Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher Part 17

Of all Shakespeare's plays _Macbeth_ is the most rapid, _Hamlet_ the slowest, in movement. _Lear_ combines length with rapidity,-like the hurricane and the whirlpool, absorbing while it advances. It begins as a stormy day in summer, with brightness; but that brightness is lurid, and antic.i.p.ates the tempest.

It was not without forethought, nor is it without its due significance, that the division of Lear's kingdom is in the first six lines of the play stated as a thing already determined in all its particulars, previously to the trial of professions, as the relative rewards of which the daughters were to be made to consider their several portions. The strange, yet by no means unnatural, mixture of selfishness, sensibility, and habit of feeling derived from, and fostered by, the particular rank and usages of the individual;-the intense desire of being intensely beloved,-selfish, and yet characteristic of the selfishness of a loving and kindly nature alone;-the self-supportless leaning for all pleasure on another's breast;-the craving after sympathy with a prodigal disinterestedness, frustrated by its own ostentation, and the mode and nature of its claims;-the anxiety, the distrust, the jealousy, which more or less accompany all selfish affections, and are amongst the surest contradistinctions of mere fondness from true love, and which originate Lear's eager wish to enjoy his daughter's violent professions, whilst the inveterate habits of sovereignty convert the wish into claim and positive right, and an incompliance with it into crime and treason;-these facts, these pa.s.sions, these moral verities, on which the whole tragedy is founded, are all prepared for, and will to the retrospect be found implied, in these first four or five lines of the play. They let us know that the trial is but a trick; and that the grossness of the old king's rage is in part the natural result of a silly trick suddenly and most unexpectedly baffled and disappointed.

It may here be worthy of notice, that _Lear_ is the only serious performance of Shakespeare, the interest and situations of which are derived from the a.s.sumption of a gross improbability; whereas Beaumont and Fletcher's tragedies are, almost all of them, founded on some out of the way accident or exception to the general experience of mankind. But observe the matchless judgment of our Shakespeare. First, improbable as the conduct of Lear is in the first scene, yet it was an old story rooted in the popular faith,-a thing taken for granted already, and consequently without any of the effects of improbability. Secondly, it is merely the canva.s.s for the characters and pa.s.sions,-a mere occasion for,-and not, in the manner of Beaumont and Fletcher, perpetually recurring as the cause, and _sine qua non_ of,-the incidents and emotions. Let the first scene of this play have been lost, and let it only be understood that a fond father had been duped by hypocritical professions of love and duty on the part of two daughters to disinherit the third, previously, and deservedly, more dear to him;-and all the rest of the tragedy would retain its interest undiminished, and be perfectly intelligible.

The accidental is nowhere the groundwork of the pa.s.sions, but that which is catholic, which in all ages has been, and ever will be, close and native to the heart of man,-parental anguish from filial ingrat.i.tude, the genuineness of worth, though coffined in bluntness, and the execrable vileness of a smooth iniquity. Perhaps I ought to have added the _Merchant of Venice_; but here too the same remarks apply. It was an old tale; and subst.i.tute any other danger than that of the pound of flesh (the circ.u.mstance in which the improbability lies), yet all the situations and the emotions appertaining to them remain equally excellent and appropriate. Whereas take away from the _Mad Lover_ of Beaumont and Fletcher the fantastic hypothesis of his engagement to cut out his own heart, and have it presented to his mistress, and all the main scenes must go with it.

Kotzebue is the German Beaumont and Fletcher, without their poetic powers, and without their _vis comica_. But, like them, he always deduces his situations and pa.s.sions from marvellous accidents, and the trick of bringing one part of our moral nature to counteract another; as our pity for misfortune and admiration of generosity and courage to combat our condemnation of guilt as in adultery, robbery, and other heinous crimes;-and, like them too, he excels in his mode of telling a story clearly and interestingly, in a series of dramatic dialogues. Only the trick of making tragedy-heroes and heroines out of shopkeepers and barmaids was too low for the age, and too unpoetic for the genius, of Beaumont and Fletcher, inferior in every respect as they are to their great predecessor and contemporary. How inferior would they have appeared, had not Shakespeare existed for them to imitate;-which in every play, more or less, they do, and in their tragedies most glaringly:-and yet-(O shame!

shame!)-they miss no opportunity of sneering at the divine man, and sub-detracting from his merits!

To return to _Lear_. Having thus in the fewest words, and in a natural reply to as natural a question,-which yet answers the secondary purpose of attracting our attention to the difference or diversity between the characters of Cornwall and Albany,-provided the _premisses_ and _data_, as it were, for our after insight into the mind and mood of the person, whose character, pa.s.sions, and sufferings are the main subject-matter of the play;-from Lear, the _persona patiens_ of his drama, Shakespeare pa.s.ses without delay to the second in importance, the chief agent and prime mover, and introduces Edmund to our acquaintance, preparing us with the same felicity of judgment, and in the same easy and natural way, for his character in the seemingly casual communication of its origin and occasion. From the first drawing up of the curtain Edmund has stood before us in the united strength and beauty of earliest manhood. Our eyes have been questioning him. Gifted as he is with high advantages of person, and further endowed by nature with a powerful intellect and a strong energetic will, even without any concurrence of circ.u.mstances and accident, pride will necessarily be the sin that most easily besets him. But Edmund is also the known and acknowledged son of the princely Gloster: he, therefore, has both the germ of pride, and the conditions best fitted to evolve and ripen it into a predominant feeling. Yet hitherto no reason appears why it should be other than the not unusual pride of person, talent, and birth,-a pride auxiliary, if not akin, to many virtues, and the natural ally of honourable impulses. But alas! in his own presence his own father takes shame to himself for the frank avowal that he is his father,-he has "blushed so often to acknowledge him that he is now brazed to it!" Edmund hears the circ.u.mstances of his birth spoken of with a most degrading and licentious levity,-his mother described as a wanton by her own paramour, and the remembrance of the animal sting, the low criminal gratifications connected with her wantonness and prost.i.tuted beauty, a.s.signed as the reason why "the wh.o.r.eson must be acknowledged!" This, and the consciousness of its notoriety; the gnawing conviction that every show of respect is an effort of courtesy, which recalls, while it represses, a contrary feeling;-this is the ever trickling flow of wormwood and gall into the wounds of pride,-the corrosive _virus_ which inoculates pride with a venom not its own, with envy, hatred, and a l.u.s.t for that power which in its blaze of radiance would hide the dark spots on his disc,-with pangs of shame personally undeserved, and therefore felt as wrongs, and with a blind ferment of vindictive working towards the occasions and causes, especially towards a brother, whose stainless birth and lawful honours were the constant remembrancers of his own debas.e.m.e.nt, and were ever in the way to prevent all chance of its being unknown, or overlooked and forgotten. Add to this, that with excellent judgment, and provident for the claims of the moral sense,-for that which, relatively to the drama, is called poetic justice, and as the fittest means for reconciling the feelings of the spectators to the horrors of Gloster's after sufferings,-at least, of rendering them somewhat less unendurable-(for I will not disguise my conviction, that in this one point the tragic in this play has been urged beyond the outermost mark and _ne plus ultra_ of the dramatic);-Shakespeare has precluded all excuse and palliation of the guilt incurred by both the parents of the base-born Edmund, by Gloster's confession that he was at the time a married man, and already blest with a lawful heir of his fortunes. The mournful alienation of brotherly love, occasioned by the law of primogeniture in n.o.ble families, or rather by the unnecessary distinctions engrafted thereon, and this in children of the same stock, is still almost proverbial on the continent,-especially, as I know from my own observation, in the south of Europe,-and appears to have been scarcely less common in our own island before the Revolution of 1688, if we may judge from the characters and sentiments so frequent in our elder comedies. There is the younger brother, for instance, in Beaumont and Fletcher's play of the _Scornful Lady_, on the one side, and Oliver in Shakespeare's _As You Like It_, on the other. Need it be said how heavy an aggravation, in such a case, the stain of b.a.s.t.a.r.dy must have been, were it only that the younger brother was liable to hear his own dishonour and his mother's infamy related by his father with an excusing shrug of the shoulders, and in a tone betwixt waggery and shame!

By the circ.u.mstances here enumerated as so many predisposing causes, Edmund's character might well be deemed already sufficiently explained; and our minds prepared for it. But in this tragedy the story or fable constrained Shakespeare to introduce wickedness in an outrageous form in the persons of Regan and Goneril. He had read nature too heedfully not to know that courage, intellect, and strength of character are the most impressive forms of power, and that to power in itself, without reference to any moral end, an inevitable admiration and complacency appertains, whether it be displayed in the conquests of a Buonaparte or Tamerlane, or in the foam and the thunder of a cataract. But in the exhibition of such a character it was of the highest importance to prevent the guilt from pa.s.sing into utter monstrosity,-which again depends on the presence or absence of causes and temptations sufficient to account for the wickedness, without the necessity of recurring to a thorough fiendishness of nature for its origination. For such are the appointed relations of intellectual power to truth, and of truth to goodness, that it becomes both morally and poetically unsafe to present what is admirable-what our nature compels us to admire-in the mind, and what is most detestable in the heart, as co-existing in the same individual without any apparent connection, or any modification of the one by the other. That Shakespeare has in one instance, that of Iago, approached to this, and that he has done it successfully, is perhaps the most astonis.h.i.+ng proof of his genius, and the opulence of its resources. But in the present tragedy, in which he was compelled to present a Goneril and a Regan, it was most carefully to be avoided;-and therefore the only one conceivable addition to the inauspicious influences on the preformation of Edmund's character is given, in the information that all the kindly counteractions to the mischievous feelings of shame, which might have been derived from co-domestication with Edgar and their common father, had been cut off by his absence from home, and foreign education from boyhood to the present time, and a prospect of its continuance, as if to preclude all risk of his interference with the father's views for the elder and legitimate son:-

"He hath been out nine years, and away he shall again."

Act i. sc. 1.-

"_Cor._ Nothing my lord.

_Lear._ Nothing?

_Cor._ Nothing.

_Lear._ Nothing can come of nothing: speak again.

_Cor._ Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave My heart into my mouth: I love your majesty According to my bond; nor more, nor less."

There is something of disgust at the ruthless hypocrisy of her sisters, and some little faulty admixture of pride and sullenness in Cordelia's "Nothing;" and her tone is well contrived, indeed, to lessen the glaring absurdity of Lear's conduct, but answers the yet more important purpose of forcing away the attention from the nursery-tale, the moment it has served its end, that of supplying the canvas for the picture. This is also materially furthered by Kent's opposition, which displays Lear's moral incapability of resigning the sovereign power in the very act of disposing of it. Kent is, perhaps, the nearest to perfect goodness in all Shakespeare's characters, and yet the most individualised. There is an extraordinary charm, in his bluntness, which is that only of a n.o.bleman, arising from a contempt of overstrained courtesy, and combined with easy placability where goodness of heart is apparent. His pa.s.sionate affection for, and fidelity to, Lear act on our feelings in Lear's own favour: virtue itself seems to be in company with him.

_Ib._ sc. 2. Edmund's speech:-

"Who, in the l.u.s.ty stealth of nature, take More composition and fierce quality Than doth," &c.

Warburton's note upon a quotation from Vanini.

Poor Vanini!-Any one but Warburton would have thought this precious pa.s.sage more characteristic of Mr. Shandy than of atheism. If the fact really were so (which it is not, but almost the contrary) I do not see why the most confirmed theist might not very naturally utter the same wish.

But it is proverbial that the youngest son in a large family is commonly the man of the greatest talents in it; and as good an authority as Vanini has said-"incalescere in venerem ardentius, spei sobolis injuriosum esse."

In this speech of Edmund you see, as soon as a man cannot reconcile himself to reason, how his conscience flies off by way of appeal to nature, who is sure upon such occasions never to find fault, and also how shame sharpens a predisposition in the heart to evil. For it is a profound moral, that shame will naturally generate guilt; the oppressed will be vindictive, like Shylock, and in the anguish of undeserved ignominy the delusion secretly springs up of getting over the moral quality of an action by fixing the mind on the mere physical act alone.

_Ib._ Edmund's speech:-

"This is the excellent foppery of the world! that, when we are sick in fortune (often the surfeit of our own behaviour), we make guilty of our disasters, the sun, the moon, and the stars," &c.

Thus scorn and misanthropy are often the antic.i.p.ations and mouth-pieces of wisdom in the detection of superst.i.tions. Both individuals and nations may be free from such prejudices by being below them, as well as by rising above them.

_Ib._ sc. 3. The Steward should be placed in exact ant.i.thesis to Kent, as the only character of utter irredeemable baseness in Shakespeare. Even in this the judgment and invention of the poet are very observable;-for what else could the willing tool of a Goneril be? Not a vice but this of baseness was left open to him.

_Ib._ sc. 4. In Lear old age is itself a character,-its natural imperfections being increased by life-long habits of receiving a prompt obedience. Any addition of individuality would have been unnecessary and painful; for the relations of others to him, of wondrous fidelity and of frightful ingrat.i.tude, alone sufficiently distinguish him. Thus Lear becomes the open and ample play-room of nature's pa.s.sions.

_Ib._-

"_Knight._ Since my young lady's going into France, Sir; the fool hath much pined away."

The Fool is no comic buffoon to make the groundlings laugh,-no forced condescension of Shakespeare's genius to the taste of his audience.

Accordingly the poet prepares for his introduction, which he never does with any of his common clowns and fools, by bringing him into living connection with the pathos of the play. He is as wonderful a creation as Caliban;-his wild babblings, and inspired idiocy, articulate and gauge the horrors of the scene.

The monster Goneril prepares what is necessary, while the character of Albany renders a still more maddening grievance possible-namely, Regan and Cornwall in perfect sympathy of monstrosity. Not a sentiment, not an image, which can give pleasure on its own account is admitted; whenever these creatures are introduced, and they are brought forward as little as possible, pure horror reigns throughout. In this scene and in all the early speeches of Lear, the one general sentiment of filial ingrat.i.tude prevails as the main-spring of the feelings;-in this early stage the outward object causing the pressure on the mind, which is not yet sufficiently familiarised with the anguish for the imagination to work upon it.

_Ib._-

"_Gon._ Do you mark that, my lord?

_Alb._ I cannot be so partial, Goneril, To the great love I bear you.

_Gon._ Pray you content," &c.

Observe the baffled endeavour of Goneril to act on the fears of Albany, and yet his pa.s.siveness, his _inertia_; he is not convinced, and yet he is afraid of looking into the thing. Such characters always yield to those who will take the trouble of governing them, or for them. Perhaps the influence of a princess, whose choice of him had royalised his state, may be some little excuse for Albany's weakness.

_Ib._ sc. 5.-

"_Lear._ O let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven!

Keep me in temper! I would not be mad!"

The mind's own antic.i.p.ation of madness! The deepest tragic notes are often struck by a half sense of an impending blow. The Fool's conclusion of this act by a grotesque prattling seems to indicate the dislocation of feeling that has begun and is to be continued.

Act ii. sc. 1. Edmund's speech:-

... "He replied, Thou unpossessing b.a.s.t.a.r.d!" &c.

Thus the secret poison in Edmund's own heart steals forth; and then observe poor Gloster's-

"Loyal and _natural_ boy!"-

as if praising the crime of Edmund's birth!

_Ib._ Compare Regan's-

"What, did _my father's_ G.o.dson seek your life?

He whom _my father_ named?"-

with the unfeminine violence of her-

"All vengeance comes too short," &c.-

and yet no reference to the guilt, but only to the accident, which she uses as an occasion for sneering at her father. Regan is not, in fact, a greater monster than Goneril, but she has the power of casting more venom.