Amenities of Literature Part 47

The halo which surrounds the poetic beat.i.tude has almost silenced criticism in its devotion; but a literary historian may not at all times be present in the choir of votaries; his labours lie outwards among the progressive opinions of a people, nor is he free to pa.s.s over what may seem paradoxical if it lies in his way.

The universal celebrity of Shakespeare is comparatively of recent origin: received, rejected, and revived, we must ascertain the alternate periods, and we must look for the causes of the neglect as well as the popularity of the poet. We may congratulate ourselves on the numerous escapes of our national bard from the oblivion of his dramatic brothers.

The history and the works of Shakespeare, and perhaps the singularity of the poet's character in respect to his own writings, are some of the most startling paradoxes in literary history.

Malone describes Shakespeare as "the great poet whom nature framed to disregard the wretched models that were set before him, and to create a drama from his own native and original stores." This cautious but creeping commentator, notwithstanding that he had often laboured to prove the contrary, gaily shot this arrow drawn from the quiver of Dryden, who has delivered very contradictory notions of Shakespeare.

Veritably--for we are now writing historically--Shakespeare never "created our drama, disregarding the wretched models before him;" far from this! the great poet had those models always before him, and worked upon them; no poet has so freely availed himself of the inventions of his predecessors, and in reality many of the dramas of Shakespeare had been written before he wrote.

It cannot be denied that our great poet never exercised his invention in the fables of his dramas; thus he spared himself half the toil of his work. He viewed with the prophetic eye of genius the old play or the old story, and at once discovered all its capabilities; he saw at once all that it had and all that it had not; its characterless personages he was confident that he could quicken with breath and action, and that his own vein, allowed to flow along the impure stream, would have the force to clear the current, and to expand its own lucid beauty.

Had not the felicitous genius of our bard revelled in this facility of adopting and adapting the ready-made inventions of many a luckless playwright, we might have lost our Shakespeare; for he never wrote for us, but for his little theatre. He had no leisure to afford whole days in constructing plots for plays, nor much troubled himself with those which he followed closely even to a fault; nor did the quickness of his genius neglect a solitary thought, nor lose a fortunate expression. To what extent were these borrowings from ma.n.u.script plays we cannot even surmise; we have one specimen of Shakespeare's free use of whatever the poet's judgment caught, in those copious pa.s.sages which he transplanted from North's "Plutarch" and Holinshed's "Chronicles," lending their words his own music.

One of his commentators, George Steevens, published six old plays on which Shakespeare had grounded six of his own; but this rash act was in the early days of the commentators.h.i.+p; Steevens must soon have discovered the inconvenience of printing unreadable dramas, to exhibit the concealed industry of the mighty bard. The spells of Shakespeare did not hang on the artificial edifice of his fable; he looked abroad for mankind, and within his own breast for all the impulses of the beings of his imagination. All he required was a scene; then the whole "sphere of humanity," as Jonson expressed it, lie wide before him. There was a Jew before the _Merchant of Venice_; a shrew had been tamed before Katherine by Petruchio; a King Lear and his three daughters, before the only one the world knows; and a tragical Hamlet had philosophised like Seneca, as the satirical Nash told, before our Shakespeare's: but this list is needless, for it would include every drama he has left us. Even the beings of his creation lie before him in their embryon state. His creative faculty never required more than a suggestion. The prototype of the wonderful Caliban has not hitherto been discovered, but the fairies of the popular mythology become the creatures of his own imagination.

Middleton first opened the incantations of "the witches." The Hecate of Middleton is a mischief-brooding hag, gross and tangible, and her "spirits, black, white, and grey," with her "devil-toad, devil-ram, devil-cat, and devil-dam," disturb their spells by the familiar drollery of their names, and their vulgar instincts. Out of this ordinary domestic witchcraft the mightier poet raised "the weird sisters,"

That look not like the inhabitants o' the earth, And yet are on't,

nameless, bodiless, vanis.h.i.+ng shadows!

And what seemed corporal Melted as breath into the wind.

The dramatic personages which seem to me peculiar to Shakespeare, and in which he evidently revelled, serving his purposes on very opposite occasions, are his clowns and domestic fools. Yet his most famous comic personage, the fat knight, was the rich graft on the miserable scion of Sir John Oldcastle, in an old play; the slight hint of "a mere pampered glutton" was idealised into that inimitable variety of human nature combined in one man--at once so despicable and so delightful!

The life of our poet remains almost a blank, and his very name a subject of contention.[1] Of that singular genius who is now deemed the national bard, we can only positively ascertain that the place of his birth was that of his death; a circ.u.mstance which, for a poet, is some evidence of his domestic prosperity; but the glorious interval of existence, how and all he performed on the stage of human life, no one observed as differing from his fellows of the company, and he of all men the least; and of his productions, wherein we are to find every excellence to which any poet has reached, our scepticism is often at work to detect what is Shakespearian among that which cannot be.

Of the idle traditions of the youth of Shakespeare, Malone, after "foraging for anecdotes" during half a century, has painfully satisfied us that all which so many continued to repeat was apocryphal. Having with his own eyes ascertained that Sir Thomas Lucy had no park, he closed with his famous corollary, that "therefore he could have no deer to be stolen." But other parks and other deer were liable to the mischance of furnis.h.i.+ng venison for a young deer-fancier to treat his friends; and Sir Thomas Lucy, probably, was Justice Shallow on this occasion to the poetic stripling. The other circ.u.mstances of the poet's early life, too well known to repeat, may stand on the same ground.

Personal facts may come down to us confused, inaccurate, and mistaken, but they do not therefore necessarily rest on no foundation. The invention of such irrelevant circ.u.mstances seems to be without a motive; and though the propagators of gossip are strange blunderers, they rarely aspire to be original inventors. We are not concerned with such tales, for there is nothing in them which is peculiar to the idiosyncrasy of the great poet.

The first noticeable incident in the life of Shakespeare was his marriage in 1582, in his eighteenth year; the nuptials of the poet seem an affair of domestic convenience, rather than a poetical incident in "the romance of life."

In 1586, being only twenty-two years of age, Shakespeare quitted home for the metropolis.

At this critical moment of his life, which Malone sought for in despair, we should have remained in darkness, had not the unfortunate and intrepid industry of the most devoted enthusiast of the Shakespearian school lifted his steady torch.[2] Shakespeare arrived at the theatre not to hold the horses of gentlemen, as was so long reported, without, for he had a more friendly interest within, doors. There he joined a neighbour in his s.h.i.+re, Richard Burbage, who subsequently became the renowned actor of the future Shakespeare's creations; and likewise Thomas Green, his townsman, and no inferior actor and poet. It is hardly a conjecture to presume that their friendly invitations had tempted our youthful adventurer to join their company. In three years Shakespeare obtained shares in the theatre, which multiplied every year, till he became the joint-proprietor with Burbage. The friends.h.i.+p of the actor and the dramatist was a golden bond, when each had conferred on the other their mutual popularity. The plays of Shakespeare were higher favourites with the public during the lifetime of this Garrick of the poet's own days; and the renowned actor was so charmed by his own success, that he perpetuated among his daughters the delightful name of Juliet, which reminded him, with pride, of his own exquisite Romeo.

Shakespeare proved a closer and a more refined observer of the art of acting than nature had enabled him to show himself as an actor, by practising his own professional precepts. Two actors, who long survived the poet, recorded that he had critically instructed the one to enact Hamlet, and the other Henry the Eighth.[3]

How in an indifferent actor like Shakespeare was betrayed those latent dramatic faculties by which he was one day to be the delight of that stage which he could not tread, remains a secret which the poet has not told. But whether it was by accident or in some happy hour, we know not, that Shakespeare, in conning the ma.n.u.script of some wretched drama, felt the glorious impulse which prompted the pen to strike out whole pa.s.sages, and to interpolate whole scenes; that moment was the obscure birth of his future genius. How he was employed at this unknown era of his life, the peevish jealousy of a brother of the craft has curiously informed us.

When Shakespeare was a name yet scarcely known, save to that mimetic world, tenanted by playwrights, it appears that he was there sustaining an active and secret avocation. The great bard had been serving a silent apprentices.h.i.+p to the dramatic muse, by trying his hand on the old stock-pieces which lay in the theatrical treasury, and further venturing his repolis.h.i.+ng touches on the new. Marlowe, Lodge, and Peele had submitted to his soft pencillings or his sharp pruning-hook. The actors were often themselves a sort of poets, and would compete with those who were only poets; and in pricing the hasty wares, would often have them fas.h.i.+oned to their liking. Alluding to the treatment the dramatists were enduring from their masters, Robert Greene indignantly addressed his peers. This curious pa.s.sage, first discovered by Tyrwhit, has been often quoted, and indispensably must be once more; for it tells us how Shakespeare, in 1592, had been fully employed within six years of his arrival at the metropolis. Greene desires his friends would no longer submit to the actors. "Do not trust those burrs, who have sought to cleave to us all; those puppets that speak from our mouths, those antics garnished in our colours. Is it not strange that I to whom they all have been beholding, is it not like that you to whom they all too have been beholding, shall, were ye in that case I am now, be both of them at once forsaken?[4] Yes, trust them not! There is _an upstart crow beautified with our feathers_, that with _his tyger's heart wrapt in a player's hide_, supposes he is as well able to _bombast[5] out a blank verse_ as the best of you, and being _an absolute Johannes Factotum_, is, in his own conceit, the only SHAKE-SCENE in a country."

"The absolute Johannes Factotum," "the only shake-scene," and "the crow beautified with their feathers," are one person; but "the tyger's heart wrapt in a player's hide," particularly points out that person. It is, in fact, a parody of a line composed by this batch of poets in one of their dramas, _The Contention of the Two Houses of York and Lancaster_; and which, with many others, Shakespeare had wholly appropriated. In the third part of _King Henry the Sixth_, in Act I., Scene IV., it stands as Peele or Greene had originally composed it--

O, tyger's heart wrapt in a woman's hide!

This attack on our untiger-like Shakespeare turns poor Greene into an enraged wasp, peevish and mortified at the Shakespearian hand which had often larded his leanness, or scarified his tumidities. Greene charges Shakespeare with altering the plays of himself, Marlowe, Lodge, and Peele, and then claiming all the merit of the work![6]

Our great bard was not insensible to the fancy of his querulous libeller, since it was on Greene's "Dorastus and Fawnia" Shakespeare founded his _Winter's Tale_, as he took his _As You Like It_ from Lodge's "Rosalynd," whose very name he preserved. Thus borrowing from the writings of his unfortunate and reckless brothers of Parna.s.sus, he has made immortal works which have long expired.

The active employment of Shakespeare among the old plays was so well known at the time, that when his name became familiar to the public, the printers were often eager to obtain the original neglected plays in their meagre condition, to avail themselves of the popularity of the Shakespearian rifacimentos. Fraud and deception were evidently practised on the uncritical readers. One of these cunning publishers issued the old play of _The Contention of the Two Houses_, &c., as _newly corrected and enlarged_ by William Shakespeare; which was true as it was acted on the stage, but false in the copy of the elder dramatist which was republished. In this manner several plays not only bear the consecrating name of Shakespeare, but seven which are now discarded from his works appeared in the edition of Rowe; in some of these the hand of Shakespeare appears to have been discerned; and it has been suggested by Mr. Collier, an experienced critic in the history of the drama, that it is possible that all the plays of Shakespeare have not yet been given to the world.

In the second and third parts of _King Henry the Sixth_, for the first was placed in his volume merely to complete the historical series, Shakespeare made ample use of several dramas; and Malone, whose microscopic criticism obtained for him the sarcastic cognomen of _Minutius Felix_, by an actual scrutiny, which we may well believe cost him the most anxious pains, computed the lines of these dramas, and has pa.s.sed his word, that of six thousand and forty-three lines, one thousand seven hundred and seventy-one were written by some author who preceded Shakespeare; two thousand three hundred and seventy-three were formed by him on the foundation laid by his predecessors, and one thousand eight hundred and forty-nine lines were entirely our poet's own composition. Malone has even contrived to distinguish them in the text; those which Shakespeare _adopted_ are printed in the usual manner; the speeches which he _altered_ or expanded, are marked by inverted commas; and to all the lines entirely _composed_ by himself, asterisks are prefixed. A critical reader may derive a curious gratification by attending to this novel text of our national poet; the only dramatist to whom this singularity has ever occurred, and on whose writings this anomalous operation could have been performed.

Shakespeare was more conversant with these preceding dramatists, most of whose writings have perished, than we can ever discover; but it is fortunate for us that his creative faculties brooded over such a world of chaotic genius. He scrupled not to appropriate those happier effusions which were not only worthy of his own genius, but are not distinguishable from it. Sometimes he only retouched, sometimes he n.o.bly amplified, expanding a slight hint into some glorious pa.s.sage, and elevating a creeping dialogue into an impa.s.sioned scene. His judgment was always the joint-workman of his fancy.

Who by the interior evidence could have conjectured that the following Shakespearian effusion, musical with his own music, was, in truth, a mere transcription from an old play of _Richard Duke of York_, whose author remains unknown? I mark by italics the rejections of Shakespeare.

In the slight emendations, we may observe that our poet consulted his ear; but in the first verse he has chosen a more expressive term.

------Doves will peck in _rescue_ (safeguard) of their brood.

Unreasonable creatures feed their young; And though man's face be fearful to their eyes, Yet, in protection of their tender ones, Who hath not seen them even with those _same_ wings Which _they have sometimes_ used _in_ fearful flight, (Which sometime they have used with fearful flight,) Make war with him that climb'd unto their nest, Offering their own lives in their young's defence?

The speech of Queen Margaret, in the third part of _Henry the Sixth_, Act V. Scene IV., in the old play, consisted of a single metaphor included in twelve lines. The single metaphor was not rejected, but it is amplified and n.o.bly sustained through forty lines in the queen's animated address to the lords:--

The mast but now blown overboard, The cable broke, the holding anchor lost, &c.

The two celebrated scenes in which the dead body of the murdered Duke of Gloster is placed before us, with such precision of horror, minutely appalling, and of the raving despair of Cardinal Beaufort so awfully depicted by his death, "making no sign," are splendours whose igniting sparks flew out of the ashes of old plays, one of _King John_, and the other of _The Contentions of the Two Houses_, and of the chronicles. But still these sublime descriptions and these fearful images are the inspirations of Shakespeare; their truth of nature, and the completeness of the purpose of the poet, the bare originals could not impart.

These ascertained evidences may suffice--it would be tedious to proceed with their abundance--of the studiousness and propriety of Shakespeare in his adoptions and adaptations of our earlier drama. Dr. Farmer was the first to discover that these plays were not written _originally_ by Shakespeare; but that able researcher was not then aware of what only the progress of discovery could demonstrate, that hardly a single drama of our national bard can be deemed to have been of his own original invention.

While thus occupied in altering and writing old plays for his own theatre, in 1593 first appeared to the world the name of William Shakespeare in the dedication to the Earl of Southampton of his "Venus and Adonis." The poet has called this poem, of a few pages, "the first heir of my invention." For him who had already written much, the expression is singular, and it looks like a tacit acknowledgment that the poet considered that the five or six plays which he had already set forth had really no claim to "_his_ invention." And the dedication betrays the tremulousness of a virgin effort. "Should this first heir prove deformed," declared our poet in his own Shakespearian diction, "I shall be sorry it had so n.o.ble a G.o.dfather, and never after _ear so barren a land_, for fear it yield me still so bad a harvest." The poet, doubtless, was induced to proceed; for the following year, 1594, produced his "Lucrece." He described his first poem as "unpolished lines;" and he still calls his second his "untutored lines." As the former, so likewise is the present dedicated to the same earl. The fervour of the style indicates the influence of the patron, and the singleness of the devotion of the poet, who tells his n.o.ble patron "What I have done is yours, and what I have to do is yours." The humble actor's intercourse with his n.o.ble friend is a remarkable incident, for the poet was not yet famous when he prefixed his name to these poems.

This earl, then in his youth, we learn was attached to theatrical amus.e.m.e.nts; and it has been ingeniously conjectured that the princely donation of a thousand pounds, which the peer presented to the poet, a tradition which Davenant had handed down, may have occurred, if it ever happened, in the interval between the publication of these two poems.

The Ovidian deliciousness of "Venus and Adonis," and the more solemn narrative of "Tarquin and Lucrece," early obtained celebrity among the youthful and impa.s.sioned generation. Shakespeare was long renowned as the amatory poet of the nation by many who had not learned to distinguish the bard among his dramatic brethren. Numerous editions of these poems confirm their popularity, and the public voice resounded from the lyres of many poets.

No poet more successfully opened his career than Shakespeare by these two popular poems; but it is remarkable that he made no farther essay with a view to permanent fame, which, as it would seem to us, he never imagined he was to derive from his dramas.

Meres, a critic of the day, has informed us that, in 1598, some sonnets by Shakespeare were in circulation among his friends. These were effusions of the hour; and, possibly, some may have been descriptive of his own condition. In 1599, a poetical collection called "The Pa.s.sionate Pilgrim," appeared under the name of Shakespeare; and ten years afterwards another, ent.i.tled "Shakespeare's Sonnets," was given to the world; but as poetical miscellanies were formed in those days by publishers who were not nice in the means they used to procure ma.n.u.scripts, it is quite uncertain what are genuine and what may be the composition of other writers in these collections.

In "The Pa.s.sionate Pilgrim," some critics find difficulty in tracing the hand of the poet; and we accidentally discover by the complaint of Heywood, a congenial dramatist, that there were two of his poems in one edition of this collection; and we know that there were also other poems by Marlowe, and Barnefield, and others. Heywood tells us that Shakespeare was greatly offended at this licentious use of his name;[7]

but he must have been imperturbably careless on such matters, otherwise he would not have suffered three editions of this spurious miscellany.

The fate of "The Sonnets" is remarkable. Steevens boldly ejected them from the poet's works, declaring that the strongest Act of Parliament that could be framed could not compel their perusal. Shall we ascribe to this caustic wit a singular deficiency in his judicial decisions, or look to some other cause for the ejection of these sonnets which have become of late the subject of so much curious inquiry? An ingenious attempt has been recently made to form what is called an autobiography of the poet by stringing together the sonnets in six distinct poems; this would be sufficient evidence that they had never pa.s.sed under the eye of the author, and that he could have had no concern in a publication which has thus mutilated his living members. This bookseller's collection remains for more than one cause an ambiguous volume.

Shakespeare now stands alone the national bard; but h.o.a.ry Time, which has decreed who are his inferiors, once saw them his equals; and when he mingled with his fellows, possibly the world looked up to a Coryphaeus whose name was not Shakespeare. Two inquiries interest us: Was the pre-eminence of our national bard acknowledged by his contemporaries?--and, What cause occasioned the utter neglect of his own reputation?

Among his contemporaries, Shakespeare could not possess the pre-eminence of the present age, for who were then to be his judges? His rivals or his audience? Our gentle Shakespeare, as Jonson called him, perhaps at no time appreciated his own genius at its peculiar excellence, and therefore was not likely to discover his solitary pre-eminence among a formidable crowd of rivals, nor were they likely to acknowledge in their friend "Will" the prevailing charm which has now subdued the world. They have even occasionally darted a shaft of ridicule or a sharp parody at our immortal tragedian; the madness of Hamlet and Ophelia could serve these dramatic writers as a subject for raillery;[8] and the airy Fletcher, who would have emulated Shakespeare, was guilty of sneering at his inimitable master. The learned JONSON was apt to be critical; CHAPMAN cast his Greek glances haughtily on the vernacular bard; MARSTON was caustic; and DRAYTON, his intimate, who had composed two or three tragedies, could hardly perceive any supremacy in SHAKESPEARE, and for us, seems parsimoniously to commend his "comic vein" as strong

As any one that traffick'd with the stage;

while BEN JONSON is hailed as

Lord of the theatre, who could bear The buskin, as the sock, away.

It was not from his dramatic brothers that SHAKESPEARE could have discovered his more than supremacy; and while the brotherhood had family quarrels among themselves, Shakespeare appears never to have moved offensively or defensively. Gifford tells us that he has never mentioned one of his contemporaries with commendation, and only once appears, with Jonson and others, to have contributed some commendatory lines to the volume of an obscure and whimsical poet.[9] As Shakespeare did not deal in this literary traffic of that day, he has received fewer tributes than some of the meanest of our poets. But if Shakespeare has not noticed any of his a.s.sociates, neither has the poet ever alluded to himself in his works. He never exults in his triumphs, nor is querulous on those who oppugned them.

With his audience he was unquestionably popular; we hear of none of his plays having been condemned, though such mischances are recorded of his rivals, and, above all, of his great compeer Jonson. We know that he was fortunate in the personation of his characters; and those natural touches, listened to on the spot when nature was left free to act her part, fell on contagious and instantaneous sympathies. But if the poet charmed by his "many-coloured life," his very faults were not less delightful. His audience revelled in bustle and bombast, and it is possibly in compliance with their stirring unchastised taste that we have received so much of his rude originals.

Our poet's recklessness of the fate of his own dramas, and his utter disregard of posterity, is at least one unquestionable fact in the blank page of his life. He was utterly reckless of his personal reputation among his contemporary readers, or otherwise he would not have suffered in his lifetime mutilated dramas, or even their first draughts, surrept.i.tiously procured, to pa.s.s under his own name;--huddled pieces without even the divisions of the acts, or crude and ridiculous dramas which he was incapable of having written. These were suicidal acts of his own fame, but they never broke his silence; and even in his retreat from the metropolis, in the leisure of his native bowers of Avon, Shakespeare felt not

That last infirmity of n.o.ble minds, The spur of fame,