Читать книгу William Shakespeare: A Critical Study - Георг Брандес - Страница 25

About the age of thirty, even men of an introspective disposition are apt to turn their gaze outwards. When Shakespeare approaches his thirtieth year, he begins to occupy himself in earnest with history, to read the chronicles, to project and work out a whole series of historical plays. Several years had now passed since he had revised and furbished up the old dramas on the subject of Henry VI. This task had whetted his appetite, and had cultivated his sense for historic character and historic nemesis. Having now given expression to the high spirits, the lyrism, and the passion of youth, in lyrical and dramatic productions of scintillant diversity, he once more turned his attention to the history of England. In so doing he obeyed a dual vocation, both as a poet and as a patriot.

Shakespeare's plays founded on English history number ten in all, four dealing with the House of Lancaster (Richard II., the two parts of Henry IV. and Henry V.) four devoted to the House of York (the three parts of Henry VI. and Richard III.), and two which stand apart from the main series, King John, of an earlier historic period, and Henry VIII., of a later.

The order of production of these plays is, however, totally unconnected with their historical order, which does not, therefore, concern us. At the same time it is worthy of remark that all these plays (with the single exception of Henry VIII.) were produced in the course of one decade, the decade in which England's national sentiment burst into flower and her pride was at its highest. These English "histories" are, however, of very unequal value, and can by no means be treated as standing on one plane.

Henry VI. was a first attempt and a mere adaptation. Now, in the year 1594, Shakespeare attacks the theme of Richard II.; and in this, his first independent historical drama, we see his originality still struggling with the tendency to imitation.

There were older plays on the subject of Richard II., but Shakespeare does not seem to have made any use of them. The model he had in his mind's eye was Marlowe's finest tragedy, his Edward II. Shakespeare's play is, however, much more than a clever imitation of Marlowe's; it is not only better composed, with a more concentrated action, but has also a great advantage in the full-blooded vitality of its style. Marlowe's style is here monotonously dry and sombre. Swinburne, moreover, has done Shakespeare an injustice in preferring Marlowe's character-drawing to that of Richard II.

The first half of Marlowe's drama is entirely taken up with the King's morbid and unnatural passion for his favourite Gaveston; Edward's every speech either expresses his grief at Gaveston's banishment and his longing for his return, or consists of glowing outbursts of joy on seeing him again. This passion makes Edward dislike his Queen and loathe the Barons, who, in their aristocratic pride, contemn the low-born favourite. He will risk everything rather than part from one who is so dear to himself and so obnoxious to his surroundings. The half-erotic fervour of his partiality renders the King's character distasteful, and deprives him of the sympathy which the poet demands for him at the end of the play.

For in the fourth and fifth acts, weak and unstable though he be, Edward has all Marlowe's sympathies. There is, indeed, something moving in his loneliness, his grief, and his brooding self-reproach. "The griefs," he says,

"of private men are soon allay'd;

But not of kings. The forest deer, being struck,

Runs to an herb that closeth up the wounds:

But when the imperial lion's flesh is gor'd,

He rends and tears it with his wrathful paw."

The simile is not true to nature, like Shakespeare's, but it forcibly expresses the meaning of Marlowe's personage. Now and then he reminds us of Henry VI. The Queen's relation to Mortimer recalls that of Margaret to Suffolk. The abdication-scene, in which the King first vehemently refuses to lay down the crown, and is then forced to consent, gave Shakespeare the model for Richard the Second's abdication. In the murder-scene, on the other hand, Marlowe displays a reckless naturalism in the description and representation of the torture inflicted on the King, an unabashe d effect-hunting in the contrast between the King's magnanimity, dread, and gratitude on the one side, and the murderers' hypocritical cruelty on the other, which Shakespeare, with his gentler nature and his almost modern tact, has rejected. It is true that we find in Shakespeare several cases in which the severed head of a person whom we have seen alive a moment before is brought upon the stage. But he would never place before the eyes of the public such a murder-scene as this, in which the King is thrown down upon a feather-bed, a table is overturned upon him, and the murderers trample upon it until he is crushed.

Marlowe's more callous nature betrays itself in such details, while something of his own wild and passionate temperament has passed into the minor characters of the play—the violent Barons, with the younger Mortimer at their head—who are drawn with a firm hand. The time had scarcely passed when a murder was reckoned an absolute necessity in a drama. In 1581, Wilson, one of Lord Leicester's men, received an order for a play which should not only be original and entertaining, but should also include "all sorts of murders, immorality, and robberies."

Richard II. is one of those plays of Shakespeare's which have never taken firm hold of the stage. Its exclusively political action and its lack of female characters are mainly to blame for this. But it is exceedingly interesting as his first attempt at independent treatment of a historical theme, and it rises far above the play which served as its model.

The action follows pretty faithfully the course of history as the poet found it in Holinshed's Chronicle. The character of the Queen, however, is quite unhistorical, being evidently invented by Shakespeare for the sake of having a woman in his play. He wanted to gain sympathy for Richard through his wife's devotion to him, and saw an opportunity for pathos in her parting from him when he is thrown into prison. In 1398, when the play opens, Isabella of France was not yet ten years old, though she had nominally been married to Richard in 1396. Finally, the King's end, fighting bravely, sword in hand, is not historical: he was starved to death in prison, in order that his body might be exhibited without any wound.

Shakespeare has vouchsafed no indication to facilitate the spectators' understanding of the characters in this play. Their action often takes us by surprise. But Swinburne has done Shakespeare a great wrong in making this a reason for praising Marlowe at his expense, and exalting the subordinate characters in Edward II. as consistent pieces of character-drawing, while he represents as inconsistent and obscure such a personage as Shakespeare's York. We may admit that in the opening scene Norfolk's figure is not quite clear, but here all obscurity ends. York is self-contradictory, unprincipled, vacillating, composite, and incoherent, but in no sense obscure. He in the first place upbraids the King with his faults, then accepts at his hands an office of the highest confidence, then betrays the King's trust, while he at the same time overwhelms the rebel Bolingbroke with reproaches, then admires the King's greatness in his fall, then hastens his dethronement, and finally, in virtuous indignation over Aumerle's plots against the new King, rushes to him to assure him of his fidelity and to clamour for the blood of his own son. There lies at the root of this conception a profound political bitterness and an early-acquired experience. Shakespeare must have studied attentively that portion of English history which lay nearest to him, the shufflings and vacillations that went on under Mary and Elizabeth, in order to have received so deep an impression of the pitifulness of political instability.

The character of old John of Gaunt, loyal to his King, but still more to his country, gives Shakespeare his first opportunity for expressing his exultation over England's greatness and his pride in being an Englishman. He places in the mouth of the dying Gaunt a superbly lyrical outburst of patriotism, deploring Richard's reckless and tyrannical policy. All comparison with Marlowe is here at an end. Shakespeare's own voice makes itself clearly heard in the rhetoric of this speech, which, with its self-controlled vehemence, its equipoise in unrest, soars high above Marlowe's wild magniloquence. In the thunderous tones of old Gaunt's invective against the King who has mortgaged his English realm, we can hear all the patriotic enthusiasm of young England in the days of Elizabeth:—

"This royal throne of kings, this sceptr'd isle,

This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,

This other Eden, demi-paradise,

This fortress, built by Nature for herself,

Against infection, and the hand of war;

This happy breed of men, this little world,

This precious stone set in the silver sea,

Which serves it in the office of a wall,

Or as a moat defensive to a house,

Against the envy of less happier lands;

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,

This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings,

Fear'd by their breed, and famous by their birth,

. . . . . . . . . .

This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land,

Dear for her reputation through the world,

Is now leas'd out, I die pronouncing it,

Like to a tenement, or pelting farm.

England, bound in with the triumphant sea,

Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege

Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame,

With inky blots, and rotten parchment bonds:

That England, that was wont to conquer others,

Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.

Ah! would the scandal vanish with my life,

How happy then were my ensuing death!" (ii. I).

Here we have indeed the roar of the young lion, the vibration of Shakespeare's own voice.

But it is upon the leading character of the play that the poet has centred all his strength; and he has succeeded in giving a vivid and many-sided picture of the Black Prince's degenerate but interesting son. As the protagonist of a tragedy, however, Richard has exactly the same defects as Marlowe's Edward. In the first half of the play he so repels the spectator' that nothing he can do in the second half suffices to obliterate the unfavourable impression. Not only has he, before the opening of the piece, committed such thoughtless and politically indefensible acts as have proved him unworthy of the great position he holds, but he behaves with such insolence to the dying Gaunt, and, after his uncle's death, displays such a low and despicable rapacity, that he can no longer appeal, as he does, to his personal right. It is true that the right of which he holds himself an embodiment is very different from the common earthly rights which he has overridden. He is religiously, dogmatically convinced of his inviolability as a king by the grace of God. But since this conviction, in his days of prosperity, has brought with it no sense of correlative duties to the crown he wears, it cannot touch the reader's sympathies as it ought to for the sake of the general effect.

We see the hand of the beginner in the way in which the poet here leaves characters and events to speak for themselves without any attempt to range them in a general scheme of perspective. He conceals himself too entirely behind his work. As there is no gleam of humour in the play, so, too, there is no guiding and harmonising sense of style.

It is from the moment that the tide begins to turn against Richard that he becomes interesting as a psychological study. After the manner of weak characters, he is alternately downcast and overweening. Very characteristically, he at one place answers Bolingbroke's question whether he is content to resign the crown: "Ay, no;—no, ay." In these syllables we see the whole man. But his temperament was highly poetical, and misfortune reveals in him a vein of reverie. He is sometimes profound to the point of paradox, sometimes fantastically overwrought to the verge of superstitious insanity (see, for instance, Act iii. 3). His brooding melancholy sometimes reminds us of Hamlet's—

"Of comfort no man speak:

Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;

Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes

Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth.

Let's choose executors, and talk of wills:

. . . . . . . .

For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground,

And tell sad stories of the death of kings:—How

some have been depos'd, some slain in war,

Some haunted by the ghosts they have depos'd.

Some poison'd by their wives, some sleeping kill'd,

All murder'd:—for within the hollow crown,

That rounds the mortal temples of a king,

Keeps Death his court, and there the antick sits,

Scoffing his state, and grinning at his pomp;

Allowing him a breath, a little scene,

To monarchise, be fear'd, and kill with looks" (iii. 2).

In these moods of depression, in which Richard gives his wit and intellect free play, he knows very well that a king is only a human being like any one else:—

"For you have but mistook me all this while:

I live with bread like you, feel want, taste grief,

Need friends. Subjected thus,

How can you say to me, I am a king?" (iii. 2).

But at other times, when his sense of majesty and his monarchical fanaticism master him, he speaks in a quite different tone:—

"Not all the water in the rough rude sea

Can wash the balm from an anointed king;

The breath of worldly men cannot depose

The deputy elected by the Lord.

For every man that Bolingbroke hath press'd,

To lift shrewd steel against our golden crown,

God for his Richard hath in heavenly pay

A glorious angel" (iii. 2).

Thus, too, at their first meeting (iii. 3) he addresses the victorious Henry of Hereford, to whom he immediately after "debases himself":—

"My master, God omnipotent.

Is mustering in his clouds on our behalf

Armies of pestilence; and they shall strike

Your children yet unborn, and unbegot,

That lift your vassal hands against my head,

And threat the glory of my precious crown."

Many centuries after Richard, King Frederick William IV. of Prussia displayed just the same mingling of intellectuality, superstition, despondency, monarchical arrogance, and fondness for declamation.

In the fourth and fifth acts, the character of Richard and the poet's art rise to their highest point. The scene in which the groom, who alone has remained faithful to the fallen King, visits him in his dungeon, is one of penetrating beauty. What can be more touching than his description of how the "roan Barbary," which had been Richard's favourite horse, carried Henry of Lancaster on his entry into London, "so proudly as if he had disdained the ground." The Arab steed here symbolises with fine simplicity the attitude of all those who had sunned themselves in the prosperity of the now fallen King.

The scene of the abdication (iv. I) is admirable by reason of the delicacy of feeling and imagination which Richard displays. His speech when he and Henry have each one hand upon the crown is one of the most beautiful Shakespeare has ever written:—

"Now is this golden crown like a deep well,

That owes two buckets filling one another;

The emptier ever dancing in the air,

The other down, unseen, and full of water:

That bucket down, and full of tears, am I,

Drinking my griefs, whilst you mount up on high."

This scene is, however, a downright imitation of the abdication-scene in Marlowe. When Northumberland in Shakespeare addresses the dethroned King with the word "lord," the King answers, "No lord of thine." In Marlowe the speech is almost identical: "Call me not lord!"

The Shakespearian scene, it should be mentioned, has its history. The censorship under Elizabeth would not suffer it to be printed, and it first appears in the Fourth Quarto, of 1608.[1] The reason of this veto was that Elizabeth, strange as it may appear, was often compared with Richard II. The action of the censorship renders it probable that it was Shakespeare's Richard II. (and not one of the earlier plays on the same theme) which, as appears in the trial of Essex, was acted by the Lord Chamberlain's Company before the conspirators, at their leaders' command, on the evening before the outbreak of the rebellion (February 7, 1601). There is nothing inconsistent with this theory in the fact that the players then called it an old play, which was already "out of use;" for the interval between 1593-94 and 1601 was sufficient, according to the ideas of that time, to render a play antiquated. Nor does it conflict with this view that in the last scenes of the play the King is sympathetically treated. On the very points on which he was comparable with Elizabeth there could be no doubt that he was in the wrong; while Henry of Hereford figures in the end as the bearer of England's future, and, for the not over-sensitive nerves of the period, that was sufficient. He, who was soon to play a leading part in two other Shakespearian dramas, is here endowed with all the qualities of the successful usurper and ruler: cunning and insight, power of dissimulation, ingratiating manners, and promptitude in action.

In a single speech (v. 3) the new-made Henry IV. sketches the character of his "unthrifty son," Shakespeare's hero: he passes his time in the taverns of London with riotous boon-companions, who now and then even rob travellers on the highway; but, being no less daring than dissolute, he gives certain "sparks of hope" for a nobler future.

[1] Its title runs, "The Tragedie of King Richard the Second: with new additions of the Parliament Sceane, and the deposing of King Richard, As it hath been lately acted by the Kinges Maiesties Seruantes, at the Globe. By William Shake-speare. At London. Printed by W. W. For Mathew Law, and are to be sold at his shop in Paules Church-yard, at the Signe of the Foxe. 1608."