From Chaucer to Tennyson
persons to construct a theory--and support it with some show of
reason--that the plays which pass under his name were really written by
Bacon or some one else. There is no danger of this paradox ever making
serious headway, for the historical evidence that Shakspere wrote
Shakspere's plays, though not overwhelming, is sufficient. But it is
startling to think that the greatest creative genius of his day, or
perhaps of all time, was suffered to slip out of life so quietly that
his title to his own works could even be questioned only two hundred and
fifty years after the event. That the single authorship of the Homeric
poems should be doubted is not so strange, for Homer is almost
prehistoric. But Shakspere was a modern Englishman, and at the time of
his death the first English colony in America was already nine years
old. The important known facts of his life can be told almost in a
sentence. He was born at Stratford-on-Avon in 1564, married when he was
eighteen, went to London probably in 1587, and became an actor, play
writer, and stockholder in the company which owned the Blackfriars and
the Globe theaters. He seemingly prospered, and retired about 1609 to
Stratford, where he lived in the house that he had bought some years
before, and where he died in 1616. His _Venus and Adonis_ was printed in
1593, his _Rape of Lucrece_ in 1594, and his _Sonnets_ in 1609. So far
as is known, only eighteen of the thirty-seven plays generally
attributed to Shakspere were printed during his life-time. These were
printed singly, in quarto shape, and were little more than stage books,
or librettos. The first collected edition of his works was the so-called
"First Folio" of 1623, published by his fellow-actors, Heming and
Condell. No contemporary of Shakspere thought it worth while to write a
life of the stage-player. There is a number of references to him in the
literature of the time; some generous, as in Ben Jonson's well-known
verses; others singularly unappreciative, like Webster's mention of "the
right happy and copious industry of Master Shakspere." But all these
together do not begin to amount to the sum of what was said about
Spenser, or Sidney, or Raleigh, or Ben Jonson. There is, indeed, nothing
to show that his contemporaries understood what a man they had among
them in the person of "Our English Terence, Mr. Will Shakespeare." The
age, for the rest, was not a self-conscious one, nor greatly given to
review writing and literary biography. Nor is there enough of
self-revelation in Shakspere's plays to aid the reader in forming a
notion of the man. He lost his identity completely in the characters of
his plays, as it is the duty of a dramatic writer to do. His sonnets
have been examined carefully in search of internal evidence as to his
character and life, but the speculations founded upon them have been
more ingenious than convincing.
Shakspere probably began by touching up old plays. _Henry VI_. and the
bloody tragedy of _Titus Andronicus_, if Shakspere's at all, are
doubtless only his revision of pieces already on the stage. The _Taming
of the Shrew_ seems to be an old play worked over by Shakspere and some
other dramatist, and traces of another hand are thought to be visible in
parts of _Henry VIII., Pericles_, and _Timon of Athens_. Such
partnerships were common among the Elizabethan dramatists, the most
illustrious example being the long association of Beaumont and Fletcher.
The plays in the First Folio were divided into histories, comedies, and
tragedies, and it will be convenient to notice them briefly in that
order.
It was a stirring time when the young adventurer came to London to try
his fortune. Elizabeth had finally thrown down the gage of battle to
Catholic Europe, by the execution of Mary Stuart, in 1587. The following
year saw the destruction of the colossal Armada, which Spain had sent to
revenge Mary's death; and hard upon these events followed the gallant
exploits of Grenville, Essex, and Raleigh.
That Shakspere shared the exultant patriotism of the times, and the
sense of their aloofness from the continent of Europe, which was now
born in the breasts of Englishmen, is evident from many a passage in his
plays.
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in a silver sea,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land,
England, bound in with the triumphant sea!
His English histories are ten in number. Of these _King John_ and _Henry
VIII._ are isolated plays. The others form a consecutive series, in the
following order: _Richard II._ the two parts of _Henry IV., Henry V.,_
the three parts of _Henry VI.,_ and _Richard III._ This series may be
divided into two, each forming a tetralogy, or group of four plays. In
the first the subject is the rise of the house of Lancaster. But the
power of the Red Rose was founded in usurpation. In the second group,
accordingly, comes the Nemesis, in the civil wars of the Roses, reaching
their catastrophe in the downfall of both Lancaster and York, and the
tyranny of Gloucester. The happy conclusion is finally reached in the
last play of the series, when this new usurper is overthrown in turn,
and Henry VII., the first Tudor sovereign, ascends the throne and
restores the Lancastrian inheritance, purified, by bloody atonement,
from the stain of Richard II.'s murder. These eight plays are, as it
were, the eight acts of one great drama; and, if such a thing were
possible, they should be represented on successive nights, like the
parts of a Greek trilogy. In order of composition the second group came
first. _Henry VI_. is strikingly inferior to the others. _Richard III_.
is a good acting play, and its popularity has been sustained by a series
of great tragedians, who have taken the part of the king. But, in a
literary sense, it is unequal to _Richard II.,_ or the two parts of
_Henry IV_. The latter is unquestionably Shakspere's greatest historical
tragedy, and it contains his master-creation in the region of low
comedy, the immortal Falstaff.
The constructive art with which Shakspere shaped history into drama is
well seen in comparing his _King John_ with the two plays on that
subject which were already on the stage. These, like all the other old
"Chronicle histories," such as _Thomas Lord Cromwell_ and the _Famous
Victories of Henry V._, follow a merely chronological, or biographical,
order, giving events loosely, as they occurred, without any unity of
effect, or any reference to their bearing on the catastrophe.
Shakspere's order was logical. He compressed and selected, disregarding
the fact of history oftentimes, in favor of the higher truth of fiction;
bringing together a crime and its punishment as cause and effect, even
though they had no such relation in the chronicle, and were separated,
perhaps, by many years.
Shakspere's first two comedies were experiments. _Love's Labour's Lost_
was a play of manners, with hardly any plot. It brought together a
number of _humors_, that is, oddities and affectations of various sorts,
and played them off on one another, as Ben Jonson afterward did in his
comedies of humor. Shakspere never returned to this type of play,
unless, perhaps, in the _Taming of the Shrew_. There the story turned on
a single "humor," Katharine's bad temper, just as the story in Jonson's
_Silent Woman_ turned on Morose's hatred of noise. The _Taming of the
Shrew_ is, therefore, one of the least Shaksperian of Shakspere's plays;
a _bourgeois_ domestic comedy, with a very narrow interest. It belongs
to the school of French comedy, like Moliere's _Malade Imaginaire_, not
to the romantic comedy of Shakspere and Fletcher.
The _Comedy of Errors_ was an experiment of an exactly opposite kind. It
was a play purely of incident; a farce, in which the main improbability
being granted, namely, that the twin Antipholi and twin Dromios are so
alike that they cannot be distinguished, all the amusing complications
follow naturally enough. There is little character-drawing in the play.
Any two pairs of twins, in the same predicament, would be equally droll.
The fun lies in the situation. This was a comedy of the Latin school,
and resembled the _Mennaechmi_ of Plautus. Shakspere never returned to
this type of play, though there is an element of "errors" in _Midsummer
Night's Dream_. In the _Two Gentlemen of Verona_ he finally hit upon
that species of romantic comedy which he may be said to have invented or
created out of the scattered materials at hand in the works of his
predecessors. In this play, as in the _Merchant of Venice, Midsummer
Night's Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, As You Like It, Twelfth Night,
Winter's Tale, All's Well that Ends Well, Measure for Measure_, and the
_Tempest_, the plan of construction is as follows. There is one main
intrigue carried out by the high comedy characters, and a secondary
intrigue, or underplot, by the low comedy characters. The former is by
no means purely comic, but admits the presentation of the noblest
motives, the strongest passions, and the most delicate graces of
romantic poetry. In some of the plays it has a prevailing lightness and
gayety, as in _As You Like It_ and _Twelfth Night_. In others, like
_Measure for Measure_, it is barely saved from becoming tragedy by the
happy close. Shylock certainly remains a tragic figure, even to the end,
and a play like _Winter's Tale_, in which the painful situation is
prolonged for years, is only technically a comedy. Such dramas, indeed,
were called, on many of the title-pages of the time, "tragi-comedies."
The low comedy interlude, on the other hand, was broadly comic. It was
cunningly interwoven with the texture of the play, sometimes loosely,
and by way of variety or relief, as in the episode of Touchstone and
Audrey, in _As You Like It_; sometimes closely, as in the case of
Dogberry and Verges, in _Much Ado about Nothing_, where the blundering
of the watch is made to bring about the denouement of the main action.
The _Merry Wives of Windsor_ is an exception to this plan of
construction. It is Shakspere's only play of contemporary, middle-class
English life, and, is written almost throughout in prose. It is his only
pure comedy, except the _Taming of the Shrew_.
Shakspere did not abandon comedy when writing tragedy, though he turned
it to a new account. The two species graded into one another. Thus
_Cymbeline_ is, in its fortunate ending, really as much of a comedy as
_Winter's Tale_--to which its plot bears a resemblance--and is only
technically a tragedy because it contains a violent death. In some of
the tragedies, as in _Macbeth_ and _Julius Caesar_, the comedy element is
reduced to a minimum. But in others, as _Romeo and Juliet_, and
_Hamlet_, it heightens the tragic feeling by the irony of contrast. Akin
to this is the use to which Shakspere put the old Vice, or Clown, of the
moralities. The Fool in Lear, Touchstone in _As You Like It_, and
Thersites in _Troilus and Cressida_, are a sort of parody of the
function of the Greek chorus, commenting the action of the drama with
scraps of bitter, or half-crazy, philosophy, and wonderful gleams of
insight into the depths of man's nature.
The earliest of Shakspere's tragedies, unless _Titus Andronicus_ be his,
was, doubtless, _Romeo and Juliet_, which is full of the passion and
poetry of youth and of first love. It contains a large proportion of
riming lines, which is usually a sign in Shakspere of early work. He
dropped rime more and more in his later plays, and his blank verse grew
freer and more varied in its pauses and the number of its feet. _Romeo
and Juliet_ is also unique, among his tragedies, in this respect, that
the catastrophe is brought about by a fatality, as in the Greek drama.