Part 20 (1/2)

Pope changed 'grave' in the first line into 'gay' Others conjecture 'great' and 'grand' Steevens says that 'grave' means 'deadly,' and that the word 'is often used by Chapman' thus; and one of his two quotations supports his statement; but certainly in Shakespeare the word does not elsewhere bear this sense It could mean 'majestic,' as Johnson takes it here But why should it not have its usualof 'infinite variety,' and her eyes ipsies, a ravity or soleaiety Their colour, presumably, hat is called 'black'; but surely they were not, like those of Tennyson's Cleopatra, '_bold_ black eyes' Readers interested in seeing what criticism is capable of may like to know that it has been proposed to read, for the first line of the quotation above, 'O this false fowl of Egypt! haggard charh I have not cancelled this note I have modified soestion, and aht]

FOOTNOTES:

[1] As this lecture was coedy_ I ignored in it, as far as possible, such aspects of the play as were noticed in that book, to the Index of which I may refer the reader

[2] See Note A

[3] 'Nohilest Antonius was busie in this preparation, Octavia his wife, whom he had left at Rome, would needs take sea to co vnto it, not for his respect at all (as ht haue an honest colour to make warre with Antonius if he did ht to be'--_Life of Antony_ (North's Translation), sect 29 The view I take does not, of course, imply that Octavius had no love for his sister

[4] See Note B

[5] The point of this remark is unaffected by the fact that the play is not divided into acts and scenes in the folios

[6] See Note C

[7] See Note D

[8] Of the 'good' heroines, Ien is the one who has most of this spirit of fire and air; and this (in union, of course, with other qualities) is perhaps the ultimate reason why for so many readers she is, what Mr Swinburne calls her, 'the woman above all Shakespeare's women'

SHAKESPEARE THE MAN

SHAKESPEARE THE MAN

Such phrases as 'Shakespeare the man' or 'Shakespeare's personality'

are, no doubt, open to objection They seeest that, if we could subtract from Shakespeare the mind that produced his works, the residue would be the man himself; and that his mind was some pure impersonal essence unaffected by the accidents of physique, temperament, and character If this were so, one could but echo Tennyson's thanksgiving that we know so little of Shakespeare But as it is assuredly not so, and as 'Shakespeare the arded for the time from a particular point of view, the natural desire to knohatever can be known of him is not to be repressed merely because there are people so foolish as to be careless about his works and yet curious about his private life Forabout the man if he had not written the works, yet, since we possess them, I would rather see and hear him for five minutes in his proper person than discover a new one

And though wehis incon the wish to find the s, and to form some idea of the disposition, the likes and dislikes, the character and the attitude towards life, of the hu who seems to us to have understood best our common huraphical knowledge of Shakespeare is so ss are so completely dramatic, that this wish, however natural, is idle But I cannot think so

Doubtless, in trying to form an idea of Shakespeare, we soon reach the limits of reasonable certainty; and it is also true that the idea we can for as individual as we could desire But it is more distinct than is often supposed, and it _is_ reasonably certain; and although we can add to its distinctness only by uesses, they really have probability in various degrees On this whole subject there is a tendency at the present time to an extreme scepticism, which appears to me to be justified neither by the circue of hueneral

This scepticism is due in part to the interest excited by Mr Lee's discussion of the Sonnets in his _Life_ of Shakespeare, and to the ihtly attached to that discussion The Sonnets are lyrical poems of friendshi+p and love In them the poet ostensibly speaks in his own person and expresses his own feelings Many critics, no doubt, had denied that he really did so; but they had not Mr Lee's knowledge, nor had they examined the matter so narrowly as he; and therefore they had not eneral belief that the Sonnets, however conventional or exaggerated their language ood deal about their author Mr Lee, however, showed far more fully than any previous writer that many of the themes, many even of the ideas, of these poe; and he came to the conclusion that in the Sonnets Shakespeare 'unlocked,' not 'his heart,' but a very different kind of arraphical inference deducible from them is that 'at one time in his career Shakespeare disdained no weapon of flattery in an endeavour toman of rank'

Now, if that inference is correct, it certainly tells us so about Shakespeare the man; but it also forbids us to take seriously what the Sonnets profess to tell us of his passionate affection, with its hopes and fears, its pain and joy; of his pride and his humility, his self-reproach and self-defence, his weariness of life and his consciousness of i to Mr Lee's statement, the Sonnets alone of Shakespeare's works 'can be held to throw any illumination on a personal trait,' it seems to follow that, so far as the works are concerned (for Mr Lee is not specially sceptical as to the external testimony), the only idea we can forle inference

Now, I venture to sur But that is not our business here, nor could a brief discussion do justice to a theory to which those who disagree with it are still greatly indebted What I wish to deny is the presupposition which seems to be frequently accepted as an obvious truth Even if Mr Lee's view of the Sonnets were indisputably correct, nay, if even, to go much further, the persons and the story in the Sonnets were as purely fictitious as those of _Twelfth Night_, theyof the personality of their author For however free a poet may be from the emotions which he simulates, and however little involved in the conditions which he iines, he cannot (unless he is a mere copyist) write a hundred and fifty lyrics expressive of those si of hi of the way in which he in particular _would_ feel and behave under the i holds in principle of the dramas Is it really conceivable that a man can write some five and thirty dramas, and portray in them an enor anything whatever of his own disposition and preferences? I do not believe that he could do this, even if he deliberately set himself to the task The only question is how much of himself he would betray

One is entitled to say this, I think, on general grounds; but we may appeal further to specific experience Of ood deal from external sources And in these cases we find that the man so known to us appears also in his works, and that these by themselves would have left on us a personal ih imperfect and perhaps in this or that point even false, would have been broadly true Of course this holds of some writers much more fully than of others; but, except where the work is very scanty in aree of all[1] If so, there is an antecedent probability that it will apply to Shakespeare too After all, he was human We may exclaim in our astonishment that he was as universal and iious rapture If we assume that he was six tih for a mortal, we may hope to form an idea of him from his plays only six times as dim as the idea of Scott that we should derive from the Waverley Novels

And this is not all As a reat majority of Shakespeare's readers--lovers of poetry untroubled by theories and questions--do forly or not, they possess such an idea; and up to a certain point the idea is the same Ask such a man whether he thinks Shakespeare was at all like Shelley, or Wordsworth, or Milton, and it will not occur to him to answer 'I have not the faintest notion'; he will answer unhesitatingly No Ask him whether he supposes that Shakespeare was at all like Fielding or Scott, and he will probably be found to i to the same type or class

And such answers unquestionably imply an idea which, however deficient in detail, is definite

Again, to go a little further in the saether ehot's essay on Shakespeare the Man, and I read a book by Goldwin Smith and an essay by Leslie Stephen (who, I found, had anticipated a good deal that I meant to say)[2] These three writers, with all their variety, have still substantially the saeneral reader' reement in the least diminished by the fact that they make no claim to be Shakespeare scholars They show themselves much abler than e they are free from his defects When they wrote their essays they had not wearied themselves with rival hypotheses, or pored over minutiae until they lost the broad and deep i leaves

Ultra-scepticism in this matter does not arise merely or mainly from the humility which every man of sense ious s either to the clever faddist who can see nothing straight, or it proceeds froers and infirmities which the expert in any subject knows too well