Selected Literary Essays, page 12
And blind Authority beating with his staff
The child that might have led him,12
and the thing is done. We can all guess how the Elizabethans would have dealt with it. We should have begun, perhaps, with a flourish about authority in the abstract, old and sour as Saturn, but blind as Cupid; and then we should certainly have passed into a series of dissolving views in which we caught glimpses of authority at work—a man being ‘progged’ in one line, and a conversation with a dean in the next.
It will be understood, of course, that variation occurs to some extent in all poetry whatsoever. What is the Hebrew parallelism but a kind of variation? The synonyms in Anglo-Saxon are the same. But I think it is not likely to be disputed that the Elizabethan dramatists used it more extensively than any other family of poets. All poets use metaphors; all poets turn the abstract into the concrete; but if we want to see multiplication of metaphors about the same idea, and if we want to see concreteness given not by a single imaginative phrase but by multiplication of instances, then we naturally turn to Shakespeare and his neighbours. The faculty which enabled a man to practise such variation, which stocked his mind with images and which brought a riot of images tumbling over one another to greet every single idea was for the Elizabethans the essential faculty of the poet. They called it Wit. Middleton in his Changeling writes:
Love has an intellect that runs through all
The scrutinous sciences, and, like a cunning poet,
Catches a quantity of every knowledge,
Yet brings all home into one mystery.*
This may be taken simply as a description of that esemplastic power which is involved in all poetry. But it has a special meaning for the seventeenth century. Never were the scrutinous sciences and the quantities of every knowledge expected to lie quite so ready to the poet’s hand; never were poets so eager to bring them all home (if it were possible) on every occasion.
It is no part of my purpose to compare this kind of writing with others. Whether you prefer the poetry which deals chiefly in construction or that which deals chiefly in variation is largely a matter of temperament. Any sane man will want both. In Shirley you may see this style in the last stages of its decay; all its peculiar vices—for every method has its vices—are then painfully visible. But it is more interesting to consider what this practice of variation could do at its best. What were the kingdoms of poetry which it alone could conquer, and whose conquest made it so dangerously attractive to the weaker poets? To ask this is, of course, equivalent to asking what Shakespeare did with it.
If we lay aside all the bardolatrous nonsense of those who would have us believe that Shakespeare was God or Nature, and ask what, in a few words, was his distinctive contribution to poetry, I really do not know why we should be afraid of answering the question. The largest things ought to be the most easily seen. The law of gravity is perhaps simpler than the Law of Tort. It is the minor poets whose quality is really indefinable, because it is nearly nothing. Thus fortified I venture to submit that the mark of Shakespeare (and it is quite enough for one mortal man) is simply this: to have combined two species of excellence which are not, in a remarkable degree, combined by any other artist, namely the imaginative splendour of the highest type of lyric and the realistic presentation of human life and character. Pindar and Aeschylus and Keats are quite as good as he on one side; and Jane Austen, Meredith, and George Eliot can meet him on the other. But Jane Austen could not write stuff like the choruses in the Agamemnon, and Keats (judging by ‘Cap and Bells’) would have made a poor show among the Bennets and the Bingleys—(not such a very poor show, when you remember some of the passages in the letters). Now the possibility of combining two such diverse qualities depends precisely on the use of variation. The problem which Shakespeare solved, perhaps unconsciously, is a very difficult one. If the character speaks as living men speak, how are we to have in his language the revealing splendours of imagination? for real passion is not articulate. He must give his poetic metaphors the air of being thrown off accidentally as he gropes for expression in the very heat of dialogue. He must have a slight stammer in his thought, and his best things must not come at the first attempt. For on those rare occasions when real life finds the inevitable phrase, that is how it arises. The man fumbles and returns again and again to his theme, and hardly knows which of his words has really hit the mark. Listen to Hamlet:
O! that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew;
Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d
His canon ’gainst self-slaughter! O God! O God!
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world.
Fie on’t! O fie! ’tis an unweeded garden,
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely.13
The flesh resolving itself into a dew, and the unweeded garden are poetical metaphors that, taken alone, might seem to come from the heights of fully wrought lyric, expressing real experience but not as life expresses it. If Hamlet used either of them he would speak only as a poet. We should not believe that a man spoke thus. We shall believe them only if he seems to stumble upon them by accident, if they come, as it were, spat out amid a chaos of other grumbles as he chews over and over again the cud of the same bitter experience. That is how Shakespeare claims for naturalistic poetry—the poetry of the close up—all the rights of that other poetry which sees its figures at a mythical distance. See how he ballasts his imaginative phrases with mere exclamations—‘O God! O God!’ and ‘Fie on’t! O fie!’ A magnificent example of the same thing occurs in Macbeth:
Methought I heard a voice cry ‘Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murder sleep’, the innocent sleep,
Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care,
The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,
Chief nourisher in life’s feast.14
Here the metaphors are perhaps even more highly wrought than Hamlet’s. If Macbeth had said only ‘sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care’, he would have said one of the best things that have been said of sleep. But we should not have believed. It is art, not life, that selects from the mind’s chaos the one ‘predestined and elected phrase That had lain bound long nights and days Until it wore when once set free Immortal pellucidity’. It is the very fact that Macbeth will not leave it at that which carries conviction. Because he is not writing a poem but blurting out the agony of his mind he has no leisure to notice that he has said a good thing. The words come tumbling one after the other, and it is only we the spectators, who gather them up and see that almost every sentence has been a poem in itself. We conclude—and this goes to the root of the matter—that Macbeth was a great poet. It is only in Shakespeare’s plays that we call the characters, as well as the author, poets. No one describes Clytemnestra as a poet. The poetry belongs to Aeschylus. We know that a real Clytemnestra would not talk like that. It is the poet, quite legitimately, who puts into her mouth the language she would not, in real life, have used, and thereby enables us to see her character more luminously than real life would have allowed us to see it. But Shakespeare makes you believe that Othello and Macbeth really spoke as we hear them speak. Without sacrificing the splendour, he has kept the lower and more factual reality as well; it is the very marriage of the mimetic and the creative, and it can hardly be done except by variation.
It would be untrue, however, to say that Shakespeare always used variation to such good purpose. Very often, and specially in his earlier work, he uses it as a poetical ornament—to decorate, and not to render more real, the dramatic situation.
His rash fierce blaze of riot cannot last,
For violent fires soon burn out themselves;
Small showers last long, but sudden storms are short;
He tires betimes that spurs too fast betimes;
With eager feeding food doth choke the feeder:
Light vanity, insatiate cormorant,
Consuming means, soon preys upon itself.15
Here, the not very profound idea hardly requires such a wealth of illustration, and we hardly believe that it would have received it. The passage comes trippingly off the tongue: it is written, I think, for the mere fun of the thing. Such examples are frequent in the earlier plays, and it is in these passages that Shakespeare reminds us most strongly of Marlowe; Marlowe who of all others used variation with the minimum of dramatic purpose, and the maximum of musical and rhetorical effect.
Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight,
And burned is Apollo’s laurel bough.16
In Shakespeare the variations are either ornament, or else, as we have seen, a method of combining poetry and realism. In Shirley they are a recipe for poetry. I do not mean that he uses the figure more constantly than his predecessors; I mean that when he is not using it he has commonly no pretence of poetry. To mark a heightened moment, or to translate an abstract conception into something that looks like poetry, variation is his unfailing resource. When Shirley had jotted down what was to be covered in a given scene, the process of converting it into actual drama consisted either of those purely dramatic articulations in which he does not differ from the prose dramatist or in variation. Where there is poetry there is variation; where there is no variation there is no poetry. Consider the opening scene between Bornwell and his wife in The Lady of Pleasure. The theme can be stated in a few words. A husband rebukes his wife for extravagance and is obstinately answered. A real dramatist would have found in this matter as many pages as Shirley; but those pages would have been occupied by the development in dialogue of the emotional situation between the two characters. Every speech would have left them related to each other in a slightly new way. On the other hand, a pure poet, of the constructive type, would have given us in some few unforgettable words an image clearer than life of the essential quality of luxury and extravagance. We should have seen once and for all what prodigality in all its wasteful beauty means to the imagination. A single line might do it, such as Clytemnestra’s
’ Έστιν θάλασσα, τίς δέ νιν κατασβέσει;
Who shall quench all the purple of the sea?17
A writer who was both a poet and a dramatist would have given us both together. Every speech would have added a new quality to the relation of the speakers and at the same time would have done what Aeschylus does. Shirley’s method is different from either. On the strictly dramatic side he has nothing to say that could not have been said in six lines. ‘Why are you angry?’ asks Bornwell. ‘Because you stint me’, retorts the lady. ‘I don’t. On the contrary I allow you to spend far too much,’ says Bornwell. ‘Well, I still think you’re mean,’ says Lady Bornwell. That is the whole scene, as drama. What swells it to its 130 odd lines is pure variation on the theme ‘you spend too much’ put into the mouth of Bornwell. During this the dramatic situation stands still. ‘Have you done, Sir?’18 Lady Bornwell asks at the end of her husband’s first speech; at the end of his third she is still asking, ‘Have you concluded your lecture?’19 The angry husband and the scornful wife remain dramatically immobile and the play ceases to go forward while the waves of variation roll over the audience. In other words, what Shirley has here to say as a dramatist is extremely little; and to convert that little into something that should seem richer he has to call in variation. The variation consists, of course, simply of an endless string of examples of the lady’s extravagance—‘this Italian master and that Dutchman’, ‘superfluous plate’, ‘vanities of tires’, ‘petticoats and pearls’.20 There is no reason why any one image should stand where it does rather than elsewhere. There is no reason why the thing should stop where it does: you might just as well turn the tap off twenty lines sooner or twenty lines later. Nor does the beauty of the separate items recompense us (as it would in Marlowe) for their lack of definite tendency. The best that such writing can do is to give us a vague impression of an angry man who has a great deal to say; but it does this only by making him as tedious as he would be in real life. No method could be easier for the writer; any one who can scan a verse and has a memory well stored can produce such work ad libitum. And as if this were not enough the scene between Bornwell and his wife is followed almost immediately by the similar scene between Celestina and her steward.21 Here, once again, the theme is extravagance opposed to frugality; once again the dramatic development, such as it is, could be shown in a few lines; all the rest is variation. In the next act we have the arrival of Master Frederick and Lady Bornwell’s disgust at his scholarly lack of fashion. Here is a situation very recalcitrant to poetical treatment, but very tempting to a real comic dramatist. It would go admirably into a prose dialogue of short questions and replies. Everything ought to be on the move. We ought to see Lady Bornwell’s gradual discovery of her nephew’s character and opinions: the rift ought to widen at every speech, and at every speech the audience ought to perceive more exactly just what the rift is and how comically exasperating. Instead of this, Shirley lets Lady Bornwell grasp the whole truth, beyond hope or error, and express her horror, in the very first line, ‘Support me, I shall faint.’22 The suddenness of this is not without its comic effect; but it is dearly purchased at the price of the following scene, in which, dramatically speaking, there is nothing left to do. The chasm is filled up as usual by the handy rubble of variation. Lady Bornwell’s long speech is merely a string of variations on the theme ‘I wish he were French and fashionable instead of studious and parsonical’, which is itself only an unprogressive amplification of the opening words ‘I shall faint’. And Frederick replies:
Madam, with your pardon you have practised
Another dialect than was taught me when
I was commended to your care and breeding.
I understand not this; Latin or Greek
Are more familiar to my apprehension:
Logic was not so hard in my first lectures
As your strange language.23
The whole speech is variation; and even the theme which it varies, namely the theme ‘My ways are not your ways’ has already been given in the opening lines of the scene. Frederick’s speech merely restates the opposition between the two characters; it does not show us that opposition alive and growing; it adds new colours to it rhetorically, not dramatically. Shirley’s method is the precise opposite of the true comic method. Shirley gives us endless change of language and leaves us exactly where we were; Molière, on the other hand, can take the very same words—as he takes the misanthrope’s ‘Je ne dis pas cela’24 in his scene with the poet—and use them over and over again and yet, at each repetition, give them a new force. The repetition is part of the progression; it is not the same thing for the poet to be relentlessly shut up by the words ‘Je ne dis pas cela’ the first time as it is the second time. The funniness consists in his bobbing up irresistibly after each suppression, only to be suppressed again.* The identical phrase develops a new vis comica in each new context. If Shirley had been writing George Dandin he would have taken the theme ‘vous l’avez voulu’, variated it into thirty lines of creaking blank verse, put it into the mouth of the husband (probably as the opening speech of the play) and then, for the remaining five acts, would have turned round and round on the same spot like a dog that cannot make up its mind to lie down.
The dangers of variation have, perhaps, as much to do with the decay of the ‘Elizabethan’ theatre as any other internal cause, and its capabilities, as I have suggested, may be one of the principal conditions of Shakespeare’s peculiar greatness. I do not, however, believe that Shakespeare consciously selected the method as a means to that combination of the dramatic and the poetic in which its greatest potential virtue lies. His own early use of it is purely ornamental, and this suggests that he began by accepting it from tradition without much reflection. Its origins, so far as I know, have not been fully examined. I suppose them to lie in Medieval Latin literature of the rhetorical type. A new study of that literature with special reference to its influence on the vernacular poets of what is called the ‘Renaissance’, and a determined inquiry into the channels by which that influence reached them, would be a very useful work.
CHAPTER 7
HAMLET: THE PRINCE OR THE POEM?
A critic who makes no claim to be a true Shakespearian scholar and who has been honoured by an invitation to speak about Shakespeare to such an audience as this, feels rather like a child brought in at dessert to recite his piece before the grown-ups. I have a temptation to furbish up all my meagre Shakespearian scholarship and to plunge into some textual or chronological problem in the hope of seeming, for this one hour, more of an expert than I am. But it really wouldn’t do. I should not deceive you: I should not even deceive myself. I have therefore decided to bestow all my childishness upon you.
And first, a reassurance. I am not going to advance a new interpretation of the character of Hamlet. Where great critics have failed I could not hope to succeed; it is rather my ambition (a more moderate one, I trust) to understand their failure. The problem I want to consider today arises in fact not directly out of the Prince’s character nor even directly out of the play, but out of the state of criticism about the play.
To give anything like a full history of this criticism would be beyond my powers and beyond the scope of a lecture; but, for my present purpose, I think we can very roughly divide it into three main schools or tendencies. The first is that which maintains simply that the actions of Hamlet have not been given adequate motives and that the play is so far bad. Hanmer is perhaps the earliest exponent of this view. According to him Hamlet is made to procrastinate because ‘had [he] gone naturally to work . . . there would have been an End to our Play’.1 But then, as Hanmer points out, Shakespeare ought to have ‘contrived some good reason’2 for the procrastination. Johnson, while praising the tragedy for its ‘variety’, substantially agrees with Hanmer: ‘of the feigned madness of Hamlet there appears no adequate cause’.3 Rümelin thinks that the ‘wisdom’ which Shakespeare has chosen to hide under ‘the wild utterances of insanity’4 is a ‘foreign and disturbing element’ as a result of which the piece ‘presents the greatest discrepancies’.5 In our own time Mr Eliot has taken the same view: Hamlet is rather like a film on which two photographs have been taken—an unhappy superposition of Shakespeare’s work ‘upon much cruder material’.6 The play ‘is most certainly an artistic failure’.7 If this school of critics is right, we shall be wasting our time in attempting to understand why Hamlet delayed. The second school, on the other hand, thinks that he did not delay at all but went to work as quickly as the circumstances permitted. This was Ritson’s view. The word of a ghost, at second hand, ‘would scarcely, in the eye of the people, have justified his killing their king’. That is why he ‘counterfeits madness, and . . . puts . . . the usurpers guilt to the test of a play’.8 Klein, after a very fierce attack on critics who want to make the Prince of Denmark ‘a German half-professor, all tongue and no hand’, comes to the same conclusion.9 So does Werder,10 and so does MacDonald;11 and the position has been brilliantly defended in modern times. In the third school or group I include all those critics who admit that Hamlet procrastinates and who explain the procrastination by his psychology. Within this general agreement there are, no doubt, very great diversities. Some critics, such as Hallam,12 Sievers,13 Raleigh,14 and Clutton-Brock,15 trace the weakness to the shock inflicted upon Hamlet by the events which precede, and immediately follow, the opening of the play; others regard it as a more permanent condition; some extend it to actual insanity, others reduce it to an almost amiable flaw in a noble nature. This third group, which boasts the names of Richardson,16 Goethe,17 Coleridge,18 Schlegel,19 and Hazlitt,20 can still, I take it, claim to represent the central and, as it were, orthodox line of Hamlet criticism.
