William ShakespeareAS A COMIC DRAMATISTA Monograph by EdwardDowden, LL. D., Professorin Trinity College, Dublin.
A Monograph by EdwardDowden, LL. D., Professorin Trinity College, Dublin.
The Essentials of Shakespearian Comedy.—The Comedies of Shakespeare, which form more than a third part of his dramatic work, belong to every period of his career as a writer, except one. During a few years, soon after the opening of the seventeenth century, he turned away from comedy, or rather he was drawn by some irresistible attraction to explore the tragic depths of life, and for a time its bright or variegated surface was lost to view. The results of his passionate inquisition of evil entered into the spirit of his latest plays, which we might name "romances" rather than "comedies," and hence the study of Shakespeare's lighter and brighter work cannot be wholly dissociated from the study of that in which terror and pity are the presiding powers.
To conceive Shakespearian comedy aright we must disconnect the word "comedy" from the associations derived from its adjectives "comic" and "comical"; we must recognize the fact that, though laughter is one of its incidents, laughter is not its end. Our chief living master of the carte and tierce of wit, Mr. George Meredith, describes folly as the natural prey of the comic spirit, "known to it in all her transformations, in every disguise; and it is with the springing delight of hawk over heron, hound after fox, that it gives her chase, never fretting, never tiring, sure of having her, allowing her no rest." Shakespeare's comedy includes the intellectual delight of chasing down folly and being in at the death, but this is not its main purpose. Nor is he eager to assume the part of the indignant moral satirist. It is not he but Ben Jonson, in the person of Asper, who announces that "with an armèd and resolvèd hand" he will
"Strip the ragged follies of their timeNaked as at their birth . . .. . . and with a whip of steelPrint wounding lashes in their iron ribs."
"Strip the ragged follies of their timeNaked as at their birth . . .. . . and with a whip of steelPrint wounding lashes in their iron ribs."
"Strip the ragged follies of their timeNaked as at their birth . . .. . . and with a whip of steelPrint wounding lashes in their iron ribs."
"Strip the ragged follies of their time
Naked as at their birth . . .
. . . and with a whip of steel
Print wounding lashes in their iron ribs."
Shakespeare on occasions can wield the whip of steel, but it is when for a time he parts company with the spirit of comedy. Moral truth radiates through all the world of his creation, but he does not suppose that morality is served by being outrageously moral; in writing comedy he has more faith in sunshine as a sanative agent than in lightning and tempest. If he is ever contemptuous, it is because the pitifulness of such a baffled pretender as Parolles, or of such lean-witted conspirators as Antonio and Sebastian, admits of no other feeling. From personal satire he, unlike several of his contemporaries, wholly abstained, unless, indeed, the theory holds good, which finds inTroilus and Cressidathat purge given by the player Shakespeare—so Kempe tells Burbage inThe Return from Parnassus—to the pestilent fellow, Ben Jonson.
Perhaps it is impossible to include under any single general conception works which differ from each other as widely asThe Comedy of Errors,Measure for Measure, andThe Tempest; but if we cannot seize it as a whole, we may see from a little distance this side and that of comedy as understood by Shakespeare. Its vital centre is not an idea, an abstraction, a doctrine, a moral thesis, but something concrete—persons involved in an action. When philosophical critics assure us that the theme ofThe Merchant of Veniceis expressed by the wordsSummum jus, summa injuria, or that it exhibits "man in relation to money," we admire the motto they discovered in their nut, and prefer the kernel in our own. The persons and the action are placed in some region, which is neither wholly one of fantasy nor yet one encumbered with the dross of actuality. Aery spirits, an earth-born Caliban, Robingoodfellow, the king and queen of Faery, may make their incursion into it, yet it is in the truest sense the haunt and home of "human mortals." The finer spirit of the poet's own age is forever present, but he makes no laborious effort to imitate life in the lower sense of reproducing contemporary manners. He turns away from his own country. Once—by command—Sir John Falstaff makes love to the laughing bourgeois wives of Windsor; but to comply with the necessity Shakespeare's comedy descends from verse to prose. Ben Jonson's invention is at home in Cob's Court and Picthatch, in the aisle of Paul's, or among the booths of Bartholomew Fair; havingdisguised the characters of his first important play under Italian names, he rightly christened them anew as Londoners. Shakespeare's imagination, throwing off the burden of the actual, desported itself in the Athenian moonlit wood and on the yellow sands of the enchanted island, under green boughs in Arden, in the garden at Belmont, in the palace of Illyria, at the shepherd's festival in Bohemia.
The action corresponds with the environment. In the great tragedies Shakespeare may on rare occasions demand certain postulates at the outset. These having been granted, the plot evolves itself within the bounds of the credible. InKing Learthe opening scene puts some strain upon our imaginative belief, but Shakespeare received the legend as it had been handed down to him, and all that follows the opening scene—though the action is vast and monstrous—obeys an order and logic which compel our acquiescence. It is not always so, if we refuse its claims to fancy, in Shakespearian comedy. In a region which borders on the realm of fantasy we must be prepared to accept many happy surprises. Our desire for happiness inclines our hearts to a pleasant credulity; if chance at the right moment intervenes, it comes as our own embodied hope. When all and every one in Arden wood, save Jaques, are on their way to wedlock, like couples coming to the ark, we are not disposed to question the reality of that old religious man upon the borders of the forest who suddenly converts the usurping Duke, and turns back the mighty power which he had set on foot. We are grateful for such hermits and such convertites.
The characters again correspond in comedy with the environment and with the action. In tragedy character is either from the first fully formed and four-square, or, if it is developed by events, it develops in accordance with an internal law. Passion runs its inevitable course, like a great wave driven of the wind, and breaks with thunder upon the shoal of death. The human actors disappear; only the general order of the world and the eternal moral law endure. But in comedy the individual must be preserved, and must at the close enter into possession of happy days; if he has erred through folly or vice, his error has not been mortal; he may in the last scene of the fifth act swiftly change his moral disposition as hewould change his outward garb. The traitor Proteus is suddenly restored to his better mind, and Valentine is generous enough to resign to the repentant traitor all his rights in Silvia. Bertram, who almost to the last entangles himself in a network of dastardly lies, is rescued from his dishonesty and foolish pride by a successful trick, and becomes the loyal husband of Helena. The Duke Orsino transfers his amorous homage from his "fancy's queen" Olivia to his "fancy's queen" Viola with a most convenient facility. Angelo discovers his own baseness in the moment when he perceives it is discovered by the world, and is straightway virtuous enough to bring the happiness required by a fifth act to the wronged Mariana. Even Iachimo—the Iago of a comedy—makes sorrowful confession of his villany, and restores the purloined bracelet and the ill-won ring. Such transformations as these indicate that even as regards character the law of comedy is a law of liberty. When it suits Shakespeare's purpose, the study of character can be profound and veracious; when occasion requires it, incident becomes all-important, and character yields to the requirements of the situation.
In truth, while it may be said that in Shakespearian tragedy character is fate, in Shakespearian comedy, among the contrasts and surprises which form so abundant a source of its vivacity, not the least effective contrast is that of character set over, as it were, against itself, not the least effective surprise is that of character entering upon new phases under the play of circumstance. The unity and logic of character may not in reality be impaired, but the unity is realized in and through diversity. In punning, a word is made to play a double part; it jostles its other self, and laughter ensues. What is so single and indivisible as personality? But if John is mistaken for Thomas, accident seems to triumph over law, and the incongruity arises of a doubled personal identity—the apparent and the real. Antipholus, of Syracuse, like the little woman of the nursery rhyme, whose sense of personality was dependent on the length of her petticoats, is almost persuaded that he is other than himself. If Viola disguises in doublet and hose, she secures by anticipation the victory of Sebastian over Olivia's heart, while in her own heart she endures a woman's hidden love for the Duke. One man in his brief time on Shakespeare's comic stage may play many parts.The ascetic scholars of Navarre are transformed into the most gallant of lovers and the most ingenious of sonneteers. Katherine the curst becomes more resolute in her wifely submission than she had been in her virginsauvagerie. Signior Benedick, who challenged Cupid at the flight, in due time alters to Benedick, the married man; my dear Lady Disdain, in pity for him, and a little in pity for herself, has yielded upon great persuasion. If, as Montaigne teaches us, man is the most variable of animals, perhaps we learn as important a truth about human nature from Shakespeare's comedies as from his more profound study of the fatality of character and passion in the tragedies.
The essentials of Shakespearian comedy at its best are, after all, simple and obvious enough—a delightful story, conducted, in some romantic region, by gracious and gallant persons, thwarted or aided by the mirthful god, Circumstance, and arriving at a fortunate issue. Such would not serve as a description of the comedies of Ben Jonson. He is pleased to keep us during the greater part of five laborious acts in the company of knaves and gulls, and at the close, poetic justice is satisfied with the detection of folly and a general retribution descending on evil-doers. Shakespeare, in comedy, is no such remorseless justicer. Don John, the bastard, is reserved for punishment, but it shall be upon the morrow, and the punishment shall be such as the mirthful Benedick may devise. Parolles escapes lightly with the laughter of Lafeu, and mockery, qualified by a supper, will not afflict him beyond endurance. Lucio is condemned to marry the mother of his child, which is so dire an evil that all other forfeits are remitted. Sir John Falstaff will join the rest by Mistress Page's country fire in jesting at his own discomfiture. Even Shylock is not wholly overwhelmed; he shall have godfathers and a godmother at his baptism, and remain in possession of half his worldly goods. Sebastian may live and discover that he is morally superior to Caliban, the thief, and Stephano, the drunkard. Iachimo kneels and receives the free forgiveness of Posthumus.
But if Shakespeare, in comedy, is niggard of punishment, he is liberal in rewards. And since almost all the stories he chooses for his comic stage are stories of love and lovers, what grand rewardcan be reserved for the fifth act so fitting as the reward of love? In the seventeenth century masque amid all its mythological, fantastic, or humorous diversities, one point, or pivot, of the action remained fixed—the incidents must give occasion to a dance of the masquers. So in Shakespearian comedy we may, with almost equal certainty, reckon upon a marriage, or more marriages than one, in act, or in immediate prospect, before the curtain closes. Or, if not a marriage, for the lovers may be wedded lovers at the opening, then, after division, or separation of husband and wife, what we may call a remarriage, with misunderstandings cleared up and faults forgiven. When Shakespeare wrote his earlier plays he was himself young, and his gaze was fixed upon the future; exultant lovers begin their new life, and the song of joy is an epithalamium. When he wrote his latest plays, he was no longer young, and he thought of the blessedness of recovering the happy past, of knitting anew the strained or broken bonds of life, of connecting the former and the latter days in natural piety. Youth still must have its rapture; Florizel must win his royal shepherdess, queen of curds and cream; the nuptials of Ferdinand and Miranda, "these, our dear-beloved," must be duly solemnized at Naples; but Shakespeare's temper is no longer the temper of youth; he is of the company of Hermione and Prospero, and the music of the close is a grave and spiritual harmony.
Between the first scene and the last the path in comedy is beset with obstacles and dangers, past which love must find a way—"the course of true love never did run smooth." These may be either internal—some difficulty arising from character, or external—difference of blood or of rank, the choice of friends, slanderous tongues, rival passions, the spite of fortune. The resolution of the difficulty must be of a corresponding kind; temper, or rash determination, must yield to the predominance of love, or the external obstacles must be removed by well-directed effort, or by a happy turn of events. The young king of Navarre and his fellow-students are immured by their ascetic vow of culture; Isabella is all but ceremonially pledged to the life of religion; Olivia is secluded by her luxury of sentimental sorrow; Beatrice, born to be a lover, is at odds with love through her pride of independence and wilfulmirth; Bertram has the young colt's pleasure in freedom, refuses to be ranged, and suffers from the haughty blindness of youth, which cannot recognize its own chief need and highest gain. All such rebels against love will be subdued in good time. On the other hand, it is her father who has decreed that Hermia shall be parted from Lysander; both father and mother have rival designs for marring the destiny of sweet Nan Page; a false friend and fickle lover separates Valentine and Silvia; a malignant plotter, who would avenge on all happy creatures the wrong of his own base birth, strikes down Hero with the blow of slander as she stands before the altar. But love has on its side gallantry and resource, loyalty and valour, the good powers of nature and the magic of the moonlit faery wood; and so, over the mountains and over the waves, love at last finds out a way.
Love being the central theme of Shakespearian comedy, laughter cannot be its principal end, and cruel or harsh laughter is almost necessarily excluded. But the laughter of joy rings out in the earlier and middle comedies, and a smile, beautiful in its wisdom and serenity, illuminates the comedies of his closing period. If satire is present, it is only on rare occasions a satire of manners; it deals rather with something universal, a satire of the fatuity of self-lovers, of the power which the human heart has of self-deception, or it is a genial mockery of the ineptitude of brainless self-importance, or the little languid lover's amorous endeavours, or the lumbering pace of heavy-witted ignorance, which cannot catch a common meaning, even by the tail; at its average rate of progress the idea whisks too swiftly from the view of such slow gazers.
The dramatis personæform a large and varied population, ranging in social rank from the king to the tinker and the bellows-mender. Princes, dukes, courtiers, pages, dissolute gallants, soldiers, sailors, shepherds, clowns, city mechanicals, the country justice, the constable and head-borough, the schoolmaster, the parson, the faithful old servant, the lively waiting-maid, roysterers, humourists, light-fingered rogues, foreign fantasticoes, middle-class English husbands and wives, Welshman, Frenchman, Spaniard, Italian, Jew, noble and gracious ladies, country wenches, courtesans, childhood, youth, manhood, old age, the maiden, the wife, the widow—all sorts andconditions of human mortals occupy the scene, while on this side enters Caliban, bearing his burden of pine-logs, and Ariel flies overhead upon the bat's back, on the other, the offended king of faery frowns upon Titania, and claims his pretty Eastern minion.
The characters are ordinarily ranged, with an excellent effect on dramatic perspective, in three groups or divisions. The lovers and their immediate friends or rivals occupy the middle plane. Above them are persons of influence or authority by virtue of age or rank, on whom in some measure the fortunes of the lovers depend. Below them are the humbler aiders and abettors of their designs, or subordinate figures lightly attached to the central action, yet sometimes playing into the hands of benevolent Chance, and always ready to diversify the scene, to enliven the stage, to afford a breathing-space between passages of high-wrought emotion, to fill an interval with glittering word-play or unconscious humour, to save romance from shrill intensity or too aerial ascension by the contact of reality. Shakespeare in comedy was hardly quite happy until he had found his Duke and his clown; then he had the space in which he could move at ease; love remains his central theme, but it is love which rises out of life; his principal figures are rendered more distinct, are seen more in the round, because they stand out from a rich and various background.
Intrigue; and the Treatment of Materials.—The intrigue of Shakespeare's comedies is seldom of his own creation. He understood by "invention" something finer or rarer than the construction of a plot. The greatest workers in literature—we must perhaps except Dante—have been thetrouvères, the finders. To form a being out of the clay, and to breathe into its nostrils the breath of life is an act of creation in the finest sense of the word. What is material and mechanical Shakespeare willingly accepts from others; his range of invention is almost without limit, but it is invention in the spiritual world. No sufficient sources have been found for his earliest comedy—Love's Labour's Lost—and for what was perhaps his latest—The Tempest; it does not follow, however, that in these instances he varied from his customary practice. When Shakespeare dealt with the substantial matter of history, he remained upon his native soil, until through Plutarch hediscovered Rome. No dramatist of his age is more truly an English patriot; no other evocation of the past in poem or play is so truly alive or so truly national as that effected in Shakespeare's series of chronicle histories; and with his English history he has connected his robustest piece of comedy—no romance of love, but a comedy of character, essentially national in its humour, its exultant mirth, its pathos, the chronicle history of King Falstaff on his tavern throne. But breathing the air of the English Renaissance, he turned away in his romantic comedies from his own country to Italy, the land of romance. Once—inCymbeline—he is a debtor to Holinshed, but Holinshed has here to summon Boccaccio to his aid. EvenThe Merry Wives of Windsor, as far as we can trace its sources, is indebted for some of its laughable adventures to the Italiannovelle. Twice Shakespeare borrowed the plots of comedies from tales by contemporary writers of England,—As You Like Itis founded upon Lodge'sRosalynde;The Winter's Tale, upon Greene'sPandosto. But although Lodge's story was in part derived from a poem of rough and humble incidents, characteristically English, it was transformed in his hands into a much-embroidered amorous pastoral of the Renaissance, and Greene'sPandostois equally a product of exotic southern culture.
Boccaccio, Bandello, Cinthio, elder English dramas derived from Italian sources, Spanish pastoral romance—these furnished the booty on which Shakespeare laid hands with the right of a conqueror. He selected, omitted, altered, added, moulding the mass of material with plastic hands, which are gentle because they are strong. Frequently he complicates the intrigue; sometimes he entangles a secondary plot with the primary; sometimes he emends the ethics, or purifies the atmosphere, or saves some cherished character from dishonour; in many instances he creates new personages, who are the interpreters of his own wisdom or humour or gracious temper. Thus inAs You Like It, though the loves of Orlando and Rosalind are transposed from the languid artificial pastoral of Lodge into the spirited wood-notes of Shakespeare, we look in vain through Lodge's romance for the sentimental-cynical Jaques, dilettante collector of curious experiences, for Touchstone, the courtier-clown, with his logic of nice distinctions, for Audrey, no Dresden-chinashepherdess, but fascinating to her ingenious suitor by virtue of her robust charms and her flattering inferiority of brain. Again, inTwelfth Nightthe character of Malvolio and of the whole group of his tormentors—Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, Fabian, Feste, Maria—are added to his originals by Shakespeare. The languorous love-in-idleness of the Duke Orsino, and Olivia's sadness prepense demanded a contrast, and in Shakespeare's imagination sprang up this crew of toper and droll and slender-witted gentlemen, and mischief-loving maid, who seem to take hands and dance around the solemn figure of that deluded magnifico of domestics. To cite but one other example, how wouldMuch Ado about Nothingdwindle if Beatrice and Benedick, its brain of wit and pulse of gallantry, were to disappear from the scene! But these, and with them the office-bearing majesty of Dogberry, prince of constables, and the astute intelligence of goodman Verges ("an old man, sir; but honest as the skin between his brows") are engrafted by Shakespeare on the original of Bandello.
Relation to Predecessors and Contemporaries.—From his predecessors and early contemporaries Shakespeare doubtless learnt whatever it was in their power to teach; at the same time he started forth on ways of his own. In Lyly he saw how something of the ideality of the masque could be transferred to comedy; how comedy could escape from the grosser world of the actual to a realm of courtly classical fantasy; how action could be suspended to give scope for the play of sparkling or ingenious dialogue in prose; how dainty song could come to the aid of speech which threatened to grow tedious; how disguises of sex could lead to delicate and diverting confusions. But Shakespeare must have perceived the lack of human interest in Lyly's plays; the deficiency of action, which often causes the progress of the piece to languish or to cease; the slight or colourless characterization; the mechanical artificiality, and monotonous balance of certain elements in Euphuistic prose. What was sprightly and ingenious in Lyly's dialogue he preserved; but of Euphuism in the strict sense we find nothing in Shakespeare's plays, except a passage of mockery, appropriately introduced where Falstaff in the tavern discourses as a moralizing father to that well-bred youth, Prince Hal,—"Forthough the camomile the more it is trodden on the faster it grows, yet youth the more it is wasted the sooner it wears." Nor, unless it be the passage describing Oberon's vision of Cupid aiming his shaft at the fair vestal throned in the West, does he follow Lyly in mythological allegory, which conceals and betrays contemporary persons and events.
In the comedies of Robert Greene examples already existed of the romantic tale of love and lovers handled in dramatic fashion. Amid the vulgar surroundings of his sorry London life, Greene preserved a certain purity of idyllic imagination. His comely maidens and loyal wives, tried and true, had shown how important and how attractive a part may be borne by women upon the comic stage. He had exhibited with some skill the art of connecting two intrigues—the primary and the subordinate. He had placed comic matter side by side with matter which approximated to tragic. He could pass from verse to prose, and could mingle with blank verse, sometimes brocaded with ornament but often fresh and sweet, easy rhymed couplets and such other arrangements of rhyme as Shakespeare practised in his early plays. But he often erred through an attempt at Marlowesque magnificence and through the pride and pomp of pseudo-classical decoration. He lacked that humour of good sense, directed upon oneself, which warns a writer when he is in danger of falling into absurdity. His ludicrous scenes do not always assist the more serious or romantic matter of the play; they are too much of the nature of an interlude or divertissement. His feeling for what is laughable was somewhat primitive and crude; a vigorous bout at quarter-staves, a lusty drubbing, the extravagant pranks of a mediæval devil, were simple and unfailing receipts to shake the ribs of the groundlings. If Shakespeare was a pupil of Greene's in comedy, he was an intelligent pupil, who knew what to remember and what to forget.
Except as regards the form of his verse and prose it cannot be said that Shakespeare, as a writer of comedy, was ever in a true sense in discipleship to any master. He found suggestions, and used them, but he took his own way. The history of his development consists in great measure in the gradual coalescing of the various faculties from which poetry may be derived. In his latestcomedies intellect and emotion are fused together; wit has been taken up into moral wisdom; imagination in its highest reach is united with the simple, primary feelings of our humanity; gaiety and seriousness interpenetrate each other; tenderness and pity are alive in the breast of the comic Muse; the laughter is often the laughter of human sympathy and of a pathetic joy; if we smile at the quaint forms of the hieroglyph of life, we know that it has a deep and sacred meaning. From the outset Shakespeare thought of comedy as a mirror of human life, which should reflect things sad and serious as well as mirthful, and which by its magic power should convert pain into pleasure; but the two elements of Shakespearian comedy exist side by side in the earliest plays; they are not yet fused into one. In the main, Shakespeare at first relied upon his nimble brain, and aimed at exciting laughter by comic surprises, contrasts, and incongruities which lie upon the surface of things and are the offspring of accident rather than of character. His delight in wit-combats and word-play is a transference to language of the same feeling which made him delight in the errors and disguisings of his persons. There is a laughter which arises from no profounder cause than titillation; the harlequinade of words, leaping one over the other, parrying, riposting, and suddenly disappearing under a mask of invisibility, yet still striking, as it were, out of the shadow, serves as a titillation of the brain.
Shakespeare's Development as a Comic Dramatist.—In his earliest group of comedies,Love's Labour's Lost,The Comedy of Errors,The Two Gentlemen of Verona,A Midsummer Night's Dream, dating perhaps from about 1590 to about 1594, Shakespeare experimented in various directions. We might name the group that of his transformation plays. The comic surprise, the comic incongruity is that of man suddenly converted from his true to a false self or from a false self to a true. Human will is here the sport of nature or the sport of accident. Nothing is but what is not. The vowed students of Navarre are betrayed into the very opposite of their assumed selves by the power of nature and of love. Proteus, the servant of Julia, the comrade of Valentine, forsakes his mistress and his friend, and is as suddenly reconverted. The brothers Antipholus and the brothers Dromio are so shuffled together by the juggler Chance,that we question if any personal identity will survive and reëmerge at the close. Whether Lysander and Demetrius will awake the rival lovers of Helena or the rival lovers of Hermia, or whether Lysander will love Hermia and Demetrius Helena, depends on the merest luck of fairy-land. But nature and luck are on the side of love; all will be set right before the end. And because women lie closer to nature than men, and their affections hold the bent with the directness and certainty of nature, they are true and constant to themselves, neither deluding their hearts with pseudo-ideals, nor changed by the play of circumstances from what they are, but using their woman's wit and woman's will to attain their proper ends.
Love's Labour's Losthas the air of a young writer's effort to be original, and to dazzle by unflagging cleverness; whence at times a tedium of wit. Shakespeare seems to have resolved to owe his plot to no man, with the result that it is somewhat too much a prepared vehicle for the exposition of an idea. The little cloister of culture, where education is to be a fine art removed from nature, is invaded by woman, and with the entrance of woman enters nature, which has more of wisdom to impart than all the academies or schools. The denouement must be as original as the general design; death arrives in the midst of mirth; there shall be no weddings in the fifth act; love's labour is lost; or, if not lost, its reward is deferred a twelvemonth; the scholars turned lovers are still infected with something of unreality and affectation, exhaling their sentiment in Petrarchan ingenuities, and one of them, Biron, with his mocking humour, takes life too proudly and wilfully; the mad girls of France are at heart serious, and they will test their lovers by a year of genuine probation, then, and not till then, the marriage bells shall ring. The Spanish fantastico, Don Adriano, towering in stature, though not in wit, above his minion page, and the learned schoolmaster Holofernes, much admired of his companion pedant, the curate, resemble stock figures of Italian comedy. Affectations of language—the decorated dialect of fashion, the pedantries of scholarship not too profound—are also departures from nature, and must submit to the laughter of good sense. Nature may, indeed, be mended by art, for nature in its first rudiments, as seen in honest Costard and goodman Dull, is not whollya thing of beauty and of joy, but the art which mends nature must be, as the wise Polixenes afterwards declared, an art that nature makes.Love's Labour's Lost—thePrecieuses ridiculesof Shakespeare, but with men for the presenters of preciosity and women as the exponents of good sense—is a comedy of dialogue rather than of incident. The stage is kept alive with much tossing about of brains in wit-encounters, with maskings and disguisings, and with that marred show of the Nine Worthies, a heroi-comic forerunner of the tedious, brief scene of young Pyramus and his love Thisbe, in which the hard-handed men of Athens appear before Duke Theseus.
The Comedy of Errorsis a comedy of incident. Here Shakespeare accepts his plot, his chief characters, and their adventures from Plautus. But the adventures are complicated by his addition of the two Dromios, which more than doubles the possibilities of ludicrous confusion. The fun cannot be too fast or furious; the unexpected always happens; the discovery is staved off to the fifth act with infinite skill; the nearer each brother approaches his fellow, the more impossible it becomes for them to meet. Nowhere has Shakespeare ravelled and unravelled the threads of an intrigue with such incomparable dexterity as in this early play. ButShakespeare'simagination could not rest satisfied with a farce, however laughable or however skilfully conducted. His vein of lyrical poetry breaks forth in the love-episode, for the sake of which he created Luciana. And he has set the entire comic business in a romantic and pathetic framework—the story of the afflicted old Ægeon and the Ephesian abbess, in whom he discovers his lost wife. The play opens with grief and the doom of death impending over an innocent life; it closes, after a cry of true pathos, with reconciling joy, and the interval is filled with laughter that peals to a climax. This is not the manner of Plautus; but laughter with Shakespeare would seem hard and barren—the crackling of thorns under a pot,—if it were wholly isolated from grief and love and joy.
Shakespeare did not again attempt the comedy of mere incident. InThe Two Gentlemen of Veronahe struck into his favourite tune—the comedy of romance. Among its sources is the Spanish pastoral of Jorge de Montemayor, but the scene is Italy, thewoman-country wooed in this play before it was wed by the imagination of its poet inThe Merchant of Venice. The theme is love, its fidelity and its infidelity—love with its incalculable surprises, love with its unalterable constancy. The characters are lightly yet gracefully outlined; there are the grave and reverend seniors; the contrasted pairs of lovers; the waiting-woman; and the clownish men-servants, to whom the business of laughter is intrusted. The persons are somewhat mechanically set over, one against the other,—Valentine the loyal against the fickle Proteus, Silvia the sprightly against the tender Julia, Speed the professional wit against Launce the unconscious humourist, whose filial affections and amorous desires for the milkmaid, who has more qualities than a water-spaniel, are only secondary to his devotion to the cur Crab, a dog, indeed, to whose share some canine errors fall, but endowed with more qualities than a wilderness of milkmaids. The disguising of Julia in masculine attire anticipates many such disguisings in later comedies. It is no frolic masking like that of the girls of France, but part of the serious-playful romance of a woman's brave and gentle heart. The blank verse is sweet and regular rather than swift or powerful in dramatic movement; rhyme is less frequently used than heretofore; the prose of Launce's soliloquies has a homely directness and vigour.
InA Midsummer Night's Dreamcomedy becomes lyrical. Character is subordinate to incident, but incident here has a dreamlike quality, which unites itself with the poetry of a fantastic world. It is a comedy of errors,—the errors of a night,—but the confusions are not external and material as in the adventures of the brothers Antipholus; they are inward and psychological; the bewilderment is one of passions, not of persons. The triumph of the poet lies before all else in the power which he shows of harmonizing materials seemingly the most incongruous. The magnificence of Theseus and his Amazonian bride,—power in the full tide of prosperity,—the crossed and wayward loves of youths and maidens, the minikin-mighty strifes of fairy-land and its roguish sports, the artistic pains and illustrious ineptitude of the crew of hempen homespuns—all these are wrought together in a dream which we accept with a tranquil and delighted wonder.
The power of the human will is, as it were, suspended in this play of elfland magic. BeforeThe Merchant of Venicewas written, Shakespeare's feeling for dramatic action and passion had been deepened and invigorated by his progress in dealing with English history and probably by the creation of a great tragedy,Romeo and Juliet, the tragedy of love and youth and death.The Merchant of Veniceis Shakespeare's first, and perhaps his most remarkable, example of the comedy of character. Here we pass from the realm of caprice to that of human volition. A passive object, the merchant, is placed in the midst as a prize to be contended for by forces naturally adverse—the passion of concentrated revenge and the spirit of charity, armed with the brightest weapons of intelligence. The masculine and the feminine powers enter upon a single combat, and victory remains with mercy and love, the "Ewigweibliche." No such figure as that of Shylock had previously appeared upon the English stage. In his person Shakespeare not only lays bare the nerve and muscle of a wrestler in the game of life, but studies the darker and sadder features of a race. He is no incredible monster like the Barabas of Marlowe, but a man, whose origins and environment have made him what he is; whom, therefore, we understand and whom in his very pitilessness we are constrained to pity. Nor had the English stage hitherto seen any woman so complex in her various powers of intellect, emotions, will, so single in their harmonious coöperance, as the noble lady of Belmont. The same energy of resolve which makes her the armed champion of Antonio had lain hidden in her loyalty to the arduous conditions of her father's will. The dramatist in this play postulates our acceptance of certain external improbabilities; these concessions made, all things are wrought out in accordance with the laws of life. The spirit of tragedy here is neighbour to the comic spirit, yet observes the finest decorum. Two actions—that of the caskets and that of the pound of flesh—work into each other without a jar and become one. The characters are grouped with perfect freedom and with an exact, though unobtruded, ordonnance, for Shakespeare's art had now learnt to conceal itself. The fifth act of the play is a kind of lovely epilogue, where, after the strained anxiety of the trial-scene, joy is preserved from its own excess by the instinct of self-mockery.
It may be that the humbler humorous scenes of the English historical plays on which he was now engaged drew down the imagination of Shakespeare as a writer of comedy from romance to realism, and made him content to work for a little while in rougher material.The Taming of the Shrew, whatever its chronological place may be, is only a spirited adaptation of an older play, and is chiefly interesting as an example of Shakespeare's art in transposing, developing, enriching with detail, the ideas of a predecessor, and as a demonstration of the temper with which he could kindle a predecessor'sallegrointo anallegro con brio. With old Sly's son of Burton heath, the village sot, he was upon his native soil, and he could heighten his original with low-life reminiscences of Warwickshire taverns.The Merry Wives of Windsoris a direct offshoot from the greater comedy of Falstaff which is incorporated in the historical plays. The tradition that it was hastily written by command of Queen Elizabeth, who desired to see "Falstaff in love," relieves us from the necessity of supposing that Shakespeare voluntarily degraded his indomitable jester into the flouting-stock of a bourgeois fabliau, "Well I am your theme: you have the start of me; I am dejected; ... ignorance itself is a plummet o'er me; use me as you will." That Shakespeare should throw himself with spirit into his task was a crime for which he earns our forgiveness by its successful issue. The merry wives are honest buxom dames, without a grain of real malice in them. The French physician and the Welsh parson murder the Queen's English with as happy a valiance as that of Fluellen and the Princess Katharine inKing Henry V.Slender is the most delightfully incompetent of wooers—a Romeomanquéof Windsor, whose amorous passion waits upon his cousin Shallow's promptings and whose wit is mislaid with his Book of Riddles. The buck-basket and the old woman of Brentford are very palpable jokes, which the crassest gentleman-usher or emptiest-headed maid-in-waiting could not miss. There are the proper topical allusions to call forth an interchange of smiling mutual intelligence. AltogetherThe Merry Wiveswas a comedy delicate enough for a queen. For such a play the proper medium was prose; verse is reserved for the slender love-episode of Fenton and Anne Page, and for the scenes connected with the fairy disguising.
As the pressure of the English historical plays lightened, Shakespeare could turn again to Italy and to romance. InThe Merry Wiveshe had grouped his characters in a circle around a gross old self-lover, whom it was their business to delude and mock. Perhaps the same device could be refined upon and turned to romantic uses. Falstaff had professed love and had been convicted of sordid self-interest. What it a pair of high-spirited persons, touched with the egotism of self-sufficingness and wilful wit, and professing a superiority to the toys of lovers, could be ensnared into that deep mutual passion which was in truth written for them in the book of fate? But there must be something deeper here than a jest; such brave union of hearts must be cemented by a common effort to confront the sorrow of the world. At this time, perhaps, Shakespeare was concerned with his revision ofLove's Labour's Lost. Might not Biron and Rosaline be reincarnated, and in place of that crude test of a twelve months' visitation of the speechless sick decreed for Biron, might not an immediate test of valiant manhood be discovered, and the newer Biron come to the happy ending of love's labour's won? In Beatrice and Benedick a brilliant centre was found for the play ofMuch Ado about Nothing. The high spirits, which gave life toThe ShrewandThe Merry Wivesare here refined by gallantry and beauty, wit and grace, and by the presence of injury and pain. The otherdramatis personægather around the hero and heroine to beguile them into love; the passion begotten of a jest is brought forth in sorrow, and sorrow at the close is converted into joy. With so much of quick and lambent dialogue as Beatrice and Benedick have to utter, we want no outstanding jester here; his speech would be an impertinence; but we need a counterfoil to wit in the unconscious humour of a Dogberry and a Verges; and these worthies assist effectively in the action of the play; Fate, the sphinx, assumes an ironic smile; the dulness of a blundering watchman unties a knot which has foiled the dexterity of the wise.
The comedy which followedMuch Ado about Nothingis one of sunshine and dappled shadow under the greenwood of Arden. Landseer's companion pictures, "War" and "Peace," find a parallel in Shakespeare'sKing Henry V.andAs You Like It, which probably belong to the same year; and the scene of both the history and thecomedy is laid in France. He would have left untouched a favourite theme of the Renaissance if he had wholly neglected the pastoral; but Shakespeare felt that the conventional pastoral alone, with its cruel shepherdess and sighing swain, however suitable for a piece of poetical tapestry, could not furnish the life and body and movement demanded by the stage. His Silvius and Phœbe, Arcadians of the mode and rhetoricians in verse, are presented with a certain reserved irony; the veritable rustics are William, whose pretty wit chiefly manifests itself in monosyllabic answers, and the wench Audrey, whom the gods did not make poetical. Touchstone, a clown among courtiers, is a courtier among clowns. The other persons of the comedy are of the high-bred class, in the midst of which the dramatist's imagination moved with most pleasure, but here they are transported into a delightful open-air environment, which breathes a freshness and sweetness into their spirits. "Sweet are the uses of adversity," and especially of such adversity as that of Rosalind, which enables her, in her disguise as Ganymede, to assist in her own wooing and to play the part of a benevolent goddess of destiny for several pairs of lovers including Orlando and herself. We learn from a play of Ben Jonson's of the same date that melancholy was a genteel fashion of the day. Shakespeare, on the suggestion of a current affectation, created in Jaques a character which was wholly original. Humourist, sentimentalist, critic, and cynic, he is the self-conscious seeker for new experiences, the dilettante collector of curiosities to be labelled in his museum as states of a human soul.
The midsummer of Shakespeare's comedy is reached inTwelfth Night. Was it his effort to resist the invasion of sadder thought which raised its mirth to the reeling heights of Sir Toby's Illyrian bacchanals? We dare not venture such a surmise, for the light and warmth are at flood-tide. The voluptuous love-languors of the Duke and Olivia's luxury of grief fatten the idle soil for the blossoming of the rose. The disease of overmuch prosperity in the palaces of Illyria seems set over against the sanity of adversity in the forest of Arden. Viola, in her disguises as Cesario, has a harder task than the banished Rosalind; for instead of assisting at her own wooing, she is required to plead as an envoy of loveagainst herself. In place of the dilettante egotist Jaques, who would range through all experiences, we have here the solemn self-lover, Malvolio, pinnacled in his own sense of importance and his code of formal propriety, yet toppling from his heights to so grotesque a fall. Had Shakespeare encountered some starched Elizabethan Puritan, who looked sourly on the theatre, and thought that because he was virtuous there should be no more cakes and ale, and did the dramatist read a humorous lesson to his time on an error more deep-seated in the human heart than the excesses of a joyous temper? Was the comic spirit here a swordsman armed with the blade of reason and good sense? If such was the case, Shakespeare was assuredly no partisan, and Sir Toby Belch is hardly his ideal representative of a liberal humanism.
After the play ofTwelfth Nightwe become aware of the first ebb of summer. It has been suggested that the events shadowed forth in theSonnetstook some of the joy out of Shakespeare's heart. It has been suggested that the fall of Essex, involving the disgrace of the poet's patron Southampton, tended to embitter his spirit. These are conjectures that cannot be verified. What is certain is, that he turned toward tragedy, and that his temper in comedy indicates a gathering of the clouds. The spirit ofAll's Well that Ends Wellis as courageous as is the title of the play; and there is a need for courage, not of the gay and sportive kind, but serious and steadfast. The hero is no gallant Orlando or high-spirited Benedick. He has in him, we must suppose, the possibilities of noble manhood, but these are obscured by the errors and the vices of youth. The heroine is no glad-hearted girl like Rosalind, no scatterer of coruscating jests like Beatrice, but a woman, clear-sighted, strong-willed, and bent on achieving her purpose. She, the poor daughter of a physician, is a healer in a world that stands in need of healing. The bright-winged Cupid of nods and becks and wreathed smiles has been transformed into Love, the physician. Helena, honoured and cherished by all who know her aright, is rejected by the one man on whom her heart is fixed, and whom she rescues from his baser self with something of that maternal protectiveness, which in certain instances constitutes the nucleus of wifely love. The Countess is Shakespeare's creation, and nowherehas he made age more beautiful. The comic business lies chiefly in the unmasking of the pretender, Parolles. It is required both by the action and the ethics of the play, but there is little to afford us pleasure in the humiliation of so paltry amiles gloriosus.
The atmosphere darkens inMeasure for Measure. In the city of Vienna corruption boils and bubbles. From the Duke's deputy to the lowest drudge of vice, society is infected with the festering evil. To deal with the subtleties of sin, virtue itself must learn crafty ways; mines must be opposed by countermines. In Claudio the passions of youth, snatching too eagerly at unlicensed satisfaction, are brought into the presence of death; and to life, tender and florid, the vast regions of the grave are full of obscurity and uncertain horror. It is hardly a scene for the joy of love, though to two strong hearts love may come in the end as the sequel of a common struggle for justice and moral reformation. Rather is it a place for the trials and the victory of virgin chastity. The Duke moves through subterranean passages, guided by the dark lantern of moral prudence. Isabella illuminates the gloom with the light of an indignant saintliness. Here it is no pompous formalist who is humiliated; no common pretender who is detected and delivered over to laughter; the deadliest ambushes of evil are attacked; the heart, "deceitful above all things and desperately wicked," is laid bare. Angelo, the self-deceiver, is exposed not merely to others, but to himself; he gazes down appalled into the abyss discovered in his own soul. We have travelled far from the fresh wild-wood paths of Arden and from the glowing gardens of Illyria.
No problems connected with the plays of Shakespeare are more difficult of solution than those offered by the satiric drama, in which matter from the story of Troy is handled in so enigmatic a fashion. Shall we placeTroilus and Cressidahard byMeasure for Measure, or date it some six years later, regarding it as a successor in comedy to the tragic study of the misanthrope inTimon of Athens? The evidence inclines in favour of the earlier date. Is some of the wood, hay, and stubble of the lostTroilus and Cressidaof Dekker and Chettle imbedded in Shakespeare's play? Is it a satire of humanity or of contemporary individuals? Was this the "purge" which Shakespeare administered to Ben Jonson, and, with Jonsondisguised as Ajax, and Marston as Thersites, was the play one of those alarums and excursions connected with the war of the theatres, in which Marston, Dekker, and Jonson were the principal combatants?[1949]Is Cressida a malicious portrait of the deceitful enchantress of theSonnets, and was a satirical presentment of the heroes of Homer a retort upon the rival poet, conjectured to be Chapman, the translator of Homer, who had stolen away the favour of Shakespeare's young friend and patron. These questions remain unanswered. We can only say that the spirit of this comedy of disillusion is alien to that of genuine comedy as conceived by Shakespeare in his happier days. The young love of Troilus is betrayed by the courtesan born. Achilles is a dull-brained fellow, barren of wit, who sulks or wantons in his tent; Ajax is a clumsy elephant; Thersites lives on garbage, and spews his filth; Pandar is a lecher, incapable except by proxy; to fight on account of Helen is to set the world at odds for an harlot, yet on her behalf it is that Hector, knowing the folly of it, dies. Troilus is indeed a gallant youth, but his passion is a greenhorn's infatuation: let him be cured of it by surgical incision, however cruel! Shall we say thatTroilus and CressidaandMeasure for Measureare connected by a certain contrast and resemblance? In each the world is bubbling with corruption. The mighty persons of the earth in the one play are as ignoble as the mean persons of the other; the confraternity of Mistress Overdone includes the champions of the world and their renowned lady-loves; the worldly wisdom of the Duke is lowered and broadened into the all-embracing but wholly mundane experience of Ulysses; and in this sorry society it is from worldly wisdom alone that we can hope for any rescue or deliverance, for here we find no saintly Isabella, but a Cressida, offering her lips to every solicitor of the Grecian tents.
The spirit of mirth withdrew itself for a time from Shakespeare's art. He could still write comic scenes, but they were used to deepen the effects of tragedy. The grave-diggers ofHamlet, the porter turning the key of hell-gate on the night of murder inMacbeth, Lear's poor fool jesting across the storm upon the heath, theclown whose basket of figs conceals the worm of Nilus—these are humorous figures created in the service of pity and terror. Shakespeare did not return to comedy until his perception of the world and human life had been purified by the tragickatharsis. With every faculty of his mind labouring at its highest, he had pursued a long dramatic inquisition of the evil that is in the world and in the heart of man. He had not retreated into any facile creed of pleasant optimism, but boldly explored the face of night, and night had brought out the stars. Such love as that of Cordelia, such loyalty as that of Kent, could be fully revealed only in and through the darkness. Man pleased Shakespeare and woman also, when he wrote his tragedies, else the players would have had lenten entertainment; for a drama founded upon misanthropy would have been unendurable. InTimon of Athensthe poet exhibits misanthropy as the evasion of weakness from the ruins of a self-indulgent optimism, and we may say that inTimon of Athenshe bade farewell to gloom.
Shakespeare's latest comedies—Pericles(as far as it is his),Cymbeline,The Winter's Tale,The Tempest—form a group, which is distinguished by a special character. The atmosphere is light and pellucid, like that which follows a thunder-storm. There is a great and wide serenity abroad; the heavens seem more spacious, and they bend down to embrace the margins of the land. The healing influences of nature are felt in the country lanes where Autolycus sings his tirra-lirra, and the meadows where Perdita follows her sheep, on the seacoast of Tarsus where Marina bears her basket of flowers, among the wild Welsh mountains with the gallant sons of Cymbeline, on the enchanted island full of "sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not." The life of cities and courts had lost much of its attraction for one who perhaps was now finding repose and restoration among the Warwickshire fields. But Shakespeare did not plead, in the manner of Rousseau, for a reversion to the primitive conditions of humanity; he could smile at Gonzalo's imaginary commonwealth, where property has no existence; he saw in Caliban the rudimentary man not half informed with soul; he had faith in an art which mends nature, while yet it is an art which nature makes. And nature itself, with all of human life, seems to hang, dreamlike and yet real, in the encompassingpower of something that is above nature and that means well, however little we can trace its ways. Dian appears to Pericles in a vision, guiding him to her temple where joy awaits him; the innocence of Hermione is vindicated by the oracle of Apollo; Posthumus in prison is visited by Jupiter, giving him assurance of divine succour—"whom best I love I cross"; Prospero is aided in his beneficent designs by ministering elemental spirits. The growing resources of the Jacobean stage assisted the dramatist in scenic effects, to which he imparted a beautiful significance. The temper of these latest plays is a temper of reconciliation; the wrongs of life are present, but for those who can transcend the baser passions they work for good. Injuries are felt but are forgiven; broken bonds of affection are reunited; the lost are restored to hearts that have loved and suffered. "The oldest hath borne most," says Albany in the closing lines ofKing Lear. The old are seen in these last romances of Shakespeare as experienced in suffering, caused by the offence of others or by the errors of their own hearts; but they have learnt through suffering a certain detachment from the greed of personal gain, and they lean over the joy of young hearts, still immersed in the innocent egoism of youth, with a fond protectiveness. Cymbeline and his recovered sons, Pericles and Marina, Hermione and Perdita, Prospero and Miranda—it is the same sentiment, varied and repeated, in each of its exemplars. Certain indications that Shakespeare was loosening his connection with the theatre are present in these plays. He could, as in the instance ofPericlesand perhaps in those ofKing Henry VIII.andThe Two Noble Kinsmencontribute fragments to a drama in which, as a whole, he took little interest. In plays of which he is the sole author, his dramatic energy flags at times, to be renewed where the subject moved his feelings or charmed his imagination. The versification is breeze-like in its freedom, but sometimes the breeze falls away and sometimes it wanders with too vague an aim. The treatment of time passes from the extreme of romantic license, as inThe Winter's Tale, to the strictest observation of the rule of unity inThe Tempest. InPericles, the earliest of these romances, Shakespeare cared only for certain scenes and situations. InCymbeline, wherever Imogen, the loveliest figure in his gallery of portraits ofwomen appears, we are certain to receive his finest workmanship. Hermione and Perdita wholly possessed his imagination, while a crude sketch sufficed for the jealousy of Leontes.The Tempest, if we set aside the laborious jesting of Antonio and Sebastian (designed to express the barren brain that often accompanies a callous heart), is wrought with equal power from the first scene to the last.
Perhaps the conjecture is well founded thatThe Tempest, with its masque of wedding blessings, was written for the marriage of Princess Elizabeth to Frederick, Elector Palatine, in February, 1613. Perhaps it was Shakespeare's latest play. And it may not be altogether an idle notion of the poet Campbell, that in Prospero's breaking his magic staff and dismissing his airy spirits we have the farewell to the stage of the great enchanter who had summoned Prospero into being.
Shakespeare found poetic comedy in its rudiments; he left it fully formed. He brought together its various elements and organized them to fulfil the functions of a single living spirit. He made laughter wise, and taught seriousness how to be winning and gracious. Through no ascetic doctrine but by virtue of the spirit of life and beauty he purified the drama from the dulness of what is gross, and kept its temper above the seductions of sentimental morals and a nerveless lubricity. Wit, fancy, grace, constructive dexterity, are found among his successors. Shakespeare's sane outlook upon life as a whole, his gentleness of strength in dealing with the passions, his reserve of power, his moral wisdom, were lost to English comedy when Prospero abjured his magic and retired to the duties of his Stratford lordship of the soil.
Edward Dowden.