"The name of Shakespeare is the greatest in all literature. No man
ever came near to him in the creative power of the mind; no man
ever had such strength and such variety of imagination." (Hallam)
"Shakespeare's mind is the horizon beyond which, at present, we do
not see." (Emerson)
"I do not believe that any book or person or event in my life ever
made so great an impression on me as the plays of Shakespeare. They
appear to be the work of some heavenly genius." (Goethe)
Shakespeare's name has become a signal for enthusiasm. The tributes quoted
above are doubtless extravagant, but they were written by men of mark in
three different countries, and they serve to indicate the tremendous
impression which Shakespeare has left upon the world. He wrote in his day
some thirty-seven plays and a few poems; since then as many hundred volumes
have been written in praise of his accomplishment. He died three centuries
ago, without caring enough for his own work to print it. At the present
time unnumbered critics, historians, scholars, are still explaining the
mind and the art displayed in that same neglected work. Most of these
eulogists begin or end their volumes with the remark that Shakespeare is so
great as to be above praise or criticism. As Taine writes, before plunging
into his own analysis, "Lofty words, eulogies are all used in vain;
Shakespeare needs not praise but comprehension merely."
Life
It is probably because so very little is known about
Shakespeare that so many bulky biographies have been written of
him. Not a solitary letter of his is known to exist; not a play
comes down to us as he wrote it. A few documents written by other
men, and sometimes ending in a sprawling signature by Shakespeare,
which looks as if made by a hand accustomed to almost any labor
except that of the pen,--these are all we have to build upon. One
record, in dribbling Latin, relates to the christening of
"Gulielmus filius Johannes Shakspere"; a second, unreliable as a
village gossip, tells an anecdote of the same person's boyhood; a
third refers to Shakespeare as "one of his Majesty's poor players";
a fourth records the burial of the poet's son Hamnet; a fifth
speaks of "Willi. Shakspere, gentleman"; a sixth is a bit of
wretched doggerel inscribed on the poet's tombstone; a seventh
tells us that in 1622, only six years after the poet's death, the
public had so little regard for his art that the council of his
native Stratford bribed his old company of players to go away from
the town without giving a performance.
It is from such dry and doubtful records that we must construct a
biography, supplementing the meager facts by liberal use of our
imagination.
Early Days
In the beautiful Warwickshire village of Stratford our poet was
born, probably in the month of April, in 1564. His mother, Mary
Arden, was a farmer's daughter; his father was a butcher and small
tradesman, who at one time held the office of high bailiff of the
village. There was a small grammar school in Stratford, and
Shakespeare may have attended it for a few years. When he was about
fourteen years old his father, who was often in lawsuits, was
imprisoned for debt, and the boy probably left school and went to
work. At eighteen he married Anne Hathaway, a peasant's daughter
eight years older than himself; at twenty-three, with his father
still in debt and his own family of three children to provide for,
Shakespeare took the footpath that led to the world beyond his
native village. [Footnote: Such is the prevalent opinion of
Shakespeare's early days; but we are dealing here with surmises,
not with established facts. There are scholars who allege that
Shakespeare's poverty is a myth; that his father was prosperous to
the end of his days; that he probably took the full course in Latin
and Greek at the Stratford school. Almost everything connected with
the poet's youth is still a matter of dispute.]
In London
From Stratford he went to London, from solitude to crowds, from
beautiful rural scenes to dirty streets, from natural country
people to seekers after the bubble of fame or fortune. Why he went
is largely a matter of speculation. That he was looking for work;
that he followed a company of actors, as a boy follows a circus;
that he was driven out of Stratford after poaching on the game
preserves of Sir Thomas Lucy, whom he ridiculed in the plays of
Henry VI and Merry Wives,--these and other theories
are still debated. The most probable explanation of his departure
is that the stage lured him away, as the printing press called the
young Franklin from whatever else he undertook; for he seems to
have headed straight for the theater, and to have found his place
not by chance or calculation but by unerring instinct. England was
then, as we have noted, in danger of going stage mad, and
Shakespeare appeared to put method into the madness.
Actor and Playwright
Beginning, undoubtedly, as an actor of small parts, he soon learned
the tricks of the stage and the humors of his audience. His first
dramatic work was to revise old plays, giving them some new twist
or setting to please the fickle public. Then he worked with other
playwrights, with Lyly and Peele perhaps, and the horrors of his
Titus Andronicus are sufficient evidence of his
collaboration with Marlowe. Finally he walked alone, having learned
his steps, and Romeo and Juliet and Midsummer Nights
Dream announced that a great poet and dramatist had suddenly
appeared in England.
Period of Gloom
This experimental period of Shakespeare's life in London was
apparently a time of health, of joyousness, of enthusiasm which
comes with the successful use of one's powers. It was followed by a
period of gloom and sorrow, to which something of bitterness was
added. What occasioned the change is again a matter of speculation.
The first conjecture is that Shakespeare was a man to whom the low
ideals of the Elizabethan stage were intolerable, and this opinion
is strengthened after reading certain of Shakespeare's sonnets,
which reflect a loathing for the theaters and the mannerless crowds
that filled them. Another conjectural cause of his gloom was the
fate of certain noblemen with whom he was apparently on terms of
friendship, to whom he dedicated his poems, and from whom he
received substantial gifts of money. Of these powerful friends, the
Earl of Essex was beheaded for treason, Pembroke was banished, and
Southampton had gone to that grave of so many high hopes, the Tower
of London. Shakespeare may have shared the sorrow of these men, as
once he had shared their joy, and there are critics who assume that
he was personally implicated in the crazy attempt of Essex at
rebellion.
Whatever the cause of his grief, Shakespeare shows in his works
that he no longer looks on the world with the clear eyes of youth.
The great tragedies of this period, Lear, Macbeth,
Hamlet, Othello and Cæsar, all portray man not
as a being of purpose and high destiny, but as the sport of chance,
the helpless victim who cries out, as in Henry IV, for a
sight of the Book of Fate, wherein is shown
how chances mock,
And changes fill the cup of alteration
With divers liquors! O, if this were seen,
The happiest youth, viewing his progress through,
What perils past, what crosses to ensue,
Would shut the book, and sit him down and die.
Return to Stratford
For such a terrible mood London offered no remedy. For a time
Shakespeare seems to have gloried in the city; then he wearied of
it, grew disgusted with the stage, and finally, after some
twenty-four years (cir. 1587-1611), sold his interest in the
theaters, shook the dust of London from his feet, and followed his
heart back to Stratford. There he adopted the ways of a country
gentleman, and there peace and serenity returned to him. He wrote
comparatively little after his retirement; but the few plays of
this last period, such as Cymbeline, Winter's Tale
and The Tempest, are the mellowest of all his works.
Shakespeare the Man
After a brief period of leisure, Shakespeare died at his prime in
1616, and was buried in the parish church of Stratford. Of his
great works, now the admiration of the world, he thought so little
that he never collected or printed them. From these works many
attempts are made to determine the poet's character, beliefs,
philosophy,--a difficult matter, since the works portray many types
of character and philosophy equally well. The testimony of a few
contemporaries is more to the point, and from these we hear that
our poet was "very good company," "of such civil demeanor," "of
such happy industry," "of such excellent fancy and brave notions,"
that he won in a somewhat brutal age the characteristic title of
"the gentle Shakespeare."
The Dramas of Shakespeare
In Shakespeare's day playwrights were producing
various types of drama: the chronicle play, representing the glories of
English history; the domestic drama, portraying homely scenes and common
people; the court comedy (called also Lylian comedy, after the dramatist
who developed it), abounding in wit and repartee for the delight of the
upper classes; the melodrama, made up of sensational elements thrown
together without much plot; the tragedy of blood, centering in one
character who struggles amidst woes and horrors; romantic comedy and
romantic tragedy, in which men and women were more or less idealized, and
in which the elements of love, poetry, romance, youthful imagination and
enthusiasm predominated.
It is interesting to note that Shakespeare essayed all these types--the
chronicle play in Henry IV, the domestic drama in Merry
Wives, the court comedy in Loves Labor's Lost, the melodrama in
Richard III, the tragedy of blood in King Lear, romantic
tragedy in Romeo and Juliet, romantic comedy in As You Like
It--and that in each he showed such a mastery as to raise him far above
all his contemporaries.
Early Dramas
In his experimental period of work (cir. 1590-1595) Shakespeare
began by revising old plays in conjunction with other actors. Henry
VI is supposed to be an example of such tinkering work. The first part
of this play (performed by Shakespeare's company in 1592) was in all
probability an older work made over by Shakespeare and some unknown
dramatist. From the fact that Joan of Arc appears in the play in two
entirely different characters, and is even made to do battle at Rouen
several years after her death, it is almost certain that Henry VI in
its present form was composed at different times and by different authors.
Love's Labor's Lost is an example of the poet's first independent
work. In this play such characters as Holofernes the schoolmaster, Costard
the clown and Adriano the fantastic Spaniard are all plainly of the "stock"
variety; various rimes and meters are used experimentally; blank verse is
not mastered; and some of the songs, such as "On a Day," are more or less
artificial. Other plays of this early experimental period are Two
Gentlemen of Verona and Richard III, the latter of which shows
the influence and, possibly, the collaboration of Marlowe.
Second Period
In the second period (cir. 1595-1600) Shakespeare constructed his
plots with better skill, showed a greater mastery of blank verse, created
some original characters, and especially did he give free rein to his
romantic imagination. All doubt and experiment vanished in the confident
enthusiasm of this period, as if Shakespeare felt within himself the coming
of the sunrise in Romeo and Juliet:
Night's candles are burnt out, and jocund day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.
Though some of his later plays are more carefully finished, in none of them
are we so completely under the sway of poetry and romance as in these early
works, written when Shakespeare first felt the thrill of mastery in his
art.
In Midsummer Nights Dream, for example, the practical affairs of
life seem to smother its poetic dreams; but note how the dream abides with
us after the play is over. The spell of the enchanted forest is broken when
the crowd invades its solitude; the witchery of moonlight fades into the
light of common day; and then comes Theseus with his dogs to drive not the
foxes but the fairies out of the landscape. As Chesterton points out, this
masterful man, who has seen no fairies, proceeds to arrange matters in a
practical way, with a wedding, a feast and a pantomime, as if these were
the chief things of life. So, he thinks, the drama is ended; but after he
and his noisy followers have departed to slumber, lo! enter once more Puck,
Oberon, Titania and the whole train of fairies, to repeople the ancient
world and dance to the music of Mendelssohn:
Hand in hand, with fairy grace,
While we sing, and bless this place.
So in The Merchant of Venice with its tragic figure of Shylock, who
is hurried off the stage to make place for a final scene of love, moonlight
and music; so in every other play of this period, the poetic dream of life
triumphs over its practical realities.
Third Period
During the third period, of maturity of power (cir. 1600-1610),
Shakespeare was overshadowed by some personal grief or disappointment. He
wrote his "farewell to mirth" in Twelfth Night, and seems to have
reflected his own perturbed state in the lines which he attributes to
Achilles in Troilus and Cressida:
My mind is troubled, like a fountain stirr'd,
And I myself see not the bottom of it.
His great tragedies belong to this period, tragedies which reveal increased
dramatic power in Shakespeare, but also his loss of hope, his horrible
conviction that man is not a free being but a puppet blown about by every
wind of fate or circumstance. In Hamlet great purposes wait upon a
feeble will, and the strongest purpose may be either wrecked or consummated
by a trifle. The whole conception of humanity in this play suggests a
clock, of which, if but one small wheel is touched, all the rest are thrown
into confusion. In Macbeth a man of courage and vaulting ambition
turns coward or traitor at the appearance of a ghost, at the gibber of
witches, at the whisper of conscience, at the taunts of his wife. In
King Lear a monarch of high disposition drags himself and others
down to destruction, not at the stern command of fate, but at the mere
suggestion of foolishness. In Othello love, faith, duty, the
fidelity of a brave man, the loyalty of a pure woman,--all are blasted,
wrecked, dishonored by a mere breath of suspicion blown by a villain.
Last Dramas
In his final period, of leisurely experiment (cir. 1610-1616),
Shakespeare seems to have recovered in Stratford the cheerfulness that he
had lost in London. He did little work during this period, but that little
is of rare charm and sweetness. He no longer portrayed human life as a
comedy of errors or a tragedy of weakness but as a glowing romance, as if
the mellow autumn of his own life had tinged all the world with its own
golden hues. With the exception of As You Like It (written in the
second period), in which brotherhood is pictured as the end of life, and
love as its unfailing guide, it is doubtful if any of the earlier plays
leaves such a wholesome impression as The Winter's Tale or The
Tempest, which were probably the last of the poet's works.
Following is a list of Shakespeare's thirty-four plays (or thirty-seven,
counting the different parts of Henry IV and Henry VI)
arranged according to the periods in which they were probably written. The
dates are approximate, not exact, and the chronological order is open to
question:
FIRST PERIOD, EARLY EXPERIMENT (1590-1595). Titus Andronicus,
Henry VI, Love's Labor's Lost, Comedy of Errors,
Two Gentlemen of Verona, Richard III, Richard II,
King John.
SECOND PERIOD, DEVELOPMENT (1595-1600). Romeo and Juliet,
Midsummer Night's Dream, Merchant of Venice, Henry IV,
Henry V, Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado About
Nothing, As You Like It.
THIRD PERIOD, MATURITY AND TROUBLE (1600-1610). Twelfth Night,
Taming of the Shrew, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Troilus
and Cressida, All's Well that Ends Well, Measure for
Measure, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony
and Cleopatra, Timon of Athens.
FOURTH PERIOD, LATER EXPERIMENT (1610-1616). Coriolanus,
Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, The
Tempest, Henry VIII (left unfinished, completed probably by
Fletcher).
Tragedy and Comedy
The most convenient arrangement of these plays appears in the First Folio
(1623) [Footnote: This was the first edition of Shakespeare's plays. It was
prepared seven years after the poet's death by two of his fellow actors,
Heminge and Condell. It contained all the plays now attributed to
Shakespeare with the exception of Pericles.] where they are grouped
in three classes called tragedies, comedies and historical plays. The
tragedy is a drama in which the characters are the victims of unhappy
passions, or are involved in desperate circumstances. The style is grave
and dignified, the movement stately; the ending is disastrous to
individuals, but illustrates the triumph of a moral principle. These rules
of true tragedy are repeatedly set aside by Shakespeare, who introduces
elements of buffoonery, and who contrives an ending that may stand for the
triumph of a principle but that is quite likely to be the result of
accident or madness. His best tragedies are Macbeth, Romeo and
Juliet, Hamlet, King Lear and Othello.
Comedy is a type of drama in which the elements of fun and humor
predominate. The style is gay; the action abounds in unexpected incidents;
the ending brings ridicule or punishment to the villains in the plot, and
satisfaction to all worthy characters. Among the best of Shakespeare's
comedies, in which he is apt to introduce serious or tragic elements, are
As You Like It, Merchant of Venice, Midsummer Night's
Dream, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest.
Strictly speaking there are only two dramatic types, all others, such as
farce, melodrama, tragi-comedy, lyric drama, or opera, and chronicle play,
being modifications of comedy or tragedy. The historical play, to which
Elizabethans were devoted, aimed to present great scenes or characters from
a past age, and were generally made up of both tragic and comic elements.
The best of Shakespeare's historical plays are Julius Cæsar,
Henry IV, Henry V, Richard III and Coriolanus.
What to Read
There is no better way to feel the power of Shakespeare than to read in
succession three different types of plays, such as the comedy of As You
Like It, the tragedy of Macbeth and the historical play of
Julius Cæsar. Another excellent trio is The Merchant of
Venice, Romeo and Juliet and Henry IV; and the reading of
these typical plays might well be concluded with The Tempest, which
was probably Shakespeare's last word to his Elizabethan audience.
The Quality of Shakespeare
As the thousand details of a Gothic cathedral
receive character and meaning from its towering spire, so all the works of
Shakespeare are dominated by his imagination. That imagination of his was
both sympathetic and creative. It was sympathetic in that it understood
without conscious effort all kinds of men, from clowns to kings, and all
human emotions that lie between the extremes of joy and sorrow; it was
creative in that, from any given emotion or motive, it could form a human
character who should be completely governed by that motive. Ambition in
Macbeth, pride in Coriolanus, wit in Mercutio, broad humor in Falstaff,
indecision in Hamlet, pure fancy in Ariel, brutality in Richard, a
passionate love in Juliet, a merry love in Rosalind, an ideal love in
Perdita,--such characters reveal Shakespeare's power to create living men
and women from a single motive or emotion.
Or take a single play, Othello, and disregarding all minor
characters, fix attention on the pure devotion of Desdemona, the jealousy
of Othello, the villainy of Iago. The genius that in a single hour can make
us understand these contrasting characters as if we had met them in the
flesh, and make our hearts ache as we enter into their joy, their anguish,
their dishonor, is beyond all ordinary standards of measurement. And
Othello must be multiplied many times before we reach the limit of
Shakespeare's creative imagination. He is like the genii of the Arabian
Nights, who produce new marvels while we wonder at the old.
Such an overpowering imagination must have created wildly, fancifully, had
it not been guided by other qualities: by an observation almost as keen as
that of Chaucer, and by the saving grace of humor. We need only mention the
latter qualities, for if the reader will examine any great play of
Shakespeare, he will surely find them in evidence: the observation keeping
the characters of the poet's imagination true to the world of men and
women, and the humor preventing some scene of terror or despair from
overwhelming us by its terrible reality.
His Faults
In view of these and other qualities it has become almost a fashion to
speak of the "perfection" of Shakespeare's art; but in truth no word could
be more out of place in such a connection. As Ben Jonson wrote in his
Timber:
"I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honor to
Shakespeare that in his writing, whatever he penned, he never
blotted out a line. My answer hath been, 'Would he had blotted a
thousand.'"
Even in his best work Shakespeare has more faults than any other poet of
England. He is in turn careless, extravagant, profuse, tedious,
sensational; his wit grows stale or coarse; his patriotism turns to
bombast; he mars even such pathetic scenes as the burial of Ophelia by
buffoonery and brawling; and all to please a public that was given to
bull-baiting.
These certainly are imperfections; yet the astonishing thing is that they
pass almost unnoticed in Shakespeare. He reflected his age, the evil and
the good of it, just as it appeared to him; and the splendor of his
representation is such that even his faults have their proper place, like
shadows in a sunlit landscape.
His View of Life
Of Shakespeare's philosophy we may say that it reflected equally well the
views of his hearers and of the hundred characters whom he created for
their pleasure. Of his personal views it is impossible to say more than
this, with truth: that he seems to have been in full sympathy with the
older writers whose stories he used as the sources of his drama. [Footnote:
The chief sources of Shakespeare's plays are: (1) Older plays, from which
he made half of his dramas, such as Richard III, Hamlet,
King John. (2) Holinshed's Chronicles, from which he obtained
material for his English historical plays. (3) Plutarch's Lives,
translated by North, which furnished him material for Caesar,
Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra. (4) French, Italian and
Spanish romances, in translations, from which he obtained the stories of
The Merchant of Venice, Othello, Twelfth Night and
As You Like It.] Now these stories commonly reflected three things
besides the main narrative: a problem, its solution, and the consequent
moral or lesson. The problem was a form of evil; its solution depended on
goodness in some form; the moral was that goodness triumphs finally and
inevitably over evil.
Many such stories were cherished by the Elizabethans, the old tale of
"Gammelyn" for example (from which came As You Like It); and just as
in our own day popular novels are dramatized, so three centuries ago
audiences demanded to see familiar stories in vigorous action. That is why
Shakespeare held to the old tales, and pleased his audience, instead of
inventing new plots. But however much he changed the characters or the
action of the story, he remained always true to the old moral:
That goodness is the rule of life,
And its glory and its triumph.
Shakespeare's women are his finest characters, and he often portrays the
love of a noble woman as triumphing over the sin or weakness of men. He has
little regard for abnormal or degenerate types, such as appear in the later
Elizabethan drama; he prefers vigorous men and pure women, precisely as the
old story-tellers did; and if Richard or some other villain overruns his
stage for an hour, such men are finally overwhelmed by the very evil which
they had planned for others. If they drag the innocent down to a common
destruction, these pure characters never seem to us to perish; they live
forever in our thought as the true emblems of humanity.
Moral Emphasis
It was Charles Lamb who referred to a copy of Shakespeare's plays as "this
manly book." The expression is a good one, and epitomizes the judgment of a
world which has found that, though Shakespeare introduces evil or vulgar
elements into his plays, his emphasis is always upon the right man and the
right action. This may seem a trite thing to say in praise of a great
genius; but when you reflect that Shakespeare is read throughout the
civilized world, the simple fact that the splendor of his poetry is
balanced by the rightness of his message becomes significant and
impressive. It speaks not only for Shakespeare but for the moral quality of
the multitudes who acknowledge his mastery. Wherever his plays are read, on
land or sea, in the crowded cities of men or the far silent places of the
earth, there the solitary man finds himself face to face with the
unchanging ideals of his race, with honor, duty, courtesy, and the moral
imperative,
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
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