came from his heart. He perceived with extreme clearness the connection of acts with their consequences; but his belief that in this sense ‘the gods are just’ was accompanied by the strongest feeling that forgiveness ought to follow repentance, and (if I may so put it) his favourite petition was the one that begins ‘Forgive us our trespasses.’ To conclude, I have fancied that he shows an unusual degree of disgust at slander and dislike of censoriousness; and where he speaks in the Sonnets of those who censured him he betrays an exceptionally decided feeling that a man’s offences are his own affair and not the world’s.29
Some of the vices which seem to have been particularly odious to Shakespeare have, we may notice, a special connection with prosperity and power. Men feign and creep and flatter to pleasethe powerful and to win their own way to ease or power; and they envy and censure and slander their competitors in the race; and when they succeed, they are ungrateful to their friends and helpers and patrons; and they become hard and unmerciful, and despise and bully those who are now below them. So, perhaps, Shakespeare said to himself in those years when, as we imagine, melancholy and embitterment often overclouded his sky, though they did not obscure his faith in goodness and much less his intellectual vision. And prosperity and power, he may have added, come less frequently by merit than by those base arts or by mere fortune. The divorce of goodness and power was, to Shelley, the ‘woe of the world’; if we substitute for ‘goodness’ the wider word ‘merit,’ we may say that this divorce, with the evil bred by power, is to Shakespeare also the root of bitterness. This fact, presented in its extreme form of the appalling cruelty of the prosperous, and the heart-rending suffering of the defenceless, forms the problem of his most tremendous drama. We have no reason to surmise that his own sufferings were calamitous; and the period which seems to be marked by melancholy and embitterment was one of outward, or at least financial, prosperity; but nevertheless we can hardly doubt that he felt on the small scale of his own life the influence of that divorce of power and merit. His complaint against Fortune, who had so ill provided for his life, runs through the Sonnets. Even if we could regard as purely conventional the declarations that his verses would make his friend immortal, it is totally impossible that he can have been unaware of the gulf between his own gifts and those of others, or can have failed to feel the disproportion between his position and his mind. Hamlet had never experienced
the spurnsThat patient merit of the unworthy takes,
the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
and that make the patient soul weary of life; the man who had experienced them was the writer of Sonnet 66, who cried for death because he was tired with beholding
desert a beggar born,And needy nothing trimmed in jollity,
desert a beggar born,
And needy nothing trimmed in jollity,
—a beggarly soul flaunting in brave array. Neither had Hamlet felt in his own person ‘the insolence of office’; but the actor had doubtless felt it often enough, and we can hardly err in hearing his own voice in dramatic expressions of wonder and contempt at the stupid pride of mere authority and at men’s slavish respect for it. Two examples will suffice. ‘Thou hast seen a farmer’s dog bark at a beggar, and the creature run from the cur? There thou mightst behold the great image of authority. A dog’s obeyed in office’: so says Lear, when madness has cleared his vision, and indignation makes the Timon-like verses that follow. The other example is almost too famous for quotation but I have a reason for quoting it:
man, proud man,Drest in a little brief authority,Most ignorant of what he’s most assured,His glassy essence, like an angry ape,Plays such fantastic tricks before high heavenAs makes the angels weep; who, with our spleens,Would all themselves laugh mortal.
man, proud man,
Drest in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he’s most assured,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As makes the angels weep; who, with our spleens,
Would all themselves laugh mortal.
It is Isabella who says that; but it is scarcely in character; Shakespeare himself is speaking.30
It is with great hesitation that I hazard a few words on Shakespeare’s religion. Any attempt to penetrate his reserve on this subject may appear a crowning impertinence; and, since his dramas are almost exclusively secular, any impressions wemay form must here be even more speculative than usual. Yet it is scarcely possible to read him much without such speculations; and there are at least some theories which may confidently be dismissed. It cannot be called absolutely impossible that Shakespeare was indifferent to music and to the beauty of Nature, and yet the idea is absurd; and in the same way it is barely possible, and yet it is preposterous, to suppose that he was an ardent and devoted atheist or Brownist or Roman Catholic, and that all the indications to the contrary are due to his artfulness and determination not to get into trouble. There is no absurdity, on the other hand, nor of necessity anything hopeless, in the question whether there are signs that he belonged to this or that church, and was inclined to one mode of thought within it rather than to another. Only the question is scarcely worth asking for our present purpose, unless there is some reason to believe that he took a keen interest in these matters. Suppose, for example, that we had ground to accept a tradition that he ‘died a papist,’ this would not tell us much about him unless we had also ground to think that he lived a papist, and that his faith went far into his personality. But in fact we receive from his writings, it appears to me, a rather strong impression that he concerned himself little, if at all, with differences of doctrine or church government.31And we may go further. Have we not reason to surmise that he was not, in the distinctive sense of the word, a religious man—a man, that is to say, whose feelings and actions are constantly and strongly influenced by thoughts of his relation to an object of worship? If Shakespeare had been such a man, is it credible that we should find nothing in tradition or in his works to indicate the fact; and is it likelythat we should find in his works some things that we do find there?32
Venturing with much doubt a little farther I will put together certain facts and impressions without at once drawing any conclusion from them. Almost all the speeches that can be called pronouncedly religious and Christian in phraseology and spirit are placed in the mouths of persons to whom they are obviously appropriate, either from their position (e.g.bishops, friars, nuns), or from what Shakespeare found in histories (e.g.Henry IV., V., and VI.), or for some other plain reason. We cannot build, therefore, on these speeches in the least. On the other hand (except, of course, where they are hypocritical or politic), we perceive in Shakespeare’s tone in regard to them not the faintest trace of dislike or contempt; nor can we find a trace anywhere of such feelings, or of irreverence, towards Christian ideas, institutions, or customs (mere humorous irreverence is not relevant here); and in the case of ‘sympathetic’ characters, living in Christian times but not in any decided sense religious, no disposition is visible to suppress or ignore their belief in, and use of, religious ideas. Some characters, again, Christian or heathen, who appear to be drawn with rather marked sympathy, have strong, if simple, religious convictions (e.g. Horatio, Edgar, Hermione); and in others, of whom so much can hardly be said, but who strike many readers, rightly or wrongly, as having a good deal of Shakespeare inthem (e.g.Romeo and Hamlet), we observe a quiet but deep sense that they and other men are neither their own masters nor responsible only to themselves and other men, but are in the hands of ‘Providence’ or guiding powers ‘above.’33
To this I will add two remarks. To every one, I suppose, certain speeches sound peculiarly personal. Perhaps others may share my feeling about Hamlet’s words:
There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,Rough-hew them how we will;
There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will;
and about those other words of his:
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,Than are dreamt of in your philosophy;
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy;
and about the speech of Prospero ending, ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on.’34On the other hand, we observe that Hamlet seems to have arrived at that conviction as to the ‘divinity’ after reflection, and that, while he usually speaks as one who accepts the received Christian ideas, yet, when meditatingprofoundly, he appears to ignore them.35In the same way the Duke inMeasure for Measureis for the most part, and necessarily, a Christian; yet nobody would guess it from the great speech, ‘Be absolute for death,’ addressed by a supposed friar to a youth under sentence to die, yet containing not a syllable about a future life.36
Without adducing more of the endless but baffling material for a conclusion, I will offer the result left on my mind, and, merely for the sake of brevity, will state it with hardly any of the qualifications it doubtless needs. Shakespeare, I imagine, was not, in the sense assigned to the word some minutes ago, a religious man. Nor was it natural to him to regard good and evil, better and worse, habitually from a theological point of view. But (this appears certain) he had a lively and serious sense of ‘conscience,’ of the pain of self-reproach and self-condemnation, and of the torment to which this pain might rise.37He was not in the least disposed to regard conscience as somehow illusory or a human invention, but on the contrary thought of it (I use the most non-committal phrase I can find) as connected with the power that rules the world and is not escapable by man. He realised very fully and felt very keenly, after his youth was pastand at certain times of stress, the sufferings and wrongs of men, the strength of evil, the hideousness of certain forms of it, and its apparent incurability in certain cases. And he must sometimes have felt all this as a terrible problem. But, however he may have been tempted, and may have yielded, to exasperation and even despair, he never doubted that it is best to be good; felt more and more that one must be patient and must forgive;38and probably maintained unbroken a conviction, practical if not formulated, that to be good is to be at peace with that unescapable power. But it is unlikely that he attempted to theorise further on the nature of the power. All was for him, in the end, mystery; and, while we have no reason whatever to attribute to him a belief in the ghosts and oracles he used in his dramas, he had no inclination to play the spy on God or to limit his power by our notions of it. That he had dreams and ponderings about the mystery such as he never put into the mouths of actors I do not doubt; but I imagine they were no more than dreams and ponderings and movings about in worlds unrealised.
Whether to this ‘religion’ he joined a more or less conventional acceptance of some or all of the usual Christian ideas, it is impossible to tell. There is no great improbability to me in the idea that he did not, but it is more probable to me that he did,—that, in fact, though he was never so tormented as Hamlet, his position in this matter was, at least in middle life (and he never reached old age), much like Hamlet’s. If this were so it might naturally happen that, as he grew older and wearier of labour, and perhaps of the tumult of pleasure and thought and pain, his more personal religion, the natural piety which seems to gain in weight and serenity in the latest plays, came to be more closely joined withChristian ideas. But I can find no clear indications that this did happen; and though some have believed that they discovered these ideas displayed in full, though not explicitly, in theTempest, I am not able to hear there more than the stream of Shakespeare’s own ‘religion’ moving with its fullest volume and making its deepest and most harmonious music.39
This lecture must end, though its subject is endless, and I will touch on only one point more,—one that may to some extent recall and connect the scattered suggestions I have offered.
If we were obliged to answer the question which of Shakespeare’s plays contains, not indeed the fullest picture of his mind, but the truest expression of his nature and habitual temper, unaffected by special causes of exhilaration or gloom, I should be disposed to chooseAs You Like It. It wants, to go no further, the addition of a touch of Sir Toby or Falstaff, and the ejection of its miraculous conversions of ill-disposed characters. But the misbehaviour of Fortune, and the hardness and ingratitude of men, form the basis of its plot, and are a frequent topic of complaint. And, on the other hand, he who is reading it has a smooth brow and smiling lips, and a heart that murmurs,
Happy is your grace,That can translate the stubbornness of fortuneInto so quiet and so sweet a style.
Happy is your grace,
That can translate the stubbornness of fortune
Into so quiet and so sweet a style.
And it is full not only of sweetness, but of romance, fun, humour of various kinds, delight in the oddities of human nature, love of modesty and fidelity and high spirit and patience, dislike of scandal and censure, contemplative curiosity, the feeling that in the end we are all merely players, together with a touch of the feeling that
Then is there mirth in heavenWhen earthly things made evenAtone together.
Then is there mirth in heaven
When earthly things made even
Atone together.
And, finally, it breathes the serene holiday mood of escape from the toil, competition, and corruption of city and court into the sun and shadow and peace of the country, where one can be idle and dream and meditate and sing, and pursue or watch the deer as the fancy takes one, and make love or smile at lovers according to one’s age.40
If, again, the question were put to us, which of Shakespeare’s characters reveals most of his personality, the majority of those who consented to give an answer would answer ‘Hamlet.’ This impression may be fanciful, but it is difficult to think it wholly so, and, speaking for those who share it, I will try to trace some of its sources. There is a good deal of Shakespeare that is not in Hamlet. But Hamlet, we think, is the only character in Shakespeare who could possibly have composed his plays (though it appears unlikely, from his verses to Ophelia, that he could have written the best songs). Into Hamlet’s mouth are put what are evidently Shakespeare’s own views on drama and acting. Hamlet alone, among the great serious characters, can be called a humorist. When in some trait of another character we seem to touch Shakespeare’spersonality, we are frequently reminded of Hamlet.41When in a profound reflective speech we hear Shakespeare’s voice, we usually hear Hamlet’s too, and his peculiar humour and turns of phrase appear unexpectedly in persons otherwise unlike him and unlike one another. The most melancholy group of Sonnets (71-74) recalls Hamlet at once, here and there recalls even his words; and he and the writer of Sonnet 66 both recount in a list the ills that make men long for death. And then Hamlet ‘was indeed honest and of an open and free nature’; sweet-tempered and modest, yet not slow to resent calumny or injury; of a serious but not a melancholy disposition; and the lover of his friend. And, with these traits, we remember his poet ecstasy at the glory of earth and sky and the marvellous endowments of man; his eager affectionate response to everything noble or sweet in human nature; his tendency to dream and to live in the world of his own mind; his liability to sudden vehement emotion, and his admiration for men whose blood and judgment are better commingled; the overwhelming effect of disillusionment upon him; his sadness, fierceness, bitterness and cynicism. All this, and more: his sensitiveness to the call of duty; his longing to answer to it, and his anguish over his strange delay; the conviction gathering in his tortured soul that man’s purposes and failures are divinely shaped to ends beyond his vision; his incessant meditation, and his sense that there are mysteries which no meditation can fathom; nay, even little traits like his recourse to music to calm his excitement, or his feeling on the one hand that the peasant should not tread on the courtier’s heels, and on the other that the mere courtier is spacious in the possession of dirt—all this, I say, corresponds with our impression of Shakespeare, or rather of characteristic traits in Shakespeare, probably hereand there a good deal heightened, and mingled with others not characteristic of Shakespeare at all. And if this is more than fancy, it may explain to us why Hamlet is the most fascinating character, and the most inexhaustible, in all imaginative literature. What else should he be, if the world’s greatest poet, who was able to give almost the reality of nature to creations totally unlike himself, put his own soul straight into this creation, and when he wrote Hamlet’s speeches wrote down his own heart?42
1904.
1Unquestionably it holds in a considerable degree of Browning, who inAt the MermaidandHousewrote as though he imagined that neither his own work nor Shakespeare’s betrayed anything of the inner man. But if we are to criticise those two poems as arguments, we must say that they involve two hopelessly false assumptions, that we have to choose between a self-revelation like Byron’s and no self-revelation at all, and that the relation between a poet and his work is like that between the inside and the outside of a house.2Almost all Shakespearean criticism, of course, contains something bearing on our subject; but I have a practical reason for mentioning in particular Mr. Frank Harris’s articles in theSaturday Reviewfor 1898. A good many of Mr. Harris’s views I cannot share, and I had arrived at almost all the ideas expressed in the lecture (except some on the Sonnets question) before reading his papers. But I found in them also valuable ideas which were quite new to me and would probably be so to many readers. It is a great pity that the articles are not collected and published in a book. [Mr. Harris has published, inThe Man Shakespeare, the substance of the articles, and also matter which, in my judgment, has much less value.]3He is apologising for an attack made on Shakespeare in a pamphlet of which he was the publisher and Greene the writer.4It was said of him, indeed, in his lifetime that, had he not played some kingly parts in sport (i.e.on the stage), he would have been a companion for a king.5Nor,vice versa, does the possession of these latter qualities at all imply, as some writers seem to assume, the absence of the former or of gentleness.6Fuller may be handing down a tradition, but it is not safe to assume this. His comparison, on the other hand, of Shakespeare and Jonson, in their wit combats, to an English man-of-war and a Spanish great galleon, reads as if his own happy fancy were operating on the reports, direct or indirect, of eye-witnesses.7See, for example, ActIV.Sc. v., to which I know no parallel in the later tragedies.8I allude to Sonnet 110, Mr. Beeching’s note on which seems to be unquestionably right: ‘There is no reference to the poet’s profession of player. The sonnet gives the confession of a favourite of society.’ This applies, I think, to the whole group of sonnets (it begins with 107) in which the poet excuses his neglect of his friend, though there arealsoreferences to his profession and its effect on his nature and his reputation. (By a slip Mr. Beeching makes the neglect last for three years.)9It is perhaps most especially in his rendering of the shock and the effects ofdisillusionmentin open natures that we seem to feel Shakespeare’s personality. The nature of this shock is expressed in Henry’s words to Lord Scroop:I will weep for thee;For this revolt of thine, methinks, is likeAnother fall of man.10There is nothing of this semi-reality, of course, in thepassionof love as portrayed, for example, in men so different as Orlando, Othello, Antony, Troilus, whose love for Cressida resembles that of Romeo for Juliet. What I have said of Romeo’s ‘love’ for Rosaline corresponds roughly with Coleridge’s view; and, without subscribing to all of Coleridge’s remarks, I believe he was right in finding an intentional contrast between this feeling and the passion that displaces it (though it does not follow that the feeling would not have become a genuine passion if Rosaline had been kind). Nor do I understand the notion that Coleridge’s view is refuted and even rendered ridiculous by the mere fact that Shakespeare found the Rosaline story in Brooke (Halliwell-Phillipps,Outlines, 7th ed., illustrative note 2). Was he compelled then to use whatever he found? Was it his practice to do so? The question is alwayswhyhe used what he found, andhow. Coleridge’s view of this matter, it need hardly be said, is far from indisputable; but it must be judged by our knowledge of Shakespeare’s mind and not of his material alone. I may add, as I have referred to Halliwell-Phillipps, that Shakespeare made changes in the story he found; that it is arbitrary to assume (not that it matters) that Coleridge, who read Steevens, was unaware of Shakespeare’s use of Brooke; and that Brooke was by no means a ‘wretched poetaster.’11Hamlet,Measure for Measure,Othello,Troilus and Cressida,King Lear,Timon of Athens. SeeShakespearean Tragedy, pp. 79-85, 275-6. I should like to insist on the view there taken that the tragedies subsequent toLearandTimondo not show the pressure of painful feelings.12It is not implied that these scenes are certainly Shakespeare’s; but I see no sufficient ground for decisively rejecting them.13That experience, certainly in part and probably wholly, belongs to an earlier time, since sonnets 138 and 144 were printed in thePassionate Pilgrim. But I see no difficulty in that. What bears little fruit in a normal condition of spirits may bear abundant fruit later, in moods of discouragement and exasperation induced largely by other causes.14The Sonnets of Shakespeare with an Introduction and Notes.Ginn & Co., 1904.15I find that Mr. Beeching, in the Stratford Town edition of Shakespeare (1907), has also urged these considerations.16I do not mean to imply that Meres necessarily refers to the sonnets we possess, or that all of these are likely to have been written by 1598.17A fact to be remembered in regard to references to the social position of the friend.18Mr. Beeching’s illustration of the friendship of the sonnets from the friendship of Gray and Bonstetten is worth pages of argument.19In 125 the poet repudiates the accusation that his friendship is too much based on beauty.20This does not imply that the Sonnets are as early as theTwo Gentlemen of Verona, and much less that they are earlier.21This seems to be referred to in lines by John Davies of Hereford, reprinted in Ingleby’sShakespeare’s Centurie of Prayse, second edition, pp. 58, 84, 94. In the first of these passages, dated 1603 (and perhaps in the second, 1609), there are signs that Davies had read Sonnet 111, a fact to be noted with regard to the question of the chronology of the Sonnets.22‘Mistress Tearsheet’ too ‘would fain hear some music,’ and ‘Sneak’s noise’ had to be sent for (2Henry IV.,II.iv. 12).23It is tempting, though not safe, to infer from theTempestand the great passage inPericlesthat Shakespeare must have been in a storm at sea; but that he felt the poetry of a sea-storm is beyond all doubt. Few moments in the reading of his works are more overwhelming than that in which, after listening not without difficulty to the writer of the first two Acts ofPericles, suddenly, as the third opens, one hears the authentic voice:Thou god of this great vast, rebuke these surgesThat wash both heaven and hell.... The seaman’s whistleIs as a whisper in the ears of death,Unheard.Knowing that this is coming, I cannot stop to read the Prologue to ActIII., though I believe Shakespeare wrote it. How it can be imagined that he did more than touch up ActsI.andII.passes my comprehension.I may call attention to another point. Unless I mistake, there is nothing in Shakespeare’s authorities, as known to us, which corresponds with the feeling of Timon’s last speech, beginning,Come not to me again: but say to Athens,Timon hath made his everlasting mansionUpon the beached verge of the salt flood:a feeling made more explicit in the final speech of Alcibiades.24The lily seems to be in almost all cases the Madonna lily. It is very doubtful whether the lily of the valley is referred to at all.25But there is something disappointing, and even estranging, in Sonnet 50, which, promising to show a real sympathy, cheats us in the end. I may observe, without implying that the fact has any personal significance, that the words about ‘the poor beetle that we tread upon’ are given to a woman (Isabella), and that it is Marina who says:I trod upon a worm against my will,But I wept for it.26Three times in one drama Shakespeare refers to this detestable trait. SeeShakespearean Tragedy, p. 268, where I should like to qualify still further the sentence containing the qualification ‘on the whole.’ Good judges, at least, assure me that I have admitted too much against the dog.27Nor can I recall any sign of liking, or even approval, of that ‘prudent,cautious, self-control’ which, according to a passage in Burns, is ‘wisdom’s root.’28Thelocus classicus, of course, isTroilus and Cressida,I.iii. 75 ff.29Of all the evils inflicted by man on man those chosen for mention in the dirge inCymbeline, one of the last plays, are the frown o’ the great, the tyrant’s stroke, slander, censure rash.30Having written these paragraphs, I should like to disclaim the belief that Shakespeare was habitually deeply discontented with his position in life.31Allusions to puritans show at most what we take almost for granted, that he did not like precisians or people hostile to the stage.32In the Sonnets, for example, there is an almost entire absence of definitely religious thought or feeling. The nearest approach to it is in Sonnet 146 (‘Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth’), where, however, there is no allusion to a divine law or judge. According to Sonnet 129, lust in action isThe expense of spirit in a waste of shame;but no word shows that it is also felt as alienation from God. It must be added that in 108 and 110 there are references to the Lord’s Prayer and, perhaps, to the First Commandment, from which a decidedly religious Christian would perhaps have shrunk. Of course I am not saying that we can draw anynecessaryinference from these facts.33It is only this ‘quiet but deep sense’ that is significant. No inference can be drawn from the fact that the mere belief in powers above seems to be taken as a matter of course in practically all the characters, good and bad alike. On the other hand there may well be something symptomatic in the apparent absence of interest in theoretical disbelief in such powers and in the immortality of the soul. I have observed elsewhere that the atheism of Aaron does not increase the probability that the conception of the character is Shakespeare’s.34With the first compare, what to me has, though more faintly, the same ring, Hermione’sIf powers divineBehold our human actions, as they do:with the second, Helena’sIt is not so with Him that all things knowsAs ’tis with us that square our guess by shows;But most it is presumption in us whenThe help of heaven we count the act of men:followed soon after by Lafeu’s remark:They say miracles are past; and we have our philosophical persons to make modern and familiar things supernatural and causeless. Hence it is that we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge, when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear.35It is worth noting that the reference, which appears in the First Quarto version of ‘To be or not to be,’ to ‘an everlasting judge,’ disappears in the revised versions.36The suggested inference, of course, is that this speech, thus out of character, and Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ (though that is in character), show us Shakespeare’s own mind. It has force, I think, but not compulsory force. The topics of these speeches are, in the old sense of the word, commonplaces. Shakespeare may have felt, Here is my chance to show what I can do with certain feelings and thoughts of supreme interest to men of all times and places and modes of belief. It would not follow from this that they are not ‘personal,’ but any inference to a non-acceptance of received religious ideas would be much weakened. (‘All the world’s a stage’ is a patent example of the suggested elaboration of a commonplace.)37What actions in particularhisconscience approved and disapproved is another question and one not relevant here.38This does not at all imply to Shakespeare, so far as we see, that evil is never to be forcibly resisted.39I do not mean to reject the idea that in some passages in theTempestShakespeare, while he wrote them with a dramatic purpose, also thought of himself. It seems to me likely. And if so, theremayhave been such a thought in the words,And thence retire me to my Milan, whereEvery third thought shall be my grave;and also in those lines about prayer and pardon which close the Epilogue, and to my ear come with a sudden effect of great seriousness, contrasting most strangely with their context. If theyhada grave and personal under-meaning it cannot have been intended for the audience, which would take the prayer as addressed to itself.40It may be added thatAs You Like It, though idyllic, is not so falsely idyllic as some critics would make it. It is based, we may roughly say, on a contrast between court and country; but those who inhale virtue from the woodland are courtiers who bring virtue with them, and the country has its churlish masters and unkind or uncouth maidens.41This has been strongly urged and fully illustrated by Mr. Harris.42It may be suggested that, in the catalogue above, I should have mentioned that imaginative ‘unreality’ in love referred to on p. 326. But I do not see in Hamlet either this, or any sign that he took Ophelia for an Imogen or even a Juliet, though naturally he was less clearly aware of her deficiencies than Shakespeare.I may add, however, another item to the catalogue. We do not feel that the problems presented to most of the tragic heroes could have been fatal to Shakespeare himself. The immense breadth and clearness of his intellect would have saved him from the fate of Othello, Troilus, or Antony. But we do feel, I think, and he himself may have felt, that he could not have coped with Hamlet’s problem; and there is no improbability in the idea that he may have experienced in some degree the melancholia of his hero.
1Unquestionably it holds in a considerable degree of Browning, who inAt the MermaidandHousewrote as though he imagined that neither his own work nor Shakespeare’s betrayed anything of the inner man. But if we are to criticise those two poems as arguments, we must say that they involve two hopelessly false assumptions, that we have to choose between a self-revelation like Byron’s and no self-revelation at all, and that the relation between a poet and his work is like that between the inside and the outside of a house.
2Almost all Shakespearean criticism, of course, contains something bearing on our subject; but I have a practical reason for mentioning in particular Mr. Frank Harris’s articles in theSaturday Reviewfor 1898. A good many of Mr. Harris’s views I cannot share, and I had arrived at almost all the ideas expressed in the lecture (except some on the Sonnets question) before reading his papers. But I found in them also valuable ideas which were quite new to me and would probably be so to many readers. It is a great pity that the articles are not collected and published in a book. [Mr. Harris has published, inThe Man Shakespeare, the substance of the articles, and also matter which, in my judgment, has much less value.]
3He is apologising for an attack made on Shakespeare in a pamphlet of which he was the publisher and Greene the writer.
4It was said of him, indeed, in his lifetime that, had he not played some kingly parts in sport (i.e.on the stage), he would have been a companion for a king.
5Nor,vice versa, does the possession of these latter qualities at all imply, as some writers seem to assume, the absence of the former or of gentleness.
6Fuller may be handing down a tradition, but it is not safe to assume this. His comparison, on the other hand, of Shakespeare and Jonson, in their wit combats, to an English man-of-war and a Spanish great galleon, reads as if his own happy fancy were operating on the reports, direct or indirect, of eye-witnesses.
7See, for example, ActIV.Sc. v., to which I know no parallel in the later tragedies.
8I allude to Sonnet 110, Mr. Beeching’s note on which seems to be unquestionably right: ‘There is no reference to the poet’s profession of player. The sonnet gives the confession of a favourite of society.’ This applies, I think, to the whole group of sonnets (it begins with 107) in which the poet excuses his neglect of his friend, though there arealsoreferences to his profession and its effect on his nature and his reputation. (By a slip Mr. Beeching makes the neglect last for three years.)
9It is perhaps most especially in his rendering of the shock and the effects ofdisillusionmentin open natures that we seem to feel Shakespeare’s personality. The nature of this shock is expressed in Henry’s words to Lord Scroop:
I will weep for thee;For this revolt of thine, methinks, is likeAnother fall of man.
I will weep for thee;
For this revolt of thine, methinks, is like
Another fall of man.
10There is nothing of this semi-reality, of course, in thepassionof love as portrayed, for example, in men so different as Orlando, Othello, Antony, Troilus, whose love for Cressida resembles that of Romeo for Juliet. What I have said of Romeo’s ‘love’ for Rosaline corresponds roughly with Coleridge’s view; and, without subscribing to all of Coleridge’s remarks, I believe he was right in finding an intentional contrast between this feeling and the passion that displaces it (though it does not follow that the feeling would not have become a genuine passion if Rosaline had been kind). Nor do I understand the notion that Coleridge’s view is refuted and even rendered ridiculous by the mere fact that Shakespeare found the Rosaline story in Brooke (Halliwell-Phillipps,Outlines, 7th ed., illustrative note 2). Was he compelled then to use whatever he found? Was it his practice to do so? The question is alwayswhyhe used what he found, andhow. Coleridge’s view of this matter, it need hardly be said, is far from indisputable; but it must be judged by our knowledge of Shakespeare’s mind and not of his material alone. I may add, as I have referred to Halliwell-Phillipps, that Shakespeare made changes in the story he found; that it is arbitrary to assume (not that it matters) that Coleridge, who read Steevens, was unaware of Shakespeare’s use of Brooke; and that Brooke was by no means a ‘wretched poetaster.’
11Hamlet,Measure for Measure,Othello,Troilus and Cressida,King Lear,Timon of Athens. SeeShakespearean Tragedy, pp. 79-85, 275-6. I should like to insist on the view there taken that the tragedies subsequent toLearandTimondo not show the pressure of painful feelings.
12It is not implied that these scenes are certainly Shakespeare’s; but I see no sufficient ground for decisively rejecting them.
13That experience, certainly in part and probably wholly, belongs to an earlier time, since sonnets 138 and 144 were printed in thePassionate Pilgrim. But I see no difficulty in that. What bears little fruit in a normal condition of spirits may bear abundant fruit later, in moods of discouragement and exasperation induced largely by other causes.
14The Sonnets of Shakespeare with an Introduction and Notes.Ginn & Co., 1904.
15I find that Mr. Beeching, in the Stratford Town edition of Shakespeare (1907), has also urged these considerations.
16I do not mean to imply that Meres necessarily refers to the sonnets we possess, or that all of these are likely to have been written by 1598.
17A fact to be remembered in regard to references to the social position of the friend.
18Mr. Beeching’s illustration of the friendship of the sonnets from the friendship of Gray and Bonstetten is worth pages of argument.
19In 125 the poet repudiates the accusation that his friendship is too much based on beauty.
20This does not imply that the Sonnets are as early as theTwo Gentlemen of Verona, and much less that they are earlier.
21This seems to be referred to in lines by John Davies of Hereford, reprinted in Ingleby’sShakespeare’s Centurie of Prayse, second edition, pp. 58, 84, 94. In the first of these passages, dated 1603 (and perhaps in the second, 1609), there are signs that Davies had read Sonnet 111, a fact to be noted with regard to the question of the chronology of the Sonnets.
22‘Mistress Tearsheet’ too ‘would fain hear some music,’ and ‘Sneak’s noise’ had to be sent for (2Henry IV.,II.iv. 12).
23It is tempting, though not safe, to infer from theTempestand the great passage inPericlesthat Shakespeare must have been in a storm at sea; but that he felt the poetry of a sea-storm is beyond all doubt. Few moments in the reading of his works are more overwhelming than that in which, after listening not without difficulty to the writer of the first two Acts ofPericles, suddenly, as the third opens, one hears the authentic voice:
Thou god of this great vast, rebuke these surgesThat wash both heaven and hell.... The seaman’s whistleIs as a whisper in the ears of death,Unheard.
Thou god of this great vast, rebuke these surges
That wash both heaven and hell.... The seaman’s whistle
Is as a whisper in the ears of death,
Unheard.
Knowing that this is coming, I cannot stop to read the Prologue to ActIII., though I believe Shakespeare wrote it. How it can be imagined that he did more than touch up ActsI.andII.passes my comprehension.
I may call attention to another point. Unless I mistake, there is nothing in Shakespeare’s authorities, as known to us, which corresponds with the feeling of Timon’s last speech, beginning,
Come not to me again: but say to Athens,Timon hath made his everlasting mansionUpon the beached verge of the salt flood:
Come not to me again: but say to Athens,
Timon hath made his everlasting mansion
Upon the beached verge of the salt flood:
a feeling made more explicit in the final speech of Alcibiades.
24The lily seems to be in almost all cases the Madonna lily. It is very doubtful whether the lily of the valley is referred to at all.
25But there is something disappointing, and even estranging, in Sonnet 50, which, promising to show a real sympathy, cheats us in the end. I may observe, without implying that the fact has any personal significance, that the words about ‘the poor beetle that we tread upon’ are given to a woman (Isabella), and that it is Marina who says:
I trod upon a worm against my will,But I wept for it.
I trod upon a worm against my will,
But I wept for it.
26Three times in one drama Shakespeare refers to this detestable trait. SeeShakespearean Tragedy, p. 268, where I should like to qualify still further the sentence containing the qualification ‘on the whole.’ Good judges, at least, assure me that I have admitted too much against the dog.
27Nor can I recall any sign of liking, or even approval, of that ‘prudent,cautious, self-control’ which, according to a passage in Burns, is ‘wisdom’s root.’
28Thelocus classicus, of course, isTroilus and Cressida,I.iii. 75 ff.
29Of all the evils inflicted by man on man those chosen for mention in the dirge inCymbeline, one of the last plays, are the frown o’ the great, the tyrant’s stroke, slander, censure rash.
30Having written these paragraphs, I should like to disclaim the belief that Shakespeare was habitually deeply discontented with his position in life.
31Allusions to puritans show at most what we take almost for granted, that he did not like precisians or people hostile to the stage.
32In the Sonnets, for example, there is an almost entire absence of definitely religious thought or feeling. The nearest approach to it is in Sonnet 146 (‘Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth’), where, however, there is no allusion to a divine law or judge. According to Sonnet 129, lust in action is
The expense of spirit in a waste of shame;
The expense of spirit in a waste of shame;
but no word shows that it is also felt as alienation from God. It must be added that in 108 and 110 there are references to the Lord’s Prayer and, perhaps, to the First Commandment, from which a decidedly religious Christian would perhaps have shrunk. Of course I am not saying that we can draw anynecessaryinference from these facts.
33It is only this ‘quiet but deep sense’ that is significant. No inference can be drawn from the fact that the mere belief in powers above seems to be taken as a matter of course in practically all the characters, good and bad alike. On the other hand there may well be something symptomatic in the apparent absence of interest in theoretical disbelief in such powers and in the immortality of the soul. I have observed elsewhere that the atheism of Aaron does not increase the probability that the conception of the character is Shakespeare’s.
34With the first compare, what to me has, though more faintly, the same ring, Hermione’s
If powers divineBehold our human actions, as they do:
If powers divine
Behold our human actions, as they do:
with the second, Helena’s
It is not so with Him that all things knowsAs ’tis with us that square our guess by shows;But most it is presumption in us whenThe help of heaven we count the act of men:
It is not so with Him that all things knows
As ’tis with us that square our guess by shows;
But most it is presumption in us when
The help of heaven we count the act of men:
followed soon after by Lafeu’s remark:
They say miracles are past; and we have our philosophical persons to make modern and familiar things supernatural and causeless. Hence it is that we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge, when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear.
They say miracles are past; and we have our philosophical persons to make modern and familiar things supernatural and causeless. Hence it is that we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge, when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear.
35It is worth noting that the reference, which appears in the First Quarto version of ‘To be or not to be,’ to ‘an everlasting judge,’ disappears in the revised versions.
36The suggested inference, of course, is that this speech, thus out of character, and Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ (though that is in character), show us Shakespeare’s own mind. It has force, I think, but not compulsory force. The topics of these speeches are, in the old sense of the word, commonplaces. Shakespeare may have felt, Here is my chance to show what I can do with certain feelings and thoughts of supreme interest to men of all times and places and modes of belief. It would not follow from this that they are not ‘personal,’ but any inference to a non-acceptance of received religious ideas would be much weakened. (‘All the world’s a stage’ is a patent example of the suggested elaboration of a commonplace.)
37What actions in particularhisconscience approved and disapproved is another question and one not relevant here.
38This does not at all imply to Shakespeare, so far as we see, that evil is never to be forcibly resisted.
39I do not mean to reject the idea that in some passages in theTempestShakespeare, while he wrote them with a dramatic purpose, also thought of himself. It seems to me likely. And if so, theremayhave been such a thought in the words,
And thence retire me to my Milan, whereEvery third thought shall be my grave;
And thence retire me to my Milan, where
Every third thought shall be my grave;
and also in those lines about prayer and pardon which close the Epilogue, and to my ear come with a sudden effect of great seriousness, contrasting most strangely with their context. If theyhada grave and personal under-meaning it cannot have been intended for the audience, which would take the prayer as addressed to itself.
40It may be added thatAs You Like It, though idyllic, is not so falsely idyllic as some critics would make it. It is based, we may roughly say, on a contrast between court and country; but those who inhale virtue from the woodland are courtiers who bring virtue with them, and the country has its churlish masters and unkind or uncouth maidens.
41This has been strongly urged and fully illustrated by Mr. Harris.
42It may be suggested that, in the catalogue above, I should have mentioned that imaginative ‘unreality’ in love referred to on p. 326. But I do not see in Hamlet either this, or any sign that he took Ophelia for an Imogen or even a Juliet, though naturally he was less clearly aware of her deficiencies than Shakespeare.
I may add, however, another item to the catalogue. We do not feel that the problems presented to most of the tragic heroes could have been fatal to Shakespeare himself. The immense breadth and clearness of his intellect would have saved him from the fate of Othello, Troilus, or Antony. But we do feel, I think, and he himself may have felt, that he could not have coped with Hamlet’s problem; and there is no improbability in the idea that he may have experienced in some degree the melancholia of his hero.
SHAKESPEARE’S THEATRE AND AUDIENCE.
SHAKESPEARE’S THEATRE AND AUDIENCE.
Whyshould we concern ourselves with Shakespeare’s theatre and audience? The vast majority of his readers since the Restoration have known nothing about them, and have enjoyed his plays enormously. And if they have enjoyed without fully understanding, it was for want of imagination and of knowledge of human nature, and not from ignorance of the conditions under which his plays were produced. At any rate, such ignorance does not exclude us from thesoulof Shakespearean drama, any more than from the soul of Homeric epic or Athenian tragedy; and it is the soul that counts and endures. For the rest, we all know that Shakespeare’s time was rough, indecorous, and inexpert in regard to machinery; and so we are prepared for coarse speech and primitive stage-arrangements, and we make allowance for them without thinking about the matter. Antiquarians may naturally wish to know more; but what more is needed for intelligent enjoyment of the plays?
I have begun with these questions because I sympathise with their spirit. Everything I am going to speak of in this lecture is comparatively unimportant for the appreciation of that which is most vital in Shakespeare; and if I were allowed my choice between an hour’s inspection of a performance at the Globe and a glimpse straight into his mind when hewas planning theTempest, I should not hesitate which to choose. Nevertheless, to say nothing of the intrinsic interest of antiquarian knowledge, we cannot make a clear division between the soul and body, or the eternal and the perishable, in works of art. Nor can we lay the finger on a line which separates that which has poetic interest from that which has none. Nor yet can we assume that any knowledge of Shakespeare’s theatre and audience, however trivial it may appear, may not help us to appreciate, or save us from misapprehending, the ‘soul’ of a play or a scene. If our own souls were capacious and vivid enough, every atom of information on these subjects, or again on the material he used in composing, would so assist us. The danger of devotion to such knowledge lies merely in our weakness. Research, though toilsome, is easy; imaginative vision, though delightful, is difficult; and we may be tempted to prefer the first. Or we note that in a given passage Shakespeare has used what he found in his authority; and we excuse ourselves from asking why he used it and what he made of it. Or we see that he has done something that would please his audience; and we dismiss it as accounted for, forgetting that perhaps it also pleasedhim, and that we have to account forthat. Or knowledge of his stage shows us the stage-convenience of a scene; and we say that the scene was due to stage-convenience, as if the cause of a thing must needs be single and simple. Such errors provoke the man who reads his Shakespeare poetically, and make him blaspheme our knowledge. But we ought not to fall into them; and we cannot reject any knowledge that may help us into Shakespeare’s mind because of the danger it brings.
I cannot attempt to describe Shakespeare’s theatre and audience, and much less to discuss the evidence on which a description must be based, or the difficult problems it raises. I must confine myself for themost part to a few points which are not always fully realised, or on which there is a risk of misapprehension.
1.
Shakespeare, we know, was a popular playwright. I mean not only that many of his plays were favourites in his day, but that he wrote, mainly at least, for the more popular kind of audience, and that, within certain limits, he conformed to its tastes. He was not, to our knowledge, the author of masques composed for performance at Court or in a great mansion, or of dramas intended for a University or one of the Inns of Court; and though his company for some time played at the Blackfriars, we may safely assume that the great majority of his works were meant primarily for a common or ‘public’ theatre like the Globe. The broad distinction between a ‘private’ and a ‘public’ theatre is familiar, and I need only remind you that at the former, which was smaller, provided seats even in the area, and was nowhere open to the weather, the audience was more select. Accordingly, dramatists who express their contempt for the audience, and their disapproval of those who consult its tastes, often discriminate between the audiences at the private and public theatres, and reserve their unmeasured language for the latter. It was for the latter that Shakespeare mainly wrote; and it is pretty clear that Jonson, who greatly admired and loved him, was still of opinion that he condescended to his audience.1
So far we seem to be on safe ground; and yet even here there is some risk of mistake. We are not to imagine that the audience at a private theatre (say the Blackfriars) accepted Jonson’s dramatictheories, while the audience at the Globe rejected them; or that the one was composed chiefly of cultured and ‘judicious’ gentlemen, and the other of riotous and malodorous plebeians; and still less that Shakespeare tried to please the latter section in preference to the former, and was beloved by the one more than by the other. The two audiences must have had the same general character, differing only in degree. Neither of them accepted Jonson’s theories, nor were the ‘judicious’ of one mind on that subject. The same play was frequently offered to both. Both were very mixed. The tastes to which objection was taken cannot have been confined to the mob. From our knowledge of human nature generally, and of the Elizabethan nobility and gentry in particular, we may be sure of this; and Jonson himself implies it. Nor is it credible that an appreciation of the best things was denied to the mob, which doubtless loved what we should despise, but appears also to have admired what we admire, and to have tolerated more poetry than most of us can stomach. Neither can these groundlings have formed the majority of the ‘public’ audience or have been omnipotent in their theatre, when it was possible for dramatists (Shakespeare included) to say such rude things of them to their faces. We must not delude ourselves as to these matters; and in particular we must realise that the mass of the audience in both kinds of theatre must have been indifferent to the unities of time and place, and more or less so to improbabilities and to decorum (at least as we conceive it) both in manners and in speech; and that it must have liked excitement, the open exhibition of violent and bloody deeds, and the intermixture of seriousness and mirth. What distinguished the more popular audience, and the more popular section in it, was a higher degree of this indifference and this liking, and in addition a special fondness for certain sources of inartistic joy.The most prominent of these, perhaps, were noise; rant; mere bawdry; ‘shews’; irrelevant songs, ballads, jokes, dances, and clownage in general; and, lastly, target-fighting and battles.2
We may describe Shakespeare’s practice in broad and general terms by saying that he neither resisted the wishes of his audience nor gratified them without reserve. He accepted the type of drama that he found, and developed it without altering its fundamental character. And in the same way, in particular matters, he gave the audience what it wanted, but in doing so gave it what it never dreamed of. It liked tragedy to be relieved by rough mirth, and it got the Grave-diggers inHamletand the old countryman inAntony and Cleopatra. It liked a ‘drum and trumpet’ history, and it gotHenry V.It liked clowns or fools, and it got Feste and the Fool inKing Lear. Shakespeare’s practice was by no means always on this level, but this was its tendency; and I imagine that (unless perhaps in early days) he knew clearly what he was doing, did it deliberately, and, when he gave the audience poor stuff, would not seriously have defended himself. Jonson, it would seem, did not understand this position. A fool was a fool to him; and if a play could be called a drum and trumpet history it was at once condemned in his eyes. One can hardly doubt that he was alluding to theTempestand theWinter’s Talewhen, a few years after the probable date of their appearance, he spoke of writers who ‘make nature afraid in their plays,’ begetting ‘tales, tempests, and such like drolleries,’ and bringing in ‘a servant-monster’ or ‘a nest of antiques.’ Caliban was a ‘monster,’ and the London public loved to gape at monsters; and so, it appears, that wonderful creation was to Jonson something like the fat woman, or the calf with five legs, that we pay apenny to see at a fair. In fact (how could he fail to take the warning?) he saw Caliban with the eyes of Trinculo and Stephano. ‘A strange fish!’ says Trinculo: ‘were I in England now, as once I was, and had but this fish painted, not a holiday fool there but would give a piece of silver.’ ‘If I can recover him,’ says Stephano, ‘and keep him tame and get to Naples with him, he’s a present for any emperor that ever trod on neat’s-leather.’ Shakespeare understood his monster otherwise; but, I fancy, when Jonson fulminated at the Mermaid against Caliban, he smiled and said nothing.
But my present subject is rather the tastes of the audience than Shakespeare’s way of meeting them.3Let me give two illustrations of them which may have some novelty. His public, in the first place, dearly loved to see soldiers, combats, and battles on the stage. They swarm in some of the dramas a little earlier than Shakespeare’s time, and the cultured dramatists speak very contemptuously of these productions, if not of Shakespeare’s historical plays. We may take as an example the First Part ofHenry VI., a feeble piece, to which Shakespeare probably contributed touches throughout, and perhaps one or two complete scenes. It appears from the stage directions (which may be defective, but cannot well be redundant) that in this one play there were represented a pitched battle of two armies, an attack on a city wall with scaling-ladders, two street-scuffles, four single combats, four skirmishes, and seven excursions. No genuine play of Shakespeare’s, I suppose, is so military from beginning to end; and we know how inHenry V.he laments that he must disgrace the name of Agincourt by showing four or five men with vile and ragged foils
Right ill-disposed in brawl ridiculous.
Right ill-disposed in brawl ridiculous.
Still he does show them; and his serious dramas contain such a profusion of combats and battles as no playwright now would dream of exhibiting. Weexpect these things perhaps in the English history-plays, and we find them in abundance there: but not there alone. The last Act inJulius Cæsar,Troilus and Cressida,King Lear,Macbeth, andCymbeline; the fourth Act ofAntony and Cleopatra; the opening Acts ofCoriolanus,—these are all full of battle-scenes. If battle cannot be shown, it can be described. If it cannot be described, still soldiers can be shown, and twice inHamletFortinbras and his army march upon the stage.4At worst there can be street-brawls and single fights, as inRomeo and Juliet. In reading Shakespeare we scarcely realise how much of this kind is exhibited. In seeing him acted we do not fully realise it, for much of it is omitted. But beyond doubt it helped to make him the most popular dramatist of his time.
If we examine Shakespeare’s battles we shall observe a certain peculiarity, which is connected with the nature of his theatre and also explains the treatment of them in ours. In most cases he does not give a picture of two whole armies engaged, but makes a pair of combatants rush upon the stage, fight, and rush off again; and this pair is succeeded by a second, and perhaps by a third. This hurried series of single combats admitted of speech-making; perhaps it also gave some impression of the changes and confusion of a battle. Our tendency, on the other hand, is to contrive one spectacle with scenic effects, or even to exhibit one magnificent tableau in which nobody says a word. And this plan, though it has the advantage of getting rid of Shakespeare’s poetry, is not exactly dramatic. It is adopted chiefly because the taste of our public is, or is supposed to be, less dramatic than spectacular, and because, unlike the Elizabethans, we are able to gratify such a taste. But there is another fact to be rememberedhere. Few playgoers now can appreciate a fencing-match, and much fewer a broad-sword and target fight. But the Elizabethan public went to see performances of this kind as we go to see cricket or football matches. They might watch them in the very building which at other times was used as a playhouse.5They could judge of the merit of the exhibition when Hotspur and Prince Henry fought, when Macduff ‘laid on,’ or when Tybalt and Mercutio used their rapiers. And this was probably another reason why Shakespeare’s battles so often consist of single combats, and why these scenes were beloved by the simpler folk among his audience.
Our second illustration concerns the popular appetite for musical and other sounds. The introduction of songs and dances6was censured as a corrupt gratification of this appetite. And so it was when the songs and dances were excessive in number, irrelevant, or out of keeping with the scene. I do not remember that in Shakespeare’s plays this is ever the case; but, in respect of songs, we may perhaps take Marston’sAntonio and Mellidaas an instance of abuse. For in each of the two Parts of that play there are directions for five songs; and, since not even the first lines of these songs are printed, we must suppose that the leader of the band, or the singing actor in the company, introduced whatever he chose. In addition to songs and dances, the musicians, at least in some plays, performed between the Acts; and the practice of accompanying certain speeches by low music—a practice which in some performances of Shakespeare now has become a pest—has the sanction of several Elizabethan playwrights, and (to a slight extent) of Shakespeare. It seemsclear, for example, that inTwelfth Nightlow music was played while the lovely opening lines (‘That strain again’) were being spoken, and also during a part of the dialogue preceding the song ‘Come away, come away, death.’ Some lines, too, of Lorenzo’s famous speech about music in theMerchant of Venicewere probably accompanied; and there is a still more conspicuous instance in the scene where Lear wakes from his long sleep and sees Cordelia standing by his side.
But, beyond all this, if we attend to the stage-directions we shall realise that in the serious plays of Shakespeare other musical sounds were of frequent occurrence. Almost always the ceremonial entrance of a royal person is marked by a ‘flourish’ or a ‘sennet’ on trumpets, cornets, or hautboys; and wherever we have armies and battles we find directions for drums, or for particular series of notes of trumpets or cornets appropriate to particular military movements. In the First Part ofHenry VI., to take that early play again, we must imagine a dead march, two other marches, three retreats, three sennets, seven flourishes, eighteen alarums; and there are besides five directions for drums, one for a horn, and five for soundings, of a kind not specified, by trumpets. In the last three scenes of the first Act inCoriolanus—scenes containing less than three hundred and fifty lines—there are directions for a parley, a retreat, five flourishes, and eight alarums, with three, less specific, for trumpets, and four for drums. We find about twenty such directions inKing Lear, and about twenty-five inMacbeth, a short play in which hautboys seem to have been unusually favoured.7It is evident that the audience loved these sounds, which, from their prevalence in passages of special kinds, seem to have been intended chiefly to stimulate excitement,and sometimes to heighten impressions of grandeur or of awe.
But this is not all. Such purposes were also served by noises not musical. Four times inMacbeth, when the Witches appear, thunder is heard. It thunders and lightens at intervals through the storm-scenes inKing Lear. Casca and Cassius, dark thoughts within them, walk the streets of Rome in a terrific thunderstorm. That loud insistent knocking which appalled Macbeth is repeated thrice at intervals while Lady Macbeth in vain endeavours to calm him, and five times while the Porter fumbles with his keys. The gate has hardly been opened and the murder discovered when the castle-bell begins its hideous alarum. The alarm-bell is used for the same purpose of intensifying excitement in the brawl that ruins Cassio, and its effect is manifest in Othello’s immediate order, ‘Silence that dreadful bell.’ I will add but one instance more. In the days of my youth, before the melodrama audience dreamed of seeing chariot-races, railway accidents, or the infernal regions, on the stage, it loved few things better than the explosion of fire-arms; and its favourite weapon was the pistol. The Elizabethans had the same fancy for fire-arms, only they preferred cannon. Shakespeare’s theatre was burnt down in 1613 at a performance ofHenry VIII., not, I suppose, as Prynne imagined, by a Providence which shared his opinion of the drama, but because the wadding of a cannon fired during the play flew to the thatch of the roof and set it ablaze. InHamletShakespeare gave the public plenty that they could not understand, but he made it up to them in explosions. While Hamlet, Horatio, and Marcellus are waiting for the Ghost, a flourish is heard, and then the roar of cannon. It is the custom to fire them when the King drinks a pledge; and this King drinks many. In the fencing-scene at the end he proposes to drink one for everyhit scored by his beloved nephew; and the first hit is duly honoured by the cannon. Unexpected events prevented the celebration of the second, but the audience lost nothing by that. While Hamlet lies dying, a sudden explosion is heard. Fortinbras is coming with his army. And, as if that were not enough, the very last words of the play are, ‘Go, bid the soldiers shoot,’ and the very last sound of the performance is a peal of ordnance. Into this most mysterious and inward of his works, it would seem, the poet flung, as if in derision of his cultured critics, well-nigh every stimulant of popular excitement he could collect: ‘carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts’; five deaths on the open stage, three appearances of a ghost, two of a mad woman, a dumb-show, two men raving and fighting in a grave at a funeral, the skulls and bones of the dead, a clown bandying jests with a prince, songs at once indecent and pathetic, marching soldiers, a fencing-match, then a litter of corpses, and explosions in the first Act and explosions in the last. And yet out of this sensational material—not in spite of it, but out of it—he made the most mysterious and inward of his dramas, which leaves us haunted by thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls; and he knew that the very audience that rejoiced in ghosts and explosions would listen, even while it was waiting for the ghost, to that which the explosion had suggested,—a general disquisition, twenty-five lines long, on the manner in which one defect may spoil a noble reputation. In this strange harmony of discords, surely unexampled before or since, we may see at a glance the essence of Elizabethan drama, of its poet, and of its audience.
2.
We have been occupied so far with characteristics of the drama which reflect the more distinctively popular tastes objected to by critics like Jonson.We may now pass on to arrangements common to all public theatres, whether the play performed were Jonson’s or Shakespeare’s; and in the first instance to a characteristic common to the public and private theatres alike.
As everyone knows, the female parts in stage-plays were taken by boys, youths, or men (a mask being sometimes worn in the last case). The indecorous Elizabethans regarded this custom almost entirely from the point of view of decorum and morality. And as to morality, no one, I believe, who examines the evidence, especially as it concerns the state of things that followed the introduction of actresses at the Restoration, will be very ready to dissent from their opinion. But it is often assumed as a matter beyond dispute that, on the side of dramatic effect, the Elizabethan practice was extremely unfortunate, if not downright absurd. This idea appears to me, to say the least, exaggerated. Our practice may be the better; for a few Shakespearean parts itoughtto be much better; but that, on the whole, it is decidedly so, or that the old custom had anything absurd about it, there seems no reason to believe. In the first place, experience in private and semi-private performances shows that female parts may be excellently acted by youths or men, and that the most obvious drawback, that of the adult male voice, is not felt to be nearly so serious as we might anticipate. For a minute or two it may call for a slight exertion of imagination in the audience; but there is no more radical error than to suppose that an audience finds this irksome, or to forget that the use of imagination at one point quickens it at other points, and so is a positive gain. And we have further to remember that the Elizabethan actor of female parts was no amateur, but a professional as carefully trained as an actress now; while dramatically he had this advantage over the actress, that he was regarded simply as a player,and not also as a woman with an attractive or unattractive person.8
In the second place, if the current ideas on this subject were true, there would be, it seems to me, more evidence of their truth. We should find, for example, that when first the new fashion came in, it was hailed by good judges as a very great improvement on the old. But the traces of such an opinion appear very scanty and doubtful, while it is certain that one of the few actors who after the Restoration still played female parts maintained a high reputation and won great applause. Again, if these parts in Shakespeare’s day were very inadequately performed, would not the effect of that fact be distinctly visible in the plays themselves? The rôles in question would be less important in Shakespeare’s dramas, for example, than in dramas of later times: but I do not see that they are. Besides, in the Shakespearean play itself the female parts would be much less important than the male: but on the whole they are not. In the tragedies and histories, it is true, the impelling forces of the action usually belong in larger measure to men than to women. But that is because the action in such plays is laid in the sphere of public life; and in cases where, in spite of this, the heroine is as prominent as the hero, her part—the part of Juliet, Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth—certainly requires as good acting as his. As to the comedies, if we ask ourselves who are the central or the most interesting figures in them, we shall find that we pronounce a woman’s name at least as often as a man’s. I understate the case. Of Shakespeare’s mature comedies theMerchant of Venice, I believe, is the only one where this name would unquestionably be a man’s, and in three of the last five it would almost certainly be a woman’s—Isabella’s,Imogen’s, Hermione’s. How shall we reconcile with these facts the idea that in his day the female parts were, on the whole, much less adequately played than the male? And finally, if the dramatists themselves believed this, why do we not find frequent indications of the belief in their prologues, epilogues, prefaces, and plays?9
We must conclude, it would seem, that the absence of actresses from the Elizabethan theatre, though at first it may appear to us highly important, made no great difference to the dramas themselves.
3.
That certainly cannot be said of the construction and arrangements of the stage. On this subject a great deal has been written of late years, and as regards many details there is still much difference of opinion.10But fortunately all that is of great moment for our present purpose is tolerably certain. In trying to bring it out, I will begin by reminding you of our present stage. For it is the stage, and not the rest of the theatre, that is of special interest here; and no serious harm will be done if, for the rest, we imagine Shakespeare’s theatre with boxes, circles, and galleries like our own, though in the shape of a more elongated horse-shoe than ours. We must imagine, of course, an area too; but there, as we shall see, an important difference comes in.
Our present stage may be called a box with one of its sides knocked out. Through this opening, which has an ornamental frame, we look into the box. Its three upright sides (for we may ignore the bottom and the top) are composed of movable painted scenes, which are changed from time to time during the course of the play. Before the play and after it the opening is blocked by a curtain, dropped from the top of the frame; and this is also dropped at intervals during the performance, that the scenes may be changed.
In all these respects the Elizabethan arrangement was quite different. The stage came forward to about the middle of the area; so that a line bisecting the house would have coincided with the line of footlights, if there had been such things. The stage was therefore a platform viewed from both sides and not only from the front; and along its sides, as well as in front of it, stood the people who paid least, the groundlings, sometimes punningly derided by dramatists as ‘the men of understanding.’ Obviously, the sides of this platform were open; nor were there movable scenes even at the back of it; nor was there any front curtain. It was overshadowed by a projecting roof; but the area, or ‘yard,’ where the groundlings stood, was open to the weather, and accordingly the theatre could not be darkened. It will be seen that, when the actors were on the forward part of the stage, they were (to exaggerate a little) in the middle of the audience, like the performers in a circus now. And on this forward naked part of the stage most of a Shakespearean drama was played. We may call it the main or front stage.11
If now we look towards the rear of this stage, what do we find? In the first place, while the backof our present-day box consists of a movable scene, that of the Elizabethan stage was formed by the ‘tiring-house,’ or dressing-room, of the actors. In its wall were two doors, by which entrances and exits were made. But it was not merely a tiring-house. In the play it might represent a room, a house, a castle, the wall of a town; and the doors played their parts accordingly. Again, when a person speaks ‘from within,’ that doubtless means that he is in the tiring-house, opens one of the doors a little, and speaks through the chink. So apparently did the prompter.
Secondly, on the top of the tiring-house was the ‘upper stage’ or ‘balcony,’ which looked down on the platform stage. It is hardly possible to make brief statements about it that would be secure. For our purposes it may be imagined as a balcony jutting forward a little from the line of the tiring-house; and it will suffice to add that, though the whole or part of it was on some occasions, or in some theatres, occupied by spectators, the whole or part of it was sometimes used by the actors and was indispensably requisite to the performance of the play. ‘Enter above’ or ‘enter aloft’ means that the actor was to appear on this upper stage or balcony. Usually, no doubt, he reached it by a ladder or stair inside the tiring-house; but on occasions there were ascents or descents directly from, or to, the main stage, as we see from ‘climbs the tree and is received above’ or ‘the citizens leap from the walls.’ The reader of Shakespeare will at once remember many scenes where the balcony was used. On it, as the city wall, appeared the Governor and citizens of Harfleur, while King Henry and his train stood before the gates below. From it Arthur made his fatal leap. It was Cleopatra’s monument, into which she and her women drew up the dying Antony. Juliet talked to Romeo from it; and from it Romeo (‘one kiss and I’ll descend’) ‘goeth down’to the main stage. Richard appeared there between the two bishops; and there the spectators imagined Duncan murdered in his sleep.12But they could not look into his chamber. The balcony could be concealed by curtains, running, like all Elizabethan stage curtains, on a rod.
In the third place, there was, towards the back of the main stage, a part that could be curtained off, and so separated from the front part of that stage. Let us call it the back stage. It is the matter about which there is most difficulty and controversy; but the general description just given would be accepted by almost all scholars and will suffice for us. Here was the curtain (more strictly, the curtains) through which the actors peeped at the audience before the play began, and at which the groundlings hurled apples and other missiles to hasten their coming or signify disapproval of them. And this ‘back stage’ was essential to many performances, and was used in a variety of ways. It was the room where Henry IV. lay dying; the cave of Timon or of Belarius; probably the tent in which Richmond slept before the battle of Bosworth; the cell of Prospero, who draws the curtains apart and shows Ferdinand and Miranda playing at chess within; and here, I imagine, and not on the balcony, Juliet, after drinking the potion, ‘falls upon her bed within the curtains.’13Finally, the back stage accounts for those passages where, at the close of a death-scene, there is no indication that the corpse was carried off the stage. If the death took place on the open stage, as it usually did, this of course was necessary, since there was no front curtain to drop; and so we usually find in thedialogue words like ‘Take up the bodies’ (Hamlet), or ‘Bear them from hence’ (King Lear). But Desdemona was murdered in her bed on the back stage; and there died also Othello and Emilia; so that Lodovico orders the bodies to be ‘hid,’ not carried off. The curtains were drawn together, and the dead actors withdrew into the tiring-house unseen,14while the living went off openly.
This triple stage is the primary thing to remember about Shakespeare’s theatre: a platform coming well forward into the yard, completely open in the larger front part, but having further back a part that could be curtained off, and overlooked by an upper stage or balcony above the tiring-house. Only a few further details need be mentioned. Though scenery was unknown, there were plenty of properties, as may be gathered from the dramas and, more quickly, from the accounts of Henslowe, the manager of the Rose. Chairs, benches, and tables are a matter of course. Kent sat in the stocks. The witches had a caldron. Imogen slept in a bed, and Iachimo crept out of his trunk in her room. Falstaff was carried off the stage in a clothes-basket. I have quoted the direction ‘climb the tree.’ A ‘banquet’ figures in Henslowe’s list, and in theTempest‘several strange shapes’ bring one in. He mentions a ‘tomb,’ and it is possible, though not likely, that the tomb of the Capulets was a property; and he mentions a ‘moss-bank,’ doubtless such as that where the wild thyme was blowing for Titania. Her lover, you remember, wore an ass’s head, and the Falstaff of theMerry Wivesa buck’s. There were whole animals, too. ‘A great horse with his legs’is in Henslowe’s list; and in a play not by Shakespeare Jonah is cast out of the whale’s belly on to the stage. Besides these properties there was a contrivance with ropes and pulleys, by which a heavenly being could descend from the stage-roof (the ‘heaven’), as inCymbelineJupiter descends upon his eagle. When his speech is over we find the direction ‘ascends.’ Soon after comes another direction: ‘vanish.’ This is addressed not to Jupiter but to various ghosts who are present. For there was a hollow space under the stage, and a trap-door into it. Through this ghosts usually made their entrances and exits; and ‘vanish’ seems commonly to mean an exit that way. Through it, too, arose and sank the witches’ caldron and the apparitions shown to Macbeth. A person could speak from under the stage, as the Ghost does when Hamlet calls him ‘old mole’; and the musicians could go and play there, as they do in the scene where Antony’s soldiers hear strange music on the night before the battle; ‘Musicke of the Hoboyes is under the Stage’ the direction runs (‘Hoboyes’ were used also in the witch-scene just mentioned).