The Man Shakespeare and His Tragic Life Story Part 35

"He words me, girls, he words me that I should not Be n.o.ble to myself."

She holds to her heroic resolve; she will never be degraded before the base Roman public; she will not see

"Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness."

It is, perhaps, worth noting here that Shakespeare lends Cleopatra, as he afterwards lent Coriola.n.u.s, his own delicate senses and neuropathic loathing for mechanic slaves with "greasy ap.r.o.ns" and "thick breaths rank of gross diet"; it is Shakespeare too and not Cleopatra who speaks of death as bringing "liberty." In "Cymbeline," Shakespeare's mask Posthumus dwells on the same idea. But these lapses are momentary; the superb declaration that follows is worthy of the queen:

"My resolution's placed, and I have nothing Of woman in me: now from head to foot I am marble-constant; now the fleeting moon No planet is of mine."

The scene with the clown who brings the "pretty worm" is the solid ground of reality on which Cleopatra rests for a breathing s.p.a.ce before rising into the blue:

"_Cleo_. Give me my robe, put on my crown; I have Immortal longings in me. Now no more The juice of Egypt's grape shall moist this lip.-- Yare, yare, good Iras! quick.--Methinks I hear Antony call; I see him rouse himself To praise my n.o.ble act; I hear him mock The luck of Caesar, which the G.o.ds give men To excuse their after-wrath. Husband, I come, Now to that name my courage prove my t.i.tle!

I am fire and air; my other elements I give to baser life."

The whole speech is miraculous in speed of mounting emotion, and when Iras dies first, this Cleopatra finds again the perfect word in which truth and beauty meet:

"This proves me base: If she first meet the curled Antony He'll make demand of her, and spend that kiss Which is my heaven to have. Come, thou mortal wretch, [_To the asp, which she applies to her breast_.]

With thy sharp teeth this knot intrinsicate Of life at once untie: poor venomous fool, Be angry, and despatch. O, could'st thou speak, That I might hear thee call great Caesar, a.s.s Unpolicied!"

The characteristic high temper of Mary Fitton breaking out again--"a.s.s unpolicied"--and then the end:

"Peace, peace!

Dost thou not see my baby at my breast, That sucks the nurse asleep?"

The final touch is of soft pleasure:

"As sweet a balm, as soft as air, as gentle,-- Antony!--Nay, I will take thee too.

[_Applying another asp to her arm_.]

What should I stay--"

For ever fortunate in her self-inflicted death Cleopatra thereby frees herself from the ignominy of certain of her actions: she is woman at once and queen, and if she cringes lower than other women, she rises, too, to higher levels than other women know. The historical fact of her self-inflicted death forced the poet to make false Cressid a Cleopatra--and his wanton gipsy-mistress was at length redeemed by a pa.s.sion of heroic resolve. The majority of critics are still debating whether indeed Cleopatra is the "dark lady" of the sonnets or not.

Professor Dowden puts forward the theory as a daring conjecture; but the ident.i.ty of the two cannot be doubted. It is impossible not to notice that Shakespeare makes Cleopatra, who was a fair Greek, gipsy-dark like his sonnet-heroine. He says, too, of the "dark lady" of the sonnets:

"Whence hast thou this becoming of things ill, That in the very refuse of thy deeds There is such strength and warrantise of skill, That, in my mind, thy worst all best exceeds?"

En.o.barbus praises Cleopatra in precisely the same words:

"Vilest things, Become themselves in her."

Antony, too, uses the same expression:

"Fie, wrangling queen!

Whom everything becomes--to chide, to laugh, To weep; whose every pa.s.sion fully strives To make itself, in thee, fair and admired."

These professors have no distinct mental image of the "dark lady" or of Cleopatra, or they would never talk of "daring conjecture" in regard to this simple identification. The points of likeness are numberless.

Ninety-nine poets and dramatists out of a hundred would have followed Plutarch and made Cleopatra's love for Antony the mainspring of her being, the _causa causans_ of her self-murder. Shakespeare does not do this; he allows the love of Antony to count with her, but it is imperious pride and hatred of degradation that compel his Cleopatra to embrace the Arch-fear. And just this same quality of pride is attributed to the "dark lady." Sonnet 131 begins:

"Thou art as tyrannous, so as thou art, As those whose beauties proudly make them cruel."

Both are women of infinite cunning and small regard for faith or truth; hearts steeled with an insane pride, and violent tempers suited with scolding slanderous tongues. Prolonged a.n.a.lysis is not needed. A point of seeming difference between them establishes their ident.i.ty. Cleopatra is beautiful, "a la.s.s unparalleled," as Charmian calls her, and accordingly we can believe that all emotions became her, and that when hopping on the street or pretending to die she was alike be-witching; beauty has this magic. But how can all things become a woman who is not beautiful, whose face some say "hath not the power to make love groan,"

who cannot even blind the senses with desire? And yet the "dark lady" of the sonnets who is thus described, has the "powerful might" of personality in as full measure as Egypt's queen. The point of seeming unlikeness is as convincing as any likeness could be; the peculiarities of both women are the same and spring from the same dominant quality.

Cleopatra is cunning, wily, faithless, pa.s.sionately unrestrained in speech and proud as Lucifer, and so is the sonnet-heroine. We may be sure that the faithlessness, scolding, and mad vanity of his mistress were defects in Shakespeare's eyes as in ours; these, indeed, were "the things ill" which nevertheless became her. What Shakespeare loved in her was what he himself lacked or possessed in lesser degree--that daemonic power of personality which he makes En.o.barbus praise in Cleopatra and which he praises directly in the sonnet-heroine. En.o.barbus says of Cleopatra:

"I saw her once Hop forty paces through the public street, And, having lost her breath, she spoke and panted, That she did make defect perfection, And, breathless, power breathe forth."

One would be willing to wager that Shakespeare is here recalling a performance of his mistress; but it is enough for my purpose now to draw attention to the unexpectedness of the attribute "power." The sonnet fastens on the same word:

"O, from what power hast thou this powerful might With insufficiency my heart to sway?"

In the same sonnet he again dwells upon her "strength": she was bold, too, to unreason, and of unbridled tongue, for, "twice forsworn herself," she had yet urged his "amiss," though guilty of the same fault. What he admired most in her was force of character. Perhaps the old saying held in her case: _ex forti dulcedo_; perhaps her confident strength had abandonments more flattering and complete than those of weaker women; perhaps in those moments her forceful dark face took on a soulful beauty that entranced his exquisite susceptibility; perhaps--but the suppositions are infinite.

Though a lover and possessed by his mistress Shakespeare was still an artist. In the sonnets he brings out her overbearing will, boldness, pride--the elemental force of her nature; in the play, on the other hand, while just mentioning her "power," he lays the chief stress upon the cunning wiles and faithlessness of her whose trade was love. But just as Cleopatra has power, so there can be no doubt of the wily cunning--"the warrantise of skill"--of the sonnet-heroine, and no doubt her faithlessness was that "just cause of hate" which Shakespeare bemoaned.

It is worth while here to notice his perfect comprehension of the powers and limits of the different forms of his art. Just as he has used the sonnets in order to portray certain intimate weaknesses and maladies of his own nature that he could not present dramatically without making his hero ridiculously effeminate, so also he used the sonnets to convey to us the domineering will and strength of his mistress--qualities which if presented dramatically would have seemed masculine-monstrous.

By taking the sonnets and the play together we get an excellent portrait of Shakespeare's mistress. In person she was probably tall and vain of her height, as Cleopatra is vain of her superiority in this respect to Octavia, with dark complexion, black eyebrows and hair, and pitch-black eyes that mirrored emotion as the lakelet mirrors the ever-changing skies; her cheeks are "damask'd white"; her breath fragrant with health, her voice melodious, her movements full of dignity--a superb gipsy to whom beauty may be denied but not distinction.

If we have a very good idea of her person we have a still better idea of her mind and soul. I must begin by stating that I do not accept implicitly Shakespeare's angry declarations that his mistress was a mere strumpet. A nature of great strength and pride is seldom merely wanton; but the fact stands that Shakespeare makes a definite charge of faithlessness against his mistress; she is, he tells us, "the bay where all men ride"; no "several plot," but "the wide world's common place."

The accusation is most explicit. But if it were well founded why should he devote two sonnets (135 and 136) to imploring her to be as liberal as the sea and to receive his love-offering as well as the tributes of others?

"Among a number one is reckon'd none Then in the number let me pa.s.s untold."

It is plain that Mistress Fitton drew away from Shakespeare after she had given herself to his friend, and this fact throws some doubt upon his accusations of utter wantonness. A true "daughter of the game," as he says in "Troilus and Cressida," is nothing but "a s.l.u.ttish spoil of opportunity" who falls to Troilus or to Diomedes in turn, knowing no reserve. It must be reckoned to the credit of Mary Fitton, or to her pride, that she appears to have been faithful to her lover for the time being, and able to resist even the solicitings of Shakespeare. But her desires seem to have been her sole restraint, and therefore we must add an extraordinary lewdness to that strength, pride, and pa.s.sionate temper which Shakespeare again and again attributes to her. Her boldness is so reckless that she shows her love for his friend even before Shakespeare's face; she knows no pity in her pa.s.sion, and always defends herself by attacking her accuser. But she is cunning in love's ways and dulls Shakespeare's resentment with "I don't hate you." Unwilling perhaps to lose her empire over him and to forego the sweetness of his honeyed flatteries, she blinded him to her faults by occasional caresses. Yet this creature, with the soul of a strumpet, the tongue of a fishwife and the "proud heart" of a queen, was the crown and flower of womanhood to Shakespeare, his counterpart and ideal. Hamlet in love with Cleopatra, the poet lost in desire of the wanton--that is the tragedy of Shakespeare's life.

In this wonderful world of ours great dramatic writers are sure to have dramatic lives. Again and again in his disgrace Antony cries:

"Whither hast thou led me, Egypt?"

Shakespeare's pa.s.sion for Mary Fitton led him to shame and madness and despair; his strength broke down under the strain and he never won back again to health. He paid the price of pa.s.sion with his very blood. It is Shakespeare and not Antony who groans:

"O this false soul of Egypt! this grave charm,-- - - - - - - - - - - Like a right gipsy, hath, at fast and loose, Beguil'd me to the very heart of loss."

Shakespeare's love for Mary Fitton is to me one of the typical tragedies of life--a symbol for ever. In its progress through the world genius is inevitably scourged and crowned with thorns and done to death; inevitably, I say, for the vast majority of men hate and despise what is superior to them: Don Quixote, too, was trodden into the mire by the swine. But the worst of it is that genius suffers also through its own excess; is bound, so to speak, to the stake of its own pa.s.sionate sensibilities, and consumed, as with fire.

CHAPTER XI. THE DRAMA OF MADNESS: "LEAR"

Ever since Lessing and Goethe it has been the fashion to praise Shakespeare as a demi-G.o.d; whatever he wrote is taken to be the rose of perfection. This senseless hero-worship, which reached idolatry in the superlatives of the "Encyclopaedia Britannica" and elsewhere in England, was certain to provoke reaction, and the reaction has come to vigorous expression in Tolstoi, who finds nothing to praise in any of Shakespeare's works, and everything to blame in most of them, especially in "Lear." Lamb and Coleridge, on the other hand, have praised "Lear" as a world's masterpiece. Lamb says of it:

"While we read it, we see not Lear; but we are Lear,--we are in his mind, we are sustained by a grandeur which baffles the malice of daughters and storms; in the aberrations of his reason we discover a mighty irregular power of reasoning, immethodised from the ordinary purposes of life, but exerting its powers, as the wind bloweth where it listeth, at will upon the corruptions and abuses of mankind."

Coleridge calls "Lear," "the open and ample playground of Nature's pa.s.sions."

These dithyrambs show rather the lyrical power of the writers than the thing described.