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Hints on the Reading of Shakespeare's Plays – How to Master the Best of These Dramas, the Finest of Modern Work

Next to the Bible in the list of great books of the world stands Shakespeare. No other work, ancient or modern, can challenge this; but, like the Bible, the great plays of Shakespeare are little read. Many of today prefer to read criticism about the dramatist rather than to get their ideas at first hand from his best works. Others spend much time on such nonsense as the Baconian theory – hours which they might devote to a close and loving study of the greatest plays the world has ever seen. Such a study would make the theory that the author of the Essays and the Novum Organum wrote Hamlet or Othello seem like midsummer madness. As well ask one to believe that Herbert Spencer wrote Pippa Passes or The Idyls of the King.

The peculiarity of Shakespeare's genius was that it reached far beyond his time; it makes him modern today, when the best work of his contemporaries, like Ben Jonson, Marlowe and Ford, are unreadable. Any theatrical manager of our time who should have the hardihood to put on the stage Jonson's The Silent Woman or Marlowe's Tamburlaine would court disaster. Yet any good actor can win success with Shakespeare's plays, although he may not coin as much money as he would from a screaming farce or a homespun play of American country life.

Those who have heard Robert Mantell in Lear, Richard III, Hamlet or Iago can form some idea of the vitality and the essential modernism of Shakespeare's work. The good actor or the good stage manager cuts out the coarse and the stupid lines that may be found in all Shakespeare's plays. The remainder reaches a height of poetic beauty, keen insight into human nature and dramatic perfection which no modern work even approaches. Take an unlettered spectator who may never have heard Shakespeare's name and he soon becomes thrall to the genius of this great Elizabethan wizard, whose master hand reaches across the centuries and moves him to laughter and tears. The only modern who can claim a place beside him is Goethe, whose Faust, whether in play or in opera, has the same deathless grip on the sympathies of an audience.

And yet in taking up Shakespeare the reader who has no guide is apt to stumble at the threshold and retire without satisfaction. As arranged, the comedies are given first, and it is not well to begin with Shakespeare's comedies. In reading any author it is the part of wisdom to begin with his best works. Our knowledge of Shakespeare is terribly meager, but we know that he went up to London from his boyhood home at Stratford-on-Avon, that he secured work in a playhouse, and that very soon he began to write plays. To many this sudden development of a raw country boy into a successful dramatist seems incredible.

Yet a similar instance is afforded by Alexander Dumas, the greatest imaginative writer of his time, and the finest story-teller in all French literature. Dumas had little education, and his work, when he went to Paris from his native province, was purely clerical, yet he read very widely, and the novels and romances of Scott aroused his imagination. But who taught Dumas the perfect use of French verse? Who gave him his prose style as limpid and flowing as a country brook? These things Dumas doesn't think it necessary to explain in his voluminous memoirs. They are simply a part of that literary genius which is the despair of the writer who has not the gift of style or the power to move his readers by creative imagination.

In the same way, had Shakespeare left any biographical notes, we should see that this raw Stratford youth unconsciously acquired every bit of culture that came in his way; that his mind absorbed like a sponge all the learning and the literary art of his famous contemporaries. The Elizabethan age was charged with a peculiar imaginative power; the verse written then surpasses in uniform strength and beauty any verse that has been written since; the men who wrote were as lawless, as daring, as superbly conscious of their own powers as the great explorers and adventurers who carried the British flag to the ends of the earth and made the English sailor feared as one whose high courage and bulldog tenacity never recognized defeat.

Given creative literary genius in greater measure than any other man was ever endowed with, the limits of Shakespeare's development could not be marked. His capacity was boundless and, living in an atmosphere as favorable to literary art as that of Athens in the time of Pericles, Shakespeare produced in a few years those immortal plays which have never been equaled in mastery of human emotion and beauty and power of diction.

There is no guide to the order in which Shakespeare wrote his plays, except the internal evidence of his verse. Certain habits of metrical work, as shown in the meter and the arrangement of the lines, have enabled close students of Shakespeare to place most of the comedies after the historical plays. Thus in the early plays Shakespeare arranged his blank verse so that the sense ends with each line and he was much given to rhymed couplets at the close of each long speech. But later, when he had gained greater mastery of his favorite blank verse, many lines are carried over, thus welding them more closely and forming verse that has the rhythm and beauty of organ tones. As Shakespeare advanced in command over the difficult blank verse he showed less desire to use rhyme.

This close study of versification shows that Love's Labor's Lost was probably Shakespeare's first play, followed by The Comedy of Errors and by several historical plays. One year after his first rollicking comedy appeared he produced Romeo and Juliet, but this great drama of young love was revised carefully six years later and put into the form that we know. Three years after his start he produced Midsummer Night's Dream and The Merchant of Venice, and followed these with his greatest comedies, Much Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night and As You Like It, the latter the comedy which appeals most strongly to modern readers and modern audiences.

Then came a period in which Shakespeare's world was somber, and his creative genius found expression in the great tragedies —Julius Cæsar, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. And finally we have the closing years of production, in which he wrote three fine plays —The Tempest, Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale.

According to the best authorities, Shakespeare began writing plays in 1590 and he ended early in 1613. Into these twenty-three years he crowded greater intellectual activity than any other man ever showed in the same space of time. Probably Sir Walter Scott, laboring like a galley slave at the oar to pay off the huge debt rolled up by the reckless Ballantyne, comes next in creative literary power to Shakespeare; but Scott's work was in prose and was far easier of production.

Shakespeare, like all writers of his day, took his materials from all sources and never scrupled to borrow plots from old or contemporary authors. But he so transmuted his materials by the alchemy of genius that one would never recognize the originals from his finished version. And he put into his great plays such a wealth of material drawn from real life that one goes to them for comfort and sympathy in affliction as he goes to the great books of the Bible. In a single play, as in Hamlet, the whole round of human life and passions is reviewed. Whatever may be his woe or his disappointment, no one goes to Hamlet without getting some response to his grief or his despair.

To give a list of the plays of Shakespeare which one should read is very difficult, because one reader prefers this and another that, and each can give good reasons for his liking. What I shall try to do here is to indicate certain plays which, if carefully read several times, will make you master of Shakespeare's art and will prepare you for wider reading in this great storehouse of human nature. Romeo and Juliet, a tragedy of young, impulsive love, represents the fine flower of Shakespeare's young imagination, before it had been clouded by sorrow. The verse betrays some of the defects of his early style, but it is rich in beauty and passion. The plot is one of the best, and this, with the opportunity for striking stage effects and brilliant costumes, has made it the most popular of all Shakespeare's plays. The characters are all sharply drawn and the swift unfolding of the plot represents the height of dramatic skill. Next to this, one should read The Merchant of Venice. Shylock is one of the great characters in Shakespeare's gallery, a pathetic, lonely figure, barred out from all close association with his fellows in trade by evil traits, that finally drive him to ruin. Then take up a comedy like As You Like It, as restful to the senses as fine music, and filled with verse as tuneful and as varied as the singing of a great artist.

By this reading you will be prepared for the supreme tragedies – each a masterpiece without a superior in any literature. These are Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Julius Cæsar, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. In no other six works in any language can one find such range of thought, such splendor of verse, such soundings of the great sea of human passions – love, jealousy, ambition, hate, remorse, fear and shame. Each typifies some overmastering passion, but Hamlet stands above all as a study of a splendid mind, swayed by every wind of impulse, noble in defeat and pathetic in the final ruin of hope and love, largely due to lack of courage and decision of character. Take it all in all, Hamlet represents the finest creative work of any modern author. This play is packed with bitter experience of life, cast in verse that is immortal in its beauty and melody.

Macbeth represents ambition, linked with superstition and weakness of will; the fruit is an evil brood – remorse struggles with desire for power, affection is torn by the malign influence of guilt, as seen in the unhinging of Lady Macbeth's mind. No one should miss the opportunity to see a great actor or a great actress in Macbeth– it is a revelation of the deeps of human tragedy. King Lear is the tragedy of old age, the same tragedy that Balzac drew in Le Pere Goriot, save that Lear becomes bitter, and after weathering the storm of madness, wreaks vengeance on his unnatural daughters. Old Goriot, one of the most pathetic figures in all fiction, goes to his grave trying to convince the world that his heartless girls really love him.

The real hero of Julius Cæsar is Brutus, done to death by men of lesser mold and coarser natures, who take advantage of his lack of practical sense and knowledge of human nature. This play is seldom put on the stage in recent years, but it is always a treat to follow it when depicted by good actors. Othello is the tragedy of jealousy working upon the mind of a simple and noble nature, which is quick to accept the evil hints of Iago because of its very lack of knowledge of women. Iago is the greatest type of pure villainy in all literature, far more vicious than Goethe's Mephistopheles, because he wreaks his power over others largely from a satanic delight in showing his skill and resources in evil. As a play Othello is the most perfectly constructed of Shakespeare's works. Finally in Antony and Cleopatra Shakespeare shows the disintegrating force of guilty love, which does not revolt even when the Egyptian Queen ruins her lover's cause by unspeakable cowardice. Cleopatra is the great siren of literature, and the picture of her charms is fine verse.

And here let me advise the hearing of good actors in Shakespeare as a means of culture. All the great Shakespearean actors are gone, but Mantell remains, and he, though not equal to Booth, is, to my mind, far more convincing than Irving. Mantell's Lear is the essence of great acting – something to recall with rare pleasure. Edwin Booth I probably saw in Hamlet a score of times in twice that many years, but never did I see him without getting some new light on the melancholy Dane. Even on successive nights Booth was never just the same, as his mood tinged his acting. His sonorous voice, his perfect enunciation, his graceful gestures, above all his striking face, alive with the light of genius – these are memories it is a delight to recall.

To develop appreciation of Shakespeare I would advise reading the plays aloud. In no other way will you be able to savor the beauty and the melody of the blank verse. It was my good fortune while an undergraduate at Cornell University to be associated for four years with Professor Hiram Corson, then head of the department of English literature. Corson believed in arousing interest in Shakespeare by reading extracts from the best plays, with running comment on the passages that best illustrated the poet's command of all the resources of blank verse. His voice was like a fine organ, wonderfully developed to express every emotion, and I can recall after nearly forty years as though it were but yesterday the thrilling effect of these readings. No actor on the stage, with the single exception of Edwin Booth, equaled Corson in beauty of voice or in power of expression.

The result of these readings, with the comment that came from a mind stored with Shakespearean lore, was to stir one's ambition to study the great plays. Recalling the liberal education that came from Corson's readings, I have been deeply sorry for college students whom I have seen vainly trying to appreciate Shakespeare's verse as read by professors with harsh, rasping, monotonous voices that killed the beauty of rhyme and meter as a frost kills a fine magnolia blossom breathing perfume over a garden. When will college presidents awake to the fact that book learning alone cannot make a successful professor of English literature, when the man is unable to bring out the melody of the verse? Similar folly is shown by the theological schools that continue to inflict upon the world preachers whose faulty elocution makes a mock of the finest passages of the Bible.

In my own case my tireless study of Shakespeare during four years at college, which included careful courses of reading and study during the long vacations, so saturated my mind with the great plays that they have been ever since one of my most cherished possessions. After years of hard newspaper work it is still possible for me to get keen pleasure from reading aloud to myself any of Shakespeare's plays. My early study of Shakespeare led me to look up every unfamiliar word, every phrase that was not clear. This used to be heavy labor, but now all the school and college editions are equipped with these aids to the student. The edition of Shakespeare which always appealed to me most strongly was the Temple edition, edited by Israel Gollancz. It is pocket size, beautifully printed and very well edited. For a companion on a solitary walk in city or country no book is superior to one of Shakespeare's plays in this convenient Temple edition, bound in limp leather.

The best edition of Shakespeare in one volume is, to my mind, the Cambridge edition, issued by the Houghton Mifflin Company of Boston, uniform with the same edition of other English and American poets. This, of course, has only a few textual notes, but it has a good glossary of unusual and obsolete words. It makes a royal octavo volume of one thousand and thirty-six double-column pages, clearly printed in nonpareil type.

In this chapter I have been able only to touch on the salient features of the work of the foremost English poet and dramatist, and, in my judgment, the greatest writer the world has ever seen. If these words of mine stimulate any young reader to take up the study of Shakespeare I shall feel well repaid. Certainly, with the single exception of the Bible, no book will reward a careful, loving study so well as Shakespeare.