William Allan Neilson

“ Cleopatra is a wanton, but no analysis can explain the subtleties with which the idealism and animalism, the sacrifice and frivolity—and how much else—of human passion are bound together in the few hundred lines which she speaks. It is impossible to affirm that each of the great characters is thoroughly consistent or offers a strictly accurate motivation. Rather, they are magnificent portraits—like the Mona Lisa—crowded with a penetrating but question-provoking psychology. Into such parts and situations as the drama could afford are impressed every possible revelation of our motives ”

“ In Shakespeare's day there was also, of course, some movement toward fixity of ideas, and there were great men who strove to convert others to their ideas and to dictate belief and conduct. But there was a breathing spell in which, comparatively speaking, men were not alike, but individual, and in which their motives and ideas revelled in a freedom from ancient precedent. In this era of flux the modern drama found its panorama of novel and varied experience making and marring character. ”

“ Known in the literature and theater of every civilized nation, the subject of a vast and increasing amount of discussion and criticism, the source of a scholarship rivaling that devoted to the writers of antiquity, the familiar theme for music and painting, the household possession of Great Britain, Germany, and America, influencing thought and conduct as few books have ever influenced them, and now an important element in the education of a great democracy,—the plays of Shakespeare occupy a position whence imagination "can not pierce a wink beyond, but doubt discovery there." ”

“ At their worst, the sonnets may have been only literary exercises on conventional themes, but at their best they are surely both superb poetry and the result of genuine emotion. Can we doubt that the poet knew the pitfalls that beset the course of human passion or that he had faith in the triumphant beauty of love and friendship? Yet the most splendid of these lyrical declarations of faith add little to what we knew of the creator of the lovers and friends of the dramas. ”

“ If the genius of the master-poet was the source of art and wisdom, the personality of the critic gained a new refulgence through its service of reflecting the rays of glory. The interest in the study of individual characters had resulted, even in Johnson's day, in some notable interpretive essays, as Maurice Morgann's on Falstaff (1777) . In the next generation, Coleridge, Lamb, and Hazlitt in England, and Schlegel and Goethe in Germany, brought the keenest intelligence and most sympathetic taste to a criticism that aspired to reveal the full range and height of Shakespeare's creative faculty. ”

“ But if we consider their characteristic note, and the fact that through the greater part of each play the forces and passions involved are rather those operative in tragedy than in comedy, we easily perceive why they have been classed as tragi-comedies or dramatic romances. Pericles in many respects stands apart from the other three in nature as well as in date, for it is a dramatization of an old Greek romance, and in it the hand of another than Shakespeare is only too evident. ”

“ Each man presents strange, almost inexplicable, contrasts in character, as Bacon or Raleigh, or Elizabeth herself. The drama mingles its sentiment and fancy with horrors and bloodshed; and no wonder, for poetry was no occupation of the cloister. Read the lives of the poets—Surrey, Wyatt, Sidney, Spenser, Raleigh, Marlowe, Jonson—and of these, only Spenser and Jonson died in their beds, and Ben had killed his man in a duel. ”

“ It is clear that, within a generation after Shakespeare's death, common opinion both in Stratford and London recognized that in the actor and dramatist a great man had passed away, that he had been in a worldly sense highly successful, though starting from unpropitious beginnings, that he wrote with great swiftness and ease, and that in his personal relations he was gentle, kindly, genial, and witty. ”

“ While these are in general qualities of the Elizabethan drama, it is noteworthy that almost from the beginning Shakespeare outstripped his rivals. Launce, Richard III, Shylock, Juliet, were enough to establish a supremacy. The years that followed with their maturing thought and experience gave an amazing development to what was manifestly the native bent of his genius. Whatever else one may find in the plays, indeed whatever one finds there of wisdom or beauty, truth or art, it cannot be separated from their revelation of human nature. ”

“ As to the intellectual quality of the author of the plays, it is clear that he was not a Galileo or a Bacon. If we judge intellectual power by its creation of system or synthesis, we shall probably estimate Shakespeare less highly than if we remember that intellect of the highest order is often displayed by maintaining openness and largeness of view in face of the solicitations of theory or prejudice. No one can read the plays in connection with the literature of the time, or of any time, without marveling at their freedom from vulgarity, pettiness, or narrowness of mental attitude. ”

“ The abounding high spirits of the earlier comedies are here replaced by a mood of calm assurance of the ultimate triumph of good and a placid faith that survives a rude acquaintance with the evil that is in men's hearts. No period has a more distinctive quality than this of the dramatic romances, in which the dramatist, on the eve of his retirement from London, gave his imagination free play, and in both character and action stamped his last creations with the mark of a lofty idealism. ”

“ It was not dead or dying when the outbreak of the Civil War cut short its course; in fact, its plays, its traditions, even some of its theaters, actors, and dramatists survived the suppression of twenty years and helped to start the drama of the Restoration. Had Shakespeare lived to the age of seventy-eight he would have seen the closing of the theaters, and his lifetime would have covered the crowded history of the drama's development from such semi-moralities as Cambises and The Nice Wanton to the last plays of Massinger and Shirley. ”

“ Not only are the plays of his experimental stage preceded by models easily discerned, but throughout his career one can see him eagerly taking up and developing varieties of drama on which less capable men had stumbled and for which the public had shown relish. Chronicle history, romantic comedy, tragedies of blood and revenge, dramatic romance, had all been invented by others, and Shakespeare never hesitated to follow their trail when it promised to lead to popular success. ”

“ He desires tragedy to give a rationalized view of life, dealing poetic justice to various typical persons, and consequently condemns Shakespeare's persons as too individual, his plots as too irregular, and the total effect of his plays as insufficiently didactic and moral. This view of tragedy was mainly due to the rationalistic and classical ideas which continued for a century to dominate European criticism. But before the seventeenth century was over, Shakespeare's growing reputation had proved itself a rock against which the tendencies in criticism had broken like unavailing waves. ”

“ Shakespeare lived peaceably in the heyday of this change, nearly of an age with Sidney, Raleigh, Spenser, Bacon, Marlowe. Like Marlowe in the soliloquies of Barabbas and Faust, he recognized the new possibilities that the age opened through money or ideas. He made much out of the commercial prosperity of the day, gained such profits as were possible from his profession, raised his estate, and acquired wealth. He gave his mind not to any cause or party but to the study of men. ”

“ No more purely delightful form of dramatic art has ever been contrived; none has ever been treated so as to yield more fully its appropriate charm; so that in view of the completeness of the artist's success we are bound to call the period which closed with the first year of the seventeenth century the triumph of comedy.
Julius Cæsar, the first of the plays dealing with Roman history, may have been written before 1600, but, whether it preceded Hamlet by one year or three, it forms a gradual introduction to the group of the great tragedies. ”

“ Human nature, at its best or worst, droll or tragic, is thus given magnitude and potency. This idealization, rendered still more effective by the verse, persuades us as we read that here are our own attributes and conflicts exalted, now into serene beauty, again into torment and horror, and again into the Olympic warfare of unknown supermen. No doubt there is confusion because of the complexity of motives depicted and the multiplicity of impressions created, but there is also a final message of the greatness and comprehensiveness of human souls. ”

“ While some of them betray signs of youth and remind us of the apprentice workman of Loves Labour's Lost, others display in their depth of thought, intensity of feeling, and superb power of incisive and concentrated expression, the full maturity of the man and the artist. Hardly in the great tragedies themselves is there clearer proof of Shakespeare's supremacy in thought and language. ”

“ But this is to take for granted a theory of the relation between artist and production which has against it the general testimony of creator and critic alike. It is not at the pitch of an emotional experience that an artist successfully transmutes his life into art, but in retrospect, when his recollective imagination reproduces his mood in a form capable of being expressed without being dissipated. Of course, Shakespeare must have lived and enjoyed and suffered intensely; but this does not commit us to a belief in an immediate turning to account of personal experience in the writing of drama. ”

“ This is true even in an early play like Romeo and Juliet, where the verse becomes undramatic in order to make the most of every opportunity for fancy or melody, and it is true also in Othello, where poetry and characterization are wedded with consummate art. The reader's pleasure is not in finding each idea finally developed or each motive given full elaboration. It is rather in the flow of words which endow each person and moment with their wealth of color and suggestion, and somehow carry on to the reader both their impression of life and the transforming power of their dignity and splendor. ”

“ Hardly, if at all, less powerful are the later tragedies of the Roman group. Antony and Cleopatra is unsurpassed for the intensity of its picture of passion, for its superb mastery of language, for its relentless truth. The more somber scenes of Coriolanus convey a tragedy which either on its personal or its political side scarcely yields to its predecessors in poignancy and gloom. ”

“ Such is the very considerable body of authenticated facts about the life of Shakespeare. Lacking though they are in intimate and personal touches, they can hardly be said to leave the main outlines of his career shadowy or mysterious. But they do not by any means exhaust the data at our disposal for forming an impression of the poet's personality. A large mass of tradition, of less than legal validity but much of it of a high degree of probability, has come down to us, the sources of which may now be detailed. ”

“ If some critic brings into new prominence a quality that has partly escaped attention, his discovery is not likely to affect the more permanent elements of their reputation. If for a time attention is turned to the plays as plays rather than as poems and to the merits of Shakespeare as a dramatist, this criticism does not lead to any lasting disregard of their poetic quality or to the permanent acceptance of skill in dramatic structure [Pg 194] as a chief element in their literary preëminence. ”

“ Paul's and the royal chapel, who, however, gave plays in public as well as at court. But the professional companies prospered in their permanent theaters, and university men with literary ambitions were quick to turn to these theaters as offering a means of livelihood. By the time that Shakespeare was twenty-five, Lyly, Peele, and Greene had made comedies that were at once popular and literary; Kyd had written a tragedy that crowded the pit; and Marlowe had brought poetry and genius to triumph on the common stage—where they had played no part since the death of Euripides. ”

“ In these last cases, it is the duty of the editor to decide from all the accessible data which version has the best claim to represent the author's intention, and to make that a basis to be departed from only in clear cases of corruption. The temptation, which no editor has completely resisted, is naturally towards an eclecticism which adopts the reading that seems most plausible in itself, without giving due weight to the general authority of the text chosen as a basis. If carried far, such eclecticism results in a patchwork quite distinct from any version that Shakespeare can have known. ”

“ Starting with the probable dates of their composition, we have traced them from the theater to the printer, through the hands of many editors, and through the long history of their effects on theatergoers and readers. In their history they have played a part in the changes of taste and opinion of three centuries, and if they have grown greatly in men's estimation, this has not been without much variability of appreciation and uncertainty as to their value. What, then, are the qualities of the plays that raised them at once above the measure of contemporary influence and rivalry? ”

“ This populace that watched with joy the cruel torment of a bear or the execution of a Catholic also delighted in the romantic comedies of Shakespeare. This people, so appallingly credulous and ignorant, so brutal, childish, so mercurial compared with Englishmen of to-day, yet set the standard of national greatness. ”

“ Shakespeare's works were studied as a whole in an effort to study the development of his art and mind. Schlegel and Coleridge gave a unity to the phenomena of the thirty-seven plays that had not been recognized hitherto; but they and their followers naturally tended to make of their author a sort of nineteenth-century romanticist. (3) Exalting the services of poetry and the creative imagination, they viewed Shakespeare's exhibition of human nature and his incidental wisdom as profound, consistent, and immensely valuable for the human race. ”

“ Lovers of the plays are likely always to query: What manner of man was this? Taken out of his London, at any time in his career, how would he seem if we could know him as a man? Of what nature is this companion and friend whose presence we have felt through all his verses and in all of his characters? The few clues offered by records or tradition, and the difficulties in separating the creator from the thousand men and women of his creation, have driven many to seek answers to these questions in the sonnets. ”

“ More significant in its effect on our general view have been the efforts of historical criticism. As our knowledge of Elizabethan literature, drama, theater, have increased, it has been possible to see Shakespeare in relation to his time and environment. The study of Shakespeare as a sixteenth-century dramatist aims not merely at a better appreciation of his work, but also to explain his development and to account for some of the qualities of his achievement. ”

“ The trivialities and the sublimities, the sin and the idealism of the sonnets coalesce with the emotional effects of the comedies and tragedies. In forming our impression of the man, whatever we may derive from the sonnets does not contradict and does not largely affect the impressions made by the poetry and humanity of the plays. For the conception which each one forms of Shakespeare the man must be derived in the main from the impressions of personality implied by the plays. ”

“ His own growth in dramatic power goes step by step with the rapid and varied development of the drama, and the measure for comparison must be, not by decades, but by years or months.
A study of the Elizabethan drama may help to excuse some of the faults and limitations of Shakespeare, but it also enforces his merits. Both faults and merits are often to be understood in the efforts of lesser men to do what he did. We admire his triumphs the more as we consider their failures. ”

“ Hamlet, the hesitating avenger, becomes the sentimentalist, the idealist, the thinker at war with himself, the embodiment of that conflict between circumstance and a nature unfitted to its task, which in some measure we have all encountered in life. An arrogant and doting old man, by the force of creative imagination, transcends the nursery tale from which he came, and [Pg 199] Human Naturecarries to us all the implications of suffering and love that surround the aging of parents and the growth of children. ”