Shakespeare Part 4

The Greeks insisted that nothing should be in a play that did not tend to the catastrophe. They did not believe in the episode--in the sudden contrasts of light and shade--in mingling the comic and the tragic.

The sunlight never fell upon their tears, and darkness did not overtake their laughter. They believed that nature sympathized or was in harmony with the events of the play. When crime was about to be committed--some horror to be perpetrated--the light grew dim, the wind sighed, the trees s.h.i.+vered, and upon all was the shadow of the coming event.

Shakespeare knew that the play had little to do with the tides and currents of universal life--that Nature cares neither for smiles nor tears, for life nor death, and that the sun s.h.i.+nes as gladly on coffins as on cradles.

The first time I visited the Place de la Concorde, where during the French Revolution stood the guillotine, and where now stands an Egyptian obelisk--a bird, sitting on the top, was singing with all its might.--Nature forgets.

One of the most notable instances of the violation by Shakespeare of the cla.s.sic model, is found in the 6th Scene of the I. Act of Macbeth.

When the King and Banquo approach the castle in which the King is to be murdered that night, no shadow falls athwart the threshold. So beautiful is the scene that the King says:

"This castle hath a pleasant seat; the air Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself Unto our gentle senses."

And Banquo adds:

"This guest of summer, The temple-haunting martlet, does approve By his loved mansionry that the heaven's breath Smells wooingly here; no jutty, frieze, b.u.t.tress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird Hath made his pendent bed and procreant cradle.

Where they most breed and haunt, I have observed The air is delicate."

Another notable instance is the porter scene immediately following the murder. So, too, the dialogue with the clown who brings the asp to Cleopatra just before the suicide, ill.u.s.trates my meaning.

I know of one paragraph in the Greek drama worthy of Shakespeare. This is in "Medea." When Medea kills her children she curses Jason, using the ordinary Billingsgate and papal curse, but at the conclusion says: "I pray the G.o.ds to make him virtuous, that he may the more deeply feel the pang that I inflict."

Shakespeare dealt in lights and shadows. He was intense. He put noons and midnights side by side. No other dramatist would have dreamed of adding to the pathos--of increasing our appreciation of Lear's agony, by supplementing the wail of the mad king with the mocking laughter of a loving clown.

X.

THE ordinary dramatists--the men of talent--(and there is the same difference between talent and genius that there is between a stone-mason and a sculptor) create characters that become types. Types are of necessity caricatures--actual men and women are to some extent contradictory in their actions. Types are blown in the one direction by the one wind--characters have pilots.

In real people, good and evil mingle. Types are all one way, or all the other--all good, or all bad, all wise or all foolish.

Pecksniff was a perfect type, a perfect hypocrite--and will remain a type as long as language lives--a hypocrite that even drunkenness could not change. Everybody understands Pecksniff, and compared with him Tartuffe was an honest man. Hamlet is an individual, a person, an actual being--and for that reason there is a difference of opinion ias to his motives and as to his character. We differ About Hamlet as we do about Caesar, or about Shakespeare himself.

Hamlet saw the ghost of his father and heard again his father's voice, and yet, afterwards, he speaks of

"the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns."

In this there is no contradiction. The reason outweighs the senses. If we should see a dead man rise from his grave, we would not, the next day, believe that we did. No one can credit a miracle until it becomes so common that it ceases to be miraculous.

Types are puppets--controlled from without--characters act from within.

There is the same difference between characters and types that there is between springs and water-works, between ca.n.a.ls and rivers, between wooden soldiers and heroes.

In most plays and in most novels the characters are so shadowy that we have to piece them out with the imagination.

One waking in the morning sometimes sees at the foot of his bed a strange figure--it may be of an ancient lady with cap and ruffles and with the expression of garrulous and fussy old age--but when the light gets stronger, the figure gradually changes and he sees a few clothes on a chair.

The dramatist lives the lives of others, and in order to delineate character must not only have imagination but sympathy with the character delineated. The great dramatist thinks of a character as an entirety, as an individual.

I once had a dream, and in this dream I was discussing a subject with another man. It occurred to me that I was dreaming, and I then said to myself: If this is a dream, I am doing the talking for both sides--consequently I ought to know in advance what the other man is going to say. In my dream I tried the experiment. I then asked the other man a question, and before he answered made up my mind what the answer was to be. To my surprise, the man did not say what I expected he would, and so great was my astonishment that I awoke.

It then occurred to me that I had discovered the secret of Shakespeare.

He did, when awake, what I did when asleep--that is, he threw off a character so perfect that it acted independently of him.

In the delineation of character Shakespeare has no rivals. He creates no monsters. His characters do not act without reason, without motive.

Iago had his reasons. In Caliban, nature was not destroyed--and Lady Macbeth certifies that the woman still was in her heart, by saying:

"Had he not resembled my father as he slept, I had done it."

Shakespeare's characters act from within. They are centres of energy.

They are not pushed by unseen hands, or pulled by unseen strings. They have objects, desires. They are persons--real, living beings.

Few dramatists succeed in getting their characters loose from the canvas--their backs stick to the wall--they do not have free and independent action--they have no background, no unexpressed motives--no untold desires. They lack the complexity of the real.

Shakespeare makes the character true to itself. Christopher Sly, surrounded by the luxuries of a lord, true to his station, calls for a pot of the smallest ale.

Take one expression by Lady Macbeth. You remember that after the murder is discovered--after the alarm bell is rung--she appears upon the scene wanting to know what has happened. Macduff refuses to tell her, saying that the slightest word would murder as it fell. At this moment Banquo comes upon the scene and Macduff cries out to him:

"Our royal master's murdered."

What does Lady Macbeth then say? She in fact makes a confession of guilt. The weak point in the terrible tragedy is that Duncan was murdered in Macbeth's castle. So when Lady Macbeth hears what they suppose is news to her, she cries:

"What! In our house!"

Had she been innocent, her horror of the crime would have made her forget the place--the venue. Banquo sees through this, and sees through her.

Her expression was a light, by which he saw her guilt--and he answers:

"Too cruel anywhere."

No matter whether Shakespeare delineated clown or king, warrior or maiden--no matter whether his characters are taken from the gutter or the throne--each is a work of consummate art, and when he is unnatural, he is so splendid that the defect is forgotten.

When Romeo is told of the death of Juliet, and thereupon makes up his mind to die upon her grave, he gives a description of the shop where poison could be purchased. He goes into particulars and tells of the alligators stuffed, of the skins of ill-shaped fishes, of the beggarly account of empty boxes, of the remnants of pack-thread, and old cakes of roses--and while it is hardly possible to believe that under such circ.u.mstances a man would take the trouble to make an inventory of a strange kind of drug-store, yet the inventory is so perfect--the picture is so marvellously drawn--that we forget to think whether it is natural or not.

In making the frame of a great picture--of a great scene--Shakespeare was often careless, but the picture is perfect. In making the sides of the arch he was negligent, but when he placed the keystone, it burst into blossom. Of course there are many lines in Shakepeare that never should have been written. In other words, there are imperfections in his plays. But we must remember that Shakespeare furnished the torch that enables us to see these imperfections.

Shakespeare speaks through his characters, and we must not mistake what the characters say, for the opinion of Shakespeare. No one can believe that Shakespeare regarded life as "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." That was the opinion of a murderer, surrounded by avengers, and whose wife--partner in his crimes--troubled with thick-coming fancies--had gone down to her death.

Most actors and writers seem to suppose that the lines called "The Seven Ages" contain Shakespeare's view of human life. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The lines were uttered by a cynic, in contempt and scorn of the human race.

Shakespeare did not put his characters in the livery and uniform of some weakness, peculiarity or pa.s.sion. He did not use names as tags or brands. He did not write under the picture, "This is a villain." His characters need no suggestive names to tell us what they are--we see them and we know them for ourselves.

It may be that in the greatest utterances of the greatest characters in the supreme moments, we have the real thoughts, opinions and convictions of Shakespeare.

Of all writers Shakespeare is the most impersonal.. He speaks through others, and the others seem to speak for themselves. The didactic is lost in the dramatic. He does not use the stage as a pulpit to enforce some maxim. He is as reticent as Nature.

He idealizes the common and transfigures all he touches--but he does not preach. He was in-terested in men and things as they were. He did not seek: to change them--but to portray, he was _Nature's mirror_--and in that mirror Nature saw herself.