If you or I had to invent out of our own heads a really shattering and shining name, a name fit for some flaming hero defying the stars, a name on horseback and high in the saddle—could we think of any so chivalrous or so challenging as Shakespeare? The very word is like Lancelot at his last tournament with a touch of the divine impotence of Don Quixote. In fact, I know only one surname that is really finer than Shakespeare, and that is Brakespear, the only English Pope. [Pope Adrian IV (1154–1159)] A pleasing lyric in prose might be built up about the two of them; the one Englishman who rose to the highest of all official places, and the other who rose to the highest of all unofficial.
(Illustrated London News, May 15, 1909)
The Speech That Shakespeare Spoke
We all know the hundred paraphrases of the Wordsworthian phrase: “The speech that Shakespeare spoke; the faith and morals hold that Milton held.” There is nothing wrong with that except that it is all nonsense. Neither of us (unfortunately) speaks the speech that Shakespeare spoke.
Shakespeare did, in fact, describe one of the most beautiful of friendships, a friendship of opposites, in the story of Hamlet and Horatio. But suppose when walking down Broadway or the Strand, the Englishman casually remarked to his American friend, or vice versa, “Then let the candid tongue lick absurd pomp and crook the pregnant hinges of the knee where thrift may follow fawning.” I am not sure that the meaning of this would instantly spring to the mind of the Englishman any more than the American.
And as for the faith and morals that Milton had, the most recent researches suggest that his morals verged on polygamy like Brigham Young’s, and that his faith chiefly consisted of doubts.
(New York American, Aug. 6, 1935)
While Shakespeare would write his own name in two or three totally different but equally illegible scrawls, he trusted the whole great load of his glory to the sound of words, to be spoken by living men.
(G.K.’s Weekly, Dec. 17, 1932)
We are all as poetical as Shakespeare; but we don’t happen to be such great poets. Our temperaments are the same, but you and I haven’t got the mind to write lines like “And all our yesterdays have lighted fools …”
(Hearth and Home, Oct. 17, 1912)
When Shakespeare merely says the very simple words, “Come unto these yellow sands, and there take hands,” there does instantly, but only instantaneously, flash through my own fancy some world where everyone is young; long lines of glowing golden sands under the glamour of an endless evening, where lovers remain at the immortal instant when they first touch hands. But if I or anybody else were to settle down to describing the maritime community living on that particular coastline, in a prose essay or novel, those yellow sands would become as dry as the sands of the desert; even as the rose-red city would fade like the rose.
(London Magazine, August, 1924)
Shakespeare we are too frequently informed, said that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet; it would be more correct to say that Shakespeare said that Miss Juliet Capulet said it, in a rather distracted moment in a romantic play.
It would cause more surprise to announce that Shakespeare said: “I am determined to be a villain!” because he said that Richard the Third said it in a rather melodramatic play.
But anyhow, the maxim and the metaphor have clung to men’s memories and produced curious results. Some gardeners, it would seem, supposed that because the rose would be as sweet with any other name therefore the name would be as sweet with any other flower; and merely turned “rose tree” into Greek and applied it to a rhododendron.
It is rather typical of the way in which science sometimes tells lies in Greek which would be too obvious in English. Other philosophers, of the realistic or cynical school, apply the maxim in a still more curious way; as meaning that because one rose has the name of a cabbage rose, therefore a rose is the same as a cabbage.
But most sensible people know the real sense of the phrase; that the world is too prone to look at the title rather than the thing, at the label rather than the bottle or the bottle rather than the wine. In this sense we can heartily agree with Miss Capulet, however distracted. Having to choose between the two, a man would be less than wise if he refused to drink good wine out of the bottle and were left merely licking the gum off the label.
So it is doubtless with roses in real life; but not entirely so in real literature. If a rose grower has an eccentric benefactor who stipulated that the word “rose” should never be uttered; but the word “hogwash” or “pignut” should be invariably substituted, but on these conditions undertook to smother him in masses of the most gorgeous and fragrant blooms of innumerable rose gardens, the recipient would doubtless be wise to prefer the thing to the word.
But it does not follow that it does not matter what we do with the word. In the heritage of poetry, which is a great part of civilization, the word is almost as valuable as the thing; indeed, the word is already part of the thing. Even Juliet shrank from actually suggesting any other name, and “hogwash” would have a good deal thrown her out of her own stride.
It is not true that a love song like “My love is like the red, red pignut” would leap to the lips of every lover, even if a footnote explained that the term was identical with the botanical Latin name for the rose.
Even for one accepting the convention, the opening line, “It was hogwash, hogwash all the way, would never recapture the first fine careless rapture of Browning’s line. In short, the name is not the thing; but the name is very far from being a mere number or sign for the thing.
Man and Nature have so long reacted on each other that I strongly suspect that kingcups or hyacinths do actually look nobler to us because of their ancient and noble names.
To forget this is to forget the very meaning of culture, which should run parallel to horticulture. And some moderns of the hogwash and pignuts school of poetry seem likely to forget it.
The revolt against culture is often the last fashion of the cultured. But above all it is very unfair to poor old Shakespeare. If ever there was a man who did not agree with Juliet’s distracted remark, in its realistic sense, it was he.
If ever a man could smell real words, as if they were flowers, and do without the flowers, it was he. Heaven knows why the world has remembered this one chance phrase of Juliet, and forgotten a thousand gorgeous and odorous phrases that rise almost like stupefying fumes. “Not poppy nor mandragora …” Surely everybody knows those intoxicant ingredients.
But I gravely doubt whether Shakespeare even knew what mandragora looked like.
(New York American, June 11, 1932)
It is the custom in many quarters to speak somewhat sneeringly of that element which is broadly called the picturesque. It is always felt to be an inferior, a vulgar, and even an artificial form of art. Yet two things may be remarked about it. The first is that, with few exceptions, the greatest literary artists have been not only particularly clever at the picturesque, but particularly fond of it. Shakespeare, for instance, delighted in certain merely pictorial contrasts which are quite distinct from, even when they are akin to, the spiritual view involved. For instance, there is admirable satire in the idea of Touchstone teaching worldly wisdom and worldly honour to the woodland yokels. There is excellent philosophy in the idea of the fool being the representative of civilisation in the forest. But quite apart from this deeper meaning in the incident, the mere figure of the jester, in his bright motley and his cap and bells, against the green background of the forest and the rude forms of the shepherds, is a strong example of the purely picturesque. There is excellent tragic irony in the confrontation of the melancholy philosopher among the tombs with the cheerful digger of the graves. It sums up the essential point, that dead bodies can be comic; it is only dead souls that can be tragic. But quite apart from such irony, the mere picture of the grotesque gravedigger, the black-clad prince, and the skull is a picture in the strongest sense picturesque. Caliban and the two shipwrecked drunkards are an admirable symbol; but they are also an admirable scene. Bottom, with the ass’s head, sitting in a ring of elves, is excellent moving comedy, but also excellent still life. Falstaff with his huge body, Bardolph with his burning nose, are masterpieces of the pen; but they would be fine sketches even for the pencil. King Lear, in the storm, is a landscape as well as a character study. There is something decorative even about the insistence on the swarthiness of Othello, or the deformity of Richard III. Shakespeare’s work is much more than picturesque; but it is picturesque.
(Introduction to Barnaby Rudge)
The artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs. It is a disease which arises from men not having sufficient power of expression to utter and get rid of the element of art in their being. It is healthful to every sane man to utter the art within him; it is essential to every sane man to get rid of the art within him at all costs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily, or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament. Thus, very great artists are able to be ordinary men, men like Shakespeare.
(Daily News, April 1, 1905)
Shakespeare, like Hamlet, was a rather rambling, irrelevant person, a “John-a-dreams,” but his dreams showed him something that shone more strangely than a spotlight when he called up such images to revisit the glimpses of the moon. There is a creative side to the English vagueness, comic in Dickens or tragic in Shakespeare.
(New York American, Aug. 1, 1935)
Shakespeare often suffers from too much inventiveness; that which clogs us and trips us up in his masterpieces is not so much inferior work as irrelevant brilliancy; not so much failures as fragments of other masterpieces.
(“Dreams,” The Coloured Lands)
The plays of Shakespeare may be full of incidental discords, but not one of them ever fails to convey its aboriginal sentiment, that life is as black as the tempest or as green as the greenwood.
(“Dreams,” The Coloured Lands)
What alone can make a literary man in the ultimate sense great … is ideas; the power of generating and making vivid an incessant output of ideas. It is untrue to say that what matters is quality and not quantity. Most men have made one good joke in their lives; but to make jokes as Dickens made them is to be a great man. Many forgotten poets have let fall a lyric with one really perfect image; but when we open any play of Shakespeare, good or bad, at any page, important or unimportant, with the practical certainty of finding some imagery that at least arrests the eye and probably enriches the memory, we are putting our trust in a great man.
(“Henry James,” The Common Man)
A country girl I know in the country of Buckingham had never seen the sea in her life until the other day. When she was asked what she thought of it she said it was like cauliflowers. Now that is a piece of pure literature-vivid, entirely independent and original, and perfectly true. I had always been haunted with an analogous kinship which I could never locate; cabbages always remind me of the sea and the sea always reminds me of cabbages. It is partly, perhaps, the veined mingling of violet and green, as in the sea a purple that is almost dark red may mix with a green that is almost yellow, and still be the blue sea as a whole. But it is more the grand curves of the cabbage that curl over cavernously like waves, and it is partly again that dreamy repetition, as of a patter, that made two great poets, Aeschylus and Shakespeare, use a word like “multitudinous” of the ocean. But just where my fancy halted the Buckinghamshire young woman rushed (so to speak) to my imaginative rescue. Cauliflowers are twenty times better than cabbages, for they show the wave breaking as well as curling, and the efflorescence of the branching foam, blind, bubbling, and opaque. Moreover, the strong lines of life are suggested; the arches of the rushing waves have all the rigid energy of green stalks, as if the whole sea were one white flower rooted in the abyss.
Now a large number of delicate and superior persons would refuse to see the force in that kitchen garden comparison, because it is not connected with any of the ordinary maritime sentiments as stated in books and songs. The aesthetic amateur would say that he knew what large and philosophical thoughts he ought to have by the boundless deep. He would say that he was not a greengrocer who would think first of greens. To which I should reply, like Hamlet, apropos of a parallel profession, “I would you were so honest a man.” The mention of Hamlet reminds me, by the way, that besides the girl who had never seen the sea I knew a girl who had never seen a stage-play. She was taken to Hamlet, and she said it was very sad. There is another case of going to the primordial point which is overlaid by learning and secondary impressions. We are so used to thinking of Hamlet as a problem that we sometimes quite forget that it is a tragedy, just as we are so used to thinking of the sea as vast and vague, that we scarcely notice when it is white and green.
(Daily News, Aug. 20, 1910)
Now and again Shakespeare, with a horror almost bordering on hysteria, will thrust into the limelight some clown or idiot, to suggest, against the black curtain of tragedy, this incongruity and inconsequence in the things that really do happen.
(“If Don John of Austria Had Married Mary Queen of Scots,” The Common Man)
I think the first truth about traditional metres is that there is a sort of speech that is stronger than speech. Not merely smoother or sweeter or more melodious, or even more beautiful; but stronger. Words are jointed together like bones; they are mortared together like bricks; they are close and compact and resistant; whereas, in all common conversational speech, every sentence is falling to pieces. Perhaps we recognise this latter fact when we talk about letting fall a remark, or dropping a hint, or throwing out an observation. All conversational speech or writing is under the curse of the Fall; it is under the law of gravitation; it is perpetually falling down, like the universe of Lucretius. But great poets do not drop hints or let observations fall; they lift them and hold them aloft, as the keystone of a strong arch thrusts up the stones, defying the law of gravity and the devil and all his angels. The words of strong poetry are packed as tight and as solid as the stones of the arch. The lines of a good sonnet are like bridges of sound across abysses of silence. The boast of the bridges is that you could march armies across them; that a man can rest his weight on every word. The awful cry out of the last tragic trance of Othello, when he realises that death is as real as love, finds words worthy of itself; megalithic words; words not only of weight, but weight-bearing; words strong enough to support him above the abyss. “If I quench thee, thou flaming minister …” The address to the candle might almost be called obscure, but it is not doubtful; it is not hesitant or wavering in words or the sound of words; it is rather as if a man were granted a greater thing than speech. And the effect is gained by this firmness in the words, and the weight that can rest on them. “I know not where is that Promethean heat.” You could stand an elephant on that line. It is true, first of all, as a mere fact of acoustics, that there is not one weak syllable in the line. At the same time, there is also that strength of style that is like the strength of gesture. “I know not where” is the essential elemental cry of man, eternally ignorant of the beginning of life, or of how it may truly be renewed. And it is a plain and simple fact, whether we like it or not, that the words “I know not where” do sound like some such ancestral cry; while the words “I don’t know where” certainly do not.
(Illustrated London News, April 1, 1933)
Rhyme gives a ringing finality to sentiment; the ear hears that something has been decided even before the brain can take it in. I believe some critics of Shakespeare blame him for ending a blank verse scene with a rhymed couplet so often. It seems to me not only natural but splendid, that the speech at the last should rise into a kind of recurrent song.
(Daily News, May 12, 1906)
The dangers of a false progress are very great. Again and again in our human past it has happened that men have started from a position of real value, have gone on under the firm impression that they were increasing that value, and have arrived at last at a position infinitely inferior, because they had really only been increasing in one quite secondary quality which was not the real value of the original state. They had indeed developed, but they had developed in the wrong thing; they did become superior to their fathers, but they only became superior in an inferiority. Some of the numerous historic examples of the thing will best explain what I mean. In this way, for instance, the English poets after the Elizabethan age sincerely believed that they were improving on the Elizabethan poetry. They felt that they were progressing. And so they were progressing. But they were progressing only in one quite small quality of the Elizabethans; they were progressing in Elizabethan ingenuity, Elizabethan complexity, in mere wit, in mere learning. A poet like Donne, let us say, or Crashaw, would look at a line of Shakespeare’s such as this—
And crook the pregnant hinges of the knee,
Where thrift may follow fawning—
and would say to himself, “That is all very nice; but I can write more queerly even than that. We are progressing, my boy!” Then he would write such a couplet as this about the Crucifixion:
It made his own lieutenant nature shrink,
It made his footstool crack and the sun wink.
And he would never notice that, though both Shakespeare’s line and his were quaint and clever—though perhaps his line was the more quaint and clever—yet the real difference between them is that Shakespeare’s line, in spite of all its cleverness, is a line of poetry. In Shakespeare the rather crabbed words are set to some strange music. Donne leaves out the music, and Donne progresses—in crabbedness.
(Daily News, July 14, 1906)
Improving on Shakespeare’s Language
A paragraph in the newspapers reports, I know not with how much truth, that the Minister controlling education in the present Russian regime has ordered the elimination of references to angels, devils, and even fairies. The paragraph states that “angels are to be supplanted by scientists and technicians who have served humanity.” I do not know whether this substitution is to be literal in every case where such things are mentioned. In that case the condition of the great literature of the past would be rather curious. Perhaps Titania, instead of saying, “What angel,” will say, “What technician wakes me from my flowery bed?” Which might be appropriate enough, even to Bottom; for the old-fashioned weaver was not only a technician, but often an excellent technician. Perhaps Horatio will avoid the mention of angels by saying to the dying Hamlet, “Good-night, sweet prince; and flights of scientists sing thee to thy rest.”
(Illustrated London News, Aug. 20, 1921)
[Thomas Bowdler (1754–1825) was an English editor who published an expurgated version of Shakespeare’s plays. Bowdlerism refers to the practice of removing words considered unsuitable from a text.]
In one point I do certainly think that the Victorian Bowdlerism did pure harm. This is the simple point that, nine times out of ten, the coarse word is the word that condemns an evil and the refined word the word that excuses it. A common evasion, for instance, substitutes for the word that brands self-sale as the essential sin, a word which weakly suggests that it is no more wicked than walking down the street. The great peril of such soft mystifications is that extreme evils (they that are abnormal even by the standard of evil) have a very long start. Where ordinary wrong is made unintelligible, extraordinary wrong can count on remaining more unintelligible still; especially among those who live in such an atmosphere of long words.
(“The Great Victorian Novelists,” The Victorian Age in Literature)
It was somewhere about the generation of Thackeray, men were not so certain as they had been about their religion and morality, that the religion and morality were hedged in with a new and crude respectability. Measure for Measure is much more plain-spoken than Vanity Fair; but Shakespeare was much more certain of the superiority of Isabella than Thackeray of the superiority of Amelia.
(Illustrated London News, June 24, 1922)
It is hard for an Englishman (at least, it is hard for me) heartily to like [French] idealistic cruelty. It is hard for us to imagine scorn as something fruitful and even festive: to behold that bitter tree bearing lovely blossoms and delightful fruit. It is hard for us to realise a pageant of blazing wit and romantic activity all produced by such stiff anger as has produced an anchorite or a suicide. It is as if all the gay Athenian comedies had been written by Timon of Athens.
(Illustrated London News, March 19, 1910)
Timon of Athens … think[s] hating men [is] better than loving them.
(Daily News, June 3, 1905)
Almost all great poets rant, from Shakespeare downwards.
(Daily News, Sept. 24, 1901)
But it is equally true that I did not ride with Chaucer to Canterbury and give him a few intelligent hints for the best passages in The Canterbury Tales. It is equally true that there was a large and lamentable gap in the company seated at the Mermaid; that scarcely a word of Shakespeare’s most poetical passages was actually contributed by me; that I did not whisper to him the word “incarnadine” when he was hesitating after “multitudinous seas”; that I entirely missed the opportunity of suggesting that Hamlet would be effectively ended by the stormy entrance of Fortinbras.
Nay, aged and infirm as I am, it were vain for me to pretend that I lost a leg at the Battle of Trafalgar, or that I am old enough to have seen (as I should like to have seen), ablaze with stars upon the deck of death, the frail figure and the elfish face of the noblest sailor of history.
Yet I propose to go on being proud of Chaucer and Shakespeare and Nelson; to feel that the poets did indeed love the language that I love and that the sailor felt something of what we also feel for the sea.
But if we accept this mystical corporate being, this larger self, we must accept it for good and ill. If we boast of our best, we must repent of our worst. Otherwise, patriotism will be a very poor thing indeed.
(New York American, Sept. 3, 1932)
Classics … must be published entire by those who care for classics. This course has been most wisely adopted in regard to all the works of all the great but uneven workers. Critics included among Shakespeare’s works almost reluctantly such works as Troilus and Cressida or Cymbeline, merely with the result that another generation of critics said they were the only good plays of Shakespeare. … It is never safe to throw away the works of the best men as refuse; if you do you will have all the best critics with their heads in the dust bin. Nevertheless, we may all quite fearlessly assert the badness of great masses of their work, so long as we do not propose thus coercively to carry it into effect. Shakespeare and Dickens resemble Dumas, not only in the fact that their bad parts are very bad, but in the fact that their bad parts are very long. When they began talking nonsense they went at it steadily, and there was no doubt about it. You could compile, I should think, the worst book in the world entirely out of selecting passages from the best writers in the world.
(Daily News, Jan. 2, 1907)
The divine punishment of hypocrisy is fatigue. Those, in Shakespeare’s fine simile, whose hearts are all as false as stairs of sand, must really have much of that exhausted sensation that comes of walking through sand when it is loose and deep. The hypocrite is that unluckiest of actors who is never out of a job. For even Mme. Sarah Bernhardt would not like to be Hamlet all the time; and Sir Herbert Tree would not like to go to bed as Svengali, any more than to black himself all over as Othello. Three-score years and ten is too long a run for the most successful play or the most energetic cast. And whenever there is this unreality in the lives and businesses of human beings, sooner or later the note of fatigue is heard. The man is tired of the mask, and still more of the task—the task of “humbugging all the people all the time.”
(Illustrated London News, June 13, 1914)
The critics [make] the frequent observation that a soliloquy is old-fashioned—and by ‘old-fashioned’ they always mean artificial or unnatural. Now I should say that a soliloquy is the most natural thing in the world. It is no more artificial than a conscience; or a habit of walking about a room. I constantly talk to myself. If a man does not talk to himself, it is because he is not worth talking to. Soliloquy is simply the strength and liberty of the soul, without which each one of us would be like that nobleman in one of the most brilliant and bizarre of Mr. Henry James’s tales, who did not exist at all except when others were present. Every man ought to be able to argue with himself.
(Dublin Review, January, 1914)
An Argument Between Two Truths
No dramatic poet ever wrote a line that he did not believe. A dramatic scene is only a stubborn argument between truths. Shakespeare believed in the political creed of Antony as much as in that of Brutus. The net effect of the work of a great artist is like the net effect of the works of Nature—it is conflict everywhere, and yet harmony above all.
(Daily News, Aug. 13, 1901)
Shakespeare’s Brutus [was] a man of piercingly pure intentions, prone to use government as a mere machine for morality, very sensitive to the charge of inconsistency and a little too proud of his own clean and honourable life.
(Daily News, Jan. 4, 1908)
[The] most difficult of all literary works [is the] political play. The thing has been achieved once at least admirably in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.… The difficulties of such a play are obvious on the face of the matter. In a political play the principal characters are not merely men. They are symbols, arithmetical figures representing millions of other men outside. It is, by dint of elaborate stage management, possible to bring a mob upon the boards, but the largest mob ever known is nothing but a floating atom of the people; and the people of which the politician has to think does not consist of knots of rioters in the street, but of some million absolutely distinct individuals, each sitting in his own breakfast room reading his own morning paper. To give even the faintest suggestion of the strength and size of the people in this sense in the course of a dramatic performance is obviously impossible. That is why it is so easy on the stage to concentrate all the pathos and dignity upon such persons as Charles I and Mary Queen of Scots, the vampires of their people, because within the minute limits of a stage there is room for their small virtues and no room for their enormous crimes.
(“Browning in Early Life,” Robert Browning)
You cannot get the British Public onto the stage by realism: if you approach that public in literature you must approach it poetically. Briefly, in studying your moral problem you must do one of two things. Either you must, in choosing your morality, ignore the whole mass of men for whom morality is meant, or you must depict that mass in some entirely symbolic shape. Your play must cease to be a realistic play, your play must cease to be a problem play before it can approach the real problem.
But there is in some great plays a spirit that overcomes this difficulty. The problem of Edward Voysey, which Mr. Granville Barker sketched with a very real suggestiveness and actuality, the problem of a young idealist entangled in the desperate compromises of real conduct, had something about it that continually reminded me of the problem of the soul of Brutus, in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Edward Voysey was really very like Brutus. Brutus, like Edward, was a man of “principles.” Brutus, like Edward, found that by some extraordinary process which his mind could hardly arrest or examine, his “principles” were gradually making him more unprincipled than anybody else. Brutus, like Edward, had a certain kind of stiff weakness that belongs to the mere ethicist; and a certain kind of stiff strength that belongs to the mere ethicist, too. Shakespeare knew, quite as well as Mr. Shaw or Mr. Granville Barker, that there is often a certain psychological cowardice behind the virtue of consistency, especially when the virtue of consistency is a paraphrase for the sin of pride. But you do get in the dramatic story of Brutus exactly the thing that you do not get in the dramatic story of Mr. Barker’s Edward Voysey. You get the thing said for Brutus which really is to be said for Brutus. And the thing which is to be said for Brutus is expressed in one syllable—Rome. It is the contention of Brutus that his “principles” are required for the public good.
This may be right or wrong; but the dramatist at least puts before us the idea of the public good. By high rhetoric, by huge crowds, by a certain superb and open tone of talk, Shakespeare manages to put upon the stage the Public Thing—which is called in Latin the Republic. Brutus might be quite wrong in saying that this public thing justified the stiffness of his principles. The public thing may not be the justification of Brutus; but certainly it is the motive of Brutus. And as a motive it ought to be suggested on the stage; as Shakespeare, in some sense, manages to suggest it. But in the modern problem play, which takes place in some dining-room or drawing-room, the reality of the public interest is not suggested at all. In The Voysey Inheritance it is not suggested at all. Mr. Granville Barker’s heroine, the sweet and sane and wise young lady who directs his hero in everything, sneers at his “principles” every time they are mentioned. This is quite natural; she has four hundred a year, or some fixed sum. She has never been near enough to real life to see the necessity of “principles.” She does not know that every train she travels by and every shop she shops in is run on “principles.” But in the Voysey interior the Public Thing is so remote and unreal that the characters can do what they like with it. They can act as if outside their front door there was a howling wilderness. People talk in a most strange way about something that they call public morality and something that they call private morality; but I cannot comprehend the distinction. Morality may be muttered in the inner chamber; morality may be settled on some moonless night; but all morality is public morality. I, for one, decidedly decline to be bothered about my duty to my neighbour, if, by looking out of the window, I can discover that I have no neighbour.
(Daily News, Nov. 11, 1905)
Now the serious modern play is, as a rule, the very reverse of a problem play; for there can be no problem unless both points of view are equally and urgently presented. Hamlet really is a problem play because at the end of it one is really in doubt as to whether upon the author’s showing Hamlet is something more than a man or something less. Henry IV and Henry V are really problem plays; in this sense, that the reader or spectator is really doubtful whether the high but harsh efficiency, valour, and ambition of Henry V are an improvement on his old blackguard camaraderie; and whether he was not a better man when he was a thief. This hearty and healthy doubt is very common in Shakespeare; I mean a doubt that exists in the writer as well as in the reader. … in Julius Caesar… Shakespeare sees quite as clearly that Brutus is unpractical and ineffectual; but he also sees, what is quite as plain and practical a fact, that these ineffectual men do capture the hearts and influence the policies of mankind.
(“The Philosopher,” George Bernard Shaw)
Shakespeare’s historical plays are something truer than historical; they are traditional, the living memory of many things lingered, though the memory of others was lost. He is right in making Richard II incarnate the claim to divine right; and Bolingbroke the baronial ambition which ultimately broke up the old mediaeval order. But divine right had become at once drier and more fantastic by the time of the Tudors. Shakespeare could not recover the fresh and popular part of the thing; for he came at a later stage in the process of stiffening which is the main thing to be studied in later mediaevalism.
(“Nationality and the French Wars,” A Short History of England)
Our English idea of a hero is built upon the … accessible and open-hearted fellow, who kills everybody with the kindest feelings. Our hero is … Harry V—I mean the genial and magnanimous Henry V of Shakespeare, not the morbid and cruel Henry V of history. … Shakespeare’s King Henry broods over his beloved subjects, and seeks to give them (in a splendid line) “a little touch of Harry in the night.”
(Illustrated London News, Mar. 19, 1910)
The Henry V of Shakespeare is not indeed the Henry V of history; yet he is more historic. He is not only a saner and more genial but a more important person. For the tradition of the whole adventure was not that of Henry, but of the populace who turned Henry into Harry. There were a thousand Harries in the army at Agincourt, and not one. For the figure that Shakespeare framed out of the legends of the great victory is largely the figure that all men saw as the Englishman of the Middle Ages. He did not really talk in poetry, like Shakespeare’s hero, but he would have liked to.
Not being able to do so, he sang; and the English people principally appear in contemporary impressions as the singing people.
(“Nationality and the French Wars,” A Short History of England)
Shakespeare, living under the Tudors, who could (and did) kill anybody they wanted to kill, could write in a detached way about man who, “dressed in a little brief authority, plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven as make the angels weep.”
(Illustrated London News, May 18, 1935)
The Elizabethan drama is like one of its own tragedies—its tempestuous torch was soon to be trodden out by the Puritans. It is needless to say that the chief tragedy was the cutting short of the comedy; for the comedy that came to England after the Restoration was by comparison both foreign and frigid. At the best it is comedy in the sense of being humorous, but not in the sense of being happy. It may be noted that the givers of good news and good luck in the Shakespearean love-stories nearly all belong to a world which was passing, whether they are friars or fairies. It is the same with the chief Elizabethan ideals, often embodied in the Elizabethan drama. The national devotion to the Virgin Queen must not be wholly discredited by its incongruity with the coarse and crafty character of the historical Elizabeth. Her critics might indeed reasonably say that in replacing the Virgin Mary by the Virgin Queen, the English reformers merely exchanged a true virgin for a false one. But this truth does not dispose of a true, though limited, contemporary cult. Whatever we think of that particular Virgin Queen, the tragic heroines of the time offer us a whole procession of virgin queens. And it is certain that the mediaevals would have understood much better than the moderns the martyrdom of Measure for Measure. And as with the title of Virgin, so with the title of Queen. The mystical monarchy glorified in Richard II was soon to be dethroned much more ruinously than in Richard II. The same Puritans who tore off the pasteboard crowns of the stage players were also to tear off the real crowns of the kings whose parts they played. All mummery was to be forbidden, and all monarchy to be called mummery. Shakespeare died upon St. George’s Day, and much of what St. George had meant died with him.
(“Spain and the Schism of Nations,” A Short History of England)
There is no person so narrow as the person who is sure that he is broad; indeed, being quite sure that one is broad is itself a form of narrowness. It shows that one has a very narrow ideal of breadth. But, moreover, there is an element involved in the Rationalist position which makes this unintentional bigotry peculiarly natural. … There are two or three principal ways in which this blameless bigotry may appear. One is the … unconscious trick of … the abuse of the post hoc, ergo propter hoc. [“after this, therefore because of this.”] Certain events are connected together, while others, in the same historical relation, are not connected together. Thus, people will say, “Elizabeth threw off the yoke of Pope and Spaniard, and then Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet.” As a matter of fact, you might just as well say, “Charles II returned amid loyal rejoicings, and then John Milton went and wrote Paradise Lost.” The Puritan literature had begun long before Charles II returned; so had the Renaissance literature, with its Italian love-tales, begun long before the Reformation or the Armada. The Reformation did occur soon after the Renaissance; but that it was not (to say the least of it) the same thing can be simply inferred from the fact that the countries where the Renaissance most markedly occurred were commonly the countries where the Reformation didn’t. Indeed, I think that the most human, generous, and comprehending consideration of Puritanism would be to regard it as a revolt against the Renaissance rather than a revolt against the Middle Ages. It was an outbreak of the barbaric mysticism of the North against the classical clarity of the South. Bunyan was a rebel against Shakespeare much more than Shakespeare was a rebel against Chaucer. It is easy to fancy Chaucer and Shakespeare sitting down at the same tavern-table; but if Bunyan had sat down with them I think one of them would have been embarrassed. Perhaps all three.
(Illustrated London News, April 30, 1910)
I think, a limited and localized fire will always be as much associated with Christians as it has always been associated with Christmas. Shakespeare, himself like a large and liberal fire round which winter tales are told, has hit the mark in this matter exactly, as it concerns the poet or maker of fictive things. Shakespeare does not say that the poet loses himself in the All, that he dissipates concrete things into a cloudy twilight, that he turns this home of ours into a vista or any vaguer thing. He says the exact opposite. It is “a local habitation and a name” that the poet gives to what would otherwise be nothing. This seeming narrowness which men complain of in the altar and the hearth is as broad as Shakespeare and the whole human imagination, and should command the respect even of those who think the cult of Christmas really is all imagination. Even those who can only regard the great story of Bethlehem as a fairy-tale told by the fire will yet agree that such narrowness is the first artistic necessity even of a good fairy-tale. But there are others who think, at least, that their thought strikes deeper and pierces to a more subtle truth in the mind. There are others for whom all our fairy-tales, and even all our appetite for fairy-tales, draw their fire from one central fairy-tale, as all forgeries draw their significance from a signature. They believe that this fable is a fact, and that the other fables cannot really be appreciated even as fables until we know it is a fact.
(“The Yule Log and the Democrat,” The Uses of Diversity)
Modern men have a vague feeling that when they have come to the feast, they have come to the finish. By modern commercial customs, the preparations for it have been so very long and the practice of it seems so very short. This is, of course, in sharp contrast to the older traditional customs, in the days when it was a sacred festival for a simpler people. Then the preparation took the form of the more austere season of Advent and the fast of Christmas Eve. But when men passed on to the feast of Christmas it went on for a long time after the feast of Christmas Day. It always went on for a continuous holiday of rejoicing for at least twelve days, and only ended in that wild culmination which Shakespeare described as Twelfth Night: or What You Will. That is to say, it was a sort of Saturnalia which ended in anybody doing whatever he would: and in William Shakespeare writing some very beautiful and rather irrelevant poetry round a perfectly impossible story about a brother and sister who looked exactly alike. In our more enlightened times, the perfectly impossible stories are printed in magazines a month or two before Christmas has begun at all; and in the hustle and hurry of this early publication, the beautiful poetry is, somehow or other, left out.
(Illustrated London News, Dec. 23, 1933)
Shakespeare is really for all ages, for all the seven ages of man. I was fond of Shakespeare when I crept unwillingly to school, and I am fond of him now when I can be more vividly described as a lean and slippered pantaloon. And I do not mean that as a child I was fond of his romantic tales merely; I was fond of his poetry, especially when it was entirely unintelligible. The open and rolling rhythm seemed to be speaking plainly even when I could not comprehend it. The huge heraldic imagery of red and gold was obvious, though I could not take it in. Members of my family who collect coincidences have assured me that I was small enough to run along the street and fall on my nose in the very act of saying the lines:
Do not for ever with thy veilèd lids
Seek for thy noble father in the dust.
Lines like
Revisit’st thus the glimpses of the moon
or like
Still climbing trees in the Hesperides
were not only good poetry, they were good children’s pictures like the cow who jumped over the moon, or the number of red herrings that grow in a wood.
(Daily News, Dec. 19, 1908)
Shakespeare must be a great puzzle to Anglo-Saxons; and that not merely in reference to the element in him that is medieval. Of course, the Anglo-Saxons, having chosen their own name from the very darkest part of the Dark Ages, disapprove of anything so remote and retrograde as being medieval. But they must surely find him in any case irritatingly international. How are we to explain his deplorable taste in Dagos? How can he have borne to be so dreadfully Italianate? The Anglo-Saxon school really ought to bring out an Anglo-Saxon translation of Shakespeare as well as of the Bible. They ought to insist on all his heroes and heroines being naturalised. They ought to alter all the proper names so that they are really proper. Perhaps it would be a little difficult to give The Merchant of Venice some respectable name like The Merchant of Manchester; but it would be easy enough to turn Signer Antonio into Mr. Antony. Perhaps we have here a new and true meaning in the immortal cry of Juliet. “O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo, and not Robinson?” Since it is a recognised truth that the very name and notion of a gentleman cannot be translated into any other language outside English, how did it come about that Shakespeare came to write of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, when a very trifling change would have turned them into The Two Gentlemen of Ventnor? This weakness for the decadent Dago will appear deplorable enough to the critic whose hopes for England are bound up so largely with the Ku Klux Klan; but I deeply regret to say that Shakespeare did not invariably even confine himself to Dagos. He showed in one case at least a shocking indifference to the Colour Bar. The Ku Klux Klan would certainly treat Othello, to say the least of it, as a coloured gentleman. And heaven knows he was a coloured gentleman, compared with the vast multitude of colourless cads who make up such very depressing conspiracies in colonial places. And what Shakespeare cared about was the colour, that is the culture, the life and legend and poetry that belonged to our civilisation as a whole. And the real interest attaching to his intense patriotism is that he survives out of a more united past, to express the idea that our national glory is to consist in achievements in that common culture and in nothing else.
(G.K.’s Weekly, June 13, 1925)
If we have not had peasants, we have occasionally had poets. And one of them, whose name is not wholly obscure, has left on record many memories that recall his country of origin, and these older and healthier traditions of the countryside; as it was when the first transition from the medieval to the modern world was passing over the woods of Warwickshire.
And the country proverb known
That every man shall have his own
In your waking shall be shown.
Those three lines of Shakespeare might very well be printed on the front of our paper [G.K.’s Weekly] as the motto of our policy. … The same passage ends with the jingle about Jack having Jill and the man having his mare again; the only true description of something that is much too good to be called Utopia; though it might be called, in the phrase of another poet, The Land of Heart’s Desire.
Yet Shakespeare knew all about Utopia; indeed he lived just after the martyrdom of the man who invented the word. But while the word is at least as old as More, the thing, or rather the thought, is older than Plato. William Shakespeare knew quite as much as William Morris about the abstraction of an Earthly Paradise. So in The Tempest, the Renaissance nobles, full of the expansive sixteenth century spirit, land on the mysterious island, as such sixteenth century adventurers did land on so many mysterious islands. And the best man among them, like the best man in every such society and period, dreams of the perfect social state he would create in a new country. He repeats, clause by clause, the programme of the International Social Democratic Soviet Republic. He recites all the revolutionary ideals which the moderns have since discovered; all the things first revealed to Robert Owen; all the thing’s hidden from humanity till Tolstoy. That expansive sixteenth century gentleman describes at length his social settlement for the new colony. There are to be no armaments. There are to be no landmarks of private property. Everything as nice as Maxton makes it. Meanwhile, it is typical of the same expansive sixteenth century spirit that while one Renaissance gentleman is thus dreaming, all the other Renaissance gentlemen are plotting to betray and murder each other, and seize each other’s possessions by force and fraud. So in fact proceeded the real Renaissance gentleman; and thus founded the landlord system and the great commercial prosperity of England. But all the time there ran in Shakespeare’s head an older and ruder and more rustic tune; deeper than the fancy about Utopia, deeper than the intrigues of the Italianate gentry, deeper even than his own deep unrest about usurpation and usurpers, there ran a tinkling tune as persistent as a brook
… the man shall have his mare again
… every man shall have his own.
(G.K.’s Weekly, Mar. 23, 1925)
Shakespeare has been called anti-democratic, because, like nearly all the European poets of all ages, he did one or two rhetorical exercises on the old theme of the odi profanum. [“I hate the common people.”] But the conversations of his clowns contain some of the most vivid traces of the wit and vitality of the popular Christian tradition. And in so far as it was a tradition of equality, it was faultlessly phrased by the Grave-digger. “And the more pity that great folk should have countenance in this world to drown or hang themselves more than their even-Christian.” I do not think it was quite accidental that Shakespeare put in that grim qualification “in this world.” But the broad fact is that the word “Christian” is generally used by the populace in a sense even more apparently remote from religious definition than this; and commonly signifies that which is human, normal, social and self-respecting.
(British Review, September, 1913)
The statement that the work of the Old Masters can be effective for popular education is not such a platitude as it will at first appear. It is both more disputable and more true than it seems. For the truth is that the great art of the past can be used for this purpose where a great many other methods now generally adopted are quite clumsy and futile. Something of this utility is shared by the plays of Shakespeare; and by no other agency I know except the paintings of such men as Titian and Leonardo.
To explain this peculiar kind of public value one must understand one of the deepest differences, and perhaps diseases, of our time. It was the mark of the art of the past, especially the art of the Renaissance, that the great man was a man. He was an extraordinary man, but only in the sense of being an ordinary man with something extra. Shakespeare or Rubens went with the plain man as far as the plain man went; they ate and drank, and desired and died as he did. That is what people mean when they say that these gods had feet of clay; their giant boots were heavy with the mire of the earth. That is what people mean when they say that Shakespeare was often coarse; that is what people mean when they say that he was often dull. They mean that a great poet of the elder kind had spaces which were idle and absent-minded; that his sub-consciousness often guided him; that he sprawled; that he was not ‘artistic’. It is not only true that Homer sometimes nodded; but nodding was part of the very greatness of Homer. His sleepy nod shakes the stars like the nod of his own Jupiter.
The old artists, then, were plain and popular in the more fundamental or (if you will) lower parts of their personality. But the typical modern artist sets out to be a separate and fantastic sort of creature, who feeds and feels in a strange manner of his own. … [Thus, there is a] distinction between two conceptions of genius, the Something more and the Something different.
(Introduction to Famous Paintings)
There exists in the world a group of persons who perpetually try to prove that Shakespeare was a clown and could not have written about princes, or that he was a drunkard and could not have written about virtue. I think there is a slight fallacy in the argument. But I wonder that they have not tried the much more tempting sport of separating the author of L’Allegro from the author of the Defensus Populi Anglicani. For the contrast between the man Milton and the poet Milton is very much greater than is commonly realized. I fear that the shortest and clearest way of stating it is that when all is said and done, he is a poet whom we cannot help liking, and a man whom we cannot like. I find it far easier to believe that an intoxicated Shakespeare wrote the marble parts of Shakespeare than that a marble Milton wrote the intoxicated, or, rather, intoxicating, parts of Milton. Milton’s character was cold …
Shakespeare puts into the mouth of some character (generally a silly character) some contemptuous talk about the greasy rabble, talk which is common to all literary work, but especially common in work which—like Shakespeare’s—was intended to please the greasy rabble. Whenever this happens critics point to it and say, “Look at the Tory prejudices of the Royalist Shakespeare! Observe the Jacobite servility of the follower of James I!” But as a matter of fact Milton despised the populace much more than Shakespeare; and Milton put his contempt for common men not into the mouth of silly or stupid characters, but into that of the one wise character, the Chorus, who is supposed to express the moral of a play:
Nor do I name of men the common rout …
But such as thou hast solemnly elected.
(Catholic World, January, 1917)
This is the real explanation of the thing which has puzzled so many dilettante critics, the problem of the extreme ordinariness of the behaviour of so many great geniuses in history. Their behaviour was so ordinary that it was not recorded; hence it was so ordinary that it seemed mysterious. … The modern artistic temperament cannot understand how a man who could write such lyrics as Shakespeare wrote, could be as keen as Shakespeare was on business transactions in a little town in Warwickshire. The explanation is simple enough; it is that Shakespeare had a real lyrical impulse, wrote a real lyric, and so got rid of the impulse and went about his business. Being an artist did not prevent him from being an ordinary man, any more than being a sleeper at night or being a diner at dinner prevented him from being an ordinary man.
All very great teachers and leaders have had this habit of assuming their point of view to be one which was human and casual, one which would readily appeal to every passing man. If a man is genuinely superior to his fellows the first thing that he believes in is the equality of man. We can see this, for instance, in that strange and innocent rationality with which Christ addressed any motley crowd that happened to stand about Him. “What man of you having a hundred sheep, and losing one, would not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which was lost?” [Luke 15:4] Or, again, “What man of you if his son ask for bread will give him a stone, or if he ask for a fish will he give him a serpent?” [Matthew 7:9–10] This plainness, this almost prosaic camaraderie, is the note of all very great minds.
To very great minds the things on which men agree are so immeasurably more important than the things on which they differ, that the latter, for all practical purposes, disappear. They have too much in them of an ancient laughter even to endure to discuss the difference between the hats of two men who were both born of a woman, or between the subtly varied cultures of two men who have both to die. The first-rate great man is equal with other men, like Shakespeare. The second-rate great man is on his knees to other men, like Whitman. The third-rate great man is superior to other men, like Whistler.
(“On the Wit of Whistler,” Heretics)
It may be noticed that the great artists always choose great fools rather than great intellectuals to embody humanity. Hamlet does express the aesthetic dreams and the bewilderments of the intellect; but Bottom the Weaver expresses them much better.
(“The Great Dickens Characters,” Charles Dickens)
Telling the truth about the terrible struggle of the human soul is surely a very elementary part of the ethics of honesty. If the characters are not wicked, the book is. This older and firmer conception of right as existing outside human weakness and without reference to human error, can be felt in the very lightest and loosest of the works of old English literature. It is commonly unmeaning enough to call Shakespeare a great moralist; but in this particular way Shakespeare is a very typical moralist. Whenever he alludes to right and wrong it is always with this old implication. Right is right, even if nobody does it. Wrong is wrong even if everybody is wrong about it.
(Illustrated London News, May 11, 1907)
There is one idea of this kind that runs through most popular tales (those, for instance, on which Shakespeare is so often based)—an idea that is profoundly moral even if the tales are immoral. It is what may be called the flaw in the deed: the idea that, if I take my advantage to the full, I shall hear of something to my disadvantage. Thus Midas fell into a fallacy about the currency; and soon had reason to become something more than a Bimetallist. Thus Macbeth had a fallacy about forestry; he could not see the trees for the wood. He forgot that, though a place cannot be moved, the trees that grow on it can. Thus Shylock had a fallacy of physiology; he forgot that, if you break into the house of life, you find it a bloody house in the most emphatic sense.
(“The Vengeance of the Flesh,” Eugenics and Other Evils)
The idea of the flaw in the deed, the unforeseen disadvantage in the contract … is very clearly conveyed, of course, in Macbeth, where the juggling fiends keep their word of promise to the ear, but break it to the hope. It is expressed in another way in Shylock, who ruthlessly insists on the bond, only to find the bond itself turn against him. As there was a hole in these deals with the devil, so there was a hole in Dr. Jekyll’s deal with the devil. Shylock won his case; but he found that winning his case was not the same as winning his object. Macbeth won his crown; but found that winning his crown was not the same as crowning his ambition.
(Illustrated London News, Sept. 19, 1925)
(Review of The Messiahship of Shakespeare by Charles Downing)
Mr. Charles Downing is the author of God in Shakespeare. He believes that the great dramatist was a reincarnation of the Divine. If we should freely admit that Shakespeare was divine, merely extending the remark to Homer, Aristophanes, Mr. Bradlaugh, and Mr. James Harris of Brixton, we fear that Mr. Downing would not be satisfied. It is due to him, however, to say that his work is a great improvement, in point of refinement and restraint, upon the ordinary ruck of works on what is (for some mysterious reason) called the “problem of Shakespeare”: the works which prove that he was Christ, Bacon, and anyone else but himself. There are real degrees of taste even in absurdity, and it is possible for a maniac to rave with the most perfect good breeding. Mr. Downing, in propounding his outrageous thesis, has real humility and the real dignity that only comes of humility. But his attitude is vitiated to the very root by a low and inadequate conception of the nature of symbolism. He opens his book with the following remarks:
“Of recent years there has been in literature a great turning of the spirit to symbolism and to what may be called essential religion. Maeterlinck abroad and Mr. Yeats at home are the names most prominent to me, at this moment, in the movement, but it pervades literature, and the latest minor poet will show traces of its influence.”
This is profoundly and most fortunately true. But Mr. Downing entirely mistakes the real nature of symbolism as evinced in Maeterlinck and Mr. Yeats when he seeks in Shakespeare for a fixed scheme of allegory. “Hermione (of The Winter’s Tale), the ideal of the Graeco-Roman world … has stepped down from her pedestal, a statue come to life, and clasped in her hands Perdita, the Christian ideal.” This is not the sort of thing Maeterlinck or Mr. Yeats write, and is presumably not the sort of thing that Shakespeare wrote. Maeterlinck’s characters do not represent particular cliques and schools in Belgian art and politics; they represent eternal things for which no philosophic name will ever be found. Mr. Yeats’s pre-historic heroes are not introduced upon the stage in order to typify Mr. Redmond’s party and Mr. Healy’s party, but to typify elemental mysteries which cannot be typified in any other way. We need a much clearer conception of the real value and function of mysticism. It is not mysticism to explain a puzzle: to say that a green cross means evolution and a blue triangle means orthodoxy. This sort of allegorical art is a mere cryptogram which ceases to exist when it is explained. Whatever a mystic may be, he is surely not only a person who destroys mystery.
The real function of symbolism is much deeper and more practical. We are surrounded in this world by huge and anonymous forces: as they rush by us we throw a name at them—love, death, destiny, remembrance—but the things themselves are infinitely vaster and more varied than the names. True artistic symbolism exists in order to provide another alphabet for the direct interpretation of these infinite anarchic things than the alphabet of language. It is not that a sea at sunset “represents” sorrow, but that a sea at sunset represents a great deal of the truth which is missed by the word “sorrow.” So it is with Mr. Downing’s Shakespeare allegory. It is not that Shakespeare is a mere philosopher: it is that philosophy is one way of describing certain unutterable things, and Shakespeare is another. Caliban, says Mr. Downing, “represents the mob.” The truth is that Caliban represents an old, dark, and lawless element in things, an element which has no name except Caliban and of which the mob is one of the hundred incarnations. So far from it being true that Caliban symbolises the mob in the street, it would be far truer to say that the mob in the street symbolises Caliban.
This error runs through the whole conception of The Messiahship of Shakespeare; the poet is perpetually being made to describe, not things themselves, but the metaphysical names of things. Shakespeare was in one sense a thorough mystic; he saw in every stone in the street things which cannot be uttered till the end of the world. His Perdita is not “a type of the Reformation,” but simply a girl in love; the Reformation is, in comparison, a trivial thing.
Mr. Downing’s taste for turning good poetry into bad metaphysics has its entirely humorous aspects, as where he provides precise logical translations of many of the sonnets. We give one example. A famous sonnet begins:
Oh, how thy worth with manners may I sing
When thou art all the better part of me?
What can mine own praise to mine own self bring?
The following is, according to Mr. Downing, what the three lines really mean:
1. How in modesty can I sing the worth of Beauty?
2. When it is all my better part, my thought, my genius, my soul.
3. What value has self-praise?
If this is really what Shakespeare meant, we can only say that literature should be everlastingly grateful that it is not what he said.
It is, however, in this treatment of The Tempest that Mr. Downing shows most singularly his cut-and-dried conception of allegory. For The Tempest really is a mystical play: its figures are symbols, but not mere mathematical symbols. Here is a description of the meaning of the wreck:
Alonzo, the ruling class, is in despair, but still clings to Antonio and Sebastian, Ambition and Laissez Faire, its old vices. … Authority being thus divided between the Backward and Progressive parties, the Mob, Caliban, lifts up its head, and, led on by Stephano and Trinculo, Sensuality and Folly, riots freely, threatening the destruction of Prospero, all Justice, Law, and Civilization, from the earth.
What is the good of this kind of symbolism? If Shakespeare meant to convey the word Ambition, why did he go to the trouble of saying the word Antonio? The truth is that Shakespeare was a symbolist of the genuine type, and symbolism of the genuine type is wholly misunderstood by Mr. Downing and his school. A real symbol of a certain law is not a mere cipher-term arbitrarily connected with that law, but an example of that law. A plough is symbolic of the toil of all things because it is an instance of it. The parables of the New Testament, for instance, are built wholly upon this principle; so are the one or two mystical plays of Shakespeare. It is not, as Mr. Downing would put it, that Prospero was not a man but an image of God, but that he was a man, and, therefore, an image of God. The same may be said of Shakespeare. We have said nothing about this central theological theory of Mr. Downing, and our silence has been deliberate. Before we decide whether any man (even the stupidest man in the street) is God, we must take the preliminary precaution of knowing what God is and what man is.
(The Speaker, May 11, 1901)
How many of my highly cultured readers have really grasped, assimilated, and made their own the poem called “The Phoenix and the Turtle”? I feel as if I were offering a prize in the newspapers for some sort of success with a crossword puzzle; but I can assure the reader that Torquemada never produced anything within a thousand miles of the Turtle and his mystical colleague. Much of the modern public will be divided between those who say “Of course we know our Shakespeare,” and those who have entirely forgotten that Shakespeare ever wrote anything of the sort. And, indeed, the first group is wrong, and the second group is right. Shakespeare never did write anything of the sort, so far as I know, except in this one extraordinary example. On the other hand, we may be fairly certain that those who say they know their Shakespeare do not know their Shakespeare. If they did, they would not fall into the fallacy of supposing that he was theirs. In all this common cultivated acquaintance with the classics there is a certain unconscious trick of omission for which we must always allow. There is even a sort of terrible irony in Matthew Arnold’s phrase that culture consists of knowing “the best that has been said and thought.” It is only too true that the knowledge of Shakespeare generally means the knowledge of the best things in Shakespeare. Or, at least, of the things which those who were thought the best critics thought were the best things. But there are many more marvellous and fantastic fish in that great sea than ever came out of it. When people say they know their Shakespeare, they generally mean that they know somebody else’s Shakespeare; especially the actor’s Shakespeare, or the actor-manager’s Shakespeare, or the highly modern producer’s Shakespeare, or, what is worst of all, the Shakespearean critic’s Shakespeare.
It is the same with all the great creations that are stared at like monuments, rather than quarried in like mines. I read a newspaper article the other day in which a man said that he knew the message of the Gospel was quite simple, because he had heard it at his mother’s knee. It did not seem to occur to him that his mother might have been a person of some common sense and that she probably read to him the passages that really are simple enough to be suitable to a child. It seems probable that she was sane enough to tell him of the Good Shepherd who goes after the lost sheep; or the welcome to the prodigal returning home; or the love of Christ for all little children. It seems improbable that she asked a child to understand what is meant by the Unjust Steward; or the Eunuchs of the Kingdom of Heaven; or the command to hate father and mother for the Kingdom of God; or the bringing of a sword into the world; or the dark enigma of Judas. Now, most educated people have exactly that memory of an expurgated Shakespeare; as they have of an expurgated Bible. They remember the things that have been theatrically presented to them; because they are theatrical. They remember the things that are quite obviously edifying, in the sense of moralising, because they have been imposed upon them. But there are a thousand things in Shakespeare which they have never even tried to understand; and this is something which I respectfully doubt whether they would understand, even if they tried.
People actually found cryptograms in Shakespeare; but there is nothing so very cryptic about a cryptogram. It is merely a sort of spelling game, by which a rather crude and clumsy series of words can somehow be traced through the thick of much more important and intelligent and beautiful words. Mrs. Gallup thus proved in an ingenious manner that Bacon wrote Shakespeare. Father Ronald Knox thus proved, much more successfully, that Queen Victoria wrote “In Memoriam.” We can prove the impossibility of a cryptogram by the existence of so many cryptograms. The more often it is done, the more impossible it is to do. There have been about ten alternative explanations of the authorship of the plays, founded on a long recurrent scheme running through the plays. I have never seen one real explanation of the short poem called “The Phoenix and the Turtle.” I mean I have never seen any in the ordinary literary text-books. Or, again, I have read all my life about the obscurity of certain writers; of how Browning baffles the reader, or even Meredith is sometimes verbally evasive. But I was never baffled by Browning or Meredith, even in my boyhood; and I am pretty completely baffled by “The Phoenix and the Turtle.” Yet, strangely enough, it is never mentioned among these other and milder examples of popular misunderstanding. I come back with some gloom to the inference: not that nobody has understood it, but that nobody has read it.
Of course, I would not be arrogant. There may be others who grasp it at a glance: whose common conversation at breakfast consists of lines like these—
Reason, in itself confounded,
Saw division grow together,
To themselves yet either neither,
Simple were so well compounded
That it cried, How true a twain
Seemeth this concordant one!
But I have not come across any of them among the public Shakespearean critics. And my conclusion, right or wrong, is this. Shakespeare did, for the first and last time, really wish to put himself beyond the reach of the Shakespearean critics. Shakespeare did really wish to leave behind him one real cryptogram: not a silly alphabetical cypher to say that he was Francis Bacon or Queen Elizabeth, or the Earl of Southampton; but something to say that he was the Shakespeare whom we shall never know. As if he had been suddenly alarmed at the horrid notion that he had really unlocked his heart with the key of the Sonnets, as Words-worth suggested; and had then resolved to leave behind him a casket that no key can unlock.
I do not set up to be a student of Shakespeare; still less of Shakespeareana. It may be that these two wild hints, the Phoenix and the Turtle, have been caught and caged and labelled and stuffed in a museum many times. They may have been identified as often as “Mr. W. H.,” who by this time might be almost anything, from the White Horse to the Waldorf Hotel. Perhaps the Turtledove is the League of Nations, cooing sweetly but apparently dying young; or the Phoenix is the German Eagle, re-arising out of the burning Reichstag. But the only serious and convincing note on it I happen to have read is in the Comtesse de Chambrun’s remarkable reconstruction called “My Shakespeare, Rise!” M. André Maurois writes a most interesting preface to this most interesting book. Himself detached from the debates on which it turns, he is only linked with Mme. de Chambrun by his interest in English literature; but he pays a just tribute to the learning which she applies to that literature. Her theory is, broadly speaking, that the motive which made Shakespeare thus cryptic was largely politic; and that the whole mystery was connected with contemporary politics. She has set out in several books her reasons for believing that Shakespeare belonged to the party, at once of revolt and reaction, which was specially bent on breaking the power and policy of Cecil and his group: a group which more or less included Bacon. It is curious that Bacon and Shakespeare, who have actually been lumped together as partners, or even identified as an alias and an alter ego, were (according to this theory), so far from working together in private life, actually working against each other in public life. This particular movement found its final issue and failure, I suppose, in the rebellion of Essex; which was certainly against Cecil on the political side, though some have disputed its purpose on the religious side. Essex may have courted some of the Puritans; his friend Southampton was certainly one of the Papists; and this book explains the mysterious lament as a dirge for the old régime: “Truth may seem, but cannot be; Beauty brag, but ’tis not she.” Certainly that is what a man might well say, who felt hostile to a new world.
(Illustrated London News, January 11, 1936)
The German professors have done a great many devastating things; but perhaps the worst thing about them was they were the first to understand Shakespeare. It is a great impertinence to understand Shakespeare: for Shakespeare certainly did not understand himself. He never talked so much sense as when he was obviously talking nonsense; and a man must have the sacred streak of nonsense somewhere in his mind before he can appreciate phrases like: “Those earthly godfathers of Heaven’s lights,” or “Bowl the round nave down the hill of heaven.” Now, the Germans are like the ladies whom Mr. Sparkler admired. They have no nonsense about them. Some of them seem to think that Hamlet meant what he said; and, thinking this, they come to the not unreasonable conclusion that he was mad. There is in Shakespeare something more godlike even than humour: something which the English call fun. The neglect of this by the Germans during the long night of German intellectual domination has produced some preposterous fruits in English, American and other criticism. The notes in my school books used to be full of alternative explanations, frequently German, of such phrases as: “I know a hawk from a hand-saw.” Grumpt says that “hand-saw” should obviously be heron-saw, to put it in the same ornithological class with hawk; but Mumpt suggests that there may have been an Elizabethan tool called a hawk, to put it in the same mechanical class with hand-saw. And all the time even a boy who had any flavour of literature, or any guess at the kind of man that Hamlet was supposed to be, could see at once that it was a joke. Hamlet said it as a piece of wild alliteration; as he might have said: “I know a baby from a blunderbuss”; or, “I know a catfish from a croquet-hoop.” By a deep and dry study of the millions exaggerations, inconsistencies and ignorances of Shakespeare they build up a sort of rampart round the unfortunate poet to defend him from his real admirers; the sulky Ben Jonson had far more genuine sympathy with Shakespeare than the world-patronising Goethe. … The first and fatal step was to take Shakespeare seriously; the next and more fatal step was to defend him in everything. The next step was to go clean off one’s head and say he was a German.
(Blinded Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Gift Book, 1915)
(“Frank Harris on Shakespeare”)
Mr. Frank Harris, who in his really poignant and pathetic autobiography used the nom de plume of “Shakespeare,” has, I hear, suddenly discovered that he is an American citizen. It makes an Englishman feel a little nervous; as if he might wake up in bed and suddenly remember that he was an Ancient Roman or a celebrated Russian dancer. There is nothing to be said, except that if Mr. Frank Harris is an American citizen he must be a very bad American citizen; for he was generally regarded as an English Jingo. But though Mr. Harris has apparently been a bad American and a bad Englishman, it is really probable that he would be a good German. Many of the more all-embracing of the Teutons say that Shakespeare was a German: and if Mr. Harris describes Shakespeare correctly it would seem as if they were right; for he describes the poet as sentimental and sulky and inordinately interested in himself, in defiance of all the facts of existence. I do not believe that Shakespeare was sulky; but then I am also sufficiently paradoxical not to believe that he was German. Mr. Harris made all Shakespeare’s emotions revolve round himself and the Dark Lady; who was exactly like Ophelia and also Cleopatra, as well as being the replica of Desdemona and the very image of Lady Macbeth. Anyhow, she was like all Shakespeare’s heroines at once, Shakespeare being unable to imagine anyone else; and in that case she must have been a lady of highly complicated character, and what the nurses describe as “a handful.” It is Mr. Harris’ mission and excuse upon this earth to prove that the Dark Lady was Mary Fitton; a lady of whom nobody seems to know anything to speak of, except that she was fair. The objection to this line of study is, that if you ask who the Dark Lady was, you will go on to ask who Mr. W. H. was; and if you ask who Mr. W. H. was, you will go mad. There are probably people at this moment, in and out of asylums, who are proving that he was Mr. William Hohenzollern.
For my part, I very much doubt whether there ever was any Dark Lady. Tennyson said, in a poem in many ways quite as egoistic as the Sonnets:
“I will take some savage woman,
she shall rear my dusky race.”
Tennyson lived in such very public privacy in the Isle of Wight, that w know he never carried out this adventurous intention in a literal sense. But if he had not, if he had gone about his business among other men like sensible fellow, as Shakespeare did, his private life would probably be as little known as Shakespeare’s. He would have been lost in a crowd. And in that case we should have these critics who ask “Who Was The Dark Lady?” asking, in the same style, “Who Was the Dusky Woman?” And we should have the Harrises and Shaws of the future saying that it was Mrs. Humphrey Ward. Or if Mrs. Ward’s hair happens really to be dark (a final disqualification) then it was Ellen Terry in a black wig. And those who think as I do would have to put their opinions in a comic paper, in order to point out that marrying a black woman is one thing and talking about marrying her quite another; that Tennyson did not, in point of fact, marry a black woman; or that she was not so black as he painted her.
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. He is a philosopher, a lawyer, nay, a Lord Chancellor. The Germans seem to maintain, not that he was a German poet, but rather that he was a German professor. Let us suppose that Shakespeare writes a charming and irresponsible play with the very irresponsible title of As You Like It, in which there is a still more irresponsible song, which begins like this:
“It was a lover and his lass,
With a hey and a ho and a hey nonny no.”
The German professors will proceed to reconstruct the second line like a Latin inscription; and they will print it like this:
“(with a) … haec . . (and a) . . hoe
. . (and a) … haec nonne no(n),”
Using, you observe, the double negative permitted in Latin in a manner more extreme even than that established by Gruncke’s Law: though Gruncke was with all the world-enlightening scholar’s necessities equipped. Or, if they do not do that, they will read it as an old English agricultural proverb, beginning “with a hay and a hoe”; and about the word “nonny” they will tell you to Cf Chaucer Cant. Pil. 971 b xii. And when you have cf’d Chaucer, you will find he speaks of “the none priest”; and you will learn that the passage is a protest against the territorial and agricultural powers possessed by the medieval clergy up to the dissolution of the monasteries, just before Shakespeare’s time. Shall the Nun and the Priest control our hays and our hoes? “No!” exclaims Shakespeare the universal world-soul, here proving that he is with the heart-thoughts of our German Luther at one. And If you venture to say that people don’t hoe hay, whatever they may do with potatoes, you will be told that you have not with our great Hegel reconciled the Is Not with the Is. Or they will tell you that Hey and Ho were two ancient gods (cf Hermes and Horus) of whom the Illuminati including Shakespeare were secret adherents; and that “nonny no” is connected with the old Roman Nones, and the Lord knows what. They will read and reread that sentence, and spell it backwards, and number its letters, and try it as anagram, and write it in Coptic to see if it looks nicer; but there is one thing they will never do to it. It will never occur to them to sing it; or, in other words, to remember that it is meant to be part of a song. In fact, the sight of a thoroughly Germanized commentator suddenly singing in the British Museum Library would be quite startling, and would undoubtedly attract remark. If the critics did this all sorts of things would happen to them; but, among other things, they would discover that the voice is lifted and the stress laid upon the second “hey”; or in other words, that Shakespeare was a poet and that they are a pack of idiots. All that these people can do is mystification; which means the making of mysteries, not the recognition of them. But even among the mysteries which really exist, they prefer these, like the Dark Lady, about which they are in the dark. There are many much brighter ladies who are just as incomprehensible and more comprehending. They are to be found in any number in the plays of Shakespeare and not in his biographies; for it is not in a man’s biography that we can read his life.
As I have already suggested, I neither know nor care whether Shakespeare either knew or cared about anybody named Mary Fitton. That he cared at some time about somebody I am very certain. I do not even admit that there was any Dark Lady. But there was something. There was something which Shakespeare thought, and these Shakespearians apparently do not think, worth writing about:
“It was a lover and his lass,
With a hey and a ho and a hey nonny no.”
or, in other words, with all the world-revolving life’s-necessities equipped.
(“On Shakespeare,” Life, April 20, 1916)
On the Shakespeare Ball By One Who Was Not There
I have been asked to describe the great Shakespeare Ball with all that advantage which Shakespeare enjoyed in describing the Battle of Agincourt—the advantage of absence. It would have annoyed him a great deal if the Globe Theatre had really been rushed by the fleeing spears of Picardy or the pursuing archers of England. Most of them (I have heard by the way) came from Wales. But, in any case, Shakespeare might very well have been much startled and unmanned if he had observed within his wooden O even one of the casques that did affright the air at Agincourt. In the same way I feel that I should be quite unmanned, for the purpose of writing this article, if I had actually, physically and with my bodily eyes beheld any of the costumes that did affright the air in the Albert Hall. For the Albert Hall, much more than any other building, certainly much more than the Elizabethan theatre, can really be called O. I cannot at the moment think of any other phrase except O that one could use about the Albert Hall.
It is but justice to those who have asked me to write this article to say that they gave me the opportunity of going to the Ball if I liked. There was only one Shakespearean character in which I could, by any physical possibility, have gone; and that, unfortunately, is the finest of all Shakespeare’s characters. I did not feel equal to imitating Falstaff for a whole evening. For the grand grotesques of human literature are surrounded by a sanctity peculiar to themselves. Modern monarchists and belated defenders of divine right have often quoted Shakespeare’s phrase that there is a divinity that doth hedge a King. Not so often, perhaps, have they pointed out that he puts it into the mouth of a particularly cowardly and indefensible usurper. But, however this may be, the real upshot and effect of Shakespeare’s work is not the divinity that hedges a king, but the divinity that hedges a clown. No decent man would dare to dress up as Falstaff, without long preparation and prayer. It is the great comic figures that have become sacred. A man can easily make game of Brutus or Boadicea, or Milton, or Mr. Gladstone. But no one can make game of Sam Weller. No one can get a rise out of Bottom the Weaver. No one can make light of Falstaff: he has too much weight. Therefore, I decided that I had not enough moral courage to travesty Falstaff. I had half a notion of coming to the Ball as Ariel; but I resisted the temptation.
Thus I can write fairly about the theory of this pageant without being confused and bewildered by the facts. For, indeed, the theory itself is not without interest, especially to those who read Shakespeare—a much smaller class than might be supposed. For the dressing and decorating and dancing of Shakespeare have become much more important than the mere reading of him. There are two schools of aesthetics and archeology in this matter, both of which were (I am quite sure) very prominent on this occasion. They both, in their several ways, bear witness to the real culture, to aesthetic appetites and the very sincere antiquarian enthusiasm of our time. They are both, with varying degrees of success and permanence, supported by the really active and influential artiste of modern England. And they both, in my own very mild opinion, suffer from the same fault—the fault of taking the whole question too seriously. There was more of the clown, more of the buffoon, in Shakespeare than either of these artistic theories will admit. The first school, of course, is that well and even brilliantly supported by Sir Herbert Tree; and the second is that equally well maintained by the modern Shakespeare societies and the simplifiers of the drama. The former from its own point of view claims to give the scene as Shakespeare imagined it. The second (also from its own point of view) professes only to give the scene as Shakespeare expected to see it. The first seeks to have scenery in which the jocund day does actually manage (or make an attempt) to stand tip-toe on the misty mountain tops. The second suggests that it would be vastly better to have a quiet back-cloth that would really permit those miraculous lines to be listened to as the real evening’s entertainment. This dispute is intelligible and interesting, but when we pass from landscape which endures to costume which alters, a bigger sort of bother presents itself. The first school is necessarily at once engulfed in the British Museum. It tries to find out what was the contemporary pattern of the dagger which Macbeth saw when it wasn’t there. It seeks to be certain what exact cut of beard Hamlet thought that an imaginary enemy might hypothetically tweak. It not only paints Othello black all over because he was a Moor, but it would be quite as ready to point Cymbeline blue all over because he was an Ancient Briton. Henry V must walk about in correct contemporary armour, even if it was the sort of armour that would have prevented him from walking about. This sort of exactitude is indeed generally rebuked at last. It dies, as pedantry dies, on the real appearance of learning. A saner view of both the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages makes such knowledge more inappropriate than ignorance. The Ancient Briton was not so blue as he is painted. But obstacles quite equally insurmountable bar the path of those reviving the simple Elizabethan stage. If it is hard to guess what Macbeth really looked like, it is harder still to discover (at this time of day) what Shakespeare might have thought he looked like. If it is hard to guess how gorgeous Fairyland was in the poet’s mind, it is harder still to guess exactly how meager it was at the Globe Theatre. Both schemes, then, are essentially antiquarian. The one tries to reproduce the period of King John; the other tries to reproduce the period of Queen Elizabeth. Both are impossible to reproduce; and Shakespeare cared not a button for either of them.
Here, surely, lies the real value of a Shakespeare fancy dress ball. It strikes that keynote of splendid incongruity, of merry and many-coloured mixtures, which was certainly in Shakespeare’s mind, whatever else was. It must have been quaint and entertaining at this particular carnival to see Anne Page in a Tudor ruff talking to King John in chain armour, or Brutus in a toga chatting with Osric in trunk-hose. But it would not be more incongruous in any instance than the groups that the stage managers have to fling in fact on the Shakespearean stage. I have seen Fortinbras, as a primeval Viking with a winged helmet and a whirling battle-axe, rush on the stage just after the death of an elegant Renaissance gentleman in black sixteenth century clothes, who had obviously died some seven centuries afterwards. I have seen pictorial versions of Cymbeline in which some of the Ancient Britons wore costumes so ancient that they are quite forgotten, and others costumes so modern that they do not (I hope) yet exist. But this is not an affront to Shakespeare’s ghost, but rather a double portion of his spirit. He had that higher frivolity which feels that as the body is less than soul, so the body is more than raiment. All his plays are one huge Fancy Dress Ball. If there was one thing he loved it was the picturesquely incompatible. And whatever contrasts or collisions occurred in all that million-coloured kaleidoscope of humanity at the Albert Hall, where cardinals must have talked with “salvage man,” and senators argued with elves, it is doubtful whether the deep note of a romantic diversity was anywhere more strongly struck than it is in those quiet sylvan scenes where the stiff and gaudy motley of Touchstone is relieved against shaggy woods and shepherds, or the bristly head of Bottom rises among fairies against the moon.
(Souvenir Program of the Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre Ball. Royal Albert Hall. June 20, 1911)