Antony call; I see him rouse himself To praise my noble act; I hear him mock The luck of Caesar, which the gods give men To excuse their after-wrath. Husband, I come, Now to that name my courage prove my title! I am fire and air; my other elements
I give to baser life.”
The whole speech is miraculous in speed of mounting emotion, and when Iras dies first, this Cleopatra finds again the perfect word in which truth and beauty meet:
“This proves me base:
If she first meet the curled Antony He’ll make demand of her, and spend that kiss Which is my heaven to have. Come, thou mortal wretch, [To the asp, which she applies to her breast.]
With thy sharp teeth this knot intrinsicate Of life at once untie: poor venomous fool, Be angry, and despatch. O, could’st thou speak, That I might hear thee call great Caesar, ass Unpolicied!”
The characteristic high temper of Mary Fitton breaking out again–“ass unpolicied”–and then the end:
“Peace, peace!
Dost thou not see my baby at my breast, That sucks the nurse asleep?”
The final touch is of soft pleasure:
“As sweet a balm, as soft as air, as gentle,– Antony!–Nay, I will take thee too.
[Applying another asp to her arm.]
What should I stay–“
For ever fortunate in her self-inflicted death Cleopatra thereby frees herself from the ignominy of certain of her actions: she is woman at once and queen, and if she cringes lower than other women, she rises, too, to higher levels than other women know. The historical fact of her self-inflicted death forced the poet to make false Cressid a Cleopatra–and his wanton gipsy-mistress was at length redeemed by a passion of heroic resolve. The majority of critics are still debating whether indeed Cleopatra is the “dark lady” of the sonnets or not. Professor Dowden puts forward the theory as a daring conjecture; but the identity of the two cannot be doubted. It is impossible not to notice that Shakespeare makes Cleopatra, who was a fair Greek, gipsy-dark like his sonnet-heroine. He says, too, of the “dark lady” of the sonnets:
“Whence hast thou this becoming of things ill, That in the very refuse of thy deeds
There is such strength and warrantise of skill, That, in my mind, thy worst all best exceeds?”
Enobarbus praises Cleopatra in precisely the same words:
“Vilest things,
Become themselves in her.”
Antony, too, uses the same expression:
“Fie, wrangling queen!
Whom everything becomes–to chide, to laugh, To weep; whose every passion fully strives To make itself, in thee, fair and admired.”
These professors have no distinct mental image of the “dark lady” or of Cleopatra, or they would never talk of “daring conjecture” in regard to this simple identification. The points of likeness are numberless. Ninety-nine poets and dramatists out of a hundred would have followed Plutarch and made Cleopatra’s love for Antony the mainspring of her being, the causa causans of her self-murder. Shakespeare does not do this; he allows the love of Antony to count with her, but it is imperious pride and hatred of degradation that compel his Cleopatra to embrace the Arch-fear. And just this same quality of pride is attributed to the “dark lady.” Sonnet 131 begins:
“Thou art as tyrannous, so as thou art, As those whose beauties proudly make them cruel.”
Both are women of infinite cunning and small regard for faith or truth; hearts steeled with an insane pride, and violent tempers suited with scolding slanderous tongues. Prolonged analysis is not needed. A point of seeming difference between them establishes their identity. Cleopatra is beautiful, “a lass unparalleled,” as Charmian calls her, and accordingly we can believe that all emotions became her, and that when hopping on the street or pretending to die she was alike be-witching; beauty has this magic. But how can all things become a woman who is not beautiful, whose face some say “hath not the power to make love groan,” who cannot even blind the senses with desire? And yet the “dark lady” of the sonnets who is thus described, has the “powerful might” of personality in as full measure as Egypt’s queen. The point of seeming unlikeness is as convincing as any likeness could be; the peculiarities of both women are the same and spring from the same dominant quality. Cleopatra is cunning, wily, faithless, passionately unrestrained in speech and proud as Lucifer, and so is the sonnet-heroine. We may be sure that the faithlessness, scolding, and mad vanity of his mistress were defects in Shakespeare’s eyes as in ours; these, indeed, were “the things ill” which nevertheless became her. What Shakespeare loved in her was what he himself lacked or possessed in lesser degree–that daemonic power of personality which he makes Enobarbus praise in Cleopatra and which he praises directly in the sonnet-heroine. Enobarbus says of Cleopatra:
“I saw her once
Hop forty paces through the public street, And, having lost her breath, she spoke and panted, That she did make defect perfection,
And, breathless, power breathe forth.”
One would be willing to wager that Shakespeare is here recalling a performance of his mistress; but it is enough for my purpose now to draw attention to the unexpectedness of the attribute “power.” The sonnet fastens on the same word:
“O, from what power hast thou this powerful might With insufficiency my heart to sway?”
In the same sonnet he again dwells upon her “strength”: she was bold, too, to unreason, and of unbridled tongue, for, “twice forsworn herself,” she had yet urged his “amiss,” though guilty of the same fault. What he admired most in her was force of character. Perhaps the old saying held in her case: ex forti dulcedo; perhaps her
confident strength had abandonments more flattering and complete than those of weaker women; perhaps in those moments her forceful dark face took on a soulful beauty that entranced his exquisite susceptibility; perhaps–but the suppositions are infinite.
Though a lover and possessed by his mistress Shakespeare was still an artist. In the sonnets he brings out her overbearing will, boldness, pride–the elemental force of her nature; in the play, on the other hand, while just mentioning her “power,” he lays the chief stress upon the cunning wiles and faithlessness of her whose trade was love. But just as Cleopatra has power, so there can be no doubt of the wily cunning–“the warrantise of skill”–of the sonnet-heroine, and no doubt her faithlessness was that “just cause of hate” which Shakespeare bemoaned.
It is worth while here to notice his perfect comprehension of the powers and limits of the different forms of his art. Just as he has used the sonnets in order to portray certain intimate weaknesses and maladies of his own nature that he could not present dramatically without making his hero ridiculously effeminate, so also he used the sonnets to convey to us the domineering will and strength of his mistress–qualities which if presented dramatically would have seemed masculine-monstrous.
By taking the sonnets and the play together we get an excellent portrait of Shakespeare’s mistress. In person she was probably tall and vain of her height, as Cleopatra is vain of her superiority in this respect to Octavia, with dark complexion, black eyebrows and hair, and pitch-black eyes that mirrored emotion as the lakelet mirrors the ever-changing skies; her cheeks are “damask’d white”; her breath fragrant with health, her voice melodious, her movements full of dignity–a superb gipsy to whom beauty may be denied but not distinction.
If we have a very good idea of her person we have a still better idea of her mind and soul. I must begin by stating that I do not accept implicitly Shakespeare’s angry declarations that his mistress was a mere strumpet. A nature of great strength and pride is seldom merely wanton; but the fact stands that Shakespeare makes a definite charge of faithlessness against his mistress; she is, he tells us, “the bay where all men ride”; no “several plot,” but “the wide world’s common place.” The accusation is most explicit. But if it were well founded why should he devote two sonnets (135 and 136) to imploring her to be as liberal as the sea and to receive his love-offering as well as the tributes of others?
“Among a number one is reckon’d none Then in the number let me pass untold.”
It is plain that Mistress Fitton drew away from Shakespeare after she had given herself to his friend, and this fact throws some doubt upon his accusations of utter wantonness. A true “daughter of the game,” as he says in “Troilus and Cressida,” is nothing but “a sluttish spoil of opportunity” who falls to Troilus or to Diomedes in turn, knowing no reserve. It must be reckoned to the credit of Mary Fitton, or to her pride, that she appears to have been faithful to her lover for the time being, and able to resist even the solicitings of Shakespeare. But her desires seem to have been her sole restraint, and therefore we must add an extraordinary lewdness to that strength, pride, and passionate temper which Shakespeare again and again attributes to her. Her boldness is so reckless that she shows her love for his friend even before Shakespeare’s face; she knows no pity in her passion, and always defends herself by attacking her accuser. But she is cunning in love’s ways and dulls Shakespeare’s resentment with “I don’t hate you.” Unwilling perhaps to lose her empire over him and to forego the sweetness of his honeyed flatteries, she blinded him to her faults by occasional caresses. Yet this creature, with the soul of a strumpet, the tongue of a fishwife and the “proud heart” of a queen, was the crown and flower of womanhood to Shakespeare, his counterpart and ideal. Hamlet in love with Cleopatra, the poet lost in desire of the wanton–that is the tragedy of Shakespeare’s life.
In this wonderful world of ours great dramatic writers are sure to have dramatic lives. Again and again in his disgrace Antony cries:
“Whither hast thou led me, Egypt?”
Shakespeare’s passion for Mary Fitton led him to shame and madness and despair; his strength broke down under the strain and he never won back again to health. He paid the price of passion with his very blood. It is Shakespeare and not Antony who groans:
“O this false soul of Egypt! this grave charm,– * * * * *
Like a right gipsy, hath, at fast and loose, Beguil’d me to the very heart of loss.”
Shakespeare’s love for Mary Fitton is to me one of the typical tragedies of life–a symbol for ever. In its progress through the world genius is inevitably scourged and crowned with thorns and done to death; inevitably, I say, for the vast majority of men hate and despise what is superior to them: Don Quixote, too, was trodden into the mire by the swine. But the worst of it is that genius suffers also through its own excess; is bound, so to speak, to the stake of its own passionate sensibilities, and consumed, as with fire.
CHAPTER XI
THE DRAMA OF MADNESS: “LEAR”
Ever since Lessing and Goethe it has been the fashion to praise Shakespeare as a demi-god; whatever he wrote is taken to be the rose of perfection. This senseless hero-worship, which reached idolatry in the superlatives of the “Encyclopaedia Britannica” and elsewhere in England, was certain to provoke reaction, and the reaction has come to vigorous expression in Tolstoi, who finds nothing to praise in any of Shakespeare’s works, and everything to blame in most of them, especially in “Lear.” Lamb and Coleridge, on the other hand, have praised “Lear” as a world’s masterpiece. Lamb says of it:
“While we read it, we see not Lear; but we are Lear,–we are in his mind, we are sustained by a grandeur which baffles the malice of daughters and storms; in the aberrations of his reason we discover a mighty irregular power of reasoning, immethodised from the ordinary purposes of life, but exerting its powers, as the wind bloweth where it listeth, at will upon the corruptions and abuses of mankind.”
Coleridge calls “Lear,” “the open and ample playground of Nature’s passions.”
These dithyrambs show rather the lyrical power of the writers than the thing described.
Tolstoi, on the other hand, keeps his eyes on the object, and sets himself to describe the story of “Lear” “as impartially as possible.” He says of the first scene:
“Not to mention the pompous, characterless language of King Lear, the same in which all Shakespeare’s kings speak, the reader or spectator cannot conceive that a king, however old and stupid he may be, could believe the words of the vicious daughters with whom he had passed his whole life, and not believe his favourite daughter, but curse and banish her; and therefore, the spectator or reader cannot share the feelings of the persons participating in this unnatural scene.”
He goes on to condemn the scene between Gloucester and his sons in the same way. The second act he describes as “absurdly foolish.” The third act is “spoiled, by the characteristic Shakespearean language.” The fourth act is “marred in the making,” and of the fifth act, he says: “Again begin Lear’s awful ravings, at which one feels ashamed, as at unsuccessful jokes.” He sums up in these words:
“Such is this celebrated drama. However absurd it may appear in my rendering (which I have endeavoured to make as impartial as possible), I may confidently say that in the original it is yet more absurd. For any man of our time–if he were not under the hypnotic suggestion that this drama is the height of perfection–it would be enough to read it to its end (were he to have sufficient patience for this) in order to be convinced that, far from being the height of perfection, it is a very bad, carelessly-composed production, which, if it could have been of interest to a certain public at a certain time, cannot evoke amongst us anything but aversion and weariness. Every reader of our time who is free from the influence of suggestion will also receive exactly the same impression from all the other extolled dramas of Shakespeare, not to mention the senseless dramatized tales, ‘Pericles,’ ‘Twelfth Night,’ ‘The Tempest,’ ‘Cymbeline,’ and ‘Troilus and Cressida.'”
Every one must admit, I think, that what Tolstoi has said of the hypothesis of the play is justified. Shakespeare, as I have shown, was nearly always an indifferent playwright, careless of the architectural construction of his pieces, contemptuous of stage-craft. So much had already been said in England, if not with the authority of Tolstoi.
It may be conceded, too, that the language which Shakespeare puts into Lear’s mouth in the first act is “characterless and pompous,” even silly; but Tolstoi should have noticed that as soon as Lear realizes the ingratitude of his daughters, his language becomes more and more simple and pathetic. Shakespeare’s kings are apt to rant and mouth when first introduced; he seems to have thought pomp of speech went with royal robes; but when the action is engaged even his monarchs speak naturally.
The truth is, that just as the iambics of Greek drama were lifted above ordinary conversation, so Shakespeare’s language, being the language mainly of poetic and romantic drama, is a little more measured and, if you will, more pompous than the small talk of everyday life, which seems to us, accustomed as we are to prose plays, more natural. Shakespeare, however, in his blank verse, reaches heights which are not often reached by prose, and when he pleases, his verse becomes as natural-easy as any prose, even that of Tolstoi himself. Tolstoi finds everything Lear says “pompous,” “artificial,” “unnatural,” but Lear’s words:
“Pray do not mock me,
I am a very foolish-fond old man
Fourscore and upward, not an hour more nor less, And, to deal plainly
I fear I am not in my perfect mind.”
touch us poignantly, just because of their childish simplicity; we feel as if Lear, in them, had reached the heart of pathos. Tolstoi, I am afraid, has missed all the poetry of Lear, all the deathless phrases. Lear says:
“I am a man,
More sinn’d against than sinning,”
and the new-coined phrase passed at once into the general currency. Who, too, can ever forget his description of the poor?
“Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are, That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you From seasons such as these?”
The like of that “looped and windowed raggedness” is hardly to be found in any other literature. In the fourth and fifth acts Lear’s language is simplicity itself, and even in that third act which Tolstoi condemns as “incredibly pompous and artificial,” we find him talking naturally:
“Ha! here ‘s three on’s are sophisticated: thou art the thing itself, unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art.”
There is still another reason why some of us cannot read “Lear” with the cold eyes of reason, contemptuously critical. “Lear” marks a stage in Shakespeare’s agony. We who know the happy ingenuousness of his youth undimmed by doubts of man or suspicions of woman, cannot help sympathizing with him when we see him cheated and betrayed, drinking the bitter cup of disillusion to the dregs. In “Lear” the angry brooding leads to madness; and it is only fitting that the keynote of the tragedy, struck again and again, should be the cry.
“O, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet Heaven! Keep me in temper: I would not be mad.”
“Lear” is the first attempt in all literature to paint madness, and not the worst attempt.
In “Lear,” Shakespeare was intent on expressing his own disillusion and naked misery. How blind Lear must have been, says Tolstoi; how incredibly foolish not to know his daughters better after living with them for twenty years; but this is just what Shakespeare wishes to express: How blind I was, he cries to us, how inconceivably trusting and foolish! How could I have imagined that a young noble would be grateful, or a wanton true? “Lear” is a page of Shakespeare’s autobiography, and the faults of it are the stains of his blistering tears.
“Lear” is badly constructed, but worse was to come. The next tragedy, “Timon,” is merely a scream of pain, and yet it, too, has a deeper than artistic interest for us as marking the utmost limit of Shakespeare’s suffering. The mortal malady of perhaps the finest spirit that has ever appeared among men has an interest for us profounder than any tragedy. And to find that in Shakespeare’s agony and bloody sweat he ignores the rules of artistry is simply what might have been expected, and, to some of us, deepens the personal interest in the drama.
In “Lear” Edgar is peculiarly Shakespeare’s mouthpiece, and to Edgar Shakespeare gives some of the finest words he ever coined:
“The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices Make instruments to plague us.”
Here, too, in what Edgar says of himself, is the moral of all passion: it is manifestly Shakespeare’s view of himself:
“A most poor man, made tame to Fortune’s blows, Who by the art of knowing and feeling sorrows Am pregnant to good pity.”
Then we find the supreme phrase–perhaps the finest ever written:
“Men must endure
Their going hence even as their coming hither. Ripeness is all.”
Shakespeare speaks through Lear in the last acts as plainly as through Edgar. In the third scene of the fifth act Lear talks to Cordelia in the very words Shakespeare gave to the saint Henry VI. at the beginning of his career. Compare the extracts on pages 118-9 with the following passage, and you will see the similarity and the astounding growth in his art.
“… Come, let’s away to prison: We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage: When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down And ask of thee forgiveness: so we’ll live, And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues Talk of court news; …”
More characteristic still of Shakespeare is the fact that when Lear is at his bitterest in the fourth act, he shows the erotic mania which is the source of all Shakespeare’s bitterness and misery; but which is utterly out of place in Lear. The reader will mark how “adultery” is dragged in:
“… Ay, every inch a king:
When I do stare, see how the subject quakes. I pardon that man’s life. What was thy cause? Adultery?
Thou shalt not die: die for adultery! No: The wren goes to ‘t, and the small gilded fly Does lecher in my sight.
Let copulation thrive; …
…
Down from the waist they are Centaurs, Though women all above;
But to the girdle do the gods inherit, Beneath is all the fiends’; …”
Thus Lear raves for a whole page: Shakespeare on his hobby: in the same erotic spirit he makes both Goneril and Regan lust after Edmund.
The note of this tragedy is Shakespeare’s understanding of his insane blind trust in men; but the passion of it springs from erotic mania and from the consciousness that he is too old for love’s lists. Perhaps his imagination never carried him higher than when Lear appeals to the heavens because they too are old:
“… O heavens,
If you do love old men, if your sweet sway Allow obedience, if yourselves are old, Make it your cause.”
CHAPTER XII
THE DRAMA OF DESPAIR: “TIMON OF ATHENS”
“Timon” marks the extremity of Shakespeare’s suffering. It is not to be called a work of art, it is hardly even a tragedy; it is the causeless ruin of a soul, a ruin insufficiently motived by complete trust in men and spendthrift generosity. If there was ever a man who gave so lavishly as Timon, if there was ever one so senseless blind in trusting, then he deserved his fate. There is no gradation in his giving, and none in his fall; no artistic crescendo. The whole drama is, as I have said, a scream of suffering, or rather, a long curse upon all the ordinary conditions of life. The highest qualities of Shakespeare are not to be found in the play. There are none of the magnificent phrases which bejewel “Lear”; little of high wisdom, even in the pages which are indubitably Shakespeare’s, and no characterization worth mentioning. The honest steward, Flavius, is the honest Kent again of “Lear,” honest and loyal beyond nature; Apemantus is another Thersites. Words which throw a high light on Shakespeare’s character are given to this or that personage of the play without discrimination. One phrase of Apemantus is as true of Shakespeare as of Timon and is worth noting:
“The middle of humanity thou never knewest, but the extremity of both ends.”
The tragic sonnet-note is given to Flavius: “What viler thing upon the earth than friends Who can bring noblest minds to basest ends!”
In so far as Timon is a character at all he is manifestly Shakespeare, Shakespeare who raves against the world, because he finds no honesty in men, no virtue in women, evil everywhere–“boundless thefts in limited professions.” This Shakespeare-Timon swings round characteristically as soon as he finds that Flavius is honest:
“Had I a steward
So true, so just, and now so comfortable? It almost turns my dangerous nature mild. Let me behold thy face. Surely this man Was born of woman.
Forgive my general and exceptless rashness, You perpetual-sober gods! I do proclaim
One honest man–mistake me not–but one …”
I cannot help putting the great and self-revealing line [Footnote: This passage is among those rejected by the commentators as un-Shakespearean: “it does not stand the test,” says the egregious Gollancz.] in italics; a line Tolstoi would, no doubt, think stupid-pompous. Timon ought to have known his steward, one might say in Tolstoi’s spirit, as Lear should have known his daughters; but this is still the tragedy, which Shakespeare wishes to emphasize that his hero was blind in trusting.
Towards the end Shakespeare speaks through Timon quite unfeignedly: Richard II. said characteristically:
“Nor I nor any man that but man is
With nothing shall be pleased, till he be eased With being nothing:”
And Timon says to Flavius:
“My long sickness
Of health and living now begins to mend And nothing brings me all things.”
Then the end:
“Timon hath made his everlasting mansion Upon the beached verge of the salt flood….”
We must not leave this play before noticing the overpowering erotic strain in Shakespeare which suits Timon as little as it suited Lear. The long discussion with Phrynia and Timandra is simply dragged in: neither woman is characterized: Shakespeare-Timon eases himself in pages of erotic raving:
“… Strike me the counterfeit matron; It is her habit only that is honest,
Herself’s a bawd:…”
And then:
“Consumptions sow
In hollow bones of man………..
……………Down with the nose, Down with it flat; take the bridge quite away …”
The “damned earth” even is “the common whore of mankind.”
“Timon” is the true sequel to “The Merchant of Venice.” Antonio gives lavishly, but is saved at the crisis by his friends. Timon gives with both hands, but when he appeals to his friends, is treated as a bore. Shakespeare had travelled far in the dozen years which separate the two plays.
All Shakespeare’s tragedies are phases of his own various weaknesses, and each one brings the hero to defeat and ruin. Hamlet cannot carry revenge to murder and fails through his own irresolution. Othello comes to grief through mad jealousy. Antony fails and falls through excess of lust; Lear through trust in men, and Timon through heedless generosity. All these are separate studies of Shakespeare’s own weaknesses; but the ruin is irretrievable, and reaches its ultimate in Timon. Trust and generosity, Shakespeare would like to tell us, were his supremest faults. In this he deceived himself. Neither “Lear” nor “Timon” is his greatest tragedy; but “Antony and Cleopatra,” for lust was his chief weakness, and the tragedy of lust his greatest play.
Much of “Timon” is not Shakespeare’s, the critics tell us, and some of it is manifestly not his, though many of the passages rejected with the best reason have, I think, been touched up by him. The second scene of the first act is as bad as bad can be; but I hear his voice in the line:
“Methinks, I could deal kingdoms to my friends, And ne’er be weary.”
At any rate, this is the keynote of the tragedy, which is struck again and again. Shakespeare probably exaggerated his generosity out of aristocratic pose; but that he was careless of money and freehanded to a fault, is, I think, certain from his writings, and can be proved from the facts known to us of his life.
CHAPTER XIII
SHAKESPEARE’S LAST ROMANCES: ALL COPIES.
“Winters Tale”: “Cymbeline”: “The Tempest.”
The wheel has swung full circle: Timon is almost as weak as “Titus Andronicus”; the pen falls from the nerveless hand. Shakespeare wrote nothing for some time. Even the critics make a break after “Timon,” which closes what they are pleased to call his third period; but they do not seem to see that the break was really a breakdown in health. In “Lear” he had brooded and raged to madness; in “Timon” he had spent himself in futile, feeble cursings. His nerves had gone to pieces. He was now forty-five years of age, the forces of youth and growth had left him. He was prematurely old and feeble.
His recovery, it seems certain, was very slow, and he never again, if I am right, regained vigorous health, I am almost certain he went down to Stratford at this crisis and spent some time there, probably a couple of years, trying, no doubt, to staunch the wound in his heart, and win back again to life. The fear of madness had frightened him from brooding: he made up his mind to let the dead past bury its dead; he would try to forget and live sanely. After all, life is better than death.
It was probably his daughter who led him back from the brink of the grave. Almost all his latest works show the same figure of a young girl. He seems now, for the first time, to have learned that a maiden can be pure, and in his old idealizing way which went with him to the end, he deified her. Judith became a symbol to him, and he lent her the ethereal grace of abstract beauty. In “Pericles” she is Marina; in “The Winter’s Tale” Perdita; in “The Tempest” Miranda. It is probable when one comes to think of it, that Ward was right when he says that Shakespeare spent his “elder years” in Stratford; he was too broken to have taken up his life in London again.
The assertion that Shakespeare broke down in health, and never won back to vigorous life, will be scorned as my imagining. The critics who have agreed to regard “Cymbeline,” “The Winter’s Tale,” and “The Tempest” as his finest works are all against me on this point, and they will call for “Proofs, proofs. Give us proofs,” they will cry, “that the man who went mad and raved with Lear, and screamed and cursed in “Timon” did really break down, and was not imagining madness and despair.” The proofs are to be found in these works themselves, plain for all men to read.
The three chief works of his last period are romances and are all copies; he was too tired to invent or even to annex; his own story is the only one that interests him. The plot of “The Winter’s Tale” is the plot of “Much Ado about Nothing.” Hero is Hermione. Another phase of “Much Ado About Nothing” is written out at length in “Cymbeline”; Imogen suffers like Hero and Hermione, under unfounded accusation. It is Shakespeare’s own history turned from this world to fairyland: what would have happened, he asks, if the woman whom I believed false, had been true? This, the theme of “Much Ado,” is the theme also of “The Winter’s Tale” and of “Cymbeline.” The idealism of the man is inveterate: he will not see that it was his own sensuality which gave him up to suffering, and not Mary Fitton’s faithlessness. “The Tempest” is the story of “As you Like it.” We have again the two dukes, the exiled good Duke, who is Shakespeare, and the bad usurping Duke, Shakespeare’s rival, Chapman, who has conquered for a time. Shakespeare is no longer able or willing to discover a new play: he can only copy himself, and in one of the scenes which he wrote into “Henry VIII.” the copy is slavish.
I allude to the third scene in the second act; the dialogue between Anne Bullen and the Old Lady is extraordinarily reminiscent. When Anne Bullen says–
“‘Tis better to be lowly born,
And range with humble livers in content, Than to be perk’d up in a glistering grief And wear a golden sorrow”
I am reminded of Henry VI. And the contention between Anne Bullen and the Old Lady, in which Anne Bullen declares that she would not be a queen, and the Old Lady scorns her:
“Beshrew me, I would,
And venture maidenhead for’t; and so would you, For all this spice of your hypocrisy.”
is much the same contention, and is handled in the same way as the contention between Desdemona and Emilia in “Othello.”
There are many other proofs of Shakespeare’s weakness of hand throughout this last period, if further proofs were needed. The chief characteristics of Shakespeare’s health are his humour, his gaiety, and wit–his love of life. A correlative characteristic is that all his women are sensuous and indulge in coarse expressions in and out of season. This is said to be a fault of his time; but only professors could use an argument which shows such ignorance of life. Homer was clean enough, and Sophocles, Spenser, too; sensuality is a quality of the individual man. Still another characteristic of Shakespeare’s maturity is that his characters, in spite of being idealized, live for us a vigorous, pulsing life.
All these characteristics are lacking in the works after “Timon.” There is practically no humour, no wit, the clowns even are merely boorish-stupid with the solitary exception of Autolycus, who is a pale reflex of one or two characteristics of Falstaff. Shakespeare’s humour has disappeared, or is so faint as scarcely to be called humour; all the heroines, too, are now vowed away from sensuality: Marina passes through the brothel unsoiled; Perdita might have milk in her veins, and not blood, and Miranda is but another name for Perdita. Imogen, too, has no trace of natural passion in her: she is a mere washing-list, so to speak, of sexless perfections. In this last period Shakespeare will have nothing to do with sensuality, and his characters, and not the female characters alone, are hardly more than abstractions; they lack the blood of emotion; there is not one of them could cast a shadow. How is it that the critics have mistaken these pale, bloodless silhouettes for Shakespeare’s masterpieces?
In his earliest works he was compelled, as we have seen, to use his own experiences perpetually, not having had any experience of life, and in these, his latest plays, he also uses when he can his own experiences to give his pictures of the world from which he had withdrawn, some sense of vivid life. For example, in “Winter’s Tale” his account of the death of the boy Mamillius is evidently a reflex of his own emotion when he lost his son, Hamnet, an emotion which at the time he pictured deathlessly in Arthur and the grief of the Queen-mother Constance. Similarly, in “Cymbeline,” the joy of the brothers in finding the sister is an echo of his own pleasure in getting to know his daughter.
I have an idea about the genesis of these last three plays as regards their order which may be wholly false, though true, I am sure, to Shakespeare’s character. I imagine he was asked by the author to touch up “Pericles.” On reading the play, he saw the opportunity of giving expression to the new emotion which had been awakened in him by the serious sweet charm of his young daughter, and accordingly he wrote the scenes in which Marina figures. Judith’s modesty was a perpetual wonder to him.
His success induced him to sketch out “The Winter’s Tale,” in which tale he played sadly with what might have been if his accused love, Mary Fitton, had been guiltless instead of guilty. I imagine he saw that the play was not a success, or supreme critic as he was, that his hand had grown weak, and seeking for the cause he probably came to the conclusion that the comparative failure was due to the fact that he did not put himself into “The Winter’s Tale,” and so he determined in the next play to draw a full-length portrait of himself again, as he had done in “Hamlet,” and accordingly he sketched Posthumus, a staider, older, idealized Hamlet, with lymph in his veins, instead of blood. In the same idealizing spirit, he pictured his rose of womanhood for us in Imogen, who is, however, not a living woman at all, any more than his earliest ideal, Juliet, was a woman. The contrast between these two sketches is the contrast between Shakespeare’s strength and his weakness. Here is how the fourteen-year-old Juliet talks of love:
“Spread thy close curtain, love-performing night, That runaways’ eyes may wink, and Romeo Leap to these arms, untalk’d of and unseen. Lovers can see to do their amorous rites By their own beauties.”
And here what Posthumus says of Imogen:
“Me of my lawful pleasure she restrain’d, And pray’d me oft forbearance: did it with A pudency so rosy, the sweet view on’t
Might well have warmed old Saturn.”
Neither of these statements is very generally true: but the second is out of character. When Shakespeare praises restraint in love he must have been very weak; in full manhood he prayed for excess of it, and regarded a surfeit as the only rational cure.
I think Shakespeare liked Posthumus and Imogen; but he could not have thought “Cymbeline” a great work, and so he pulled himself together for a masterpiece. He seems to have said to himself, “All that fighting of Posthumus is wrong; men do not fight at forty-eight; I will paint myself simply in the qualities I possess now; I will tell the truth about myself so far as I can.” The result is the portrait of Prospero in “The Tempest.”
Let me just say before I begin to study Prospero that I find the introduction of the Masque in the fourth act extraordinarily interesting. Ben Jonson had written classic masques for this and that occasion; masques which were very successful, we are told; they had “caught on,” in fact, to use our modern slang. Shakespeare will now show us that he, too, can write a masque with classic deities in it, and better Jonson’s example. It is pitiful, and goes to prove, I think, that Shakespeare was but little esteemed by his generation.
Jonson answered him conceitedly, as Jonson would, in the Introduction to his “Bartholomew Fair” (1612-14), “If there be never a Servant
monster i’ the Fayre, who can help it, he sayes; nor a nest of Antiques. He is loth to make nature afraid in his Playes,
like those that beget Tales, Tempests, and such like
Drolleries.”
At the very end, the creator of Hamlet, the finest mind in the world, was eager to show that he could write as well in any style as the author of “Every Man in his Humour.” To me the bare fact is full of interest, and most pitiful.
Let us now turn to “The Tempest,” and see how our poet figures in it. It is Shakespeare’s last work, and one of his very greatest; his testament to the English people; in wisdom and high poetry a miracle.
The portrait of Shakespeare we get in Prospero is astonishingly faithful and ingenuous, in spite of its idealization. His life’s day is waning to the end; shadows of the night are drawing in upon him, yet he is the same bookish, melancholy student, the lover of all courtesies and generosities, whom we met first as Biron in “Love’s Labour’s Lost.” The gaiety is gone and the sensuality; the spiritual outlook is infinitely sadder–that is what the years have done with our gentle Shakespeare.
Prospero’s first appearance in the second scene of the first act is as a loving father and magician; he says to Miranda:
“I have done nothing but in care of thee, Of thee, my dear one! thee, my daughter.”
He asks Miranda what she can remember of her early life, and reaches magical words:
“What seest thou else
In the dark backward and abysm of time?”
Miranda is only fifteen years of age. Shakespeare turned Juliet, it will be remembered, from a girl of sixteen into one of fourteen; now, though the sensuality has left him, he makes Miranda only fifteen; clearly he is the same admirer of girlish youth at forty-eight as he was twenty years before. Then Prospero tells Miranda of himself and his brother, the “perfidious” Duke:
“And Prospero, the prime Duke, being so reputed In dignity, and for the liberal arts
Without a parallel; those being all my study.”
He will not only be a Prince now, but a master “without a parallel” in the liberal arts. He must explain, too, at undue length, how he allowed himself to be supplanted by his false brother, and speaks about himself in Shakespeare’s very words:
“I thus neglecting worldly ends, all dedicate To closeness, and the bettering of my mind With that, which, but by being so retired, O’erprized all popular rate, in my false brother Awaked an evil nature: and my trust,
Like a good parent, did beget of him, A falsehood, in its contrary as great
As my trust was; which had, indeed, no limit, A confidence sans bound.”
Shakespeare, too, “neglecting worldly ends,” had dedicated himself to “bettering of his mind,” we may be sure. Prospero goes on to tell us explicitly how Shakespeare loved books, which we were only able to infer from his earlier plays:
“Me, poor man, my library
Was dukedom large enough.”
And again, Gonzalo (another name for Kent and Flavius) having given him some books, he says:
“Of his gentleness,
Knowing I loved my books, he furnished me From my own library, with volumes that
I prize above my dukedom.”
His daughter grieves lest she had been a trouble to him: forthwith Shakespeare-Prospero answers:
“O, a cherubim
Thou wast, that did preserve me. Thou didst smile Infused with a fortitude from heaven,
When I have deck’d the sea with drops full salt Under my burden groan’d; which raised in me An undergoing stomach, to bear up
Against what should ensue.”
But why should the magician weep or groan under a burden? had he no confidence in his miraculous powers? All this is Shakespeare’s confession. Every word is true; his daughter did indeed “preserve” Shakespeare, and enable him to bear up under the burden of life’s betrayals.
No wonder Prospero begins to apologize for this long-winded confession, which indeed is “most impertinent” to the play, as he admits, though most interesting to him and to us, for he is simply Shakespeare telling us his own feelings at the time. The gentle magician then hears from Ariel how the shipwreck has been conducted without harming a hair of anyone.
The whole scene is an extraordinarily faithful and detailed picture of Shakespeare’s soul. I find significance even in the fact that Ariel wants his freedom “a full year” before the term Prospero had originally proposed. Shakespeare finished “The Tempest,” I believe, and therewith set the seal on his life’s work a full year earlier than he had intended; he feared lest death might surprise him before he had put the pinnacle on his work. Ariel’s torment, too, is full of meaning for me; for Ariel is Shakespeare’s “shaping spirit of imagination,” who was once the slave of “a foul witch,” and by her “imprisoned painfully” for “a dozen years.”
That “dozen years” is to me astonishingly true and interesting: it shows that my reading of the duration of his passion-torture was absolutely correct–Shakespeare’s “delicate spirit” and best powers bound to Mary Fitton’s “earthy” service from 1597 to 1608.
We can perhaps fix this latter date with some assurance. Mistress Fitton married for the second time a Captain or Mr. Polwhele late in 1607, or some short time before March, 1608, when the fact of her recent marriage was recorded in the will of her great uncle. It seems to me probable, or at least possible, that this event marks her complete separation from Shakespeare; she may very likely have left the Court and London on ceasing to be a Maid of Honour.
Shakespeare is so filled with himself in this last play, so certain that he is the most important person in the world, that this scene is more charged with intimate self-revealing than any other in all his works. And when Ferdinand comes upon the stage Shakespeare lends him, too, his own peculiar qualities. His puppets no longer interest him; he is careless of characterization. Ferdinand says:
“This music crept by me upon the waters Allaying both their fury and my passion With its sweet air.”
Music, it will be remembered, had precisely the same peculiar effect upon Duke Orsino in “Twelfth Night.” Ferdinand, too, is extraordinarily conceited:
“I am the best of them that speak this speech. …. Myself am Naples.”
Shakespeare’s natural aristocratic pride as a Prince reinforced by his understanding of his own real importance. Ferdinand then declares he will be content with a prison if he can see Miranda in it:
“Space enough
Have I in such a prison.”
Which is Hamlet’s:
“I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space.”
The second act, with its foiled conspiracy, is wretchedly bad, and the meeting of Caliban and Trinculo with Stephanie does not improve it much, Shakespeare has little interest now in anything outside himself: age and greatness are as self-centred as youth.
In the third act the courtship of Ferdinand and Miranda is pretty, but hardly more. Ferdinand is bloodless, thin, and Miranda swears “by her modesty,” as the jewel in her dower, which takes away a little from the charming confession of girl-love:
“I would not wish
Any companion in the world but you.”
The comic relief which follows is unspeakably dull; but the words of Ariel, warning the King of Naples and the usurping Duke that the wrong they have done Prospero is certain to be avenged unless blotted out by “heart-sorrow and a clear life ensuing,” are most characteristic and memorable.
In the fourth act Prospero preaches, as we have seen, self-restraint to Ferdinand in words which, in their very extravagance, show how deeply he regretted his own fault with his wife before marriage. I shall consider the whole passage when treating of Shakespeare’s marriage as an incident in his life. Afterwards comes the masque, and the marvellous speech of Prospero, which touches the highest height of poetry:
“These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inhabit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made of; and our little life Is rounded with a sleep. Sir, I am vex’d; Bear with my weakness; my old brain is troubled: Be not disturb’d with my infirmity:
If you be pleased, retire into my cell, And there repose: a turn or two I’ll walk, To still my beating mind.”
I have given the verses to the very end, for I find the insistence on his age and weakness (which are not in keeping with the character of a magician), a confession of Shakespeare himself: the words “beating mind” are extraordinarily characteristic, proving as they do that his thoughts and emotions were too strong for his frail body.
In the fifth act Shakespeare-Prospero shows himself to us at his noblest: he will forgive his enemies:
“Though with their high wrongs I am struck to the quick, Yet with my nobler reason ‘gainst my fury Do I take part: the rarer action is
In virtue than in vengeance: they being penitent, The sole drift of my purpose doth extend Not a frown further.”
In “The Two Gentlemen of Verona” we saw how Shakespeare-Valentine forgave his faithless friend as soon as he repented: here is the same creed touched to nobler expression.
And then, with all his wishes satisfied, his heart’s desire accomplished, Prospero is ready to set out for Milan again and home. We all expect some expression of joy from him, but this is what we get:
“And thence retire me to my Milan, where Every third thought shall be my grave.”
The despair is wholly unexpected and out of place, as was the story of his weakness and infirmity, his “beating mind.” It is evidently Shakespeare’s own confession. After writing “The Tempest” he intends to retire to Stratford, where “every third thought shall be my grave.”
I have purposely drawn special attention to Shakespeare’s weakness and despair at this time, because the sad, rhymed Epilogue which has to be spoken by Prospero has been attributed to another hand by a good many scholars. It is manifestly Shakespeare’s, out of Shakespeare’s very heart indeed; though Mr. Israel Gollancz follows his leaders in saying that the “Epilogue to the play is evidently by some other hand than Shakespeare’s”: “evidently” is good. Here it is:
“Now my charms are all o’erthrown,
And what strength I have’s mine own, Which is most faint: now, ’tis true,
I must be here confined by you,
Or sent to Naples. Let me not
Since I have my dukedom got,
And pardon’d the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell; But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands:
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails, Which was to please. Now I want,
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant; And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself, and frees all faults As you from crimes would pardon’d be
Let your indulgence set me free.”
From youth to age Shakespeare occupied himself with the deepest problems of human existence; again and again we find him trying to pierce the darkness that enshrouds life. Is there indeed nothing beyond the grave–nothing? Is the noble fabric of human thought, achievement and endeavour to fade into nothingness and pass away like the pageant of a dream? He will not cheat himself with unfounded hopes, nor delude himself into belief; he resigns himself with a sigh–it is the undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveller returns. But Shakespeare always believed in repentance and forgiveness, and now, world-weary, old and weak, he turns to prayer, [Footnote: Hamlet, too, after speaking with his father’s ghost, cries: “I’ll go pray.”] prayer that–
“assaults
Mercy itself and frees all faults.”
Poor, broken Shakespeare! “My ending is despair”: the sadness of it, and the pity, lie deeper than tears.
What a man! to produce a masterpiece in spite of such weakness. What a play is this “Tempest”! At length Shakespeare sees himself as he is, a monarch without a country; but master of a very “potent art,” a great magician, with imagination as an attendant spirit, that can conjure up shipwrecks, or enslave enemies, or create lovers at will; and all his powers are used in gentle kindness. Ariel is a higher creation, more spiritual and charming than any other poet has ever attempted; and Caliban, the earth-born, half-beast, half-man–these are the poles of Shakespeare’s genius.
CHAPTER XIV
SHAKESPEARE’S LIFE
Our long travail is almost at an end. We have watched Shakespeare painting himself at various periods of his life, and at full length in twenty dramas, as the gentle, sensuous poet-thinker. We have studied him when given over to wild passion in the sonnets and elsewhere, and to insane jealousy in “Othello”; we have seen him as Hamlet brooding on revenge and self-murder, and in “Lear,” and “Timon” raging on the verge of madness, and in these ecstasies, when the soul is incapable of feigning, we have discovered his true nature as it differed from the ideal presentments which his vanity shaped and coloured. We have corrected his personal estimate by that “story of faults conceal’d” which Shakespeare himself referred to in sonnet 88. It only remains for me now to give a brief account of his life and the incidents of it to show that my reading of his character is borne out by the known facts, and thus put the man in his proper setting, so to speak.
On the other hand, our knowledge of Shakespeare’s character will help us to reconstruct his life-story. What is known positively of his life could be given in a couple of pages; but there are traditions of him, tales about him, innumerable scraps of fact and fiction concerning him which are more or less interesting and authentic; and now that we know the man, we shall be able to accept or reject these reports with some degree of confidence, and so arrive at a credible picture of his life’s journey, and the changes which Time wrought in him. In all I may say about him I shall keep close to the facts as given in his works. When tradition seems consonant with what Shakespeare has told us about himself, or with what Ben Jonson said of him, I shall use it with confidence.
Shakespeare was a common name in Warwickshire; other Shakespeares besides the poet’s family were known there in the sixteenth century, and at least one other William Shakespeare in the neighbourhood of Stratford. The poet’s father, John Shakespeare, was of farmer stock, and seems to have had an adventurous spirit: he left Snitterfield, his birthplace, as a young man, for the neighbouring town of Stratford, where he set up in business for himself. Aubrey says he was a butcher; he certainly dealt in meat, skins, and leather, as well as in corn, wool, and malt–an adaptable, quick man, who turned his hand to anything–a Jack-of-all-trades. He appears to have been successful at first, for in 1556, five years after coming to Stratford, he purchased two freehold tenements, one with a garden in Henley Street, and the other in Greenhill Street, with an orchard. In 1557 he was elected burgess, or town councillor, and shortly afterwards did the best stroke of business in his life by marrying Mary Arden, whose father had been a substantial farmer. Mary inherited the fee simple of Asbies, a house with some fifty acres of land at Wilmcote, and an interest in property at Snitterfield; the whole perhaps worth some L80 or L90, or, say, L600 of our money. His marriage turned John Shakespeare into a well-to-do citizen; he filled various offices in the borough, and in 1568 became a bailiff, the highest position in the corporation. During his year of office, we are told, he entertained two companies of actors at Stratford.
Mary Arden seems to have been her father’s favourite child, and though she could not sign her own name, must have possessed rare qualities; for the poet, as we learn from “Coriolanus,” held her in extraordinary esteem and affection, and mourned her after her death as “the noblest mother in the world.”
William Shakespeare, the first son and third child of this couple, was born on the 22nd or 23rd April, 1564, no one knows which day; the Stratford parish registers prove that he was baptized on 26th April. And if the date of his birth is not known, neither is the place of it; his father owned two houses in Henley Street, and it is uncertain which he was born in.
John Shakespeare had, fortunately, nothing to pay for the education of his sons. They had free tuition at the Grammar School at Stratford. The poet went to school when he was seven or eight years of age, and received an ordinary education together with some grounding in Latin. He probably spent most of his time at first making stories out of the frescoes on the walls. There can be no doubt that he learned easily all he was taught, and still less doubt that he was not taught much. He mastered Lyly’s “Latin Grammar,” and was taken through some conversation books like the “Sententiae Pueriles,” and not much further, for he puts Latin phrases in the mouth of the schoolmasters, Holofernes in “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” and Hugh Evans in “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” and all these phrases are taken word for word either from Lyly’s Grammar or from the “Sententiae Pueriles.” In “Titus Andronicus,” too, one of Tamora’s sons, on reading a Latin couplet, says it is a verse of Horace, but he “read it in the grammar,” which was probably the author’s case. Ben Jonson’s sneer was well-founded, Shakespeare had “little Latine and lesse Greeke.” His French, as shown in his “Henry V.,” was anything but good, and his Italian was probably still slighter.
It was lucky for Shakespeare that his father’s increasing poverty withdrew him from school early, and forced him into contact with life. Aubrey says that “when he was a boy he exercised his father’s trade [of butcher]; but when he kill’d a calfe he would doe it in high style and make a speech.” I daresay young Will flourished about with a knife and made romantic speeches; but I am pretty sure he never killed a calf. Killing a calf is not the easiest part of a butcher’s business; nor a task which Shakespeare at any time would have selected. The tradition is simply sufficient to prove that the town folk had already noticed the eager, quick, spouting lad.
Of Shakespeare’s life after he left school, say from thirteen to eighteen, we know almost nothing. He probably did odd jobs for his father from time to time; but his father’s business seems to have run rapidly from bad to worse; for in 1586 a creditor informed the local Court that John Shakespeare had no goods on which distraint could be levied, and on 6th September of the same year he was deprived of his alderman’s gown. During this period of steadily increasing poverty in the house it was only to be expected that young Will Shakespeare would run wild.
The tradition as given by Rowe says that he fell “into low company, and amongst them some that made a frequent practice of deer-stealing engaged him with them more than once in robbing the park of Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecot, near Stratford. For this he was prosecuted by that gentleman, as he then thought somewhat too severely, and in order to revenge that ill-usage he made a ballad upon him.”
Another story has it that Sir Thomas Lucy got a lawyer from Warwick to prosecute the boys, and that Shakespeare stuck his satirical ballad to the park gates at Charlecot. The ballad is said to have been lost, but certain verses were preserved which fit the circumstances and suit Shakespeare’s character so perfectly that I for one am content to accept them. I give the first and the last verses as most characteristic:
SONG
“A parliament member, a Justice of peace, At home a poor scarecrow, in London an asse, If Lowsie is lucy, as some volke miscalle it Then Lucy is lowsie, whatever befalle it. He thinks himself greate
Yet an asse in his state,
We allowe by his ears but with asses to mate. If Lucy is lowsie, as some volke miscalle it Sing lowsie Lucy whatever befalle it.
* * * * *
“If a juvenile frolick he cannot forgive, We’ll sing lowsie Lucy as long as we live, And Lucy, the lowsie, a libel may calle it Sing lowsie Lucy whatever befalle it.
He thinks himself greate
Yet an asse in his state,
We allowe by his ears but with asses to mate. If Lucy is lowsie, as some volke miscalle it Sing lowsie Lucy, Whatever befalle it.”
The last verse, so out of keeping in its curious impartiality with the scurrilous refrain, appears to me to carry its own signature. There can be no doubt that the verses give us young Shakespeare’s feelings in the matter. It was probably reading ballads and tales of “Merrie Sherwood” that first inclined him to deer-stealing; and we have already seen from his “Richard II.” and “Henry IV.” and “Henry V.” that he had been led astray by low companions.
In his idle, high-spirited youth, Shakespeare did worse than break bounds and kill deer; he was at a loose end and up to all sorts of mischief. At eighteen he had already courted and won Anne Hathaway, a farmer’s daughter of the neighbouring village of Shottery. Anne was nearly eight years older than he was. Her father had died a short time before and left Anne, his eldest daughter, L6 13s. 4d.,
or, say, L50 of our money. The house at Shottery, now shown as Anne Hathaway’s cottage, once formed part of Richard Hathaway’s farmhouse, and there, and in the neighbouring lanes, the lovers did their courting. The wooing on Shakespeare’s side was nothing but pastime, though it led to marriage.
His marriage is perhaps the first serious mistake that Shakespeare made, and it certainly influenced his whole life. It is needful, therefore, to understand it as accurately as may be, however we may judge it. A man’s life, like a great river, may be limpid-pure in the beginning, and when near its source; as it grows and gains strength it is inevitably sullied and stained with earth’s soilure.
The ordinary apologists would have us believe that the marriage was happy; they know that Shakespeare was not married in Stratford, and, though a minor, his parents’ consent to the marriage was not obtained; but they persist in talking about his love for his wife, and his wife’s devoted affection for him. Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps, the bell-wether of the flock, has gone so far as to tell us how on the morning of the day he died “his wife, who had smoothed the pillow beneath his head for the last time, felt that her right hand was taken from her.” Let us see if there is any foundation for this sentimental balderdash. Here are some of the facts.
In the Bishop of Worcester’s register a licence was issued on 27th November, 1582, authorizing the marriage of William Shakespeare with Anne Whately, of Temple Grafton. On the very next day in the register of the same Bishop there is a deed, wherein Fulk Sandells and John Richardson, farmers of Shottery, bound themselves in the Bishop’s court under a surety of L40 to free the Bishop of all liability should a lawful impediment–“by reason of any pre-contract or consanguinity”–be subsequently disclosed to imperil the validity of the marriage, then in contemplation, of William Shakespeare with Anne Hathaway.
Dryasdust, of course, argues that there is no connection whatever between these two events. He is able to persuade himself easily that the William Shakespeare who got a licence to marry Anne Whately, of Temple Grafton, on 27th November, 1582, is not the same William Shakespeare who is being forced to marry Anne Hathaway on the next day by two friends of Anne Hathaway’s father. Yet such a coincidence as two William Shakespeares seeking to be married by special licence in the same court at the same moment of time is too extraordinary to be admitted. Besides, why should Sandells and Richardson bind themselves as sureties in L40 to free the Bishop of liability by reason of any pre-contract if there were no pre-contract? The two William Shakespeares are clearly one and the same person. Sandells was a supervisor of the will of Richard Hathaway, and was described in the will as “my trustie friende and neighbour.” He showed himself a trusty friend of the usual sort to his friend’s daughter, and when he heard that loose Will Shakespeare was attempting to marry Anne Whately, he forthwith went to the same Bishop’s court which had granted the licence, pledged himself and his neighbour, Richardson, as sureties that there was no pre-contract, and so induced the Bishop, who no doubt then learned the unholy circumstances for the first time, to grant a licence in order that the marriage with Anne Hathaway could be celebrated, “with once asking of the bannes” and without the consent of the father of the bridegroom, which was usually required when the bridegroom was a minor.
Clearly Fulk Sandells was a masterful man; young Will Shakespeare was forced to give up Anne Whately, poor lass, and marry Anne Hathaway, much against his will. Like many another man, Shakespeare married at leisure, and repented in hot haste. Six months later a daughter was born to him, and was baptized in the name of Susanna at Stratford Parish Church on the 26th of May, 1583. There was, therefore, an importunate reason for the wedding, as Sandells, no doubt, made the Bishop understand.
The whole story, it seems to me, is in perfect consonance with Shakespeare’s impulsive, sensual nature; is, indeed, an excellent illustration of it. Hot, impatient, idle Will got Anne Hathaway into trouble, was forced to marry her, and at once came to regret. Let us see how far these inferences from plain facts are borne out from his works.
The most important passages seem to have escaped critical scholarship. I have already said that the earliest works of Shakespeare, and the latest, are the most fruitful in details about his private life. In the earliest works he was compelled to use his own experience, having no observation of life to help him, and at the end of his life, having said almost everything he had to say, he again went back to his early experience for little vital facts to lend a colour to the fainter pictures of age. In “The Winter’s Tale,” a shepherd finds the child Perdita, who has been exposed; one would expect him to stumble on the child by chance and express surprise; but this shepherd of Shakespeare begins to talk in this way:
“I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting. Hark you now! Would any but these boiled brains of nineteen and two-and-twenty hunt this weather?”
Now this passage has nothing to do with the play, nor with the shepherd’s occupation; nor is it at all characteristic of a shepherd boy. Between ten and three-and-twenty a poor shepherd boy is likely to be kept hard at work; he is not idle and at a loose end like young Shakespeare, free to rob the ancientry, steal, fight, and get wenches with child. That, in my opinion, is Shakespeare’s own confession.
Of course, every one has noticed how Shakespeare again and again in his plays declares that a woman should take in marriage an “elder than herself,” and that intimacy before marriage is productive of nothing but “barren hate and discord.” In “Twelfth Night” he says:
“Let still the woman take
An elder than herself: so wears she to him, So sways she level in her husband’s heart.”
In “The Tempest” he writes again:
“If thou dost break her virgin knot before All sanctimonious ceremonies may
With full and holy rite be minister’d, No sweet aspersions shall the heavens let fall To make this contract grow; but barren hate, Sour-ey’d disdain, and discord, shall bestrew The union of your bed with weeds so loathly That you shall hate it both.”
These admonitions are so far-fetched and so emphatic that they plainly discover personal feeling. We have, besides, those quaint, angry passages in the “Comedy of Errors,” to which we have already drawn attention, which show that the poet detested his wife.
The known facts, too, all corroborate this inference: let us consider them a little. The first child was born within six months of the marriage; twins followed in 1585; a little later Shakespeare left Stratford not to return to it for eight or nine years, and when he did return there was probably no further intimacy with his wife; at any rate, there were no more children. Yet Shakespeare, one fancies, was fond of children. When his son Hamnet died his grief showed itself in his work–in “King John” and in “The Winter’s Tale.” He was full of loving kindness to his daughters, too, in later life; it was his wife alone for whom he had no affection, no forgiveness.
There are other facts which establish this conclusion. While Shakespeare was in London he allowed his wife to suffer the extremes of poverty. Sometime between 1585 and 1595 she appears to have borrowed forty shillings from Thomas Whittington, who had formerly been her father’s shepherd. The money was still unpaid when Whittington died, in 1601, and he directed his executor to recover the sum from the poet, and distribute it among the poor of Stratford. Now Shakespeare was rich when he returned to Stratford in 1595, and always generous. He paid off his father’s heavy debts; how came it that he did not pay this trifling debt of his wife? The mere fact proves beyond doubt that Shakespeare disliked her and would have nothing to do with her.
Even towards the end of his life, when he was suffering from increasing weakness, which would have made most men sympathetic, even if it did not induce them completely to relent, Shakespeare shows the same aversion to his poor wife. In 1613, when on a short visit to London, he bought a house in Blackfriars for L140; in the purchase he barred his wife’s dower, which proceeding seems even to Dryasdust “pretty conclusive proof that he had the intention of excluding her from the enjoyment of his possessions after his death.”
In the first draft of his will Shakespeare did not mention his wife. The apologists explain this by saying that, of course, he had already given her all that she ought to have. But if he loved her he would have mentioned her with affection, if only to console her in her widowhood. Before the will was signed he inserted a bequest to her of his “second-best bed,” and the apologists have been at pains to explain that the best bed was kept for guests, and that Shakespeare willed to his wife the bed they both occupied. How inarticulate poor William Shakespeare must have become! Could the master of language find no better word than the contemptuous one? Had he said “our bed” it would have been enough; “the second-best bed” admits of but one interpretation. His daughters, who had lived with their mother, and who had not been afflicted by her jealousy and scolding tongue, begged the dying man to put in some mention of her, and he wrote in that “second-best bed”–bitter to the last. If his own plain words and these inferences, drawn from indisputable facts, are not sufficient, then let us take one fact more, and consider its significance; one fact, so to speak, from the grave.
When Shakespeare died he left some lines to be placed over his tomb. Here they are:
“Good friend for Jesus sake forbeare To Digg the dust enclosed heare.
Blessed be ye man yt spares thes stones And Curst be ye yt moves my bones.”
Now, why did Shakespeare make this peculiar request? No one seems to have seen any meaning in it. It looks to me as if Shakespeare wrote the verses in order to prevent his wife being buried with him. He wanted to be free of her in death as in life. At any rate, the fact is that she was not buried with him, but apart from him; he had seen to that. His grave was never opened, though his wife expressed a desire to be buried with him. The man who needs further proofs would not be persuaded though one came from the dead to convince him.
The marriage was an unfortunate one for many reasons, as an enforced marriage is apt to be, even when it is not the marriage of a boy in his teens to a woman some eight years his senior. Shakespeare takes trouble to tell us in “The Comedy of Errors” that his wife was spitefully jealous, and a bitter scold. She must have injured him, poisoned his life with her jealous nagging, or Shakespeare would have forgiven her. There is some excuse for him, if excuse be needed. At the time the marriage must have seemed the wildest folly to him, seething as he was with inordinate conceit. He was wise beyond his years, and yet he had been forced to give hostages to fortune before he had any means of livelihood, before he had even found a place in life. What a position for a poet–penniless, saddled with a jealous wife and three children before he was twenty-one. And this poet was proud, and vain, and in love with all distinctions.
But why did Shakespeare nurse such persistent enmity all through his life to jealous, scolding Anne Hathaway? Shakespeare had wronged her; the keener his moral sense, the more certain he was to blame his partner in the fault, for in no other way could he excuse himself.
It was overpowering sensuality and rashness which had led Shakespeare into the noose, and now there was nothing for it but to cut the rope. He had either to be true to his higher nature or to the conventional view of his duty; he was true to himself and fled to London, and the world is the richer for his decision. The only excuse he ever made is to be found in the sonnet-line:
“Love is too young to know what conscience is.”
For my part I do not see that any excuse is needed: if Shakespeare had married Anne Whately he might never have gone to London or written a play. Shakespeare’s hatred of his wife and his regret for having married her were alike foolish. Our brains are seldom the wisest part of us. It was well that he made love to Anne Hathaway; well, too, that he was forced to marry her; well, finally, that he should desert her. I am sorry he treated her badly and left her unsupplied with money; that was needlessly cruel; but it is just the kindliest men who have these extraordinary lapses; Shakespeare’s loathing for his wife was measureless, was a part of his own self-esteem, and his self-esteem was founded on snobbish non-essentials for many years, if not, indeed, throughout his life.
There is a tradition preserved by Rowe that before going to London young Shakespeare taught school in the country; it may be; but he did not teach for long, we can be sure, and what he had to teach there were few scholars in the English country then or now capable of learning. Another tradition asserts that he obtained employment as a lawyer’s clerk, probably because of the frequent use of legal phrases in his plays. But these apologists all forget that they are speaking of men like themselves, and of times like ours. Politics is the main theme of talk in our day; but in the time of Elizabeth it was rather dangerous to show one’s wisdom by criticizing the government: law was then the chief staple of conversation: every educated man was therefore familiar with law and its phraseology, as men are familiar in our day with the jargon of politics.
When did Shakespeare fly to London? Some say when he was twenty-one, as soon as his wife presented him with twins, in 1585. Others say as soon as Sir Thomas Lucy’s persecution became intolerable. Both causes no doubt worked together, and yet another cause, given in “The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” was the real causa causans. Shakespeare was
naturally ambitious; eager to measure himself with the best and try his powers. London was the arena where all great prizes were to be won: Shakespeare strained towards the Court like a greyhound in leash. But when did he go? Again in doubt I take the shepherd’s words in “The Winter’s Tale” as a guide. Most men would have said from fourteen to twenty was the dangerous age for a youth; but Shakespeare had perhaps a personal reason for the peculiar “ten to twenty-three.” He was, no doubt, astoundingly precocious, and probably even at ten he had learned everything of value that the grammar school had to teach, and his thoughts had begun to play truant. Twenty-three, too, is a significant date in his life; in 1587, when he was twenty-three, two companies of actors, under the nominal patronage of the Queen and Lord Leicester, returned to London from a provincial tour, during which they visited Stratford. In Lord Leicester’s company were Burbage and Heminge, with whom we know that Shakespeare was closely connected in later life. It seems to me probable that he returned with this company to London, and arrived in London, as he tells us in “The Comedy of Errors,” “stiff and weary with long travel,” and at once went out to view the town and “peruse the traders.”
There is a tradition that when he came to London in 1587 he held horses outside the doors of the theatre. This story was first put about by the compiler of “The Lives of the Poets,” in 1753. According to the author the story was related by D’Avenant to Betterton; but Rowe, to whom Betterton must have told it, does not transmit it. Rowe was perhaps right to forget it or leave it out; though the story is not in itself incredible. Such work must have been infinitely distasteful to Shakespeare, but necessity is a hard master, and Greene, who talks of him later as “Shake-scene,” also speaks in the same connection of these “grooms.” The curious amplified version of the story that Shakespeare organized a service of boys to hold the horses is hardly to be believed. The great Doctor was anything but a poet, or a good judge of the poetic temperament.
The Shakespeares of this world are not apt to take up menial employs, and this one had already shown that he preferred idle musings and parasitic dependence to uncongenial labour. Whoever reads the second scene of the second act of “The Comedy of Errors,” will see that Shakespeare, even at the beginning, had an uncommonly good opinion of himself. He plays gentleman from the first, and despises trade; he snubs his servant and will not brook familiarity from him. In “The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” he tells us that he left the country and came to London seeking “honour,” intending, no doubt, to make a name for himself by his writings. He had probably “Venus and Adonis” in his pocket when he first reached London. This would inspire a poet with the self-confidence which a well-filled purse lends to an ordinary man.
I am inclined to accept Rowe’s statement that Shakespeare was received into an actor-company at first in a very mean rank. The parish clerk of Stratford at the end of the seventeenth century used to tell the visitors that Shakespeare entered the playhouse as a servitor; but, however he entered it, it is pretty certain he was not long in a subordinate position.
What manner of man was William Shakespeare when he first fronted life in London somewhere about 1587? Aubrey tells us that he was “a handsome, well-shap’t man, very good company, and of a very readie and pleasant smooth witt.” The bust of him in Stratford Church was coloured; it gave him light hazel eyes, and auburn hair and beard. Rowe says of him that “besides the advantages of his witt, he was in himself a good-natured man, of too great sweetness in his manners, and a most agreeable companion.”
I picture him to myself very like Swinburne–of middle height or below it, inclined to be stout; the face well-featured, with forehead domed to reverence and quick, pointed chin; a face lighted with hazel-clear vivid eyes and charming with sensuous-full mobile lips that curve easily to kisses or gay ironic laughter; an exceedingly sensitive, eager speaking face that mirrors every fleeting change of emotion….
I can see him talking, talking with extreme fluency in a high tenor voice, the reddish hair flung back from the high forehead, the eyes now dancing, now aflame, every feature quick with the “beating mind.”
And such talk–the groundwork of it, so to speak, very intimate-careless; but gemmed with thoughts, diamonded with wit, rhythmic with feeling: don’t we know how it ran–“A hundred and fifty tattered prodigals…. No eye hath seen such scarecrows, … discarded, unjust serving-men, younger sons to younger brothers, revolted tapsters, and ostlers trade-fallen: the cankers of a calm world and a long peace.” And after the thought the humour again–“food for powder, food for powder.”
Now let us consider some of his other qualities. In 1592 he published his “Venus and Adonis,” which he had no doubt written in 1587 or even earlier, for he called it “the first heir of my invention” when he dedicated it to Lord Southampton. This work is to me extremely significant. It is all concerned with the wooing of young Adonis by Venus, an older woman. Now, goddesses have no age, nor do women, as a rule, woo in this sensual fashion. The peculiarities point to personal experience. “I, too,” Shakespeare tells us practically, “was wooed by an older woman against my will.” He seems to have wished the world to accept this version of his untimely marriage. Young Shakespeare in London was probably a little ashamed of being married to some one whom he could hardly introduce or avow. The apologists who declare that he made money very early in his career give us no explanation of the fact that he never brought his wife or children to London. Wherever we touch Shakespeare’s intimate life, we find proof upon proof that he detested his wife and was glad to live without her.
Looked at in this light “Venus and Adonis” is not a very noble thing to have written; but I am dealing with a young poet’s nature, and the majority of young poets would like to forget their Anne Hathaway if they could; or, to excuse themselves, would put the blame of an ill-sorted union upon the partner to it.
There is a certain weakness, however, shown in the whole story of his marriage; a weakness of character, as well as a weakness of morale, which it is impossible to ignore; and there were other weaknesses in Shakespeare, especially a weakness of body which must necessarily have had its correlative delicacies of mind.
I have pointed out in the first part of this book that sleeplessness was a characteristic of Shakespeare, even in youth; he attributes it to Henry IV. in old age, and to Henry V., a youth at the time, who probably never knew what a sleepless night meant. Shakespeare’s alter ego,
Valentine, in “The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” suffers from it, and so do Macbeth and Hamlet, and a dozen others of his chief characters, in particular his impersonations–all of which shows, I think, that from the beginning the mind of Shakespeare was too strong for his body. As we should say to-day, he was too emotional, and lived on his nerves. I always think of him as a ship over-engined; when the driving-power is working at full speed it shakes the ship to pieces.
One other weakness is marked in him, and that is that he could not drink, could not carry his liquor like a man–to use our accepted phrase. Hamlet thought drinking a custom more honoured in the breach than in the observance; Cassius, Shakespeare’s incarnation in “Othello,” confessed that he had “poor unhappy brains for drinking”: tradition informs us that Shakespeare himself died of a “feavour” from drinking–all of which confirms my opinion that Shakespeare was delicate rather than robust. He was, also, extraordinarily fastidious: in drama after drama he rails against the “greasy” caps and “stinking” breath of the common people. This overstrained disgust suggests to me a certain delicacy of constitution.
But there is still another indication of bodily weakness which in itself would be convincing to those accustomed to read closely; but which would carry little or no weight to the careless. In sonnet 129 Shakespeare tells us of lust and its effects, and the confession seems to me purely personal. Here are four lines of it:
“Enjoy’d no sooner but despised straight; Past reason hunted; and no sooner had,
Past reason hated, as a swallowed bait, On purpose laid to make the taker mad.”
Now, this is not the ordinary man’s experience of passion and its effects. “Past reason hunted,” such an one might say, but he would certainly not go on “No sooner had, Past reason hated.” He is not moved to hate by enjoyment, but to tenderness; it is your weakling who is physically exhausted by enjoyment who is moved to hatred. This sonnet was written by Shakespeare in the prime of manhood at thirty-four or thirty-five at latest.
Shakespeare was probably healthy as a young man, but intensely sensitive and highly strung; too finely constituted ever to have been strong. One notices that he takes no pleasure in fighting; his heroes are, of course, all “valiant,” but he shows no loving interest in the game of fighting as a game. In fact, we have already seen that he found no wonderful phrase for any of the manly virtues; he was a neuropath and a lover, and not a fighter, even in youth, or Fulk Sandells might have rued his interference.
The dominating facts to be kept ever in mind about Shakespeare are that he was delicate in body, and over-excitable; yielding and irresolute in character; with too great sweetness of manners and inordinately given to the pleasures of love.
How would such a man fare in the world of London in 1587? It was a wild and wilful age; eager English spirits were beginning to take a part in the opening up of the new world; the old, limiting horizons were gone; men dared to think for themselves and act boldly; ten years before Drake had sailed round the world–the adventurer was the characteristic product of the time. In ordinary company a word led to a blow, and the fight was often brought to a fatal conclusion with dagger or sword or both. In those rough days actors were almost outlaws; Ben Jonson is known to have killed two or three men; Marlowe died in a tavern brawl. Courage has always been highly esteemed in England, like gentility and a university training. Shakespeare possessed none of these passports to public favour. He could not shoulder his way through the throng. The wild adventurous life of the time was not to his liking, even in early manhood; from the beginning he preferred “the life removed” and his books; all given over to the “bettering of his mind” he could only have been appreciated at any time by the finer spirits.
Entering the theatre as a servitor he no doubt made such acquaintances as offered themselves, and spent a good deal of his leisure perforce with second-rate actors and writers in common taverns and studied his Bardolph and Pistol, and especially his Falstaff at first hand. Perhaps Marlowe was one of his ciceroni in rough company. Shakespeare had
almost certainly met Marlowe very early in his career, for he worked with him in the “Third Part of Henry VI.,” and his “Richard III.” is a conscious imitation of Marlowe, and Marlowe was dissipated enough and wild enough to have shown him the wildest side of life in London in the ’80’s. It was the very best thing that could have happened to delicate Shakespeare, to come poor and unknown to London, and be soused in common rowdy life like this against his will by sheer necessity; for if left to his own devices he would probably have grown up a bookish poet–a second Coleridge. Fate takes care of her favourites.
It was all in his favour that he should have been forced at first to win his spurs as an actor. He must have been too intelligent, one would think, ever to have brought it far as a mummer; he looked upon the half-art of acting with disdain and disgust, as he tells us in the sonnets, and if in Hamlet he condescends to give advice to actors, it is to admonish them not to outrage the decencies of nature by tearing a passion to tatters. He had at hand a surer ladder to fame than the mummer’s art. As soon as he felt his feet in London he set to work adapting plays, and writing plays, while reading his own poetry to all and sundry who would listen, and I have no doubt that patrons of the stage, who were also men of rank, were willing to listen to Shakespeare from the beginning. He was of those who require no introductions.
In 1592, four or five years after his arrival in London, he had already come to the front as a dramatist, or at least as an adapter of plays, for Robert Greene, a scholar and playwright, attacked him in his “Groatsworth of Wit” in this fashion:
“There is an upstart Crow, beautified in our feathers that, with his tiger’s heart wrapt in a player’s hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you, and, being an absolute Johannes fac totum, is, in his own conceit, the only Shakescene in a country. Oh, that I might intreat your rare wits to be employed in more profitable courses, and let these apes imitate your past excellence, and never more acquaint them with your admired inventions.”
It is plain from this weird appeal that Shakespeare had already made his mark.
There are further proofs of his rapid success. One of Chettle’s references to Shakespeare (I take Chettle to be the original of Falstaff) throws light upon the poet’s position in London in these early days. Shortly after Greene had insulted Shakespeare as “Shake-scene” Chettle apologized for the insult in these terms:
“I am as sorry,” Chettle wrote, “as if the original fault had beene my fault, because myselfe have seen his (i.e., Shakespeare’s) demeanour no less civill than he (is) exelent in the qualitie he professes. Besides, divers of worship have reported his uprightnes of dealing, which argues his honesty, and his facetious grace in writing that aprooves his art.”
In 1592, then, Shakespeare was most “civill in demeanour,” and had won golden opinions from people of importance.
Actors and poets of that time could not help knowing a good many of the young nobles who came to the theatre and sat round the stage listening to the performances. And Shakespeare, with his aristocratic sympathies and charming sweetness of nature, must have made friends with the greatest ease. Chettle’s apology proves that early in his career he had the art or luck to win distinguished patrons who spoke well of him. While still new to town he came to know Lord Southampton, to whom he dedicated “Venus and Adonis”; the fulsome dedication of “Lucrece” to the same nobleman two years later shows that deference had rapidly ripened into affectionate devotion; no wonder Rowe noticed the “too great sweetness in his manners.” Thinking of his intimacy with Southampton on the one hand and Bardolph on the other, one is constrained to say of Shakespeare what Apemantus says of Timon:
“The middle of humanity thou never knewest, But the extremity of both ends.”
In the extremes characters show themselves more clearly than they do in the middle classes; at both ends of society speech and deed are unrestrained. Falstaff and Bardolph and the rest were free of convention by being below it, just as Bassanio and Mercutio were free because they were above it, and made the rules. The young lord did what he pleased, and spoke his mind as plainly as the footpad. Life at both ends was the very school for quick, sympathetic Shakespeare. But even in early manhood, as soon as he came to himself and found his work, one other quality is as plain in Shakespeare as even his humour–high impartial intellect with sincere ethical judgement. He judges even Falstaff severely, to the point of harshness, indeed; as he judged himself later in Enobarbus. This high critical faculty pervades all his work. But it must not be thought that his conduct was as scrupulous as his principles, or his will as sovereign as his intelligence. That he was a loose-liver while in London is well attested. Contemporary anecdotes generally hit off a man’s peculiarities, and the only anecdote of Shakespeare that is known to have been told about him in his lifetime illustrates this master trait of his character. Burbage, we are told, when playing Richard III., arranged with a lady in the audience to visit her after the performance. Shakespeare overheard the rendezvous, anticipated his fellow’s visit, and met Burbage on his arrival with the jibe that “William the Conqueror came before Richard III.” The lightness is no doubt as characteristic of Shakespeare as the impudent humour.
There is another fact in Shakespeare’s life which throws almost as much light on his character as his marriage. He seems to have come to riches very early and very easily. As we have seen, he was never able to paint a miser, which confirms Jonson’s testimony that he was “of an open and free nature.” In 1597 he went down to Stratford and bought New Place, then in ruinous condition, but the chief house in the town, for L60; he spent at least as much more between 1597 and 1599 in rebuilding the house and stocking the barns with grain. In 1602 we find that he purchased from William and John Combe, of Stratford, a hundred and seven acres of arable land near the town, for which he paid L320; in 1605, too, he bought for L440 a moiety of the tithes of Stratford for an unexpired term of thirty-one years, which investment seems to have brought him in little except a wearisome lawsuit.
Now, how did the poet obtain this thousand pounds or so? English apologists naturally assume that he was a “good business man”; with delicious unconscious irony they one and all picture the man who hated tradesmen as himself a sort of thrifty tradesman-soul–a master of practical life who looked after the pennies from the beginning. These commentators all treat Shakespeare as the Hebrews treated God; they make him in their own likeness. In Shakespeare’s case this practice leads to absurdity. Let us take the strongest advocate of the accepted view. Dryasdust is at pains to prove that Shakespeare’s emoluments, even as an actor in the ’90’s, were not likely to have fallen below a hundred a year; but even Dryasdust admits that his large earnings came after 1599, from his shares in the Globe Theatre, and is inclined “to accept the tradition that Shakespeare received from the Earl of Southampton a large gift of money.” As Southampton came of age in 1595, he may well out of his riches have helped the man who had dedicated his poems to him with servile adulation. Moreover, the statement is put forward by Rowe, who is certainly more trustworthy than the general run of gossip-mongers, and his account of the matter proves that he did not accept the story with eager credulity, but as one compelled by authority. Here is what he says:
“There is one story so singular in magnificence of this patron of Shakspeare that if I had not been assured that the story was handed down by Sir Wm. D’Avenant, who was probably very well acquainted with his affairs, I should not have ventured to insert that my lord Southampton, at one time, gave him a thousand pounds to enable him to go through with a purchase to which he heard he had a mind. A bounty very great, and very rare at any time, almost equal to that profuse generosity the present age has shown to French dancers and Italian Eunuchs.”
It seems to me a great deal more likely that this munificent gift of Southampton was the source of Shakespeare’s wealth than that he added coin to coin in saving, careful fashion. It may be said at once that all the evidence we have is in favour of Shakespeare’s extravagance, and against his thrift. As we have seen, when studying “The Merchant of Venice,” the presumption is that he looked upon saving with contempt, and was himself freehanded to a fault. The Rev. John Ward, who was Vicar of Stratford from 1648 to 1679, tells us “that he spent at the rate of a thousand a year, as I have heard.”
It is impossible to deny that Shakespeare got rid of a great deal of money even after his retirement to Stratford; and men accustomed to save are not likely to become prodigal in old age.
On the 10th March, 1613, Shakespeare bought a house in Blackfriars for L140; the next day he executed another deed, now in the British Museum, which stipulated that L60 of the purchase-money was to remain on mortgage until the following Michaelmas; the money was unpaid at Shakespeare’s death, which seems to me to argue a certain carelessness, to say the least of it.
Dryasdust makes out that Shakespeare, in the years from 1600 to 1612, was earning about six hundred a year in the money of the period, or nearly five thousand a year of our money, and yet he was unable or unwilling to pay off a paltry L60.
After passing the last five years of his life in village Stratford, where he could not possibly have found many opportunities of extravagance, he was only able to leave a little more than one year’s income. He willed New Place to his elder daughter, Susanna Hall, together with the land, barns, and gardens at and near Stratford (except the tenement in Chapel Lane), and the house in Blackfriars, London, all together equal, at the most, to five or six hundred pounds; and to his younger daughter, Judith, he bequeathed the tenement in Chapel Lane, L150 in money, and another L150 to be paid if she was alive three years after the date of the will. Nine hundred pounds, or so, of the money of the period, would cover all he possessed at death. When we consider these things, it becomes plain, I think, that Shakespeare was extravagant to lavishness even in cautious age. While in London he no doubt earned and was given large sums of money; but he was free-handed and careless, and died far poorer than one would have expected from an ordinarily thrifty man. The loose-liver is usually a spendthrift.
There are worse faults to be laid to his account than lechery and extravagance. Every one who has read his works with any care must admit that Shakespeare was a snob of the purest English water. Aristocratic tastes were natural to him; inherent, indeed, in the delicate sensitiveness of his beauty-loving temperament; but he desired the outward and visible signs of gentility as much as any podgy millionaire of our time, and stooped as low to get them as man could stoop. In 1596, his young son, Hamnet, died at Stratford, and was buried on 11th August in the parish church. This event called Shakespeare back to his village, and while he was there he most probably paid his father’s debts, and certainly tried to acquire for himself and his successors the position of gentlefolk. He induced his father to make application to the College of Heralds for a coat of arms, on the ground not only that his father was a man of substance, but that he had also married into a “worshipful” family. The draft grant of arms was not executed at the time. It may have been that the father’s pecuniary position became known to the College, or perhaps the profession of the son created difficulties; but in any case nothing was done for some time. In 1597, however, the Earl of Essex became Earl Marshal and Chief of the Heralds’ College, and the scholar and antiquary, William Camden, joined the College as Clarenceux King of Arms. Shakespeare must have been known to the Earl of Essex, who was an intimate friend of the Earl of Southampton; he was indeed almost certainly a friend and admirer of Essex. The Shakespeares’ second application to be admitted to the status of gentlefolk took a new form. They asserted roundly that the coat as set out in the draft of 1596 had been assigned to John Shakespeare while he was bailiff, and the heralds were asked to give him a “recognition” of it. At the same time John Shakespeare asked for permission to quarter on his “ancient coat of arms” that of the Ardens of Wilmscote, his wife’s family. But this was going too far, even for a friend of Essex. To grant such a request might have got the College into trouble with the influential Warwickshire family of Arden, and so it was refused; but the grant was “recognized,” and Shakespeare’s peculiar ambition was satisfied.
Every single incident in his life bears out what we have learned from his works. In all his writings he praises lords and gentlemen, and runs down the citizens and common people, and in his life he spent some years, a good deal of trouble, and many impudent lies in getting for his father a grant of arms and recognition as a gentleman–a very pitiful ambition, but peculiarly English. Shakespeare, one fancies, was a gentleman by nature, and a good deal more.
But his snobbishness had other worse results. Partly because of it he never got to know the middle classes in England. True, even in his time they were excessively Puritanical, which quality hedged them off, so to speak, from the playwright-poet. With his usual gentleness or timidity, Shakespeare never tells us directly what he thought of the Puritans, but his half-averted, contemptuous glance at them in passing, is very significant. Angelo, the would-be Puritan ruler, was a “false seemer,” Malvolio was a “chough.” The peculiar virtues of the English middle class, its courage and sheepishness; its good conduct and respect for duties; its religious sense and cocksure narrow-mindedness, held no attraction for Shakespeare, and, armoured in snobbishness, he utterly missed what a knowledge of the middle classes might have given him.
Let us take one instance of his loss. Though he lived in an age of fanaticism, he never drew a fanatic or reformer, never conceived a man as swimming against the stream of his time. He had but a vague conception of the few spirits in each age who lead humanity to new and higher ideals; he could not understand a Christ or a Mahomet, and it seems as if he took but small interest in Jeanne d’Arc, the noblest being that came within the ken of his art. For even if we admit that he did not write the first part of “Henry VI.,” it is certain that it passed through his hands, and that in his youth, at any rate, he saw nothing to correct in that vile and stupid libel on the greatest of women. Even the English fanatic escaped his intelligence; his Jack Cade, as I have already noticed, is a wretched caricature; no Cade moves his fellows save by appealing to the best in them, to their sense of justice, or what they take for justice. The Cade who will wheedle men for his own gross ambitions may make a few dupes, but not thousands of devoted followers. These elementary truths Shakespeare never understood. Yet how much greater he would have been had he understood them; had he studied even one Puritan lovingly and depicted him sympathetically. For the fanatic is one of the hinges which swing the door of the modern world. Shakespeare’s “universal sympathy”–to quote Coleridge–did not include the plainly-clad tub-thumper who dared to accuse him to his face of serving the Babylonish Whore. Shakespeare sneered at the Puritan instead of studying him; with the result that he belongs rather to the Renaissance than to the modern world, in spite even of his Hamlet. The best of a Wordsworth or a Turgenief is outside him; he would never have understood a Marianna or a Bazarof, and the noble faith of the sonnet to “Toussaint l’Ouverture” was quite beyond him. He could never have written:
“Thou hast left behind Powers that will work for thee, air, earth and skies; There’s not a breathing of the common wind That will forget thee; thou hast great allies; Thy friends are exultations, agonies,
And love, and man’s unconquerable mind.”
It is time to speak of him frankly; he was gentle, and witty; gay, and sweet-mannered, very studious, too, and fair of mind; but at the same time he was weak in body and irresolute, hasty and wordy, and took habitually the easiest way out of difficulties; he was ill-endowed in the virile virtues and virile vices. When he showed arrogance it was always of intellect and not of character; he was a parasite by nature. But none of these faults would have brought him to ruin; he was snared again in full manhood by his master-quality, his overpowering sensuality, and thrown in the mire.
CHAPTER XV
SHAKESPEARE’S LIFE–continued
Shakespeare’s life seems to fall sharply into two halves. Till he met Mistress Fitton, about 1597, he must have been happy and well content, I think, in spite of his deep underlying melancholy. According to my reckoning he had been in London about ten years, and no man has ever done so much in the time and been so successful even as the world counts success. He had not only written the early poems and the early plays, but in the last three or four years half-a-dozen masterpieces: “A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream,” “Romeo and Juliet,” “Richard II.,” “King John,” “The Merchant of Venice,” “The Two Parts of Henry IV.” At thirty-three he was already the greatest poet and dramatist of whom Time holds any record.
Southampton’s bounty had given him ease, and allowed him to discharge his father’s debts, and place his dearly loved mother in a position of comfort in the best house in Stratford.
He had troops of friends, we may be sure, for there was no gentler, gayer, kindlier creature in all London, and he set store by friendship. Ten years before he had neither money, place, nor position; now he had all these, and was known even at Court. The Queen had been kind to him. He ended the epilogue to the “Second Part of Henry IV.,” which he had just finished, by kneeling “to pray for the Queen.” Essex or Southampton had no doubt brought his work to Elizabeth’s notice: she had approved his “Falstaff” and encouraged him to continue. Of all his successes, this royal recognition was surely the one which pleased him most. He was at the topmost height of happy hours when he met the woman who was to change the world for him.
In the lives of great men the typical tragedies are likely to repeat themselves. Socrates was condemned to drain many a poisoned cup before he was given the bowl of hemlock: Shakespeare had come to grief with many women before he fell with Mary Fitton. It was his ungovernable sensuality which drove him in youth to his untimely and unhappy marriage; it was his ungovernable sensuality, too, which in his maturity led him to worship Mary Fitton, and threw him into those twelve years of bondage to earthy, coarse service which he regretted so bitterly when the passion-fever had burned itself out.
One can easily guess how he came to know the self-willed and wild-living maid-of-honour. Like many of the courtiers, Mistress Fitton affected the society of the players. Kemp, the clown of his company, knew her, and dedicated a book to her rather familiarly. I have always thought that Shakespeare resented Kemp’s intimacy with Mistress Fitton, for when Hamlet advises the players to prevent the clown from gagging, he adds, with a snarl of personal spite:
“a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it.”
Mary Fitton’s position, her proud, dark beauty, her daring of speech and deed took Shakespeare by storm. She was his complement in every failing; her strength matched his weakness; her resolution his hesitation, her boldness his timidity; besides, she was of rank and place, and out of pure snobbery he felt himself her inferior. He forgot that humble