“AN OUTLINE SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE” published in the two volume work: Brief History of English and American Literature,Vol.1 by HENRY A. BEERS New York: Eaton & Mains, 1897. [The text of the section of this book on Shakespeare follows.] Of the life of William Shakspere,the greatest dramatic poet of the world, so little is known that it has been possible for ingenious 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 {109} America was already nineyears 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,playwriter, and stockholder in the company which owned the Blackfriars and the Globe Theaters. He seemingly prospered in his calling and retired about 1609 to Stratford-on-Avon, 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, the 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 are 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 {110} amongthem 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 Elisabethan 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. Elisabeth had finally thrown down the gage of battle to Catholic Europe, by the execution of Mary Stuart, in 1587. {111} Thefollowing 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 III._, 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 {112} VII., the firstTudor 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 {113} though they had no such relation in thechronicle, 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," Katherine'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 _Menaechmi_ of Plautus. Shakspere never returned to this type of {114} play, thoughthere 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_, _Winters 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 {115} Touchstoneand 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 _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 {116} Juliet_, which is full of thepassion 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. It was Shakspere's habit to work out his tragic conclusions from within, through character, rather than through external chances. This is true of all the great tragedies of his middle life, _Hamlet_, _Othello_, _Lear_, _Macbeth_, in every one of which the catastrophe is involved in the character and actions of the hero. This is so, in a special sense, in _Hamlet_, the subtlest of all Shakspere's plays, and if not his masterpiece, at any rate the one which has most attracted and puzzled the greatest minds. It is observable that in Shakspere's comedies there is no one central figure, but that, in passing into tragedy, he intensified and concentrated the attention upon a single character. This difference is seen, even in the naming of the plays; the tragedies always take their titles from their heroes, the comedies never. Somewhat later, probably, than the tragedies already mentioned, were the three Roman plays, _Julius Caesar_, _Coriolanus_, and _Antony and Cleopatra_. It is characteristic of Shakspere that he invented the plot of none of his plays, but took {117} material that he found athand. In these Roman tragedies, he followed Plutarch closely, and yet, even in so doing, gave, if possible, a greater evidence of real creative power than when he borrowed a mere outline of a story from some Italian novelist. It is most instructive to compare _Julius Caesar_ with Ben Jonson's _Catiline and Sejanus_. Jonson was careful not to go beyond his text. In _Catiline_ he translates almost literally the whole of Cicero's first oration against Catiline. Sejanus is a mosaic of passages, from Tacitus and Suetonius. There is none of this dead learning in Shakspere's play. Having grasped the conception of the characters of Brutus, Cassius, and Mark Anthony, as Plutarch gave them, he pushed them out into their consequences in every word and act, so independently of his original, and yet so harmoniously with it, that the reader knows that he is reading history, and needs no further warrant for it than Shakspere's own. _Timon of Athens_ is the least agreeable and most monotonous of Shakspere's undoubted tragedies, and _Troilus and Cressida_, said Coleridge, is the hardest to characterize. The figures of the old Homeric world fare but hardly under the glaring light of modern standards of morality which Shakspere turns upon them. Ajax becomes a stupid bully, Ulysses a crafty politician, and swift-footed Achilles a vain and sulky chief of faction. In losing their ideal remoteness, the heroes of the _Iliad_ lose their poetic quality, and the lover of Homer experiences an unpleasant disenchantment. {118} It was customary in the 18th century to speak of Shakspere as a rude though prodigious genius. Even Milton could describe him as "warbling his native wood-notes wild." But a truer criticism, beginning in England with Coleridge, has shown that he was also a profound artist. It is true that he wrote for his audiences, and that his art is not every-where and at all points perfect. But a great artist will contrive, as Shakspere did, to reconcile practical exigencies, like those of the public stage, with the finer requirements of his art. Strained interpretations have been put upon this or that item in Shakspere's plays; and yet it is generally true that some deeper reason can be assigned for his method in a given case than that "the audience liked puns," or, "the audience liked ghosts." Compare, for example, his delicate management of the supernatural with Marlowe's procedure in _Faustus_. Shakspere's age believed in witches, elves, and apparitions; and yet there is always something shadowy or allegorical in his use of such machinery. The ghost in _Hamlet_ is merely an embodied suspicion. Banquo's wraith, which is invisible to all but Macbeth, is the haunting of an evil conscience. The witches in the same play are but the promptings of ambition, thrown into a human shape, so as to become actors in the drama. In the same way, the fairies in _Midsummer Night's Dream_ are the personified caprices of the lovers, and they are unseen by the human characters, whose likes and dislikes they control, save in the instance where {119} Bottom is"translated" (that is, becomes mad) and has sight of the invisible world. So in the _Tempest_, Ariel is the spirit of the air and Caliban of the earth, ministering, with more or less of unwillingness, to man's necessities. Shakspere is the most universal of writers. He touches more men at more points than Homer, or Dante, or Goethe. The deepest wisdom, the sweetest poetry, the widest range of character, are combined in his plays. He made the English language an organ of expression unexcelled in the history of literature. Yet he is not an English poet simply, but a world-poet. Germany has made him her own, and the Latin races, though at first hindered in a true appreciation of him by the canons of classical taste, have at length learned to know him. An ever-growing mass of Shaksperian literature, in the way of comment and interpretation, critical, textual, historical, or illustrative, testifies to the durability and growth of his fame. Above all, his plays still keep, and probably always will keep, the stage. It is common to speak of Shakspere and the other Elisabethan dramatists as if they stood, in some sense, on a level. But in truth there is an almost measureless distance between him and all his contemporaries. The rest shared with him in the mighty influences of the age. Their plays are touched here and there with the power and splendor of which they were all joint heirs. But, as a whole, they are obsolete. They live in books, but not int he hearts and on the tongues of men. [This concludes the section of this book that deals with Shakespeare. --Mrs. Cox] ___________________________________________________________________ The etext above is a complete book presented in this format by Librarian Deborah Cox of Montgomery College Library in full compliance with the license provided by Project Gutenberg. For full details of this license, go to http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:The_Project_Gutenberg_License.
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