The personal note of every one of his great tragedies is that Shakespeare feels he has failed in life, failed lamentably. His Brutus, we feel, failed of necessity because of his aloofness from practical life; his Coriolanus, too, had to fail, and almost forgoes sympathy by his faults; but this Antony ought not to have failed: we cannot understand why the man leaves the sea-battle to follow Cleopatra's flight, who but an act or two before, with lesser reason, realized his danger and was able to break off from his enchantress. Yet the passion of desire that sways Antony is so splendidly portrayed; is, too, so dominant in all of us, that we accept it at once as explaining the inexplicable.

In measure as Shakespeare ennobled Antony, the historical fact of ultimate defeat and failure allowed him to degrade Cleopatra. And this he did willingly enough, for from the moment he took up the subject he identified the Queen of Egypt with his own faithless mistress, Mary Fitton, whom he had already tried to depict as "false Cressid." This identification of himself and his own experience of passion with the persons and passions of the story explains some of the faults of the drama; while being the source, also, of its singular splendour.

In this play we have the finest possible example of the strife between Shakespeare's yielding poetic temperament and the severity of his intellect. He heaps praises on Antony, as we have seen, from all sides; he loved the man as a sort of superb alter ego, and yet his intellectual fairness is so extraordinary that it compelled him to create a character who should uphold the truth even against his heart's favourite. Dr. Brandes speaks of Enobarbus as a "sort of chorus"; he is far more than that; he is the intellectual conscience of the play, a weight, so to speak, to redress the balance which Shakespeare used this once and never again. What a confession this is of personal partiality! A single instance will suffice to prove my point: Shakespeare makes Antony cast the blame for the flight at Actium on Cleopatra, and manages almost to hide the unmanly weakness of the plaint by its infinitely pathetic wording:

"Whither hast them led me, Egypt?

A little later Cleopatra asks:

"Is Antony or we in fault for this?"

and at once Enobarbus voices the exact truth:

"Antony only, that would make his will Lord of his reason. What though you fled . . . . . . . . . why should he follow?"

Again and again Antony reproaches Cleopatra, and again and again Enobarbus is used to keep the truth before us. Some of these reproaches, it seems to me, are so extravagant and so ill-founded that they discover the personal passion of the poet. For example, Antony insults Cleopatra:

"You have been a boggler ever."

And the proof forsooth is:

"I found you as a morsel cold upon Dead Caesar's trencher."

But to have been Caesar's mistress was Cleopatra's chief title to fame. Shakespeare is here probably reviling Mary Fitton for being deserted by some early lover. Curiously enough, this weakness of Antony increases the complexity of his character, while the naturalistic passion of his words adds enormously to the effect of the play. Again and again in this drama Shakespeare's personal vindictiveness serves an artistic purpose. The story of "Troilus and Cressida" is in itself low and vile, and when loaded with Shakespeare's bitterness outrages probability; but the love of Antony and Cleopatra is so overwhelming that it goes to ruin and suicide and beyond, and when intensified by Shakespeare's personal feeling becomes a world's masterpiece.

We have already seen that the feminine railing Shakespeare puts in the mouth of Antony increases the realistic effect, and just in the same way the low cunning, temper, and mean greed which he attributes to Cleopatra, transform her from a somewhat incomprehensible historical marionette into the most splendid specimen of the courtesan in the world's literature. Heine speaks of her contemptuously as a "kept woman," but the epithet only shows how Heine in default of knowledge fell back on his racial gift of feminine denigration. Even before she enters we see that Shakespeare has not forgiven his dark scornful mistress; Cleopatra is the finest picture he ever painted of Mary Fitton; but Antony's friends tell us, at the outset, she is a "lustful gipsy," a "strumpet," and at first she merely plays on Antony's manliness; she sends for him, and when he comes, departs. A little later she sends again, telling her messenger:

"I did not send you: if you find him sad, Say, I am dancing; if in mirth, report That I am sudden sick: quick, and return."

And when Charmian, her woman, declares that the way to keep a man is to "cross him in nothing," she replies scornfully:

"Thou teachest, like a fool, the way to lose him."

She uses a dozen taunts to prevent her lover from leaving her; but when she sees him resolved, she wishes him victory and success. And so through a myriad changes of mood and of cunning wiles we discover that love for Antony which is the anchor to her unstable nature.

The scene with the eunuch Mardian is a little gem. She asks:

"Hast thou affections? Mar. Yes, gracious madam. Cleo. Indeed? Mar. Not in deed, madam; for I can do nothing. But what indeed is honest to be done; Yet have I fierce affections, and think What Venus did with Mars. Cleo. O, Charmian! Where think'st thou he is now? Stands he, or sits he?"

She is with her lover again, and recalls his phrase for her, "my serpent of old Nile," and feeds herself with love's "delicious poison."

No sooner does she win our sympathy by her passion for Antony than Shakespeare chills our admiration by showing her as the courtesan:

"Cleo. Did I, Charmian, Ever love Caesar so?

Char. O, that brave Caesar!

Cleo. Be choked with such another emphasis! Say, the brave Antony.

Char. The valiant Caesar!

Cleo. By Isis, I will give thee bloody teeth If thou with Caesar paragon again My man of men.

Char. By your most gracious pardon, I sing but after you.

Cleo. My salad days, When I was green in judgement: cold in blood, To say as I said then!"

Already we see and know her, her wiles, her passion, her quick temper, her chameleon-like changes, her subtle charms of person and of word, and yet we have not reached the end of the first act. Next to Falstaff and to Hamlet, Cleopatra is the most astonishing piece of portraiture in all Shakespeare. Enobarbus gives the soul of her:

"Ant. She is cunning past man's thought.

Eno. Alack, sir, no; her passions are made of nothing but the finest part of pure love....

Ant. Would I had never seen her!

Eno. O, sir, you had then left unseen a wonderful piece of work; which not to have been blest withal would have discredited your travel."

Here Shakespeare gives his true opinion of Mary Fitton: then comes the miraculous expression:

"Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale Her infinite variety. Other women cloy The appetites they feed; but she makes hungry Where most she satisfies."

Act by act Shakespeare makes the portrait more complex and more perfect. In the second act she calls for music like the dark lady of the Sonnets:

"Music—moody food of us that trade in love,"

and then she'll have no music, but will play billiards, and not billiards either, but will fish and think every fish caught an Antony. And again she flies to memory:

"That time—O times!— I laughed him out of patience; and that night I laughed him into patience; and next morn, Ere the ninth hour, I drunk him to his bed; Then put my tires and mantles on him, whilst I wore his sword Philippan."

The charm of it all, the deathless charm and the astounding veracity! The messenger enters, and she promises him for good news "gold and her bluest veins to kiss." When she hears that Antony is well she pours more gold on him, but when he pauses in his recital she has a mind to strike him. When he tells that Caesar and Antony are friends, it is a fortune she'll give; but when she learns that Antony is betrothed to Octavia she turns to her women with "I am pale, Charmian," and when she hears that Antony is married she flies into a fury, strikes the messenger down and hales him up and down the room by his hair. When he runs from her knife she sends for him:

"I will not hurt him. These hands do lack nobility, that they strike A meaner than myself."

She has the fascination of great pride and the magic of manners. When the messenger returns she is a queen again, most courteous-wise:

"Come hither, sir. Though it be honest, it is never good To bring bad news."

She wants to know the features of Octavia, her years, her inclination, the colour of her hair, her height—everything.

A most veracious full-length portrait, with the minute finish of a miniature; it shows how Shakespeare had studied every fold and foible of Mary Fitton's soul. In the third act Cleopatra takes up again the theme of Octavia's appearance, only to run down her rival, and so salve her wounded vanity and cheat her heart to hope. The messenger, too, who lends himself to her humour now becomes a proper man. Shakespeare seizes every opportunity to add another touch to the wonderful picture.

Cleopatra appears next in Antony's camp at Actium talking with Enobarbus:

"Cleo. I will be even with thee, doubt it not.

Eno. But why, why, why?

Cleo. Thou hast forspoke my being in these wars, And say'st it is not fit."

Each phrase of the dialogue reveals her soul, dark fold on fold.

She is the only person who strengthens Antony in his quixotic-foolish resolve to fight at sea.

"Cleo. I have sixty sails, Caesar none better."

And then the shameful flight.

I have pursued this bald analysis thus far, not for pleasure merely, but to show the miracle of that portraiture the traits of which can bear examination one by one. So far Cleopatra is, as Enobarbus calls her, "a wonderful piece of work," a woman of women, inscrutable, cunning, deceitful, prodigal, with a good memory for injuries, yet as quick to forgiveness as to anger, a minion of the moon, fleeting as water yet loving-true withal, a sumptuous bubble, whose perpetual vagaries are but perfect obedience to every breath of passion. But now Shakespeare without reason makes her faithless to Antony and to love. In the second scene of the third act Thyreus comes to her with Caesar's message:

"Thyr. He knows that you embrace not Antony As you did love but as you feared him.

Cleo. O!

Thyr. The scars upon your honour therefore he Does pity as constrained blemishes, Not as deserved.

Cleo. He is a god, and knows What is most right. Mine honour was not yielded, But conquered merely.

Eno. [Aside.] To be sure of that I will ask Antony.—Sir, sir, thou'rt so leaky That we must leave thee to thy sinking, for Thy dearest quit thee."

And when Thyreus asks her to leave Antony and put herself under Caesar's protection, who "desires to give," she tells him:

"I am prompt To lay my crown at his feet, and there to kneel."

Thyreus then asks for grace to lay his duty on her hand. She gives it to him with the words:

"Your Caesar's father oft, When he hath mused of taking kingdoms in, Bestowed his lips on that unworthy place As it rained kisses."

It is as if Antony were forgotten, clean wiped from her mind. The whole scene is a libel upon Cleopatra and upon womanhood. When betrayed, women are faithless out of anger, pique, desire of revenge; they are faithless out of fear, out of ambition, for fancy's sake—for fifty motives, but not without motive. It would have been easy to justify this scene. All the dramatist had to do was to show us that Cleopatra, a proud woman and scorned queen, could not forget Antony's faithlessness in leaving her to marry Octavia; but she never mentions Octavia, never seems to remember her after she has got Antony back. This omission, too, implies a slur upon her. Nor does she kiss Caesar's "conquering hand" out of fear. Thyreus has told her it would please Caesar if she would make of his fortunes a staff to lean upon; she has no fear, and her ambitions are wreathed round Antony: Caesar has nothing to offer that can tempt her, as we shall see later. The scene is a libel upon her. The more one studies it, the clearer it becomes that Shakespeare wrote it out of wounded personal feeling. Cleopatra's prototype, Mary Fitton, had betrayed him again and again, and the faithlessness rankled. Cleopatra, therefore, shall be painted as faithless, without cause, as Cressid was, from incurable vice of nature. Shakespeare tried to get rid of his bitterness in this way, and if his art suffered, so much the worse for his art. Curiously enough, in this instance, for reasons that will appear later, the artistic effect is deepened.

The conclusion of this scene, where Thyreus is whipped and Cleopatra overwhelmed with insults by Antony, does not add much to our knowledge of Cleopatra's character: one may notice, however, that it is the reproach of cold-heartedness that she catches up to answer. The scene follows in which she plays squire to Antony and helps to buckle on his armour. But this scene (invented by Shakespeare), which might bring out the sweet woman-weakness in her, and so reconcile us to her again, is used against her remorselessly by the poet. When Antony wakes and cries for his armour she begs him to "sleep a little"; the touch is natural enough, but coming after her faithlessness to her lover and her acceptance of Caesar it shows more than human frailty. It is plain that, intent upon ennobling Antony, Shakespeare is willing to degrade Cleopatra beyond nature. Then comes Antony's victory, and his passion at length finds perfect lyrical expression:

"O thou day o' the world, Chain mine armed neck; leap thou, attire and all, Through proof of harness to my heart, and there Ride on the pants triumphing."

At once Cleopatra catches fire with that responsive flame of womanhood which was surely her chiefest charm:

"Lord of lords! O infinite virtue! Com'st thou smiling from The world's great snare uncaught?"

What magic in the utterance, what a revelation of Cleopatra's character and of Shakespeare's! To Cleopatra's feminine weakness the world seems one huge snare which only cunning may escape.

Another day, and final irremediable defeat drives her in fear to the monument and to that pretended suicide which is the immediate cause of Antony's despair:

"Unarm, Eros: the long day's task is done, And we must sleep."

When Antony leaves the stage, Shakespeare's idealizing vision turns to Cleopatra. About this point, too, the historical fact fetters Shakespeare and forces him to realize the other side of Cleopatra. After Antony's death Cleopatra did kill herself. One can only motive and explain this suicide by self-immolating love. It is natural that at first Shakespeare will have it that Cleopatra's nobility of nature is merely a reflection, a light borrowed from Antony. She will not open the monument to let the dying man enter, but her sincerity and love enable us to forgive this:

"I dare not, dear,— Dear my lord, pardon,—I dare not, Lest I be taken...."

Here occurs a fault of taste which I find inexplicable. While Cleopatra and her women are drawing Antony up, he cries;

"O quick, or I am gone."

And Cleopatra answers:

"Here's sport, indeed!—How heavy weighs my lord! Our strength has all gone into heaviness, That makes the weight."

The "Here's sport, indeed"! seems to me a terrible fault, an inexcusable lapse of taste. I should like to think it a misprint or misreading, but it is unfortunately like Shakespeare in a certain mood, possible to him, at least, here as elsewhere.

Cleopatra's lament over Antony's dead body is a piece of Shakespeare's self-revealing made lyrical by beauty of word and image. The allusion to his boy-rival, Pembroke, is unmistakable; for women are not contemptuous of youth:

"Young boys and girls Are level now with men; the odds is gone, And there is nothing left remarkable Beneath the visiting moon."

When Cleopatra comes to herself after swooning, her anger is characteristic because wholly unexpected; it is one sign more that Shakespeare had a living model in his mind:

"It were for me To throw my sceptre at the injurious gods; To tell them that this world did equal theirs Till they had stolen our jewel. All's but naught."

Her resolve to kill herself is borrowed:

"We'll bury him; and then, what's brave, what's noble, Let's do it after the high Roman fashion, And make death proud to take us."

But the resolution holds:

"It is great To do that thing that ends all other deeds, Which shackles accidents and bolts up change."

It is this greatness of soul in Cleopatra which Shakespeare has now to portray. Caesar's messenger, Proculeius, whom Antony has told her to trust, promises her everything in return for her "sweet dependency." On being surprised she tries to kill herself, and when disarmed shows again that characteristic petulant anger:

"Sir, I will eat no meat, I'll not drink, sir; . . . . . This mortal house I'll ruin, Do Caesar what he can."

And her reasons are all of pride and hatred of disgrace. She'll not be "chastised with the sober eye of dull Octavia," nor shown "to the shouting varletry of censuring Rome." Her imagination is at work now, that quick forecast of the mind that steels her desperate resolve:

"Rather on Nilus' mud Lay me stark nak'd, and let the water-flies Blow me into abhorring."

The heroic mood passes. She tries to deceive Caesar as to her wealth, and is shamed by her treasurer Seleucus. The scene is appalling; poor human nature stripped to the skin—all imperfections exposed; Cleopatra cheating, lying, raging like a drab; her words to Seleucus are merciless while self-revealing:

"O slave, of no more trust Than love that's hired."

This scene deepens and darkens the impression made by her unmotived faithlessness to Antony. It is, however, splendidly characteristic and I think needful; but it renders that previous avowal of faithlessness to Antony altogether superfluous, the sole fault in an almost perfect portrait. For, as I have said already, Shakespeare's mistakes in characterization nearly always spring from his desire to idealize; but here his personal vindictiveness comes to help his art. The historical fact compels him now to give his harlot, Cleopatra, heroic attributes; in spite of Caesar's threats to treat her sons severely if she dares to take her own life and thus deprive his triumph of its glory, she outwits him and dies a queen, a worthy descendant, as Charmian says, of "many royal kings." Nothing but personal bitterness could have prevented Shakespeare from idealizing such a woman out of likeness to humanity. But in this solitary and singular case his personal suffering bound him to realism though the history justified idealization. The high lights were for once balanced by the depths of shadow, and a masterpiece was the result.

Shakespeare leaves out Caesar's threats to put Cleopatra's sons to death; had he used these menaces he would have made Caesar more natural in my opinion, given a touch of characteristic brutality to the calculating intellect; but he omitted them probably because he felt that Cleopatra's pedestal was high enough without that addition.

The end is very characteristic of Shakespeare's temper. Caesar becomes nobly generous; he approves Cleopatra's wisdom in swearing falsehoods about her treasure; he will not reckon with her like "a merchant," and Cleopatra herself puts on the royal robes, and she who has played wanton before us so long becomes a queen of queens. And yet her character is wonderfully maintained; no cunning can cheat this mistress of duplicity:

"He words me, girls, he words me that I should not Be noble to myself."

She holds to her heroic resolve; she will never be degraded before the base Roman public; she will not see

"Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness."

It is, perhaps, worth noting here that Shakespeare lends Cleopatra, as he afterwards lent Coriolanus, his own delicate senses and neuropathic loathing for mechanic slaves with "greasy aprons" and "thick breaths rank of gross diet"; it is Shakespeare too and not Cleopatra who speaks of death as bringing "liberty." In "Cymbeline," Shakespeare's mask Posthumus dwells on the same idea. But these lapses are momentary; the superb declaration that follows is worthy of the queen:

"My resolution's placed, and I have nothing Of woman in me: now from head to foot I am marble-constant; now the fleeting moon No planet is of mine."

The scene with the clown who brings the "pretty worm" is the solid ground of reality on which Cleopatra rests for a breathing space before rising into the blue:

"Cleo. Give me my robe, put on my crown; I have Immortal longings in me. Now no more The juice of Egypt's grape shall moist this lip.— Yare, yare, good Iras! quick.—Methinks I hear Antony call; I see him rouse himself To praise my noble act; I hear him mock The luck of Caesar, which the gods give men To excuse their after-wrath. Husband, I come, Now to that name my courage prove my title! I am fire and air; my other elements I give to baser life."

The whole speech is miraculous in speed of mounting emotion, and when Iras dies first, this Cleopatra finds again the perfect word in which truth and beauty meet:

"This proves me base: If she first meet the curled Antony He'll make demand of her, and spend that kiss Which is my heaven to have. Come, thou mortal wretch, [To the asp, which she applies to her breast.] With thy sharp teeth this knot intrinsicate Of life at once untie: poor venomous fool, Be angry, and despatch. O, could'st thou speak, That I might hear thee call great Caesar, ass Unpolicied!"

The characteristic high temper of Mary Fitton breaking out again—"ass unpolicied"—and then the end:

"Peace, peace! Dost thou not see my baby at my breast, That sucks the nurse asleep?"

The final touch is of soft pleasure:

"As sweet a balm, as soft as air, as gentle,— Antony!—Nay, I will take thee too. [Applying another asp to her arm.] What should I stay—"

For ever fortunate in her self-inflicted death Cleopatra thereby frees herself from the ignominy of certain of her actions: she is woman at once and queen, and if she cringes lower than other women, she rises, too, to higher levels than other women know. The historical fact of her self-inflicted death forced the poet to make false Cressid a Cleopatra—and his wanton gipsy-mistress was at length redeemed by a passion of heroic resolve. The majority of critics are still debating whether indeed Cleopatra is the "dark lady" of the sonnets or not. Professor Dowden puts forward the theory as a daring conjecture; but the identity of the two cannot be doubted. It is impossible not to notice that Shakespeare makes Cleopatra, who was a fair Greek, gipsy-dark like his sonnet-heroine. He says, too, of the "dark lady" of the sonnets:

"Whence hast thou this becoming of things ill, That in the very refuse of thy deeds There is such strength and warrantise of skill, That, in my mind, thy worst all best exceeds?"

Enobarbus praises Cleopatra in precisely the same words:

"Vilest things, Become themselves in her."

Antony, too, uses the same expression:

"Fie, wrangling queen! Whom everything becomes—to chide, to laugh, To weep; whose every passion fully strives To make itself, in thee, fair and admired."

These professors have no distinct mental image of the "dark lady" or of Cleopatra, or they would never talk of "daring conjecture" in regard to this simple identification. The points of likeness are numberless. Ninety-nine poets and dramatists out of a hundred would have followed Plutarch and made Cleopatra's love for Antony the mainspring of her being, the causa causans of her self-murder. Shakespeare does not do this; he allows the love of Antony to count with her, but it is imperious pride and hatred of degradation that compel his Cleopatra to embrace the Arch-fear. And just this same quality of pride is attributed to the "dark lady." Sonnet 131 begins:

"Thou art as tyrannous, so as thou art, As those whose beauties proudly make them cruel."

Both are women of infinite cunning and small regard for faith or truth; hearts steeled with an insane pride, and violent tempers suited with scolding slanderous tongues. Prolonged analysis is not needed. A point of seeming difference between them establishes their identity. Cleopatra is beautiful, "a lass unparalleled," as Charmian calls her, and accordingly we can believe that all emotions became her, and that when hopping on the street or pretending to die she was alike be-witching; beauty has this magic. But how can all things become a woman who is not beautiful, whose face some say "hath not the power to make love groan," who cannot even blind the senses with desire? And yet the "dark lady" of the sonnets who is thus described, has the "powerful might" of personality in as full measure as Egypt's queen. The point of seeming unlikeness is as convincing as any likeness could be; the peculiarities of both women are the same and spring from the same dominant quality. Cleopatra is cunning, wily, faithless, passionately unrestrained in speech and proud as Lucifer, and so is the sonnet-heroine. We may be sure that the faithlessness, scolding, and mad vanity of his mistress were defects in Shakespeare's eyes as in ours; these, indeed, were "the things ill" which nevertheless became her. What Shakespeare loved in her was what he himself lacked or possessed in lesser degree—that daemonic power of personality which he makes Enobarbus praise in Cleopatra and which he praises directly in the sonnet-heroine. Enobarbus says of Cleopatra:

"I saw her once Hop forty paces through the public street, And, having lost her breath, she spoke and panted, That she did make defect perfection, And, breathless, power breathe forth."

One would be willing to wager that Shakespeare is here recalling a performance of his mistress; but it is enough for my purpose now to draw attention to the unexpectedness of the attribute "power." The sonnet fastens on the same word:

"O, from what power hast thou this powerful might With insufficiency my heart to sway?"

In the same sonnet he again dwells upon her "strength": she was bold, too, to unreason, and of unbridled tongue, for, "twice forsworn herself," she had yet urged his "amiss," though guilty of the same fault. What he admired most in her was force of character. Perhaps the old saying held in her case: ex forti dulcedo; perhaps her confident strength had abandonments more flattering and complete than those of weaker women; perhaps in those moments her forceful dark face took on a soulful beauty that entranced his exquisite susceptibility; perhaps—but the suppositions are infinite.

Though a lover and possessed by his mistress Shakespeare was still an artist. In the sonnets he brings out her overbearing will, boldness, pride—the elemental force of her nature; in the play, on the other hand, while just mentioning her "power," he lays the chief stress upon the cunning wiles and faithlessness of her whose trade was love. But just as Cleopatra has power, so there can be no doubt of the wily cunning—"the warrantise of skill"—of the sonnet-heroine, and no doubt her faithlessness was that "just cause of hate" which Shakespeare bemoaned.

It is worth while here to notice his perfect comprehension of the powers and limits of the different forms of his art. Just as he has used the sonnets in order to portray certain intimate weaknesses and maladies of his own nature that he could not present dramatically without making his hero ridiculously effeminate, so also he used the sonnets to convey to us the domineering will and strength of his mistress—qualities which if presented dramatically would have seemed masculine-monstrous.

By taking the sonnets and the play together we get an excellent portrait of Shakespeare's mistress. In person she was probably tall and vain of her height, as Cleopatra is vain of her superiority in this respect to Octavia, with dark complexion, black eyebrows and hair, and pitch-black eyes that mirrored emotion as the lakelet mirrors the ever-changing skies; her cheeks are "damask'd white"; her breath fragrant with health, her voice melodious, her movements full of dignity—a superb gipsy to whom beauty may be denied but not distinction.

If we have a very good idea of her person we have a still better idea of her mind and soul. I must begin by stating that I do not accept implicitly Shakespeare's angry declarations that his mistress was a mere strumpet. A nature of great strength and pride is seldom merely wanton; but the fact stands that Shakespeare makes a definite charge of faithlessness against his mistress; she is, he tells us, "the bay where all men ride"; no "several plot," but "the wide world's common place." The accusation is most explicit. But if it were well founded why should he devote two sonnets (135 and 136) to imploring her to be as liberal as the sea and to receive his love-offering as well as the tributes of others?

"Among a number one is reckon'd none Then in the number let me pass untold."

It is plain that Mistress Fitton drew away from Shakespeare after she had given herself to his friend, and this fact throws some doubt upon his accusations of utter wantonness. A true "daughter of the game," as he says in "Troilus and Cressida," is nothing but "a sluttish spoil of opportunity" who falls to Troilus or to Diomedes in turn, knowing no reserve. It must be reckoned to the credit of Mary Fitton, or to her pride, that she appears to have been faithful to her lover for the time being, and able to resist even the solicitings of Shakespeare. But her desires seem to have been her sole restraint, and therefore we must add an extraordinary lewdness to that strength, pride, and passionate temper which Shakespeare again and again attributes to her. Her boldness is so reckless that she shows her love for his friend even before Shakespeare's face; she knows no pity in her passion, and always defends herself by attacking her accuser. But she is cunning in love's ways and dulls Shakespeare's resentment with "I don't hate you." Unwilling perhaps to lose her empire over him and to forego the sweetness of his honeyed flatteries, she blinded him to her faults by occasional caresses. Yet this creature, with the soul of a strumpet, the tongue of a fishwife and the "proud heart" of a queen, was the crown and flower of womanhood to Shakespeare, his counterpart and ideal. Hamlet in love with Cleopatra, the poet lost in desire of the wanton—that is the tragedy of Shakespeare's life.

In this wonderful world of ours great dramatic writers are sure to have dramatic lives. Again and again in his disgrace Antony cries:

"Whither hast thou led me, Egypt?"

Shakespeare's passion for Mary Fitton led him to shame and madness and despair; his strength broke down under the strain and he never won back again to health. He paid the price of passion with his very blood. It is Shakespeare and not Antony who groans:

"O this false soul of Egypt! this grave charm,— * * * * * Like a right gipsy, hath, at fast and loose, Beguil'd me to the very heart of loss."

Shakespeare's love for Mary Fitton is to me one of the typical tragedies of life—a symbol for ever. In its progress through the world genius is inevitably scourged and crowned with thorns and done to death; inevitably, I say, for the vast majority of men hate and despise what is superior to them: Don Quixote, too, was trodden into the mire by the swine. But the worst of it is that genius suffers also through its own excess; is bound, so to speak, to the stake of its own passionate sensibilities, and consumed, as with fire.



CHAPTER XI

THE DRAMA OF MADNESS: "LEAR"

Ever since Lessing and Goethe it has been the fashion to praise Shakespeare as a demi-god; whatever he wrote is taken to be the rose of perfection. This senseless hero-worship, which reached idolatry in the superlatives of the "Encyclopaedia Britannica" and elsewhere in England, was certain to provoke reaction, and the reaction has come to vigorous expression in Tolstoi, who finds nothing to praise in any of Shakespeare's works, and everything to blame in most of them, especially in "Lear." Lamb and Coleridge, on the other hand, have praised "Lear" as a world's masterpiece. Lamb says of it:

"While we read it, we see not Lear; but we are Lear,—we are in his mind, we are sustained by a grandeur which baffles the malice of daughters and storms; in the aberrations of his reason we discover a mighty irregular power of reasoning, immethodised from the ordinary purposes of life, but exerting its powers, as the wind bloweth where it listeth, at will upon the corruptions and abuses of mankind."

Coleridge calls "Lear," "the open and ample playground of Nature's passions."

These dithyrambs show rather the lyrical power of the writers than the thing described.

Tolstoi, on the other hand, keeps his eyes on the object, and sets himself to describe the story of "Lear" "as impartially as possible." He says of the first scene:

"Not to mention the pompous, characterless language of King Lear, the same in which all Shakespeare's kings speak, the reader or spectator cannot conceive that a king, however old and stupid he may be, could believe the words of the vicious daughters with whom he had passed his whole life, and not believe his favourite daughter, but curse and banish her; and therefore, the spectator or reader cannot share the feelings of the persons participating in this unnatural scene."

He goes on to condemn the scene between Gloucester and his sons in the same way. The second act he describes as "absurdly foolish." The third act is "spoiled, by the characteristic Shakespearean language." The fourth act is "marred in the making," and of the fifth act, he says: "Again begin Lear's awful ravings, at which one feels ashamed, as at unsuccessful jokes." He sums up in these words:

"Such is this celebrated drama. However absurd it may appear in my rendering (which I have endeavoured to make as impartial as possible), I may confidently say that in the original it is yet more absurd. For any man of our time—if he were not under the hypnotic suggestion that this drama is the height of perfection—it would be enough to read it to its end (were he to have sufficient patience for this) in order to be convinced that, far from being the height of perfection, it is a very bad, carelessly-composed production, which, if it could have been of interest to a certain public at a certain time, cannot evoke amongst us anything but aversion and weariness. Every reader of our time who is free from the influence of suggestion will also receive exactly the same impression from all the other extolled dramas of Shakespeare, not to mention the senseless dramatized tales, 'Pericles,' 'Twelfth Night,' 'The Tempest,' 'Cymbeline,' and 'Troilus and Cressida.'"

Every one must admit, I think, that what Tolstoi has said of the hypothesis of the play is justified. Shakespeare, as I have shown, was nearly always an indifferent playwright, careless of the architectural construction of his pieces, contemptuous of stage-craft. So much had already been said in England, if not with the authority of Tolstoi.

It may be conceded, too, that the language which Shakespeare puts into Lear's mouth in the first act is "characterless and pompous," even silly; but Tolstoi should have noticed that as soon as Lear realizes the ingratitude of his daughters, his language becomes more and more simple and pathetic. Shakespeare's kings are apt to rant and mouth when first introduced; he seems to have thought pomp of speech went with royal robes; but when the action is engaged even his monarchs speak naturally.

The truth is, that just as the iambics of Greek drama were lifted above ordinary conversation, so Shakespeare's language, being the language mainly of poetic and romantic drama, is a little more measured and, if you will, more pompous than the small talk of everyday life, which seems to us, accustomed as we are to prose plays, more natural. Shakespeare, however, in his blank verse, reaches heights which are not often reached by prose, and when he pleases, his verse becomes as natural-easy as any prose, even that of Tolstoi himself. Tolstoi finds everything Lear says "pompous," "artificial," "unnatural," but Lear's words:

"Pray do not mock me, I am a very foolish-fond old man Fourscore and upward, not an hour more nor less, And, to deal plainly I fear I am not in my perfect mind."

touch us poignantly, just because of their childish simplicity; we feel as if Lear, in them, had reached the heart of pathos. Tolstoi, I am afraid, has missed all the poetry of Lear, all the deathless phrases. Lear says:

"I am a man, More sinn'd against than sinning,"

and the new-coined phrase passed at once into the general currency. Who, too, can ever forget his description of the poor?

"Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are, That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you From seasons such as these?"

The like of that "looped and windowed raggedness" is hardly to be found in any other literature. In the fourth and fifth acts Lear's language is simplicity itself, and even in that third act which Tolstoi condemns as "incredibly pompous and artificial," we find him talking naturally:

"Ha! here 's three on's are sophisticated: thou art the thing itself, unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art."

There is still another reason why some of us cannot read "Lear" with the cold eyes of reason, contemptuously critical. "Lear" marks a stage in Shakespeare's agony. We who know the happy ingenuousness of his youth undimmed by doubts of man or suspicions of woman, cannot help sympathizing with him when we see him cheated and betrayed, drinking the bitter cup of disillusion to the dregs. In "Lear" the angry brooding leads to madness; and it is only fitting that the keynote of the tragedy, struck again and again, should be the cry.

"O, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet Heaven! Keep me in temper: I would not be mad."

"Lear" is the first attempt in all literature to paint madness, and not the worst attempt.

In "Lear," Shakespeare was intent on expressing his own disillusion and naked misery. How blind Lear must have been, says Tolstoi; how incredibly foolish not to know his daughters better after living with them for twenty years; but this is just what Shakespeare wishes to express: How blind I was, he cries to us, how inconceivably trusting and foolish! How could I have imagined that a young noble would be grateful, or a wanton true? "Lear" is a page of Shakespeare's autobiography, and the faults of it are the stains of his blistering tears.

"Lear" is badly constructed, but worse was to come. The next tragedy, "Timon," is merely a scream of pain, and yet it, too, has a deeper than artistic interest for us as marking the utmost limit of Shakespeare's suffering. The mortal malady of perhaps the finest spirit that has ever appeared among men has an interest for us profounder than any tragedy. And to find that in Shakespeare's agony and bloody sweat he ignores the rules of artistry is simply what might have been expected, and, to some of us, deepens the personal interest in the drama.

In "Lear" Edgar is peculiarly Shakespeare's mouthpiece, and to Edgar Shakespeare gives some of the finest words he ever coined:

"The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices Make instruments to plague us."

Here, too, in what Edgar says of himself, is the moral of all passion: it is manifestly Shakespeare's view of himself:

"A most poor man, made tame to Fortune's blows, Who by the art of knowing and feeling sorrows Am pregnant to good pity."

Then we find the supreme phrase—perhaps the finest ever written:

"Men must endure Their going hence even as their coming hither. Ripeness is all."

Shakespeare speaks through Lear in the last acts as plainly as through Edgar. In the third scene of the fifth act Lear talks to Cordelia in the very words Shakespeare gave to the saint Henry VI. at the beginning of his career. Compare the extracts on pages 118-9 with the following passage, and you will see the similarity and the astounding growth in his art.

"... Come, let's away to prison: We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage: When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down And ask of thee forgiveness: so we'll live, And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues Talk of court news; ..."

More characteristic still of Shakespeare is the fact that when Lear is at his bitterest in the fourth act, he shows the erotic mania which is the source of all Shakespeare's bitterness and misery; but which is utterly out of place in Lear. The reader will mark how "adultery" is dragged in:

"... Ay, every inch a king: When I do stare, see how the subject quakes. I pardon that man's life. What was thy cause? Adultery? Thou shalt not die: die for adultery! No: The wren goes to 't, and the small gilded fly Does lecher in my sight. Let copulation thrive; ... ... Down from the waist they are Centaurs, Though women all above; But to the girdle do the gods inherit, Beneath is all the fiends'; ..."

Thus Lear raves for a whole page: Shakespeare on his hobby: in the same erotic spirit he makes both Goneril and Regan lust after Edmund.

The note of this tragedy is Shakespeare's understanding of his insane blind trust in men; but the passion of it springs from erotic mania and from the consciousness that he is too old for love's lists. Perhaps his imagination never carried him higher than when Lear appeals to the heavens because they too are old:

"... O heavens, If you do love old men, if your sweet sway Allow obedience, if yourselves are old, Make it your cause."



CHAPTER XII

THE DRAMA OF DESPAIR: "TIMON OF ATHENS"

"Timon" marks the extremity of Shakespeare's suffering. It is not to be called a work of art, it is hardly even a tragedy; it is the causeless ruin of a soul, a ruin insufficiently motived by complete trust in men and spendthrift generosity. If there was ever a man who gave so lavishly as Timon, if there was ever one so senseless blind in trusting, then he deserved his fate. There is no gradation in his giving, and none in his fall; no artistic crescendo. The whole drama is, as I have said, a scream of suffering, or rather, a long curse upon all the ordinary conditions of life. The highest qualities of Shakespeare are not to be found in the play. There are none of the magnificent phrases which bejewel "Lear"; little of high wisdom, even in the pages which are indubitably Shakespeare's, and no characterization worth mentioning. The honest steward, Flavius, is the honest Kent again of "Lear," honest and loyal beyond nature; Apemantus is another Thersites. Words which throw a high light on Shakespeare's character are given to this or that personage of the play without discrimination. One phrase of Apemantus is as true of Shakespeare as of Timon and is worth noting:

"The middle of humanity thou never knewest, but the extremity of both ends."

The tragic sonnet-note is given to Flavius: "What viler thing upon the earth than friends Who can bring noblest minds to basest ends!"

In so far as Timon is a character at all he is manifestly Shakespeare, Shakespeare who raves against the world, because he finds no honesty in men, no virtue in women, evil everywhere—"boundless thefts in limited professions." This Shakespeare-Timon swings round characteristically as soon as he finds that Flavius is honest:

"Had I a steward So true, so just, and now so comfortable? It almost turns my dangerous nature mild. Let me behold thy face. Surely this man Was born of woman. Forgive my general and exceptless rashness, You perpetual-sober gods! I do proclaim One honest man—mistake me not—but one ..."

I cannot help putting the great and self-revealing line [Footnote: This passage is among those rejected by the commentators as un-Shakespearean: "it does not stand the test," says the egregious Gollancz.] in italics; a line Tolstoi would, no doubt, think stupid-pompous. Timon ought to have known his steward, one might say in Tolstoi's spirit, as Lear should have known his daughters; but this is still the tragedy, which Shakespeare wishes to emphasize that his hero was blind in trusting.

Towards the end Shakespeare speaks through Timon quite unfeignedly: Richard II. said characteristically:

"Nor I nor any man that but man is With nothing shall be pleased, till he be eased With being nothing:"

And Timon says to Flavius:

"My long sickness Of health and living now begins to mend And nothing brings me all things."

Then the end:

"Timon hath made his everlasting mansion Upon the beached verge of the salt flood...."

We must not leave this play before noticing the overpowering erotic strain in Shakespeare which suits Timon as little as it suited Lear. The long discussion with Phrynia and Timandra is simply dragged in: neither woman is characterized: Shakespeare-Timon eases himself in pages of erotic raving:

"... Strike me the counterfeit matron; It is her habit only that is honest, Herself's a bawd:..."

And then:

"Consumptions sow In hollow bones of man........... ...............Down with the nose, Down with it flat; take the bridge quite away ..."

The "damned earth" even is "the common whore of mankind."

"Timon" is the true sequel to "The Merchant of Venice." Antonio gives lavishly, but is saved at the crisis by his friends. Timon gives with both hands, but when he appeals to his friends, is treated as a bore. Shakespeare had travelled far in the dozen years which separate the two plays.

All Shakespeare's tragedies are phases of his own various weaknesses, and each one brings the hero to defeat and ruin. Hamlet cannot carry revenge to murder and fails through his own irresolution. Othello comes to grief through mad jealousy. Antony fails and falls through excess of lust; Lear through trust in men, and Timon through heedless generosity. All these are separate studies of Shakespeare's own weaknesses; but the ruin is irretrievable, and reaches its ultimate in Timon. Trust and generosity, Shakespeare would like to tell us, were his supremest faults. In this he deceived himself. Neither "Lear" nor "Timon" is his greatest tragedy; but "Antony and Cleopatra," for lust was his chief weakness, and the tragedy of lust his greatest play.

Much of "Timon" is not Shakespeare's, the critics tell us, and some of it is manifestly not his, though many of the passages rejected with the best reason have, I think, been touched up by him. The second scene of the first act is as bad as bad can be; but I hear his voice in the line:

"Methinks, I could deal kingdoms to my friends, And ne'er be weary."

At any rate, this is the keynote of the tragedy, which is struck again and again. Shakespeare probably exaggerated his generosity out of aristocratic pose; but that he was careless of money and freehanded to a fault, is, I think, certain from his writings, and can be proved from the facts known to us of his life.



CHAPTER XIII

SHAKESPEARE'S LAST ROMANCES: ALL COPIES.

"Winters Tale": "Cymbeline": "The Tempest."

The wheel has swung full circle: Timon is almost as weak as "Titus Andronicus"; the pen falls from the nerveless hand. Shakespeare wrote nothing for some time. Even the critics make a break after "Timon," which closes what they are pleased to call his third period; but they do not seem to see that the break was really a breakdown in health. In "Lear" he had brooded and raged to madness; in "Timon" he had spent himself in futile, feeble cursings. His nerves had gone to pieces. He was now forty-five years of age, the forces of youth and growth had left him. He was prematurely old and feeble.

His recovery, it seems certain, was very slow, and he never again, if I am right, regained vigorous health, I am almost certain he went down to Stratford at this crisis and spent some time there, probably a couple of years, trying, no doubt, to staunch the wound in his heart, and win back again to life. The fear of madness had frightened him from brooding: he made up his mind to let the dead past bury its dead; he would try to forget and live sanely. After all, life is better than death.

It was probably his daughter who led him back from the brink of the grave. Almost all his latest works show the same figure of a young girl. He seems now, for the first time, to have learned that a maiden can be pure, and in his old idealizing way which went with him to the end, he deified her. Judith became a symbol to him, and he lent her the ethereal grace of abstract beauty. In "Pericles" she is Marina; in "The Winter's Tale" Perdita; in "The Tempest" Miranda. It is probable when one comes to think of it, that Ward was right when he says that Shakespeare spent his "elder years" in Stratford; he was too broken to have taken up his life in London again.

The assertion that Shakespeare broke down in health, and never won back to vigorous life, will be scorned as my imagining. The critics who have agreed to regard "Cymbeline," "The Winter's Tale," and "The Tempest" as his finest works are all against me on this point, and they will call for "Proofs, proofs. Give us proofs," they will cry, "that the man who went mad and raved with Lear, and screamed and cursed in "Timon" did really break down, and was not imagining madness and despair." The proofs are to be found in these works themselves, plain for all men to read.

The three chief works of his last period are romances and are all copies; he was too tired to invent or even to annex; his own story is the only one that interests him. The plot of "The Winter's Tale" is the plot of "Much Ado about Nothing." Hero is Hermione. Another phase of "Much Ado About Nothing" is written out at length in "Cymbeline"; Imogen suffers like Hero and Hermione, under unfounded accusation. It is Shakespeare's own history turned from this world to fairyland: what would have happened, he asks, if the woman whom I believed false, had been true? This, the theme of "Much Ado," is the theme also of "The Winter's Tale" and of "Cymbeline." The idealism of the man is inveterate: he will not see that it was his own sensuality which gave him up to suffering, and not Mary Fitton's faithlessness. "The Tempest" is the story of "As you Like it." We have again the two dukes, the exiled good Duke, who is Shakespeare, and the bad usurping Duke, Shakespeare's rival, Chapman, who has conquered for a time. Shakespeare is no longer able or willing to discover a new play: he can only copy himself, and in one of the scenes which he wrote into "Henry VIII." the copy is slavish.

I allude to the third scene in the second act; the dialogue between Anne Bullen and the Old Lady is extraordinarily reminiscent. When Anne Bullen says—

"'Tis better to be lowly born, And range with humble livers in content, Than to be perk'd up in a glistering grief And wear a golden sorrow"

I am reminded of Henry VI. And the contention between Anne Bullen and the Old Lady, in which Anne Bullen declares that she would not be a queen, and the Old Lady scorns her:

"Beshrew me, I would, And venture maidenhead for't; and so would you, For all this spice of your hypocrisy."

is much the same contention, and is handled in the same way as the contention between Desdemona and Emilia in "Othello."

There are many other proofs of Shakespeare's weakness of hand throughout this last period, if further proofs were needed. The chief characteristics of Shakespeare's health are his humour, his gaiety, and wit—his love of life. A correlative characteristic is that all his women are sensuous and indulge in coarse expressions in and out of season. This is said to be a fault of his time; but only professors could use an argument which shows such ignorance of life. Homer was clean enough, and Sophocles, Spenser, too; sensuality is a quality of the individual man. Still another characteristic of Shakespeare's maturity is that his characters, in spite of being idealized, live for us a vigorous, pulsing life.

All these characteristics are lacking in the works after "Timon." There is practically no humour, no wit, the clowns even are merely boorish-stupid with the solitary exception of Autolycus, who is a pale reflex of one or two characteristics of Falstaff. Shakespeare's humour has disappeared, or is so faint as scarcely to be called humour; all the heroines, too, are now vowed away from sensuality: Marina passes through the brothel unsoiled; Perdita might have milk in her veins, and not blood, and Miranda is but another name for Perdita. Imogen, too, has no trace of natural passion in her: she is a mere washing-list, so to speak, of sexless perfections. In this last period Shakespeare will have nothing to do with sensuality, and his characters, and not the female characters alone, are hardly more than abstractions; they lack the blood of emotion; there is not one of them could cast a shadow. How is it that the critics have mistaken these pale, bloodless silhouettes for Shakespeare's masterpieces?

In his earliest works he was compelled, as we have seen, to use his own experiences perpetually, not having had any experience of life, and in these, his latest plays, he also uses when he can his own experiences to give his pictures of the world from which he had withdrawn, some sense of vivid life. For example, in "Winter's Tale" his account of the death of the boy Mamillius is evidently a reflex of his own emotion when he lost his son, Hamnet, an emotion which at the time he pictured deathlessly in Arthur and the grief of the Queen-mother Constance. Similarly, in "Cymbeline," the joy of the brothers in finding the sister is an echo of his own pleasure in getting to know his daughter.

I have an idea about the genesis of these last three plays as regards their order which may be wholly false, though true, I am sure, to Shakespeare's character. I imagine he was asked by the author to touch up "Pericles." On reading the play, he saw the opportunity of giving expression to the new emotion which had been awakened in him by the serious sweet charm of his young daughter, and accordingly he wrote the scenes in which Marina figures. Judith's modesty was a perpetual wonder to him.

His success induced him to sketch out "The Winter's Tale," in which tale he played sadly with what might have been if his accused love, Mary Fitton, had been guiltless instead of guilty. I imagine he saw that the play was not a success, or supreme critic as he was, that his hand had grown weak, and seeking for the cause he probably came to the conclusion that the comparative failure was due to the fact that he did not put himself into "The Winter's Tale," and so he determined in the next play to draw a full-length portrait of himself again, as he had done in "Hamlet," and accordingly he sketched Posthumus, a staider, older, idealized Hamlet, with lymph in his veins, instead of blood. In the same idealizing spirit, he pictured his rose of womanhood for us in Imogen, who is, however, not a living woman at all, any more than his earliest ideal, Juliet, was a woman. The contrast between these two sketches is the contrast between Shakespeare's strength and his weakness. Here is how the fourteen-year-old Juliet talks of love:

"Spread thy close curtain, love-performing night, That runaways' eyes may wink, and Romeo Leap to these arms, untalk'd of and unseen. Lovers can see to do their amorous rites By their own beauties."

And here what Posthumus says of Imogen:

"Me of my lawful pleasure she restrain'd, And pray'd me oft forbearance: did it with A pudency so rosy, the sweet view on't Might well have warmed old Saturn."

Neither of these statements is very generally true: but the second is out of character. When Shakespeare praises restraint in love he must have been very weak; in full manhood he prayed for excess of it, and regarded a surfeit as the only rational cure.

I think Shakespeare liked Posthumus and Imogen; but he could not have thought "Cymbeline" a great work, and so he pulled himself together for a masterpiece. He seems to have said to himself, "All that fighting of Posthumus is wrong; men do not fight at forty-eight; I will paint myself simply in the qualities I possess now; I will tell the truth about myself so far as I can." The result is the portrait of Prospero in "The Tempest."

Let me just say before I begin to study Prospero that I find the introduction of the Masque in the fourth act extraordinarily interesting. Ben Jonson had written classic masques for this and that occasion; masques which were very successful, we are told; they had "caught on," in fact, to use our modern slang. Shakespeare will now show us that he, too, can write a masque with classic deities in it, and better Jonson's example. It is pitiful, and goes to prove, I think, that Shakespeare was but little esteemed by his generation.

Jonson answered him conceitedly, as Jonson would, in the Introduction to his "Bartholomew Fair" (1612-14), "If there be never a Servant monster i' the Fayre, who can help it, he sayes; nor a nest of Antiques. He is loth to make nature afraid in his Playes, like those that beget Tales, Tempests, and such like Drolleries."

At the very end, the creator of Hamlet, the finest mind in the world, was eager to show that he could write as well in any style as the author of "Every Man in his Humour." To me the bare fact is full of interest, and most pitiful.

Let us now turn to "The Tempest," and see how our poet figures in it. It is Shakespeare's last work, and one of his very greatest; his testament to the English people; in wisdom and high poetry a miracle.

The portrait of Shakespeare we get in Prospero is astonishingly faithful and ingenuous, in spite of its idealization. His life's day is waning to the end; shadows of the night are drawing in upon him, yet he is the same bookish, melancholy student, the lover of all courtesies and generosities, whom we met first as Biron in "Love's Labour's Lost." The gaiety is gone and the sensuality; the spiritual outlook is infinitely sadder—that is what the years have done with our gentle Shakespeare.

Prospero's first appearance in the second scene of the first act is as a loving father and magician; he says to Miranda:

"I have done nothing but in care of thee, Of thee, my dear one! thee, my daughter."

He asks Miranda what she can remember of her early life, and reaches magical words:

"What seest thou else In the dark backward and abysm of time?"

Miranda is only fifteen years of age. Shakespeare turned Juliet, it will be remembered, from a girl of sixteen into one of fourteen; now, though the sensuality has left him, he makes Miranda only fifteen; clearly he is the same admirer of girlish youth at forty-eight as he was twenty years before. Then Prospero tells Miranda of himself and his brother, the "perfidious" Duke:

"And Prospero, the prime Duke, being so reputed In dignity, and for the liberal arts Without a parallel; those being all my study."

He will not only be a Prince now, but a master "without a parallel" in the liberal arts. He must explain, too, at undue length, how he allowed himself to be supplanted by his false brother, and speaks about himself in Shakespeare's very words:

"I thus neglecting worldly ends, all dedicate To closeness, and the bettering of my mind With that, which, but by being so retired, O'erprized all popular rate, in my false brother Awaked an evil nature: and my trust, Like a good parent, did beget of him, A falsehood, in its contrary as great As my trust was; which had, indeed, no limit, A confidence sans bound."

Shakespeare, too, "neglecting worldly ends," had dedicated himself to "bettering of his mind," we may be sure. Prospero goes on to tell us explicitly how Shakespeare loved books, which we were only able to infer from his earlier plays:

"Me, poor man, my library Was dukedom large enough."

And again, Gonzalo (another name for Kent and Flavius) having given him some books, he says:

"Of his gentleness, Knowing I loved my books, he furnished me From my own library, with volumes that I prize above my dukedom."

His daughter grieves lest she had been a trouble to him: forthwith Shakespeare-Prospero answers:

"O, a cherubim Thou wast, that did preserve me. Thou didst smile Infused with a fortitude from heaven, When I have deck'd the sea with drops full salt Under my burden groan'd; which raised in me An undergoing stomach, to bear up Against what should ensue."

But why should the magician weep or groan under a burden? had he no confidence in his miraculous powers? All this is Shakespeare's confession. Every word is true; his daughter did indeed "preserve" Shakespeare, and enable him to bear up under the burden of life's betrayals.

No wonder Prospero begins to apologize for this long-winded confession, which indeed is "most impertinent" to the play, as he admits, though most interesting to him and to us, for he is simply Shakespeare telling us his own feelings at the time. The gentle magician then hears from Ariel how the shipwreck has been conducted without harming a hair of anyone.

The whole scene is an extraordinarily faithful and detailed picture of Shakespeare's soul. I find significance even in the fact that Ariel wants his freedom "a full year" before the term Prospero had originally proposed. Shakespeare finished "The Tempest," I believe, and therewith set the seal on his life's work a full year earlier than he had intended; he feared lest death might surprise him before he had put the pinnacle on his work. Ariel's torment, too, is full of meaning for me; for Ariel is Shakespeare's "shaping spirit of imagination," who was once the slave of "a foul witch," and by her "imprisoned painfully" for "a dozen years."

That "dozen years" is to me astonishingly true and interesting: it shows that my reading of the duration of his passion-torture was absolutely correct—Shakespeare's "delicate spirit" and best powers bound to Mary Fitton's "earthy" service from 1597 to 1608.

We can perhaps fix this latter date with some assurance. Mistress Fitton married for the second time a Captain or Mr. Polwhele late in 1607, or some short time before March, 1608, when the fact of her recent marriage was recorded in the will of her great uncle. It seems to me probable, or at least possible, that this event marks her complete separation from Shakespeare; she may very likely have left the Court and London on ceasing to be a Maid of Honour.

Shakespeare is so filled with himself in this last play, so certain that he is the most important person in the world, that this scene is more charged with intimate self-revealing than any other in all his works. And when Ferdinand comes upon the stage Shakespeare lends him, too, his own peculiar qualities. His puppets no longer interest him; he is careless of characterization. Ferdinand says:

"This music crept by me upon the waters Allaying both their fury and my passion With its sweet air."

Music, it will be remembered, had precisely the same peculiar effect upon Duke Orsino in "Twelfth Night." Ferdinand, too, is extraordinarily conceited:

"I am the best of them that speak this speech. .... Myself am Naples."

Shakespeare's natural aristocratic pride as a Prince reinforced by his understanding of his own real importance. Ferdinand then declares he will be content with a prison if he can see Miranda in it:

"Space enough Have I in such a prison."

Which is Hamlet's:

"I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space."

The second act, with its foiled conspiracy, is wretchedly bad, and the meeting of Caliban and Trinculo with Stephanie does not improve it much, Shakespeare has little interest now in anything outside himself: age and greatness are as self-centred as youth.

In the third act the courtship of Ferdinand and Miranda is pretty, but hardly more. Ferdinand is bloodless, thin, and Miranda swears "by her modesty," as the jewel in her dower, which takes away a little from the charming confession of girl-love:

"I would not wish Any companion in the world but you."

The comic relief which follows is unspeakably dull; but the words of Ariel, warning the King of Naples and the usurping Duke that the wrong they have done Prospero is certain to be avenged unless blotted out by "heart-sorrow and a clear life ensuing," are most characteristic and memorable.

In the fourth act Prospero preaches, as we have seen, self-restraint to Ferdinand in words which, in their very extravagance, show how deeply he regretted his own fault with his wife before marriage. I shall consider the whole passage when treating of Shakespeare's marriage as an incident in his life. Afterwards comes the masque, and the marvellous speech of Prospero, which touches the highest height of poetry:

"These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabric of this vision The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inhabit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made of; and our little life Is rounded with a sleep. Sir, I am vex'd; Bear with my weakness; my old brain is troubled: Be not disturb'd with my infirmity: If you be pleased, retire into my cell, And there repose: a turn or two I'll walk, To still my beating mind."

I have given the verses to the very end, for I find the insistence on his age and weakness (which are not in keeping with the character of a magician), a confession of Shakespeare himself: the words "beating mind" are extraordinarily characteristic, proving as they do that his thoughts and emotions were too strong for his frail body.

In the fifth act Shakespeare-Prospero shows himself to us at his noblest: he will forgive his enemies:

"Though with their high wrongs I am struck to the quick, Yet with my nobler reason 'gainst my fury Do I take part: the rarer action is In virtue than in vengeance: they being penitent, The sole drift of my purpose doth extend Not a frown further."

In "The Two Gentlemen of Verona" we saw how Shakespeare-Valentine forgave his faithless friend as soon as he repented: here is the same creed touched to nobler expression.

And then, with all his wishes satisfied, his heart's desire accomplished, Prospero is ready to set out for Milan again and home. We all expect some expression of joy from him, but this is what we get:

"And thence retire me to my Milan, where Every third thought shall be my grave."

The despair is wholly unexpected and out of place, as was the story of his weakness and infirmity, his "beating mind." It is evidently Shakespeare's own confession. After writing "The Tempest" he intends to retire to Stratford, where "every third thought shall be my grave."

I have purposely drawn special attention to Shakespeare's weakness and despair at this time, because the sad, rhymed Epilogue which has to be spoken by Prospero has been attributed to another hand by a good many scholars. It is manifestly Shakespeare's, out of Shakespeare's very heart indeed; though Mr. Israel Gollancz follows his leaders in saying that the "Epilogue to the play is evidently by some other hand than Shakespeare's": "evidently" is good. Here it is:

"Now my charms are all o'erthrown, And what strength I have's mine own, Which is most faint: now, 'tis true, I must be here confined by you, Or sent to Naples. Let me not Since I have my dukedom got, And pardon'd the deceiver, dwell In this bare island by your spell; But release me from my bands With the help of your good hands: Gentle breath of yours my sails Must fill, or else my project fails, Which was to please. Now I want, Spirits to enforce, art to enchant; And my ending is despair, Unless I be relieved by prayer, Which pierces so that it assaults Mercy itself, and frees all faults As you from crimes would pardon'd be Let your indulgence set me free."

From youth to age Shakespeare occupied himself with the deepest problems of human existence; again and again we find him trying to pierce the darkness that enshrouds life. Is there indeed nothing beyond the grave—nothing? Is the noble fabric of human thought, achievement and endeavour to fade into nothingness and pass away like the pageant of a dream? He will not cheat himself with unfounded hopes, nor delude himself into belief; he resigns himself with a sigh—it is the undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveller returns. But Shakespeare always believed in repentance and forgiveness, and now, world-weary, old and weak, he turns to prayer, [Footnote: Hamlet, too, after speaking with his father's ghost, cries: "I'll go pray."] prayer that—

"assaults Mercy itself and frees all faults."

Poor, broken Shakespeare! "My ending is despair": the sadness of it, and the pity, lie deeper than tears.

What a man! to produce a masterpiece in spite of such weakness. What a play is this "Tempest"! At length Shakespeare sees himself as he is, a monarch without a country; but master of a very "potent art," a great magician, with imagination as an attendant spirit, that can conjure up shipwrecks, or enslave enemies, or create lovers at will; and all his powers are used in gentle kindness. Ariel is a higher creation, more spiritual and charming than any other poet has ever attempted; and Caliban, the earth-born, half-beast, half-man—these are the poles of Shakespeare's genius.



CHAPTER XIV

SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE

Our long travail is almost at an end. We have watched Shakespeare painting himself at various periods of his life, and at full length in twenty dramas, as the gentle, sensuous poet-thinker. We have studied him when given over to wild passion in the sonnets and elsewhere, and to insane jealousy in "Othello"; we have seen him as Hamlet brooding on revenge and self-murder, and in "Lear," and "Timon" raging on the verge of madness, and in these ecstasies, when the soul is incapable of feigning, we have discovered his true nature as it differed from the ideal presentments which his vanity shaped and coloured. We have corrected his personal estimate by that "story of faults conceal'd" which Shakespeare himself referred to in sonnet 88. It only remains for me now to give a brief account of his life and the incidents of it to show that my reading of his character is borne out by the known facts, and thus put the man in his proper setting, so to speak.

On the other hand, our knowledge of Shakespeare's character will help us to reconstruct his life-story. What is known positively of his life could be given in a couple of pages; but there are traditions of him, tales about him, innumerable scraps of fact and fiction concerning him which are more or less interesting and authentic; and now that we know the man, we shall be able to accept or reject these reports with some degree of confidence, and so arrive at a credible picture of his life's journey, and the changes which Time wrought in him. In all I may say about him I shall keep close to the facts as given in his works. When tradition seems consonant with what Shakespeare has told us about himself, or with what Ben Jonson said of him, I shall use it with confidence.

Shakespeare was a common name in Warwickshire; other Shakespeares besides the poet's family were known there in the sixteenth century, and at least one other William Shakespeare in the neighbourhood of Stratford. The poet's father, John Shakespeare, was of farmer stock, and seems to have had an adventurous spirit: he left Snitterfield, his birthplace, as a young man, for the neighbouring town of Stratford, where he set up in business for himself. Aubrey says he was a butcher; he certainly dealt in meat, skins, and leather, as well as in corn, wool, and malt—an adaptable, quick man, who turned his hand to anything—a Jack-of-all-trades. He appears to have been successful at first, for in 1556, five years after coming to Stratford, he purchased two freehold tenements, one with a garden in Henley Street, and the other in Greenhill Street, with an orchard. In 1557 he was elected burgess, or town councillor, and shortly afterwards did the best stroke of business in his life by marrying Mary Arden, whose father had been a substantial farmer. Mary inherited the fee simple of Asbies, a house with some fifty acres of land at Wilmcote, and an interest in property at Snitterfield; the whole perhaps worth some L80 or L90, or, say, L600 of our money. His marriage turned John Shakespeare into a well-to-do citizen; he filled various offices in the borough, and in 1568 became a bailiff, the highest position in the corporation. During his year of office, we are told, he entertained two companies of actors at Stratford.

Mary Arden seems to have been her father's favourite child, and though she could not sign her own name, must have possessed rare qualities; for the poet, as we learn from "Coriolanus," held her in extraordinary esteem and affection, and mourned her after her death as "the noblest mother in the world."

William Shakespeare, the first son and third child of this couple, was born on the 22nd or 23rd April, 1564, no one knows which day; the Stratford parish registers prove that he was baptized on 26th April. And if the date of his birth is not known, neither is the place of it; his father owned two houses in Henley Street, and it is uncertain which he was born in.

John Shakespeare had, fortunately, nothing to pay for the education of his sons. They had free tuition at the Grammar School at Stratford. The poet went to school when he was seven or eight years of age, and received an ordinary education together with some grounding in Latin. He probably spent most of his time at first making stories out of the frescoes on the walls. There can be no doubt that he learned easily all he was taught, and still less doubt that he was not taught much. He mastered Lyly's "Latin Grammar," and was taken through some conversation books like the "Sententiae Pueriles," and not much further, for he puts Latin phrases in the mouth of the schoolmasters, Holofernes in "Love's Labour's Lost," and Hugh Evans in "The Merry Wives of Windsor," and all these phrases are taken word for word either from Lyly's Grammar or from the "Sententiae Pueriles." In "Titus Andronicus," too, one of Tamora's sons, on reading a Latin couplet, says it is a verse of Horace, but he "read it in the grammar," which was probably the author's case. Ben Jonson's sneer was well-founded, Shakespeare had "little Latine and lesse Greeke." His French, as shown in his "Henry V.," was anything but good, and his Italian was probably still slighter.

It was lucky for Shakespeare that his father's increasing poverty withdrew him from school early, and forced him into contact with life. Aubrey says that "when he was a boy he exercised his father's trade [of butcher]; but when he kill'd a calfe he would doe it in high style and make a speech." I daresay young Will flourished about with a knife and made romantic speeches; but I am pretty sure he never killed a calf. Killing a calf is not the easiest part of a butcher's business; nor a task which Shakespeare at any time would have selected. The tradition is simply sufficient to prove that the town folk had already noticed the eager, quick, spouting lad.

Of Shakespeare's life after he left school, say from thirteen to eighteen, we know almost nothing. He probably did odd jobs for his father from time to time; but his father's business seems to have run rapidly from bad to worse; for in 1586 a creditor informed the local Court that John Shakespeare had no goods on which distraint could be levied, and on 6th September of the same year he was deprived of his alderman's gown. During this period of steadily increasing poverty in the house it was only to be expected that young Will Shakespeare would run wild.

The tradition as given by Rowe says that he fell "into low company, and amongst them some that made a frequent practice of deer-stealing engaged him with them more than once in robbing the park of Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecot, near Stratford. For this he was prosecuted by that gentleman, as he then thought somewhat too severely, and in order to revenge that ill-usage he made a ballad upon him."

Another story has it that Sir Thomas Lucy got a lawyer from Warwick to prosecute the boys, and that Shakespeare stuck his satirical ballad to the park gates at Charlecot. The ballad is said to have been lost, but certain verses were preserved which fit the circumstances and suit Shakespeare's character so perfectly that I for one am content to accept them. I give the first and the last verses as most characteristic:

SONG

"A parliament member, a Justice of peace, At home a poor scarecrow, in London an asse, If Lowsie is lucy, as some volke miscalle it Then Lucy is lowsie, whatever befalle it. He thinks himself greate Yet an asse in his state, We allowe by his ears but with asses to mate. If Lucy is lowsie, as some volke miscalle it Sing lowsie Lucy whatever befalle it. * * * * * "If a juvenile frolick he cannot forgive, We'll sing lowsie Lucy as long as we live, And Lucy, the lowsie, a libel may calle it Sing lowsie Lucy whatever befalle it. He thinks himself greate Yet an asse in his state, We allowe by his ears but with asses to mate. If Lucy is lowsie, as some volke miscalle it Sing lowsie Lucy, Whatever befalle it."

The last verse, so out of keeping in its curious impartiality with the scurrilous refrain, appears to me to carry its own signature. There can be no doubt that the verses give us young Shakespeare's feelings in the matter. It was probably reading ballads and tales of "Merrie Sherwood" that first inclined him to deer-stealing; and we have already seen from his "Richard II." and "Henry IV." and "Henry V." that he had been led astray by low companions.

In his idle, high-spirited youth, Shakespeare did worse than break bounds and kill deer; he was at a loose end and up to all sorts of mischief. At eighteen he had already courted and won Anne Hathaway, a farmer's daughter of the neighbouring village of Shottery. Anne was nearly eight years older than he was. Her father had died a short time before and left Anne, his eldest daughter, L6 13s. 4d., or, say, L50 of our money. The house at Shottery, now shown as Anne Hathaway's cottage, once formed part of Richard Hathaway's farmhouse, and there, and in the neighbouring lanes, the lovers did their courting. The wooing on Shakespeare's side was nothing but pastime, though it led to marriage.

His marriage is perhaps the first serious mistake that Shakespeare made, and it certainly influenced his whole life. It is needful, therefore, to understand it as accurately as may be, however we may judge it. A man's life, like a great river, may be limpid-pure in the beginning, and when near its source; as it grows and gains strength it is inevitably sullied and stained with earth's soilure.

The ordinary apologists would have us believe that the marriage was happy; they know that Shakespeare was not married in Stratford, and, though a minor, his parents' consent to the marriage was not obtained; but they persist in talking about his love for his wife, and his wife's devoted affection for him. Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps, the bell-wether of the flock, has gone so far as to tell us how on the morning of the day he died "his wife, who had smoothed the pillow beneath his head for the last time, felt that her right hand was taken from her." Let us see if there is any foundation for this sentimental balderdash. Here are some of the facts.

In the Bishop of Worcester's register a licence was issued on 27th November, 1582, authorizing the marriage of William Shakespeare with Anne Whately, of Temple Grafton. On the very next day in the register of the same Bishop there is a deed, wherein Fulk Sandells and John Richardson, farmers of Shottery, bound themselves in the Bishop's court under a surety of L40 to free the Bishop of all liability should a lawful impediment—"by reason of any pre-contract or consanguinity"—be subsequently disclosed to imperil the validity of the marriage, then in contemplation, of William Shakespeare with Anne Hathaway.

Dryasdust, of course, argues that there is no connection whatever between these two events. He is able to persuade himself easily that the William Shakespeare who got a licence to marry Anne Whately, of Temple Grafton, on 27th November, 1582, is not the same William Shakespeare who is being forced to marry Anne Hathaway on the next day by two friends of Anne Hathaway's father. Yet such a coincidence as two William Shakespeares seeking to be married by special licence in the same court at the same moment of time is too extraordinary to be admitted. Besides, why should Sandells and Richardson bind themselves as sureties in L40 to free the Bishop of liability by reason of any pre-contract if there were no pre-contract? The two William Shakespeares are clearly one and the same person. Sandells was a supervisor of the will of Richard Hathaway, and was described in the will as "my trustie friende and neighbour." He showed himself a trusty friend of the usual sort to his friend's daughter, and when he heard that loose Will Shakespeare was attempting to marry Anne Whately, he forthwith went to the same Bishop's court which had granted the licence, pledged himself and his neighbour, Richardson, as sureties that there was no pre-contract, and so induced the Bishop, who no doubt then learned the unholy circumstances for the first time, to grant a licence in order that the marriage with Anne Hathaway could be celebrated, "with once asking of the bannes" and without the consent of the father of the bridegroom, which was usually required when the bridegroom was a minor.

Clearly Fulk Sandells was a masterful man; young Will Shakespeare was forced to give up Anne Whately, poor lass, and marry Anne Hathaway, much against his will. Like many another man, Shakespeare married at leisure, and repented in hot haste. Six months later a daughter was born to him, and was baptized in the name of Susanna at Stratford Parish Church on the 26th of May, 1583. There was, therefore, an importunate reason for the wedding, as Sandells, no doubt, made the Bishop understand.

The whole story, it seems to me, is in perfect consonance with Shakespeare's impulsive, sensual nature; is, indeed, an excellent illustration of it. Hot, impatient, idle Will got Anne Hathaway into trouble, was forced to marry her, and at once came to regret. Let us see how far these inferences from plain facts are borne out from his works.

The most important passages seem to have escaped critical scholarship. I have already said that the earliest works of Shakespeare, and the latest, are the most fruitful in details about his private life. In the earliest works he was compelled to use his own experience, having no observation of life to help him, and at the end of his life, having said almost everything he had to say, he again went back to his early experience for little vital facts to lend a colour to the fainter pictures of age. In "The Winter's Tale," a shepherd finds the child Perdita, who has been exposed; one would expect him to stumble on the child by chance and express surprise; but this shepherd of Shakespeare begins to talk in this way:

"I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting. Hark you now! Would any but these boiled brains of nineteen and two-and-twenty hunt this weather?"

Now this passage has nothing to do with the play, nor with the shepherd's occupation; nor is it at all characteristic of a shepherd boy. Between ten and three-and-twenty a poor shepherd boy is likely to be kept hard at work; he is not idle and at a loose end like young Shakespeare, free to rob the ancientry, steal, fight, and get wenches with child. That, in my opinion, is Shakespeare's own confession.

Of course, every one has noticed how Shakespeare again and again in his plays declares that a woman should take in marriage an "elder than herself," and that intimacy before marriage is productive of nothing but "barren hate and discord." In "Twelfth Night" he says: