A Life of William Shakespeare Part 16

A third version (long the _textus receptus_) figured in the Folio of 1623. Here many pa.s.sages, not to be found in the quartos, appear for the first time, but a few others that appear in the quartos are omitted. The Folio text probably came nearest to the original ma.n.u.script; but it, too, followed an acting copy which had been abbreviated somewhat less drastically than the Second Quarto and in a different fas.h.i.+on. {224} Theobald in his 'Shakespeare Restored' (1726) made the first scholarly attempt to form a text from a collation of the First Folio with the Second Quarto, and Theobald's text with further embellishments by Sir Thomas Hanmer, Edward Capell, and the Cambridge editors of 1866, is now generally adopted.

Popularity of 'Hamlet.'

'Hamlet' was the only drama by Shakespeare that was acted in his lifetime at the two Universities. It has since attracted more attention from actors, playgoers, and readers of all capacities than any other of Shakespeare's plays. Its world-wide popularity from its author's day to our own, when it is as warmly welcomed in the theatres of France and Germany as in those of England and America, is the most striking of the many testimonies to the eminence of Shakespeare's dramatic instinct. At a first glance there seems little in the play to attract the uneducated or the unreflecting. 'Hamlet' is mainly a psychological effort, a study of the reflective temperament in excess. The action develops slowly; at times there is no movement at all. The piece is the longest of Shakespeare's plays, reaching a total of over 3,900 lines. It is thus some nine hundred lines longer than 'Antony and Cleopatra'--the play by Shakespeare that approaches 'Hamlet' more closely in numerical strength of lines. At the same time the total length of Hamlet's speeches far exceeds that of those allotted by Shakespeare to any other of his characters. Humorous relief is, it is true, effectively supplied to the tragic theme by Polonius and the grave-diggers, and if the topical references to contemporary theatrical history (II. ii. 350-89) could only count on an appreciative reception from an Elizabethan audience, the pungent censure of actors' perennial defects is calculated to catch the ear of the average playgoer of all ages. But it is not to these subsidiary features that the universality of the play's vogue can be attributed. It is the intensity of interest which Shakespeare contrives to excite in the character of the hero that explains the position of the play in popular esteem. The play's unrivalled power of attraction lies in the pathetic fascination exerted on minds of almost every calibre by the central figure--a high-born youth of chivalric instincts and finely developed intellect, who, when stirred to avenge in action a desperate private wrong, is foiled by introspective workings of the brain that paralyse the will.

'Troilus and Cressida.'

Although the difficulties of determining the date of 'Troilus and Cressida' are very great, there are many grounds for a.s.signing its composition to the early days of 1603. In 1599 Dekker and Chettle were engaged by Henslowe to prepare for the Earl of Nottingham's company--a rival of Shakespeare's company--a play of 'Troilus and Cressida,' of which no trace survives. It doubtless suggested the topic to Shakespeare. On February 7, 1602-3, James Roberts obtained a license for 'the booke of Troilus and Cresseda as yt is acted by my Lord Chamberlens men,' _i.e._ Shakespeare's company. {226a} Roberts printed the Second Quarto of 'Hamlet' and others of Shakespeare's plays; but his effort to publish 'Troilus' proved abortive owing to the interposition of the players. Roberts's 'book' was probably Shakespeare's play. The metrical characteristics of Shakespeare's 'Troilus and Cressida'--the regularity of the blank verse--powerfully confirm the date of composition which Roberts's license suggests. Six years later, however, on January 28, 1608-9, a new license for the issue of 'a booke called the history of Troylus and Cressida' was granted to other publishers, Richard Bonian and Henry Walley, {226b} and these publishers, more fortunate than Roberts soon printed a quarto with Shakespeare's full name as author. The text seems fairly authentic, but exceptional obscurity attaches to the circ.u.mstances of the publication. Some copies of the book bear an ordinary type of t.i.tle-page stating that the piece was printed 'as it was acted by the King's majesties servants at the Globe.' But in other copies, which differ in no way in regard to the text of the play, there was subst.i.tuted for this t.i.tle-page a more pretentious announcement running: 'The famous Historie of Troylus and Cresseid, excellently expressing the beginning of their loues with the conceited wooing of Pandarus, prince of Lacia.' After this pompous t.i.tle-page there was inserted, for the first and only time in the case of a play by Shakespeare that was published in his lifetime, an advertis.e.m.e.nt or preface. In this interpolated page an anonymous scribe, writing in the name of the publishers, paid bombastic and high-flown compliments to Shakespeare as a writer of 'comedies,' and defiantly boasted that the 'grand possessers'--_i.e._ the owners--of the ma.n.u.script deprecated its publication. By way of enhancing the value of what were obviously stolen wares, it was falsely added that the piece was new and unacted. This address was possibly the brazen reply of the publishers to a more than usually emphatic protest on the part of players or dramatist against the printing of the piece. The editors of the Folio evinced distrust of the Quarto edition by printing their text from a different copy showing many deviations, which were not always for the better.

Treatment of the theme.

The work, which in point of construction shows signs of haste, and in style is exceptionally unequal, is the least attractive of the efforts of Shakespeare's middle life. The story is based on a romantic legend of the Trojan war, which is of mediaeval origin. Shakespeare had possibly read Chapman's translation of Homer's 'Iliad,' but he owed his plot to Chaucer's 'Troilus and Cresseid' and Lydgate's 'Troy Book.' In defiance of his authorities he presented Cressida as a heartless coquette; the poets who had previously treated her story--Boccaccio, Chaucer, Lydgate, and Robert Henryson--had imagined her as a tender-hearted, if frail, beauty, with claims on their pity rather than on their scorn. But Shakespeare's innovation is dramatically effective, and accords with strictly moral canons. The charge frequently brought against the dramatist that in 'Troilus and Cressida' he cynically invested the Greek heroes of cla.s.sical antiquity with contemptible characteristics is ill supported by the text of the play. Ulysses, Nestor, and Agamemnon figure in Shakespeare's play as brave generals and sagacious statesmen, and in their speeches Shakespeare concentrated a marvellous wealth of pithily expressed philosophy, much of which has fortunately obtained proverbial currency. Shakespeare's conception of the Greeks followed traditional lines except in the case of Achilles, whom he transforms into a brutal coward. And that portrait quite legitimately interpreted the selfish, unreasoning, and exorbitant pride with which the warrior was credited by Homer, and his imitators.

Shakespeare's treatment of his theme cannot therefore be fairly construed, as some critics construe it, into a petty-minded protest against the honour paid to the ancient Greeks and to the form and sentiment of their literature by more learned dramatists of the day, like Ben Jonson and Chapman. Although Shakespeare knew the Homeric version of the Trojan war, he worked in 'Troilus and Cressida' upon a mediaeval romance, which was practically uninfluenced either for good or evil by the cla.s.sical spirit. {228}

Queen Elizabeth's death, March 26, 1603.

Despite the a.s.sociation of Shakespeare's company with the rebellion of 1601, and its difficulties with the children of the Chapel Royal, he and his fellow actors retained their hold on Court favour till the close of Elizabeth's reign. As late as February 2, 1603, the company entertained the dying Queen at Richmond. Her death on March 26, 1603, drew from Shakespeare's early eulogist, Chettle, a vain appeal to him under the fanciful name of Melicert, to

Drop from his honied muse one sable teare, To mourne her death that graced his desert, And to his laies opened her royal eare. {230}

But, except on sentimental grounds, the Queen's death justified no lamentation on the part of Shakespeare. On the withdrawal of one royal patron he and his friends at once found another, who proved far more liberal and appreciative.

James I's patronage.

On May 19, 1603, James I, very soon after his accession, extended to Shakespeare and other members of the Lord Chamberlain's company a very marked and valuable recognition. To them he granted under royal letters patent a license 'freely to use and exercise the arte and facultie of playing comedies, tragedies, histories, enterludes, moralls, pastoralles, stage-plaies, and such other like as they have already studied, or hereafter shall use or studie as well for the recreation of our loving subjectes as for our solace and pleasure, when we shall thinke good to see them during our pleasure.' The Globe Theatre was noted as the customary scene of their labours, but permission was granted to them to perform in the town-hall or moot-hall of any country town. Nine actors are named. Lawrence Fletcher stands first on the list; he had already performed before James in Scotland in 1599 and 1601. Shakespeare comes second and Burbage third. The company to which they belonged was thenceforth styled the King's company; its members became 'the King's Servants' and they took rank with the Grooms of the Chamber. {231} Shakespeare's plays were thenceforth repeatedly performed in James's presence, and Oldys related that James wrote Shakespeare a letter in his own hand, which was at one time in the possession of Sir William D'Avenant, and afterwards, according to Lintot, in that of John Sheffield, first duke of Buckingham.

In the autumn and winter of 1603 the prevalence of the plague led to the closing of the theatres in London. The King's players were compelled to make a prolonged tour in the provinces, which entailed some loss of income. For two months from the third week in October, the Court was temporarily installed at Wilton, the residence of William Herbert, third earl of Pembroke, and late in November the company was summoned by the royal officers to perform in the royal presence. The actors travelled from Mortlake to Salisbury 'unto the Courte aforesaide,' and their performance took place at Wilton House on December 2. They received next day 'upon the Councells warrant' the large sum of 30 pounds 'by way of his majesties reward.' {232a} Many other gracious marks of royal favour followed. On March 15, 1604, Shakespeare and eight other actors of the company walked from the Tower of London to Westminster in the procession which accompanied the King on his formal entry into London. Each actor received four and a half yards of scarlet cloth to wear as a cloak on the occasion, and in the doc.u.ment authorising the grant Shakespeare's name stands first on the list. {232b} The dramatist Dekker was author of a somewhat bombastic account of the elaborate ceremonial, which rapidly ran through three editions. On April 9, 1604, the King gave further proof of his friendly interest in the fortunes of his actors by causing an official letter to be sent to the Lord Mayor of London and the Justices of the Peace for Middles.e.x and Surrey, bidding them 'permit and suffer'

the King's players to 'exercise their playes' at their 'usual house,' the Globe. {233a} Four months later--in August--every member of the company was summoned by the King's order to attend at Somerset House during the fortnight's sojourn there of the Spanish amba.s.sador extraordinary, Juan Fernandez de Velasco, duke de Frias, and Constable of Castile, who came to London to ratify the treaty of peace between England and Spain, and was magnificently entertained by the English Court. {233b} Between All Saints' Day [November 1] and the ensuing Shrove Tuesday, which fell early in February 1605, Shakespeare's company gave no fewer than eleven performances at Whitehall in the royal presence.

XIV--THE HIGHEST THEMES OF TRAGEDY

'Oth.e.l.lo' and 'Measure for Measure.'

Under the incentive of such exalted patronage, Shakespeare's activity redoubled, but his work shows none of the conventional marks of literature that is produced in the blaze of Court favour. The first six years of the new reign saw him absorbed in the highest themes of tragedy, and an unparalleled intensity and energy, which bore few traces of the trammels of a Court, thenceforth illumined every scene that he contrived.

To 1604 the composition of two plays can be confidently a.s.signed, one of which--'Oth.e.l.lo'--ranks with Shakespeare's greatest achievements; while the other--'Measure for Measure'--although as a whole far inferior to 'Oth.e.l.lo,' contains one of the finest scenes (between Angelo and Isabella, II. ii. 43 sq.) and one of the greatest speeches (Claudio on the fear of death, III. i. 116-30) in the range of Shakespearean drama.

'Oth.e.l.lo' was doubtless the first new piece by Shakespeare that was acted before James. It was produced at Whitehall on November 1. 'Measure for Measure' followed on December 26. {235} Neither was printed in Shakespeare's lifetime. The plots of both ultimately come from the same Italian collection of novels--Giraldi Cinthio's 'Hecatommithi,' which was first published in 1565.

Cinthio's painful story of 'Oth.e.l.lo' (decad. iii. nov. 3) is not known to have been translated into English before Shakespeare dramatised it. He followed its main drift with fidelity, but he introduced the new characters of Roderigo and Emilia, and he invested the catastrophe with new and fearful intensity by making Iago's cruel treachery known to Oth.e.l.lo at the last, after Iago's perfidy has impelled the n.o.ble-hearted Moor in his groundless jealousy to murder his gentle and innocent wife Desdemona. Iago became in Shakespeare's hands the subtlest of all studies of intellectual villainy and hypocrisy. The whole tragedy displays to magnificent advantage the dramatist's fully matured powers.

An unfaltering equilibrium is maintained in the treatment of plot and characters alike.

Cinthio made the perilous story of 'Measure for Measure' the subject not only of a romance, but of a tragedy called 'Epitia.' Before Shakespeare wrote his play, Cinthio's romance had been twice rendered into English by George Whetstone. Whetstone had not only given a somewhat altered version of the Italian romance in his unwieldy play of 'Promos and Ca.s.sandra' (in two parts of five acts each, 1578), but he had also freely translated it in his collection of prose tales, 'Heptameron of Civil Discources' (1582). Yet there is every likelihood that Shakespeare also knew Cinthio's play, which, unlike his romance, was untranslated; the leading character, who is by Shakespeare christened Angelo, was known by another name to Cinthio in his story, but Cinthio in his play (and not in his novel) gives the character a sister named Angela, which doubtless suggested Shakespeare's designation. {237} In the hands of Shakespeare's predecessors the tale is a sordid record of l.u.s.t and cruelty. But Shakespeare prudently showed scant respect for their handling of the narrative. By diverting the course of the plot at a critical point he not merely proved his artistic ingenuity, but gave dramatic dignity and moral elevation to a degraded and repellent theme. In the old versions Isabella yields her virtue as the price of her brother's life. The central fact of Shakespeare's play is Isabella's inflexible and unconditional chast.i.ty. Other of Shakespeare's alterations, like the Duke's abrupt proposal to marry Isabella, seem hastily conceived. But his creation of the pathetic character of Mariana 'of the moated grange'--the legally affianced bride of Angelo, Isabella's would-be seducer--skilfully excludes the possibility of a settlement (as in the old stories) between Isabella and Angelo on terms of marriage.

Shakespeare's argument is throughout philosophically subtle. The poetic eloquence in which Isabella and the Duke pay homage to the virtue of chast.i.ty, and the many expositions of the corruption with which unchecked s.e.xual pa.s.sion threatens society, alternate with coa.r.s.ely comic interludes which suggest the vanity of seeking to efface natural instincts by the coercion of law. There is little in the play that seems designed to recommend it to the Court before which it was first performed. But the two emphatic references to a ruler's dislike of mobs, despite his love of his people, were perhaps penned in deferential allusion to James I, whose horror of crowds was notorious. In act i. sc.

i. 67-72 the Duke remarks:

I love the people, But do not like to stage me to their eyes.

Though it do well, I do not relish well Their loud applause and aves vehement.

Nor do I think the man of safe discretion That does affect it.

Of like tenor is the succeeding speech of Angelo (act ii. sc. iv. 27-30):

The general [_i.e._ the public], subject to a well-wish'd king, . . .

Crowd to his presence, where their untaught love Must needs appear offence.

'Macbeth.'

In 'Macbeth,' his 'great epic drama,' which he began in 1605 and completed next year, Shakespeare employed a setting wholly in harmony with the accession of a Scottish king. The story was drawn from Holinshed's 'Chronicle of Scottish History,' with occasional reference, perhaps, to earlier Scottish sources. {239} The supernatural machinery of the three witches accorded with the King's superst.i.tious faith in demonology; the dramatist lavished his sympathy on Banquo, James's ancestor; while Macbeth's vision of kings who carry 'twofold b.a.l.l.s and treble sceptres' (iv. i. 20) plainly adverted to the union of Scotland with England and Ireland under James's sway. The allusion by the porter (ii. iii. 9) to the 'equivocator . . . who committed treason' was perhaps suggested by the notorious defence of the doctrine of equivocation made by the Jesuit Henry Garnett, who was executed early in 1606 for his share in the 'Gunpowder Plot.' The piece was not printed until 1623. It is in its existing shape by far the shortest of all Shakespeare's tragedies, ('Hamlet' is nearly twice as long) and it is possible that it survives only in an abbreviated acting version. Much scenic elaboration characterised the production. Dr. Simon Forman witnessed a performance of the tragedy at the Globe in April 1611, and noted that Macbeth and Banquo entered the stage on horseback, and that Banquo's ghost was materially represented (iii. iv. 40 seq.) Like 'Oth.e.l.lo,' the play ranks with the n.o.blest tragedies either of the modern or the ancient world.

The characters of hero and heroine--Macbeth and his wife--are depicted with the utmost subtlety and insight. In three points 'Macbeth' differs somewhat from other of Shakespeare's productions in the great cla.s.s of literature to which it belongs. The interweaving with the tragic story of supernatural interludes in which Fate is weirdly personified is not exactly matched in any other of Shakespeare's tragedies. In the second place, the action proceeds with a rapidity that is wholly without parallel in the rest of Shakespeare's plays. Nowhere, moreover, has Shakespeare introduced comic relief into a tragedy with bolder effect than in the porter's speech after the murder of Duncan (II. iii. I seq.) The theory that this pa.s.sage was from another hand does not merit acceptance. {240} It cannot, however, be overlooked that the second scene of the first act--Duncan's interview with the 'bleeding sergeant'--falls so far below the style of the rest of the play as to suggest that it was an interpolation by a hack of the theatre. The resemblances between Thomas Middleton's later play of 'The Witch' (1610) and portions of 'Macbeth' may safely be ascribed to plagiarism on Middleton's part. Of two songs which, according to the stage directions, were to be sung during the representation of 'Macbeth' (III. v. and IV.

i.), only the first line of each is noted there, but songs beginning with the same lines are set out in full in Middleton's play; they were probably by Middleton, and were interpolated by actors in a stage version of 'Macbeth' after its original production.

'King Lear.'

'King Lear,' in which Shakespeare's tragic genius moved without any faltering on t.i.tanic heights, was written during 1606, and was produced before the Court at Whitehall on the night of December 26 of that year.

{241a} It was entered on the 'Stationers' Registers' on November 26, 1607, and two imperfect editions, published by Nathaniel b.u.t.ter, appeared in the following year; neither exactly corresponds with the other or with the improved and fairly satisfactory text of the Folio. The three versions present three different playhouse transcripts. Like its immediate predecessor, 'Macbeth,' the tragedy was mainly founded on Holinshed's 'Chronicle.' The leading theme had been dramatised as early as 1593, but Shakespeare's attention was no doubt directed to it by the publication of a crude dramatic adaptation of Holinshed's version in 1605 under the t.i.tle of 'The True Chronicle History of King Leir and his three Daughters--Gonorill, Ragan, and Cordella.' Shakespeare did not adhere closely to his original. He invested the tale of Lear with a hopelessly tragic conclusion, and on it he grafted the equally distressing tale of Gloucester and his two sons, which he drew from Sidney's 'Arcadia.'

{241b} Hints for the speeches of Edgar when feigning madness were drawn from Harsnet's 'Declaration of Popish Impostures,' 1603. In every act of 'Lear' the pity and terror of which tragedy is capable reach their climax. Only one who has something of the Shakespearean gift of language could adequately characterise the scenes of agony--'the living martyrdom'--to which the fiendish ingrat.i.tude of his daughters condemns the abdicated king--'a very foolish, fond old man, fourscore and upward.'

The elemental pa.s.sions burst forth in his utterances with all the vehemence of the volcanic tempest which beats about his defenceless head in the scene on the heath. The brutal blinding of Gloucester by Cornwall exceeds in horror any other situation that Shakespeare created, if we a.s.sume that he was not responsible for the like scenes of mutilation in 't.i.tus Andronicus.' At no point in 'Lear' is there any loosening of the tragic tension. The faithful half-witted lad who serves the king as his fool plays the jesting chorus on his master's fortunes in penetrating earnest and deepens the desolating pathos.

'Timon of Athens.'