The Art of Shakspere, as Revealed by Himself

[Footnote: 1863.]

Winter’s Tale, Act ii. scene 1.

People sometimes say Shakspere’s commentators find far more in him than he ever intended. That may be granted of every writer of genius. But if it means that nothing can exist in a work of art beyond what the writer knew while producing it, it is false to that extent.

No artist is a creator in the sense of inventing his own forms. The forms of man and nature that he modifies and combines into a new region of art have their own original life and meaning, and the laws of their combination are natural and harmonious. Whatever aspects he uses, he cannot remove the many more essential to their vitality, and to that of his presentation, which form the background his use stands out from. So the observant reader will find the objects falling into combinations and harmonies that are there whether the writer saw them or not; they will be numerous and true in proportion to the scope and truth of the representation, and the more harmonious meanings a work has, the better its claim to genius. So it must be granted, joyfully, that Shakspere may hold meanings he did not see, to which his art, as art, does not point.

Still, in great artists conscious art probably bears some proportion to unconscious truth, as the visible volcanic light bears a true relation to the hidden fire of the globe; so Shakspere’s plays are unlikely to show many signs of working art he was unaware of. Some truths may be revealed through him that he knew only potentially; but marks of work bearing on the play’s results are unlikely to be accidents. A stroke of the mallet may be more effective than the sculptor hoped, but he intended it. In the drama the chisel-marks are easier to find than in finished marble, since the lines fall into the general finish without being obliterated. Even so, the reader fears he is dressing the idol of his intellect in the weavings of his fancy; I am convinced it is the very consummateness of Shakspere’s art that exposes it to this doubt, since the dramatist, like the sculptor, avoids every avoidable hint of the process, so that the result may be a living whole. But we need not argue only from probabilities. He has given us a peep into his studio—or workshop, which is more comprehensive.

We should not expect such a revelation as literary criticism, for using art and theorizing about it are very different mental operations. The productive and critical faculties are rarely equally strong, and even then cannot work equally on the same object. There is a perfect satisfaction in producing that does not need re-presenting to the critical faculty. A great writer’s criticism of his own work comes from within, seeing the hidden side in relation to his own idea; ordinary criticism looks at the side turned to the public. Nor could so prolific a man find time to criticize others’ works, except in relaxed moments like those at the Mermaid Tavern, where his friends sat silent under the flow of his wisdom and humour, or made the street ring with their own enjoyment.

But when an artist speculates about another art than his own, we may expect the principles he works by to take outward, visible form, modified by the difference of the art. In one of Shakspere’s poems he describes an imagined work of a sister-art, Painting, so brilliantly that the light shines back on his own art, revealing the principles he held about representative art and suggesting many thoughts about detail, harmony, finish, pregnancy and scope. It is in “The Rape of Lucrece.” A long quotation needs no apology: one of the greatest helps even an artist can give is to isolate peculiar beauties and compel us to see them.

Lucrece has sent a messenger to beg her husband to come at once. Waiting, worn out with weeping, she looks for some variation of her misery.

The oftener I read these verses, among Shakspere’s earliest compositions, the more I am struck by the care with which he represents the work of the picture—“shows the strife of the painter.” How like his own art!

The scope and variety of the whole picture is like one of his own works: mass achieved by accumulating individuals, Troy standing for the aim of the whole, the Simois flowing in foaming rivalry with men’s strife—the pictorial form of that sympathy of nature with human passion he so often brings into his plays. But take a portion as a condensed picture of how his art combines all varieties into one whole: his genius is like Nestor’s oratory in the seventh and eighth stanzas, which harmonizes every attitude and action through the influence that is both the occasion of the debate and the charm restraining it through fear of losing it. So the dramatic genius that harmonizes his play is visible only in its effects, too ethereal for the ruder intellect to analyse; it is like Nestor’s words, for which the picture has only “thin winding breath which purled up to the sky.” Take the power that reconciles, in the mysterious midnight of the summer-wood, the graceful passions of childish elves, the fierce passions of men and women, and their ludicrous reflection in the artisans’ little convex-mirror drama: Puck revels in things that fall out preposterously; the Elf-Queen loves ass-headed Bottom, from whose long hairy ears—strange bouquet-holders—bloom the musk-roses, the odour-founts of the play; and the philosophy of the unbelieving Theseus, with the candour of Hippolyta, ties it all to human life. Or take the pretended madman Edgar, the court-fool, and the rugged old king going grandly mad, sheltered in one hut and lapped in the roar of a thunderstorm.

My object with this poem is to offer, from many instances, a few examples of how the excellences he describes in the picture turn into the corresponding forms of the drama. I hope it will then be unnecessary to urge that the artistic virtues he praises in another man’s art went with a corresponding consciousness in his own—the artist’s, which differs from the critic’s in seeing its objects from the concave side of the hammered relief. If that is granted, I would go on to a more important conclusion: how unlikely it is that a writer conscious of such fitnesses was unconscious of the grand embodiments of truth in his plays, whether he knew it or not. An instance showing Shakspere quite at home contemplating such truths will strengthen this part of my argument.

I shall give corresponding embodiments in words, where colours yield to tones and lines to phrases, beginning with the lowest kind: art concerned with matters so small that it is hard to believe unconscious art had any part in them. They can hardly come directly from the inspiration of the whole, and their very minuteness argues that the poet was conscious of them; belonging only to the construction of the play, they cannot claim the independent existence of truths, which are there whether Shakspere saw them or not. If he did not intend them, the most that can be said is that his work is so natural that, as in life, there is room for wonderful coincidences that follow no law.

Perhaps every example I give will be open to dispute. Such matters admit no direct proof, and I would not have dared combine them but for the ninth stanza above, which I ask my readers to turn back to. Its imaginary work means work hinted at and left to the reader’s imagination. On the stage such work must exist on a great scale; but the minute particularization of the “conceit deceitful” in the rest of the stanza justifies thinking that Shakspere intended many, if not all, of the little fitnesses a careful reader finds. They are not found more often because, like life, he blends everything into living beauty, with no salient points. He is not like the barn-door fowl, which runs out cackling when she has laid an egg, and often when she has not; in an ordinary drama the tone itself says—I have done it. But Shakspere will not spoil his art to show his art. It is there and does its part; find it if you can, and if not, pass on. If I can show such art exists where it is not readily discovered, it becomes more probable where it is harder to isolate and define.

To produce a few instances, then:

In “Much Ado about Nothing,” since the play’s nature is in its name, is it not likely that Shakspere named the two constables Dogberry (a poisonous berry) and Verjuice (the juice of crab-apples)? The names have nothing to do with their stupid harmlessness; they match their way of turning things upside down and saying the opposite of what they mean.

In the same play Margaret objects to her mistress wearing a certain rebato (a large plaited ruff) on her wedding morning. May this relate to her having worn her mistress’s clothes the night before? She might have rumpled or soiled it, and feared discovery.

In “King Henry IV.,” Part I., the Prince kills Hotspur in the last scene. History does not record this, and had it been a fact, its silence about so notable a deed would be a contradiction. But Shakspere needs the Prince to be the slayer, and will not contradict history even in its silence. What is he to do? He will account for history not knowing. Falstaff claiming the honour, the Prince says to him:

This reveals the Prince’s magnificence, in being ready to give up his chief renown for a friend. But the Historic Muse could not believe fat Jack Falstaff had killed Hotspur, and would not record the claim.

In the second part of the same play, act i. scene 2, Falstaff is indignant at Mr. Dombledon, the silk mercer, for wanting security from a gentleman for a short cloak and slops of satin. In act ii. scene 1 the hostess says Sir John is to dine with Master Smooth, the silkman: foiled by Dombledon, he has already made himself so agreeable to Smooth that he is “indited to dinner.” That is, by the bye, as to the action; but as to Sir John’s character, is it not

The conceit deceitful in the painting is imagination that means more than it says. So the speakers’ words in the play stand for more than they mean; they are Shakspere’s in relation to his whole. To Achilles his spear is only his spear; to the painter it stands for Achilles himself.

Coleridge remarks on James Gurney in “King John:” “How individual and comical he is with the four words allowed to his dramatic life!” They answer the Bastard’s request to leave the room. Gurney has been lingering, as an old servant will, when Faulconbridge says, with strained politeness, “James Gurney, wilt thou give us leave a while?” Gurney, condescending to the second son he has known from infancy, replies, “Good leave, good Philip.” That lets Faulconbridge show his ambition and scorn of his present standing, in contempt for even the Christian name he will soon exchange for Sir Richard and Plantagenet—Philip being then the name for a sparrow, which ladies made pets of. Surely in these words of the serving-man we have an outcome of the same art by which

In the “Winter’s Tale,” act iv. scene 3, Perdita, dressed with unwonted gaiety for the sheep-shearing festival, is astonished to find herself speaking in full strains of poetry. She says, half-ashamed:

She does not mean this seriously, but the robe has more to do with it than she thinks. Her passion for Florizel sets the springs of her thoughts free, and they flow with a princess’s grace; but the robe opens the door of her speech, and by raising her self-consciousness betrays her into what is natural to her but seems, on reflection, inconsistent with her low birth and poor education. This instance involves higher elements than my earlier ones and leads to a more important class.

In “Macbeth,” act ii. scene 4, why is the old man introduced, who has nothing to do with the play’s conduct?—So that, speaking with Rosse, he may bear witness to the exceptional terror of the storm, which, we find from Banquo’s words:

had begun to gather before supper was over in the castle. This storm is Nature’s sympathetic horror at the breaking open of the Lord’s anointed temple—a horror the animals share, for Duncan’s horses, “the minions of their race,” the most sensitive of their kind, tear each other to pieces in it. Consider with this an earlier part of the same act. Macbeth, rejoining his wife after the murder, says:

These two, Macbeth says, woke each other—one laughing, the other crying murder. Then they prayed and slept again.—I used to think Donalbain’s companion would be his brother Malcolm, and that they woke in horror at their father’s murderer passing the door. A friend objected that Malcolm, the elder, would then have been named rather than Donalbain. Accept this, and the significance is more delicate: the presence affected the two differently, one laughing, the other crying murder; yet both were terrified and dared not sleep till they had prayed. His sons, his horses, the elements are shaken by one unconscious sympathy with the murdered king.

Associate with this the end of act iv. scene 3 of “Julius Caesar,” where all Brutus’s attendants cry out in their sleep as Caesar’s ghost leaves their master’s tent. This outcry is not in Plutarch.

To return to “Macbeth:” why is the doctor introduced at the English court? He has no more to do with the play’s progress than the old man, and is introduced for a precisely similar reason.—As a doctor, he is the best possible witness that King Edward the Confessor is a fountain of health to his people, gifted for his goodness with the sacred power of curing The King’s Evil by his holy touch. The English King is introduced for contrast with the Scotch King, a raging bear among his subjects.

In the “Winter’s Tale,” named so for the extraordinary character of its events (the play itself says “a sad tale’s best for winter: I have one of sprites and goblins”), Antigonus has a remarkable vision in which Hermione appears and commands the exposure of her child in a place that seems most unsuitable and dangerous. Convinced it is real, he obeys, and the whole marvellous result depends on it. So the vision must be genuine. But how could it be, if Hermione was not dead, as Antigonus firmly believed? I would feel this an objection to the play’s art, but for this answer:—she was still in the deathlike swoon into which she fell when news of her son’s loss reached her at her husband’s judgment-seat, where she ought not to have been out of her chamber.

Note also, in act ii. scene 1 of the same play, how changeable Hermione’s mood about her boy is, as a sign of her condition. If we overlook this, we shall think the words were put in only to fill up the business of the play.

In “Twelfth Night,” both ladies make the first advances in love. Is it not worth noticing that one has lost her brother and the other believes she has lost hers? They may be placed with Phoebe in “As You Like It,” who, having suddenly lost her love on discovering it was a woman, at once accepts her rejected lover Silvius, and with Romeo, who, rejected and, as he believes, inconsolable, falls in love with Juliet the moment he sees her. That his love for Rosaline was only calf-love beside his love for Juliet shows in the different tones of his speech. Compare what he says to Benvolio in act i. scene 1 with his later speeches: conceit is prominent in both, but one is ruled by fancy, the other by imagination.

In this same play there is another similar point. In Arthur Brook’s story, Shakspere’s source, Lady Capulet never tells Juliet of their intention to marry her to Count Paris. Why does Shakspere add this?—To explain Juliet’s falling in love with Romeo so suddenly: her mother has set her mind moving that way. She has never seen Paris, and is looking about, wondering which he may be and whether she can like him, when she meets Romeo’s love-filled eyes and is at once overcome. What a significant speech is Paulina’s in the “Winter’s Tale,” act v. scene 1: “How? Not women?” She is a thorough partisan, siding with women against men, strengthened in this by her mistress’s treatment by her husband. One has just said that if Perdita would begin a sect she might “make proselytes of who she bid but follow.” “How? Not women?” she rejoins; assured that “women will love her,” she has no more to say.

A stranger in an old book-shop gave me this explanation of a line in “Twelfth Night:”—Malvolio, having built his castle in the air, proceeds to inhabit it. Describing his behaviour in a supposed case, he says (act ii. scene 5): “I frown the while; and perchance, wind up my watch, or play with my some rich jewel”—A dash ought to come after my. Malvolio was about to say chain, but remembering it was the badge of his office as steward, and so of servitude, he changes it to “some rich jewel,” said with pretended carelessness.

In “Hamlet,” act iii. scene 1, did not Shakspere intend Ophelia’s passionate soliloquy—one no maiden knowing she was overheard would utter—together with her father’s words:

to show that, weak as Ophelia was, she was not false enough to join any plot to betray Hamlet to her father and the King? They had stayed behind the arras, not gone out as she must have supposed.

Next, let my reader turn once more to the poem, consider the physiognomy of Ajax and Ulysses in the fifth stanza, and then see that description transformed into the higher form of revelation in speech in “Troilus and Cressida.” Then, if he will associate the principles of that stanza with the third, especially its last two lines, I will apply this to Lady Macbeth.

Shakspere does not mean that someone looking at that portion alone could see the eyes looking sad, but that the sweet observance of the whole so rouses the imagination that it supplies what distance hid: the rest pointed that way.—In somewhat this way we are led to a right understanding of Lady Macbeth. First put together these utterances of hers:

Had these passages stood alone, we might have judged Shakspere meant Lady Macbeth as an utter materialist, believing in nothing beyond the immediate reports of the senses. But when we find them associated with passages like these—

then we find our former theory will not do; there are deeper foundations. Lady Macbeth was an unbeliever morally, and so found it necessary to keep down all imagination, the upheaving of that inward world whose very being she would have annihilated. Yet out of this world arose at last the phantom of her slain self, and, possessing her sleeping frame, sent it out to wander in the night and rub its distressed, blood-stained hands in vain. For, as in this same “Rape of Lucrece,”

But when so many lines of delineation meet, run into and correct one another, taking so natural and living a form that there is no making of a point anywhere, and the woman is shown by no theory but by the natural laws of human decline, the only way to account for the perfection of the portrayal is that, given a shadow, Shakspere could so place himself that the shadow became his own—the correct shadow of his form coming between it and the sunlight. This is the highest dramatic gift a man can have, but it is mainly inspiration rather than art. Much conscious art probably mingled with it, but its lines are lost in the general glow, so we are left where we were as to Shakspere’s artistic consciousness. I will now give a few plainer instances of such sweet observance in his work as he would have admired in a painting.

First, think how seldom Shakspere uses poetry in his plays. The whole play is a poem in the highest sense, but truth forbids him to make poetic speech the rule for his characters. Their speech is poetic in relation to the whole and the end, not to the speaker or the immediate utterance. Even though every character is idealized, it is idealized after its kind, and poetry would not be the ideal speech of most. Look then at the exceptions: they glow with poetic loveliness and fervour, and are very jewels of sweet observance, whose setting allows them force as lawful and prominence as natural. I will mention a few.

In “Julius Caesar,” act i. scene 3, Casca’s manner of speaking seems inconsistent with the “sour fashion” Cassius rightly attributes to him, till we remember he speaks in the midst of an almost supernatural thunder-storm: the hidden electricity of his nature comes out in poetic words answering the outburst of the overcharged heavens and earth.

Shakspere invariably makes the dying speak poetically, and generally prophetically, recognizing that the poetic and prophetic moods are identical at their highest, and that justice gives them the same name. Even Sir John, poor ruined gentleman, babbles of green fields. The passage is disputed; I believe that if this is not the original reading, Shakspere himself would justify it.

Romeo and Juliet talk poetry as a matter of course.

In “King John,” act v. scenes 4 and 5, see how differently the dying Melun and the living, victorious Lewis regard the same sunset:

The exquisite duet between Lorenzo and Jessica opening act v. of “The Merchant of Venice” takes as its subject the circumstances that produce the mood—the lovely night and crescent moon—which make them talk poetry, then call for music, then speculate on its nature.

Now some instances of sweet observance of other kinds.

There is observance more true than sweet in Jacques in “As You Like It:” the fault-finder in age was the fault-doer in youth and manhood. Jacques patronizing the fool is one of the rarest displays of self-ignorance.

In the same play, when Rosalind hears Orlando is in the wood, she cries, “Alas the day! what shall I do with my doublet and hose?” When he asks, “Where dwell you, pretty youth?” she answers, tripping in her rôle, “Here in the skirts of the forest, like fringe upon a petticoat.”

In the second part of “King Henry IV.,” act iv. scene 3, Falstaff says of Prince John: “Good faith, this same young sober-blooded boy doth not love me; nor a man cannot make him laugh;—but that’s no marvel: he drinks no wine.” This is the Prince John who later betrays the insurgents by the falsest of quibbles, winning his revenge through their good faith.

In “King Henry IV,” act i. scene 2, Poins does not call Falstaff a coward like the other two, but says only—“If he fight longer than he sees reason, I’ll forswear arms.” Associate this with Falstaff’s soliloquy on honour in act v. scene 1, and the true character of his courage or cowardice—it may bear either name—comes out.

Is there not conscious art in the hospitable face of Macbeth’s castle, bearing a homely welcome in its multitude of nests of the temple-haunting martlet (Psalm lxxxiv. 3), just as Lady Macbeth, the fiend-soul of the house, steps out like the building’s own speech with her falsely smiled welcome? Is there not observance in it?

Such instances might be endless, as Shakspere’s work is infinite. I confine myself to two more, from “The Merchant of Venice.”

Shakspere needs a character capable of the magnificent devotion of friendship the old story gives Antonio. So he gives us a man sober to sadness, thoughtful to melancholy, as the play’s first words reveal. He holds “the world but as the world,”—

We are left to conjecture the cause of this sadness; Antonio professes not to know. But such a disposition, even with no definite cause, will generally attach itself to something; and accused of being in love, Antonio rejects it with only a sad “Fie! fie!” This and his whole character seem to me to point to an old but ever cherished grief.

Among other changes to the original story of this play, Shakspere has added the story of Jessica and Lorenzo, apparently wholly his own. Why? Surely there were characters and interests enough already!—It seems to me he doubted whether the Jew would have carried out his fell design against Antonio on the original ground of his hatred alone, without another passion to goad him, second only to his love of gold: his affection for his daughter, which, since he regarded her as his property, had risen to a passion. So Shakspere invents her, that he may send a dog of a Christian to steal her and, worse, tempt her to steal her father’s stones and ducats. I suspect he sends the old villain off with more pity from the audience than any other dramatist of the time would have dared, or been able, to rouse, and that he is the only human Jew in the English drama up to then.

I have now reached the last and most important stage of my argument. If Shakspere was so well aware of the artistic relations of the parts of his drama, is it likely that the grand meanings of the whole were unperceived by him and reach us unintended—arising only from his dealing so truly with human nature that his work must involve whatever lessons human life itself involves?

Is there no intention, for instance, in placing Prospero, who forsook the duties of his dukedom for the study of magic, on a desert island with just three subjects: a monster below humanity, a creature etherealized beyond it, and a complete embodiment of human perfection? Is it not that he may learn how to rule, and then return, by his wisely directed magic, to the home and duties that devotion to magic had driven him from?

In “Julius Caesar,” the death of Brutus, though it follows as the consequence of his murder of Caesar, differs in character from Caesar’s death as Brutus differs from Caesar. Caesar’s last words were Et tu Brute? When Brutus, resolved to lay violent hands on himself, takes leave of his friends, he says:

Here Shakspere did not invent; he found both speeches in Plutarch. But how unerring his choice!

Is the final catastrophe in “Hamlet” such because Shakspere could do no better?—It is: he could do no better than the best. Where but in the regions beyond could Hamlet’s questionings be put to rest? It would have been a fine thing indeed for the most nobly perplexed of thinkers to be left—his love in the grave, his father’s memory a torment, his mother’s a blot, innocent blood on his innocent hands, half understood by his best friend—to climb in desolate dreariness the contemptible height of the degraded throne and shine the first in a drunken court!

Before my last instance I will draw attention to a passage in another play that directly teaches the lesson of the play I am about to discuss: the first speech in act ii. of “As You Like It” might be made a text for expounding the whole of “King Lear.”

The banished duke is trying to bring his courtiers to see their exile as part of their moral training. I know I punctuate the passage differently, while returning to the old text.

The line Here feel we not the penalty of Adam? has caused much perplexity; Shakspere’s expounders do not believe he can mean that the uses of adversity are really sweet. But the duke sees that the penalty of Adam is what makes the woods more free from peril than the envious court; that it is in fact the best blessing, since it feelingly persuades man what he is; and to know what we are, with no false judgments of ourselves, he finds so sweet that the churlish chiding of the winter’s wind is well endured.

Now to Lear. We find an old man with a large heart, hungry for love and not knowing what love is; ignorant as a child in all matters of high import; so unsubdued, and so unkingly, in temper that he storms because his dinner is not ready by the clock of his hunger; a child in everything but his grey hairs, wrinkled face and failing strength. If a life ends so, whatever else its success, the end is wretched and unworthy. But let Lear be blown by the winds and beaten by the rains of heaven till he pities “poor naked wretches;” feels he has “ta’en too little care of” them; and sees through pomp what “a poor, bare, forked animal” he is; and the old king has risen higher in the real social scale—that of the country he is bound for—than when he held his kingdom undivided for his thankless daughters. Then let him learn at last that “love is the only good in the world;” let him find his Cordelia, and plot with her how in their dungeon they will be singing like birds i’ the cage and, in the secret place of peace, look abroad on the world like God’s spies; then let the generous old heart swell till it breaks, not with rage and hate and vengeance but with love; and all is well: it is time he went to overtake his daughter and dwell with her in the home of the true, the eternal, the unchangeable. All his suffering came from his own fault; but from it has sprung another crop, not of evil but of good, whose seeds lay unfruitful in the soil until the sharp ploughshare of ill brought them into the blessed influences of the air of heaven.