A Dish of Orts : Chiefly Papers on the Imagination, and on Shakespeare

Here then we have the low beginnings of blank verse. It was nearly a hundred and twenty years before Milton took it up, and, while it served him well, glorified it; nor are we aware of any poem of worth written in that measure between. Here, of course, we speak of the epic form of the verse, which, as being uttered ore rotundo, is necessarily of considerable difference from the form it assumes in the drama.

Let us now glance for a moment at the forms of composition in use for dramatic purposes before blank verse came into favour with play-writers. The nature of the verse employed in the miracle-plays will be sufficiently seen from the short specimens already given. These plays were made up of carefully measured and varied lines, with correct and superabundant rhymes, and no marked lack of melody or rhythm. But as far as we have made acquaintance with the moral and other rhymed plays which followed, there was a great falling off in these respects. They are in great measure composed of long, irregular lines, with a kind of rhythmical progress rather than rhythm in them. They are exceedingly difficult to read musically, at least to one of our day. Here are a few verses of the sort, from the dramatic poem, rather than drama, called somewhat improperly “The Moral Play of God’s Promises,” by John Bale, who died the year before Shakspere was born. It is the first in Dodsley’s collection. The verses have some poetic merit. The rhythm will be allowed to be difficult at least. The verses are arranged in stanzas, of which we give two. In most plays the verses are arranged in rhyming couplets only.

 
  Pater Coelestis.
  I have with fearcenesse mankynde oft tymes corrected,
  And agayne, I have allured hym by swete promes.
  I have sent sore plages, when he hath me neglected,
  And then by and by, most comfortable swetnes.
  To wynne hym to grace, bothe mercye and ryghteousnes
  I have exercysed, yet wyll he not amende.
  Shall I now lose hym, or shall I him defende?
 
 
  In hys most myschefe, most hygh grace will I sende,
  To overcome hym by favoure, if it may be.
  With hys abusyons no longar wyll I contende,
  But now accomplysh my first wyll and decre.
  My worde beynge flesh, from hens shall set hym fre,
  Hym teachynge a waye of perfyght ryhteousnesse,
  That he shall not nede to perysh in hys weaknesse.
 

To our ears, at least, the older miracle-plays were greatly superior. It is interesting to find, however, in this apparently popular mode of “building the rhyme”—certainly not the lofty rhyme, for no such crumbling foundation could carry any height of superstructure—the elements of the most popular rhythm of the present day; a rhythm admitting of any number of syllables in the line, from four up to twelve, or even more, and demanding only that there shall be not more than four accented syllables in the line. A song written with any spirit in this measure has, other things not being quite equal, yet almost a certainty of becoming more popular than one written in any other measure. Most of Barry Cornwall’s and Mrs. Heman’s songs are written in it. Scott’s “Lay of the Last Minstrel,” Coleridge’s “Christabel,” Byron’s “Siege of Corinth,” Shelley’s “Sensitive Plant,” are examples of the rhythm. Spenser is the first who has made good use of it. One of the months in the “Shepherd’s Calendar” is composed in it. We quote a few lines from this poem, to show at once the kind we mean:—

 
  “No marvel, Thenot, if thou can bear
  Cheerfully the winter’s wrathful cheer;
  For age and winter accord full nigh;
  This chill, that cold; this crooked, that wry;
  And as the lowering weather looks down,
  So seemest thou like Good Friday to frown:
  But my flowering youth is foe to frost;
  My ship unwont in storms to be tost.”
 

We can trace it slightly in Sir Thomas Wyatt, and we think in others who preceded Spenser. There is no sign of it in Chaucer. But we judge it to be the essential rhythm of Anglo-Saxon poetry, which will quite harmonize with, if it cannot explain, the fact of its being the most popular measure still. Shakspere makes a little use of it in one, if not in more, of his plays, though it there partakes of the irregular character of that of the older plays which he is imitating. But we suspect the clowns of the authorship of some of the rhymes, “speaking more than was set down for them,” evidently no uncommon offence.

Prose was likewise in use for the drama at an early period.

But we must now regard the application of blank verse to the use of the drama. And in this part of our subject we owe most to the investigations of Mr. Collier, than whom no one has done more to merit our gratitude for such aids. It is universally acknowledged that “Ferrex and Porrex” was the first drama in blank verse. But it was never represented on the public stage. It was the joint production of Thomas Sackville, afterwards Lord Buckhurst and Earl of Dorset, and Thomas Norton, both gentlemen of the Inner Temple, by the members of which it was played before the Queen at Whitehall in 1561, three years before Shakspere was born. As to its merits, the impression left by it upon our minds is such that, although the verse is decent, and in some respects irreproachable, we think the time spent in reading it must be all but lost to any but those who must verify to themselves their literary profession; a profession which, like all other professions, involves a good deal of disagreeable duty. We spare our readers all quotation, there being no occasion to show what blank verse of the commonest description is. But we beg to be allowed to state that this drama by no means represents the poetic powers of Thomas Sackville. For although we cannot agree with Hallam’s general criticism, either for or against Sackville, and although we admire Spenser, we hope, as much as that writer could have admired him, we yet venture to say that not only may some of Sackville’s personifications “fairly be compared with some of the most poetical passages in Spenser,” but that there is in this kind in Sackville a strength and simplicity of representation which surpasses that of Spenser in passages in which the latter probably imitated the former. We refer to the allegorical personages in Sackville’s “Induction to the Mirrour of Magistrates,” and in Spenser’s description of the “House of Pride.”

Mr. Collier judges that the play in blank verse first represented on the public stage was the “Tamburlaine” of Christopher Marlowe, and that it was acted before 1587, at which date Shakspere would be twenty-three. This was followed by other and better plays by the same author. Although we cannot say much for the dramatic art of Marlowe, he has far surpassed every one that went before him in dramatic poetry. The passages that might worthily be quoted from Marlowe’s writings for the sake of their poetry are innumerable, notwithstanding that there are many others which occupy a border land between poetry and bombast, and are such that it is to us impossible to say to which class they rather belong. Of course it is easy for a critic to gain the credit of common-sense at the same time that he saves himself the trouble of doing what he too frequently shows himself incapable of doing to any good purpose—we mean thinking—by classing all such passages together as bombastical nonsense; but even in the matter of poetry and bombast, a wise reader will recognize that extremes so entirely meet, without being in the least identical, that they are capable of a sort of chemico-literary admixture, if not of combination. Goethe himself need not have been ashamed to have written one or two of the scenes in Marlowe’s “Faust;” not that we mean to imply that they in the least resemble Goethe’s handiwork. His verse is, for dramatic purposes, far inferior to Shakspere’s; but it was a great matter for Shakspere that Marlowe preceded him, and helped to prepare to his hand the tools and fashions he needed. The provision of blank verse for Shakspere’s use seems to us worthy of being called providential, even in a system in which we cannot believe that there is any chance. For as the stage itself is elevated a few feet above the ordinary level, because it is the scene of a representation, just so the speech of the drama, dealing not with unreal but with ideal persons, the fool being a worthy fool, and the villain a worthy villain, needs to be elevated some tones above that of ordinary life, which is generally flavoured with so much of the commonplace. Now the commonplace has no place at all in the drama of Shakspere, which fact at once elevates it above the tone of ordinary life. And so the mode of the speech must be elevated as well; therefore from prose into blank verse. If we go beyond this, we cease to be natural for the stage as well as life; and the result is that kind of composition well enough known in Shakspere’s time, which he ridicules in the recitations of the player in “Hamlet,” about Priam and Hecuba. We could show the very passages of the play-writer Nash which Shakspere imitates in these. To use another figure, Shakspere, in the same play, instructs the players “to hold, as ‘twere, the mirror up to nature.” Now every one must have felt that somehow there is a difference between the appearance of any object or group of objects immediately presented to the eye, and the appearance of the same object or objects in a mirror. Nature herself is not the same in the mirror held up to her. Everything changes sides in this representation; and the room which is an ordinary, well-known, homely room, gains something of the strange and poetic when regarded in the mirror over the fire. Now for this representation, for this mirror-reflection on the stage, blank verse is just the suitable glass to receive the silvering of the genius-mind behind it.

But if Shakspere had had to sit down and make his tools first, and then quarry his stone and fell his timber for the building of his house, instead of finding everything ready to his hand for dressing his stone already hewn, for sawing and carving the timber already in logs and planks beside him, no doubt his house would have been built; but can we with any reason suppose that it would have proved such “a lordly pleasure-house”? Not even Shakspere could do without his poor little brothers who preceded him, and, like the goblins and gnomes of the drama, got everything out of the bowels of the dark earth, ready for the master, whom it would have been a shame to see working in the gloom and the dust instead of in the open eye of the day. Nor is anything so helpful to the true development of power as the possibility of free action for as much of the power as is already operative. This room for free action was provided by blank verse.

Yet when Shakspere came first upon the scene of dramatic labour, he had to serve his private apprenticeship, to which the apprenticeship of the age in the drama, had led up. He had to act first of all. Driven to London and the drama by an irresistible impulse, when the choice of some profession was necessary to make him independent of his father, seeing he was himself, though very young, a married man, the first form in which the impulse to the drama would naturally show itself in him would be the desire to act; for the outside relations would first operate. As to the degree of merit he possessed as an actor we have but scanty means of judging; for afterwards, in his own plays, he never took the best characters, having written them for his friend Richard Burbage. Possibly the dramatic impulse was sufficiently appeased by the writing of the play, and he desired no further satisfaction from personal representation; although the amount of study spent upon the higher department of the art might have been more than sufficient to render him unrivalled as well in the presentation of his own conceptions. But the dramatic spring, having once broken the upper surface, would scoop out a deeper and deeper well for itself to play in, and the actor would soon begin to work upon the parts he had himself to study for presentation. It being found that he greatly bettered his own parts, those of others would be submitted to him, and at length whole plays committed to his revision, of which kind there may be several in the collection of his works. If the feather-end of his pen is just traceable in “Titus Andronicus,” the point of it is much more evident, and to as good purpose as Beaumont or Fletcher could have used his to, at the best, in “Pericles, Prince of Tyre.” Nor would it be long before he would submit one of his own plays for approbation; and then the whole of his dramatic career lies open before him, with every possible advantage for perfecting the work, for the undertaking of which he was better qualified by nature than probably any other man whosoever; for he knew everything about acting, practically—about the play-house and its capabilities, about stage necessities, about the personal endowments and individual qualifications of each of the company—so that, when he was writing a play, he could distribute the parts before they even appeared upon paper, and write for each actor with the very living form of the ideal person present “in his mind’s eye,” and often to his bodily sight; so that the actual came in aid of the ideal, as it always does if the ideal be genuine, and the loftiest conceptions proved the truest to visible nature.

This close relation of Shakspere to the actual leads us to a general and remarkable fact, which again will lead us back to Shakspere. All the great writers of Queen Elizabeth’s time were men of affairs; they were not literary men merely, in the general acceptation of the word at present. Hooker was a hard-working, sheep-keeping, cradle-rocking pastor of a country parish. Bacon’s legal duties were innumerable before he became Lord Keeper and Lord Chancellor. Raleigh was soldier, sailor, adventurer, courtier, politician, discoverer: indeed, it is to his imprisonment that we are indebted for much the most ambitious of his literary undertakings, “The History of the World,” a work which for simple majesty of subject and style is hardly to be surpassed in prose. Sidney, at the age of three-and-twenty, received the highest praise for the management of a secret embassy to the Emperor of Germany; took the deepest and most active interest in the political affairs of his country; would have sailed with Sir Francis Drake for South American discovery; and might probably have been king of poor Poland, if the queen had not been too selfish or wise to spare him. The whole of his literary productions was the work of his spare hours. Spenser himself, who was, except Shakspere, the most purely a literary man of them all, was at one time Secretary to the Lord Deputy of Ireland, and, later in life, Sheriff of Cork. Nor is the remark true only of the writers of Elizabeth’s period, or of the country of England.

It seems to us one of the greatest advantages that can befall a poet, to be drawn out of his study, and still more out of the chamber of imagery in his own thoughts, to behold and speculate upon the embodiment of Divine thoughts and purposes in men and their affairs around him. Now Shakspere had no public appointment, but he reaped all the advantage which such could have given him, and more, from the perfection of his dramatic position. It was not with making plays alone that he had to do; but, himself an actor, himself in a great measure the owner of more than one theatre, with a little realm far more difficult to rule than many a kingdom—a company, namely, of actors—although possibly less difficult from the fact that they were only men and boys; with the pecuniary affairs of the management likewise under his supervision—he must have found, in the relations and necessities of his own profession, not merely enough of the actual to keep him real in his representations, but almost sufficient opportunity for his one great study, that of mankind, independently of social and friendly relations, which in his case were of the widest and deepest.

But Shakspere had not business relations merely: he was a man of business. There is a common blunder manifested, both in theory on the one side, and in practice on the other, which the life of Shakspere sets full in the light. The theory is, that genius is a sort of abnormal development of the imagination, to the detriment and loss of the practical powers, and that a genius is therefore a kind of incapable, incompetent being, as far as worldly matters are concerned. The most complete refutation of this notion lies in the fact that the greatest genius the world has known was a successful man in common affairs. While his genius grew in strength, fervour, and executive power, his worldly condition rose as well; he became a man of importance in the eyes of his townspeople, by whom he would not have been honoured if he had not made money; and he purchased landed property in his native place with the results of his management of his theatres.

The practical blunder lies in the notion cherished occasionally by young people ambitious of literary distinction, that in the pursuit of such things they must be content with the poverty to which the world dooms its greatest men; accepting their very poverty as an additional proof of their own genius. If this means that the poet is not to make money his object, it means well: no man should. But if it means either that the world is unkind, or that the poet is not to “gather up the fragments, that nothing be lost,” it means ill. Shakspere did not make haste to be rich. He neither blamed, courted, nor neglected the world: he was friendly with it. He could not have pinched and scraped; but neither did he waste or neglect his worldly substance, which is God’s gift too. Many immense fortunes have been made, not by absolute dishonesty, but in ways to which a man of genius ought to be yet more ashamed than another to condescend; but it does not therefore follow that if a man of genius will do honest work he will not make a fair livelihood by it, which for all good results of intellect and heart is better than a great fortune. But then Shakspere began with doing what he could. He did not consent to starve until the world should recognize his genius, or grumble against the blindness of the nation in not seeing what it was impossible it should see before it was fairly set forth. He began at once to supply something which the world wanted; for it wants many an honest thing. He went on the stage and acted, and so gained power to reveal the genius which he possessed; and the world, in its possible measure, was not slow to recognize it. Many a young fellow who has entered life with the one ambition of being a poet, has failed because he did not perceive that it is better to be a man than to be a poet, that it is his first duty to get an honest living by doing some honest work that he can do, and for which there is a demand, although it may not be the most pleasant employment. Time would have shown whether he was meant to be a poet or not; and if he had been no poet he would have been no beggar; and if he had turned out a poet, it would have been partly in virtue of that experience of life and truth, gained in his case in the struggle for bread, without which, gained somehow, a man may be a sweet dreamer, but can be no strong maker, no poet. In a word, here is the Englishman of genius, beginning life with nothing, and dying, not rich, but easy and honoured; and this by doing what no one else could do, writing dramas in which the outward grandeur or beauty is but an exponent of the inward worth; hiding pearls for the wise even within the jewelled play of the variegated bubbles of fancy, which he blew while he wrought, for the innocent delight of his thoughtless brothers and sisters. Wherever the rainbow of Shakspere’s genius stands, there lies, indeed, at the foot of its glorious arch, a golden key, which will open the secret doors of truth, and admit the humble seeker into the presence of Wisdom, who, having cried in the streets in vain, sits at home and waits for him who will come to find her. And Shakspere had cakes and ale, although he was virtuous.

But what do we know about the character of Shakspere? How can we tell the inner life of a man who has uttered himself in dramas, in which of course it is impossible that he should ever speak in his own person? No doubt he may speak his own sentiments through the mouths of many of his persons; but how are we to know in what cases he does so?—At least we may assert, as a self-evident negative, that a passage treating of a wide question put into the mouth of a person despised and rebuked by the best characters in the play, is not likely to contain any cautiously formed and cherished opinion of the dramatist. At first sight this may seem almost a truism; but we have only to remind our readers that one of the passages oftenest quoted with admiration, and indeed separately printed and illuminated, is “The Seven Ages of Man,” a passage full of inhuman contempt for humanity and unbelief in its destiny, in which not one of the seven ages is allowed to pass over its poor sad stage without a sneer; and that this passage is given by Shakspere to the blasé sensualist Jaques in “As You Like it,” a man who, the good and wise Duke says, has been as vile as it is possible for man to be, so vile that it would be an additional sin in him to rebuke sin; a man who never was capable of seeing what is good in any man, and hates men’s vices because he hates themselves, seeing in them only the reflex of his own disgust. Shakspere knew better than to say that all the world is a stage, and all the men and women merely players. He had been a player himself, but only on the stage: Jaques had been a player where he ought to have been a true man. The whole of his account of human life is contradicted and exposed at once by the entrance, the very moment when he has finished his wicked burlesque, of Orlando, the young master, carrying Adam, the old servant, upon his back. The song that immediately follows, sings true: “Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly.” But between the all of Jaques and the most of the song, there is just the difference between earth and hell.—Of course, both from a literary and dramatic point of view, “The Seven Ages” is perfect.

Now let us make one positive statement to balance the other: that wherever we find, in the mouth of a noble character, not stock sentiments of stage virtue, but appreciation of a truth which it needs deep thought and experience united with love of truth, to discover or verify for one’s self, especially if the truth be of a sort which most men will fail not merely to recognize as a truth, but to understand at all, because the understanding of it depends on the foregoing spiritual perception—then we think we may receive the passage as an expression of the inner soul of the writer. He must have seen it before he could have said it; and to see such a truth is to love it; or rather, love of truth in the general must have preceded and enabled to the discovery of it. Such a passage is the speech of the Duke, opening the second act of the play just referred to, “As You Like it.” The lesson it contains is, that the well-being of a man cannot be secured except he partakes of the ills of life, “the penalty of Adam.” And it seems to us strange that the excellent editors of the Cambridge edition, now in the course of publication—a great boon to all students of Shakspere—should not have perceived that the original reading, that of the folios, is the right one,—

 
  “Here feel we not the penalty of Adam?”
 

which, with the point of interrogation supplied, furnishes the true meaning of the whole passage; namely, that the penalty of Adam is just what makes the “wood more free from peril than the envious court,” teaching each “not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think.”

But Shakspere, although everywhere felt, is nowhere seen in his plays. He is too true an artist to show his own face from behind the play of life with which he fills his stage. What we can find of him there we must find by regarding the whole, and allowing the spiritual essence of the whole to find its way to our brain, and thence to our heart. The student of Shakspere becomes imbued with the idea of his character. It exhales from his writings. And when we have found the main drift of any play—the grand rounding of the whole—then by that we may interpret individual passages. It is alone in their relation to the whole that we can do them full justice, and in their relation to the whole that we discover the mind of the master.

But we have another source of more direct enlightenment as to Shakspere himself. We only say more direct, not more certain or extended enlightenment. We have one collection of poems in which he speaks in his own person and of himself. Of course we refer to his sonnets. Though these occupy, with their presentation of himself, such a small relative space, they yet admirably round and complete, to our eyes, the circle of his individuality. In them and the plays the common saying—one of the truest—that extremes meet, is verified. No man is complete in whom there are no extremes, or in whom those extremes do not meet. Now the very individuality of Shakspere, judged by his dramas alone, has been declared nonexistent; while in the sonnets he manifests some of the deepest phases of a healthy self-consciousness. We do not intend to enter into the still unsettled question as to whether these sonnets were addressed to a man or a woman. We have scarcely a doubt left on the question ourselves, as will be seen from the argument we found on our conviction. We cannot say we feel much interest in the other question, If a man, what man? A few placed at the end, arranged as they have come down to us, are beyond doubt addressed to a woman. But the difference in tone between these and the others we think very remarkable. Possibly at the time they were written—most of them early in his life, as it appears to us, although they were not published till the year 1609, when he was forty-five years of age, Meres referring to them in the year 1598, eleven years before, as known “among his private friends”—he had not known such women as he knew afterwards, and hence the true devotion of his soul is given to a friend of his own sex. Gervinus, whose lectures on Shakspere, profound and lofty to a degree unattempted by any other interpreter, we are glad to find have been done into a suitable English translation, under the superintendence of the author himself—Gervinus says somewhere in them that, as Shakspere lived and wrote, his ideal of womanhood grew nobler and purer. Certainly the woman to whom the last few of these sonnets are addressed was neither noble nor pure. We think, in this matter at least, they record one of his early experiences.

We shall briefly indicate what we find in these sonnets about the man himself, and shall commence with what is least pleasing and of least value.

We must confess, then, that, probably soon after he came first to London, he, then a married man, had an intrigue with a married woman, of which there are indications that he was afterwards deeply ashamed. One little incident seems curiously traceable: that he had given her a set of tablets which his friend had given him; and the sonnet in which he excuses himself to his friend for having done so, seems to us the only piece of special pleading, and therefore ungenuine expression, in the whole. This friend, to whom the rest of the sonnets are addressed, made the acquaintance of this woman, and both were false to Shakspere. Even Shakspere could not keep the love of a worthless woman. So much the better for him; but it is a sad story at best. Yet even in this environment of evil we see the nobility of the man, and his real self. The sonnets in which he mourns his friend’s falsehood, forgives him, and even finds excuses for him, that he may not lose his own love of him, are, to our minds, amongst the most beautiful, as they are the most profound. Of these are the 33rd and 34th. Nor does he stop here, but proceeds in the following, the 35th, to comfort his friend in his grief for his offence, even accusing himself of offence in having made more excuse for his fault than the fault needed! But to leave this part of his history, which, as far as we know, stands alone, and yet cannot with truth be passed by, any more than the story of the crime of David, though in this case there is no comparison to be made between the two further than the primary fact, let us look at the one reality which, from a spiritual point of view, independently of the literary beauties of these poems, causes them to stand all but alone in literature. We mean what has been unavoidably touched upon already, the devotion of his friendship. We have said this makes the poems stand all but alone; for we ought to be better able to understand these poems of Shakspere, from the fact that in our day has appeared the only other poem which is like these, and which casts back a light upon them.

 
  “Yet turn thee to the doubtful shore,
    Where thy first form was made a man:
    I loved thee, spirit, and love; nor can
  The soul of Shakspeare love thee more.”
 

So sings the Poet of our day, in the loftiest of his poems—“In Memoriam”—addressing the spirit of his vanished friend. In the midst of his song arises the thought of the Poet of all time, who loved his friend too, and would have lost him in a way far worse than death, had not his love been too strong even for that death, alone ghastly, which threatened to cut the golden chain that bound them, and part them by the gulf impassable. Tennyson’s friend had never wronged him; and to the divineness of Shakspere’s love is added that of forgiveness. Such love as this between man and man is rare, and therefore to the mind which is in itself no way rare, incredible, because unintelligible. But though all the commonest things are very divine, yet divine individuality is and will be a rare thing at any given period on the earth. Faith, in its ideal sense, will always be hard to find on the earth. But perhaps this kind of affection between man and man may, as Coleridge indicates in his “Table Talk,” have been more common in the reigns of Elizabeth and James than it is now. There is a certain dread of the demonstrative in the present day, which may, perhaps, be carried into regions where it is out of place, and hinder the development of a devotion which must be real, and grand, and divine, if one man such as Shakspere or Tennyson has ever felt it. If one has felt it, humanity may claim it. And surely He who is the Son of man has verified the claim. We believe there are indeed few of us who know what to love our neighbour as ourselves means; but when we find a man here and there in the course of centuries who does, we may take this man as the prophet of coming good for his race, his prophecy being himself.