A Study of Shakespeare Part 10

If further confirmation could be needed of the underlying significance of allusion traceable throughout this play, it might amply be supplied by fresh reference to the first scene in which the Nurse makes her appearance on the stage, and is checked by Lady Capulet in the full tide of affectionate regret for her lost husband. We can well imagine Anne Boleyn cutting short the regrets of some indiscreet courtier for Sir Thomas More in the very words of the text;

Enough of this; I pray thee, hold thy peace.

The "parlous knock" which left so big a lump upon the brow of the infant Juliet is evidently an allusion to the declaration of Elizabeth's illegitimacy while yet in her cradle. The seal of b.a.s.t.a.r.dy set upon the baby brow of

Anne Boleyn's daughter may well be said to have "broken" it.

The counsel of the Nurse to Juliet in Act iii. Scene 5 to forsake Romeo for Paris indicates the bias of the hierarchy in favour of Ess.e.x--"a lovely gentleman"--rather than of the ultra-Protestant policy of Burghley, who doubtless in the eyes of courtiers and churchmen was "a dish-clout to him."

These were a few of the points, set down at random, which he had been enabled to verify within the limits of a single play. They would suffice to give an idea of the process by which, when applied in detail to every one of Shakespeare's plays, he trusted to establish the secret history and import of each, not less than the general sequence and significance of all. Further instalments of this work would probably be issued in the forthcoming or future Transactions of the Newest Shakespeare Society; and it was confidently expected that the final monument of his research when thoroughly completed and ill.u.s.trated by copious appendices, would prove as worthy as any work of mere English scholarship could hope to be of a place beside the inestimable commentaries of Gervinus, Ulrici, and the Polypseudocriticopantodapomorosophisticometricoglossematographicomaniacal Company for the Confusion of Shakespeare and Diffusion of Verbiage (Unlimited).

CHIMAERA BOMBINANS IN VACUO.

NOTE.

Mindful of the good old apologue regarding "the squeak of the real pig,"

I think it here worth while to certify the reader of little faith, that the more incredibly impudent absurdities above cited are not so much or so often the freaks of parody or the fancies of burlesque as select excerpts and transcripts of printed and published utterances from the "pink soft litter" of a living brood--from the reports of an actual Society, issued in an abridged and doubtless an emasculated form through the columns of a weekly newspaper. One final and unapproachable instance, one transcendant and pyramidal example of cla.s.sical taste and of critical scholarship, I did not venture to impair by transference from those columns and transplantation into these pages among humbler specimens of minor monstrosity. Let it stand here once more on record as "a good jest for ever"--or rather as the best and therefore as the worst, as the worst and therefore as the best, of all possible bad jests ever to be cracked between this and the crack of doom. Sophocles, said a learned member, was the proper parallel to Shakespeare among the ancient tragedians: AEschylus--hear, O heaven, and give ear, O earth!--_AEschylus was only a Marlowe_.

The hand which here transcribes this most transcendant utterance has written before now many lines in verse and in prose to the honour and glory of Christopher Marlowe: it has never--be the humble avowal thus blushingly recorded--it has never set down as the writer's opinion that he was only an AEschylus. In other words, it has never registered as my deliberate and judicial verdict the finding that he was only the equal of the greatest among all tragic and all prophetic poets; of the man who combined all the light of the Greeks with all the fire of the Hebrews; who varied at his will the revelation of the single gift of Isaiah with the display of the mightiest among the manifold gifts of Shakespeare.

Footnotes.

{30} Reprinted by Dr. Grosart in his beautiful and valuable edition of Greene's works.

{33} One thing is certain: that d.a.m.nable last scene at which the gorge rises even to remember it is in execution as unlike the crudest phase of Shakespeare's style as in conception it is unlike the idlest birth of his spirit. Let us hope that so foul a thing could not have been done in even tolerably good verse.

{42} It is not the least of Lord Macaulay's offences against art that he should have contributed the temporary weight of his influence as a critic to the support of so ignorant and absurd a tradition of criticism as that which cla.s.ses the great writer here mentioned with the brutal if "brawny"

Wycherley--a cla.s.sification almost to be paralleled with that which in the days of our fathers saw fit to couple together the names of Balzac and of Sue. Any competent critic will always recognise in _The Way of the World_ one of the glories, in _The Country Wife_ one of the disgraces, of dramatic and of English literature. The stains discernible on the masterpiece of Congreve are trivial and conventional; the mere conception of the other man's work displays a mind so prurient and leprous, uncovers such an unfathomable and unimaginable beastliness of imagination, that in the present age at least he would probably have figured as a virtuous journalist and professional rebuker of poetic vice or artistic aberration.

{63} Since this pa.s.sage first went to press, I have received from Dr.

Grosart the most happy news that he has procured a perfect copy of this precious volume, and will shortly add it to his occasional issues of golden waifs and strays forgotten by the ebb-tide of time. Not even the disinterment of Robert Chester's "glorified" poem, with its appended jewels of verse from Shakespeare's very hand and from others only less great than Shakespeare's, all now at last reset in their strange original framework, was a gift of greater price than this.

{89} Compare with Beaumont's admirable farce of Bessus the wretched imitation of it attempted after his death in the _Nice Valour_ of Fletcher; whose proper genius was neither for pure tragedy nor broad farce, but for high comedy and heroic romance--a field of his own invention; witness _Monsieur Thomas_ and _The Knight of Malta_: while Beaumont has approved himself in tragedy all but the worthiest disciple of Shakespeare, in farce beyond all comparison the aptest pupil of Jonson. He could give us no _Fox_ or _Alchemist_; but the inventor of Bessus and Calianax was worthy of the esteem and affection returned to him by the creator of Morose and Rabbi Busy.

{92} A desperate attempt has been made to support the metrical argument in favour of Fletcher's authorship by the production of a list in which such words as _slavery, emperor, pitying, difference_, and even _Christians_, were actually registered as trisyllabic terminations. To such unimaginable shifts are critics of the finger-counting or syllabic school inevitably and fatally reduced in the effort to establish by rule of thumb even so much as may seem verifiable by that rule in the province of poetical criticism. Prosody is at best no more than the skeleton of verse, as verse is the body of poetry; while the gain of such painful labourers in a field they know not how to till is not even a skeleton of worthless or irrelevant fact, but the shadow of such a skeleton reflected in water. It would seem that critics who hear only through their fingers have not even fingers to hear with.

{108} "La dynastie du bon sens, inauguree dans Panurge, continuee dans Sancho Panca, tourne a mal et avorte dans Falstaff." (_William Shakespeare_, deuxieme partie, livre premier, ch. ii,)

{125} Possibly some readers may agree with my second thoughts, in thinking that one exception may here be made and some surprise be here expressed at Shakespeare's rejection of Sly's memorable query--"When will the fool come again, Sim?" It is true that he could well afford to spare it, as what could he not well afford to spare? but I will confess that it seems to me worthy of a place among his own Sly's most admirable and notable sallies of humour.

{129} _History of English Dramatic Poetry_, ed. 1879, vol. ii. pp.437- 447. In a later part of his n.o.ble and invaluable work (vol. iii. p.188) the author quotes a pa.s.sage from "the induction to _A Warning for Fair Women_, 1599 (to which Shakespeare most a.s.suredly contributed)." It will be seen that I do not shrink from admitting the full weight of authority which can be thrown into the scale against my own opinion. To such an a.s.sertion from the insolent organs of pretentious ignorance I should be content with the simple rejoinder that Shakespeare most a.s.suredly did nothing whatever of the sort; but to return such an answer in the present case would be to write myself down--and that in company to which I should most emphatically object--as something very decidedly more--and worse--than an a.s.s.

{137} Not for the first and probably not for the last time I turn, with all confidence as with all reverence, for ill.u.s.tration and confirmation of my own words, to the exquisite critical genius of a long honoured and long lamented fellow-craftsman. The following admirable and final estimate of the more special element or peculiar quality in the intellectual force of Honore de Balzac could only have been taken by the inevitable intuition and rendered by the subtlest eloquence of Charles Baudelaire. Nothing could more aptly and perfectly ill.u.s.trate the distinction indicated in my text between unimaginative realism and imaginative reality.

"I have many a time been astonished that to pa.s.s for an observer should be Balzac's great popular t.i.tle to fame. To me it had always seemed that it was his chief merit to be a visionary, and a pa.s.sionate visionary. All his characters are gifted with the ardour of life which animated himself.

All his fictions are as deeply coloured as dreams. From the highest of the aristocracy to the lowest of the mob, all the actors in his _Human Comedy_ are keener after living, more active and cunning in their struggles, more staunch in endurance of misfortune, more ravenous in enjoyment, more angelic in devotion, than the comedy of the real world shows them to us. In a word, every one in Balzac, down to the very scullions, has genius. Every mind is a weapon loaded to the muzzle with will. It is actually Balzac himself. And as all the beings of the outer world presented themselves to his mind's eye in strong relief and with a telling expression, he has given a convulsive action to his figures; he has blackened their shadows and intensified their lights. Besides, his prodigious love of detail, the outcome of an immoderate ambition to see everything, to bring everything to sight, to guess everything, to make others guess everything, obliged him to set down more forcibly the princ.i.p.al lines, so as to preserve the perspective of the whole. He reminds me sometimes of those etchers who are never satisfied with the biting-in of their outlines, and transform into very ravines the main scratches of the plate. From this astonishing natural disposition of mind wonderful results have been produced. But this disposition is generally defined as Balzac's great fault. More properly speaking, it is exactly his great distinctive duality. But who can boast of being so happily gifted, and of being able to apply a method which may permit him to invest--and that with a sure hand--what is purely trivial with splendour and imperial purple? Who can do this? Now, he who does not, to speak the truth, does no great thing."

Nor was any very great thing done by the author of _A Warning for Fair Women_.

{141} I do not know or remember in the whole radiant range of Elizabethan drama more than one parallel tribute to that paid in this play by an English poet to the yet foreign art of painting, through the eloquent mouth of this enthusiastic villain of genius, whom we might regard as a more genuinely t.i.tianic sort of Wainwright. The parallel pa.s.sage is that most lovely and fervid of all imaginative panegyrics on this art, extracted by Lamb from the comedy of _Doctor Dodipoll_; which saw the light or twilight of publication just eight years later than _Arden of Feversham_.

{154} I remember to have somewhere at some time fallen in with some remark by some commentator to some such effect as this: that it would be somewhat difficult to excuse the unwomanly violence of this demand.

Doubtless it would. And doubtless it would be somewhat more than difficult to extenuate the unmaidenly indelicacy of Jeanne Darc.

{179} What would at least be partly l.u.s.t in another man is all but purely hatred in Iago.

Now I do love her too: Not out of absolute l.u.s.t, (though, peradventure, I stand accountant for as great a sin) But partly led to diet my revenge.

For "partly" read "wholly," and for "peradventure" read "a.s.suredly," and the incarnate father of lies, made manifest in the flesh, here speaks all but all the truth for once, to himself alone.

{205} I add the proof in a footnote, so as to take up no more than a small necessary s.p.a.ce of my text with the establishment of a fact which yet can seem insignificant to no mortal who has a human ear for lyric song. Shakespeare's verse, as all the wide world knows, ends thus:

But my kisses bring again, bring again, Seals of love, but sealed in vain, sealed in vain.

The echo has been dropped by Fletcher, who has thus achieved the remarkable musical feat of turning a nightingale's note into a sparrow's.

The mutilation of Philomela by the hands of Tereus was a jest compared to the mutilation of Shakespeare by the hands of Fletcher: who thereby reduced the close of the first verse into agreement if not into accordance with the close of his own. This appended verse, as all the world does not and need not know, ends thus:

But first set my poor heart free, Bound in those icy chains by thee.

Even an earless owner of fingers enough to count on may by their help convince himself of the difference in metre here. But not only does the last line, with unsolicited and literally superfluous liberality, offer us a syllable over measure; the words are such as absolutely to defy antiphonal repet.i.tion or reverberation of the three last in either line.

Let us therefore, like good scriptural scholars, according equally to the letter and the spirit of the text, render unto Fletcher the things which be Fletcher's, and unto Shakespeare the things which be Shakespeare's.

{210} It is worth remark that in a still older sample of an older and ruder form of play than can have been the very earliest mould in which the pristine or pre-Shakespearean model of _Pericles_ was cast, the part of Chorus here a.s.signed to Gower was filled by a representative of his fellow-poet Lydgate.

{217} Except perhaps one little word of due praise for the pretty imitation or recollection of his dead friend Beaumont rather than of Shakespeare, in the description of the crazed girl whose "careless tresses a wreath of bullrush rounded" where she sat playing with flowers for emblems at a game of love and sorrow--but liker in all else to Bellario by another fountain-side than to Ophelia by the brook of death.

{220} On the 17th of September, 1864.

{232} The once too celebrated crime which in this play was exhibited on the public stage with the forcible fidelity of a wellnigh brutal realism took actual place on the private stage of fact in the year 1604. Four years afterwards the play was published as Shakespeare's. Eight years more, and Shakespeare was with AEschylus.

{237} Written in 1879.

{239} Capell has altered this to "proud perfumes"; marking the change in a note, with the scrupulous honesty which would seem to have usually distinguished him from more daring and more famous editors.

{245a} The feeble archaic inversion in this line is one among many small signs which all together suffice, if not to throw back the date of this play to the years immediately preceding the advent of Marlowe or the full influence of his genius and example, yet certainly to mark it as an instance of survival from that period of incomposite and inadequate workmanship in verse.

{245b} Or than this play to a genuine work of Shakespeare's. "Brick to coral"--these three words describe exactly the difference in tone and shade of literary colour.

{246} Here for the first time we come upon a verse not unworthy of Marlowe himself--a verse in spirit as in cadence recalling the deep oceanic reverberations of his "mighty line," profound and just and simple and single as a note of the music of the sea. But it would be hard if a devout and studious disciple were never to catch one pa.s.sing tone of his master's habitual accent.--It may be worth while to observe that we find here the same modulation of verse--common enough since then, but new to the patient auditors of _Gorboduc_ and _Locrine_--which we find in the finest pa.s.sage of Marlowe's imperfect play of _Dido_, completed by Nash after the young Master's untimely death.

Why star'st thou in my face? If thou wilt stay, Leap in my arms: mine arms are open wide: If not--turn from me, and I'll turn from thee; For though thou hast the power to say farewell, I have not power to stay thee.