Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher Part 5

"Love's Labour's Lost."

The characters in this play are either impersonated out of Shakespeare's own multiformity by imaginative self-position, or out of such as a country town and schoolboy's observation might supply,-the curate, the schoolmaster, the Armado (who even in my time was not extinct in the cheaper inns of North Wales), and so on. The satire is chiefly on follies of words. Biron and Rosaline are evidently the pre-existent state of Benedict and Beatrice, and so, perhaps, is Boyet of Lafeu, and Costard of the tapster in _Measure for Measure_; and the frequency of the rhymes, the sweetness as well as the smoothness of the metre, and the number of acute and fancifully ill.u.s.trated aphorisms, are all as they ought to be in a poet's youth. True genius begins by generalising and condensing; it ends in realising and expanding. It first collects the seeds.

Yet, if this juvenile drama had been the only one extant of our Shakespeare, and we possessed the tradition only of his riper works, or accounts of them in writers who had not even mentioned this play,-how many of Shakespeare's characteristic features might we not still have discovered in _Love's Labour's Lost_, though as in a portrait taken of him in his boyhood.

I can never sufficiently admire the wonderful activity of thought throughout the whole of the first scene of the play, rendered natural, as it is, by the choice of the characters, and the whimsical determination on which the drama is founded. A whimsical determination certainly;-yet not altogether so very improbable to those who are conversant in the history of the middle ages, with their Courts of Love, and all that lighter drapery of chivalry, which engaged even mighty kings with a sort of serio-comic interest, and may well be supposed to have occupied more completely the smaller princes, at a time when the n.o.ble's or prince's court contained the only theatre of the domain or princ.i.p.ality. This sort of story, too, was admirably suited to Shakespeare's times, when the English court was still the foster-mother of the state and the muses; and when, in consequence, the courtiers, and men of rank and fas.h.i.+on, affected a display of wit, point, and sententious observation, that would be deemed intolerable at present,-but in which a hundred years of controversy, involving every great political, and every dear domestic, interest, had trained all but the lowest cla.s.ses to partic.i.p.ate. Add to this the very style of the sermons of the time, and the eagerness of the Protestants to distinguish themselves by long and frequent preaching, and it will be found that, from the reign of Henry VIII. to the abdication of James II.

no country ever received such a national education as England.

Hence the comic matter chosen in the first instance is a ridiculous imitation or apery of this constant striving after logical precision and subtle opposition of thoughts, together with a making the most of every conception or image, by expressing it under the least expected property belonging to it, and this, again, rendered specially absurd by being applied to the most current subjects and occurrences. The phrases and modes of combination in argument were caught by the most ignorant from the custom of the age, and their ridiculous misapplication of them is most amusingly exhibited in Costard; whilst examples suited only to the gravest propositions and impersonations, or apostrophes to abstract thoughts impersonated, which are in fact the natural language only of the most vehement agitations of the mind, are adopted by the c.o.xcombry of Armado as mere artifices of ornament.

The same kind of intellectual action is exhibited in a more serious and elevated strain in many other parts of this play. Biron's speech at the end of the Fourth Act is an excellent specimen of it. It is logic clothed in rhetoric;-but observe how Shakespeare, in his two-fold being of poet and philosopher, avails himself of it to convey profound truths in the most lively images,-the whole remaining faithful to the character supposed to utter the lines, and the expressions themselves const.i.tuting a further development of that character:-

"Other slow arts entirely keep the brain: And therefore finding barren practisers, Scarce show a harvest of their heavy toil: But love, first learned in a lady's eyes, Lives not alone immured in the brain; But, with the motion of all elements, Courses as swift as thought in every power; And gives to every power a double power, Above their functions and their offices.

It adds a precious seeing to the eye, A lover's eyes will gaze an eagle blind; A lover's ear will hear the lowest sound, When the suspicious head of theft is stopp'd: Love's feeling is more soft and sensible, Than are the tender horns of c.o.c.kled snails; Love's tongue proves dainty Bacchus gross in taste; For valour, is not love a Hercules, Still climbing trees in the Hesperides?

Subtle as Sphinx; as sweet and musical, As bright Apollo's lute, strung with his hair; And when love speaks, the voice of all the G.o.ds Makes heaven drowsy with the harmony.

Never durst poet touch a pen to write, Until his ink were tempered with love's sighs; Oh, then his lines would ravish savage ears, And plant in tyrants mild humility.

From women's eyes this doctrine I derive: They sparkle still the right Promethean fire; They are the books, the arts, the academes, That show, contain, and nourish all the world; Else, none at all in aught proves excellent; Then fools you were these women to forswear; Or, keeping what is sworn, you will prove fools.

For wisdom's sake, a word that all men love; Or for love's sake, a word that loves all men; Or for men's sake, the authors of these women; Or women's sake, by whom we men are men; Let us once lose our oaths, to find ourselves, Or else we lose ourselves to keep our oaths: It is religion to be thus forsworn: For charity itself fulfils the law: And who can sever love from charity?"-

This is quite a study;-sometimes you see this youthful G.o.d of poetry connecting disparate thoughts purely by means of resemblances in the words expressing them,-a thing in character in lighter comedy, especially of that kind in which Shakespeare delights, namely, the purposed display of wit, though sometimes too, disfiguring his graver scenes;-but more often you may see him doubling the natural connection or order of logical consequence in the thoughts by the introduction of an artificial and sought for resemblance in the words, as, for instance, in the third line of the play,-

"And then grace us in the disgrace of death;"-

this being a figure often having its force and propriety, as justified by the law of pa.s.sion, which, inducing in the mind an unusual activity, seeks for means to waste its superfluity,-when in the highest degree-in lyric repet.i.tions and sublime tautology-"At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down; at her feet he bowed, he fell; where he bowed, there he fell down dead,"-and, in lower degrees, in making the words themselves the subjects and materials of that surplus action, and for the same cause that agitates our limbs, and forces our very gestures into a tempest in states of high excitement.

The mere style of narration in _Love's Labour's Lost_, like that of aegeon in the first scene of the _Comedy of Errors_, and of the Captain in the second scene of _Macbeth_, seems imitated with its defects and its beauties from Sir Philip Sidney; whose _Arcadia_, though not then published, was already well known in ma.n.u.script copies, and could hardly have escaped the notice and admiration of Shakespeare as the friend and client of the Earl of Southampton. The chief defect consists in the parentheses and parenthetic thoughts and descriptions, suited neither to the pa.s.sion of the speaker, nor the purpose of the person to whom the information is to be given, but manifestly betraying the author himself,-not by way of continuous undersong, but-palpably, and so as to show themselves addressed to the general reader. However, it is not unimportant to notice how strong a presumption the diction and allusions of this play afford, that, though Shakespeare's acquirements in the dead languages might not be such as we suppose in a learned education, his habits had, nevertheless, been scholastic, and those of a student. For a young author's first work almost always bespeaks his recent pursuits, and his first observations of life are either drawn from the immediate employments of his youth, and from the characters and images most deeply impressed on his mind in the situations in which those employments had placed him;-or else they are fixed on such objects and occurrences in the world, as are easily connected with, and seem to bear upon, his studies and the hitherto exclusive subjects of his meditation. Just as Ben Jonson, who applied himself to the drama after having served in Flanders, fills his earliest plays with true or pretended soldiers, the wrongs and neglects of the former, and the absurd boasts and knavery of their counterfeits. So Lessing's first comedies are placed in the universities, and consist of events and characters conceivable in an academic life.

I will only further remark the sweet and tempered gravity, with which Shakespeare in the end draws the only fitting moral which such a drama afforded. Here Rosaline rises up to the full height of Beatrice:-

"_Ros._ Oft have I heard of you, my lord Biron, Before I saw you: and the world's large tongue Proclaims you for a man replete with mocks; Full of comparisons, and wounding flouts, Which you on all estates will execute That lie within the mercy of your wit: To weed this wormwood from your fruitful brain, And therewithal, to win me, if you please (Without the which I am not to be won), You shall this twelvemonth term from day to day Visit the speechless sick, and still converse With groaning wretches; and your talk shall be, With all the fierce endeavour of your wit, To enforce the pained impotent to smile.

_Biron._ To move wild laughter in the throat of death?

It cannot be; it is impossible; Mirth cannot move a soul in agony.

_Ros._ Why, that's the way to choke a gibing spirit, Whose influence is begot of that loose grace, Which shallow laughing hearers give to fools; A jest's prosperity lies in the ear Of him that hears it, never in the tongue Of him that makes it: then, if sickly ears, Deaf'd with the clamours of their own dear groans, Will hear your idle scorns, continue then, And I will have you, and that fault withal: But, if they will not, throw away that spirit, And I shall find you empty of that fault, Right joyful of your reformation."

Act v. sc. 2. In Biron's speech to the Princess:

"And, therefore, like the eye, Full of _straying_ shapes, of habits, and of forms"-

either read _stray_, which I prefer; or throw _full_ back to the preceding lines,-

"Like the eye, full Of straying shapes," &c,

In the same scene:-

"_Biron._ And what to me, my love? and what to me?

_Ros._ You must be purged too, your sins are rank; You are attaint with fault and perjury: Therefore, if you my favour mean to get, A twelvemonth shall you spend, and never rest, But seek the weary beds of people sick."

There can be no doubt, indeed, about the propriety of expunging this speech of Rosaline's; it soils the very page that retains it. But I do not agree with Warburton and others in striking out the preceding line also.

It is quite in Biron's character; and Rosaline, not answering it immediately, Dumain takes up the question for him, and, after he and Longaville are answered, Biron, with evident propriety, says:-

"_Studies_ my mistress?" &c.

"Midsummer Night's Dream."

Act i. sc. 1.-

"_Her._ O cross! too high to be enthrall'd to low-

_Lys._ Or else misgrafted in respect of years;

_Her._ O spite! too old to be engaged to young-

_Lys._ Or else it stood upon the choice of friends;

_Her._ O h.e.l.l! to chuse love by another's eye!"

There is no authority for any alteration;-but I never can help feeling how great an improvement it would be, if the two former of Hermia's exclamations were omitted;-the third and only appropriate one would then become a beauty, and most natural.

_Ib._ Helena's speech:-

"I will go tell him of fair Hermia's flight," &c.

I am convinced that Shakespeare availed himself of the t.i.tle of this play in his own mind, and worked upon it as a dream throughout, but especially, and perhaps unpleasingly, in this broad determination of ungrateful treachery in Helena, so undisguisedly avowed to herself, and this, too, after the witty cool philosophising that precedes. The act itself is natural, and the resolve so to act is, I fear, likewise too true a picture of the lax hold which principles have on a woman's heart, when opposed to, or even separated from, pa.s.sion and inclination. For women are less hypocrites to their own minds than men are, because in general they feel less proportionate abhorrence of moral evil in and for itself, and more of its outward consequences, as detection and loss of character, than men,-their natures being almost wholly extroitive. Still, however just in itself, the representation of this is not poetical; we shrink from it, and cannot harmonise it with the ideal.

Act ii. sc. 1. Theobald's edition-

"_Through_ bush, _through_ briar-

_Through_ flood, _through fire_-"

What a n.o.ble pair of ears this worthy Theobald must have had! The eight amphimacers or cretics,-

"Over hill, over dale, Thoro' bush, thoro' briar, Over park, over pale, Throro' flood, thoro' fire"-

have a delightful effect on the ear in their sweet transition to the trochaic,-

"I do wander ev'ry where Swifter than the moones sphere," &c.