Halleck's New English Literature Part 25

"He was not of an age but for all time."

He meant that Shakespeare does not exhibit some popular conceit, folly, or phase of thought, which is merely the fashion of the hour and for which succeeding generations would care nothing; but that he voices those truths which appeal to the people of all ages. The grief of Lear over the dead Cordelia, the ambition of Lady Macbeth, the loves of Rosalind and Juliet, the questionings of Hamlet, interest us as much today as they did the Elizabethans. Fashions in literature may come and go, but Shakespeare's work remains.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ELLEN TERRY AS LADY MACBETH. _From the painting by Sargent_.]

Humor.--Shakespeare had the most comprehensive sense of humor of any of the world's great writers,--a humor that was closely related to his sympathy. It has been said that he saved his tragedies from the fatal disease of absurdity, by inoculating them with his comic virus, and that his sense of humor kept him from ever becoming shrill. This faculty enabled him to detect incongruity, to keep from overstressing a situation, to enter into the personality of others, to recover quickly from "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune," and in one of his last plays, _The Tempest_, to welcome the "brave young world"

as if he would like to play the game of life again. It was largely because of his humor that the tragedies and pain of life did not sour and subdue Shakespeare.

He soon wearies of a vacant laugh. He has only one strictly farcical play, _The Comedy of Errors_. There are few intellects keen enough to extract all the humor from Shakespeare. For literal minds the full comprehension of even a slight display of his humor, such as the following dialogue affords, is better exercise than the solution of an algebraic problem. Dogberry, a constable in _Much Ado About Nothing_, thus instructs the Watch:--

"_Dogberry_. You shall comprehend all vagrom men; you are to bid any man stand in the prince's name.

"_Watch_. How if a' will not stand?

"_Dogberry_. Why, then, take no note of him, but let him go, and presently call the rest of the watch together, and thank G.o.d you are rid of a knave."

Of all Shakespeare's qualities, his humor is the hardest to describe because of its protean forms. Falstaff is his greatest humorous creation. So resourceful is he that even defeat enables him to rise like Antaeus after a fall. His humor is almost a philosophy of existence for those who love to use wit and ingenuity in trying to evade the laws of sober, orderly living. Perhaps it was for this very reason that Shakespeare consented to send so early to "Arthur's bosom"[26] a character who had not a little of the complexity of Hamlet.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FALSTAFF AND HIS PAGE. _From a drawing by B.

Westmacott_.]

Much of Shakespeare's humor is delicately suffused through his plays.

Many of them either ripple with the laughter of his characters or are lighted with their smiles. We may pa.s.s pleasant hours in the company of his joyous creations, such as Rosalind in _As You Like It_, or Portia in _The Merchant of Venice_, or Puck as the spokesman for _A Midsummer Night's Dream_, who good naturedly exclaims:--

"Lord, what fools these mortals be!"

or Viola and her companions in _Twelfth Night_, or Beatrice and Benedict in _Much Ado About Nothing_, or Ariel in _The Tempest_ playing pranks on the bewildered mariners and singing of the joys of life which come as a reward for service:--

"Merrily, merrily shall I live now Under the blossom that hangs on the bough."

Shakespeare is also the one English author who is equally successful in depicting the highest type of both comedy and tragedy. He has the power to describe even a deathbed scene so as to invest it with both humor and pathos. Dame Quickly's lines in _Henry V_., on the death of Falstaff, show this capacity.

The next greatest English writer is lacking in this sense of humor.

John Milton could write the tragedies of a _Paradise Lost_ and a _Samson Agonistes_, but he could not give us the humor of _A Midsummer Night's Dream_, _The Comedy of Errors_, or _As You Like It_. We have seen that the next greatest dramatic genius, Marlowe, has little sense of humor. Mrs. Browning correctly describes the plays of Shakespeare as filled--

"With tears and laughters for all time."

Moral Ideals.--To show the moral consequences of acts was the work which most appealed to him. Banquo voiced the comprehensiveness of moral law when he said, "In the great hand of G.o.d I stand." There is here great divergence between the views of Shakespeare and of Bacon.

Dowden says:--

"While Bacon's sense of the presence of physical law in the universe was for his time extraordinarily developed, he seems practically to have acted upon the theory that the moral laws of the world are not inexorable, but rather by tactics and dexterity may be cleverly evaded. Their supremacy was acknowledged by Shakespeare in the minutest as well as in the greatest concerns of human life."

By employing "tactics" in sending Hamlet on a voyage to England, the king hoped to avoid the consequences of his crime. Macbeth in vain tried every stratagem to "trammel up the consequence." Goneril and Regan drive their white-haired father out into the storm; but even in _King Lear_, where the forces of evil seem to run riot, let us note the result:--

"Throughout that stupendous Third Act the good are seen growing better through suffering, and the bad worse through success. The warm castle is a room in h.e.l.l, the storm-swept heath a sanctuary...

The only real thing in the world is the soul with its courage, patience, devotion. And nothing outward can touch that."[27]

Shakespeare makes no pessimists. He shows how misfortune crowns life with new moral glory. We rise from the gloom of _King Lear_, feeling that we would rather be like Cordelia than like either of her sisters or any other selfish character who apparently triumphs until life's close. And yet Cordelia lost everything, her portion of her father's kingdom and her own life. When we realize that Shakespeare found one hundred and ten lines in _King Lear_ sufficient not only to confer immortality on Cordelia, but also to make us all eager to pay homage to her, in spite of the fact that the ordinary standard of the world has not ceased to declare such a life a failure, we may the better understand that his greatest power consisted in revealing the moral victories possible for this rough-hewn human life.

Shakespeare made a mistake about the seacoast of Bohemia and the location of Milan with reference to the sea, but he was always sure of the relative position of right and wrong and of the ultimate failure of evil. In his greatest plays, for instance, in _Macbeth_, he sought to impress the incalculable danger of meddling with evil, the impossibility of forecasting the tragedy that might thereby result, the certainty that retribution would follow, either here or beyond "this bank and shoal of time."

Mastery of his Mother Tongue.--His wealth of expression is another striking characteristic. In a poem on Shakespeare, Ben Jonson wrote:--

"Thou had'st small Latin and less Greek."

Shakespeare is, however, the mightiest master of the English tongue.

He uses 15,000 different words, while the second greatest writer in our language employs only 7000. A great novelist like Thackeray has a vocabulary of about 5000 words, while many uneducated laborers do not use over 600 words. The combinations that Shakespeare has made with these 15,000 words are far more striking than their mere number.

Variety of Style.--The style of Milton, Addison, Dr. Johnson, and Macaulay has some definite peculiarities, which can easily be cla.s.sified. Shakespeare, on the contrary, in holding the mirror up to nature, has different styles for his sailors, soldiers, courtiers, kings, and shepherds,--for Juliet, the lover; for Mistress Quickly, the alewife; for Hamlet, the philosopher; and for Bottom, the weaver.

To employ so many styles requires genius of a peculiar kind. In the case of most of us, our style would soon betray our individuality.

When Dr. Samuel Johnson tried to write a drama, he made all his little fishes talk like whales, as Goldsmith wittily remarked.

In the same play Shakespeare's style varies from the dainty lyric touch of Ariel's song about the cowslip's bell and the blossoming bough, to a style unsurpa.s.sed for grandeur:--

"The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind."

In the same pa.s.sage his note immediately changes to the soft _vox humana_ of--

"We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep."

His Influence on Thought.--With the exception of the _Scriptures_, Shakespeare's dramas have surpa.s.sed all other works in molding modern English thought. If a person should master Shakespeare and the _Bible_, he would find most that is greatest in human thought, outside of the realm of science.

Even when we do not read him, we cannot escape the influence of others who have been swayed by him. For generations, certain modes of thought have crystallized about his phrases. We may instance such expressions as these: "Brevity is the soul of wit." "What's in a name?" "The wish was father to the thought." "The time is out of joint." "There's the rub." "There's a divinity that shapes our ends." "Comparisons are odorous." It would, perhaps, not be too much to say that the play of _Hamlet_ has affected the thought of the majority of the English-speaking race. His grip on Anglo-Saxon thought has been increasing for more than three hundred years.

Shakespeare's influence on the thought of any individual has only two circ.u.mscribing factors,--the extent of Shakespearean study and the capacity of interpreting the facts of life. No intelligent person can study Shakespeare without becoming a deeper and more varied thinker, without securing a broader comprehension of human existence,--its struggles, failures, and successes. If we have before viewed humanity through a gla.s.s darkly, Shakespeare will gradually lead us where we can see face to face the beauty and the grandeur of the mystery of existence. His most valuable influence often consists in rendering his students sympathetic and in making them feel a sense of kinship with life. Shakespeare's readers more quickly realize that human nature shows the shaping touch of divinity. They have the rare joy of discovering the world anew and of exclaiming with Miranda:--

"How many goodly creatures are there here!

How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in't!"[28]

When we have really become acquainted with Shakespeare, our lives will be less prosaic and restricted. After intimate companionship with him, there will be, in the words of Ariel, hardly any common thing in life--

"But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange."[29]

BEN JONSON, 1573?-1637

[Ill.u.s.tration: BEN JONSON. _From the portrait by Gerard Honthorst, National Portrait Gallery_.]

Life.--About nine years after the birth of Shakespeare his greatest successor in the English drama was born in London. Jonson outlived Shakespeare twenty-one years and helped to usher in the decline of the drama.

Ben Jonson, the son of a clergyman and the stepson of a master bricklayer, received a good education at Westminster School. Unlike Shakespeare, Jonson learned much Latin and Greek. In one respect Jonson's training was unfortunate for a poet. He was taught to write prose exercises first and then to turn them into poetry. In this way he acquired the habit of trying to express unpoetical ideas in verse.

Art could change the prose into metrical riming lines, but art could not breathe into them the living soul of poetry. In after times Jonson said that Shakespeare lacked art, but Jonson recognized that the author of _Hamlet_ had the magic touch of nature. Jonson's pen rarely felt her all-embracing touch.

If Jonson served an apprenticeship as a bricklayer, as his enemies afterward said, he did not continue long at such work. He crossed the Channel and enlisted for a brief time as a soldier in the Netherlands.

He soon returned to London and became a writer for the theater, and thenceforth lived the life of an author and a student. He loved to study and translate the cla.s.sics. In fact, what a novice might think original in Jonson's plays was often borrowed from the cla.s.sics. Of his relations to the cla.s.sical writers, Dryden says, "You track him everywhere in their snow." Jonson was known as the most learned poet of the age, because, if his plays demanded any special knowledge, no subject was too hard, dry, or remote from common life for him to attempt to master it. He knew the boundaries of Bohemia, and he took pleasure in saying to a friend: "Shakespeare in a play brought in a number of men saying they had suffered shipwreck in Bohemia, where is no sea near, by some hundred miles."

Jonson's personal characteristics partly explain why he placed himself in opposition to the spirit of the age. He was extremely combative. It was almost a necessity for him to quarrel with some person or with some opinion. He killed two men in duels, and he would probably have been hanged, if he had not pleaded benefit of clergy. For the greater part of his life, he was often occupied with pen and ink quarrels.

When James I. ascended the throne in 1603, Jonson soon became a royal favorite. He was often employed to write masques, a peculiar species of drama which called for magnificent scenery and dress, and gave the n.o.bility the opportunity of acting the part of some distinguished or supernatural character. Such work brought Jonson into intimate a.s.sociation with the leading men of the day.