Читать книгу The Man Shakespeare and His Tragic Life Story - Frank Harris - Страница 9

Table of Contents

It is time now, I think, to test my theory by considering the converse of it. In any case, the attempt to see the other side, is pretty sure to make for enlightenment, and may thus justify itself. In the mirror which Shakespeare held up to human nature, we not only see Romeo, and Jaques, Hamlet, Macbeth and Posthumus; but also the leonine, frank face of the Bastard, the fiery, lean, impatient mask of Hotspur, and the cynical, bold eyes of Richard III. Even if it were admitted that Shakespeare preferred the type of the poet-philosopher, he was certainly able, one would say, to depict the man of action with extraordinary vigour and success. He himself then must have possessed a certain strength of character, certain qualities of decision and courage; he must have had, at least, “a good stroke in him,” as Carlyle phrased it. This is the universal belief, a belief sanctioned by Coleridge and Goethe, and founded apparently on plain facts, and yet, I think, it is mistaken, demonstrably untrue. It might even be put more plausibly than any of its defenders has put it. One might point out that Shakespeare's men of action are nearly all to be found in the historical plays which he wrote in early manhood, while the portrait of the philosopher-poet is the favourite study of his riper years. It would then be possible to suggest that Shakespeare grew from a bold roistering youth into a melancholy, thoughtful old age, touching both extremes of manhood in his own development. But even this comforting explanation will not stand: his earliest impersonations are all thinkers.

Let us consider, again, how preference in a writer is established. Everyone feels that Sophocles prefers Antigone to Ismene; Ismene is a mere sketch of gentle feminine weakness; while Antigone is a great portrait of the revoltée, the first appearance indeed in literature of the “new woman,” and the place she fills in the drama, and the ideal qualities attributed to her girlhood—alike betray the personal admiration of the poet. In the same way Shakespeare's men of action are mere sketches in comparison with the intimate detailed portrait of the aesthete-philosopher-poet with his sensuous, gentle, melancholy temperament. Moreover, and this should be decisive, Shakespeare's men of action are all taken from history, or tradition, or story, and not from imagination, and their characteristics were supplied by the chroniclers and not invented by the dramatist. To see how far this is true I must examine Shakespeare's historical plays at some length Such an examination did not form a part of my original purpose. It is very difficult, not to say impossible, to ascertain exactly how far history and verbal tradition helped Shakespeare in his historical portraits of English worthies. Jaques, for instance, is his own creation from top to toe; every word given to him therefore deserves careful study; but how much of Hotspur is Shakespeare's, and how much of the Bastard? Without pretending, however, to define exactly the sources or the limits of the master's inspiration, there are certain indications in the historical plays which throw a flood of light on the poet's nature, and certain plain inferences from his methods which it would be folly not to draw.

Let us begin with “King John,” as one of the easiest and most helpful to us at this stage, and remembering that Shakespeare's drama was evidently founded on the old play entitled “The Troublesome Raigne of King John,” let us from our knowledge of Shakespeare's character forecast what his part in the work must have been. A believer in the theory I have set forth would guess at once that the strong, manly character of the Bastard was vigorously sketched even in the old play, and just as surely one would attribute the gentle, feminine, pathetic character of Arthur to Shakespeare. And this is precisely what we find: Philip Fauconbridge is excellently depicted in the old play; he is called:

“A hardy wildehead, tough and venturous,”

and he talks and acts the character to the life. In “The Troublesome Raigne,” as in “King John,” he is proud of his true father, the lion-hearted Richard, and careless of the stain of his illegitimate birth; he cries:

“The world 's in my debt,

There's something owing to Plantaginet.

I, marrie Sir, let me alone for game

He act some wonders now I know my name;

By blessed Marie He not sell that pride

For England's wealth and all the world beside.”

Who does not feel the leaping courage and hardihood of the Bastard in these lines? Shakespeare seizes the spirit of the character and renders it, but his emendations are all by way of emphasis: he does not add a new quality; his Bastard is the Bastard of “The Troublesome Raigne.” But the gentle, pathetic character of Arthur is all Shakespeare's. In the old play Arthur is presented as a prematurely wise youth who now urges the claims of his descent and speaks boldly for his rights, and now begs his vixenish mother to

“Wisely winke at all

Least further harmes ensue our hasty speech.”

Again, he consoles her with the same prudence:

“Seasons will change and so our present griefe

May change with them and all to our reliefe.”

This Arthur is certainly nothing like Shakespeare's Arthur. Shakespeare, who had just lost his only son Hamnet, {Footnote: Some months before writing “King John” Shakespeare had visited Stratford for the first time after ten years absence and had then perhaps learned to know and love young Hamnet.} in his twelfth year, turns Arthur from a young man into a child, and draws all the pathos possible from his weakness and suffering; Arthur's first words are of “his powerless hand,” and his advice to his mother reaches the very fount of tears:

“Good my mother, peace!

I would that I were low laid in my grave;

I am not worth this coil that's made for me.”

When taken prisoner his thought is not of himself:

“O, this will make my mother die with grief.”

He is a woman-child in unselfish sympathy.

The whole of the exquisitely pathetic scene between Hubert and Arthur belongs, as one might have guessed, to Shakespeare, that is, the whole pathos of it belongs to him.

In the old play Arthur thanks Hubert for his care, calls him “curteous keeper,” and, in fact, behaves as the conventional prince. He has no words of such affecting appeal as Shakespeare puts into Arthur's mouth:

“I would to heaven

I were your son, so you would love me, Hubert.”

This love and longing for love is the characteristic of Shakespeare's Arthur; he goes on:

“Are you sick, Hubert? You look pale to-day.

In sooth, I would you were a little sick,

That I might sit all night and watch with you:

I warrant, I love you more than you do me.”

A girl could not be more tender, more anxious for love's assurance. In “The Troublesome Raigne,” when Hubert tells Arthur that he has bad news for him, tidings of “more hate than death,” Arthur faces the unknown with a man's courage; he asks:

“What is it, man? if needes be don,

Act it, and end it, that the paine were gon.”

It might be the Bastard speaking, so hardy-reckless are the words. When this Arthur pleads for his eyesight, he does it in this way:

“I speake not only for eyes priviledge,

The chiefe exterior that I would enjoy:

But for thy perill, farre beyond my paine,

Thy sweete soules losse more than my eyes vaine lack.”

Again at the end he says:

“Delay not, Hubert, my orisons are ended,

Begin I pray thee, reave me of my sight.”

And when Hubert relents because his “conscience bids him desist,” Arthur says:

“Hubert, if ever Arthur be in state

Looke for amends of this received gift.”

In all this there is neither realization of character nor even sincere emotion. But Shakespeare's Arthur is a masterpiece of soul-revealing, and moves us to pity at every word:

“Will you put out mine eyes?

These eyes that never did, nor never shall,

So much as frown on you?”

And then the child's imaginative horror of being bound:

“For heaven's sake, Hubert, let me not be bound.

Nay, hear me, Hubert: drive these men away,

And I will sit as quiet as a lamb;

I will not stir, nor wince, nor speak a word.”

When Hubert relents, Shakespeare's Arthur does not promise reward, he simply breathes a sigh of exquisite affection:

“O, now you look like Hubert: all this while

You were disguised.”

And finally, when Hubert promises never to hurt him, his words are:

“O heaven! I thank you, Hubert.”

Arthur's character we owe entirely to Shakespeare, there is no hint of his weakness and tenderness in the original, no hint either of the pathos of his appeal—these are the inventions of gentle Shakespeare, who has manifestly revealed his own exceeding tenderness and sweetness of heart in the person of the child Prince. Of course, there are faults in the work; faults of affectation and word-conceit hardly to be endured. When Hubert says he will burn out his eyes with hot irons, Arthur replies:

“Ah, none, but in this iron age, would do it! The iron of itself, though heat red-hot,”

and so forth. ... Nor does this passage of tinsel stand alone. When the iron cools and Hubert says he can revive it, Arthur replies with pinchbeck conceits:

“An if you do you will but make it blush, And glow with shame at your proceedings,”

and so forth. The faults are bad enough; but the heavenly virtues carry them all off triumphantly. There is no creation like Arthur in the whole realm of poetry; he is all angelic love and gentleness, and yet neither mawkish nor unnatural; his fears make him real to us, and the horror of his situation allows us to accept his exquisite pleading as possible. We need only think of Tennyson's May Queen, or of his unspeakable Arthur, or of Thackeray's prig Esmond, in order to understand how difficult it is in literature to make goodness attractive or even credible. Yet Shakespeare's art triumphs where no one else save Balzac and Tourgenief has achieved even a half-success.

I cannot leave this play without noticing that Shakespeare has shown in it a hatred of murder just as emphatically as he has revealed his love of gentleness and pity in the creation of Arthur. In spite of the loyalty which the English nobles avow in the second scene of the fourth act, which is a quality that always commends itself to Shakespeare, Pembroke is merely their mouthpiece in requesting the King to “enfranchise Arthur.” As soon as John tells them that Arthur is dead they throw off their allegiance and insult the monarch to his face. Even John is startled by their indignation, and brought as near remorse as is possible for him:

“I repent;

There is no sure foundation set on blood;

No certain life achieved by others' death—”

—which reads like a reflection of Shakespeare himself. When the Bastard asks the nobles to return to their allegiance, Salisbury finds an astonishing phrase to express their loathing of the crime:

“The King hath dispossess'd himself of us;

We will not line his thin bestained cloak

With our pure honours, nor attend the foot That leaves the print of blood where'er it walks.”

In all literature there is no more terrible image: Shakespeare's horror of bloodshed has more than Aeschylean intensity. When the dead body of Arthur is found each of the nobles in turn expresses his abhorrence of the deed, and all join in vowing instant revenge. Even the Bastard calls it

“A damned and bloody work,

The graceless action of a heavy hand,”

and a little later the thought of the crime brings even this tough adventurer to weakness:

“I am amazed, methinks, and lose my way

Among the thorns and dangers of this world.”

—a phrase that suits the weakness of Richard II. or Henry VI. or Shakespeare himself better than it suits the hardy Bastard. Even as a young man Shakespeare hated the cruelty of ambition and the savagery of war as much as he loved all the ceremonies of chivalry and observances of gentle courtesy.

Very similar inferences are to be drawn from a study of Shakespeare's “King Richard II.,” which in some respects is his most important historical creation. Coleridge says: “I know of no character drawn by our great poet with such unequalled skill as that of Richard II.” Such praise is extravagant; but it would have been true to say that up to 1593 or 1594, when Shakespeare wrote “King Richard II.,” he had given us no character so complex and so interesting as this Richard. Coleridge overpraised the character-drawing probably because the study of Richard's weakness and irresolution, and the pathos resulting from such helplessness, must have seemed very like an analysis of his own nature.

Let us now examine “Richard II.,” and see what light it casts on Shakespeare's qualities. There was an old play of the same title, a play which is now lost, but we can form some idea of what it was like from the description in Forman's Diary. Like most of the old history-plays it ranged over twenty years of Richard's reign, whereas Shakespeare's tragedy is confined to the last year of Richard's life. It is probable that the old play presented King Richard as more wicked and more deceitful than Shakespeare imagines him. We know that in the “Confessio Amantis,” Gower, the poet, cast off his allegiance to Richard: for he cancelled the dedication of the poem to Richard, and dedicated it instead to Henry. William Langland, too, the author of the “Vision of Piers Plowman,” turned from Richard at the last, and used his deposition as a warning to ill-advised youth. It may be assumed, then, that tradition pictured Richard as a vile creature in whom weakness nourished crime. Shakespeare took his story partly from Holinshed's narrative, and partly either from the old play or from the traditional view of Richard's character. When he began to write the play he evidently intended to portray Richard as even more detestable than history and tradition had presented him. In Holinshed Richard is not accused of the murder of Gloster, whereas Shakespeare directly charges him with it, or rather makes Gaunt do so, and the accusation is not denied, much less disproved. At the close of the first act we are astonished by the revelation of Richard's devilish heartlessness. The King hearing that his uncle, John of Gaunt, is “grievous sick,” cries out:

“Now put it, God, in his physician's mind,

To help him to his grave immediately!

The lining of his coffers shall make coats

To deck our soldiers for these Irish wars.

Come, gentlemen, let's all go visit him:

Pray God we may make haste and come too late.”

This mixture of greed and cold cruelty decked out with blasphemous phrase is viler, I think, than anything attributed by Shakespeare to the worst of his villains. But surely some hint of Richard's incredible vileness should have come earlier in the play, should have preceded at least his banishment of Bolingbroke, if Shakespeare had really meant to present him to us in this light.

In the first scene of the second act, when Gaunt reproves him, Richard turns on him in a rage, threatening. In the very same scene York reproves Richard for seizing Gaunt's money and land, and Richard retorts:

“Think what you will: we seize into our hands

His plate, his goods, his money, and his lands.”

But when York blames him to his face and predicts that evil will befall him and leaves him, Richard in spite of this at once creates:

“Our uncle York, Lord Governor of England;

For he is just, and always loved us well.”

This Richard of Shakespeare is so far, I submit, almost incomprehensible. When reproved by Gaunt and warned, Richard rages and threatens; when blamed by York much more severely, Richard rewards York: the two scenes contradict each other. Moreover, though his callous selfishness, greed and cruelty are apparently established, in the very next scene of this act our sympathy with Richard is called forth by the praise his queen gives him. She says: