The Man Shakespeare and His Tragic Life Story Part 29

"Repent what's past; avoid what is to come; And do not spread the compost on the weeds To make them ranker....

a.s.sume a virtue if you have it not...."

In his description of the king and queen we get Shakespeare's view of Lord Herbert and Miss Fitton: the king (Herbert) is "mildew'd" and foul in comparison with his modest poet-rival--"A satyr to Hyperion."

Hamlet's view of his mother (Miss Fitton), though bitterer still, is yet the bitterness of disappointed love: he will have her repent, refrain from the adultery, and be pure and good again. When the Queen asks:

"What shall I do?"

Hamlet answers:

"Not this, by no means, that I bid you do: Let the king tempt you again to bed; Pinch wanton on your cheek; call you his mouse; And let him, for a pair of reechy kisses, Or paddling in your neck with his d.a.m.ned fingers...."

Maddened with jealousy he sees the act, scourges himself with his own lewd imagining as Posthumus scourges himself. No one ever felt this intensity of jealous rage about a mother or a sister. The mere idea is absurd; it is one's own pa.s.sion-torture that speaks in such words as I have here quoted.

Hamlet's treatment of Ophelia, too, and his advice to her are all the outcome of Shakespeare's own disappointment:

"Get thee to a nunnery: why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?"

We all expect from Hamlet some outburst of divine tenderness to Ophelia; but the scenes with the pure and devoted girl whom he is supposed to love are not half realized, are nothing like so intense as the scenes with the guilty mother. It is jealousy that is blazing in Shakespeare at this time, and not love; when Hamlet speaks to the Queen we hear Shakespeare speaking to his own faithless, guilty love. Besides, Ophelia is not even realized; she is submissive affection, an abstraction, and not a character. Shakespeare did not take interest enough in her to give her flesh and blood.

Shakespeare's jealousy and excessive sensuality come to full light in the scene between Hamlet and Ophelia, when they are about to witness the play before the king: he persists in talking s.m.u.t to her, which she pretends not to understand. The lewdness, we all feel, is out of place in "Hamlet," horribly out of place when Hamlet is talking to Ophelia, but Shakespeare's sensuality has been stung to ecstasy by Miss Fitton's frailty, and he cannot but give it voice. As soon as Ophelia goes out of her mind she, too, becomes coa.r.s.e--all of which is but a witness to Shakespeare's tortured animality. Yet Goethe can talk of Hamlet's "pure and most moral nature." A goat is hardly less pure, though Hamlet was moral enough in the high sense of the word.

There are one or two minor questions still to be considered, and the chief of these is how far, even in this moment of disillusion, did our Shakespeare see himself as he was? Hamlet says:

"I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious; with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in,

imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do crawling between heaven and earth? We are arrant knaves, all; believe none of us."

All this is mere rhetoric, and full of clever self-excusing. Hamlet is not very revengeful or very ambitious; he is weakly-irresolute, and excessively sensual, with all the faults that accompany these frailties.

Even at this moment, when he must know that he is not very revengeful, that forgiveness were easier to him, Shakespeare will pose to himself, and call himself revengeful: he is such an idealist that he absolutely refuses to see himself as he is. In later dramas we shall find that he grows to deeper self-knowledge. Hamlet is but the half-way house to complete understanding.

Fortunately we have each of us an infallible touchstone by which we can judge of our love of truth. Any of us, man or woman, would rather be accused of a mental than a physical shortcoming. Do we see our bodily imperfections as they are? Can we describe ourselves pitilessly with snub nose, or coa.r.s.e beak, bandy legs or thin shanks; gross paunch or sedgy beard? Shakespeare in Hamlet can hardly bear even to suggest his physical imperfections. Hamlet lets out inadvertently that he was fat, but he will not say so openly. His mother says to Hamlet:

"You are fat and scant of breath."

Many people, especially actors, have been so determined to see Hamlet as slight and student-like, that they have tried to criticize this phrase, and one of them, Mr. Beerbohm Tree, even in our day, went so far as to degrade the text to "faint and scant of breath." But the fatness is there, and comes to view again in another phrase of Hamlet:

"O, that this too, too solid flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew."

No thin man ever spoke of his flesh in that way. Shakespeare was probably small, too. We know that he used to play Adam in "As You Like it," and in the play Orlando has to take Adam up and carry him off the stage, a thing no actor would attempt if the Adam had been a big man.

Shakespeare was probably of middle height, or below it, and podgy. I always picture him to myself as very like Swinburne. Yet even in Hamlet he would make himself out to be a devil of a fellow: "valiant Hamlet," a swordsman of the finest, a superb duellist, who can touch Laertes again and again, though lacking practice. At the last push of fate Shakespeare will pose and deceive himself.

It is curiously characteristic of Shakespeare that when Hamlet broods on retaliation he does not brood like a brave man, who gloats on challenging his enemy to a fair fight, and killing him by sheer force or resolution; his pa.s.sion, his revenge, is almost that of an Italian bravo. Not once does Hamlet think of forcing the king (Herbert) to a duel; he goes about with ideas of a.s.sa.s.sination, and not of combat.

"Now might I do it pat"

he cries as he sees the king praying; and he does not do it because he would thus send the king's soul to Heaven--shrill wordy intensity to excuse want of nerve. Whenever we get under the skin, it is Shakespeare's femininity which startles us.

One cannot leave this great picture of Hamlet-Shakespeare without noticing one curious fact, which throws a flood of light on the relations of literary art to life. Shakespeare, as we have seen, is boiling with jealous pa.s.sion, brooding continually on murderous revenge, and so becomes conscious of his own irresolution. He dwells on this, and makes this irresolution the chief feature of Hamlet's character, and yet because he is writing about himself he manages to suggest so many other qualities, and such amiable and n.o.ble ones, that we are all in love with Hamlet, in spite of his irresolution, erotic mania and b.l.o.o.d.y thoughts.

In later dramas Shakespeare went on to deal with the deeper and more elemental things in his nature, with jealousy in "Oth.e.l.lo," and pa.s.sionate desire in "Antony and Cleopatra"; but he never, perhaps, did much better work than in this drama where he chooses to magnify a secondary and ancillary weakness into the chief defect of his whole being. The pathos of the drama is to be found in the fact that Shakespeare realizes he is unable to take personal vengeance on Herbert.

"Hamlet" is a drama of pathetic weakness, strengthened by a drama of revenge and jealousy. In these last respects it is a preparatory study for "Oth.e.l.lo."

In "Hamlet" Shakespeare let out some of the foul matter which Herbert's mean betrayal had bred in him. Even in "Hamlet," however, his pa.s.sion for Mary Fitton, and his jealousy of her, const.i.tute the real theme. We shall soon see how this pa.s.sion coloured all the rest of his life and art, and at length brought about his ruin.

CHAPTER VIII. DRAMAS OF REVENGE AND JEALOUSY: PART II "OTh.e.l.lO"

There is perhaps no single drama which throws such light on Shakespeare and his method of work as "Oth.e.l.lo": it is a long conflict between the artist in him and the man, and, in the struggle, both his artistic ideals and his pa.s.sionate soul come to clearest view. From it we see that Shakespeare's nature gave itself gradually to jealousy and revenge.

The fire of his pa.s.sion burned more and more fiercely for years; was infinitely hotter in 1604, when "Oth.e.l.lo" was written, than it had been when "Julius Caesar" was written in 1600. This proves to me that Shakespeare's connection with Mary Fitton did not come to an end when he first discovered her unfaithfulness. The intimacy continued for a dozen years. In Sonnet 136 he prays her to allow him to be one of her lovers.

That she was liberal enough to consent appears clearly from the growth of pa.s.sion in his plays. It is certain, too, that she went on deceiving him with other lovers, or his jealousy would have waned away, ebbing with fulfilled desire. But his pa.s.sion increases in intensity from 1597 to 1604, whipped no doubt to ecstasy by continual deception and wild jealousy. Both l.u.s.t and jealousy swing to madness in "Oth.e.l.lo," But Shakespeare was so great an artist that, when he took the story from Cinthio, he tried to realize it without bringing in his own personality: hence a conflict between his art and his pa.s.sion.

At first sight "Oth.e.l.lo" reminds one of a picture by t.i.tian or Veronese; it is a romantic conception; the personages are all in gala dress; the struggle between Iago and the Moor is melodramatic; the whole picture aglow with a superb richness of colour. It is Shakespeare's finest play, his supreme achievement as a playwright. It is impossible to read "Oth.e.l.lo" without admiring the art of it. The beginning is so easy: the introduction of the chief characters so measured and impressive that when the action really begins, it develops and increases in speed as by its own weight to the inevitable end; inevitable--for the end in this case is merely the resultant of the shock of these various personalities. But if the action itself is superbly ordered, the painting of character leaves much to be desired, as we shall see. There is one notable difference between "Oth.e.l.lo" and those dramas, "Hamlet,"

"Macbeth," and "Cymbeline," wherein Shakespeare has depicted himself as the protagonist. In the self-revealing dramas not only does Shakespeare give his hero licence to talk, in and out of season, and thus hinder the development of the story, but he also allows him to occupy the whole stage without a compet.i.tor. The explanation is obvious enough. Dramatic art is to be congratulated on the fact that now and then Shakespeare left himself for a little out of the play, for then not only does the construction of the play improve, but the play grows in interest through the encounter of evenly-matched antagonists. The first thing we notice in "Oth.e.l.lo" is that Iago is at least as important a character as the hero himself. "Hamlet," on the other hand, is almost a lyric; there is no counterpoise to the student-prince.

Now let us get to the play itself. Oth.e.l.lo's first appearance in converse with Iago in the second scene of the first act does not seem to me to deserve the praise that has been lavished on it. Though Oth.e.l.lo knows that "boasting is (not) an honour," he nevertheless boasts himself of royal blood. We have noticed already Shakespeare's love of good blood, and belief in its wondrous efficacy; it is one of his permanent and most characteristic traits. The pa.s.sage about royal descent might be left out with advantage; if these three lines are omitted, Oth.e.l.lo's pride in his own nature--his "parts and perfect soul"--is far more strongly felt. But such trivial flaws are forgotten when Brabantio enters and swords are drawn.

"Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them."

is excellent in its contemptuous irony. A little later, however, Oth.e.l.lo finds an expression which is intensely characteristic of a great man of action:

"Hold your hands, Both you of my inclining, and the rest; Were it my cue to fight, I should have known it Without a prompter."

This last line and a half is addressed especially to Iago who is bent on provoking a fight, and is, I think, the best piece of character-painting in all "Oth.e.l.lo"; the born general knows instinctively the moment to attack just as the trained boxer's hand strikes before he consciously sees the opening. When Oth.e.l.lo speaks before the Duke, too, he reveals himself with admirable clearness and truth to nature. His pride is so deep-rooted, his self-respect so great, that he respects all other dignitaries: the Senators are his "very n.o.ble and approved good masters." Every word weighed and effectual. Admirable, too, is the expression "round unvarnished tale."

But pride and respect for others' greatness are not qualities peculiar to the man of action; they belong to all men of ability. As soon as Oth.e.l.lo begins to tell how he won Desdemona, he falls out of his character. Feeling certain that he has placed his hero before us in strong outlines, Shakespeare lets himself go, and at once we catch him speaking and not Oth.e.l.lo. In "antres vast and deserts idle" I hear the poet, and when the verse swings to--

".... men whose heads Do grow beneath their shoulders,"

it is plain that Oth.e.l.lo, the lord and lover of realities, has deserted the firm ground of fact. But Shakespeare pulls himself in almost before he has yielded to the charm of his own words, and again Oth.e.l.lo speaks:

"This to hear Would Desdemona seriously incline, But still the house-affairs would draw her thence,

and so forth.

The temptation, however, was overpowering, and again Shakespeare yields to it:

"And often did beguile her of her tears When I did speak of some distressful stroke That my youth suffered."

It is a characteristic of the man of action that he thinks lightly of reverses; he loves hard buffets as a swimmer high waves, and when he tells his life-story he does not talk of his "distress." This "distressful stroke that my youth suffered" is manifestly pure Shakespeare--tender-hearted Shakespeare, who pitied himself and the distressful strokes his youth suffered very profoundly. The characterization of Oth.e.l.lo in the rest of this scene is anything but happy. He talks too much; I miss the short sharp words which would show the man used to command, and not only does he talk too much, but he talks in images like a poet, and exaggerates:

"The tyrant Custom, most grave senators, Hath made the flinty and steel couch of war My thrice-driven bed of down."

Even the matter here is insincere; this is the poet's explanation of the Captain's preference for a hard bed and hard living: "has been accustomed to it," says Shakespeare, not understanding that there are born hunter and soldier natures who absolutely prefer hardships to effeminate luxury. Oth.e.l.lo's next speech is just as bad; he talks too much of things particular and private, and the farther he goes, the worse he gets, till we again hear the poet speaking, or rather mouthing: