PROFESSOR Mark Van Doren recently wrote a book about Shakespeare based upon the comfortable postulate that Shakespeare does not “seem to call for explanations beyond those which a whole heart and a free mind abundantly supply,”1 and he must have been discouraged when, after all his efforts to rid it of the prejudicial aura of books and learning, the friendly literary critic of the New Yorker magazine chose to acclaim it as a work of scholarship. For it is a heartening conviction, this, that John Doe has only to reassure himself about the wholeness of his heart and the freedom of his mind to undertake to interpret Shakespeare. Any heart and any mind will do.
Shakespeare himself has frequently been put in the Caedmon school of poets, and even Dr. Furness while dedicating himself to issuing a variorum edition of Shakespeare's works wrote in this vein:
I cannot reconcile myself to the opinion that SHAKESPEARE ever made use of his dramatic art for the purpose of instructing, or as a means of enforcing his own views, any more than I believe that his poetic inspiration was dependent on his personal experiences.2
Dr. Furness’ comment is as reassuring to writers as is Professor Van Doren's to critics. Personal experience and personal conviction, the contents of the mind that creates or that interprets, have nothing to do with the business of writing or of understanding, if we accept the statements of these critics. As I have said, these are comforting thoughts. They are even reassuringly democratic. Under these rules all of us are created free and equal as critics and writers, and we stay that way.
Less comforting about the content of the critic's and the writer's mind and heart, though agreeing that Shakespeare's poetic inspiration was not dependent on his personal experiences, Professor Stoll presents another significant critical attitude, for he pictures Shakespeare's relation to the life about him as that of the mere observer, the recorder, the man who didn't take sides:
we cannot easily make out his character, his likes or dislikes, his convictions or principles. He is too fair, too tolerant, too indulgent: the creator is lost in the multitude of his creations, and, a god in his own world, he is invisible. No partisan, or satirist, no reformer or propagandist—he stays his hand, lets things be. … And he betrays no bias in affairs of church or state. … Theories and questions, creeds, problems, parties, these were not for him. Not new ideas but familiar ones interested him and served his popular dramatic purpose—pagan, Catholic, or royalist notions, for instance, not those of the newer faith. Like most of the great poets and artists he is no seer or prophet, no philosopher.3
To me the last two sentences do not bear the relation that Professor Stoll seems to attribute to them, for the perception of the eternal and the immutable in the ever-changing phenomena of the past and the present, rather than any hurrying to be abreast of the latest intellectual fad, seems to me to mark the great poet as seer and prophet and philosopher. But this is beside the point which I wish to make, that many critics, like Professor Stoll, regard Shakespeare as a man without intellectual or moral passion.
The voice of the historian, Professor A. F. Pollard, echoes in regard to his particular field the same judgment upon Shakespeare:
No period of English literature has less to do with politics than that during which English letters reached their zenith; and no English writer's attitude towards the questions, with which alone political history is concerned, is more obscure or less important than Shakespeare's.… Shakespeare himself, whose genius was less circumscribed than any other's, shuns the problems of contemporary politics. The literature of his age was not political; and its political writings, except in so far as Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity was political, were not literature.4
Opposed to these expounders of the literary profession there has arisen a swarm of critics who find that Shakespeare used his plays to call names. These are the identifiers. Mostly they identify Essex and Mary, Queen of Scots, but almost anyone is a candidate for high honors, the chief difficulty being that the clamor is a bit confusing which results from such clashing opinions as those which identify Armado in Love's Labor's Lost as the Monarcho, Antonio Perez, John Lyly, Philip of Spain, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Don John of Austria.
Finally, there are the critics who accept Shakespeare as a man of Elizabethan England who read the books that were then printed and saw the sights and knew the men and women about him. They think of him as aware of what he read and what he saw, and reflecting in his plays the modes of living and of thinking and of play writing that were current.
This group of critics of Shakespeare as represented in their approach to his historical plays found their precursor in Richard Simpson, who in two important papers in 1874 discussed “The Political Use of the Stage in Shakespeare's Time” and “The Politics of Shakespeare's Historical Plays.”5 Simpson's successors have been numerous and include many familiar names—H. B. Charlton, G. B. Harrison, Dover Wilson, E. P. Kuhl, John W. Draper, W. C. Curry, Alfred Hart, and others. These critics have made us aware that Shakespeare's plays concerning English history echoed many of the political teachings of the time. Some of them have found specific sources implied. Professor Hart, for instance, summarizes his work by saying that he “attempted to show that the dramatist took his views on divine right and the mutual relation of monarch and subjects from the official book of sermons,”6 that is, from the Homilies published in 1571.
But it is possible, I think, to go further than these critics have gone in relating Shakespeare to his background, to try to ascertain the general relation of his thinking to that which prevailed about him while he lived. Many of the conclusions reached by the critics whom I have described as the successors of Richard Simpson are those which I shall reach in a more roundabout way. But what I hope to show is that just as there is in the Shakespearean tragedies a dominant ethical pattern of passion opposed to reason, so there is in the history plays a dominant political pattern characteristic of the political philosophy of his age.
Perhaps it will help explain my point of view in regard to Shakespeare's plays if I venture to state my own credo. I do not believe that a poet exists in a vacuum, or even that he exists solely in the minds and hearts of his interpreters. I do not believe that he can write great poetry without conviction and without passion. I do not believe that his reflection of his period is casual and fragmentary and accidental. Rather, it seems to me the poet must be reckoned a man among men, a man who can be understood only against the background of his own time. His ideas and his experiences are conditioned by the time and the place in which he lives. He is inevitably a man of feeling. If, however, he is not merely a poet but a great poet, the particulars of his experience are linked in meaning to the universal of which they are a representative part. If he is a great poet, his feeling becomes an intense passion. It is not that he does not write out of his experience that sets him as a man apart; it is rather that he penetrates through experience to the meaning of experience. For this reason he has generally been reckoned a seer and a prophet. It is not lack of feeling but a passion for universal truth that takes his hatred and his love out of the realm of the petty and into the realm of the significant. In this sense, and in this sense only, is he impersonal. Further, the greatest poets have always in their work been philosophers; that is to say they have developed, as they matured, consistent patterns of thought. They have seen life as a whole, not in fragments.
I hope no one will misunderstand me as saying that a poet expounds a philosophy in set words or invents a system of the universe. The poet is as much conditioned by the material he works in as by his experience. If he is a dramatist, he has to do first and fundamentally with plot. The characters may, indeed, express his philosophy or their own, but the plot is bound to express the author's philosophy; it is bound to relate particular characters and their particular actions to universal law. Macbeth may say that “Life is a tale told by an idiot,” but the play of Macbeth is not a tale of a world run by an idiot. It is a tale of a world of clearly defined moral law, in which Macbeth and his particular actions meet with the indestructible and the universal. Poets today have another philosophy, and their plots reveal their uncertainties. But Shakespeare's plots were clear and sure because he had a definite, fundamental conception of universal law.
It is to a study of Shakespeare's historical plays from this point of view that this book is directed. The first problem involved is the definition of a history play, for that definition must lead to the background of thought and purpose which affords the basis for interpreting individual plays.