Читать книгу William Shakespeare: A Critical Study - Георг Брандес - Страница 24

From the autumn of 1592 until the summer of 1593 all the London theatres were closed. That frightful scourge, the plague, from which England had so long been free, was raging in the capital. Even the sittings of the Law Courts had to be suspended. At Christmas 1592 the Queen refrained from ordering any plays at court, and the Privy Council had at an earlier date issued a proclamation forbidding all public theatrical performances, on the reasonable ground that convalescents, weary of their long confinement, made haste to resort to such entertainments before they were properly out of quarantine, and thus spread the contagion.

The matter has a particular bearing upon the biography of Shakespeare, since, if he ever travelled on the continent of Europe, it was probably at this period, while the theatres were closed.

That it must have been now, if ever, there can be no great doubt. But it remains exceedingly difficult to determine whether Shakespeare ever crossed the Channel.

We have noticed what an attraction Italy possessed for him, even from the beginning of his career. To this The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Romeo and Juliet bear witness. But in these plays we as yet find nothing which points definitely to the conclusion that the poet had seen with his own eyes the country in which his action is placed. It is different with the dramas of Italian scene which Shakespeare produces about the year 1596—the adaptation of the old Taming of a Shrew and The Merchant of Venice; it is different, too, with Othello, which comes much later. Here we find definite local colour, with such an abundance of details pointing to actual vision that it is hard to account for them otherwise than by assuming a visit on the poet's part to such cities as Verona, Venice, and Pisa.

It is on the face of it highly probable that Shakespeare should wish to see Italy as soon as he could find an opportunity. To the Englishman of that day Italy was the goal of every longing. It was the great home of culture. Men studied its literature and imitated its poetry. It was the beautiful land where dwelt the joy of life. Venice in especial exercised a fascination stronger than that of Paris. It needed no great wealth to make a pilgrimage to Italy. One could travel inexpensively, perhaps on foot, like that Coryat who discovered the use of the fork; one could pass the night at cheap hostelries. Many of the distinguished men of the time are known to have visited Italy—men of science, like Bacon, and afterwards Harvey; authors and poets like Lyly, Munday, Nash, Greene, and Daniel, the form of whose sonnets determined that of Shakespeare's. Among the artists of Shakespeare's time, the widely-travelled Inigo Jones had made a stay in Italy. Most of these men have themselves given us some account of their travels; but as Shakespeare has left us no biographical records whatever, the absence of any direct mention of such a journey on his part is of little moment, if other significant facts can be adduced in its favour.

And such facts are not wanting.

There were in Shakespeare's time no guide-books for the use of travellers. What he knows, then, of foreign lands and their customs he cannot have gathered from such sources. Of Venice, which Shakespeare has so livingly depicted, no description was published in England until after he had written his Merchant of Venice. Lewkenor's description of the city (itself a mere compilation at second hand) dates from 1598, Coryat's from 1611, Moryson's from 1617.

In Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew, we notice with surprise not only the correctness of the Italian names, but the remarkable way in which, at the very beginning of the play, several Italian cities and districts are characterised in a single phrase. Lombardy is "the pleasant garden of great Italy;" Pisa is "renowned for grave citizens;" and here the epithet "grave" is especially noteworthy, since many testimonies concur to show that it was particularly characteristic of the inhabitants of Pisa. C. A. Brown, in Shakespeare's Autobiographical Poems, has pointed out the remarkable form of the betrothal of Petruchio and Katherine (namely, that her father joins their hands in the presence of two witnesses), and observes that this form was not English, but peculiarly Italian. It is not to be found in the older play, the scene of which, however, is laid in Athens.

Special attention was long ago directed to the following speech at the end of the second act, where Gremio reckons up all the goods and gear with which his house is stocked:—

"First, as you know, my house within the city

Is richly furnished with plate and gold:

Basins, and ewers, to lave her dainty hands;

My hangings all of Tyrian tapestry;

In ivory coffers I have stuff'd my crowns;

In cypress chests my arras, counterpoints,

Costly apparel, tents, and canopies,

Fine linen, Turkey cushions boss'd with pearl,

Valance of Venice gold in needlework,

Pewter and Iprass, and all things that belong

To house, or housekeeping."

Lady Morgan long ago remarked that she had seen literally all of these articles of luxury in the palaces of Venice, Genoa, and Florence. Miss Martineau, in ignorance alike of Brown's theory and Lady Morgan's observation, expressed to Shakespeare's biographer, Charles Knight, her feeling that the local colour of The Taming of the Shrew and The Merchant of Venice displays such an intimate acquaintance, not only with the manners and customs of Italy, but with the minutest details of domestic life, that it cannot possibly have been gleaned from books or from mere conversations with this man or that who happened to have floated in a gondola.

On such a question as this, the decided impressions of feminine readers are not without a certain weight.

Brown has pointed out as specifically Italian such small traits as Iago's scoffing at the Florentine Cassio as "a great arithmetician," "a counter-caster," the Florentines being noted as masters of arithmetic and bookkeeping. Another such trait is the present of a dish of pigeons which Gobbo, in The Merchant of Venice, brings to his son's master.

Karl Elze, who has strongly insisted upon the probability of Shakespeare's having travelled Italy in the year 1593, dwells particularly upon his apparent familiarity with Venice. The name of Gobbo is a genuine Venetian name, and suggests, moreover, the kneeling stone figure, "Il Gobbo di Rialto," that forms the base of the granite pillar to which, in former days, the decrees of the Republic were affixed. Shakespeare knew that the Exchange was held on the Rialto island. An especially weighty argument lies in the fact that the study of the Jewish nature, to which his Shylock bears witness, would have been impossible in England, where no Jews were permitted by law to reside since their expulsion, begun in the time of Richard Cœur-de-Lion, and completed in 1290. Not until Cromwell's time was the embargo removed in a few cases. On the other hand, there were in Venice more than eleven hundred Jews (according to Coryat, as many as from five to six thousand).[1]

One of the most striking details as regards The Merchant of Venice is this: Portia sends her servant Balthasar with an important message to Padua, and orders him to ride quickly and meet her at "the common ferry which trades to Venice." Now Portia's palace at Belmont may be conceived as one of the summer residences, rich in art treasures, which the merchant princes of Venice at that time possessed on the banks of the Brenta. From Dolo, on the Brenta, it is twenty miles to Venice—just the distance which Portia says that she must "measure" in order to reach the city. If we conceive Belmont as situated at Dolo, it would be just possible for the servant to ride rapidly to Padua, and on the way back to overtake Portia, who would travel more slowly, at the ferry, which was then at Fusina, at the mouth of the Brenta. How exactly Shakespeare knew this, and how uncommon the knowledge was in his day, is shown in the expressions he uses, and in the misunderstanding of these expressions on the part of his printers and editors. The lines in the fourth scene of the third act, as they appear in all the Quartos and Folios, are these:—

"Bring them, I pray thee, with imagined speed

Unto the tranect, to the common ferry,

Which trades to Venice."

"Tranect," which means nothing, is, of course, a misprint for "traject," an uncommon expression which the printers clearly did not understand. This, as Elze has pointed out, is simply the Venetian word traghetto (Italian tragitto). How should Shakespeare have known either of the word or the thing if he had not been on the spot?

Other details in the second of these plays, written immediately after his conjectured return, strengthen this impression. In the Induction to The Taming of the Shrew, where the nobleman proposes to show Sly his pictures, there occur the lines:—

"We'll show thee Io as she was a maid,

And how she was beguiled and surpris'd,

As lively painted as the deed was done."

These lines, as Elze has justly urged, convey the impression that Shakespeare had seen Correggio's famous picture of Jupiter and Io. This is quite possible if he travelled in North Italy at the time suggested, for from 1585 to 1600 the picture was in the palace of the sculptor Leoni at Milan, and was constantly visited by travellers. If we add that Shakespeare's numerous references to sea-voyages, storms at sea, the agonies of sea-sickness, &c., together with his illustrations and metaphors borrowed from provisions and dress at sea,[2] point to his having made a sea-passage of some length,[3] we cannot but regard it as highly probable that he possessed a closer knowledge of Italy than could be gained from oral descriptions and from books.

It is impossible, however, to arrive at any certainty on the point. His pictures of Italy are sometimes notably lacking in traits which could scarcely have been overlooked by one who knew the places. And the reader cannot but feel a certain scepticism when he observes how scholars have converted every seeming piece of ignorance on Shakespeare's part into a proof of his miraculous knowledge.

In virtue of this determination to make every apparent blot in Shakespeare redound to his advantage, it could be shown that he had been in Italy before he began to write plays at all. In The Two Gentlemen of Verona it is said that Valentine takes ship at Verona to go to Milan. This seems to betray a gross ignorance of the geography of Italy. Karl Elze, however, has discovered that in the sixteenth century Verona and Milan were actually connected by a canal. In Romeo and Juliet the heroine says to Friar Laurence, "Shall I come again at evening mass?" This sounds strange, as the Catholic Church knows nothing of evening masses; but R. Simpson has discovered that they were actually in use at that time, and especially in Verona. Shakespeare probably knew no more of these details than he did of the fact that, about 1270, Bohemia possessed provinces on the Adriatic, so that he could with an easy conscience accept from Greene the voyage to the coast of Bohemia in The Winter's Tale.

On the whole, scholars have been far too eager to find confirmation of every trivial detail in Shakespeare's allusions to Italian localities. Knight, for instance, declared that "the Sagittary," mentioned in Othello," was the residence at the arsenal of the commanding officers of the navy and army of the Republic," and that Shakespeare had "probably looked upon" the figure of an archer over the gates; whereas it now appears that the commanding officer never had any residence in the arsenal, and that no figure of an archer ever existed there. Elze, again, has gone into most uncritical raptures over Shakespeare's marvellously exact characterisation of Giulio Romano The Winter's Tale, (v. 2) as that "rare Italian master who, had he himself eternity, and could put breath into his works, would beguile Nature of her custom, so perfectly he is her ape." As a matter of fact, Shakespeare has simply attributed to an artist whose fame had reached his ears that characteristic which, as we have seen above, he regarded as the highest in pictorial art. Giulio Romano, with his crude superficiality, could not possibly have aroused his admiration had he known his work. That he did not know it is sufficiently evident from the fact that he has made him a sculptor, and praised him in that capacity, and not as a painter.

Elze, confronted with this fact, takes refuge in a Latin epitaph on Romano, quoted by Vasari, which speaks of "Corpora sculpta pictaque" by him, and here again finds a testimony to Shakespeare's omniscience, since he knew of works of sculpture by Romano which no one else has seen or heard of. We can only see in this a new proof of the fact that critical idolatry of departed greatness can now and then lead the student as far astray as uncritical prejudice.

[1] A very few Jews were, indeed, tolerated in England in spite of the prohibition, but it is not probable that Shakespeare knew any of them.

[2] See Pericles, The Tempest, Cymbeline (i. 7), As You Like It (ii. 7), Hamlet (v. 2).

[3] It must be remembered that the sea route to Italy was practically closed by Spanish cruisers.