Serv. O, I am slain! My lord, you have one eye left (Dies.) Corn. Lest it see more, prevent it. Out, vile jelly! Glou. All dark and comfortless. Where's my son? . . Such are the manners of that stage. They are unbridled, like those of the age, and like the poet's imagination. To copy the common actions of everyday life, the puerilities and feeblenesses to which the greatest continually sink, the outbursts of passion which degrade them, the indecent, harsh, or foul words, the atrocious deeds in which license revels, the brutality and ferocity of primitive nature, is the work of a free and unencumbered imagination. To copy this hideousness and these excesses with a selection of such familiar, significant, precise details, that they reveal under every word of every personage a complete civilization, is the work of a concentrated and all-powerful imagination. This species of manners and this energy of description indicate the same faculty, unique and excessive, which the style had already indicated. IV. On this common background stands out in striking relief a population of distinct living figures, illuminated by an intense light. This creative power is Shakespeare's great gift, and it communicates an extraordinary significance to his words. Every phrase pronounced by one of his characters enables us to see, besides the idea which it contains and the emotion which prompted it, the aggregate of the qualities and the entire character which produced it-the mood, physical attitude, bearing, look of the man, all instantaneously, with a clearness and force approached by no one. The words which strike our ears are not the thousandth part of those we hear within; they are like sparks thrown off here and there; the eyes catch rare flashes of flame; the mind alone perceives the vast conflagration of which they are the signs and the effect. He gives us two dramas in one: the first strange, convulsive, curtailed, visible; the other consistent, immense, invisible; the one covers the other so well, 1 King Lear, iii. 7. that as a rule we do not realize that we are perusing words: we hear the roll of those terrible voices, we see contracted features, glowing eyes, pallid faces; we see the agitation, the furious resolutions which mount to the brain with the feverish blood, and descend to the sharp-strung nerves. This property possessed by every phrase to exhibit a world of sentiments and forms, comes from the fact that the phrase is actually caused by a world of emotions and images. Shakespeare, when he wrote, felt all that we feel, and much besides. He had the prodigious faculty of seeing in a twinkling of the eye a complete character, body, mind, past and present, in every detail and every depth of his being, with the exact attitude and the expression of face, which the situation demanded. A word here and there of Hamlet or Othello would need for its explanation three pages of commentaries; each of the half-understood thoughts, which the commentator may have discovered, has left its trace in the turn of the phrase, in the nature of the metaphor, in the order of the words; nowadays, in pursuing these traces, we divine the thoughts. These innumerable traces have been impressed in a second, within the compass of a line. In the next line there are as many, impressed just as quickly, and in the same compass. You can gauge the concentration and the velocity of the imagination which creates thus. These characters are all of the same family. Good or bad, gross or delicate, witty or stupid, Shakespeare gives them all the same kind of spirit which is his own. He has made of them imaginative people, void of will and reason, impassioned machines, vehemently jostled one against another, who were outwardly whatever is most natural and most abandoned in human nature. Let us act the play to ourselves, and see in all its stages this clanship of figures, this prominence of portraits. Lowest of all are the stupid folk, babbling or brutish. Imagination already exists there, where reason is not yet born; it exists also there where reason is dead. The idiot and the brute blindly follow the phantoms which exist in their benumbed or mechanical brains. No poet has understood this mechanism like Shakespeare. His Caliban, for instance, a deformed savage, fed on roots, growls like a beast under the hand of Prospero, who has subdued him. He howls continually against his master, though he knows that every curse will be paid back with 66 cramps and aches." He is a chained wolf, trembling and fierce, who tries to bite when approached, and who crouches when he sees the lash raised. He has a foul sensuality, a loud base laugh, the gluttony of degraded humanity. He wishes to violate Miranda in her sleep. He cries for his food, and gorges himself when he gets it. A sailor who had landed in the island, Stephano, gives him wine; he kisses his feet, and takes him for a god; he asks if he has not dropped from heaven, and adores him. We find in him rebellious and baffled passions, which are eager to rise again and to be satiated. Stephano had beaten his comrade. Caliban cries, "Beat him enough: after a little time I'll beat him too." He prays Stephano to come with him and murder Prospero in his sleep; he thirsts to lead him there, dances through joy and sees his master already with his "weasand" cut, and his brains scattered on the earth: "Prithee, my king, be quiet. See'st thou here, This is the mouth o' the cell: no noise, and enter. Others, like Ajax and Cloten, are more like men, and yet it is pure mood that Shakespeare depicts in them, as in Caliban. The clogging corporeal machine, the mass of muscles, the thick blood sluggishly moving along in the veins of these fighting men, oppress the intelligence, and leave no life but for animal passions. Ajax uses his fists, and devours meat; that is his existence; if he is jealous of Achilles, it is pretty much as a bull is jealous of his fellow. He permits himself to be restrained and led by Ulysses, without looking before him: the grossest flattery decoys him. The Greeks have urged him to accept Hector's challenge. Behold him puffed up with pride, scorning to answer anyone, not knowing what he says or does. Thersites cries, "Goodmorrow, Ajax;" and he replies, "Thanks, Agamemnon." He has no further thought than to contemplate his enormous frame, and roll majestically his big stupid eyes. When the day of the fight has come, he strikes at Hector as on an anvil. After a good while they are separated. "I am not warm yet," says Ajax, "let us fight again."2 Cloten is less massive than this 1 The Tempest, iv. 1. 2 See Troilus and Cressida, ii. 3, the jesting manner in which the generals drive on this fierce brute. phlegmatic ox; but he is just as idiotic, just as vainglorious, just as coarse. The beautiful Imogen, urged by his insults and his scullion manners, tells him that his whole body is not worth as much as Posthumus' meanest garment. He is stung to the quick, repeats the word several times; he cannot shake off the idea, and runs at it again and again with his head down, like an angry ram: "Cloten. His garment?' Now, the devil— Imogen. To Dorothy my woman hie thee presently— • I'll be revenged: 'His meanest garment!' Well."1 You have abused me: 'His meanest garment!' He gets some of Posthumus' garments, and goes to Milford Haven, expecting to meet Imogen there. On his way he mutters thus: "With that suit upon my back, will I ravish her: first kill him, and in her eyes; there shall she see my valour, which will then be a torment to her contempt. He on the ground, my speech of insultment ended on his dead body, and when my lust has dined,-which, as I say, to vex her I will execute in the clothes that she so praised,-to the court I'll knock her back, foot her home again." 2 Others again, are but babblers: for example, Polonius, the grave brainless counselor; a great baby, not yet out of his "swathing clouts;" a solemn booby, who rains on men a shower of counsels, compliments, and maxims; a sort of court speaking-trumpet, useful in grand ceremonies, with the air of a thinker, but fit only to spout words. But the most complete of all these characters is that of the nurse in Romeo and Juliet, a gossip, loose in her talk, a regular kitchen oracle, smelling of the stew-pan and old boots, foolish, impudent, immoral, but otherwise a good creature, and affectionate to her nurse-child. Mark this disjointed and never-ending gossip's babble: "Nurse. 'Faith I can tell her age unto an hour. Lady Capulet. She's not fourteen. Nurse. Come Lammas-eve at night shall she be fourteen. Were of an age: well, Susan is with God; 1 Cymbeline, ii. 3. 2 Ibid. iii. 5. And she was wean'd,-I never shall forget it,- To see it tetchy and fall out with the dug! Shake, quoth the dove-house: 'twas no need, I trow, And since that time it is eleven years; For then she could stand alone; nay, by the rood, She could have run and waddled all about; Then she tells an indecent anecdote, which she begins over again four times. She is silenced: what then? She has her anecdote in her head, and cannot cease repeating it and laughing to herself. Endless repetitions are the mind's first step. The vulgar do not pursue the straight line of reasoning and of the story; they repeat their steps, as it were merely marking time: struck with an image, they keep it for an hour before their eyes, and are never tired of it. If they do advance, they turn aside to a hundred subordinate ideas before they get at the phrase required. They allow themselves to be diverted by all the thoughts which come across them. This is what the nurse does; and when she brings Juliet news of her lover, she torments and wearies her, less from a wish to tease than from a habit of wandering from the point: "Nurse. Jesu, what haste? can you not stay awhile? Do you not see that I am out of breath? Juliet. How art thou out of breath, when thou hast breath To say to me that thou art out of breath? Is thy news good, or bad? answer to that; N. Well, you have made a simple choice; you know not how to choose a man: Romeo! no, not he: though his face be better than any man's, yet his leg excels all men's; and for a hand and a foot, and a body, though they be not to be talked on, yet they are past compare: he is not the flower of courtesy, but, I'll warrant him, as gentle as a lamb. Go thy ways, wench; serve God. What, have you dined at home? 1 Romeo and Juliet, i. 3. |