Halleck's New English Literature · Chapter 44General Characteristics
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Sympathy.—-His most pronounced characteristic is the broadest sympathy ever shown by an author. He seems to have been able to sympathize with every kind of human soul in every emergency. He plays with the simple rustics in A Midsummer Night's Dream. The portrait of the serving man Adam, in As You Like It, is as kindly and as discriminating as that of king or nobleman. Though he is the scholar and philosopher in Hamlet, he can afterward roam the country with the tramp Autolycus in The Winter's Tale. Women have marveled at the ease with which his sympathy crosses the barriers of sex, at his portraits of Portia, Rosalind, Desdemona, Lady Macbeth, Miranda, Cleopatra, and Cordelia. Great actresses have testified to their amazement at his discovery of feminine secrets which they had thought no man could ever divine.
[Illustration: HENRY IRVING AS HAMLET.]
Universality.—Shakespeare's sympathy might have been broad enough to include all the people of his own time and their peculiar interests, but might have lacked the power to project itself into the universal heart of humanity. Sometimes a writer voices the ideals and aspirations of his own day so effectively that he is called the spokesman of his age, but he makes slight appeal to future generations. Shakespeare was the spokesman of his own time, but he had the genius also to speak to all ages. He loved to present the eternal truths of the human heart and to invest them with such a touch of nature as to reveal the kinship of the entire world.
His contemporary, the dramatist, Ben Jonson, had the penetration to say of Shakespeare:—
"He was not of an age but for all time."
He meant that Shakespeare does not exhibit some popular conceit, folly, or phase of thought, which is merely the fashion of the hour and for which succeeding generations would care nothing; but that he voices those truths which appeal to the people of all ages. The grief of Lear over the dead Cordelia, the ambition of Lady Macbeth, the loves of Rosalind and Juliet, the questionings of Hamlet, interest us as much today as they did the Elizabethans. Fashions in literature may come and go, but Shakespeare's work remains.
[Illustration: ELLEN TERRY AS LADY MACBETH. From the painting by Sargent.]
Humor.—Shakespeare had the most comprehensive sense of humor of any of the world's great writers,—a humor that was closely related to his sympathy. It has been said that he saved his tragedies from the fatal disease of absurdity, by inoculating them with his comic virus, and that his sense of humor kept him from ever becoming shrill. This faculty enabled him to detect incongruity, to keep from overstressing a situation, to enter into the personality of others, to recover quickly from "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune," and in one of his last plays, The Tempest, to welcome the "brave young world" as if he would like to play the game of life again. It was largely because of his humor that the tragedies and pain of life did not sour and subdue Shakespeare.
He soon wearies of a vacant laugh. He has only one strictly farcical play, The Comedy of Errors. There are few intellects keen enough to extract all the humor from Shakespeare. For literal minds the full comprehension of even a slight display of his humor, such as the following dialogue affords, is better exercise than the solution of an algebraic problem. Dogberry, a constable in Much Ado About Nothing, thus instructs the Watch:—
"Dogberry. You shall comprehend all vagrom men; you are to bid any man stand in the prince's name.
"Watch. How if a' will not stand?
"Dogberry. Why, then, take no note of him, but let him go, and presently call the rest of the watch together, and thank God you are rid of a knave."
Of all Shakespeare's qualities, his humor is the hardest to describe because of its protean forms. Falstaff is his greatest humorous creation. So resourceful is he that even defeat enables him to rise like Antaeus after a fall. His humor is almost a philosophy of existence for those who love to use wit and ingenuity in trying to evade the laws of sober, orderly living. Perhaps it was for this very reason that Shakespeare consented to send so early to "Arthur's bosom"[26] a character who had not a little of the complexity of Hamlet.
[Illustration: FALSTAFF AND HIS PAGE. From a drawing by B. Westmacott.]
Much of Shakespeare's humor is delicately suffused through his plays. Many of them either ripple with the laughter of his characters or are lighted with their smiles. We may pass pleasant hours in the company of his joyous creations, such as Rosalind in As You Like It, or Portia in The Merchant of Venice, or Puck as the spokesman for A Midsummer Night's Dream, who good naturedly exclaims:—
"Lord, what fools these mortals be!"
or Viola and her companions in Twelfth Night, or Beatrice and Benedict in Much Ado About Nothing, or Ariel in The Tempest playing pranks on the bewildered mariners and singing of the joys of life which come as a reward for service:—
"Merrily, merrily shall I live now Under the blossom that hangs on the bough."
Shakespeare is also the one English author who is equally successful in depicting the highest type of both comedy and tragedy. He has the power to describe even a deathbed scene so as to invest it with both humor and pathos. Dame Quickly's lines in Henry V., on the death of Falstaff, show this capacity.
The next greatest English writer is lacking in this sense of humor. John Milton could write the tragedies of a Paradise Lost and a Samson Agonistes, but he could not give us the humor of A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Comedy of Errors, or As You Like It. We have seen that the next greatest dramatic genius, Marlowe, has little sense of humor. Mrs. Browning correctly describes the plays of Shakespeare as filled—
"With tears and laughters for all time."
Moral Ideals.—To show the moral consequences of acts was the work which most appealed to him. Banquo voiced the comprehensiveness of moral law when he said, "In the great hand of God I stand." There is here great divergence between the views of Shakespeare and of Bacon. Dowden says:—
"While Bacon's sense of the presence of physical law in the universe was for his time extraordinarily developed, he seems practically to have acted upon the theory that the moral laws of the world are not inexorable, but rather by tactics and dexterity may be cleverly evaded. Their supremacy was acknowledged by Shakespeare in the minutest as well as in the greatest concerns of human life."
By employing "tactics" in sending Hamlet on a voyage to England, the king hoped to avoid the consequences of his crime. Macbeth in vain tried every stratagem to "trammel up the consequence." Goneril and Regan drive their white-haired father out into the storm; but even in King Lear, where the forces of evil seem to run riot, let us note the result:—
"Throughout that stupendous Third Act the good are seen growing better through suffering, and the bad worse through success. The warm castle is a room in hell, the storm-swept heath a sanctuary… The only real thing in the world is the soul with its courage, patience, devotion. And nothing outward can touch that."[27]
Shakespeare makes no pessimists. He shows how misfortune crowns life with new moral glory. We rise from the gloom of King Lear, feeling that we would rather be like Cordelia than like either of her sisters or any other selfish character who apparently triumphs until life's close. And yet Cordelia lost everything, her portion of her father's kingdom and her own life. When we realize that Shakespeare found one hundred and ten lines in King Lear sufficient not only to confer immortality on Cordelia, but also to make us all eager to pay homage to her, in spite of the fact that the ordinary standard of the world has not ceased to declare such a life a failure, we may the better understand that his greatest power consisted in revealing the moral victories possible for this rough-hewn human life.
Shakespeare made a mistake about the seacoast of Bohemia and the location of Milan with reference to the sea, but he was always sure of the relative position of right and wrong and of the ultimate failure of evil. In his greatest plays, for instance, in Macbeth, he sought to impress the incalculable danger of meddling with evil, the impossibility of forecasting the tragedy that might thereby result, the certainty that retribution would follow, either here or beyond "this bank and shoal of time."
Mastery of his Mother Tongue.—His wealth of expression is another striking characteristic. In a poem on Shakespeare, Ben Jonson wrote:—
"Thou had'st small Latin and less Greek."
Shakespeare is, however, the mightiest master of the English tongue. He uses 15,000 different words, while the second greatest writer in our language employs only 7000. A great novelist like Thackeray has a vocabulary of about 5000 words, while many uneducated laborers do not use over 600 words. The combinations that Shakespeare has made with these 15,000 words are far more striking than their mere number.
Variety of Style.—The style of Milton, Addison, Dr. Johnson, and Macaulay has some definite peculiarities, which can easily be classified. Shakespeare, on the contrary, in holding the mirror up to nature, has different styles for his sailors, soldiers, courtiers, kings, and shepherds,—for Juliet, the lover; for Mistress Quickly, the alewife; for Hamlet, the philosopher; and for Bottom, the weaver. To employ so many styles requires genius of a peculiar kind. In the case of most of us, our style would soon betray our individuality. When Dr. Samuel Johnson tried to write a drama, he made all his little fishes talk like whales, as Goldsmith wittily remarked.
In the same play Shakespeare's style varies from the dainty lyric touch of Ariel's song about the cowslip's bell and the blossoming bough, to a style unsurpassed for grandeur:—
"The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind."
In the same passage his note immediately changes to the soft vox humana of—
"We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep."
His Influence on Thought.—With the exception of the Scriptures, Shakespeare's dramas have surpassed all other works in molding modern English thought. If a person should master Shakespeare and the Bible, he would find most that is greatest in human thought, outside of the realm of science.
Even when we do not read him, we cannot escape the influence of others who have been swayed by him. For generations, certain modes of thought have crystallized about his phrases. We may instance such expressions as these: "Brevity is the soul of wit." "What's in a name?" "The wish was father to the thought." "The time is out of joint." "There's the rub." "There's a divinity that shapes our ends." "Comparisons are odorous." It would, perhaps, not be too much to say that the play of Hamlet has affected the thought of the majority of the English-speaking race. His grip on Anglo-Saxon thought has been increasing for more than three hundred years.
Shakespeare's influence on the thought of any individual has only two circumscribing factors,—the extent of Shakespearean study and the capacity of interpreting the facts of life. No intelligent person can study Shakespeare without becoming a deeper and more varied thinker, without securing a broader comprehension of human existence,—its struggles, failures, and successes. If we have before viewed humanity through a glass darkly, Shakespeare will gradually lead us where we can see face to face the beauty and the grandeur of the mystery of existence. His most valuable influence often consists in rendering his students sympathetic and in making them feel a sense of kinship with life. Shakespeare's readers more quickly realize that human nature shows the shaping touch of divinity. They have the rare joy of discovering the world anew and of exclaiming with Miranda:—
"How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in't!"[28]
When we have really become acquainted with Shakespeare, our lives will be less prosaic and restricted. After intimate companionship with him, there will be, in the words of Ariel, hardly any common thing in life—
"But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange."[29]