Charles David Stewart

“ Whatever Shakespeare's meaning may be, the word has some figurative application which is more illuminating.
Let us turn next to "All's Well that Ends Well." The chaste Diana, whose Italian upbringing, like Juliet's, has made womanly modesty the one great meaning of life to her, finds herself contemplating a crucial moment. She is dealing with Bertram under circumstances of secrecy; their relations, if Bertram has his way, are to be by stealth. Certain words rise to her lips as she contemplates the step of deserting her colors and leaving her girlhood forever behind her. ”

“ She and Romeo have been secretly married, and in the evening of that same day we see her waiting, in a transport of anticipation, among the orchard trees. The blood has mounted to her cheeks as she sees her girlhood about to be relinquished; she has a lively sense of the too garish day; and being so modest she wishes night to fall speedily so that her own eyes may wink, or be blinded ”

“ This means simply the taking of arms against self—suicide; for not by any such opposition to others could his troubles be conquered. But by death, if it brings oblivion, the dagger can conquer all. It might be easy enough to kill a king. But the only way to really wipe a man out of existence is to kill yourself. ”

“ For there truth-telling is a complicate matter which goes on in the open; the conscientiousness is evident. And if the reservations would seem, from the teller's private point of view, to detract, candidly, from the importance of the other person, the statement becomes all the more effective as flattery, for he must indeed be an honest soul who would go so far as openly to take away anything from his meed of praise. ”

“ Polonius, by his way of putting it, very conscientiously denies the king a certain power of possession over him. He does not owe his soul to him. That he owes to his God. It would seem, to the person addressed, that anything so conscientious, even at the risk of coming close to detraction, could not be inspired by any mere motives of flattery. Polonius has thought aloud, as it were, and his honest mind has produced this reservation. And yet the reservation is, in fact, no detraction at all, for what King could possibly object to a man's owing his soul to his God? ”

“ In the outcome Shakespeare emphasizes the fact that though a government may have any number of laws, true justice and the public welfare are, after all, dependent upon the character and insight of those who hold the reins of authority.
In a good public officer three things are necessary—power, intellect and character. A man may have great intellectual ability but it will avail him little in a public position if he have not the authority or power to put his ideas into practice. ”

“ This state of affairs is rather embarrassing to one who would fain come forth and invite the world to re-study Shakespeare with him. It is difficult enough to state the cruxes, with which the human mind seems to have gone completely astray, in a way that will make them simple, without having to struggle against the preconception that one is simply working in ambitious ignorance. ”

“ Polonius, who is not entirely a fool and is not intended as such, has assiduously built up for himself a character of wisdom, of weighty mentality and acute and subtle insight, and he has attained to a court office in that capacity. He is a diplomat, the king's professional adviser. As a matter of fact, however, the everyday run of affairs at court does not make very frequent call for his profound services; there is not enough occasion to keep his reputation with the king always to the fore. Therefore he is always watching for the smallest opportunity to make an impression. ”

“ Shakespeare has kept in mind certain subtle truths regarding human nature, and by choosing Polonius to put them in practice he has kept the wily and doddering old diplomat delightfully in character. There are certain fundamental facts in human nature which I would advise anyone to study who wishes to become an adept in the art of flattery.
First. If you wish to flatter anyone in reality, you must seem to be telling the truth; and no form of truth-telling is so convincing as that of making reservations. ”

“ A fine distinction serves the purpose, for it is the very nature of conscientious thought to observe distinctions and differences. It is by making mental corrections and verbal qualifications that truth is arrived at. And so, when we have a character like Polonius, we may expect to see flattery swim in her own native element. What he has to say is really very simple—He owes his duty to his king as he owes his soul to God. He starts out in a way that would seem quite spontaneous and natural—I owe my duty as I owe my soul ”

“ Nothing gives the appearance of honest truth-telling so much as the taking of a statement that, upon second thought, you find too large for exact verity and then trimming it down conscientiously to the size of the truth itself. ”

“ Lear had been anything but shrewd all through his life; and the mind always likes to think itself that which it is not. But instantly there is a reaction and he is the old mandatory Lear who knows nothing but power—"there's my gauntlet; I'll prove it on a giant." And finally he ends with thinking himself very shrewd indeed—"when the thunder would not peace at my bidding; there I found 'em, there I smelt 'em out." This passage is a study of mind, character and personal history. The unbalanced mind, as Shakespeare shows it, does not lack idea; it lacks continuity of thought. ”

“ We see the dewdrop thrown forth to evaporate—so light a trifle is love. The words airy air are what the careless hand follows as it swings idly on the wrist. As there is a contrast in pictorial idea between the strong lion and the inert pendent dewdrop, so there is contrast between the forceful half of the gesture and the part that deals with air ”

“ The whole soliloquy, "To be or not to be," is engaged solely with the subject of forgetting. That is to say, not with mere death, as ordinarily understood, but with oblivion. Hamlet's one great desire was to forget. The only way to forget is to die. ”

“ Polonius, with his usual way of making fine distinctions, comes before the king and says:—"I hold my duty as I hold my soul; both to my God, one to my gracious king." In other words, Polonius holds or owes both his soul and his duty to his God, whereas he holds but one of them, his duty, to his king. For it would be manifestly absurd to tell a king that you owe your soul to him in the same sense that you owe it to the Creator. The king would not be very strongly convinced of your sincerity. ”

“ In a democracy, the people must have these qualities in order to choose officers rightly; in a monarchy, such as Shakespeare is considering, these must be the qualities of the ruler himself if government is to prosper—power, intellect and character. ”

“ He is all courtliness and clothes. But as to intellect, his mind is a mere collection of bizarre phrases and knightly notions by which he affects the much-travelled courtier and man of wars. To Costard he would naturally seem the very paragon of ladies' men. ”

“ We should at least catch the spirit of the comparison and remember that woman is bound and circumscribed by the strongest barriers of custom and education and the very instincts of her finer nature to regard her womanhood as a trust, a thing to which she is bound as a nun to her convent or a sailor to his ship. I have said that the scar, being secluded, implies secrecy. ”

“ They see the world, as we all do, in the light of self. This is very strongly brought out in Lear when he addresses the storm as being concerned wholly with his own interests; but it is the same in all of Shakespeare's work. He brings out always that we see the world through our own eyes; the universe takes on the immediate hue of the speaker's thoughts in regard to self. In the above passage we see suddenly that Juliet is regarding the universe in the light of a bed! ”

“ Now what sort of man is Boyet? He is the French nobleman who accompanied the Princess and her ladies to England. The conductor of such a party is, of course, your complete ladies' man; and as we see in this scene particularly, he has a nimble wit in their playful encounters with him.
It is into one of these wit encounters that the simple-minded swain, Costard, finds himself projected. It is a hunting scene consisting of the Princess and the ladies of her train. Excepting the huntsman who acts as their guide, the only representative of the stronger sex is Boyet. ”

“ Lear's one great lesson had been that his followers were self-seeking flatterers; they did not tell him the truth about himself. A man who will say ay or no to anything whatever, according as his interest lies, is simply a liar; and lying is no good divinity. A "clothier's yard" does not refer to a particular sort of yard as a standard of measurement; it is the distance from the tip of the nose to the end of the thumb when the arm is stretched out sidewise. ”

“ She is contemplating actual darkness in the oncoming of night, from which it will be seen that her having merely run away from home for a while that day does not apply with any sense to her present vein of thought. ”

“ It must be evident however that any ingenious effort with exclamation points, periods and commas must be vain so long as we remain in the dark as to the sense of the one word which gives the point of view of the whole passage. As so much of the text is involved, and that in the eloquent climactic passage where Juliet expectantly awaits the coming of the husband she has just married, it is a point that will be well worth settling permanently.
In starting out, let us keep one fact to the fore: Shakespeare was always true to human nature in any set of circumstances. ”

“ When we see the word scar in con- nection with a rope it would seem that there could be little doubt as what sort of a scar it was; and still less as to what the rope was there for.
While we should conceive Shakespeare's figures of speech as pictorially as our imagina- tion will allow, I do not mean to insist that the reader shall confine himself to the exact details I have used to bring forth the meaning. Shakespeare does not need to go into details; he touches off the imagination with the few vital words which will enforce the idea in its principal aspects. ”

“ If Antony, the triple pillar of the world, commanded a man to sum up his message quickly, it is safe to say that he would make some attempt to do so. But the messenger does not respond. Then, too, if Antony is here supposed to be asking for the sum of the news he must have some intention of listening. But Cleopatra immediately says, "Nay, hear them, Antony." He not only shows no indication of having made such an inquiry of the messenger, but he continues to ignore his presence even when Cleopatra tries later to get him to give audience. ”

“ As she expresses it, she is in a pass where "we" (meaning women generally) "forsake ourselves." Now forsake certainly means to desert or give up what we feel ought to be clung to; and so, reading this "All's Well" passage in the strict light of the context we find one of Shakespeare's women regarding herself, in connection with the giving up of her principles of maidenhood, as a deserter or runaway. It is very apt and luminous of her inner life. In "Romeo and Juliet" we see Shakespeare dealing with a young Italian girl of the same type of womanhood. ”

“ And when Boyet gracefully withdraws from Maria's parting shot and Costard is left standing alone, he is mightily puffed up with the idea that he and the ladies have vanquished such a personage as Boyet. It is right in this connection that the stubborn passage comes.
What Costard now does is very natural. Like all of us he wishes to set full value upon the qualities of the enemy, for thus we magnify our own prowess in the encounter. He therefore sets about characterizing Boyet, who, as we have seen, is both a fine courtier and a wit ”

“ On the other hand, a man may be in a position of absolute authority and have any amount of brains, and yet his influence for good will still be dependent upon his moral character—his personal nature or " worth" as Shakespeare calls it ”

“ In Furness' Variorum edition of the play, a crown octavo volume, twenty-eight pages of fine print are devoted to a review of the attempts that have been made to clear up the meaning; it occupies, in fact, the whole index to the play. The question which has been so long argued is—What does the "runaways" of the First Folio mean? And should it be printed runaway's or runaways'? In what sense also, or in what connection, is this winking to be understood?
Gollancz says that runaways' eyes is "the main difficulty of the passage, which has been, perhaps, the greatest crux or puzzle in Shakespeare." ”

“ That moment he is thinking of war; he has enlisted or impressed a soldier, and the soldier does not draw the bow to suit him. Suddenly his mind jumps to "Peace, peace; this piece of toasted cheese will do 't." The very opposite of military power, brute force, is the small shrewdness of catching a mouse. ”

“ He did not deal in elaborate mythological allusions and ingenious figures of speech in and for themselves; his expressions are such as will throw the deepest and most searching light upon the human heart, and that with an especial regard for the character speaking. Second: he does not jump quickly from one figure of speech to another with such mere liveliness of fancy as many critics think. ”

“ We find her modesty accentuated by having her look forward to the time when "strange love, grown bold, think true love acted simple modesty." At present, as she waits anxiously in the orchard, she has neither grown bold nor does the act of love seem modest to her. ”