"Thou hands when he hears the culprit groan under the knife. art a villain!" cries Brabantio. "You are a senator!" answers Iago. But the feature which really completes him, and makes him take rank with Mephistopheles, is the atrocious truth and the cogent reasoning by which he likens his crime to virtue. 1 Cassio, under his advice, goes to see Desdemona, to obtain her intercession for him; this visit is to be the ruin of Desdemona and Cassio. Iago, left alone, hums for an instant quietly, then cries: "And what's he then that says I play the villain ? Probal to thinking and indeed the course 192 3 To all these features must be added a diabolical energy, an inexhaustible inventiveness in images, caricatures, obscenity, the manners of a guard-room, the brutal bearing and tastes of a trooper, habits of dissimulation, coolness, hatred, and patience, contracted amid the perils and devices of a military life, and the continuous miseries of long degradation and frustrated hope; you will understand how Shakespeare could transform abstract treachery into a concrete form, and how Iago's atrocious vengeance is only the natural consequence of his character, life, and training. VIII. How much more visible is this impassioned and unfettered . - genius of Shakespeare in the great characters which sustain the whole weight of the drama! The startling imagination, the furious velocity of the manifold and exuberant ideas, passion let loose, rushing upon death and crime, hallucinations, madness, all the ravages of delirium bursting through will and reason : such are the forces and ravings which engender them. Shall I speak of dazzling Cleopatra, who holds Antony in the whirlwind of her devices and caprices, who fascinates and kills, who scatters to the winds the lives of men as a handful of desert dust, the fatal Eastern sorceress who sports with love and death, impetuous, irresistible, child of air and fire, whose life is but a 1 See the like cynicism and scepticism in Richard III. Both begin by slandering human nature, and both are misanthropical of malice prepense. 2 Othello, il. 3. 8 See his conversation with Brabantio, then with Roderigo, Act i. tempest, whose thought, ever barbed and broken, is like the crackling of a lightning flash? Of Othello, who, beset by the graphic picture of physical adultery, cries at every word of Iago like a man on the rack; who, his nerves hardened by twenty years of war and shipwreck, grows mad and swoons for grief, and whose soul, poisoned by jealousy, is distracted and disorganized in convulsions and in stupor? Or of old King Lear, violent and weak, whose half-unseated reason is gradually toppled over under the shocks of incredible treacheries, who presents the frightful spectacle of madness, first increasing, then complete, of curses, howlings, superhuman sorrows, into which the transport of the first access of fury carries him, and then of peaceful incoherence, chattering imbecility, into which the shattered man subsides; a marvelous creation, the supreme effort of pure imagination, a disease of reason, which reason could never have conceived? 1 Amid so many portraitures let us choose two or three to indicate the depth and nature of them all. The critic is lost in Shakespeare, as in an immense town; he will describe a couple of monuments, and entreat the reader to imagine the city. Plutarch's Coriolanus is an austere, coldly haughty patrician, a general of the army. In Shakespeare's hands he becomes a coarse soldier, a man of the people as to his language and manners, an athlete of war, with a voice like a trumpet; whose eyes by contradiction are filled with a rush of blood and anger, proud and terrible in mood, a lion's soul in the body of a bull. The philosopher Plutarch told of him a lofty philosophic action, saying that he had been at pains to save his landlord in the sack of Corioli. Shakespeare's Coriolanus has indeed the same disposition, for he is really a good fellow; but when Lartius asks him the name of this poor Volscian, in order to secure his liberty, he yawns out: "By Jupiter! forgot. I am weary; yea, my memory is tired. Have we no wine here?" 2 He is hot, he has been fighting, he must drink; he leaves his Volscian in chains, and thinks no more of him. He fights like a porter, with shouts and insults, and the cries from that deep 1 See again, in Timon, and Hotspur more particularly, perfect examples of vehement and unreasoning imagination. 2 Coriolanus, i. 9. (( chest are heard above the din of the battle like the sounds from a brazen trumpet. He has scaled the walls of Corioli, he has butchered till he is gorged with slaughter. Instantly he turns to the army of Cominius, and arrives red with blood, as he were flay'd." "Come I too late?" Cominius begins to compliment him. "Come I too late?" he repeats. The battle is not yet finished: he embraces Cominius: "O! let me clip ye In arms as sound as when I woo'd, in heart For the battle is a real holiday to him. Such senses, such a strong frame, need the outcry, the din of battle, the excitement of death and wounds. This haughty and indomitable heart needs the joy of victory and destruction. Mark the display of his patrician arrogance and his soldier's bearing, when he is of fered the tenth of the spoils : "I thank you, general; But cannot make my heart consent to take The soldiers cry, Marcius! Marcius! and the trumpets sound. He gets into a passion: rates the brawlers: "No more, I say! For that I have not wash'd .. In acclamations hyperbolical; As if I loved my little should be dieted In praises sauced with lies." 3 They are reduced to loading him with honors: Cominius gives him a war-horse; decrees him the cognomen of Coriolanus; the people shout Caius Marcius Coriolanus! He replies: "I will go wash; And when my face is fair, you shall perceive Whether I blush or no: howbeit, I thank you. This loud voice, loud laughter, blunt acknowledgment, of a man who can act and shout better than speak, foretell the mode in which he will treat the plebeians. He loads them with insults; he cannot find abuse enough for the cobblers, tailors, envious cowards, down on their knees for a coin. "To beg of Hob and 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. 1 Coriolanus, i. 6. 2 Ibid. i. 9. Dick!" "Bid them wash their faces and keep their teeth clean." But he must beg, if he would be consul; his friends constrain him. It is then that the passionate soul, incapable of self-restraint, such as Shakespeare knew how to paint, breaks forth without hindrance. He is there in his candidate's gown, gnashing his teeth, and getting up his lesson in this style: "What must I say? 'I pray, sir'-Plague upon't! I cannot bring My tongue to such a pace:-'Look, sir, my wounds! I got them in my country's service, when Some certain of your brethren roar'd and ran The tribunes have no difficulty in stopping the election of a candidate who begs in this fashion. They taunt him in full senate, reproach him with his speech about the corn. He repeats it, with aggravations. Once roused, neither danger nor prayer re strains him: "His heart's his mouth: And, being angry, 'does forget that ever He rails against the people, the tribunes, ediles, flatterers of the plebs. "Come, enough," says his friend Menenius. "Enough, with over-measure," says Brutus the tribune. He retorts: "No, take more: The tribune cries, Treason! and bids seize him. He cries: "Hence, old goat! Hence, rotten thing! or I shall shake thy bones He strikes him, drives the mob off: he fancies himself amongst Volscians. “On fair ground I could beat forty of them!" And when his friends hurry him off, he threatens still, and "Speak(s) o' the people, As if you (he) were a god to punish, not Yet he bends before his mother, for he has recognized in her a 1 Coriolanus, ii. 3. 2 Ibid. iii. 1. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. soul as lofty and a courage as intractable as his own. He has submitted from his infancy to the ascendency of this pride which he admires. Volumnia reminds him: "My praises made thee first a soldier." Without power over himself, continually tossed on the fire of his too hot blood, he has always been the arm, she the thought. He obeys from involuntary respect, like a soldier before his general, but with what effort! "Coriolanus. The smiles of knaves Tent in my cheeks, and schoolboys' tears take up .. Cor. Pray, be content: Mother, I am going to the market-place; Chide me no more. I'll mountebank their loves, ... Cog their hearts from them, and come home beloved He goes, and his friends speak for him. asides, he appears to be submissive. nounce the accusation, and summon him to answer as a traitor: Except a few bitter Then the tribunes pro "Cor. How! traitor! Men. Nay, temperately: your promise. Cor. The fires i' the lowest hell fold-in the people! His friends surround him, entreat him: he will not listen; he foams at the mouth, he is like a wounded lion: 1 Coriolanus, iii. 2. "Let them pronounce the steep Tarpeian death, The people vote exile, supporting by their shouts the sentence of the tribune : |