image nothing beyond them.’ We talk idly of Johnson’s pompous redundance. His sentences are balanced, and it is therefore supposed that the second part repeats the first, but the truth is that each part contains a new thought. It was his manner to throw successive ideas into this form. Those who are acquainted with his history and his awful mental struggles will find infinite pathos in this restrained comment.

Midsummer Night’s Dream.—Shakespeare’s overlooking quality, as that of a god surveying human affairs, is shown in this play:

‘When they next wake, all this derisionShall seem a dream and fruitless vision.’. . .‘Her dotage now I do begin to pity.’. . .‘And think no more of this night’s accidentsBut as the fierce vexation of a dream.’. . .

All this night’s storm from a drop of magic juice! Oberon has been watching Titania’s courtship of Bottom. She sleeps, and he touches her eyes with Dian’s bud:

‘Now, my Titania, wake you, my sweet queen’

Romeo and Juliet.—The love of Juliet is a thing altogether by itself, not to be classed, never anticipated by any other author, and not imitable. It is sensuous. Look at her soliloquy, ‘Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds,’ etc., and yet it is woven through and through with immortal threads of fidelity and contempt of death:

‘O! bid me leap, rather than marry Paris,From off the battlements of yonder tower.. . .Or bid me go into a new-made grave.’

How great this girl is! If I were to meet her, how I should be awed! The Juliets I have seen on the stage fail here. They do not bend my knees in that adoration which is inspired by the sea and stars. The love of Romeo for Juliet and of Juliet for Romeo does not stimulate passion, but rather controls it. I never become hot in reading the play. What a solemnity there is in its movement! The lovers are not merely two human beings with no other meaning. The Eternal Powers are at work throughout. Romeo’s love for Rosaline is taken over from Brooke’s poem. Shakespeare adds the touch that it was not genuine. He makes Friar Laurence say:

‘O she knew well!Thy love did read by rote, and could not spell.’

The love for Rosaline is different altogether from the love for Juliet.

‘O heavy lightness! serious vanity!’

is artificial.

Shakespeare also follows Brooke in Juliet’s momentary outburst against Romeo when she hears of Tybalt’s death, but the contradiction of the echo by the nurse is Shakespeare’s own:

‘Blister’d be thy tongueFor such a wish! he was not born to shame.’

Apart from the quarrel between the Montagus and Capulets, we feel that the love between Romeo and Juliet could have no other than a tragic end. This world of ours conspires against such passion.

IHenry IV.v. 4—

‘O Harry, thou hast robb’d me of my youth!I better brook the loss of brittle lifeThan those proud titles thou hast won of me;They wound my thoughts worse than thy sword my flesh:But thought’s the slave of life, and life time’s fool;And time, that takes survey of all the world,Must have a stop.’

The last three lines are not melancholy philosophising. As such they would be out of place coming from Hotspur. They are consolation and joy. Death will extinguish for us the memory of certain things suffered and done. That is a gain which is not outweighed by the loss of any pleasure life can give.

Luders’ essay three parts of a century ago showed conclusively that Holinshed’s and Shakespeare’s Prince of Wales, as we see him in the play ofHenry IV., wild and dissolute with ignoble companions, is a legend which is disproved by documentary history, but Shakespeare’s Prince is nevertheless dramatically true. Johnson says, ‘He is great without effort, and brave without tumult. The trifler is roused into a hero, and the hero again reposes in the trifler. The character is great, original, and just.’ Johnson’s criticism is true. There is no interruption or strain in the passage from one self to the other self: they are both in fact the same self. It is something of a shock that the King should cast off Falstaff, but if a man is appointed to command it is necessary that he should at once take up his proper position. I remember the promotion of a subordinate to a responsible post. His manner changed the next day. He had the courage to ring his bell and give orders to his senior under whom he had been serving.

He became one of the most efficient administrators I ever knew. On the other hand, nearly at the same time another subordinate was promoted who was timid and continued his habits of familiarity with his colleagues. His department fell into disorder and he was dismissed.

As You Like It.—Lady Anne Blunt in her admirable books,A Pilgrimage to NejdandThe Bedouin Tribes of the Euphrates, notices that the true Arab sheykh of the desert, when a traveller seeks his hospitality, asks no questions until food and drink have been offered, and even then is in no hurry. So also the Duke:

‘Welcome, fall to: I will not trouble youAs yet, to question you about your fortunes.’

Curiosity about personal matters is ignoble.

Rosalind’s love for Orlando is born of pity. ‘If I be foiled, there is but one shamed that was never gracious; if killed, but one dead that is willing to be so: I shall do my friends no wrong, for I have none to lament me; the world no injury, for in it I have nothing; only in the world I fill up a place, which may be better supplied when I have made it empty.’

It is a proof of Orlando’s gentle breeding that he instantly yields to courtesy:

‘Speak you so gently? Pardon me, I pray you.’

Orlando says to Jaques: ‘I will chide no breather in the world, but myself, against whom I know most faults.’ This is characteristic of Shakespeare, and is in the spirit of the Gospels.

The difficulty in this play is not Oliver’s sudden love for Celia, although Shakespeare seems to have felt that it was a little too rapid, for Orlando asks Oliver, ‘Is’t possible that on so little acquaintance you should like her?’ It is rather Celia’s prompt response which takes us aback. It looks too much like ‘any woman to any man.’ It may be said in excuse that Celia had heard the piteous story of his conversion, how he had become ‘a wretched ragged man o’ergrown with hair,’ and what is more to the point, she had heard of Orlando’s noble kindness to him. It is odd that Shakespeare does not adopt from Lodge’s novel Oliver’s rescue of Celia from a band of ruffians. Johnson says, ‘To Celia much may be forgiven for the heroism of her friendship.’ She forsook not only her father—she had reason not to care much about him—but she forsook thecourtfor Rosalind.

Much Ado about Nothing.—Why should Don Pedro offer to take Claudio’s place in the wooing of Hero and why should Claudio consent?

Borachio says, ‘Hear me call Margaret, Hero; hear Margaret call me Claudio.’

When Borachio recounts to Conrad what he had done, he makes no mention of his personation of Claudio—‘Know, that I have to-night wooed Margaret, the lady Hero’s gentlewoman, by the name of Hero; she leans me out at her mistress’s chamber-window, bids me a thousand times good night.’

Theobald remarks that if Claudio saw another man with the woman supposed to be Hero and heard her call him Claudio, Claudio would merely suppose that Hero was deceived. Theobald proposes to substitute ‘Borachio’ for ‘Claudio’ in the line just quoted. Borachio had just asked Don John to tell Don Pedro and Claudio that Hero loved him, Borachio. But if Theobald’s emendation be received, difficulties still remain. Margaret must have been persuaded to answer to the name of Hero. After Borachio’s arrest he tells us that Margaret wore Hero’s garments. But Shakespeare, deserting Spenser, from whom this mystification appears to be borrowed, gives no reason which induced Margaret to play this part.

Where was Hero on that night? Borachio promises Don John that ‘he will so fashion the matter, that Hero shall be absent.’ Claudio asks Hero

‘What man was he talk’d with you yesternightOut at your window betwixt twelve and one?’

She does not reply, as we should think she would, that she was not sleeping in that room, although Benedick asks Beatrice,

‘Lady, were you her bedfellow last night?’

and Beatrice replies,

‘No, truly not; although until last night,I have this twelvemonth been her bedfellow.’

Claudio is despicable, and his marriage with Hero is a foul, black spot in the play. Observe that in the first scene he asks Don Pedro,

‘Hath Leonato any son, my lord?’

and Don Pedro, understanding the drift of the question, replies:

‘No child but Hero, she’s his only heir.’

What a mean, damnable excuse he makes.

‘Yet sinn’d I not,But in mistaking.’

Beatrice with sure eye discerns the scoundrel. ‘Kill Claudio.’ Not Don Pedro, not even Don John, although she had heard Benedick denounce him as the author of the villainy.

Beatrice and the Friar never doubt Hero’s innocence. The Friar declares that

‘In her eye there hath appear’d a fireTo burn the errors that these princes holdAgainst her maiden truth.’

What an amplitude there is in Beatrice! What a sweep it is to bring into what we already know of her such divine faith in her friend! This light-hearted girl suddenly becomes sublime.

Hamlet.—Coleridge’s remark that the two former appearances of the Ghost increase its objectivity when it appears to Hamlet is subtle and true. Observe that the Ghost is visible to Hamlet, Marcellus, Bernardo and Horatio, but not to the Queen.

There is in Coleridge an activity of intellect which is so fascinating that we do not stay to inquire whether the result is in accordance with the facts. He says thattædium vitæas in the case of Hamlet is due to ‘unchecked appetency of the ideal.’ Was the appetency of the ideal strong in Hamlet? The ideal exalts our interest in earthly things.

‘Now might I do it pat, now he is praying.’ Johnson says that this speech, in which Hamlet contrives damnation for the man he would punish, is too horrible to be read or to be uttered; whereupon Coleridge remarks that Hamlet’s postponement of revenge till it should bring damnation to soul as well as body ‘was merely the excuse Hamlet made to himself for not taking advantage of this particular and favourable moment for doing justice upon his guilty uncle, at the urgent instance of the spirit of his father.’ I doubt if this is a complete explanation. Would it strike the audience as the motive? Men of Hamlet’s mould not only speak but feel extravagantly. Incapacity for prompt action is accompanied with more intense emotion than that which is felt by him who acts at once. Hamlet meditates on revenge instead of executing it, and his desire, by brooding, becomes diabolic.

Generalisations like those of Polonius are obtained from observation during youth and middle age. In old age the creation of generalisations ceases and we fall back on our acquired stock. They remain true, but the application fails. We must be increasingly careful in the use of these ancient abstractions, and more intent on the consideration of the instance before us. The temptation to drag it under what we already know is great and must be resisted. Proverbs and wise saws are more suitable to common life than to intricate relationships. They are inapplicable to deep passion and spiritual matters.

Johnson notes that the Ghost’s visits are a failure so far as Hamlet’s resolution is concerned.

Hamlet says,

‘O! from this time forth,My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!’

but they remained thoughts. The play is to be the thing to decide him, but when it is over and he has the clearest proofs, he does not act, but consents to leave Denmark and returns by accident. Had he obeyed the Ghost’s promptings and killed the King at the end of the play in the third act, Polonius, Ophelia, the Queen, Laertes, and Hamlet himself might have been saved.

Troilus and Cressidais an inexplicable play. It is a justification of those critics who obstinately, but without external evidence, refuse to believe that much which is attributed to Shakespeare really belongs to him. It is absolutely impossible that the man who put these words into the mouth of Achilles:

‘I have a woman’s longing,An appetite that I am sick withal,To see great Hector in his weeds of peace;To talk with him, and to behold his visage,Even to my full of view.’

could have adapted from theRecuyellthe shocking ignominy of the ninth scene in the fifth act in which Achilles calls on his myrmidons to slay Hector unarmed, and then triumphs in these lines:

‘My half-supp’d sword, that frankly would have fed,Pleas’d with this dainty bit, thus goes to bed.[Sheathes his sword.Come, tie his body to my horse’s tail;Along the field I will the Trojan trail.’

Measure for Measureas a play is hateful to me, although there are passages in it as truly Shakespeare as anything to be found in all his works. The chief objection to it is that justice, to use Coleridge’s word, is ‘baffled.’ There are other objections almost as great. From beginning to end almost everybody is base, foolish, or uninteresting. The Duke’s temporary withdrawal is stupid and contemptible, considering that he is the governor of the state; the condemnation of Claudio is wildly unnatural; the substitution of Mariana loathsome; the treachery of Angelo in not reprieving Claudio inconceivable, notwithstanding what we already know of the deputy’s hypocrisy and villainy. The lowest depth of scoundrelism is reached when, face to face with Mariana and publicly at the city gate before the Duke and all the company assembled, he excuses himself from marrying her because

‘her reputation was disvaluedIn levity.’

And yet he is let off scot-free, and Mariana marries him! Isabella’s apology,

‘I partly think,A due sincerity govern’d his deeds,Till he did look on me,’

might be sufficient for an outbreak of his lust but not for his lying, and Mariana’s is still worse:

‘Best men are moulded out of faults.’

Not out of such faults as Angelo’s are the best men moulded.

The punishment inflicted on the poor wretch Lucio is horrible.

Lucio. ‘I beseech your highness, do not marry me to a whore! . . . Marrying a punk, my lord, is pressing to death, whipping and hanging.Duke. Slandering a prince deserves it.’

Lucio. ‘I beseech your highness, do not marry me to a whore! . . . Marrying a punk, my lord, is pressing to death, whipping and hanging.

Duke. Slandering a prince deserves it.’

This is a foul line. I should like to discover documentary proof that it is not Shakespeare’s, but the gag of some actor desirous of pleasing court folk!

ThePromos and Cassandrafrom whichMeasure for Measureis taken is certainly worse, for Promos (Angelo) is made to marry Cassandra (Isabella) and after the marriage is to die, but Cassandra, ‘tyed in the greatest bondes of affection to her husband, becomes an earnest suter for his life.’

Henry VIII.—The scene in which Katherine appears before the court is perhaps the finest in the play. To what noble use is her Spanish pride turned! The last line of the following quotation from Katherine’s reply to Wolsey is infinite:

‘For it is youHave blown this coal betwixt my lord and me,Which God’s dew quench.’

Othellois pure tragedy, for the judgment which falls on Othello and Desdemona, although it is disproportionate to the character or life of either, is necessary from the beginning. Brabantio was not wholly without justification in thinking the marriage unnatural, and Desdemona’s desertion of him without a word was unfeeling. The depth of the tragedy is increased by his death.

‘Poor Desdemon I am glad thy father’s dead.Thy match was mortal to him.’

Iago feels the necessity of obtaining motives for his conduct. He tries to find them in the supposed infidelity of his wife with Othello and in his supersession by Cassio. Neither is sufficient, but he partly believes in them, and they partly serve their purpose.

Coleridge says Othello was not jealous: he lacked the suspicion that is essential to jealousy. Perhaps so, but in that case we want a name for the passion which rushes to belief of that which it prays may be false. The very intensity of love, so far from inducing careful examination of slander against the divinity I worship, prevents reflection by anxiety; by terror lest the love should be disturbed. Iago’s evidence, thinks Coleridge, was so strong that Othello could not have done otherwise; but would he have acted in war on evidence equally weak?

How mad Iago is with all his cunning! What a fool! Had he been anything but the maddest fool, he would have seen that in the end his plans must break down. Intellect? Yes, of a kind he had it pre-eminently, but intellect becomes folly when it is inhuman.

‘Farewell the plumed troop, and the big wars.’

Shakespeare might have made Othello the more eager to plunge into the big wars, but Desdemona is so inwoven with him that the whole fabric goes to ruin when she is torn out.

Othello ‘falls in a trance’ after his outburst at the beginning of the fourth act. He is a Moor. In the background also lies Brabantio’s prophecy. Venice cannot do without him, but he cannot hold a Venetian woman.

King Lear.—There are passages inKing Learwhich are enough to make us wish we had never been born. They are almost an impeachment of the Ruler of the Universe, and yet—there is Cordelia. Whence did she come? She is as much His handiwork as Regan, and in all our conclusions about Him we must take her into account.

Lear does not go mad. He is mad from the beginning, but his madness is in abeyance. Look at the style of his curses on Goneril.

Coleridge’s criticism is exact: ‘Lear’s self-supportless leaning for all pleasure on another’s breast.’ If a man desires not to go mad or not to be soured into oil of vitriol, let him watch the doors of his heart; let him never solicit any expression of love.

Cordelia’s ‘nothing, my lord,’ as Coleridge says, is partly irrepressible disgust at her sisters’ hypocrisy. There was also, as France admits, ‘a tardiness in nature’ in Cordelia. She was her father’s favourite, but what sort of a life must she have lived with such a father before the time at which the play opens? We ought not to be surprised that she refuses to be demonstrative. She reacts against his exaggeration.

I cannot read the blinding of Gloucester. The only excuse that can be offered, not good for much, is that Shakespeare found the story in theArcadia, and that in his day horrors on the stage were not so repulsive as they are to us. Cordelia’s death taken from Holinshed is almost as bad. It is not involved in the tragedy like the death of Ophelia or of Desdemona.

All’s Well that Ends Well.—Johnson comments, ‘I cannot reconcile my heart to Bertram; a man noble without generosity, and young without truth; who married Helena as a coward, and leaves her as a profligate: when she is dead by his unkindness, sneaks home to a second marriage, is accused by a woman whom he has wronged, defends himself by falsehood, and is dismissed to happiness.’ This is just. Bertram is atrocious. With Helena before him he says,

‘If she, my liege, can make me know this clearly,I’ll love her dearly, ever, ever dearly.’

Did he require a deposition on oath in presence of a magistrate? He deserved a scourging in the market place.

Coleridge calls Helena one of Shakespeare’s loveliest women. I cannot agree. She secures her husband’s embraces under a false pretence. How a woman could consent to lie in the arms of a man who had cast her off, and who believed when he was enjoying her that she was a mistress whom he preferred is beyond my comprehension. It is so in Boccaccio, but that is no excuse. Devotion to a man who is indifferent or who hates, is tragically possible, but in its greatest intensity would hardly permit such humiliation.

The play is bad altogether. What was the necessity for suggesting Bertram’s second marriage? There is nowhere any trace of Shakespeare’s depth. The difficulties of the text are singular, and seem to mark this drama as one different from the rest.

Macbeth.—Johnson’s remark that the events are so great that they overpower the persons and prevent nice discrimination of character is partly true.

Coleridge notices that Lady Macbeth was a person of high rank, living much alone. A darkly meditative mind left in solitude can conceive without being startled the most awful designs. The same imagination in Lady Macbeth which brooded over the plot against Duncan’s life drove her to delirium and suicide.

Shakespeare transfers the most perilous stuff in him to Macbeth. The function smothered in surmise; the reflection on the emptiness of life—tale told by an idiot—Shakespeare empties it into this murderous traitor. He makes him thepreyof that which is mixed in the composition of the best.

The witches do not strike us as miraculous. They are not supernatural, but extensions of the natural.

It is an apology for emendation that one of the most celebrated passages in the play is based on conjecture (confirmed by what follows) and on analogy.

‘I dare do all that may become a man;Who daresno[Folio] more is none.’

‘No’—corrected by Rowe to ‘do.’

InMeasure for Measurewe have

‘Be that you are,That is, a woman; if you be more, you’re none.’

Note the terrible, gasping brevity of the dialogue between Lady Macbeth and her husband after the murder:

Lady M.‘Did not you speak?M.When?Lady M.Now.M.As I descended?Lady M.Ay.’

Lady M.‘Did not you speak?

M.When?

Lady M.Now.

M.As I descended?

Lady M.Ay.’

Macbeth’s speech beginning just before he hears of Lady Macbeth’s death, and ending after he hears of it, should be interpreted and spoken as follows. He had just said he ‘will laugh a siege to scorn.’ Then a cry of women within.

‘What is that noise?Seyton. It is the cry of women, my good lord.[Exit.Macbeth(musing). I have almost forgot the taste of fears.The time has been, my senses would have cool’dTo hear a night-shriek; and my fell of hairWould at a dismal treatise rouse and stirAs life were in ’t: I have supp’d full with horrors;Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts,Cannot once start me.Re-enter Seyton.Wherefore was that cry?Seyton. The queen, my lord, is dead.Macbeth(with a touch of impatience). She should have died hereafter:There would have been a time for such a word.’

‘What is that noise?

Seyton. It is the cry of women, my good lord.

[Exit.

Macbeth(musing). I have almost forgot the taste of fears.The time has been, my senses would have cool’dTo hear a night-shriek; and my fell of hairWould at a dismal treatise rouse and stirAs life were in ’t: I have supp’d full with horrors;Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts,Cannot once start me.

Re-enter Seyton.

Wherefore was that cry?

Seyton. The queen, my lord, is dead.

Macbeth(with a touch of impatience). She should have died hereafter:There would have been a time for such a word.’

He makes no inquiry about his wife, but goes on with his reverie, which does not specially refer to her.

‘To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,Creeps in this petty pace from day to dayTo the last syllable of recorded time,And all our yesterdays have lighted foolsThe way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor playerThat struts and frets his hour upon the stageAnd then is heard no more: it is a taleTold by an idiot, full of sound and fury,Signifying nothing.’

The ‘pettypace,’ coming from Macbeth! The ‘out, out, brief candle,’ should be spoken in the same musing tone.

Johnson says of a learned apology by Heath for a line inMacbethwhich is defective in metre: ‘This is one of the effects of literature in minds not naturally perspicacious’—a criticism which might be extended to much Shakespearean comment.

Cymbeline.—The wager is loathsome. If any man with whom we were acquainted had laid it, should we not scorn and brand him? It was a crime to mention Imogen’s name in such society as that which met at Philario’s house. The only excuse is Boccaccio, but what shall we say of Iachimo’s interview with Imogen, invented by Shakespeare! After his beastly experiment upon her, he excuses himself:

‘I have spoke this, to know if your affianceWere deeply rooted.’

She begs him to prolong his visit! The apology is worse than the original insult.

The royal behaviour, or what Shakespeare means us to take for royal behaviour, in the two youths is overdone and sometimes repulsive.

Arviragus goes out of his way to put his love for Imogen higher than that for his supposed father, Belarius, who is present.

‘The bier at door,And a demand who is’t shall die, I’d sayMy father, not this youth.’

Yet the point of the scene is the nobility of blood in these youths!

Lucius, who had protected Imogen, hopes she will plead for his life, and she turns on him:

‘No, no; alack!There’s other work in hand: I see a thingBitter to me as death: your life, good master,Must shuffle for itself.’

In the fifth act Posthumus believes his wife to be guilty, and yet breaks out into strains like these:

‘So I’ll die,For thee, O Imogen! even for whom my lifeIs every breath a death.. . .For Imogen’s dear life take mine; and though’Tis not so dear, yet ’tis a life; you coin’d it.’

Shakespeare surely ought to have made Posthumus revert to perfect faith. He ought to have borrowed something from his own Beatrice. Posthumus wishes Imogen saved, because, if her life had been spared, she might have repented.

Iachimo is impossible, simple blackness, worse than Iago. He is unactable, for some motivation is necessary.

Shakespeare’s genius is so immense that it overpowers us, and we must be on our guard lest it should twist our instinct for what is true and right. The errors of a fool are not dangerous, but those of a Shakespeare, Goethe, or Byron it is almost impossible to resist.

Twelfth Night.—The play is two plays in one without much connection. The Viola play is improbable. Why did Shakespeare omit that part of the story which tells us that Silla (Viola) had seen the Duke when he was shipwrecked on Cyprus where she lived, and had fallen in love with him? In the play, hearing of the Duke, she discloses a design to make her ‘own occasion mellow.’

Malvolio shut up as mad—

Clown. ‘What is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild-fowl?Malvolio. That the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird.Clown. What thinkest thou of his opinion?Malvolio. I think nobly of the soul, and no way approve his opinion.’

Clown. ‘What is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild-fowl?

Malvolio. That the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird.

Clown. What thinkest thou of his opinion?

Malvolio. I think nobly of the soul, and no way approve his opinion.’

Malvolio was a gentleman, but he was more. Shakespeare may go a little too far with the yellow stockings and cross-gartering, but the liability to deception by a supposed profession of love is a divine weakness, not inconsistent with true nobility of intellect and with sagacity. There is no reason to suppose he was often deceived in worldly matters. Maria is a bad sort of clever barmaid, and was not unwilling to marry the drunken Sir Toby. When I last sawTwelfth Nightacted, the whole of the latter part of the fifth act was omitted, for the purpose, apparently, of strengthening the representation of Malvolio as a comic fool whose silly brain is turned by conceit. It was shocking, but the manager knew his audience.

Julius Cæsar.—Casca is indignant that Cæsar should be offered the crown, but he despises the applause of the mob when Cæsar rejected it. ‘The rabblement hooted and clapped their chopped hands and threw up their sweaty night-caps, and uttered such a deal of stinking breath because Cæsar refused the crown that it had almost choked Cæsar; for he swounded and fell down at it; and for mine own part, I durst not laugh, for fear of opening my lips and receiving the bad air.’

Brutus. ‘Between the acting of a dreadful thingAnd the first motion, all the interim isLike a phantasma, or a hideous dream:The Genius and the mortal instrumentsAre then in council; and the state of man,Like to a little kingdom, suffers thenThe nature of an insurrection.’

I cannot think Dr. Johnson, Mason, and Delius are right in supposing the Genius to be the power which watches over us for our protection, and that the mortal instruments are the passions which rebel against it, and, as Johnson says, ‘excite him to a deed of honour and danger.’ The Genius and the mortal instruments are in council. The Genius is the president and the mortal instruments are subordinates. The insurrection is their resistance because they cannot at once be brought to do what the Genius directs. There is no hint in what goes before of ‘safety.’ The mortal instruments suggest

‘I know no personal cause to spurn at him.’

Blakeway agrees with this interpretation.

In both Plutarch and Shakespeare, Brutus refuses to kill Antony. Brutus will go no further than justice demands. But this is not enough for success. Hence the ruin of the republican cause.

Steevens says that the apparition at Sardis ‘could not be at once the shade of Cæsar and the evil genius of Brutus.’ But Shakespeare intended that it should be both. Brutus in the fifth scene of the fifth act thus replies to Volumnius:

‘The ghost of Cæsar hath appear’d to meTwo several times by night: at Sardis, once;And, this last night, here in Philippi’s fields.’

It is an instance of Steevens’ prosaic temper that he could not see the fitness of the combination.

Brutus. And whether we shall meet again I know not.Therefore our everlasting farewell take;For ever, and for ever, farewell, Cassius!If we do meet again, why, we shall smile;If not, why then, this parting was well made.Cassius. For ever, and for ever, farewell, Brutus!If we do meet again, we’ll smile indeed;If not, ’tis true, this parting was well made.

These verses are perhaps the noblest in our language. Nothing ever has gone or could go beyond them. Shakespeare here justifies the claim on his behalf to be placed alone and unreachable. Observe the repetition by Cassius almost word for word. Swift must have had this passage in his mind when in a letter to Pope, which I quote from memory, as I cannot lay my hand on it, he tells Pope that he will come over to England and see him if possible, but, if not, ‘we must part, as all human creatures have parted.’

‘Why, then, lead on. O! that a man might knowThe end of this day’s business ere it come!But it sufficeth that the day will end,And then the end is known. Come, ho! away!’

These lines might easily be turned into commonplace, but what could be more pathetic or solemn?

The true drama of Julius Cæsar is indicated by Plutarch. It is Cæsar’s triumph over innumerable difficulties, any one of which might have been fatal, the protection by his genius, the limitation of its power, the Dictatorship—‘Semideus,’ his death. Shakespeare gives no reason, nor does Plutarch, why Brutus should have plotted to kill Cæsar, excepting the fear of what might happen if he were to become absolute. Brutus is abstract.

‘Such one he was (of him we boldly say),In whose rich soule all sovereigne powres did sute,In whom in peace the elements all laySo mixt, as none could soveraigntie impute;As all did govern, yet all did obey;His lively temper was so absolute,That ’t seem’d, when heaven his modell first began,In him it show’d perfection in a man.’

This is Drayton’s imitation of what Antony says of Brutus, and it is one which not only does not spoil the original, but is itself original.

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