William Shakespeare Part 19

"The sun ariseth in his majesty Who doth the world so gloriously behold, That cedar-tops and hills seem burnish'd gold."

It is full of the images of delicate quick-blooded things going swiftly and l.u.s.tily from the boiling of the April in them.

_The Rape of Lucrece._--This poem was published in 1594, with a dedication to the Earl of Southampton. Like so many of the works of Shakespeare, it describes at length the prompting, acting, and results of a treachery inspired by an obsession. Tarquin, hearing of Lucrece's chast.i.ty, longs to attempt her. Coming stealthily to her home, in her lord's absence, he foully ravishes her. She kills herself and he is banished from Rome. The subject is not unlike that of _Venus and Adonis_, with the s.e.xes reversed. In both poems the subject is s.e.xual obsession and its results.

_Lucrece_ is a wiser and a finer poem than _Venus and Adonis_. It is constructed with the art of a man familiar with the theatre. The delaying of the great moments so as to heighten the expectation, is contrived with rapturous energy. The poem is heaped and overflowing with the abundance of imaginative power. The wealth of the young man's mind is poured out like life in June.

It is strange that both Lucrece and Hamlet, in their moments of distraction, turn to the image of Troy blazing with the punishment of treachery.

_The Pa.s.sionate Pilgrim._--This little collection of poems was published in 1599, under Shakespeare's name, by William Jaggard, a dishonest bookseller. It contains poems by Richard Barnfield, Bartholomew Griffin, Christopher Marlowe, and one or more unknown hands. It also contains two genuine Shakespearean sonnets, three more from the text of _Love's Labour's Lost_, and three (less certainly his) on the subject of _Venus and Adonis_, which have the ring of his freshest youthful manner.

Whether any others in the collection be by Shakespeare can only be a matter of opinion. The nineteenth poem has a smack of his mind about it.

If it be by him it must be his earliest extant work.

_The Sonnets._--_Written_ between 1592 and 1609. _Published_ (piratically) 1609.

These personal poems have puzzled many readers. Many writers have tried to interpret them. Although their first editor tells us that they are "serene, cleare, and elegantlie plaine (with) no intricate and cloudie stuffe to trouble and perplex the intellect," much good and bad brain work has been spent on them. Some have held that they are poetical exercises. Others find that they are confessions. Others wrest from dark lines dark meanings, till they have laid bare a story from them. Others interpret spiritually. Others find evidence in them that Shakespeare was guilty of an abnormal form of pa.s.sion. The facts about them may be stated--

1. They are personal poems. Some of them are of great beauty; others are unsuccessful.

2. They were written in many moods. Some were written in a mood of the intensest tranquil ecstasy, others in a fit of earthly pa.s.sion, others in a trivial mood.

3. They were written to more than one person. Many were written to an attractive, handsome, young, unmarried man, Shakespeare's dear friend. Men with imagination enjoy sweeter and closer friendships than the many know. The many, mulish as ever, therefore imagine evil.

4. Some of the sonnets were written to a woman, of the kind described in two or three of the plays, viz. a black-haired, black-eyed, white-faced, witty wanton, false to her marriage vows and the cause of similar falseness in Shakespeare himself, and in his friend.

5. Many of them show that Shakespeare, loving this woman, against his better nature, was wilfully betrayed by her to all the devils of jealousy, craving and self-loathing, which follow the banner of lechery. Among the objects of the jealousy another poet figured.

No one knows who the friend, the lady and the rival poet were. The discovery of letters and ma.n.u.scripts may some day remove the mystery.

"Against that time, if ever that time come," men of intellect would do well to accept the sonnets as beautiful poems, and try to write as good ones to their wives.

Beautiful as many of the sonnets are, they are less wonderful achievements and less important to the soul of man than the plays. Few people thought much of them until the degradation of the English theatre had hidden from English minds the greater glory of the creative system.

That they are now widely read while the plays are seldom acted, is another proof that this age cares more for what was perishing and personal in Shakespeare than for that which went winging on, in the great light, surveying the eternal in man.

What Shakespeare thought of his perishing self is expressed in the n.o.blest of the sonnets. Two syllables are missing from the second line.

"Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth, ( ) these rebel powers that thee array, Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth, Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?

Why so large cost, having so short a lease, Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?

Shall worms, inheritors of this excess, Eat up thy charge? is this thy body's end?

Then, soul, live thou upon thy servant's loss, And let that pine to aggravate thy store; Buy terms divine with selling hours of dross; Within be fed, without be rich no more: So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men, And Death once dead, there's no more dying then."

The sonnets were piratically published in a quarto volume in 1609. At the end of the volume a narrative poem was printed, under the name _A Lover's Complaint_. It tells in the first person the story of a girl who has been seduced by a plausible villain. It is a work of Shakespeare's youth, fresh and felicitous as youth's work often is, and very nearly as empty.

_The Phoenix and The Turtle._--This strange, very beautiful poem was published in 1601 in an appendix to Robert Chester's _Love's Martyr, or Rosalin's Complaint_, to which several famous poets contributed. In dark and n.o.ble verse it describes a spiritual marriage, suddenly ended by death. It is too strange to be the fruit of a human sorrow. It is the work of a great mind trying to express in unusual symbols a thought too subtle and too intense to be expressed in any other way. Spiritual ecstasy is the only key to work of this kind. To the reader without that key it can only be so many strange words set in a n.o.ble rhythm for no apparent cause.

Poetry moves in many ways. It may glorify and make spiritual some action of man, or it may give to thoughts such life as thoughts can have, an intenser and stranger life than man knows, with forms that are not human and a speech unintelligible to normal human moods. This poem gives to a flock of thoughts about the pa.s.sing of truth and beauty the mystery and vitality of birds, who come from a far country, to fill the mind with their crying.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Shakespeare's plays were printed carelessly, often from imperfect, torn, ill-written or stolen copies. When printed, they were seldom corrected.

When reprinted, the original errors were often made much worse. Thus, "he met the night-mare," or "a met the night-mare," in the original ma.n.u.script, was printed "a nellthu night more," and reprinted "anelthu night Moore." Those who lightly read the modern editions seldom know that years of mental toil went to the preparation of the texts so easily read to-day.

Many English minds have paid tribute to Shakespeare. Few of them deserve more praise than the Cambridge Editors, whose six years of labour cleared the text of countless errors and corruptions. The correction of a corrupt text by collation and conjecture, is one of the most difficult and least amusing tasks that a fine mind can have. The Cambridge _Shakespeare_, the work of William George Clark and Dr. William Aldis Wright, gives a text not likely to be improved until the poet's corrected ma.n.u.scripts are found.

The _Life of William Shakespeare_ has been ably written by Dr. Sidney Lee, whose judgment equals his learning.

Some of the dramatic methods of Shakespeare have been n.o.bly studied by Dr. A. C. Bradley in his _Shakespearean Tragedy_.

To these books and to the Shakespearean Essays in Mr. W. B. Yeats's _Ideas of Good and Evil_, I am deeply indebted, as all modern students of Shakespeare must be.

Our knowledge of Shakespeare is imperfect. It can only be increased by minute and patient study, by the rejection of surmise about him, and by the constant public playing of his plays, in the Shakespearean manner, by actors who will neither mutilate nor distort what the great mind strove to make just.

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EDITORS:

PROF. GILBERT MURRAY, D.Litt., LL.D., F.B.A.

HERBERT FISHER, M.A., F.B.A.

PROF. J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A.

PROF. WM. T. BREWSTER, M.A.

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