Part 6 (1/2)

If ”Oth.e.l.lo” is comparatively free from current conventions, ”Lear” is in many respects the most Elizabethan of Shakespeare's tragedies. Story, themes, situations, stage effects constantly recall the plays of his predecessors; and if his creative imagination here attains the most astounding triumph in all literature, it cannot be said to free itself entirely from a confusion of archaisms and absurdities.

Returning to English history, Shakespeare selected a story that had outgrown the chronicles and been narrated by several poets and in one drama. From the early ”Leir” he took a few important hints, but he treated the material of the chronicles with a freedom which both its obviously legendary character and its remoulding by other poets permitted. He was only slightly concerned with the presentation of history and hurried over the battles and the shows, the still indispensable accompaniment of historical plays. He was concerned solely with the tragic entanglements of character, with the devastations of evil and folly.

The kernel of the story, Lear's trick and Cordelia's unsatisfactory reply, though possessing a kind of objectivity suitable for the stage, is of itself so absurd and childish as to impede illusion of truth. Its development is full of inconsistency, and the interwoven themes of madness, villany, l.u.s.t, ambition, family feud, and ideal virtue suggest no break from the Elizabethan canon of tragedy. To the story of Lear and his daughters, Shakespeare added the still more childish parallel story of Gloster and his sons. This common device of a reinforcing sub-plot is here extended to every situation and motive. Even the devoted Kent is balanced by Goneril's faithful creature, Oswald; the inhuman sisters are supported by the machinating Edmund; and, most extraordinary of all, the a.s.sumed madness of Edgar becomes an accompaniment for the real madness of Lear. The elaboration of the sub-plot causes an unprecedented complexity of persons and events, and it dislocates the structure. The intense interest which is absorbed in the sufferings of Lear finds itself distracted and dissipated in a medley of incidents so incongruous and so confusing that one wonders how a rational mind could have selected them. The crowded scenes which separate the climax of the third act from the catastrophe a.s.suredly form one of the least happy instances of the Elizabethan habit of introducing a change of interest and a variety of incident in the fourth and fifth acts.

Yet the structure of the play, if far from faultless, reveals amazing mastery. The development of the action in the first three acts with the constantly increasing tension of feeling, and the final gathering of all the different actions in the wonderfully condensed catastrophe, are among the greatest achievements of dramatic plotting. Moreover, in spite of his zest for crowded and diversified action, Shakespeare's feeling for unity of emotional effect caused him to omit one motive that modern renovators have never been able to forego. He found a place for battles, villany, childish intrigue, the clown's songs and jests, the plucking out of Gloster's eyes, and the protracted foolery between Edgar and his helpless father, but he refused to admit romantic love into this drama of the madness that separates father and child.

Though Shakespeare chose to involve himself in these manifold difficulties of story and structure, he hardly felt his fetters. No play depends less on mere incident and event. The inconsistencies and confusion of the action are forgotten in the wild turmoil of human pa.s.sions. Wild, terrible, elementary, brutal, grotesque, or sublime,--everything in the play is touched with the imaginative truth that gives it limitless range of suggestion, applicable to any discord of parents and children or to the most dreadful spiritual torture. Insanity, long a favorite theme of Elizabethan tragedy, and fantastic grotesqueness, often its bane, summon his imagination to its most wonderful creation when the feigning Bedlam counters the mad king mid the jests of the fool and the havoc of the storm.

Such a conception could have been attempted only in an age which took its emotions strong and mixed, which found insanity a subject for laughter as well as horror, and which refused to limit the imagination by reason or rule. In that age a lesser than Shakespeare might have formed the bare design of making his audience laugh at the fool and poor Tom, and shudder at the eyeless Gloster and the raving Ancient. Something akin to it may be found in many scenes, in that in which Marlowe's emperor and empress dash out their brains against the bars of their cage in a frenzy of humiliation, or that in which Webster's d.u.c.h.ess stands undazzled amid the dancing ring of obscene maniacs. The Elizabethan drama had prepared the opportunity for the full and terrible presentation of the discords and agony of a breaking mind. The London audience was ready for the scenes on the heath.

Madness is only one element that contributes to the overwhelming effect of the play. Its so-called pessimism is the only other on which our meagre survey may dwell. English tragedy had from the beginning concerned itself mainly with heinous crime and sin; and during the years immediately preceding and following ”Lear” there was a distinct conception of tragedy as the representation not only of the depths of iniquity but of the moral confusion and blackness that beset us all. In ”Hamlet,” ”Oth.e.l.lo,” and ”Measure for Measure” the sense of evil is ever present. In ”Lear” it grips the reader like the rack. As in ”Oth.e.l.lo,” evil, here represented by the two fiendish daughters as well as by an intriguing villain, dominates the action, and carries all that is good along with it to destruction. But evil is only one of the forces that cause suffering and ruin. Lear and Cordelia contend against their own imperfections and against chance and circ.u.mstance so hostile that they seem directed by G.o.ds who sport with men as with flies and loose the fury of the elements to torment their victims.

Where else in tragedy are the forces that make for ruin so appalling and so irresistible; and where else are suffering and ruin so dreadful and so complete? The sufferers are powerless. Suffering does not here arouse a Promethean defiance, but it discovers and purifies human virtue. If evil is dominant over the action, Cordelia, Kent, the Fool, and the chastened and purified Lear are dominant in our reflections. The end is not the fall and cessation of all that is good. Even in our dismay at the convulsion which evil may cause, there remains the memory of the perfection of human devotion and love. The final impression must, however, partake of confusion and horror at the blackness and ruthlessness of a moral order that can sacrifice perfect virtue in an effort to free itself from the hideous enormity of evil. This is the tragedy of life as Shakespeare saw it, and the cry of bewilderment and agony seems to come from the poet's own heart.

The language, sometimes crowded and difficult, has hardly a trace of artifice. Rarely as perfectly mastered as in ”Hamlet” and ”Oth.e.l.lo,” it surpa.s.ses even those plays in the tremendous sincerity of its pa.s.sion. If pa.s.sionate despair at things human has a language, it is the speech of Lear.

”Macbeth” offers a marked contrast to ”Lear” in its brevity and rapidity.

In spite of a few probable interpolations, the text is so short that it may likely represent a condensation of the original version. In none of the tragedies is the story told with more breathless directness, or with more effective presentation of the externals of the action. The play is more dependent on the chronicle than ”Lear,” and pays more attention to the representation of history. In ”Lear” the political and national importance of the events is forgotten, but in ”Macbeth” the convulsion of the kingdom is kept in mind, and the battles, political intrigue, and the prophecies of future dynasties recall the early chronicle plays. The story in Holinshed's chronicle, however, conforms to the current ideas of tragedy, so closely indeed that one wonders that some writer had not earlier attempted its dramatization.[20] Apparently it awaited a Scottish king and a general interest in Scottish affairs. The story is one of crime and retribution with a rather striking likeness to some of the cla.s.sical dramas. It coincides with the Senecan plan of a crime committed and then revenged through the accompaniment of supernatural agencies. It is the story, familiar to both humanistic and popular tragedy, of a usurper who becomes a b.l.o.o.d.y tyrant and is overthrown after a reign of increasing crime.

Macbeth's inordinate and fatal ambition also offers an obvious chance for a development akin to that of Marlowe's protagonists. Again, as in most English tragedies from ”Cambyses” to ”Seja.n.u.s,” the story presents the punishment of evil rather than the suffering of the good, and, except for the absence of l.u.s.t as a motive, might have found favor with any contemporary dramatist. All these possibilities in the story were seized upon by Shakespeare and adapted to his purpose. ”Macbeth” might be studied as the complement of ”Lear” in the reflection and summarizing of all preceding essays at tragedy.

Shakespeare's use of these various potentialities of the story and the definiteness of his unifying purpose may both be seen by a comparison with his treatment of the very similar materials furnished by the chronicles for ”Richard III.” There, following closely the Marlowean methods, he for some reason minimized the motive of remorse emphasized in his sources, and left Richard as conscienceless as Tamburlaine or Barabas. In ”Macbeth” the story of ambition is also a story of the temptation, defeat, and remorse of conscience. As in the other great tragedies, Shakespeare informed the old material with the struggle of the human will. At the same time he made the most of the hints in the chronicle that the protagonist was driven by fate or some forces beyond his control. He united with marvelous dramatic tact the destiny tragedy of the Greeks and the villain tragedy of the Elizabethans. As a result the character of Macbeth has its paradoxes that are the despair of the a.n.a.lysts. We do not quite know how far free-will and how far superhuman agencies determined his course. But while the superhuman agencies give his villany a mystery and impressiveness, they never confuse for a moment the distinctions of good and evil. The powers of right and wrong are clearly marshaled, and the triumph of evil leads to anguish as well as to ruin.

Shakespeare's transforming and vitalizing use of both the suggestions of Holinshed and the established conventions of tragedy in order to suit this changed purpose is manifest at every turn, but nowhere so transcendently as in his treatment of the supernatural. The ghost that interrupts the banquet is no shrieking revenger, hardly more than a hallucination of the murderer.

The invisibility of the ghost to all but the one whom he would frighten or admonish has other examples in the drama, but by 1605 most of the playwrights made their ghosts either melodramatically horrible or vulgarly familiar. In ”Macbeth” Shakespeare not only etherealizes the ghost as in ”Julius Caesar” and ”Hamlet,” but makes him a part of the very mood and temper of the murderer. And similarly, the witches, drawn from Holinshed's hints, represent a supernatural interference very different from that of the furies, devils, or sorcerers usual in the theatre. Some of their stage effects are archaic enough, as the shows of the head, the b.l.o.o.d.y child, and the monarchs; some, like their vanis.h.i.+ng in air, may have been novel on the stage of the Globe; certainly they were all intended to surpa.s.s in mere theatrical novelty and effectiveness any of the supernatural or magical creatures of the contemporary drama. Delighting the groundlings and appealing to the current interest in witchcraft, they are none the less essential to the drama, inwrapt in the conception of character. The foul hags of superst.i.tion, they seem also to have the attributes of the cla.s.sical Fates. Novel and effective on the stage, they are the supervisors of Macbeth's destiny. They lay bare the path to his crimes, yet they seem to obey rather than to govern his inclinations. The embodiments of the desires hid in his bosom, they become, like the dagger in the air and the ghost of Banquo, the symptoms of his soul's disease.

The disease of the soul is the theme, and the attention is centred upon crime and its accompaniments, as in many contemporary plays, but with less relief than in any other of Shakespeare's tragedies. While the range of crime is confined, l.u.s.t for instance never appearing as a motive, there is an unrelieved concentration on the evil course of ambition. The virtuous and n.o.ble have only minor parts. Lady Macbeth is an instigator and accomplice in crime. For the first time since Shakespeare's early plays, there is no idealized woman. The wickedness of Iago and the wolfish sisters was relieved by the lovableness of Desdemona and Cordelia, unavailing for the time but unforgettable in the sympathies of the reader. The eternal stars never glimmer through the blackness that broods over Macbeth.

Because of this concentration on one process of evil and the absence of any idealization of goodness, the play has a less intense appeal to our sympathies than the three preceding tragedies. Again, because of its concern with historical and political results, it removes itself from immediate relations.h.i.+p to common experience. In these respects it links itself with the two Roman historical tragedies that followed it.

”Antony and Cleopatra” and ”Coriola.n.u.s,” like ”Julius Caesar,” are dramas of great historical characters already splendidly described in Plutarch. They are consequently far more limited by their sources than are the other tragedies. Shakespeare was circ.u.mscribed by the main historical facts of persons and events, and he was writing as the translator and interpreter of Plutarch; yet his conception and methods remained the same as in ”Hamlet”

or ”Macbeth.” An idealization of the tragic struggle of the protagonist is environed by a wealth of incidents and persons, and accomplished by a gathering and transformation of the methods and matters of current tragedy.

The world of antiquity is not faithfully reproduced, but it is made alive and akin to our daily experience in the same fas.h.i.+on as are the Elsinore of Polonius and the grave-diggers, and the Britain of Osric and Kent. And the tragic conflicts that involve the great persons, if confused in the spectacles and actions of this varied stage, are the accompaniments of momentous national crises, themselves of hardly less imaginative appeal than the spiritual struggles which they parallel. The mental battles of Macbeth and Lear are reflected and magnified by the incantations of the weird sisters and the turmoil of the elements; those of Coriola.n.u.s and Antony by the battle of the powerful and the oppressed and by the throes of a dying civilization.

In ”Antony and Cleopatra,” the subject of many Renaissance tragedies, Shakespeare chose for a theme an ign.o.ble infatuation that leads counter to duty and on to destruction. The difficulties of the historical material led to a remarkable reversion in dramatic structure to the methods of the early chronicle plays, innumerable and loosely connected scenes, constant s.h.i.+fting of place, prolonged time, and an absence of tragic unity. The problem of a confused and intricate action, voluntarily imposed in ”Lear,”

is here forced upon the dramatist who will combine the wars of the triumvirs, the conflict of East and West, and the story of an enchantress and her victim. The tragic course of the conflict between infatuation and ambition is inc.u.mbered by historical details and stage spectacles, but in style and characterization few plays more greatly reveal Shakespeare's genius. In no play is the idealization of character more magnificent; no other dramatist has made Antony in the lures of a strumpet still representative of what is ill.u.s.trious and magnanimous in mankind, no other has made a woman with the manners and heart of a strumpet the rightful empress of the imagination. The interest in the play is less centred than in the other tragedies. It is divided between the spectacle of historical events and the conflict of motives; it lies as much in the persons as vitalizations of history as in their fate as human beings. But this is the triumph of historical tragedy as Shakespeare conceived it. Its scenic presentation makes alive the events and persons, and through a grandiose panorama interprets the pa.s.sions that ravished both empires and the souls of their possessors.

The human drama in ”Coriola.n.u.s” is involved not only in historical circ.u.mstances, but also in the eternal conflict between the upper and the lower cla.s.ses, the incurable disease of the body politic. While their pride in cla.s.s, their blindness to the rights of others, and their failure in patriotism are made apparent, the patricians are treated as the representatives of righteousness and n.o.bility. The plebeians, on the contrary, are depicted without appreciation of their sufferings or rights, as ignorant, imbecile, and the dupes of tricky demagogues. Contempt for the mob was a common sentiment in Renaissance literature, and the people as a factor in history held little place in the thoughts of the sixteenth century or in the historical drama. But here and in ”Julius Caesar”

Shakespeare treats them with far less consideration than does Fletcher or Ma.s.singer, with a contempt, indeed, that can hardly have flattered his audiences and that has often been taken as indicative of strong personal feeling. Shakespeare must have foreseen at least some of the political lessons which would be derived from the play, but one may easily exaggerate its importance as an exposition of his political theory. He was following Plutarch closely, with an eye for interesting theatrical scenes as in ”Antony and Cleopatra,” but with less than his usual inspiration. The lack of individuality in the persons, a certain typicality in the characterization, and the heaviness and complexity of the style may have been caused less by an intrusion of political theory than by a lapsing of that splendid power of characterization so long maintained. Moreover, the political partisans.h.i.+p is in part a dramatic necessity, almost compelled by Shakespeare's conception of tragedy and his dramatic method. Coriola.n.u.s must be given resplendent virtues. The populace as a foil and contrast must be made contemptible and the ready tool of vice. Pride, the fatal defect of the hero, must be exposed as was the sensuality of Antony, but it must be made the flaw of an Achilles. The role of villain is left for the demagogues, and that of the witless accomplice for the people. Again, here, as in all his histories, Shakespeare is blind to the importance of the people, because for him, as for his contemporaries, the dramatization of history was the dramatization of its great personages, and their pa.s.sions, vices, and ambitions.

The loss of power discernible in ”Coriola.n.u.s” is conspicuous in ”Timon.”

Its corrupt text and unfinished condition and the certainty that only part of the play is Shakespeare's render uncertain its importance among the tragedies. Here, however, as in ”Coriola.n.u.s,” though the interest in the causes that make man's misery is still keen, the lack of inspiration results in an exaggerated type for a protagonist and in an unconvincing exposition of human baseness. If Coriola.n.u.s's politics were Shakespeare's, certainly Timon's misanthropy was not.

With these themes Shakespeare's interest in tragedy exhausted itself.

Possibly influenced by the success of Beaumont and Fletcher's early romantic plays, he attempted in ”Cymbeline,” and perfected in ”A Winter's Tale” and ”The Tempest,” a type of play combining tragic and idyllic elements, full of romantic variety of incident, and resulting in surprising and happy _denouements_. The possibilities for tragedy are there; jealousy, villany, and intrigue abound; even death is introduced. But the main actions are not of suffering and ruin; love and forgiveness heal all ills; and the end is reconciliation and marriage. These romantic tragicomedies are not only departures from the established tragic forms, but from any consideration of tragic themes and problems comparable in seriousness or intensity with that of the plays which we have just discussed.

NOTE ON BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ward, Fleay, and Sch.e.l.ling continue to be the best general guides.

Important critical discussions of Shakespeare's tragedies by Professors A.