In the sequence of the history plays, Shakespeare, as I have suggested in an earlier chapter, achieved a reconciliation of epic material with dramatic form, somewhat as Milton, in Samson Agonistes, transmuted the matter of religious experience into drama. In studying Milton's play, we were drawn imperceptibly into describing its dramatic power; for the reality of the religious experience was self-evident, and the question whether or not the reconciliation had been achieved rested upon that of whether or not the resulting work was dramatic. With Shakespeare's histories we find ourselves, equally of necessity, approaching from the opposite direction. We do not, at this point in Shakespeare studies, question whether individual plays are dramatic, but we may well question whether or not the series contains the material of epic. We may perhaps suggest in what ways and by what means they have preserved the spaciousness and coherence of their epic material as well as the concentration and immediacy of drama.
The spaciousness has been preserved by the fact that we have primarily a group of four central plays supported by at least four or five more (one of which is of unquestioned dramatic power), extending together over several historical periods and introducing some two hundred different characters. This, of course, does not in itself guarantee the effect of vastness; it might merely guarantee chaos. But the balance and relating of characters in Shakespeare's hands are such that we experience the multi-fariousness of life and not mere confusion. The presence of some element of continuity between the plays of the main and even of the subsidiary group1 is, I think, less obvious; but it is this which ultimately gives coherence to the wealth of material. In fact, it is precisely here that the challenge of epic form to dramatic material arises. For a series of plays on related themes, with a certain number of overlapping characters, though clear and ordered in their individual disposal of their material, might yet remain no more than a number of excellent individual works of art, illuminating each other, but affording no continuous and coherent image, no central, emergent idea. Now, in most epic material we find a central figure, some aspect of whose life and experience forms a theme to which, should an epic poem be written upon that subject, everything in the poem could be made to contribute. Each character, episode, or group of events could bear, that is, a necessary relation to this central figure or idea, illuminating and illuminated by it, while at the same time maintaining its own relation, in the spatial and chronological scheme of the poem, with the other characters, episodes, and events. Aeneas's wanderings are a naturally shaped sequence, and can be causally related in a work of art, provided that all that is included affects or illuminates his experience and purpose.
This complete cohesion is characteristic only of the epic itself; there is, as a rule, only potential cohesion in the raw epic material. But is there anything akin to this potential continuity of epic material in the series of Shakespeare's political plays? Can we distinguish in them something which relates what would else be isolated units, causing them to illuminate each other and to contribute, each in turn, some indispensable part of a whole whose balance would be impaired without it?
I think we can distinguish some such factor in Shakespeare's series but, as I have suggested, it will not be found in the generally prevailing mood of nationalism (and his attitude to nationalism passes through many phases between the writing of Henry VI and the writing of Henry V) nor in any single character. The central and continuous image in these plays, more specific than a mood, more comprehensive than a character, is, I believe, a composite figure — that of the statesman-king, the leader and the public man, which Shakespeare builds up gradually through the series of the political plays from Henry VI to Henry V. This figure recurs, in varying forms, through the greater part of Shakespeare's drama, for after the picture is completed in the political plays he appears to revise and reconsider it, studying it from a different angle in several of the tragedies and late plays. For the purposes of this discussion we are concerned with the political plays, and chiefly with those four in which Shakespeare achieves simultaneously the abundance of epic material and the cogency of drama. But I have permitted myself, in order to indicate the vastness and complexity of this image, to include some evidence of his later thought; the revaluation, by reason of which he builds up a contrasting portrait, thereby making explicit and definite what had been implicit in that first portrait with which we are primarily concerned.
The portrait of the statesman-king is the result of a series of explorations, now the study of a failure, now of a partial success; a vast, closely articulated body of thought imaged always in terms of actual character, yet completely incorporated in no one character. The figure that finally emerges is not Falconbridge or Theseus or Henry IV or Henry V, yet it would be incomplete if any one of them were taken away; nor is it the mere opposite of Henry VI or John or Richard III or Richard II, yet it would also be incomplete if one of these were destroyed. These separate images are but statements or qualifications contributing to that vast image, no one of them in itself coextensive with the composite whole. It is this which gives coherence to the material of the history plays, which nevertheless remain individual works of art. If it is true that Shakespeare has thus subdued potential epic material to dramatic form, may we now consider in more detail certain plays, in order to see how the emergent figure of the king dominates and draws to itself the whole of the central series?
Of the figures who appear in Shakespeare's political plays, we need survey only a certain group — the men upon whom the highest offices devolve. Inevitably, with an Elizabethan or Jacobean writer, this means the office of kingship, or of leadership in some form very like kingship. The position may be reached by violence and usurpation or by peaceful inheritance; in the first place the man may be capable of maintaining it and so partly justified in his action, or incapable of what he attempts, and so lose it; in the second case he may lend himself willingly to the task or it may be thrust upon an unwilling or inadequate man. But in every case, from his earliest to his latest work, Shakespeare makes an imaginative exploration of the experience, adding something to the vast body of his comment on the figure of the statesman-king. Moreover, he is, broadly speaking, concerned in his Elizabethan phase mainly with what the office requires in the man, in his Jacobean phase with what the office does to the man. He passes, that is, from an interest centred chiefly in building up the picture of an ideal king or leader, to a study of the effect on the individual of the demands and privileges of his office.
Shakespeare's first explorations of this field seem to have been incidental to other work and to have led him, for the most part, to negative conclusions. The process by which he feels his way towards the centre of the experience is familiar to all his readers. The figure of Henry VI is the first which he is forced to consider (and at this early stage there presumably was an element of compulsion in the choice of the theme), and by his way of portraying the disasters of that reign Shakespeare shows clearly that he perceives some element of kingliness to be lacking. Henry is a pious, reflective man, by no means lacking in dignity, with a conscientious, but not necessarily intelligent, sense of his position. In an age when kings must be equally competent in peace and war, he is too simple for a politician (much less a statesman) and too ready to trust to conciliation to be a soldier. He lets his wife and his supporters fight his battle while he sits upon a hill alongside the field and laments that he has not been born a shepherd; yet at his death he claims in all good faith that he has loved his people and is convinced that they have no cause to desert him. A good man, a conscientious man, admirably suited for certain kinds of private, or, better still, monastic life; but neither firm, intelligent, shrewd, nor capable. A figure that tells us clearly that Shakespeare has already marked and inwardly digested the admonitions of the seventh chapter of Machiavelli's Prince and sees that ruthlessness is sometimes merciful and that a ‘dangerous lenity’ has no place among the ‘king-becoming graces’.
Nor, for the matter of that, has a pure self-seeking individualism, and this type of leader he unhesitatingly despatches at the end of Henry VI and in the course of Richard III. What may be briefly termed the Tamburlaine-Hotspur-Essex-Byron figure that fascinated Chapman, the great lawless sixteenth-century nobleman whose purpose was his own glorification, had short shrift at Shakespeare's hands. Actually Richard III receives less consideration as a type of leader than almost any other figure. He stands, in the group of Shakespeare's kings, as a crude but highly coloured specimen of the Tudor adventurer, storming his way to power, possessing the kingdom by violence, but unstable both on account of the violence of his passion and of some weakness inherent in the act of usurpation itself.
Indeed, it is this attitude of possessiveness that Shakespeare seems next to notice as one at least of the factors in the downfall of many leaders, and, as he defines it more clearly in King John, there forms behind it the shadowy suggestion of an opposite quality which comes, in the end, to be the essence of Shakespeare's positive ideal of kingship. The kings and rulers in King John all talk of their countries in terms of possession; the country is their property, they are landlords whose responsibilities go no further than treating it well enough to get a good yield from it; being men of sense, they preserve or protect it so that it does not depreciate, but there is no glimmer in their minds of any other feeling. Only in the mind of Salisbury, which misgives him at the thought of bringing civil war among the people he should protect, and in that of Falconbridge, who sees that the king is responsible for putting courage and good heart into his people, is there anything further. In Falconbridge we have a positive, if simple, ideal of service, a positive picture of kingly bearing and, incidentally, certain attributes that reappear in all Shakespeare's later successful kings; tenacity, resourcefulness, and shrewdness.
It is at this point that Shakespeare pauses to sum up, in a somewhat unexpected place, the positive findings of these first four political plays. The findings have, we admit, been up to now mainly negative — it is easier to write dramatically about disastrous reigns than about calm and prosperous ones, and there were more on record in the late sixteenth century. A king must not be submissive, conciliatory, and retiring (like Henry VI), however pious and conscientious; still less must he be a self-indulgent sentimentalist like Edward IV. But neither must he be a marauding egotist like Richard III, nor a landlord of his country like John, Philip, and the King of Austria. All these bring disaster with them and themselves end in disaster, because, however else they may differ, they are all at bottom individualists who have not sunk their individualism in their office of leader. It matters little to Shakespeare, at this stage and in this connection, whether the individualism take the form of withdrawal from the world or of rapacious assault upon it, whether the natural habitat of the mind be a monastery or a battlefield. Both alike fail to meet the demands of sixteenth-century kingship because they do not think primarily of their office as a demand.
And it is here that the other figure to which I referred is interposed, that short study of a king who is indeed kingly; firm, just, even-tempered, possessed of a broad humanity and the characteristic Tudor love of his people, which, while it will no longer regard them as counters in an international gamble, yet knows precisely how to make a discreet display of that humanity and that love, so as to rivet unshakably the affections of those people. In the consciousness of the political value of these affections, no less than in the already slightly cynical realization of the manipulation needed to keep them at their height, Shakespeare has made a long step forward from the group of early historical plays.
Theseus. What are they that do play it?
Philostrate. Hard-handed men, that work in Athens here,
Which never labour'd in their minds till now;
And now have toiled their unbreathed memories
With this same play, against your nuptial.Theseus. And we will hear it.
… What poor duty cannot do, noble respect
Takes it in might, not merit.
Where I have come, great clerks have purposed
To greet me with premeditated welcomes;
Where I have seen them shiver and look pale,
Make periods in the midst of sentences,
Throttle their practis'd accent in their fears,
And, in conclusion, dumbly have broke off,
Not paying me a welcome. Trust me, sweet,
Out of this silence yet I pick'd a welcome:
And in the modesty of fearful duty
I read as much as from the rattling tongue
Of saucy and audacious eloquence.
This, it may well be contended, is not Theseus speaking, but, rather, a greater than Theseus, the last and greatest of the Tudor monarchs, who had ‘the heart of a king and of a king of England, too’. But, what is equally significant for our purpose, it is already an anticipation of one of the dominant voices from the next group of plays, the group of the major histories, whose task is to build up the positive figure of kingship, to which the group of minor and preliminary histories have so far contributed only negative suggestions. The ground, then, has been thoroughly cleared by the time Shakespeare reaches the great tetralogy (Richard II, Henry IV, I and II, Henry V), and a few positive suggestions have been made.
The portrait of Richard II defines more clearly what is already implied, the fatal weakness of self-indulgent egotism, even though it be accompanied by private graces or virtues. But it adds, far more strongly, a picture of the fatal blindness that arrogates to itself the privileges of kingship while disregarding the responsibilities on whose account alone the privileges exist. Shakespeare's effective leaders, Falconbridge, Theseus, Henry IV, Henry V, Claudius, all see with perfect clearness the essential reciprocity of these two, and the last three at least have no sentimental illusions about either. Richard, in whom the sense of privilege amounts to megalomania, serves to define the extreme of that position, just as his immediate successor, Henry IV, defines the extreme position of the man oppressed by the sense of responsibility. (Here, as in so much else, it is Henry V who achieves the balance and reconciliation of the two.)
Not all the water in the rough rude sea
Can wash the balm from an anointed king;
The breath of worldly men cannot depose
The deputy elected by the Lord:
For every man that Bolingbroke hath pressed,
To lift shrewd steel against our golden crown,
God for his Richard hath in heavenly pay
A glorious angel. Then, if angels fight,
Weak men must fail, for Heaven still guards the right.
But Richard, with his extravagant claims, serves a further purpose. His half-inspired, half-insane religiosity sees in the holder of his office the immediate representative of God on earth, claims for the king a consequent divinity, and genuinely believes that the hosts of Bolingbroke will fall before the ‘glorious angels’ whom ‘Heaven for his Richard hath in heavenly pay’. That there is something in what he says Shakespeare never, either at this time or before or after it, denies. In this particular play the very difficulty of dislodging Richard from the throne indicates it clearly, and in the earlier play we find that Henry VI is equally difficult to remove, while the courageous and astute Richard of Gloucester maintains his balance only with great difficulty and for a short time. There is something sacred in inheritance, and, though the evidence of the early plays has all pointed to the forming of this idea, it is in Richard II that, at a touch, it suddenly crystallizes out. Henry VI and Richard II, in their different ways inadequate men, have strong titles; and an unflawed title, if not half the king, is at least an important part of him. It is at least difficult to ‘wash the balm from an anointed king’ though it may not — and indeed does not — need ‘all the water in the rough rude sea’ to do it.
But if this hectic religiosity, this inflated claim of divine right, is fantastic in Richard's mouth, it is no longer fantastic when it haunts the broken dreams of the dying Henry IV. For the character and position of Henry IV introduce a set of problems the exact opposite of those of Richard II and new in Shakespeare's survey. Henry, fine statesman and excellent ruler as he is, is crippled and frustrated by his flawed title, and the sense of the sacredness of inheritance is as strong in him, who was perpetually reminded of his lack of it, as it ever was in Richard, and is accompanied by a far shrewder estimate of its significance.
The solution of the problems of the two parts of Henry IV and Henry V is the peculiar contribution of Shakespeare's Elizabethan phase to the summation of his idea of a king, of the man who should fit at every point the demands laid upon him by public office. Henry IV has all the qualities necessary to a king and avoids all the weaknesses of temperament in the portrayal of which the positive qualities have, so far, been implied. He has shrewdness, tenacity, and self-command that already approaches self-concealment; he has the true Tudor sense of the value of discreet popularity. He is as astute as a badger and has very much the same tough courage. He is not self-indulgent, he is not vain, he is not self-absorbed. He is not even a saint or a poet. He is an exceedingly able, hard working statesman whose career reveals gradually but clearly the main qualification for kingship, the king's sense of responsibility to his people, that sense of service which, while making him no more than the state's greatest servant, makes all his privileges and exemptions, even a measure of autocracy itself, no more than necessary means for that service. Domineering he is, at times, like Shakespeare's prototype of Tudor monarchy, but he has, in the main, decent intentions, and he possesses, through thick and thin, an unfailing, humorous sense of proportion.
Having, then, such potentialities, why is he not the final figure in the group? The answer is obvious after the study of Richard II. The flaw in Henry's title, the fatal act of usurpation with which Richard had made such fine play, does indeed cripple his power and, through that, his mental stature, eating into his confidence and bringing down all loftiness of gesture or intention to the necessity of cunning and circumspection. Character no less than tenure suffers thus under the nemesis for an outrage done to the sacredness of inheritance. Henry IV is in nearly all things a potential Henry V and, trembling upon the verge of achievement, he looks into the promised land, and, as so often happens, speaks more explicitly of it than those who have dwelt in it familiarly. That is why it is, I think, impossible to understand Henry V as Shakespeare saw him, the Henry V who never speaks out, unless we can see his position and his intentions through the eyes of Bolingbroke's frustration:
Heaven knows, my son,
By what by-paths, and indirect, crook'd ways
I met this crown: and I myself know well
How troublesome it sat upon my head.
To thee, it shall descend with better quiet,
Better opinion, better confirmation:
For all the soil of the achievement goes
With me, into the earth.
It is left to Henry V to gather up in himself all that is fitting and necessary to a king and to remain as the epitome of the Elizabethan idea of the ‘polliticke vertues’. Shakespeare has at last resolved his demands upon such a figure into certain clearly defined qualifications and summed them all in Henry V, with his unflawed, hereditary title and his assured possession of all kingly attributes. With his broad-based popularity, his genuine love of public service for its own sake, his strong sense of responsibility, and his equally clear sense of its relation to privilege, his shrewd statesman's brain, successfully masked as that of a simple soldier, he stands where, perhaps, no king in drama has stood before or after him. Church and state, commoners and noblemen, soldiers and civilians, he knows them all, with a knowledge rooted in the taverns of Eastcheap, and holds them in his hand, too practised, popular, and secure to make a show of mastery. He was a statesman fulfilling Burke's demand — he knew how the whole world lived. He was a monarch, modelled upon the greatest of the Tudors, Elizabeth herself. It probably happens to every man to believe, at one time or another, for a time at least, that the greatest of the arts is conduct. And it is some such experience as this, in Shakespeare's career, that lies, I think, at the base of the great historical studies culminating in the figure of Henry V.
But if this were all, the composite figure would be shorn of half its subtlety and magnitude. We are aware already in this play that Shakespeare has gone beyond the experience he is primarily describing; that, implicit in this carefully balanced study, this culmination of so long and careful an exploration, is the germ of some later revulsion of thought which refutes it, as the great destructive speeches of Timon refute Ulysses' speech on the beauty of degree, of the ordered hierarchical state. For a while, it may be, between the writing of Henry IV and Henry V, Shakespeare believed the highest achievement of man to be the ordered state he afterwards described in Troilus and Cressida, the image of the ordered universe, of the cosmos with its regulated spheres.
The Heavens themselves, the planets and this centre,
Observe degree, priority and place,
Insisture, course, proportion, season, form,
Office, and custom, in all line of order:…But when the planets
In evil mixture to disorder wander,
What plagues, and what portents, what mutiny?
What raging of the sea? Shaking of earth?
Commotion in the winds, frights, changes, horrors,
Divert and crack, rend and deracinate
The unity and married calm of states
Quite from their fixture? O, when degree is shak'd,
(Which is the ladder to all high designs)
The enterprise is sick. How could communities,
Degrees in schools, and brotherhoods in cities,
Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,
The primogenitive and due of birth,
Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels,
(But by degree) stand in authentic place?
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And hark what discord follows.
The keystone of this order was the figure of the perfect public man, of Henry V. All the implications of the foregoing plays point to this ultimate emergence of the complete figure. In all the anticipations that lead up to him, and particularly in the later scenes of the second part of Henry IV, Shakespeare has, he would seem to imply, ‘in this rough work, shaped out a man’; the great art of conduct, and of public conduct at that, is at last truly understood.
But has he? Or has he, as it were unawares, and led already on to some perception beyond his immediate purpose, shaped out instead something that is at once more and less than a man. Henry V has indeed transformed himself into a public figure; the most forbidding thing about him is the completeness with which this has been done. He is solid and flawless. There is no attribute in him that is not part of this figure, no desire, no interest, no habit even that is not harmonized with it. He is never off the platform; even when, alone in a moment of weariness and of intense anxiety, he sees with absolute clearness the futility of privilege and the burden of responsibility, he still argues his case in general terms, a king's life weighed against a peasant's, peasant against king. No expression of personal desire escapes him; though he makes almost the same comparison as Henry VI, he is detached alike from king and shepherd, commenting upon them, but wasting no more strength on imagining what cannot be than on deluding himself, like Richard, with the empty glories of his state. He has inured himself so steadfastly to the life of a king, lived so long in councils and committees, weighing, sifting, deciding, commanding, that his brain automatically delivers a public speech where another man utters a cry of despair, of weariness or of prayer. It is in vain that we look for the personality of Henry behind the king; there is nothing else there. We know how his brain works upon any one of half a dozen problems; the treachery of Cambridge, Grey, and Scroop, the fomenting of wars abroad to preserve peace at home, the disaffection in the army, the difficulties of a formidable campaign, and the equally great dangers of a crushing victory. We see the diplomacy, the soldiership, the vigilant, astute eye upon the moods of people and barons, the excellent acting of a part in court and camp and council-room, and only when we try to look into the heart of the man do we find that it is hardly acting, after all, that the character has been converted whole to the uses of this function, the individual utterly eliminated, sublimated if you will. There is no Henry, only a king.
I think Shakespeare was profoundly interested in this particular study. Not, indeed, by the character, for there is no character, but by the singular circumstances of its disappearance. Neither we the readers nor Henry himself nor his God ever meets the individual that had once underlain the outer crust that covers a Tudor monarch, for there is nothing beneath the crust; all has been converted into it; all desires, all impulses, all selfhood, all spirit. He is never alone, even with his God — least of all when he prays, for then he is more than ever in the council chamber driving an astute bargain, a piece of shrewd diplomacy, between one king and another.
O God of battles, steel my soldiers' hearts,
Possess them not with fear. Take from them now
The sense of reckoning, if th' opposed numbers
Pluck their hearts from them. Not to-day, O Lord,
O, not to-day, think not upon the fault
My father made, in compassing the crown.
I Richard's body have interred new,
And on it have bestowed more contrite tears,
Than from it issued forced drops of blood.
Five hundred poor I have in yearly pay
Who twice a day their wither'd hands hold up
Toward Heaven, to pardon blood. And I have built
Two chantries, where the sad and solemn priests
Sing still for Richard's soul. More will I do,
Though all that I can do is nothing worth;
Since that my penitence comes after all,
Imploring pardon.
This king, as Shakespeare portrays him, is indeed ‘a wondrous necessary man’, the keystone upon which the sixteenth-century state depends, and individuality has at last been subjugated wholly to the demands of office. But it is not for nothing that the generations of Shakespeare's readers have found little to love in this play. Unless we read it in the light of a certain bitter, underlying commentary, implicit in the orientation of the chief character, there is little there but that most grievous product of unremitting office, a dead man walking.
For the truth is that Shakespeare himself, now that he has built the figure with such care, out of the cumulative experience of eight plays, begins to recoil from it. It has been an experiment, an exploration, like, but for its larger scale, his brief but effective exploration of the system of Machiavelli, and, as he did with that system, so he does with this vast body of assembled evidence on public life: he rejects its findings as invalid before the deeper demands of the less explicit but immutable laws of man's spirit.
So much, then, for the Elizabethan phase of Shakespeare's portrait of the statesman-king, for the record of the period when he for a time believed that the wide canvas of public life was greater than the illimitable experience of the spirit. The contrast between the private and public virtues has been made clear, the qualifications of the great statesman have been slowly selected, tested, and built up into a single figure. Such characteristics as did not contribute to his public self have been eliminated (and they are seen, somewhat surprisingly, to be nearly co-terminous with character). More than this, certain of the loyalties, decencies, and ideals most prized in an individual are found to be incompatible with the public virtues. Henry, who rejected Falstaff in circumstances which cannot be forgiven, will also, in the moment of crisis, bargain with his God like a pedlar. His religion and his love for his people alike carry with them a tinge of expediency, a hint of the glib platform speaker.
It would seem, then, that in the very act of completing the figure, Shakespeare became aware of a certain insufficiency, and that dissatisfaction was already implicit in his treatment of Henry V, the culminating study of the series. What was there implicit is revealed by degrees in his treatment in the later plays of similar characters, or characters similarly placed. At the risk of straying a little from the immediate content of this discussion, may we consider Shakespeare's final comments? For the additional significance they lend to the subtlety, the implicit qualification that they bring to light in it.
Now, in the very play which concluded his Elizabethan picture, Shakespeare indicates already the tone and direction of his Jacobean commentary, which is at first merely dissatisfaction and disillusionment. In the course of the corollaries added in the Jacobean period it becomes clear that the disillusionment follows his perception of the true nature of Henry's supreme achievement, the whole and integral subordination of his individuality to the office of leadership. Shakespeare never again gives us a full picture of a successful ruler, with the exception of the figure of Claudius (the somewhat cynical implications of this selection constitute a study in themselves) and for the most part the men who fail, in the Jacobean plays, to meet the demands of public life are of interest not because they prove unfit for office, but because they are unfitted by office for something which Shakespeare increasingly perceives to be of deeper value.
Brutus is the first character in whom Shakespeare studied the wreckage that can be made of a man's conduct and career by the attempt to subject to the traffic of public life ideals deriving from values that cannot necessarily be carried into it. Brutus himself has an intuition of this when he pleads at the beginning with Cassius not to
have me seek into myself
For that which is not in me.
For what is in him, the clear sense of justice, the deep honourableness, the assumption that all other men's actions rest on the same spring of honour and clear vision, serve not to better the state, but only to wreck it and him. A coarser and shrewder mind, having the sense to ‘hold the world but as the world’, could have served the state more effectively. Cassius, from the first, acts openly ‘in envy of great Caesar’, but Brutus is blinded even to this by his preoccupation with ‘the general good’, unaccompanied as it is by the essential knowledge of how the world lives. The illumination of his nobler conception cannot be expressed directly in action — not, certainly, by the man whose function it is to transmit the illumination — and this inference, if we are justified in making it of Brutus, points on to the conclusion finally reached in Antony and Cleopatra.
But whatever may happen to the conduct and career of the man who mistakenly offers himself to public service, the personality, in this first study, survives the wreck unspoiled. Cassius is wrong, as usual, when he assumed that Brutus's
honourable metal may be wrought
From that it is disposed.
The most he does is to make Brutus deceive himself as to the nature of his function, not as to the nature or truth of his vision. Brutus does, indeed, a certain violence to himself in setting before him a picture of an ideal Roman citizen and insisting that he can and must become that man, a theme that Shakespeare explores again and more searchingly in Coriolanus. But Brutus escapes the last penalties even of this; ‘I slew my best lover for the good of Rome’, but he can in part redeem it, for he has, when it comes to the test, ‘the same dagger for myself’. One other comment Shakespeare makes upon the relations of the private and public virtues, fast separating themselves in his mind, when he exposes, though in no way bitterly, the artificiality of this standard of public conduct. In Brutus's reception of the news of Portia's death — ‘Portia is dead … Speak no more of her … Well to our work alive’ — this becomes suddenly clear.2 Ultimately Shakespeare was to overthrow the artificial and shallow conventions of conduct which public office, more than anything else, was likely to impose upon a man. In the meantime he is content to leave Brutus to reveal himself at death in the line ‘I found no man but he was true to me’ (the personal relations filling his thought at the last), and to conclude all upon the significant comment ‘His life was gentle’.
After Brutus, the studies of the effect of public life upon the mind are, for a time, either cynical or tragic. All are studies of disaster in the soul, disaster which seems final in the Duke of Vienna, Angelo, Macbeth, and Coriolanus, and redeemed in Lear only by the miracle of suffering.
The companion studies in Measure for Measure stand together; the Duke, who has brought to cunning perfection Henry V's tactics in manipulating his people while adding to them a stronger spice of Machiavelli's, and Angelo, whom he chooses, with matchless irony, as an upright pillar of society. Public life has taken its part in the subversion of both these characters. They are not the only hypocrites in the play, but their particular blends of deception and self-deception are those that it peculiarly fosters. The deep and almost irreparable division in the mind of Angelo comes of the lifelong demeanour of a decent citizen unconsciously supported, like one of Ibsen's ‘pillars of society’, by the picture of himself that he finds in other men's eyes. The test of contact with Isabella discovers to him a self far other, that public life had hitherto allowed him to hide from. He would be, were it not for his conversion by exposure, as clear a case as could be found of the man
Qui notus nimis omnibus
Ignotus moritur sibi.
The two great tragic studies which contribute something to our knowledge of Shakespeare's Jacobean comment on the effects of office upon the individual fall into line rather with the latest plays than with the earlier. In Macbeth and in Lear the catastrophe goes deeper than with Brutus; nobility of nature is poisoned or driven askew by power rather than wrecked by the assumption of mistaken responsibilities. Personality itself is touched, but by the privilege of leadership, not by its demands. Though the theme of Macbeth is chiefly the Aeschylean one of crime begetting crime, yet the ‘insolence of office’ has its share in the growth of that megalomania which cries, ‘For mine own good All causes shall give way’. The companion study in Lear is that of a man already formed, before the play opens, by the slower working of a more extended term of privilege. He, like an earlier king, was ‘not born to sue but to command’; absorbed in the imperiousness that is the natural growth of unrestricted privilege, even in a magnanimous nature, he ‘hath ever but slenderly known himself’. Had not catastrophe redeemed him, had it not been for the realization, ‘I have ta'en too little care of this’, he too might have suffered the fate of Seneca's king: Ignotus moritur sibi.’
Indeed, it is this hiding of the self from the man who escapes it in public life that Shakespeare examines in the last of the great negative studies of the Jacobean series. Coriolanus is the companion figure in the later period, to Henry V in the Elizabethan. The distinction between the figures of Henry V and Coriolanus reveals the distance that Shakespeare's mind has travelled in the interval and the finality of his verdict on his own earlier creation. For Coriolanus is a study of a man bred and reared to public life from infancy, regardless of the suitability of his temperament for the task. He has not, like Henry, subjugated himself to it deliberately; he has been dedicated by Volumnia to the code of his caste. From this springs a mind more deeply divided even than Angelo's, and from that in turn the catastrophe that overwhelms him and nearly subverts the state. Because the identification of man and office has not been spontaneous, the individual that was Coriolanus has been not transmuted, but suppressed. The natural character has never been allowed to grow, and so it has become stunted, thwarted, and ill-regulated, as unreliable and unpredictable as the Roman mob, which is its image in the outward action of the play. More even than Lear or Leontes, he ‘hath ever but slenderly known himself’, but unlike them he speaks a strange jargon of conventional Roman sentiment, appearing to think in terms of service and loyalties utterly alien to the ruthless, self-seeking underlying nature. For Coriolanus, throughout his career, is acting. But as he has not identified himself with his part and becoming lost in it like Henry V, his sedulous training in public life never quite serves to restrain the hysterical outbursts of rebellion from the inner self that he has never met. He is perfect in the words and gestures of a Roman noble; the generosity to his public foe, Aufidius, the little touches of would-be magnanimity to dependants, the blunt, honest soldier's refusal to take rewards or hear his ‘nothings monstered’, the deference to Cominius and the senior men of his own party, to his mother and to his wife (a deference which never, somehow, quite amounts to considerateness) — all these he has at his command, and so long as the situations are those he has been schooled to meet, he can present a tolerably coherent and unified front to life. He can say, almost in the words of Brutus, that
brave death out-weighs bad life,
And that his country's dearer than himself,
but the fine speeches, the schooled responses, the conditioned reactions, all collapse when the unknown, underlying self is touched by catastrophic failure. This life-long public self stripped away, the maimed personality does not (as indeed it cannot now) seek to discover itself, but only hurries, like a dislodged hermit crab, to find another shell. The ruthless training for office and public life has wrought its full and fatal effect.
As in the preliminary or minor histories Shakespeare gave a mainly negative conclusion on the nature of kingship and followed it up in the major histories by a positive study of what kingship was, so, in the Jacobean plays, he gives first a series of studies (though far less definitely orientated or closely correlated) of individuals sacrificed in one way or another to the exigencies of public life, and leads up to a final and positive study of the individual spirit triumphing over the less substantial claims, the more superficial values of the other. The last detailed comment is that of Antony and Cleopatra, which is like a symphonic rendering of the passionate theme of individual freedom, not the childish egotism of Henry VI or Richard II or that later modification in Lear and Macbeth, but the mature realization that upon the individual life of the spirit the world of affairs could have no final claim.
The whole course, then, of Shakespeare's survey of this problem, the choosing out by trial and error of the qualifications proper to a great statesman-king, the welding together of these findings into a single figure, the subsequent surveying of this figure and its implications from a distance and from a world of experience quite other, and the ultimate abandonment both of the figure and of the claims it represented, the whole course of this survey resolves itself ultimately into one conclusion, harmonious alike with the main body of Shakespeare's thought and with the conclusions reached simultaneously by the finest poetic thought of his contemporaries. It is a magnificent plea, first negative and then positive, for the supreme claims of the individual spirit. Shakespeare, from the first, sees, as clearly as Chapman, that there was little place for it in public life, that public life was not best served by it, but he sees equally clearly, and he sees it at the last, that neither is this spirit itself best served by public life. For Shakespeare, the second conclusion, the final pronouncement of his experience upon this theme, is the valid one.
Of his view of conduct as itself a supreme art, Shakespeare surrenders nothing in this latest phase; but the quality of the conduct which interests him changes profoundly. He, no less than Ford or Webster, sees in it the possibility of sublimity, but, like them, and indeed like all the Jacobeans, he no longer finds its essential expression in the council chamber, the battlefield or the forum, but rather in the inner recesses of the spirit, revealed, if revealed at all, by chance or the accident of affinity. He must have recognized the echo of his own thought in Webster's words,
For know, whether I am doomed to live or die
I can do both like a prince,
the words in which his duchess declares her allegiance not to a pattern of conduct imposed by social demands, but to an inner aristocratic ideal, unrealized even by the character itself until that moment. For Shakespeare, too, had by then explored those minds whose purpose is not so much the presentation of a certain figure to the world as obedience to the guidance of certain perceptions, perceptions that not only cannot be directly expressed in public life, but may even be contaminated in the attempt at such direct expression. Henry V and Coriolanus are concerned to present a design for living whose main lines they themselves (with varying completeness) already know. But Hamlet, Lear, Timon, Cleopatra, Antony are concerned not at all with presenting a figure of such and such design, and hardly at all with that conscious uttering of principle in word and action that makes up public conduct. They proceed instead by a half-unconscious subordination of action, and even thought, to the guidance of some often undefined principle (itself perhaps at variance with the verdict of the world or unapprehended by it), which transmutes the character into something of which it itself would remain incompletely aware, unless released in a moment of tragic crisis.
That citadel of absolute truth, the inner self hardly known to the man himself, may be corrupted by the effort to stage himself to the public eye, and to surrender to the demand of public life may well be fatal to that core of the spirit wherein is stored its potential immortality.
Shakespeare's final position is an uncompromising declaration of individual freedom and responsibility, that supreme virtue of which the Jacobeans knew so well the value. ‘I have in this rough work shaped out a man.’ He has, indeed, throughout the Jacobean period: Brutus, Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, Timon, Antony, Cleopatra, Prospera. And the shaping has involved the rejection not of Falstaff, but of Henry V.
It is the shaping out of this ‘man’, the creation of this figure which is no one man but an image to which many characters bring their parts, that makes the historical and political group organic.3 To maintain that the political plays, even the four that make up the central group, are equivalent to an epic would be a piece of foolish extremism. A work of art cannot at the same time be two different works of art. But it is possible to consider that the sequence, through the continuous presence of this image of the statesman-king, is able to subdue to the dramatic form the vast and apparently undramatic matter of potential epic, without losing the peculiar virtue of epic material, coherent presentation of spaciousness, and of the multifariousness of life.
In Shakespeare's history plays we have, then, I believe, a second instance of hard-won reconciliation of seemingly alien content with dramatic form.
1 The group of plays with which we are mainly concerned here is the series Richard II, Henry IV (I and II) and Henry V, for in these four the simultaneous effect of epic space and dramatic concentration may be most clearly observed. But the gradually built-up figure of the king, which gives significance and unity to this central group, is supported by the exploration and commentary of the four earlier plays, and by various studies of kings and statesmen in the later. Accordingly, I have sometimes drawn upon these also for their contributions, whether as a preliminary group whose significant order is that of the writing, or as subsequent observations and conclusions revealing the implications of the main group. There is a certain apparent inconsistency in deriving the union of epic magnitude and dramatic concentration partly from the earlier group of plays for which (with the exception of Richard III) we cannot claim the highest dramatic quality, and partly again from several detached later plays for which we cannot claim continuity of subject. But it is more apparent than actual; the contributions of the three earlier plays are almost entirely in the form of negative conclusions and the substance of their findings recapitulated in the main group, while those of the later plays are a revaluation of the central image of that same group. The service of both to the present argument is that of revealing explicitly what is included by implication in the main, and central, group, and thus permitting it to be stated more briefly and with fewer qualifications.
2 If further comment were needed, it is furnished by two still clearer episodes in the later play of Macbeth; one where Siward's stoical reception of his son's death is rebuked by Malcolm's natural humanity, another where Macduff makes his unanswerable appeal to genuine manhood against the artificial standard of conventional manliness:
Dispute it like a man!
I shall do so.
But I must also feel it as a man.
This, a far more assured and mature comment (not without interesting analogies in other contemporary dramatists), reflects back upon the conventional stoicism of the public man in Brutus and leaves us no doubt as to the conclusion Shakespeare had already drawn there.
3 It may be urged that these plays are not a planned sequence, that there can therefore have been no continuous design (as in the Oresteia) and that the whole cannot have cohered in Shakespeare's mind as the living parts of a great work of art cohere to make an organic whole. In support of this it might be pointed out that the plays were written at fairly wide intervals. But the vast organism of a major work of art must always be held in the artist's mind through a considerable period of time, even if it finally takes the form of a single poem. Interruption of work upon it, the suspension of attention for a time, need not destroy the fundamental continuity of thought for the organic nature of the work of art that is finally produced. How long did Milton hold Paradise Lost in mind? And how long did Goethe hold Faust?