The Man Shakespeare and His Tragic Life Story Part 19

"Self-harming jealousy! fie, beat it hence!"

In the second scene of this second act Adriana goes on nagging in almost the same way.

In the second scene of the third act there is a phrase from the hero, Antipholus of Syracuse, about Adriana which I find significant:

"She that doth call me husband, even my soul Doth for a wife abhor!"

There is no reason in the comedy for such strong words. Most men would be amused or pleased by a woman who makes up to them as Adriana makes up to Antipholus. I hear Shakespeare in this uncalled-for, over-emphatic "even my soul doth for a wife abhor."

In the fifth act Adriana is brought before the Abbess, and is proved to be a jealous scold. Shakespeare will not be satisfied till some impartial great person of Adriana's own s.e.x has condemned her. Adriana admits that she has scolded her husband in public and in private, too; the Abbess replies:

"And thereof came it that the man was mad."

And she adds:

"The venom clamours of a jealous woman Poisons more deadly than a mad dog's tooth."

Again, a needlessly emphatic condemnation. But Adriana will not accept the reproof: she will have her husband at all costs. The whole scene discovers personal feeling. Adriana is the portrait that Shakespeare wished to give us of his wife.

The learned commentators have seemingly conspired to say as little about "The Two Gentlemen of Verona" as possible. No one of them identifies the protagonist, Valentine, with Shakespeare, though all of them identified Biron with Shakespeare, and yet Valentine, as we shall see, is a far better portrait of the master than Biron. This untimely blindness of the critics is, evidently, due to the fact that Coleridge has hardly mentioned "The Two Gentlemen of Verona," and they have consequently been unable to parrot his opinions.

"The Two Gentlemen of Verona" is manifestly a later work than "Love's Labour's Lost"; there is more blank verse and less rhyme in it, and a considerable improvement in character-drawing. Julia, for example, is individualized and lives for us in her affection and jealousy; her talks with her maid Lucetta are taken from life; they are indeed the first sketch of the delightful talks between Portia and Nerissa, and mark an immense advance upon the wordy _badinage_ of the Princess and her ladies in "Love's Labour's Lost," where there was no attempt at differentiation of character. It seems indubitable to me that "The Two Gentlemen of Verona" is also later than "The Comedy of Errors," and just as far beyond doubt that it is earlier than "A Midsummer Night's Dream,"

in spite of Dr. Furnival's "Trial Table."

The first three comedies, "Love's Labour's Lost," "The Comedy of Errors," and "The Two Gentlemen of Verona," are all noteworthy for the light they throw on Shakespeare's early life.

In "The Two Gentlemen of Verona" Shakespeare makes similar youthful mistakes in portraiture to those we noticed in "Love's Labour's Lost"; mistakes which show that he is thinking of himself and his own circ.u.mstances. At the beginning of the play the only difference between Proteus and Valentine is that one is in love, and the other, heart-free, is leaving home to go to Milan. In this first scene Shakespeare speaks frankly through both Proteus and Valentine, just as he spoke through both the King and Biron in the first scene of "Love's Labour's Lost,"

and through both AEgeon and Antipholus of Syracuse in "The Comedy of Errors." But whilst the circ.u.mstances in the earliest comedy are imaginary and fantastic, the circ.u.mstances in "The Two Gentlemen of Verona" are manifestly, I think, taken from the poet's own experience.

In the dialogue between Valentine and Proteus I hear Shakespeare persuading himself that he should leave Stratford. Some readers may regard this a.s.sumption as far-fetched, but it will appear the more plausible, I think, the more the dialogue is studied. Valentine begins the argument:

"Home-keeping youth have ever homely wits,"--

he will "see the wonders of the world abroad" rather than live "dully sluggardiz'd at home," wearing out "youth with shapeless idleness." But all these reasons are at once superfluous and peculiar. The audience needs no persuasion to believe that a young man is eager to travel and go to Court. Shakespeare's quick mounting spirit is in the lines, and the needlessness of the argument shows that we have here a personal confession. Valentine, then, mocks at love, because it was love that held Shakespeare so long in Stratford, and when Proteus defends it, he replies:

"Even so by Love the young and tender wit Is turned to folly; blasting in the bud, Losing his verdure even in the prime, And all the fair effects of future hopes."

Here is Shakespeare's confession that his marriage had been a failure, not only because of his wife's mad jealousy and violent temper, which we have been forced to realize in "The Comedy of Errors," but also because love and its home-keeping ways threatened to dull and imprison the eager artist spirit. In the last charming line I find not only the music of Shakespeare's voice, but also one of the reasons--perhaps, indeed, the chief because the highest reason--which drew him from Stratford to London. And what the "future hope" was, he told us in the very first line of "Love's Labour's Lost." The King begins the play with"

"Let Fame, that all hunt after in their lives."

Now all men don't hunt after fame; it was Shakespeare who felt that Fame pieced out Life's span and made us "heirs of all eternity"; it was young Shakespeare who desired fame so pa.s.sionately that he believed all other men must share his immortal longing, the desire in him being a forecast of capacity, as, indeed, it usually is. If any one is inclined to think that I am here abusing conjecture let him remember that Proteus, too, tells us that Valentine is hunting after honour.

When Proteus defends love we hear Shakespeare just as clearly as when Valentine inveighs against it:

"Yet writers say, as in the sweetest bud The eating canker dwells, so eating love Inhabits in the finest wits of all."

Shakespeare could not be disloyal to that pa.s.sion of desire in him which he instinctively felt was, in some way or other, the necessary complement of his splendid intelligence. We must take the summing-up of Proteus when Valentine leaves him as the other half of Shakespeare's personal confession:

"He after honour hunts, I after love: He leaves his friends to dignify them more; I leave myself, my friends, and all for love.

Thou, Julia, thou hast metamorphosed me,-- Made me neglect my studies, lose my time, War with good counsel, set the world at naught; Made wit with musing weak, heart sick with thought."

Young Shakespeare hunted as much after love as after honour, and these verses show that he has fully understood what a drag on him his foolish marriage has been. That all this is true to Shakespeare appears from the fact that it is false to the character of Proteus. Proteus is supposed to talk like this in the first blush of pa.s.sion, before he has won Julia, before he even knows that she loves him. Is that natural? Or is it not rather Shakespeare's confession of what two wasted years of married life in Stratford had done for him? It was ambition--desire of fame and new love--that drove the tired and discontented Shakespeare from Anne Hathaway's arms to London.

When his father tells Proteus he must to Court on the morrow, instead of showing indignation or obstinate resolve to outwit tyranny, he generalizes in Shakespeare's way, exactly as Romeo and Orsino generalize in poetic numbers:

"O, how this spring of love resembleth The uncertain glory of an April day."

Another reason for believing that this play deals with Shakespeare's own experiences is to be found in the curious change that takes place in Valentine. In the first act Valentine disdains love: he prefers to travel and win honour; but as soon as he reaches Milan and sees Silvia, he falls even more desperately in love than Proteus. What was the object, then, in making him talk so earnestly against love in the first act? It may be argued that Shakespeare intended merely to contrast the two characters in the first act; but he contrasts them in the first act on this matter of love, only in the second act to annul the distinction himself created. Moreover, and this is decisive, Valentine rails against love in the first act as one who has experienced love's utmost rage:

"To be In love: when scorn is bought with groans; coy looks, With heart-sore sighs; one fading moment's mirth, With twenty watchful, weary, tedious nights."

The man who speaks like this is not the man who despises love and prefers honour, but one who has already given himself to pa.s.sion with an absolute abandonment. Such inconsistencies and flaws in workmanship are in themselves trivial, but, from my point of view, significant; for whenever Shakespeare slips in drawing character, in nine cases out of ten he slips through dragging in his own personality or his personal experience, and not through carelessness, much less incompetence; his mistakes, therefore, nearly always throw light on his nature or on his life's story. From the beginning, too, Valentine like Shakespeare is a born lover.

As soon, moreover, as he has gone to the capital and fallen in love he becomes Shakespeare's avowed favourite. He finds Silvia's glove and cries:

"Sweet ornament that decks a thing divine--"

the exclamation reminding us of how Romeo talks of Juliet's glove. Like other men, Shakespeare learned life gradually, and in youth poverty of experience forces him to repeat his effects.

Again, when Valentine praises his friend Proteus to the Duke, we find a characteristic touch of Shakespeare. Valentine says:

"His years but young; but his experience old; His head unmellowed; but his judgement ripe."

In "The Merchant of Venice" Bellario, the learned doctor of Padua, praises Portia in similar terms:

"I never knew so young a body with so old a head."

But it is when Valentine confesses his love that Shakespeare speaks through him most clearly:

"Ay, Proteus, but that life is altered now, I have done penance for contemning love; - - - - - - - - - - For in revenge of my contempt of love Love hath chased sleep from my enthralled eyes And made them watchers of my own heart's sorrow.

O gentle Proteus, Love's a mighty lord,"--

and so on.

Every word in this confession is characteristic of the poet and especially the fact that his insomnia is due to love. Valentine then gives himself to pa.s.sionate praise of Silvia, and ends with the "She is alone" that recalls "She is all the beauty extant" of "The Two n.o.ble Kinsmen." Valentine the lover reminds us of Romeo as the sketch resembles the finished picture; when banished, he cries:

"And why not death, rather than living torment? To die is to be banished from myself; And Silvia is myself: banished from her, Is self from self; a deadly banishment. What light is light, if Silvia be not seen? What joy is joy, if Silvia be not by? Unless it be to think that she is by And feed upon the shadow of perfection. Except I be by Silvia in the night There is no music in the nightingale,"

and so forth. I might compare this with what Romeo says of his banishment, and perhaps infer from this two-fold treatment of the theme that Shakespeare left behind in Stratford some dark beauty who may have given Anne Hathaway good cause for jealous rage. It must not be forgotten here that Dryasdust tells us he was betrothed to another girl when Anne Hathaway's relations forced him to marry their kinswoman.

A moment later and this lover Valentine uses the very words that we found so characteristic in the mouth of the lover Orsino in Twelfth Night":

"O I have fed upon this woe already, And now excess of it will make me surfeit."

Valentine, indeed, shows us traits of nearly all Shakespeare's later lovers, and this seems to me interesting, because of course all the qualities were in the youth, which were later differenced into various characters. His advice to the Duke, who pretends to be in love, is far too ripe, too contemptuous-true, to suit the character of such a votary of fond desire as Valentine was; it is mellow with experience and man-of-the-world wisdom, and the last couplet of it distinctly fore-shadows Bened.i.c.k:

"Flatter and praise, commend, extol their graces; Though ne'er so black, say they have angels' faces.

That man that hath a tongue, I say, is no man If with his tongue he cannot win a woman."