Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth
speech of Aeneas contains lines which are unquestionably grand and free
from any suspicion of bombast, and others which, though not free from
that suspicion, are nevertheless highly poetic. To the first class
certainly belongs the passage beginning, 'But as we often see.' To the
second belongs the description of Pyrrhus, covered with blood that was
Baked and impasted with the parching streets,
That lend a tyrannous and damned light
To their lord's murder;
and again the picture of Pyrrhus standing like a tyrant in a picture,
with his uplifted arm arrested in act to strike by the crash of the
falling towers of Ilium. It is surely impossible to say that these lines
are _merely_ absurd and not in the least grand; and with them I should
join the passage about Fortune's wheel, and the concluding lines.
But how can the insertion of these passages possibly be explained on the
hypothesis that Shakespeare meant the speech to be ridiculous?
3. 'Still,' it may be answered, 'Shakespeare _must_ have been conscious
of the bombast in some of these passages. How could he help seeing it?
And, if he saw it, he cannot have meant seriously to praise the speech.'
But why must he have seen it? Did Marlowe know when he wrote
bombastically? Or Marston? Or Heywood? Does not Shakespeare elsewhere
write bombast? The truth is that the two defects of style in the speech
are the very defects we do find in his writings. When he wished to make
his style exceptionally high and passionate he always ran some risk of
bombast. And he was even more prone to the fault which in this speech
seems to me the more marked, a use of metaphors which sound to our ears
'conceited' or grotesque. To me at any rate the metaphors in 'now is he
total gules' and 'mincing with his sword her husband's limbs' are more
disturbing than any of the bombast. But, as regards this second defect,
there are many places in Shakespeare worse than the speech of Aeneas;
and, as regards the first, though in his undoubtedly genuine works there
is no passage so faulty, there is also no passage of quite the same
species (for his narrative poems do not aim at epic grandeur), and there
are many passages where bombast of the same kind, though not of the same
degree, occurs.
Let the reader ask himself, for instance, how the following lines would
strike him if he came on them for the first time out of their context:
Whip me, ye devils,
From the possession of this heavenly sight!
Blow me about in winds! Roast me in sulphur!
Wash me in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire!
Are Pyrrhus's 'total gules' any worse than Duncan's 'silver skin laced
with his golden blood,' or so bad as the chamberlains' daggers
'unmannerly breech'd with gore'?[262] If 'to bathe in reeking wounds,'
and 'spongy officers,' and even 'alarum'd by his sentinel the wolf,
Whose howl's his watch,' and other such phrases in _Macbeth_, had
occurred in the speech of Aeneas, we should certainly have been told
that they were meant for burlesque. I open _Troilus and Cressida_
(because, like the speech of Aeneas, it has to do with the story of
Troy), and I read, in a perfectly serious context (IV. v. 6 f.):
Thou, trumpet, there's thy purse.
Now crack thy lungs, and split thy brazen pipe:
Blow, villain, till thy sphered bias cheek
Outswell the colic of puff'd Aquilon:
Come, stretch thy chest, and let thy eyes spout blood;
Thou blow'st for Hector.
'Splendid!' one cries. Yes, but if you are told it is also bombastic,
can you deny it? I read again (V. v. 7):
bastard Margarelon
Hath Doreus prisoner,
And stands colossus-wise, waving his beam,
Upon the pashed corses of the kings.
Or, to turn to earlier but still undoubted works, Shakespeare wrote in
_Romeo and Juliet_,
here will I remain
With worms that are thy chamber-maids;
and in _King John_,
And pick strong matter of revolt and wrath
Out of the bloody finger-ends of John;
and in _Lucrece_,
And, bubbling from her breast, it doth divide
In two slow rivers, that the crimson blood
Circles her body in on every side,
Who, like a late-sack'd island, vastly stood
Bare and unpeopled in this fearful flood.
Some of her blood still pure and red remain'd,
And some look'd black, and that false Tarquin stain'd.
Is it so very unlikely that the poet who wrote thus might, aiming at a
peculiarly heightened and passionate style, write the speech of Aeneas?
4. But, pursuing this line of argument, we must go further. There is
really scarcely one idea, and there is but little phraseology, in the
speech that cannot be paralleled from Shakespeare's own works. He merely
exaggerates a little here what he has done elsewhere. I will conclude
this Note by showing that this is so as regards almost all the passages
most objected to, as well as some others. (1) 'The Hyrcanian beast' is
Macbeth's 'Hyrcan tiger' (III. iv. 101), who also occurs in _3 Hen. VI._
I. iv. 155. (2) With 'total gules' Steevens compared _Timon_ IV. iii. 59
(an undoubtedly Shakespearean passage),
With man's blood paint the ground, gules, gules.
(3) With 'baked and impasted' cf. _John_ III. iii. 42, 'If that surly
spirit melancholy Had baked thy blood.' In the questionable _Tit. And._
V. ii. 201 we have, 'in that paste let their vile heads be baked' (a
paste made of blood and bones, _ib._ 188), and in the undoubted _Richard
II._ III. ii. 154 (quoted by Caldecott) Richard refers to the ground
Which serves as paste and cover to our bones.
(4) 'O'er-sized with coagulate gore' finds an exact parallel in the
'blood-siz'd field' of the _Two Noble Kinsmen_, I. i. 99, a scene which,
whether written by Shakespeare (as I fully believe) or by another poet,
was certainly written in all seriousness. (5) 'With eyes like
carbuncles' has been much ridiculed, but Milton (_P.L._ ix. 500) gives
'carbuncle eyes' to Satan turned into a serpent (Steevens), and why are
they more outrageous than ruby lips and cheeks (_J.C._ III. i. 260,
_Macb._ III. iv. 115, _Cym._ II. ii. 17)? (6) Priam falling with the
mere wind of Pyrrhus's sword is paralleled, not only in _Dido Queen of
Carthage_, but in _Tr. and Cr._ V. iii. 40 (Warburton). (7) With Pyrrhus
standing like a painted tyrant cf. _Macb._ V. viii. 25 (Delius). (8) The
forging of Mars's armour occurs again in _Tr. and Cr._ IV. v. 255, where
Hector swears by the forge that stithied Mars his helm, just as Hamlet
himself alludes to Vulcan's stithy (III. ii. 89). (9) The idea of
'strumpet Fortune' is common: _e.g._ _Macb._ I. ii. 15, 'Fortune ...
show'd like a rebel's whore.' (10) With the 'rant' about her wheel
Warburton compares _Ant. and Cl._ IV. xv. 43, where Cleopatra would
rail so high
That the false huswife Fortune break her wheel.
(11.) Pyrrhus minces with his sword Priam's limbs, and Timon (IV. iii.
122) bids Alcibiades 'mince' the babe without remorse.'[263]
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 259: It is impossible to tell whether Coleridge formed his
view independently, or adopted it from Schlegel. For there is no record
of his having expressed his opinion prior to the time of his reading
Schlegel's _Lectures_; and, whatever he said to the contrary, his
borrowings from Schlegel are demonstrable.]
[Footnote 260: Clark and Wright well compare Polonius' antithesis of
'rich, not gaudy': though I doubt if 'handsome' implies richness.]
[Footnote 261: Is it not possible that 'mobled queen,' to which Hamlet
seems to object, and which Polonius praises, is meant for an example of
the second fault of affected phraseology, from which the play was said
to be free, and an instance of which therefore surprises Hamlet?]
[Footnote 262: The extravagance of these phrases is doubtless
intentional (for Macbeth in using them is trying to act a part), but the
_absurdity_ of the second can hardly be so.]
[Footnote 263: Steevens observes that Heywood uses the phrase 'guled
with slaughter,' and I find in his _Iron Age_ various passages
indicating that he knew the speech of Aeneas (cf. p. 140 for another
sign that he knew _Hamlet_). The two parts of the _Iron Age_ were
published in 1632, but are said, in the preface to the Second, to have
'been long since writ.' I refer to the pages of vol. 3 of Pearson's
_Heywood_ (1874). (1) p. 329, Troilus 'lyeth imbak'd In his cold blood.'
(2) p. 341, of Achilles' armour:
_Vulcan_ that wrought it out of gadds of Steele
With his _Ciclopian_ hammers, never made
Such noise upon his Anvile forging it,
Than these my arm'd fists in _Ulisses_ wracke.
(3) p. 357, 'till _Hecub's_ reverent lockes Be gul'd in slaughter.' (4)
p. 357, '_Scamander_ plaines Ore-spread with intrailes bak'd in blood
and dust.' (5) p. 378, 'We'll rost them at the scorching flames of
_Troy_.' (6) p. 379, 'tragicke slaughter, clad in gules and sables'
(cf.'sable arms' in the speech in _Hamlet_). (7) p. 384, 'these lockes,
now knotted all, As bak't in blood.' Of these, all but (1) and (2) are
in Part II. Part I. has many passages which recall _Troilus and
Cressida_. Mr. Fleay's speculation as to its date will be found in his
_Chronicle History of the English Drama_, i. p. 285.
For the same writer's ingenious theory (which is of course incapable of
proof) regarding the relation of the player's speech in _Hamlet_ to
Marlowe and Nash's _Dido_, see Furness's Variorum _Hamlet_.]
NOTE G.
HAMLET'S APOLOGY TO LAERTES.
Johnson, in commenting on the passage (V. ii. 237-255), says: 'I wish
Hamlet had made some other defence; it is unsuitable to the character of
a good or a brave man to shelter himself in falsehood.' And Seymour
(according to Furness) thought the falsehood so ignoble that he rejected
lines 239-250 as an interpolation!
I wish first to remark that we are mistaken when we suppose that Hamlet
is here apologising specially for his behaviour to Laertes at Ophelia's
grave. We naturally suppose this because he has told Horatio that he is
sorry he 'forgot himself' on that occasion, and that he will court
Laertes' favours (V. ii. 75 ff.). But what he says in that very passage
shows that he is thinking chiefly of the greater wrong he has done
Laertes by depriving him of his father:
For, by the image of my cause, I see
The portraiture of his.
And it is also evident in the last words of the apology itself that he
is referring in it to the deaths of Polonius and Ophelia:
Sir, in this audience,
Let my disclaiming from a purposed evil
Free me so far in your most generous thoughts,
_That I have shot mine arrow o'er the house,
And hurt my brother._
But now, as to the falsehood. The charge is not to be set aside lightly;
and, for my part, I confess that, while rejecting of course Johnson's
notion that Shakespeare wanted to paint 'a good man,' I have momentarily
shared Johnson's wish that Hamlet had made 'some other defence' than
that of madness. But I think the wish proceeds from failure to imagine
the situation.
In the first place, _what_ other defence can we wish Hamlet to have
made? I can think of none. He cannot tell the truth. He cannot say to
Laertes, 'I meant to stab the King, not your father.' He cannot explain
why he was unkind to Ophelia. Even on the false supposition that he is
referring simply to his behaviour at the grave, he can hardly say, I
suppose, 'You ranted so abominably that you put me into a towering
passion.' _Whatever_ he said, it would have to be more or less untrue.
Next, what moral difference is there between feigning insanity and
asserting it? If we are to blame Hamlet for the second, why not equally
for the first?