Dale Ahlquist
In his Autobiography, G. K. Chesterton paints the following early memory:
My father knew all his English literature backwards, and … I knew a great deal of it by heart, long before I could really get it into my head. I knew pages of Shakespeare’s blank verse without a notion of the meaning of most of it; which is perhaps the right way to begin to appreciate verse. And it is also recorded of me that, at the age of six or seven, I tumbled down in the street in the act of excitedly reciting the words,
Good Hamlet, cast this nighted colour off,
And let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark,
Do not for ever with thy veiléd lids
Seek for thy noble father in the dust,
at which appropriate moment I pitched forward on my nose.
This amusing passage reveals that Chesterton enjoyed a lifelong relationship with Shakespeare. It was a relationship that was scheduled to continue in print, as Chesterton had been commissioned to write a book on Shakespeare after completing the Autobiography. Unfortunately, the Autobiography was the last book he wrote. He poetically completed his life in the flesh only a few weeks after completing it on paper.
Anyone familiar with Chesterton’s exquisite literary criticism is pained by the thought that he did not live long enough to write that promised book on Shakespeare. Each of his books on other literary figures—Dickens, Browning, Stevenson, Chaucer, St. Thomas Aquinas—has been praised by experts on those authors as the best work ever written on that subject. Chesterton always combines a profound insight with an unbelievably wide knowledge, an unfailingly fresh perspective and simply dazzling prose. The book on Shakespeare might have been his greatest book if only he had written it.
But perhaps it was not lost to us after all. Perhaps he did write the book on Shakespeare. Among the thousands of essays that Chesterton churned out over his thirty-six-year career are several devoted to Shakespeare’s plays and characters and criticisms. Just over two dozen of those essays were collected by Chesterton’s secretary and literary executrix, Dorothy Collins, who put them in a book called Chesterton on Shakespeare. But only a few copies were printed by a small, obscure press in the 1970s, which were the dark ages in terms of interest in Chesterton. Most of his books were out of print at that point, and his popularity was at an all-time low. It is a book that almost no one has read.
There has since been a wonderful revival of interest in Chesterton, thanks in no small part to our colleges and universities. As his books have returned to print, even scholars are starting to take notice. Not lost on them is the fact that Chesterton’s one hundred or so books represent only a fraction of what he wrote. There is more material to be mined among his uncollected writings that first appeared in newspapers and magazines. Much more. Enough for many more books.
I have had the pleasure of attempting to complete the task promised by Chesterton and started by his secretary: the book on Shakespeare. I am sure more good bits of Chesterton’s criticism on Shakespeare will still turn up. But here is the most complete collection that you can expect to see for a while. It has at least fifty percent more material than Dorothy Collins’ first go-round, drawn from over one hundred additional sources, spanning Chesterton’s entire literary career. There are references to at least thirty of Shakespeare’s thirty-seven plays. Interestingly, he talks more about Richard II than Richard III, talks more about Falstaff than any of the kings. There are references to Cymbeline but none to The Taming of the Shrew. And Hamlet gets the most attention, as well he should.
Some of these essays and excerpts have been buried for a long time. It was fun to dig these up. I am especially grateful to Geir Hasnes, who has done so much work in tracking down uncollected Chesterton pieces. He found the essay on Love’s Labour Lost, the souvenir program from the Shakespeare Ball, and some other great things that appear here for the first time after being hidden for a century or more.
For the few people who have seen the earlier collection, I have followed Dorothy Collins’ layout only somewhat. We begin by putting Shakespeare in his context. Chesterton compares Elizabethan drama not only with the drama that came after it—right up to our day—but with the drama that came before it—medieval drama, which most modern audiences (and critics) know nothing about. He also argues persuasively that Shakespeare, the cream of English literature, is part of the Latin tradition and not the Nordic or even distinctly Anglo tradition.
Then comes Chesterton’s treatment of the tragedies and the comedies. It is possible that the superb essays “The Macbeths” and “The Tragedy of King Lear” were actually intended for the Shakespeare book that Chesterton had been commissioned to write, since they apparently were never published in his lifetime. Add to them, from the comedy section, the essay in which Chesterton gives the highest praise to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and we have pure literary criticism at its finest. If there were no Chesterton, and a college English student handed in an essay like one of these, any proper English professor with even a modicum of respect for his subject would properly fall to his knees and weep with joy and then retire in peace. His life would be fulfilled.
In the next section we see how Chesterton deals with the plays as plays—the staging, the costuming, the plotting. Chesterton shows how Shakespeare can be adapted to fashion but of course transcends fashion. The fashions fade, Shakespeare remains. Chesterton also muses on the intriguing idea of presenting the Shakespeare tragedies as detective stories. Who killed Desdemona? Othello would be the last one we suspect.
We then consider several essays and excerpts that cover the wide range of the elements of Shakespeare: his style, his techniques, his themes, his characters, and the reactions they elicit in us. Here we touch on the history plays as well. Chesterton is insightful and incisive in his observations, revealing a keen power of interpretation. And yet he is humble enough to admit when he is absolutely baffled by Shakespeare’s rather obscure and obtuse poem, “The Phoenix and the Turtle.” That Chesterton cannot figure out what it means should give comfort to all students everywhere.
The greatest living playwright in England in Chesterton’s day was the Irishman George Bernard Shaw. Chesterton and Shaw were good friends and even better opponents. Among the many topics on which they disagreed was the greatness of Shakespeare and the philosophical outlook of Shakespeare. Shaw didn’t think the Swan of Avon was any great shakes. Worse still, he thought Shakespeare was a pessimist. Chesterton sets Shaw straight on both accounts. He points out that Shaw does not see what the world sees in Shakespeare, because what the world sees is not what Shaw happens to be looking for. And though Chesterton would never admit to doing so, he exposes Shaw as a bit of a lightweight.
Recently, there have been some several serious books arguing that Shakespeare was a Catholic. Chesterton joins this argument even before it starts, and seems to end it as well. As always, he draws on history, philosophy, literature, art, and common sense to make his points converge on a conclusion. It is clear that Shakespeare shares the religion of Chaucer and Dante as a fellow architect of literary cathedrals.
If there is one part of his criticism where we might have wished he had spent less time, and more time on something else, it would be in the amount of ink Chesterton devotes to refuting the folks who claimed that Bacon wrote Shakespeare. Or the Earl of Leicester. Or Sir Walter Raleigh. Or the theory that it was Shakespeare’s patron, Lord Southampton, who wrote Shakespeare’s works. (“Lord Southampton evidently believed in keeping a dog and then barking himself.”) And yet, it is still useful to include his many arguments here because they can be used to refute the current crop of anti-Stratfordians who this week claim that Edward de Vere wrote Shakespeare. I have no doubt that, if necessary, Chesterton would update his arguments to skewer these latest challenges to the authenticity of Shakespeare, but the new arguments are surprisingly old and stale, and Chesterton’s rebuttals are still fresh and new. I admit I enjoy arguing with the Oxfordians because they know their Shakespeare, even if they do not know it was Shakespeare. These people puzzle me, but I love them anyway.
It is true that a great deal of Chesterton’s Shakespeare criticism is a criticism of Shakespeare’s critics. “Critics say that little is known about ‘the Man Shakespeare.’ But, to judge by the critics, even less is known about ‘the Poet Shakespeare’: for he is allowed to be almost everything except a poet.” Shakespeare poetry speaks to the poetical in all of us. Though we cannot write like Shakespeare, we immediately recognize that what Shakespeare has written is what we think and feel. He captures our moods like the Psalmist. The same doubts and dreads, the same hopes and ecstasies. The same wryness and wrath. Chesterton says the great plays of Shakespeare are things “that nearly anybody can obtain and anybody should enjoy.” But as is often the case, the modern critics get between Shakespeare and his audience and make him and his plays into something other than what the audience sees. Chesterton’s main role as a critic is to undo the damage done by other critics. Chesterton’s genius as a critic is that he tells the audience not what it should feel but what it does feel.
But Chesterton can also take us to a sublime level that we might not have achieved on our own. He can open our eyes, as it were. In one of his early reviews of a book on Shakespeare criticism, Chesterton says: “The only test that can be adequately suggested of a critic’s work on a masterpiece is whether it freshens it or makes it stale, whether, like the inferior appreciation, it sends us to our hundredth reading of the work, or whether, like the higher appreciation, it sends us to our first reading of it. There is one kind of criticism which reminds us that we have read a book; there is another and better which convinces us that we have never read it.”
In this sense Chesterton gets us to read Shakespeare for the first time. Of course, as he points out: when people talk about the books they would take to a desert island, they usually answer: Shakespeare and the Bible. This is because, in most cases, they would be reading Shakespeare and the Bible for the first time in their lives.
Shakespeare is a classic, which means he is quoted as opposed to being read. Though Shakespeare’s popularity never goes away, very few of us have read Shakespeare. Chesterton, however, really has read Shakespeare. They were, as I said, lifelong friends. And one thing true friends do is keep their promises. Here, I hope, is the book that Chesterton promised to write about his friend.