SHAKESPEARE IN RECENT YEARS

II. THE THemes of TrAGEDY

Any discussion of Shakespearean tragedy that contained no reference to the dramatist's humour would be blind, indeed, to the genius of the man. He is the one great master of Tragedy who at the same time is also a master of Humour and Comedy. He is the creator of Falstaff as well as of Hamlet; and what a difference in the two worlds! In this I think no figure in literature quite approaches him, unless, indeed, it be old Homer, who certainly has elements of both pity and laughter. But is it still believed generally, with Mr. Andrew Lang, that the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" can be strictly contemporaneous and works by one and the same mind? It is one reason why the name Homer stands alone in his lofty majesty as the representative of a great ancient civilization and art. Good "Maister Chaucer" united the same elements of humour and pathos in his dramatic Tales, and this is why Chaucer, in the annals of English poetry, in breadth of vision and insight, comes nearest to Shakespeare. The great Goethe conceived the scene in Auerbach's Keller, as well as the Temptation and Prison Scene in "Faust;" he transmuted folksongs and wrote the idyllic "Hermann and Dorothea" as well as the classic "Iphigeneia;" he produced the romantic "Sorrows of Werther" as well as the realistic "Elective Affinities" and the philosophical biography of "Wilhelm Meister" as well as the genial "Autobiography." We may not call Milton humorous, but he gave us the idyllic grace and charm of "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso," the lyric perfection of "Lycidas," and the ringing moral enthusiasm of the Sonnets to set over against the larger epic flights of "Paradise Lost." Byron, when he felt the immensity of nature, or pondered over "the glory that was Greece' and the grandeur that was Rome's," wrote a canto of "Childe Harold;"' when his errant mood altered to the flippant and cynical and farcical, he added another set of stanzas to "Don Juan," the greatest burlesque poem in our literature.

But if we name other English poets, we are too apt to be reminded of one dominant characteristic note alone, however resonant and stirring. We name Spenser, and we think of the poet of the "Faerie Queen" and the Marriage Hymns. We name Herrick, and we mean the sweets of paganism

.. of brooks, of blossoms, birds and bowers

Of April, May, of June and July flowers;

of may-poles, hock-carts, wassails, wakes,

Of bride-grooms, brides, and of their bridal cakes.

We name Dryden, and we think of the heroic couplet in satire and of the Odes for Music - wherein "he raised a mortal to the skies" and which almost lifted "Honest John" into a higher class. We name Pope, we think of the same heroic couplet brought to an even finer polish in Satires and Epistles. We name Burns, we think of the most natural lyrical poet of the race. We name Wordsworth, it is of the joy in nature, of the simple in life, of an effluence shed down from above on common things, of a high reflectiveness and a deep moral earnestness. We name Coleridge, it is of the witchery of the supernatural. We name Shelley, it is of "the longing of the moth for the star." We name Keats, it is that

Beauty is truth; truth, beauty- that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

To paraphrase Mr. Watts-Dunton: These with their one voice can sing one tune or in fortunate cases with one voice can sing many tunes. But when we name names like Homer and Shakespeare, “having, like the nightingale of Gongora, many voices, [they] seem to be able to sing all tunes."

The steady growth of Shakespeare's dramatic powers and poetic genius which lead up to the highest themes of tragedy is perhaps best seen just in the early plays, usually comedies.

In structure you observe how the early plays portray their characters in groups and by their external situation, and not by inward traits as later. In the "Comedy of Errors," for instance, there are two brothers and two Dromios, two sisters contrasted in disposition who mate with the two brothers, two parents separated and reunited. In "Love's Labour's Lost" the grouping

goes by threes: there is a king and three gentlemen together with a princess and three ladies, to fall in love with each other; three oddities the fantastical Spaniard, the pedagogue and the preacher and three lower representatives: Costard, Moth and Dull. In "Two Gentlemen of Verona" two gentlemen are contrasted, two ladies are crossed, and two suitors rejected. Chiefest of all, two clowns are differentiated: humorous Launce with his dog, and witty Speed with his verbal quips — the fathers of all Shakespeare's later clowns and fools.

And what clowns they are! Launcelot Gobbo - a distant relation and namesake of Launce's the blundering Dogberry, the philosophical Touchstone, the merry Feste, to the dear fool in "Lear" who went to bed at noon and didn't wake up because there was no longer need for him in the play. English and American humour have developed very differently and each has its own special national flavor, but in any discussion as to the English sense of humour, towards which we Americans are apt to be unfair because very different from our own, we may remember that English literature possesses Chaucer, Shakespeare, Swift, Fielding, Sterne, Goldsmith, Lamb, Jane Austen, Dickens, Thackeray-and in these qualities, too, Shakespeare and Chaucer easily lead.

In "Midsummer Night's Dream" three distinct threads are interwoven: those of the Court, the base and rude Mechanicals, and the Fairies. At Court there are again two pairs of lovers crossed and recrossed, which finds a contrasting echo in Titania's dream. The structure, with all its deftness, is still based upon balance and antithesis. The contemporary tragedy of youth, "Romeo and Juliet," has two factions, two gentlemen in pursuit of the same lady, two principal adherents, and the so-called "comic" figures, Mercutio and the Nurse-a companion each for the hero and the heroine.

But in none of these earliest plays is there any specially deep insight or keen portrayal of character. There is what you expect to find in the work of youth: sparkle, plays on words, witty repartee. However, in "Midsummer Night's Dream" a growing change is apparent. While still lacking in dramatic characterization, this play shows advance in the exercise of both poetic

fancy and imagination. The three threads are skillfully intertwined to make a perfect pattern. The play has a lyrical tone which produces an operatic effect. It is fanciful and is charmingly poetic in the interpretation of these fancies. It also contains Shakespeare's first conscious poetic creed:

The lunatic, the lover and the poet

Are of imagination all compact . . . .

The poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,

And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen

Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.

Yet with all its poetry - indeed, in its very enthusiasm for poetry and its luxuriance of fancy-"Midsummer Night's Dream" is still the comedy of a young man. The folk and fairy lore is delightful and convincing. We may not easily believe in the transformations of a "Comedy of Errors" at Ephesus, but we can believe those in "Midsummer Night's Dream" caused by the family quarrels of Oberon and Titania, King and Queen of Fairyland. The author of "Midsummer Night's Dream," even better than the playwright in "Peter Pan," so happily presented by Miss Maude Adams for two seasons in New York, might ask the audience: "Good people, do you believe in fairies?" Of course we do, imaginatively and poetically.

Not only is this play conscious poetry, but in "the play within the play"—"the most lamentable comedy of Pyramus and Thisbe"- the poet has something to say of his art as playwright. "Pyramus and Thisbe," at the absurdities of which we laugh so heartily, could not have been very different from the crude plays then and still presented by the English house-servants. We know that within the sound of the whirring trolley-car London mummers still give presentations of St. George and the Turkish Champion. Mr. Thomas Hardy has a vivid portrayal of such a play in the pages of one of his strongest novels, "The Return of the Native." And what marvels may we not still see in the amateur theatricals of small towns and schools! As for Bully Bottom, whose "chief humour is for a tyrant or a part to tear

a cat in, to make all split," and who has the ambition to play every part at once, he anticipates in genuine humour the universal genius of Falstaff, equal to all situations. In the "Pyramus and Thisbe" story itself, after making us laugh at its ludicrousness, Shakespeare seems to have said: "You laugh, do you? I shall take the same catastrophe of two lovers and make you thrill. The lover shall again think his lady dead, and shall do himself to death, and she discovering this shall die too at his side and this play I shall call not 'Pyramus and Thisbe' but 'Romeo and Juliet.''

In the "Merchant of Venice" Shakespeare has freed himself from the powerful influence, hitherto so marked, of his great predecessor, Marlowe. The subject was suggested by Marlowe's "Jew of Malta," but the difference in the portrayal is that between a monster and a human soul. The dramatist is getting away from the mere grouping of characters. He is growing both in poetic expression and in dramatic grasp, in insight and in interpretation of character. Shakespeare again took an old plot, perhaps an old play. He probably started out with the intention of making the Jew grotesque and ridiculous after the pattern of the cheater cheated, which was the common Elizabethan attitude toward one of the race. If so, the character outgrew the author's original intentions. Shakespeare's dramatic imagination is here at work, and far from remaining a comic figure, of which there are many suggestions, Shylock grows real under the dramatist's hands and is the psychological prototype of those stupendous later creations: Hamlet, Othello, Iago, Lear, Macbeth and Cleopatra. All these are conceived as great figures of tragedy; and Shylock, too, is really a creature of tragedy. Tragedy is here, as later, a spiritual conception. The poet's imagination ran away with him and the play assumes tragic proportions in the fourth act. We in turn have become wrought up and are not satisfied at Shylock's merely disappearing. We are only half-reconciled by the delicious music and moonlight of runaway Jessica in the fifth act of anticlimax. We are assured by Lorenzo:

The man that hath no music in himself

Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,