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 Shakespearean Tragedy:
Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth

By A. C. Bradley

Glasgow, Scotland:  Glasgow University Press, 1919. 

DEDICATION:  TO MY STUDENTS

PREFACE

These lectures are based on a selection from materials used in teaching
at Liverpool, Glasgow, and Oxford; and I have for the most part
preserved the lecture form. The point of view taken in them is explained
in the Introduction. I should, of course, wish them to be read in their
order, and a knowledge of the first two is assumed in the remainder; but
readers who may prefer to enter at once on the discussion of the several
plays can do so by beginning at page 89.

Any one who writes on Shakespeare must owe much to his predecessors.
Where I was conscious of a particular obligation, I have acknowledged
it; but most of my reading of Shakespearean criticism was done many
years ago, and I can only hope that I have not often reproduced as my
own what belongs to another.

Many of the Notes will be of interest only to scholars, who may find, I
hope, something new in them.

I have quoted, as a rule, from the Globe edition, and have referred
always to its numeration of acts, scenes, and lines.

_November, 1904._

       *       *       *       *       *

NOTE TO SECOND AND SUBSEQUENT IMPRESSIONS

In these impressions I have confined myself to making some formal
improvements, correcting indubitable mistakes, and indicating here and
there my desire to modify or develop at some future time statements
which seem to me doubtful or open to misunderstanding. The changes,
where it seemed desirable, are shown by the inclusion of sentences in
square brackets.

 

CONTENTS

                                                              PAGE
INTRODUCTION                                                    1

LECTURE I.

THE SUBSTANCE OF SHAKESPEAREAN TRAGEDY  5

LECTURE II.

CONSTRUCTION IN SHAKESPEARE'S TRAGEDIES 40

LECTURE III.

SHAKESPEARE'S TRAGIC PERIOD--HAMLET  79

LECTURE IV.

HAMLET                                                        129

LECTURE V.

OTHELLO                                                       175

LECTURE VI.

OTHELLO                                                       207

LECTURE VII.

KING LEAR                                                     243

LECTURE VIII.

KING LEAR                                                     280

LECTURE IX.

MACBETH                                                       331

LECTURE X.

MACBETH                                                       366

NOTE A. Events before the opening of the action in Hamlet    401

NOTE B. Where was Hamlet at the time of his father's death?  403

NOTE C. Hamlet's age                                                          407

NOTE D. 'My tables--meet it is I set it down'                         409

NOTE E. The Ghost in the cellarage                                      412

NOTE F. The Player's speech in _Hamlet_                            413

NOTE G. Hamlet's apology to Laertes                                   420

NOTE H. The exchange of rapiers                                         422

NOTE I. The duration of the action in Othello                         423
NOTE J. The 'additions' in the Folio text of Othello.\The
  Pontic sea                                                                            429

NOTE K. Othello's courtship                                                  432

NOTE L. Othello in the Temptation scene                               434

NOTE M. Questions as to _Othello_, IV. i.                             435

NOTE N. Two passages in the last scene of _Othello_            437

NOTE O. Othello on Desdemona's last words                         438

NOTE P. Did Emilia suspect Iago?                                         439

NOTE Q. Iago's suspicion regarding Cassio and Emilia           441

NOTE R. Reminiscences of _Othello_ in _King Lear_             441

NOTE S. _King Lear_ and _Timon of Athens_                       443

NOTE T. Did Shakespeare shorten _King Lear_?                    445

NOTE U. Movements of the _dramatis personæ_ in _King
  Lear_, II                                                                               448

NOTE V. Suspected interpolations in _King Lear_                  450

NOTE W. The staging of the scene of Lear's reunion with
  Cordelia                                                                            453

NOTE X. The Battle in _King Lear_                                    456

NOTE Y. Some difficult passages in _King Lear_                458

NOTE Z. Suspected interpolations in _Macbeth_                 466

NOTE AA. Has _Macbeth_ been abridged?                         467

NOTE BB. The date of _Macbeth_. Metrical Tests              470

NOTE CC. When was the murder of Duncan first plotted?   480

NOTE DD. Did Lady Macbeth really faint?                          484

NOTE EE. Duration of the action in _Macbeth_. Macbeth's age.
  'He has no children'                                                           486

NOTE FF. The Ghost of Banquo                                        492

INDEX                                                                               494

INTRODUCTION

In these lectures I propose to consider the four principal tragedies of
Shakespeare from a single point of view. Nothing will be said of
Shakespeare's place in the history either of English literature or of
the drama in general. No attempt will be made to compare him with other
writers. I shall leave untouched, or merely glanced at, questions
regarding his life and character, the development of his genius and art,
the genuineness, sources, texts, inter-relations of his various works.
Even what may be called, in a restricted sense, the 'poetry' of the four
tragedies--the beauties of style, diction, versification--I shall pass
by in silence. Our one object will be what, again in a restricted sense,
may be called dramatic appreciation; to increase our understanding and
enjoyment of these works as dramas; to learn to apprehend the action and
some of the personages of each with a somewhat greater truth and
intensity, so that they may assume in our imaginations a shape a little
less unlike the shape they wore in the imagination of their creator. For
this end all those studies that were mentioned just now, of literary
history and the like, are useful and even in various degrees necessary.
But an overt pursuit of them is not necessary here, nor is any one of
them so indispensable to our object as that close familiarity with the
plays, that native strength and justice of perception, and that habit of
reading with an eager mind, which make many an unscholarly lover of
Shakespeare a far better critic than many a Shakespeare scholar.

Such lovers read a play more or less as if they were actors who had to
study all the parts. They do not need, of course, to imagine whereabouts
the persons are to stand, or what gestures they ought to use; but they
want to realise fully and exactly the inner movements which produced
these words and no other, these deeds and no other, at each particular
moment. This, carried through a drama, is the right way to read the
dramatist Shakespeare; and the prime requisite here is therefore a vivid
and intent imagination. But this alone will hardly suffice. It is
necessary also, especially to a true conception of the whole, to
compare, to analyse, to dissect. And such readers often shrink from this
task, which seems to them prosaic or even a desecration. They
misunderstand, I believe. They would not shrink if they remembered two
things. In the first place, in this process of comparison and analysis,
it is not requisite, it is on the contrary ruinous, to set imagination
aside and to substitute some supposed 'cold reason'; and it is only want
of practice that makes the concurrent use of analysis and of poetic
perception difficult or irksome. And, in the second place, these
dissecting processes, though they are also imaginative, are still, and
are meant to be, nothing but means to an end. When they have finished
their work (it can only be finished for the time) they give place to the
end, which is that same imaginative reading or re-creation of the drama
from which they set out, but a reading now enriched by the products of
analysis, and therefore far more adequate and enjoyable.

This, at any rate, is the faith in the strength of which I venture, with
merely personal misgivings, on the path of analytic interpretation. And
so, before coming to the first of the four tragedies, I propose to
discuss some preliminary matters which concern them all. Though each is
individual through and through, they have, in a sense, one and the same
substance; for in all of them Shakespeare represents the tragic aspect
of life, the tragic fact. They have, again, up to a certain point, a
common form or structure. This substance and this structure, which would
be found to distinguish them, for example, from Greek tragedies, may, to
diminish repetition, be considered once for all; and in considering them
we shall also be able to observe characteristic differences among the
four plays. And to this may be added the little that it seems necessary
to premise on the position of these dramas in Shakespeare's literary
career.

Much that is said on our main preliminary subjects will naturally hold
good, within certain limits, of other dramas of Shakespeare beside
_Hamlet_, _Othello_, _King Lear_, and _Macbeth_. But it will often apply
to these other works only in part, and to some of them more fully than
to others. _Romeo and Juliet_, for instance, is a pure tragedy, but it
is an early work, and in some respects an immature one. _Richard III._
and _Richard II._, _Julius Caesar_, _Antony and Cleopatra_, and
_Coriolanus_ are tragic histories or historical tragedies, in which
Shakespeare acknowledged in practice a certain obligation to follow his
authority, even when that authority offered him an undramatic material.
Probably he himself would have met some criticisms to which these plays
are open by appealing to their historical character, and by denying that
such works are to be judged by the standard of pure tragedy. In any
case, most of these plays, perhaps all, do show, as a matter of fact,
considerable deviations from that standard; and, therefore, what is said
of the pure tragedies must be applied to them with qualifications which
I shall often take for granted without mention. There remain _Titus
Andronicus_ and _Timon of Athens_. The former I shall leave out of
account, because, even if Shakespeare wrote the whole of it, he did so
before he had either a style of his own or any characteristic tragic
conception. _Timon_ stands on a different footing. Parts of it are
unquestionably Shakespeare's, and they will be referred to in one of the
later lectures. But much of the writing is evidently not his, and as it
seems probable that the conception and construction of the whole tragedy
should also be attributed to some other writer, I shall omit this work
too from our preliminary discussions.

 

LECTURE I

THE SUBSTANCE OF SHAKESPEAREAN TRAGEDY

The question we are to consider in this lecture may be stated in a
variety of ways. We may put it thus: What is the substance of a
Shakespearean tragedy, taken in abstraction both from its form and from
the differences in point of substance between one tragedy and another?
Or thus: What is the nature of the tragic aspect of life as represented
by Shakespeare? What is the general fact shown now in this tragedy and
now in that? And we are putting the same question when we ask: What is
Shakespeare's tragic conception, or conception of tragedy?

These expressions, it should be observed, do not imply that Shakespeare
himself ever asked or answered such a question; that he set himself to
reflect on the tragic aspects of life, that he framed a tragic
conception, and still less that, like Aristotle or Corneille, he had a
theory of the kind of poetry called tragedy. These things are all
possible; how far any one of them is probable we need not discuss; but
none of them is presupposed by the question we are going to consider.
This question implies only that, as a matter of fact, Shakespeare in
writing tragedy did represent a certain aspect of life in a certain way,
and that through examination of his writings we ought to be able, to
some extent, to describe this aspect and way in terms addressed to the
understanding. Such a description, so far as it is true and adequate,
may, after these explanations, be called indifferently an account of the
substance of Shakespearean tragedy, or an account of Shakespeare's
conception of tragedy or view of the tragic fact.

Two further warnings may be required. In the first place, we must
remember that the tragic aspect of life is only one aspect. We cannot
arrive at Shakespeare's whole dramatic way of looking at the world from
his tragedies alone, as we can arrive at Milton's way of regarding
things, or at Wordsworth's or at Shelley's, by examining almost any one
of their important works. Speaking very broadly, one may say that these
poets at their best always look at things in one light; but _Hamlet_ and
_Henry IV._ and _Cymbeline_ reflect things from quite distinct
positions, and Shakespeare's whole dramatic view is not to be identified
with any one of these reflections. And, in the second place, I may
repeat that in these lectures, at any rate for the most part, we are to
be content with his _dramatic_ view, and are not to ask whether it
corresponded exactly with his opinions or creed outside his poetry--the
opinions or creed of the being whom we sometimes oddly call 'Shakespeare
the man.' It does not seem likely that outside his poetry he was a very
simple-minded Catholic or Protestant or Atheist, as some have
maintained; but we cannot be sure, as with those other poets we can,
that in his works he expressed his deepest and most cherished
convictions on ultimate questions, or even that he had any. And in his
dramatic conceptions there is enough to occupy us.

1

In approaching our subject it will be best, without attempting to
shorten the path by referring to famous theories of the drama, to start
directly from the facts, and to collect from them gradually an idea of
Shakespearean Tragedy. And first, to begin from the outside, such a
tragedy brings before us a considerable number of persons (many more
than the persons in a Greek play, unless the members of the Chorus are
reckoned among them); but it is pre-eminently the story of one person,
the 'hero,'[1] or at most of two, the 'hero' and 'heroine.' Moreover, it
is only in the love-tragedies, _Romeo and Juliet_ and _Antony and
Cleopatra_, that the heroine is as much the centre of the action as the
hero. The rest, including _Macbeth_, are single stars. So that, having
noticed the peculiarity of these two dramas, we may henceforth, for the
sake of brevity, ignore it, and may speak of the tragic story as being
concerned primarily with one person.

The story, next, leads up to, and includes, the _death_ of the hero. On
the one hand (whatever may be true of tragedy elsewhere), no play at the
end of which the hero remains alive is, in the full Shakespearean sense,
a tragedy; and we no longer class _Troilus and Cressida_ or _Cymbeline_
as such, as did the editors of the Folio. On the other hand, the story
depicts also the troubled part of the hero's life which precedes and
leads up to his death; and an instantaneous death occurring by
'accident' in the midst of prosperity would not suffice for it. It is,
in fact, essentially a tale of suffering and calamity conducting to
death.

The suffering and calamity are, moreover, exceptional. They befall a
conspicuous person. They are themselves of some striking kind. They are
also, as a rule, unexpected, and contrasted with previous happiness or
glory. A tale, for example, of a man slowly worn to death by disease,
poverty, little cares, sordid vices, petty persecutions, however piteous
or dreadful it might be, would not be tragic in the Shakespearean sense.

Such exceptional suffering and calamity, then, affecting the hero,
and--we must now add--generally extending far and wide beyond him, so as
to make the whole scene a scene of woe, are an essential ingredient in
tragedy and a chief source of the tragic emotions, and especially of
pity. But the proportions of this ingredient, and the direction taken by
tragic pity, will naturally vary greatly. Pity, for example, has a much
larger part in _King Lear_ than in _Macbeth_, and is directed in the one
case chiefly to the hero, in the other chiefly to minor characters.

Let us now pause for a moment on the ideas we have so far reached. They
would more than suffice to describe the whole tragic fact as it
presented itself to the mediaeval mind. To the mediaeval mind a tragedy
meant a narrative rather than a play, and its notion of the matter of
this narrative may readily be gathered from Dante or, still better, from
Chaucer. Chaucer's _Monk's Tale_ is a series of what he calls
'tragedies'; and this means in fact a series of tales _de Casibus
Illustrium Virorum_,--stories of the Falls of Illustrious Men, such as
Lucifer, Adam, Hercules and Nebuchadnezzar. And the Monk ends the tale
of Croesus thus:

     Anhanged was Cresus, the proudè kyng;
     His roial tronè myghte hym nat availle.
     Tragédie is noon oother maner thyng,
     Ne kan in syngyng criè ne biwaille
     But for that Fortune alwey wole assaile
     With unwar strook the regnès that been proude;
     For whan men trusteth hire, thanne wol she faille,
     And covere hire brighte facè with a clowde.

A total reverse of fortune, coming unawares upon a man who 'stood in
high degree,' happy and apparently secure,--such was the tragic fact to
the mediaeval mind. It appealed strongly to common human sympathy and
pity; it startled also another feeling, that of fear. It frightened men
and awed them. It made them feel that man is blind and helpless, the
plaything of an inscrutable power, called by the name of Fortune or some
other name,--a power which appears to smile on him for a little, and
then on a sudden strikes him down in his pride.

Shakespeare's idea of the tragic fact is larger than this idea and goes
beyond it; but it includes it, and it is worth while to observe the
identity of the two in a certain point which is often ignored. Tragedy
with Shakespeare is concerned always with persons of 'high degree';
often with kings or princes; if not, with leaders in the state like
Coriolanus, Brutus, Antony; at the least, as in _Romeo and Juliet_, with
members of great houses, whose quarrels are of public moment. There is a
decided difference here between _Othello_ and our three other tragedies,
but it is not a difference of kind. Othello himself is no mere private
person; he is the General of the Republic. At the beginning we see him
in the Council-Chamber of the Senate. The consciousness of his high
position never leaves him. At the end, when he is determined to live no
longer, he is as anxious as Hamlet not to be misjudged by the great
world, and his last speech begins,

     Soft you; a word or two before you go.
     I have done the state some service, and they know it.[2]

And this characteristic of Shakespeare's tragedies, though not the most
vital, is neither external nor unimportant. The saying that every
death-bed is the scene of the fifth act of a tragedy has its meaning,
but it would not be true if the word 'tragedy' bore its dramatic sense.
The pangs of despised love and the anguish of remorse, we say, are the
same in a peasant and a prince; but, not to insist that they cannot be
so when the prince is really a prince, the story of the prince, the
triumvir, or the general, has a greatness and dignity of its own. His
fate affects the welfare of a whole nation or empire; and when he falls
suddenly from the height of earthly greatness to the dust, his fall
produces a sense of contrast, of the powerlessness of man, and of the
omnipotence--perhaps the caprice--of Fortune or Fate, which no tale of
private life can possibly rival.

Such feelings are constantly evoked by Shakespeare's tragedies,--again
in varying degrees. Perhaps they are the very strongest of the emotions
awakened by the early tragedy of _Richard II._, where they receive a
concentrated expression in Richard's famous speech about the antic
Death, who sits in the hollow crown

     That rounds the mortal temples of a king,

grinning at his pomp, watching till his vanity and his fancied security
have wholly encased him round, and then coming and boring with a little
pin through his castle wall. And these feelings, though their
predominance is subdued in the mightiest tragedies, remain powerful
there. In the figure of the maddened Lear we see

     A sight most pitiful in the meanest wretch,
     Past speaking of in a king;

and if we would realise the truth in this matter we cannot do better
than compare with the effect of _King Lear_ the effect of Tourgénief's
parallel and remarkable tale of peasant life, _A King Lear of the
Steppes_.

2

A Shakespearean tragedy as so far considered may be called a story of
exceptional calamity leading to the death of a man in high estate. But
it is clearly much more than this, and we have now to regard it from
another side. No amount of calamity which merely befell a man,
descending from the clouds like lightning, or stealing from the darkness
like pestilence, could alone provide the substance of its story. Job was
the greatest of all the children of the east, and his afflictions were
well-nigh more than he could bear; but even if we imagined them wearing
him to death, that would not make his story tragic. Nor yet would it
become so, in the Shakespearean sense, if the fire, and the great wind
from the wilderness, and the torments of his flesh were conceived as
sent by a supernatural power, whether just or malignant. The calamities
of tragedy do not simply happen, nor are they sent; they proceed mainly
from actions, and those the actions of men.

We see a number of human beings placed in certain circumstances; and we
see, arising from the co-operation of their characters in these
circumstances, certain actions. These actions beget others, and these
others beget others again, until this series of inter-connected deeds
leads by an apparently inevitable sequence to a catastrophe. The effect
of such a series on imagination is to make us regard the sufferings
which accompany it, and the catastrophe in which it ends, not only or
chiefly as something which happens to the persons concerned, but equally
as something which is caused by them. This at least may be said of the
principal persons, and, among them, of the hero, who always contributes
in some measure to the disaster in which he perishes.

This second aspect of tragedy evidently differs greatly from the first.
Men, from this point of view, appear to us primarily as agents,
'themselves the authors of their proper woe'; and our fear and pity,
though they will not cease or diminish, will be modified accordingly. We
are now to consider this second aspect, remembering that it too is only
one aspect, and additional to the first, not a substitute for it.

The 'story' or 'action' of a Shakespearean tragedy does not consist, of
course, solely of human actions or deeds; but the deeds are the
predominant factor. And these deeds are, for the most part, actions in
the full sense of the word; not things done ''tween asleep and wake,'
but acts or omissions thoroughly expressive of the doer,--characteristic
deeds. The centre of the tragedy, therefore, may be said with equal
truth to lie in action issuing from character, or in character issuing
in action.

Shakespeare's main interest lay here. To say that it lay in _mere_
character, or was a psychological interest, would be a great mistake,
for he was dramatic to the tips of his fingers. It is possible to find
places where he has given a certain indulgence to his love of poetry,
and even to his turn for general reflections; but it would be very
difficult, and in his later tragedies perhaps impossible, to detect
passages where he has allowed such freedom to the interest in character
apart from action. But for the opposite extreme, for the abstraction of
mere 'plot' (which is a very different thing from the tragic 'action'),
for the kind of interest which predominates in a novel like _The Woman
in White_, it is clear that he cared even less. I do not mean that this
interest is absent from his dramas; but it is subordinate to others, and
is so interwoven with them that we are rarely conscious of it apart, and
rarely feel in any great strength the half-intellectual, half-nervous
excitement of following an ingenious complication. What we do feel
strongly, as a tragedy advances to its close, is that the calamities and
catastrophe follow inevitably from the deeds of men, and that the main
source of these deeds is character. The dictum that, with Shakespeare,
'character is destiny' is no doubt an exaggeration, and one that may
mislead (for many of his tragic personages, if they had not met with
peculiar circumstances, would have escaped a tragic end, and might even
have lived fairly untroubled lives); but it is the exaggeration of a
vital truth.

This truth, with some of its qualifications, will appear more clearly if
we now go on to ask what elements are to be found in the 'story' or
'action,' occasionally or frequently, beside the characteristic deeds,
and the sufferings and circumstances, of the persons. I will refer to
three of these additional factors.

(_a_) Shakespeare, occasionally and for reasons which need not be
discussed here, represents abnormal conditions of mind; insanity, for
example, somnambulism, hallucinations. And deeds issuing from these are
certainly not what we called deeds in the fullest sense, deeds
expressive of character. No; but these abnormal conditions are never
introduced as the origin of deeds of any dramatic moment. Lady Macbeth's
sleep-walking has no influence whatever on the events that follow it.
Macbeth did not murder Duncan because he saw a dagger in the air: he saw
the dagger because he was about to murder Duncan. Lear's insanity is not
the cause of a tragic conflict any more than Ophelia's; it is, like
Ophelia's, the result of a conflict; and in both cases the effect is
mainly pathetic. If Lear were really mad when he divided his kingdom, if
Hamlet were really mad at any time in the story, they would cease to be
tragic characters.

(_b_) Shakespeare also introduces the supernatural into some of his
tragedies; he introduces ghosts, and witches who have supernatural
knowledge. This supernatural element certainly cannot in most cases, if
in any, be explained away as an illusion in the mind of one of the
characters. And further, it does contribute to the action, and is in
more than one instance an indispensable part of it: so that to describe
human character, with circumstances, as always the _sole_ motive force
in this action would be a serious error. But the supernatural is always
placed in the closest relation with character. It gives a confirmation
and a distinct form to inward movements already present and exerting an
influence; to the sense of failure in Brutus, to the stifled workings of
conscience in Richard, to the half-formed thought or the horrified
memory of guilt in Macbeth, to suspicion in Hamlet. Moreover, its
influence is never of a compulsive kind. It forms no more than an
element, however important, in the problem which the hero has to face;
and we are never allowed to feel that it has removed his capacity or
responsibility for dealing with this problem. So far indeed are we from
feeling this, that many readers run to the opposite extreme, and openly
or privately regard the supernatural as having nothing to do with the
real interest of the play.

(_c_) Shakespeare, lastly, in most of his tragedies allows to 'chance'
or 'accident' an appreciable influence at some point in the action.
Chance or accident here will be found, I think, to mean any occurrence
(not supernatural, of course) which enters the dramatic sequence neither
from the agency of a character, nor from the obvious surrounding
circumstances.[3] It may be called an accident, in this sense, that
Romeo never got the Friar's message about the potion, and that Juliet
did not awake from her long sleep a minute sooner; an accident that
Edgar arrived at the prison just too late to save Cordelia's life; an
accident that Desdemona dropped her handkerchief at the most fatal of
moments; an accident that the pirate ship attacked Hamlet's ship, so
that he was able to return forthwith to Denmark. Now this operation of
accident is a fact, and a prominent fact, of human life. To exclude it
_wholly_ from tragedy, therefore, would be, we may say, to fail in
truth. And, besides, it is not merely a fact. That men may start a
course of events but can neither calculate nor control it, is a _tragic_
fact. The dramatist may use accident so as to make us feel this; and
there are also other dramatic uses to which it may be put. Shakespeare
accordingly admits it. On the other hand, any _large_ admission of
chance into the tragic sequence[4] would certainly weaken, and might
destroy, the sense of the causal connection of character, deed, and
catastrophe. And Shakespeare really uses it very sparingly. We seldom
find ourselves exclaiming, 'What an unlucky accident!' I believe most
readers would have to search painfully for instances. It is, further,
frequently easy to see the dramatic intention of an accident; and some
things which look like accidents have really a connection with
character, and are therefore not in the full sense accidents. Finally, I
believe it will be found that almost all the prominent accidents occur
when the action is well advanced and the impression of the causal
sequence is too firmly fixed to be impaired.

Thus it appears that these three elements in the 'action' are
subordinate, while the dominant factor consists in deeds which issue
from character. So that, by way of summary, we may now alter our first
statement, 'A tragedy is a story of exceptional calamity leading to the
death of a man in high estate,' and we may say instead (what in its turn
is one-sided, though less so), that the story is one of human actions
producing exceptional calamity and ending in the death of such a man.[5]

       *       *       *       *       *

Before we leave the 'action,' however, there is another question that
may usefully be asked. Can we define this 'action' further by describing
it as a conflict?

The frequent use of this idea in discussions on tragedy is ultimately
due, I suppose, to the influence of Hegel's theory on the subject,
certainly the most important theory since Aristotle's. But Hegel's view
of the tragic conflict is not only unfamiliar to English readers and
difficult to expound shortly, but it had its origin in reflections on
Greek tragedy and, as Hegel was well aware, applies only imperfectly to
the works of Shakespeare.[6] I shall, therefore, confine myself to the
idea of conflict in its more general form. In this form it is obviously
suitable to Shakespearean tragedy; but it is vague, and I will try to
make it more precise by putting the question, Who are the combatants in
this conflict?

Not seldom the conflict may quite naturally be conceived as lying
between two persons, of whom the hero is one; or, more fully, as lying
between two parties or groups, in one of which the hero is the leading
figure. Or if we prefer to speak (as we may quite well do if we know
what we are about) of the passions, tendencies, ideas, principles,
forces, which animate these persons or groups, we may say that two of
such passions or ideas, regarded as animating two persons or groups, are
the combatants. The love of Romeo and Juliet is in conflict with the
hatred of their houses, represented by various other characters. The
cause of Brutus and Cassius struggles with that of Julius, Octavius and
Antony. In _Richard II._ the King stands on one side, Bolingbroke and
his party on the other. In _Macbeth_ the hero and heroine are opposed to
the representatives of Duncan. In all these cases the great majority of
the _dramatis personae_ fall without difficulty into antagonistic
groups, and the conflict between these groups ends with the defeat of
the hero.

Yet one cannot help feeling that in at least one of these cases,
_Macbeth_, there is something a little external in this way of looking
at the action. And when we come to some other plays this feeling
increases. No doubt most of the characters in _Hamlet_, _King Lear_,
_Othello_, or _Antony and Cleopatra_ can be arranged in opposed
groups;[7] and no doubt there is a conflict; and yet it seems misleading
to describe this conflict as one _between these groups_. It cannot be
simply this. For though Hamlet and the King are mortal foes, yet that
which engrosses our interest and dwells in our memory at least as much
as the conflict between them, is the conflict _within_ one of them. And
so it is, though not in the same degree, with _Antony and Cleopatra_ and
even with _Othello_; and, in fact, in a certain measure, it is so with
nearly all the tragedies. There is an outward conflict of persons and
groups, there is also a conflict of forces in the hero's soul; and even
in _Julius Caesar_ and _Macbeth_ the interest of the former can hardly
be said to exceed that of the latter.

The truth is, that the type of tragedy in which the hero opposes to a
hostile force an undivided soul, is not the Shakespearean type. The
souls of those who contend with the hero may be thus undivided; they
generally are; but, as a rule, the hero, though he pursues his fated
way, is, at least at some point in the action, and sometimes at many,
torn by an inward struggle; and it is frequently at such points that
Shakespeare shows his most extraordinary power. If further we compare
the earlier tragedies with the later, we find that it is in the latter,
the maturest works, that this inward struggle is most emphasised. In the
last of them, _Coriolanus_, its interest completely eclipses towards the
close of the play that of the outward conflict. _Romeo and Juliet_,
_Richard III._, _Richard II._, where the hero contends with an outward
force, but comparatively little with himself, are all early plays.

If we are to include the outer and the inner struggle in a conception
more definite than that of conflict in general, we must employ some such
phrase as 'spiritual force.' This will mean whatever forces act in the
human spirit, whether good or evil, whether personal passion or
impersonal principle; doubts, desires, scruples, ideas--whatever can
animate, shake, possess, and drive a man's soul. In a Shakespearean
tragedy some such forces are shown in conflict. They are shown acting in
men and generating strife between them. They are also shown, less
universally, but quite as characteristically, generating disturbance and
even conflict in the soul of the hero. Treasonous ambition in Macbeth
collides with loyalty and patriotism in Macduff and Malcolm: here is the
outward conflict. But these powers or principles equally collide in the
soul of Macbeth himself: here is the inner. And neither by itself could
make the tragedy.[8]

We shall see later the importance of this idea. Here we need only
observe that the notion of tragedy as a conflict emphasises the fact
that action is the centre of the story, while the concentration of
interest, in the greater plays, on the inward struggle emphasises the
fact that this action is essentially the expression of character.

3

Let us turn now from the 'action' to the central figure in it; and,
ignoring the characteristics which distinguish the heroes from one
another, let us ask whether they have any common qualities which appear
to be essential to the tragic effect.

One they certainly have. They are exceptional beings. We have seen
already that the hero, with Shakespeare, is a person of high degree or
of public importance, and that his actions or sufferings are of an
unusual kind. But this is not all. His nature also is exceptional, and
generally raises him in some respect much above the average level of
humanity. This does not mean that he is an eccentric or a paragon.
Shakespeare never drew monstrosities of virtue; some of his heroes are
far from being 'good'; and if he drew eccentrics he gave them a
subordinate position in the plot. His tragic characters are made of the
stuff we find within ourselves and within the persons who surround them.
But, by an intensification of the life which they share with others,
they are raised above them; and the greatest are raised so far that, if
we fully realise all that is implied in their words and actions, we
become conscious that in real life we have known scarcely any one
resembling them. Some, like Hamlet and Cleopatra, have genius. Others,
like Othello, Lear, Macbeth, Coriolanus, are built on the grand scale;
and desire, passion, or will attains in them a terrible force. In almost
all we observe a marked one-sidedness, a predisposition in some
particular direction; a total incapacity, in certain circumstances, of
resisting the force which draws in this direction; a fatal tendency to
identify the whole being with one interest, object, passion, or habit of
mind. This, it would seem, is, for Shakespeare, the fundamental tragic
trait. It is present in his early heroes, Romeo and Richard II.,
infatuated men, who otherwise rise comparatively little above the
ordinary level. It is a fatal gift, but it carries with it a touch of
greatness; and when there is joined to it nobility of mind, or genius,
or immense force, we realise the full power and reach of the soul, and
the conflict in which it engages acquires that magnitude which stirs not
only sympathy and pity, but admiration, terror, and awe.

The easiest way to bring home to oneself the nature of the tragic
character is to compare it with a character of another kind. Dramas like
_Cymbeline_ and the _Winter's Tale_, which might seem destined to end
tragically, but actually end otherwise, owe their happy ending largely
to the fact that the principal characters fail to reach tragic
dimensions. And, conversely, if these persons were put in the place of
the tragic heroes, the dramas in which they appeared would cease to be
tragedies. Posthumus would never have acted as Othello did; Othello, on
his side, would have met Iachimo's challenge with something more than
words. If, like Posthumus, he had remained convinced of his wife's
infidelity, he would not have repented her execution; if, like Leontes,
he had come to believe that by an unjust accusation he had caused her
death, he would never have lived on, like Leontes. In the same way the
villain Iachimo has no touch of tragic greatness. But Iago comes nearer
to it, and if Iago had slandered Imogen and had supposed his slanders to
have led to her death, he certainly would not have turned melancholy and
wished to die. One reason why the end of the _Merchant of Venice_ fails
to satisfy us is that Shylock is a tragic character, and that we cannot
believe in his accepting his defeat and the conditions imposed on him.
This was a case where Shakespeare's imagination ran away with him, so
that he drew a figure with which the destined pleasant ending would not
harmonise.

In the circumstances where we see the hero placed, his tragic trait,
which is also his greatness, is fatal to him. To meet these
circumstances something is required which a smaller man might have
given, but which the hero cannot give. He errs, by action or omission;
and his error, joining with other causes, brings on him ruin. This is
always so with Shakespeare. As we have seen, the idea of the tragic hero
as a being destroyed simply and solely by external forces is quite alien
to him; and not less so is the idea of the hero as contributing to his
destruction only by acts in which we see no flaw. But the fatal
imperfection or error, which is never absent, is of different kinds and
degrees. At one extreme stands the excess and precipitancy of Romeo,
which scarcely, if at all, diminish our regard for him; at the other the
murderous ambition of Richard III. In most cases the tragic error
involves no conscious breach of right; in some (_e.g._ that of Brutus or
Othello) it is accompanied by a full conviction of right. In Hamlet
there is a painful consciousness that duty is being neglected; in Antony
a clear knowledge that the worse of two courses is being pursued; but
Richard and Macbeth are the only heroes who do what they themselves
recognise to be villainous. It is important to observe that Shakespeare
does admit such heroes,[9] and also that he appears to feel, and exerts
himself to meet, the difficulty that arises from their admission. The
difficulty is that the spectator must desire their defeat and even their
destruction; and yet this desire, and the satisfaction of it, are not
tragic feelings. Shakespeare gives to Richard therefore a power which
excites astonishment, and a courage which extorts admiration. He gives
to Macbeth a similar, though less extraordinary, greatness, and adds to
it a conscience so terrifying in its warnings and so maddening in its
reproaches that the spectacle of inward torment compels a horrified
sympathy and awe which balance, at the least, the desire for the hero's
ruin.

The tragic hero with Shakespeare, then, need not be 'good,' though
generally he is 'good' and therefore at once wins sympathy in his error.
But it is necessary that he should have so much of greatness that in his
error and fall we may be vividly conscious of the possibilities of human
nature.[10] Hence, in the first place, a Shakespearean tragedy is never,
like some miscalled tragedies, depressing. No one ever closes the book
with the feeling that man is a poor mean creature. He may be wretched
and he may be awful, but he is not small. His lot may be heart-rending
and mysterious, but it is not contemptible. The most confirmed of cynics
ceases to be a cynic while he reads these plays. And with this greatness
of the tragic hero (which is not always confined to him) is connected,
secondly, what I venture to describe as the centre of the tragic
impression. This central feeling is the impression of waste. With
Shakespeare, at any rate, the pity and fear which are stirred by the
tragic story seem to unite with, and even to merge in, a profound sense
of sadness and mystery, which is due to this impression of waste. 'What
a piece of work is man,' we cry; 'so much more beautiful and so much
more terrible than we knew! Why should he be so if this beauty and
greatness only tortures itself and throws itself away?' We seem to have
before us a type of the mystery of the whole world, the tragic fact
which extends far beyond the limits of tragedy. Everywhere, from the
crushed rocks beneath our feet to the soul of man, we see power,
intelligence, life and glory, which astound us and seem to call for our
worship. And everywhere we see them perishing, devouring one another and
destroying themselves, often with dreadful pain, as though they came
into being for no other end. Tragedy is the typical form of this
mystery, because that greatness of soul which it exhibits oppressed,
conflicting and destroyed, is the highest existence in our view. It
forces the mystery upon us, and it makes us realise so vividly the worth
of that which is wasted that we cannot possibly seek comfort in the
reflection that all is vanity.

4

In this tragic world, then, where individuals, however great they may be
and however decisive their actions may appear, are so evidently not the
ultimate power, what is this power? What account can we give of it which
will correspond with the imaginative impressions we receive? This will
be our final question.

The variety of the answers given to this question shows how difficult it
is. And the difficulty has many sources. Most people, even among those
who know Shakespeare well and come into real contact with his mind, are
inclined to isolate and exaggerate some one aspect of the tragic fact.
Some are so much influenced by their own habitual beliefs that they
import them more or less into their interpretation of every author who
is 'sympathetic' to them. And even where neither of these causes of
error appears to operate, another is present from which it is probably
impossible wholly to escape. What I mean is this. Any answer we give to
the question proposed ought to correspond with, or to represent in terms
of the understanding, our imaginative and emotional experience in
reading the tragedies. We have, of course, to do our best by study and
effort to make this experience true to Shakespeare; but, that done to
the best of our ability, the experience is the matter to be interpreted,
and the test by which the interpretation must be tried. But it is
extremely hard to make out exactly what this experience is, because, in
the very effort to make it out, our reflecting mind, full of everyday
ideas, is always tending to transform it by the application of these
ideas, and so to elicit a result which, instead of representing the
fact, conventionalises it. And the consequence is not only mistaken
theories; it is that many a man will declare that he feels in reading a
tragedy what he never really felt, while he fails to recognise what he
actually did feel. It is not likely that we shall escape all these
dangers in our effort to find an answer to the question regarding the
tragic world and the ultimate power in it.

It will be agreed, however, first, that this question must not be
answered in 'religious' language. For although this or that _dramatis
persona_ may speak of gods or of God, of evil spirits or of Satan, of
heaven and of hell, and although the poet may show us ghosts from
another world, these ideas do not materially influence his
representation of life, nor are they used to throw light on the mystery
of its tragedy. The Elizabethan drama was almost wholly secular; and
while Shakespeare was writing he practically confined his view to the
world of non-theological observation and thought, so that he represents
it substantially in one and the same way whether the period of the story
is pre-Christian or Christian.[11] He looked at this 'secular' world
most intently and seriously; and he painted it, we cannot but conclude,
with entire fidelity, without the wish to enforce an opinion of his own,
and, in essentials, without regard to anyone's hopes, fears, or beliefs.
His greatness is largely due to this fidelity in a mind of extraordinary
power; and if, as a private person, he had a religious faith, his tragic
view can hardly have been in contradiction with this faith, but must
have been included in it, and supplemented, not abolished, by additional
ideas.

Two statements, next, may at once be made regarding the tragic fact as
he represents it: one, that it is and remains to us something piteous,
fearful and mysterious; the other, that the representation of it does
not leave us crushed, rebellious or desperate. These statements will be
accepted, I believe, by any reader who is in touch with Shakespeare's
mind and can observe his own. Indeed such a reader is rather likely to
complain that they are painfully obvious. But if they are true as well
as obvious, something follows from them in regard to our present
question.

From the first it follows that the ultimate power in the tragic world is
not adequately described as a law or order which we can see to be just
and benevolent,--as, in that sense, a 'moral order': for in that case
the spectacle of suffering and waste could not seem to us so fearful and
mysterious as it does. And from the second it follows that this ultimate
power is not adequately described as a fate, whether malicious and
cruel, or blind and indifferent to human happiness and goodness: for in
that case the spectacle would leave us desperate or rebellious. Yet one
or other of these two ideas will be found to govern most accounts of
Shakespeare's tragic view or world. These accounts isolate and
exaggerate single aspects, either the aspect of action or that of
suffering; either the close and unbroken connection of character, will,
deed and catastrophe, which, taken alone, shows the individual simply as
sinning against, or failing to conform to, the moral order and drawing
his just doom on his own head; or else that pressure of outward forces,
that sway of accident, and those blind and agonised struggles, which,
taken alone, show him as the mere victim of some power which cares
neither for his sins nor for his pain. Such views contradict one
another, and no third view can unite them; but the several aspects from
whose isolation and exaggeration they spring are both present in the
fact, and a view which would be true to the fact and to the whole of our
imaginative experience must in some way combine these aspects.

Let us begin, then, with the idea of fatality and glance at some of the
impressions which give rise to it, without asking at present whether
this idea is their natural or fitting expression. There can be no doubt
that they do arise and that they ought to arise. If we do not feel at
times that the hero is, in some sense, a doomed man; that he and others
drift struggling to destruction like helpless creatures borne on an
irresistible flood towards a cataract; that, faulty as they may be,
their fault is far from being the sole or sufficient cause of all they
suffer; and that the power from which they cannot escape is relentless
and immovable, we have failed to receive an essential part of the full
tragic effect.

The sources of these impressions are various, and I will refer only to a
few. One of them is put into words by Shakespeare himself when he makes
the player-king in _Hamlet_ say:

     Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own;

'their ends' are the issues or outcomes of our thoughts, and these, says
the speaker, are not our own. The tragic world is a world of action, and
action is the translation of thought into reality. We see men and women
confidently attempting it. They strike into the existing order of things
in pursuance of their ideas. But what they achieve is not what they
intended; it is terribly unlike it. They understand nothing, we say to
ourselves, of the world on which they operate. They fight blindly in the
dark, and the power that works through them makes them the instrument of
a design which is not theirs. They act freely, and yet their action
binds them hand and foot. And it makes no difference whether they meant
well or ill. No one could mean better than Brutus, but he contrives
misery for his country and death for himself. No one could mean worse
than Iago, and he too is caught in the web he spins for others. Hamlet,
recoiling from the rough duty of revenge, is pushed into
blood-guiltiness he never dreamed of, and forced at last on the revenge
he could not will. His adversary's murders, and no less his adversary's
remorse, bring about the opposite of what they sought. Lear follows an
old man's whim, half generous, half selfish; and in a moment it looses
all the powers of darkness upon him. Othello agonises over an empty
fiction, and, meaning to execute solemn justice, butchers innocence and
strangles love. They understand themselves no better than the world
about them. Coriolanus thinks that his heart is iron, and it melts like
snow before a fire. Lady Macbeth, who thought she could dash out her own
child's brains, finds herself hounded to death by the smell of a
stranger's blood. Her husband thinks that to gain a crown he would jump
the life to come, and finds that the crown has brought him all the
horrors of that life. Everywhere, in this tragic world, man's thought,
translated into act, is transformed into the opposite of itself. His
act, the movement of a few ounces of matter in a moment of time, becomes
a monstrous flood which spreads over a kingdom. And whatsoever he dreams
of doing, he achieves that which he least dreamed of, his own
destruction.

All this makes us feel the blindness and helplessness of man. Yet by
itself it would hardly suggest the idea of fate, because it shows man as
in some degree, however slight, the cause of his own undoing. But other
impressions come to aid it. It is aided by everything which makes us
feel that a man is, as we say, terribly unlucky; and of this there is,
even in Shakespeare, not a little. Here come in some of the accidents
already considered, Juliet's waking from her trance a minute too late,
Desdemona's loss of her handkerchief at the only moment when the loss
would have mattered, that insignificant delay which cost Cordelia's
life. Again, men act, no doubt, in accordance with their characters; but
what is it that brings them just the one problem which is fatal to them
and would be easy to another, and sometimes brings it to them just when
they are least fitted to face it? How is it that Othello comes to be the
companion of the one man in the world who is at once able enough, brave
enough, and vile enough to ensnare him? By what strange fatality does it
happen that Lear has such daughters and Cordelia such sisters? Even
character itself contributes to these feelings of fatality. How could
men escape, we cry, such vehement propensities as drive Romeo, Antony,
Coriolanus, to their doom? And why is it that a man's virtues help to
destroy him, and that his weakness or defect is so intertwined with
everything that is admirable in him that we can hardly separate them
even in imagination?

If we find in Shakespeare's tragedies the source of impressions like
these, it is important, on the other hand, to notice what we do _not_
find there. We find practically no trace of fatalism in its more
primitive, crude and obvious forms. Nothing, again, makes us think of
the actions and sufferings of the persons as somehow arbitrarily fixed
beforehand without regard to their feelings, thoughts and resolutions.
Nor, I believe, are the facts ever so presented that it seems to us as
if the supreme power, whatever it may be, had a special spite against a
family or an individual. Neither, lastly, do we receive the impression
(which, it must be observed, is not purely fatalistic) that a family,
owing to some hideous crime or impiety in early days, is doomed in later
days to continue a career of portentous calamities and sins.
Shakespeare, indeed, does not appear to have taken much interest in
heredity, or to have attached much importance to it. (See, however,
'heredity' in the Index.)

What, then, is this 'fate' which the impressions already considered lead
us to describe as the ultimate power in the tragic world? It appears to
be a mythological expression for the whole system or order, of which the
individual characters form an inconsiderable and feeble part; which
seems to determine, far more than they, their native dispositions and
their circumstances, and, through these, their action; which is so vast
and complex that they can scarcely at all understand it or control its
workings; and which has a nature so definite and fixed that whatever
changes take place in it produce other changes inevitably and without
regard to men's desires and regrets. And whether this system or order is
best called by the name of fate or no,[12] it can hardly be denied that
it does appear as the ultimate power in the tragic world, and that it
has such characteristics as these. But the name 'fate' may be intended
to imply something more--to imply that this order is a blank necessity,
totally regardless alike of human weal and of the difference between
good and evil or right and wrong. And such an implication many readers
would at once reject. They would maintain, on the contrary, that this
order shows characteristics of quite another kind from those which made
us give it the name of fate, characteristics which certainly should not
induce us to forget those others, but which would lead us to describe it
as a moral order and its necessity as a moral necessity.

5

Let us turn, then, to this idea. It brings into the light those aspects
of the tragic fact which the idea of fate throws into the shade. And the
argument which leads to it in its simplest form may be stated briefly
thus: 'Whatever may be said of accidents, circumstances and the like,
human action is, after all, presented to us as the central fact in
tragedy, and also as the main cause of the catastrophe. That necessity
which so much impresses us is, after all, chiefly the necessary
connection of actions and consequences. For these actions we, without
even raising a question on the subject, hold the agents responsible; and
the tragedy would disappear for us if we did not. The critical action
is, in greater or less degree, wrong or bad. The catastrophe is, in the
main, the return of this action on the head of the agent. It is an
example of justice; and that order which, present alike within the
agents and outside them, infallibly brings it about, is therefore just.
The rigour of its justice is terrible, no doubt, for a tragedy is a
terrible story; but, in spite of fear and pity, we acquiesce, because
our sense of justice is satisfied.'

Now, if this view is to hold good, the 'justice' of which it speaks must
be at once distinguished from what is called 'poetic justice.' 'Poetic
justice' means that prosperity and adversity are distributed in
proportion to the merits of the agents. Such 'poetic justice' is in
flagrant contradiction with the facts of life, and it is absent from
Shakespeare's tragic picture of life; indeed, this very absence is a
ground of constant complaint on the part of Dr. Johnson. [Greek:
Drasanti pathein], 'the doer must suffer'--this we find in Shakespeare.
We also find that villainy never remains victorious and prosperous at
the last. But an assignment of amounts of happiness and misery, an
assignment even of life and death, in proportion to merit, we do not
find. No one who thinks of Desdemona and Cordelia; or who remembers that
one end awaits Richard III. and Brutus, Macbeth and Hamlet; or who asks
himself which suffered most, Othello or Iago; will ever accuse
Shakespeare of representing the ultimate power as 'poetically' just.

And we must go further. I venture to say that it is a mistake to use at
all these terms of justice and merit or desert. And this for two
reasons. In the first place, essential as it is to recognise the
connection between act and consequence, and natural as it may seem in
some cases (_e.g._ Macbeth's) to say that the doer only gets what he
deserves, yet in very many cases to say this would be quite unnatural.
We might not object to the statement that Lear deserved to suffer for
his folly, selfishness and tyranny; but to assert that he deserved to
suffer what he did suffer is to do violence not merely to language but
to any healthy moral sense. It is, moreover, to obscure the tragic fact
that the consequences of action cannot be limited to that which would
appear to us to follow 'justly' from them. And, this being so, when we
call the order of the tragic world just, we are either using the word in
some vague and unexplained sense, or we are going beyond what is shown
us of this order, and are appealing to faith.

But, in the second place, the ideas of justice and desert are, it seems
to me, in _all_ cases--even those of Richard III. and of Macbeth and
Lady Macbeth--untrue to our imaginative experience. When we are immersed
in a tragedy, we feel towards dispositions, actions, and persons such
emotions as attraction and repulsion, pity, wonder, fear, horror,
perhaps hatred; but we do not _judge_. This is a point of view which
emerges only when, in reading a play, we slip, by our own fault or the
dramatist's, from the tragic position, or when, in thinking about the
play afterwards, we fall back on our everyday legal and moral notions.
But tragedy does not belong, any more than religion belongs, to the
sphere of these notions; neither does the imaginative attitude in
presence of it. While we are in its world we watch what is, seeing that
so it happened and must have happened, feeling that it is piteous,
dreadful, awful, mysterious, but neither passing sentence on the agents,
nor asking whether the behaviour of the ultimate power towards them is
just. And, therefore, the use of such language in attempts to render our
imaginative experience in terms of the understanding is, to say the
least, full of danger.[13]

Let us attempt then to re-state the idea that the ultimate power in the
tragic world is a moral order. Let us put aside the ideas of justice and
merit, and speak simply of good and evil. Let us understand by these
words, primarily, moral good and evil, but also everything else in human
beings which we take to be excellent or the reverse. Let us understand
the statement that the ultimate power or order is 'moral' to mean that
it does not show itself indifferent to good and evil, or equally
favourable or unfavourable to both, but shows itself akin to good and
alien from evil. And, understanding the statement thus, let us ask what
grounds it has in the tragic fact as presented by Shakespeare.

Here, as in dealing with the grounds on which the idea of fate rests, I
choose only two or three out of many. And the most important is this. In
Shakespearean tragedy the main source of the convulsion which produces
suffering and death is never good: good contributes to this convulsion
only from its tragic implication with its opposite in one and the same
character. The main source, on the contrary, is in every case evil; and,
what is more (though this seems to have been little noticed), it is in
almost every case evil in the fullest sense, not mere imperfection but
plain moral evil. The love of Romeo and Juliet conducts them to death
only because of the senseless hatred of their houses. Guilty ambition,
seconded by diabolic malice and issuing in murder, opens the action in
_Macbeth_. Iago is the main source of the convulsion in _Othello_;
Goneril, Regan and Edmund in _King Lear_. Even when this plain moral
evil is not the obviously prime source within the play, it lies behind
it: the situation with which Hamlet has to deal has been formed by
adultery and murder. _Julius Caesar_ is the only tragedy in which one is
even tempted to find an exception to this rule. And the inference is
obvious. If it is chiefly evil that violently disturbs the order of the
world, this order cannot be friendly to evil or indifferent between evil
and good, any more than a body which is convulsed by poison is friendly
to it or indifferent to the distinction between poison and food.

Again, if we confine our attention to the hero, and to those cases where
the gross and palpable evil is not in him but elsewhere, we find that
the comparatively innocent hero still shows some marked imperfection or
defect,--irresolution, precipitancy, pride, credulousness, excessive
simplicity, excessive susceptibility to sexual emotions, and the like.
These defects or imperfections are certainly, in the wide sense of the
word, evil, and they contribute decisively to the conflict and
catastrophe. And the inference is again obvious. The ultimate power
which shows itself disturbed by this evil and reacts against it, must
have a nature alien to it. Indeed its reaction is so vehement and
'relentless' that it would seem to be bent on nothing short of good in
perfection, and to be ruthless in its demand for it.

To this must be added another fact, or another aspect of the same fact.
Evil exhibits itself everywhere as something negative, barren,
weakening, destructive, a principle of death. It isolates, disunites,
and tends to annihilate not only its opposite but itself. That which
keeps the evil man[14] prosperous, makes him succeed, even permits him
to exist, is the good in him (I do not mean only the obviously 'moral'
good). When the evil in him masters the good and has its way, it
destroys other people through him, but it also destroys _him_. At the
close of the struggle he has vanished, and has left behind him nothing
that can stand. What remains is a family, a city, a country, exhausted,
pale and feeble, but alive through the principle of good which animates
it; and, within it, individuals who, if they have not the brilliance or
greatness of the tragic character, still have won our respect and
confidence. And the inference would seem clear. If existence in an order
depends on good, and if the presence of evil is hostile to such
existence, the inner being or soul of this order must be akin to good.

These are aspects of the tragic world at least as clearly marked as
those which, taken alone, suggest the idea of fate. And the idea which
they in their turn, when taken alone, may suggest, is that of an order
which does not indeed award 'poetic justice,' but which reacts through
the necessity of its own 'moral' nature both against attacks made upon
it and against failure to conform to it. Tragedy, on this view, is the
exhibition of that convulsive reaction; and the fact that the spectacle
does not leave us rebellious or desperate is due to a more or less
distinct perception that the tragic suffering and death arise from
collision, not with a fate or blank power, but with a moral power, a
power akin to all that we admire and revere in the characters
themselves. This perception produces something like a feeling of
acquiescence in the catastrophe, though it neither leads us to pass
judgment on the characters nor diminishes the pity, the fear, and the
sense of waste, which their struggle, suffering and fall evoke. And,
finally, this view seems quite able to do justice to those aspects of
the tragic fact which give rise to the idea of fate. They would appear
as various expressions of the fact that the moral order acts not
capriciously or like a human being, but from the necessity of its
nature, or, if we prefer the phrase, by general laws,--a necessity or
law which of course knows no exception and is as 'ruthless' as fate.

It is impossible to deny to this view a large measure of truth. And yet
without some amendment it can hardly satisfy. For it does not include
the whole of the facts, and therefore does not wholly correspond with
the impressions they produce. Let it be granted that the system or order
which shows itself omnipotent against individuals is, in the sense
explained, moral. Still--at any rate for the eye of sight--the evil
against which it asserts itself, and the persons whom this evil
inhabits, are not really something outside the order, so that they can
attack it or fail to conform to it; they are within it and a part of it.
It itself produces them,--produces Iago as well as Desdemona, Iago's
cruelty as well as Iago's courage. It is not poisoned, it poisons
itself. Doubtless it shows by its violent reaction that the poison _is_
poison, and that its health lies in good. But one significant fact
cannot remove another, and the spectacle we witness scarcely warrants
the assertion that the order is responsible for the good in Desdemona,
but Iago for the evil in Iago. If we make this assertion we make it on
grounds other than the facts as presented in Shakespeare's tragedies.

Nor does the idea of a moral order asserting itself against attack or
want of conformity answer in full to our feelings regarding the tragic
character. We do not think of Hamlet merely as failing to meet its
demand, of Antony as merely sinning against it, or even of Macbeth as
simply attacking it. What we feel corresponds quite as much to the idea
that they are _its_ parts, expressions, products; that in their defect
or evil _it_ is untrue to its soul of goodness, and falls into conflict
and collision with itself; that, in making them suffer and waste
themselves, _it_ suffers and wastes itself; and that when, to save its
life and regain peace from this intestinal struggle, it casts them out,
it has lost a part of its own substance,--a part more dangerous and
unquiet, but far more valuable and nearer to its heart, than that which
remains,--a Fortinbras, a Malcolm, an Octavius. There is no tragedy in
its expulsion of evil: the tragedy is that this involves the waste of
good.

Thus we are left at last with an idea showing two sides or aspects which
we can neither separate nor reconcile. The whole or order against which
the individual part shows itself powerless seems to be animated by a
passion for perfection: we cannot otherwise explain its behaviour
towards evil. Yet it appears to engender this evil within itself, and in
its effort to overcome and expel it it is agonised with pain, and driven
to mutilate its own substance and to lose not only evil but priceless
good. That this idea, though very different from the idea of a blank
fate, is no solution of the riddle of life is obvious; but why should we
expect it to be such a solution? Shakespeare was not attempting to
justify the ways of God to men, or to show the universe as a Divine
Comedy. He was writing tragedy, and tragedy would not be tragedy if it
were not a painful mystery. Nor can he be said even to point distinctly,
like some writers of tragedy, in any direction where a solution might
lie. We find a few references to gods or God, to the influence of the
stars, to another life: some of them certainly, all of them perhaps,
merely dramatic--appropriate to the person from whose lips they fall. A
ghost comes from Purgatory to impart a secret out of the reach of its
hearer--who presently meditates on the question whether the sleep of
death is dreamless. Accidents once or twice remind us strangely of the
words, 'There's a divinity that shapes our ends.' More important are
other impressions. Sometimes from the very furnace of affliction a
conviction seems borne to us that somehow, if we could see it, this
agony counts as nothing against the heroism and love which appear in it
and thrill our hearts. Sometimes we are driven to cry out that these
mighty or heavenly spirits who perish are too great for the little space
in which they move, and that they vanish not into nothingness but into
freedom. Sometimes from these sources and from others comes a
presentiment, formless but haunting and even profound, that all the fury
of conflict, with its waste and woe, is less than half the truth, even
an illusion, 'such stuff as dreams are made on.' But these faint and
scattered intimations that the tragic world, being but a fragment of a
whole beyond our vision, must needs be a contradiction and no ultimate
truth, avail nothing to interpret the mystery. We remain confronted with
the inexplicable fact, or the no less inexplicable appearance, of a
world travailing for perfection, but bringing to birth, together with
glorious good, an evil which it is able to overcome only by self-torture
and self-waste. And this fact or appearance is tragedy.[15]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: _Julius Caesar_ is not an exception to this rule. Caesar,
whose murder comes in the Third Act, is in a sense the dominating figure
in the story, but Brutus is the 'hero.']

[Footnote 2: _Timon of Athens_, we have seen, was probably not designed
by Shakespeare, but even _Timon_ is no exception to the rule. The
sub-plot is concerned with Alcibiades and his army, and Timon himself is
treated by the Senate as a man of great importance. _Arden of Feversham_
and _A Yorkshire Tragedy_ would certainly be exceptions to the rule; but
I assume that neither of them is Shakespeare's; and if either is, it
belongs to a different species from his admitted tragedies. See, on this
species, Symonds, _Shakspere's Predecessors_, ch. xi.]

[Footnote 3: Even a deed would, I think, be counted an 'accident,' if it
were the deed of a very minor person whose character had not been
indicated; because such a deed would not issue from the little world to
which the dramatist had confined our attention.]

[Footnote 4: Comedy stands in a different position. The tricks played by
chance often form a principal part of the comic action.]

[Footnote 5: It may be observed that the influence of the three elements
just considered is to strengthen the tendency, produced by the
sufferings considered first, to regard the tragic persons as passive
rather than as agents.]

[Footnote 6: An account of Hegel's view may be found in _Oxford Lectures
on Poetry_.]

[Footnote 7: The reader, however, will find considerable difficulty in
placing some very important characters in these and other plays. I will
give only two or three illustrations. Edgar is clearly not on the same
side as Edmund, and yet it seems awkward to range him on Gloster's side
when Gloster wishes to put him to death. Ophelia is in love with Hamlet,
but how can she be said to be of Hamlet's party against the King and
Polonius, or of their party against Hamlet? Desdemona worships Othello,
yet it sounds odd to say that Othello is on the same side with a person
whom he insults, strikes and murders.]

[Footnote 8: I have given names to the 'spiritual forces' in _Macbeth_
merely to illustrate the idea, and without any pretension to adequacy.
Perhaps, in view of some interpretations of Shakespeare's plays, it will
be as well to add that I do not dream of suggesting that in any of his
dramas Shakespeare imagined two abstract principles or passions
conflicting, and incorporated them in persons; or that there is any
necessity for a reader to define for himself the particular forces which
conflict in a given case.]

[Footnote 9: Aristotle apparently would exclude them.]

[Footnote 10: Richard II. is perhaps an exception, and I must confess
that to me he is scarcely a tragic character, and that, if he is
nevertheless a tragic figure, he is so only because his fall from
prosperity to adversity is so great.]

[Footnote 11: I say substantially; but the concluding remarks on
_Hamlet_ will modify a little the statements above.]

[Footnote 12: I have raised no objection to the use of the idea of fate,
because it occurs so often both in conversation and in books about
Shakespeare's tragedies that I must suppose it to be natural to many
readers. Yet I doubt whether it would be so if Greek tragedy had never
been written; and I must in candour confess that to me it does not often
occur while I am reading, or when I have just read, a tragedy of
Shakespeare. Wordsworth's lines, for example, about

         poor humanity's afflicted will
     Struggling in vain with ruthless destiny

do not represent the impression I receive; much less do images which
compare man to a puny creature helpless in the claws of a bird of prey.
The reader should examine himself closely on this matter.]

[Footnote 13: It is dangerous, I think, in reference to all really good
tragedies, but I am dealing here only with Shakespeare's. In not a few
Greek tragedies it is almost inevitable that we should think of justice
and retribution, not only because the _dramatis personae_ often speak of
them, but also because there is something casuistical about the tragic
problem itself. The poet treats the story in such a way that the
question, Is the hero doing right or wrong? is almost forced upon us.
But this is not so with Shakespeare. _Julius Caesar_ is probably the
only one of his tragedies in which the question suggests itself to us,
and this is one of the reasons why that play has something of a classic
air. Even here, if we ask the question, we have no doubt at all about
the answer.]

[Footnote 14: It is most essential to remember that an evil man is much
more than the evil in him. I may add that in this paragraph I have, for
the sake of clearness, considered evil in its most pronounced form; but
what is said would apply, _mutatis mutandis_, to evil as imperfection,
etc.]

[Footnote 15: Partly in order not to anticipate later passages, I
abstained from treating fully here the question why we feel, at the
death of the tragic hero, not only pain but also reconciliation and
sometimes even exultation. As I cannot at present make good this defect,
I would ask the reader to refer to the word _Reconciliation_ in the
Index. See also, in _Oxford Lectures on Poetry_, _Hegel's Theory of
Tragedy_, especially pp. 90, 91.]

 

LECTURE II

CONSTRUCTION IN SHAKESPEARE'S TRAGEDIES

Having discussed the substance of a Shakespearean tragedy, we should
naturally go on to examine the form. And under this head many things
might be included; for example, Shakespeare's methods of
characterisation, his language, his versification, the construction of
his plots. I intend, however, to speak only of the last of these
subjects, which has been somewhat neglected;[16] and, as construction is
a more or less technical matter, I shall add some general remarks on
Shakespeare as an artist.

1

As a Shakespearean tragedy represents a conflict which terminates in a
catastrophe, any such tragedy may roughly be divided into three parts.
The first of these sets forth or expounds the situation,[17] or state of
affairs, out of which the conflict arises; and it may, therefore, be
called the Exposition. The second deals with the definite beginning, the
growth and the vicissitudes of the conflict. It forms accordingly the
bulk of the play, comprising the Second, Third and Fourth Acts, and
usually a part of the First and a part of the Fifth. The final section
of the tragedy shows the issue of the conflict in a catastrophe.[18]

The application of this scheme of division is naturally more or less
arbitrary. The first part glides into the second, and the second into
the third, and there may often be difficulty in drawing the lines
between them. But it is still harder to divide spring from summer, and
summer from autumn; and yet spring is spring, and summer summer.

The main business of the Exposition, which we will consider first, is to
introduce us into a little world of persons; to show us their positions
in life, their circumstances, their relations to one another, and
perhaps something of their characters; and to leave us keenly interested
in the question what will come out of this condition of things. We are
left thus expectant, not merely because some of the persons interest us
at once, but also because their situation in regard to one another
points to difficulties in the future. This situation is not one of
conflict,[19] but it threatens conflict. For example, we see first the
hatred of the Montagues and Capulets; and then we see Romeo ready to
fall violently in love; and then we hear talk of a marriage between
Juliet and Paris; but the exposition is not complete, and the conflict
has not definitely begun to arise, till, in the last scene of the First
Act, Romeo the Montague sees Juliet the Capulet and becomes her slave.

The dramatist's chief difficulty in the exposition is obvious, and it is
illustrated clearly enough in the plays of unpractised writers; for
example, in _Remorse_, and even in _The Cenci_. He has to impart to the
audience a quantity of information about matters of which they generally
know nothing and never know all that is necessary for his purpose.[20]
But the process of merely acquiring information is unpleasant, and the
direct imparting of it is undramatic. Unless he uses a prologue,
therefore, he must conceal from his auditors the fact that they are
being informed, and must tell them what he wants them to know by means
which are interesting on their own account. These means, with
Shakespeare, are not only speeches but actions and events. From the very
beginning of the play, though the conflict has not arisen, things are
happening and being done which in some degree arrest, startle, and
excite; and in a few scenes we have mastered the situation of affairs
without perceiving the dramatist's designs upon us. Not that this is
always so with Shakespeare. In the opening scene of his early _Comedy of
Errors_, and in the opening speech of _Richard III._, we feel that the
speakers are addressing us; and in the second scene of the _Tempest_
(for Shakespeare grew at last rather negligent of technique) the purpose
of Prospero's long explanation to Miranda is palpable. But in general
Shakespeare's expositions are masterpieces.[21]

His usual plan in tragedy is to begin with a short scene, or part of a
scene, either full of life and stir, or in some other way arresting.
Then, having secured a hearing, he proceeds to conversations at a lower
pitch, accompanied by little action but conveying much information. For
example, _Romeo and Juliet_ opens with a street-fight, _Julius Caesar_
and _Coriolanus_ with a crowd in commotion; and when this excitement has
had its effect on the audience, there follow quiet speeches, in which
the cause of the excitement, and so a great part of the situation, are
disclosed. In _Hamlet_ and _Macbeth_ this scheme is employed with great
boldness. In _Hamlet_ the first appearance of the Ghost occurs at the
fortieth line, and with such effect that Shakespeare can afford to
introduce at once a conversation which explains part of the state of
affairs at Elsinore; and the second appearance, having again increased
the tension, is followed by a long scene, which contains no action but
introduces almost all the _dramatis personae_ and adds the information
left wanting. The opening of _Macbeth_ is even more remarkable, for
there is probably no parallel to its first scene, where the senses and
imagination are assaulted by a storm of thunder and supernatural alarm.
This scene is only eleven lines long, but its influence is so great that
the next can safely be occupied with a mere report of Macbeth's
battles,--a narrative which would have won much less attention if it had
opened the play.

When Shakespeare begins his exposition thus he generally at first makes
people talk about the hero, but keeps the hero himself for some time out
of sight, so that we await his entrance with curiosity, and sometimes
with anxiety. On the other hand, if the play opens with a quiet
conversation, this is usually brief, and then at once the hero enters
and takes action of some decided kind. Nothing, for example, can be less
like the beginning of _Macbeth_ than that of _King Lear_. The tone is
pitched so low that the conversation between Kent, Gloster, and Edmund
is written in prose. But at the thirty-fourth line it is broken off by
the entrance of Lear and his court, and without delay the King proceeds
to his fatal division of the kingdom.

This tragedy illustrates another practice of Shakespeare's. _King Lear_
has a secondary plot, that which concerns Gloster and his two sons. To
make the beginning of this plot quite clear, and to mark it off from the
main action, Shakespeare gives it a separate exposition. The great scene
of the division of Britain and the rejection of Cordelia and Kent is
followed by the second scene, in which Gloster and his two sons appear
alone, and the beginning of Edmund's design is disclosed. In _Hamlet_,
though the plot is single, there is a little group of characters
possessing a certain independent interest,--Polonius, his son, and his
daughter; and so the third scene is devoted wholly to them. And again,
in _Othello_, since Roderigo is to occupy a peculiar position almost
throughout the action, he is introduced at once, alone with Iago, and
his position is explained before the other characters are allowed to
appear.

But why should Iago open the play? Or, if this seems too presumptuous a
question, let us put it in the form, What is the effect of his opening
the play? It is that we receive at the very outset a strong impression
of the force which is to prove fatal to the hero's happiness, so that,
when we see the hero himself, the shadow of fate already rests upon him.
And an effect of this kind is to be noticed in other tragedies. We are
made conscious at once of some power which is to influence the whole
action to the hero's undoing. In _Macbeth_ we see and hear the Witches,
in _Hamlet_ the Ghost. In the first scene of _Julius Caesar_ and of
_Coriolanus_ those qualities of the crowd are vividly shown which render
hopeless the enterprise of the one hero and wreck the ambition of the
other. It is the same with the hatred between the rival houses in _Romeo
and Juliet_, and with Antony's infatuated passion. We realise them at
the end of the first page, and are almost ready to regard the hero as
doomed. Often, again, at one or more points during the exposition this
feeling is reinforced by some expression that has an ominous effect. The
first words we hear from Macbeth, 'So foul and fair a day I have not
seen,' echo, though he knows it not, the last words we heard from the
Witches, 'Fair is foul, and foul is fair.' Romeo, on his way with his
friends to the banquet, where he is to see Juliet for the first time,
tells Mercutio that he has had a dream. What the dream was we never
learn, for Mercutio does not care to know, and breaks into his speech
about Queen Mab; but we can guess its nature from Romeo's last speech in
the scene:

                          My mind misgives
     Some consequence yet hanging in the stars
     Shall bitterly begin his fearful date
     With this night's revels.

When Brabantio, forced to acquiesce in his daughter's stolen marriage,
turns, as he leaves the council-chamber, to Othello, with the warning,

     Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see;
     She has deceived her father, and may thee,

this warning, and no less Othello's answer, 'My life upon her faith,'
make our hearts sink. The whole of the coming story seems to be
prefigured in Antony's muttered words (I. ii. 120):

     These strong Egyptian fetters I must break,
     Or lose myself in dotage;

and, again, in Hamlet's weary sigh, following so soon on the passionate
resolution stirred by the message of the Ghost:

     The time is out of joint. Oh cursed spite,
     That ever I was born to set it right.

These words occur at a point (the end of the First Act) which may be
held to fall either within the exposition or beyond it. I should take
the former view, though such questions, as we saw at starting, can
hardly be decided with certainty. The dimensions of this first section
of a tragedy depend on a variety of causes, of which the chief seems to
be the comparative simplicity or complexity of the situation from which
the conflict arises. Where this is simple the exposition is short, as in
_Julius Caesar_ and _Macbeth_. Where it is complicated the exposition
requires more space, as in _Romeo and Juliet_, _Hamlet_, and _King
Lear_. Its completion is generally marked in the mind of the reader by a
feeling that the action it contains is for the moment complete but has
left a problem. The lovers have met, but their families are at deadly
enmity; the hero seems at the height of success, but has admitted the
thought of murdering his sovereign; the old king has divided his kingdom
between two hypocritical daughters, and has rejected his true child; the
hero has acknowledged a sacred duty of revenge, but is weary of life:
and we ask, What will come of this? Sometimes, I may add, a certain time
is supposed to elapse before the events which answer our question make
their appearance and the conflict begins; in _King Lear_, for instance,
about a fortnight; in _Hamlet_ about two months.

2

We come now to the conflict itself. And here one or two preliminary
remarks are necessary. In the first place, it must be remembered that
our point of view in examining the construction of a play will not
always coincide with that which we occupy in thinking of its whole
dramatic effect. For example, that struggle in the hero's soul which
sometimes accompanies the outward struggle is of the highest importance
for the total effect of a tragedy; but it is not always necessary or
desirable to consider it when the question is merely one of
construction. And this is natural. The play is meant primarily for the
theatre; and theatrically the outward conflict, with its influence on
the fortunes of the hero, is the aspect which first catches, if it does
not engross, attention. For the average play-goer of every period the
main interest of _Hamlet_ has probably lain in the vicissitudes of his
long duel with the King; and the question, one may almost say, has been
which will first kill the other. And so, from the point of view of
construction, the fact that Hamlet spares the King when he finds him
praying, is, from its effect on the hero's fortunes, of great moment;
but the cause of the fact, which lies within Hamlet's character, is not
so.

In the second place we must be prepared to find that, as the plays vary
so much, no single way of regarding the conflict will answer precisely
to the construction of all; that it sometimes appears possible to look
at the construction of a tragedy in two quite different ways, and that
it is material to find the best of the two; and that thus, in any given
instance, it is necessary first to define the opposing sides in the
conflict. I will give one or two examples. In some tragedies, as we saw
in our first lecture, the opposing forces can, for practical purposes,
be identified with opposing persons or groups. So it is in _Romeo and
Juliet_ and _Macbeth_. But it is not always so. The love of Othello may
be said to contend with another force, as the love of Romeo does; but
Othello cannot be said to contend with Iago as Romeo contends with the
representatives of the hatred of the houses, or as Macbeth contends with
Malcolm and Macduff. Again, in _Macbeth_ the hero, however much
influenced by others, supplies the main driving power of the action; but
in _King Lear_ he does not. Possibly, therefore, the conflict, and with
it the construction, may best be regarded from different points of view
in these two plays, in spite of the fact that the hero is the central
figure in each. But if we do not observe this we shall attempt to find
the same scheme in both, and shall either be driven to some unnatural
view or to a sceptical despair of perceiving any principle of
construction at all.

With these warnings, I turn to the question whether we can trace any
distinct method or methods by which Shakespeare represents the rise and
development of the conflict.

(1) One at least is obvious, and indeed it is followed not merely during
the conflict but from beginning to end of the play. There are, of
course, in the action certain places where the tension in the minds of
the audience becomes extreme. We shall consider these presently. But, in
addition, there is, all through the tragedy, a constant alternation of
rises and falls in this tension or in the emotional pitch of the work, a
regular sequence of more exciting and less exciting sections. Some kind
of variation of pitch is to be found, of course, in all drama, for it
rests on the elementary facts that relief must be given after emotional
strain, and that contrast is required to bring out the full force of an
effect. But a good drama of our own time shows nothing approaching to
the _regularity_ with which in the plays of Shakespeare and of his
contemporaries the principle is applied. And the main cause of this
difference lies simply in a change of theatrical arrangements. In
Shakespeare's theatre, as there was no scenery, scene followed scene
with scarcely any pause; and so the readiest, though not the only, way
to vary the emotional pitch was to interpose a whole scene where the
tension was low between scenes where it was high. In our theatres there
is a great deal of scenery, which takes a long time to set and change;
and therefore the number of scenes is small, and the variations of
tension have to be provided within the scenes, and still more by the
pauses between them. With Shakespeare there are, of course, in any long
scene variations of tension, but the scenes are numerous and, compared
with ours, usually short, and variety is given principally by their
difference in pitch.

It may further be observed that, in a portion of the play which is
relatively unexciting, the scenes of lower tension may be as long as
those of higher; while in a portion of the play which is specially
exciting the scenes of low tension are shorter, often much shorter, than
the others. The reader may verify this statement by comparing the First
or the Fourth Act in most of the tragedies with the Third; for, speaking
very roughly, we may say that the First and Fourth are relatively quiet
acts, the Third highly critical. A good example is the Third Act of
_King Lear_, where the scenes of high tension (ii., iv., vi.) are
respectively 95, 186 and 122 lines in length, while those of low tension
(i., iii., v.) are respectively 55, 26 and 26 lines long. Scene vii.,
the last of the Act, is, I may add, a very exciting scene, though it
follows scene vi., and therefore the tone of scene vi. is greatly
lowered during its final thirty lines.

(2) If we turn now from the differences of tension to the sequence of
events within the conflict, we shall find the principle of alternation
at work again in another and a quite independent way. Let us for the
sake of brevity call the two sides in the conflict A and B. Now,
usually, as we shall see presently, through a considerable part of the
play, perhaps the first half, the cause of A is, on the whole,
advancing; and through the remaining part it is retiring, while that of
B advances in turn. But, underlying this broad movement, all through the
conflict we shall find a regular alternation of smaller advances and
retirals; first A seeming to win some ground, and then the
counter-action of B being shown. And since we always more or less
decidedly prefer A to B or B to A, the result of this oscillating
movement is a constant alternation of hope and fear, or rather of a
mixed state predominantly hopeful and a mixed state predominantly
apprehensive. An example will make the point clear. In _Hamlet_ the
conflict begins with the hero's feigning to be insane from
disappointment in love, and we are shown his immediate success in
convincing Polonius. Let us call this an advance of A. The next scene
shows the King's great uneasiness about Hamlet's melancholy, and his
scepticism as to Polonius's explanation of its cause: advance of B.
Hamlet completely baffles Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who have been
sent to discover his secret, and he arranges for the test of the
play-scene: advance of A. But immediately before the play-scene his
soliloquy on suicide fills us with misgiving; and his words to Ophelia,
overheard, so convince the King that love is _not_ the cause of his
nephew's strange behaviour, that he determines to get rid of him by
sending him to England: advance of B. The play-scene proves a complete
success: decided advance of A. Directly after it Hamlet spares the King
at prayer, and in an interview with his mother unwittingly kills
Polonius, and so gives his enemy a perfect excuse for sending him away
(to be executed): decided advance of B. I need not pursue the
illustration further. This oscillating movement can be traced without
difficulty in any of the tragedies, though less distinctly in one or two
of the earliest.

(3) Though this movement continues right up to the catastrophe, its
effect does not disguise that much broader effect to which I have
already alluded, and which we have now to study. In all the tragedies,
though more clearly in some than in others, one side is distinctly felt
to be on the whole advancing up to a certain point in the conflict, and
then to be on the whole declining before the reaction of the other.
There is therefore felt to be a critical point in the action, which
proves also to be a turning point. It is critical sometimes in the sense
that, until it is reached, the conflict is not, so to speak, clenched;
one of the two sets of forces might subside, or a reconciliation might
somehow be effected; while, as soon as it is reached, we feel this can
no longer be. It is critical also because the advancing force has
apparently asserted itself victoriously, gaining, if not all it could
wish, still a very substantial advantage; whereas really it is on the
point of turning downward towards its fall. This Crisis, as a rule,
comes somewhere near the middle of the play; and where it is well marked
it has the effect, as to construction, of dividing the play into five
parts instead of three; these parts showing (1) a situation not yet one
of conflict, (2) the rise and development of the conflict, in which A or
B advances on the whole till it reaches (3) the Crisis, on which follows
(4) the decline of A or B towards (5) the Catastrophe. And it will be
seen that the fourth and fifth parts repeat, though with a reversal of
direction as regards A or B, the movement of the second and third,
working towards the catastrophe as the second and third worked towards
the crisis.

In developing, illustrating and qualifying this statement, it will be
best to begin with the tragedies in which the movement is most clear and
simple. These are _Julius Caesar_ and _Macbeth_. In the former the
fortunes of the conspiracy rise with vicissitudes up to the crisis of
the assassination (III. i.); they then sink with vicissitudes to the
catastrophe, where Brutus and Cassius perish. In the latter, Macbeth,
hurrying, in spite of much inward resistance, to the murder of Duncan,
attains the crown, the upward movement being extraordinarily rapid, and
the crisis arriving early: his cause then turns slowly downward, and
soon hastens to ruin. In both these tragedies the simplicity of the
constructional effect, it should be noticed, depends in part on the fact
that the contending forces may quite naturally be identified with
certain persons, and partly again on the fact that the defeat of one
side is the victory of the other. Octavius and Antony, Malcolm and
Macduff, are left standing over the bodies of their foes.

This is not so in _Romeo and Juliet_ and _Hamlet_, because here,
although the hero perishes, the side opposed to him, being the more
faulty or evil, cannot be allowed to triumph when he falls. Otherwise
the type of construction is the same. The fortunes of Romeo and Juliet
rise and culminate in their marriage (II. vi.), and then begin to
decline before the opposition of their houses, which, aided by
accidents, produces a catastrophe, but is thereupon converted into a
remorseful reconciliation. Hamlet's cause reaches its zenith in the
success of the play-scene (III. ii.). Thereafter the reaction makes way,
and he perishes through the plot of the King and Laertes. But they are
not allowed to survive their success.

The construction in the remaining Roman plays follows the same plan, but
in both plays (as in _Richard II._ and _Richard III._) it suffers from
the intractable nature of the historical material, and is also
influenced by other causes. In _Coriolanus_ the hero reaches the topmost
point of success when he is named consul (II. iii.), and the rest of the
play shows his decline and fall; but in this decline he attains again
for a time extraordinary power, and triumphs, in a sense, over his
original adversary, though he succumbs to another. In _Antony and
Cleopatra_ the advance of the hero's cause depends on his freeing
himself from the heroine, and he appears to have succeeded when he
becomes reconciled to Octavius and marries Octavia (III. ii.); but he
returns to Egypt and is gradually driven to his death, which involves
that of the heroine.

There remain two of the greatest of the tragedies, and in both of them a
certain difficulty will be felt. _King Lear_ alone among these plays has
a distinct double action. Besides this, it is impossible, I think, from
the point of view of construction, to regard the hero as the leading
figure. If we attempt to do so, we must either find the crisis in the
First Act (for after it Lear's course is downward), and this is absurd;
or else we must say that the usual movement is present but its direction
is reversed, the hero's cause first sinking to the lowest point (in the
Storm-scenes) and then rising again. But this also will not do; for
though his fortunes may be said to rise again for a time, they rise only
to fall once more to a catastrophe. The truth is, that after the First
Act, which is really filled by the exposition, Lear suffers but hardly
initiates action at all; and the right way to look at the matter, _from
the point of view of construction_, is to regard Goneril, Regan and
Edmund as the leading characters. It is they who, in the conflict,
initiate action. Their fortune mounts to the crisis, where the old King
is driven out into the storm and loses his reason, and where Gloster is
blinded and expelled from his home (III. vi. and vii.). Then the
counter-action begins to gather force, and their cause to decline; and,
although they win the battle, they are involved in the catastrophe which
they bring on Cordelia and Lear. Thus we may still find in _King Lear_
the usual scheme of an ascending and a descending movement of one side
in the conflict.

The case of _Othello_ is more peculiar. In its whole constructional
effect _Othello_ differs from the other tragedies, and the cause of this
difference is not hard to find, and will be mentioned presently. But
how, after it is found, are we to define the principle of the
construction? On the one hand the usual method seems to show itself.
Othello's fortune certainly advances in the early part of the play, and
it may be considered to reach its topmost point in the exquisite joy of
his reunion with Desdemona in Cyprus; while soon afterwards it begins to
turn, and then falls to the catastrophe. But the topmost point thus
comes very early (II. i.), and, moreover, is but faintly marked; indeed,
it is scarcely felt as a crisis at all. And, what is still more
significant, though reached by conflict, it is not reached by conflict
with the force which afterwards destroys it. Iago, in the early scenes,
is indeed shown to cherish a design against Othello, but it is not Iago
against whom he has at first to assert himself, but Brabantio; and Iago
does not even begin to poison his mind until the third scene of the
Third Act.

Can we then, on the other hand, following the precedent of _King Lear_,
and remembering the probable chronological juxtaposition of the two
plays, regard Iago as the leading figure from the point of view of
construction? This might at first seem the right view; for it is the
case that _Othello_ resembles _King Lear_ in having a hero more acted
upon than acting, or rather a hero driven to act by being acted upon.
But then, if Iago is taken as the leading figure, the usual mode of
construction is plainly abandoned, for there will nowhere be a crisis
followed by a descending movement. Iago's cause advances, at first
slowly and quietly, then rapidly, but it does nothing but advance until
the catastrophe swallows his dupe and him together. And this way of
regarding the action does positive violence, I think, to our natural
impressions of the earlier part of the play.

I think, therefore, that the usual scheme is so far followed that the
drama represents first the rise of the hero, and then his fall. But,
however this question may be decided, one striking peculiarity remains,
and is the cause of the unique effect of _Othello_. In the first half of
the play the main conflict is merely incubating; then it bursts into
life, and goes storming, without intermission or change of direction, to
its close. Now, in this peculiarity _Othello_ is quite unlike the other
tragedies; and in the consequent effect, which is that the second half
of the drama is immeasurably more exciting than the first, it is
approached only by _Antony and Cleopatra_. I shall therefore reserve it
for separate consideration, though in proceeding to speak further of
Shakespeare's treatment of the tragic conflict I shall have to mention
some devices which are used in _Othello_ as well as in the other
tragedies.

3

Shakespeare's general plan, we have seen, is to show one set of forces
advancing, in secret or open opposition to the other, to some decisive
success, and then driven downward to defeat by the reaction it provokes.
And the advantages of this plan, as seen in such a typical instance as
_Julius Caesar_, are manifest. It conveys the movement of the conflict
to the mind with great clearness and force. It helps to produce the
impression that in his decline and fall the doer's act is returning on
his own head. And, finally, as used by Shakespeare, it makes the first
half of the play intensely interesting and dramatic. Action which
effects a striking change in an existing situation is naturally watched
with keen interest; and this we find in some of these tragedies. And the
spectacle, which others exhibit, of a purpose forming itself and, in
spite of outward obstacles and often of inward resistance, forcing its
way onward to a happy consummation or a terrible deed, not only gives
scope to that psychological subtlety in which Shakespeare is scarcely
rivalled, but is also dramatic in the highest degree.

But when the crisis has been reached there come difficulties and
dangers, which, if we put Shakespeare for the moment out of mind, are
easily seen. An immediate and crushing counter-action would, no doubt,
sustain the interest, but it would precipitate the catastrophe, and
leave a feeling that there has been too long a preparation for a final
effect so brief. What seems necessary is a momentary pause, followed by
a counter-action which mounts at first slowly, and afterwards, as it
gathers force, with quickening speed. And yet the result of this
arrangement, it would seem, must be, for a time, a decided slackening of
tension. Nor is this the only difficulty. The persons who represent the
counter-action and now take the lead, are likely to be comparatively
unfamiliar, and therefore unwelcome, to the audience; and, even if
familiar, they are almost sure to be at first, if not permanently, less
interesting than those who figured in the ascending movement, and on
whom attention has been fixed. Possibly, too, their necessary prominence
may crowd the hero into the back-ground. Hence the point of danger in
this method of construction seems to lie in that section of the play
which follows the crisis and has not yet approached the catastrophe. And
this section will usually comprise the Fourth Act, together, in some
cases, with a part of the Third and a part of the Fifth.

Shakespeare was so masterly a playwright, and had so wonderful a power
of giving life to unpromising subjects, that to a large extent he was
able to surmount this difficulty. But illustrations of it are easily to
be found in his tragedies, and it is not always surmounted. In almost
all of them we are conscious of that momentary pause in the action,
though, as we shall see, it does not generally occur _immediately_ after
the crisis. Sometimes he allows himself to be driven to keep the hero
off the stage for a long time while the counter-action is rising;
Macbeth, Hamlet and Coriolanus during about 450 lines, Lear for nearly
500, Romeo for about 550 (it matters less here, because Juliet is quite
as important as Romeo). How can a drama in which this happens compete,
in its latter part, with _Othello_? And again, how can deliberations
between Octavius, Antony and Lepidus, between Malcolm and Macduff,
between the Capulets, between Laertes and the King, keep us at the
pitch, I do not say of the crisis, but even of the action which led up
to it? Good critics--writers who have criticised Shakespeare's dramas
from within, instead of applying to them some standard ready-made by
themselves or derived from dramas and a theatre of quite other kinds
than his--have held that some of his greatest tragedies fall off in the
Fourth Act, and that one or two never wholly recover themselves. And I
believe most readers would find, if they examined their impressions,
that to their minds _Julius Caesar_, _Hamlet_, _King Lear_ and _Macbeth_
have all a tendency to 'drag' in this section of the play, and that the
first and perhaps also the last of these four fail even in the
catastrophe to reach the height of the greatest scenes that have
preceded the Fourth Act. I will not ask how far these impressions are
justified. The difficulties in question will become clearer and will
gain in interest if we look rather at the means which have been employed
to meet them, and which certainly have in part, at least, overcome them.

(_a_) The first of these is always strikingly effective, sometimes
marvellously so. The crisis in which the ascending force reaches its
zenith is followed quickly, or even without the slightest pause, by a
reverse or counter-blow not less emphatic and in some cases even more
exciting. And the effect is to make us feel a sudden and tragic change
in the direction of the movement, which, after ascending more or less
gradually, now turns sharply downward. To the assassination of Caesar
(III. i.) succeeds the scene in the Forum (III. ii.), where Antony
carries the people away in a storm of sympathy with the dead man and of
fury against the conspirators. We have hardly realised their victory
before we are forced to anticipate their ultimate defeat and to take the
liveliest interest in their chief antagonist. In _Hamlet_ the thrilling
success of the play-scene (III. ii.) is met and undone at once by the
counter-stroke of Hamlet's failure to take vengeance (III. iii.) and his
misfortune in killing Polonius (III. iv.). Coriolanus has no sooner
gained the consulship than he is excited to frenzy by the tribunes and
driven into exile. On the marriage of Romeo follows immediately the
brawl which leads to Mercutio's death and the banishment of the hero
(II. vi. and III. i.). In all of these instances excepting that of
_Hamlet_ the scene of the counter-stroke is at least as exciting as that
of the crisis, perhaps more so. Most people, if asked to mention the
scene that occupies the _centre_ of the action in _Julius Caesar_ and in
_Coriolanus_, would mention the scenes of Antony's speech and
Coriolanus' banishment. Thus that apparently necessary pause in the
action does not, in any of these dramas, come directly after the crisis.
It is deferred; and in several cases it is by various devices deferred
for some little time; _e.g._ in _Romeo and Juliet_ till the hero has
left Verona, and Juliet is told that her marriage with Paris is to take
place 'next Thursday morn' (end of Act III.); in _Macbeth_ till the
murder of Duncan has been followed by that of Banquo, and this by the
banquet-scene. Hence the point where this pause occurs is very rarely
reached before the end of the Third Act.

(_b_) Either at this point, or in the scene of the counter-stroke which
precedes it, we sometimes find a peculiar effect. We are reminded of the
state of affairs in which the conflict began. The opening of _Julius
Caesar_ warned us that, among a people so unstable and so easily led
this way or that, the enterprise of Brutus is hopeless; the days of the
Republic are done. In the scene of Antony's speech we see this same
people again. At the beginning of _Antony and Cleopatra_ the hero is
about to leave Cleopatra for Rome. Where the play takes, as it were, a
fresh start after the crisis, he leaves Octavia for Egypt. In _Hamlet_,
when the counter-stroke succeeds to the crisis, the Ghost, who had
appeared in the opening scenes, reappears. Macbeth's action in the first
part of the tragedy followed on the prediction of the Witches who
promised him the throne. When the action moves forward again after the
banquet-scene the Witches appear once more, and make those fresh
promises which again drive him forward. This repetition of a first
effect produces a fateful feeling. It generally also stimulates
expectation as to the new movement about to begin. In _Macbeth_ the
scene is, in addition, of the greatest consequence from the purely
theatrical point of view.

(_c_) It has yet another function. It shows, in Macbeth's furious
irritability and purposeless savagery, the internal reaction which
accompanies the outward decline of his fortunes. And in other plays also
the exhibition of such inner changes forms a means by which interest is
sustained in this difficult section of a tragedy. There is no point in
_Hamlet_ where we feel more hopeless than that where the hero, having
missed his chance, moralises over his irresolution and determines to
cherish now only thoughts of blood, and then departs without an effort
for England. One purpose, again, of the quarrel-scene between Brutus and
Cassius (IV. iii), as also of the appearance of Caesar's ghost just
afterwards, is to indicate the inward changes. Otherwise the
introduction of this famous and wonderful scene can hardly be defended
on strictly dramatic grounds. No one would consent to part with it, and
it is invaluable in sustaining interest during the progress of the
reaction, but it is an episode, the removal of which would not affect
the actual sequence of events (unless we may hold that, but for the
emotion caused by the quarrel and reconciliation, Cassius would not have
allowed Brutus to overcome his objection to the fatal policy of offering
battle at Philippi).

(_d_) The quarrel-scene illustrates yet another favourite expedient. In
this section of a tragedy Shakespeare often appeals to an emotion
different from any of those excited in the first half of the play, and
so provides novelty and generally also relief. As a rule this new
emotion is pathetic; and the pathos is not terrible or lacerating, but,
even if painful, is accompanied by the sense of beauty and by an outflow
of admiration or affection, which come with an inexpressible sweetness
after the tension of the crisis and the first counter-stroke. So it is
with the reconciliation of Brutus and Cassius, and the arrival of the
news of Portia's death. The most famous instance of this effect is the
scene (IV. vii.) where Lear wakes from sleep and finds Cordelia bending
over him, perhaps the most tear-compelling passage in literature.
Another is the short scene (IV. ii.) in which the talk of Lady Macduff
and her little boy is interrupted by the entrance of the murderers, a
passage of touching beauty and heroism. Another is the introduction of
Ophelia in her madness (twice in different parts of IV. v.), where the
effect, though intensely pathetic, is beautiful and moving rather than
harrowing; and this effect is repeated in a softer tone in the
description of Ophelia's death (end of Act IV.). And in _Othello_ the
passage where pathos of _this_ kind reaches its height is certainly that
where Desdemona and Emilia converse, and the willow-song is sung, on the
eve of the catastrophe (IV. iii.).

(_e_) Sometimes, again, in this section of a tragedy we find humorous or
semi-humorous passages. On the whole such passages occur most frequently
in the early or middle part of the play, which naturally grows more
sombre as it nears the close; but their occasional introduction in the
Fourth Act, and even later, affords variety and relief, and also
heightens by contrast the tragic feelings. For example, there is a touch
of comedy in the conversation of Lady Macduff with her little boy.
Purely and delightfully humorous are the talk and behaviour of the
servants in that admirable scene where Coriolanus comes disguised in
mean apparel to the house of Aufidius (IV. v.); of a more mingled kind
is the effect of the discussion between Menenius and the sentinels in V.
ii.; and in the very middle of the supreme scene between the hero,
Volumnia and Virgilia, little Marcius makes us burst out laughing (V.
iii.) A little before the catastrophe in _Hamlet_ comes the grave-digger
passage, a passage ever welcome, but of a length which could hardly be
defended on purely dramatic grounds; and still later, occupying some
hundred and twenty lines of the very last scene, we have the chatter of
Osric with Hamlet's mockery of it. But the acme of audacity is reached
in _Antony and Cleopatra_, where, quite close to the end, the old
countryman who brings the asps to Cleopatra discourses on the virtues
and vices of the worm, and where his last words, 'Yes, forsooth: I wish
you joy o' the worm,' are followed, without the intervention of a line,
by the glorious speech,

     Give me my robe; put on my crown; I have
     Immortal longings in me....

In some of the instances of pathos or humour just mentioned we have been
brought to that part of the play which immediately precedes, or even
contains, the catastrophe. And I will add at once three remarks which
refer specially to this final section of a tragedy.

(_f_) In several plays Shakespeare makes here an appeal which in his own
time was evidently powerful: he introduces scenes of battle. This is the
case in _Richard III._, _Julius Caesar_, _King Lear_, _Macbeth_ and
_Antony and Cleopatra_. Richard, Brutus and Cassius, and Macbeth die on
the battlefield. Even if his use of this expedient were not enough to
show that battle-scenes were extremely popular in the Elizabethan
theatre, we know it from other sources. It is a curious comment on the
futility of our spectacular effects that in our theatre these scenes, in
which we strive after an 'illusion' of which the Elizabethans never
dreamt, produce comparatively little excitement, and to many spectators
are even somewhat distasteful.[22] And although some of them thrill the
imagination of the reader, they rarely, I think, quite satisfy the
_dramatic_ sense. Perhaps this is partly because a battle is not the
most favourable place for the exhibition of tragic character; and it is
worth notice that Brutus, Cassius and Antony do not die fighting, but
commit suicide after defeat. The actual battle, however, does make us
feel the greatness of Antony, and still more does it help us to regard
Richard and Macbeth in their day of doom as heroes, and to mingle
sympathy and enthusiastic admiration with desire for their defeat.

(_g_) In some of the tragedies, again, an expedient is used, which
Freytag has pointed out (though he sometimes finds it, I think, where it
is not really employed). Shakespeare very rarely makes the least attempt
to surprise by his catastrophes. They are felt to be inevitable, though
the precise way in which they will be brought about is not, of course,
foreseen. Occasionally, however, where we dread the catastrophe because
we love the hero, a moment occurs, just before it, in which a gleam of
false hope lights up the darkening scene; and, though we know it is
false, it affects us. Far the most remarkable example is to be found in
the final Act of _King Lear_. Here the victory of Edgar and the deaths
of Edmund and the two sisters have almost made us forget the design on
the lives of Lear and Cordelia. Even when we are reminded of it there is
still room for hope that Edgar, who rushes away to the prison, will be
in time to save them; and, however familiar we are with the play, the
sudden entrance of Lear, with Cordelia dead in his arms, comes on us
with a shock. Much slighter, but quite perceptible, is the effect of
Antony's victory on land, and of the last outburst of pride and joy as
he and Cleopatra meet (IV. viii.). The frank apology of Hamlet to
Laertes, their reconciliation, and a delusive appearance of quiet and
even confident firmness in the tone of the hero's conversation with
Horatio, almost blind us to our better knowledge, and give to the
catastrophe an added pain. Those in the audience who are ignorant of
_Macbeth_, and who take more simply than most readers now can do the
mysterious prophecies concerning Birnam Wood and the man not born of
woman, feel, I imagine, just before the catastrophe, a false fear that
the hero may yet escape.

(_h_) I will mention only one point more. In some cases Shakespeare
spreads the catastrophe out, so to speak, over a considerable space, and
thus shortens that difficult section which has to show the development
of the counter-action. This is possible only where there is, besides the
hero, some character who engages our interest in the highest degree, and
with whose fate his own is bound up. Thus the murder of Desdemona is
separated by some distance from the death of Othello. The most
impressive scene in _Macbeth_, after that of Duncan's murder, is the
sleep-walking scene; and it may truly, if not literally, be said to show
the catastrophe of Lady Macbeth. Yet it is the opening scene of the
Fifth Act, and a number of scenes in which Macbeth's fate is still
approaching intervene before the close. Finally, in _Antony and
Cleopatra_ the heroine equals the hero in importance, and here the death
of Antony actually occurs in the Fourth Act, and the whole of the Fifth
is devoted to Cleopatra.

       *       *       *       *       *

Let us now turn to _Othello_ and consider briefly its exceptional scheme
of construction. The advantage of this scheme is obvious. In the second
half of the tragedy there is no danger of 'dragging,' of any awkward
pause, any undue lowering of pitch, any need of scenes which, however
fine, are more or less episodic. The tension is extreme, and it is
relaxed only for brief intervals to permit of some slight relief. From
the moment when Iago begins to poison Othello's mind we hold our breath.
_Othello_ from this point onwards is certainly the most exciting of
Shakespeare's plays, unless possibly _Macbeth_ in its first part may be
held to rival it. And _Othello_ is such a masterpiece that we are
scarcely conscious of any disadvantage attending its method of
construction, and may even wonder why Shakespeare employed this
method--at any rate in its purity--in this tragedy alone. Nor is it any
answer to say that it would not elsewhere have suited his material. Even
if this be granted, how was it that he only once chose a story to which
this method was appropriate? To his eyes, or for his instinct, there
must have been some disadvantage in it. And dangers in it are in fact
not hard to see.

In the first place, where the conflict develops very slowly, or, as in
_Othello_, remains in a state of incubation during the first part of a
tragedy, that part cannot produce the tension proper to the
corresponding part of a tragedy like _Macbeth_, and may even run the
risk of being somewhat flat. This seems obvious, and it is none the less
true because in _Othello_ the difficulty is overcome. We may even see
that in _Othello_ a difficulty was felt. The First Act is full of stir,
but it is so because Shakespeare has filled it with a kind of
preliminary conflict between the hero and Brabantio,--a personage who
then vanishes from the stage. The long first scene of the Second Act is
largely occupied with mere conversations, artfully drawn out to
dimensions which can scarcely be considered essential to the plot. These
expedients are fully justified by their success, and nothing more
consummate in their way is to be found in Shakespeare than Othello's
speech to the Senate and Iago's two talks with Roderigo. But the fact
that Shakespeare can make a plan succeed does not show that the plan is,
abstractedly considered, a good plan; and if the scheme of construction
in _Othello_ were placed, in the shape of a mere outline, before a
play-wright ignorant of the actual drama, he would certainly, I believe,
feel grave misgivings about the first half of the play.

There is a second difficulty in the scheme. When the middle of the
tragedy is reached, the audience is not what it was at the beginning. It
has been attending for some time, and has been through a certain amount
of agitation. The extreme tension which now arises may therefore easily
tire and displease it, all the more if the matter which produces the
tension is very painful, if the catastrophe is not less so, and if the
limits of the remainder of the play (not to speak of any other
consideration) permit of very little relief. It is one thing to watch
the scene of Duncan's assassination at the beginning of the Second Act,
and another thing to watch the murder of Desdemona at the beginning of
the Fifth. If Shakespeare has wholly avoided this difficulty in
_Othello_, it is by treating the first part of the play in such a manner
that the sympathies excited are predominantly pleasant and therefore not
exhausting. The scene in the Council Chamber, and the scene of the
reunion at Cyprus, give almost unmixed happiness to the audience;
however repulsive Iago may be, the humour of his gulling of Roderigo is
agreeable; even the scene of Cassio's intoxication is not, on the whole,
painful. Hence we come to the great temptation-scene, where the conflict
emerges into life (III. iii.), with nerves unshaken and feelings much
fresher than those with which we greet the banquet-scene in _Macbeth_
(III. iv.), or the first of the storm-scenes in _King Lear_ (III. i.).
The same skill may be observed in _Antony and Cleopatra_, where, as we
saw, the second half of the tragedy is the more exciting. But, again,
the success due to Shakespeare's skill does not show that the scheme of
construction is free from a characteristic danger; and on the whole it
would appear to be best fitted for a plot which, though it may cause
painful agitation as it nears the end, actually ends with a solution
instead of a catastrophe.

But for Shakespeare's scanty use of this method there may have been a
deeper, though probably an unconscious, reason. The method suits a plot
based on intrigue. It may produce intense suspense. It may stir most
powerfully the tragic feelings of pity and fear. And it throws into
relief that aspect of tragedy in which great or beautiful lives seem
caught in the net of fate. But it is apt to be less favourable to the
exhibition of character, to show less clearly how an act returns upon
the agent, and to produce less strongly the impression of an inexorable
order working in the passions and actions of men, and labouring through
their agony and waste towards good. Now, it seems clear from his
tragedies that what appealed most to Shakespeare was this latter class
of effects. I do not ask here whether _Othello_ fails to produce, in the
same degree as the other tragedies, these impressions; but Shakespeare's
preference for them may have been one reason why he habitually chose a
scheme of construction which produces in the final Acts but little of
strained suspense, and presents the catastrophe as a thing foreseen and
following with a psychological and moral necessity on the action
exhibited in the first part of the tragedy.

4

The more minute details of construction cannot well be examined here,
and I will not pursue the subject further. But its discussion suggests a
question which will have occurred to some of my hearers. They may have
asked themselves whether I have not used the words 'art' and 'device'
and 'expedient' and 'method' too boldly, as though Shakespeare were a
conscious artist, and not rather a writer who constructed in obedience
to an extraordinary dramatic instinct, as he composed mainly by
inspiration. And a brief explanation on this head will enable me to
allude to a few more points, chiefly of construction, which are not too
technical for a lecture.

In speaking, for convenience, of devices and expedients, I did not
intend to imply that Shakespeare always deliberately aimed at the
effects which he produced. But _no_ artist always does this, and I see
no reason to doubt that Shakespeare often did it, or to suppose that his
method of constructing and composing differed, except in degree, from
that of the most 'conscious' of artists. The antithesis of art and
inspiration, though not meaningless, is often most misleading.
Inspiration is surely not incompatible with considerate workmanship. The
two may be severed, but they need not be so, and where a genuinely
poetic result is being produced they cannot be so. The glow of a first
conception must in some measure survive or rekindle itself in the work
of planning and executing; and what is called a technical expedient may
'come' to a man with as sudden a glory as a splendid image. Verse may be
easy and unpremeditated, as Milton says his was, and yet many a word in
it may be changed many a time, and the last change be more 'inspired'
than the original. The difference between poets in these matters is no
doubt considerable, and sometimes important, but it can only be a
difference of less and more. It is probable that Shakespeare often wrote
fluently, for Jonson (a better authority than Heminge and Condell) says
so; and for anything we can tell he may also have constructed with
unusual readiness. But we know that he revised and re-wrote (for
instance in _Love's Labour's Lost_ and _Romeo and Juliet_ and _Hamlet_);
it is almost impossible that he can have worked out the plots of his
best plays without much reflection and many experiments; and it appears
to me scarcely more possible to mistake the signs of deliberate care in
some of his famous speeches. If a 'conscious artist' means one who holds
his work away from him, scrutinises and judges it, and, if need be,
alters it and alters it till it comes as near satisfying him as he can
make it, I am sure that Shakespeare frequently employed such conscious
art. If it means, again, an artist who consciously aims at the effects
he produces, what ground have we for doubting that he frequently
employed such art, though probably less frequently than a good many
other poets?

But perhaps the notion of a 'conscious artist' in drama is that of one
who studies the theory of the art, and even writes with an eye to its
'rules.' And we know it was long a favourite idea that Shakespeare was
totally ignorant of the 'rules.' Yet this is quite incredible. The
rules referred to, such as they were, were not buried in Aristotle's
Greek nor even hidden away in Italian treatises. He could find pretty
well all of them in a book so current and famous as Sidney's _Defence
of Poetry_. Even if we suppose that he refused to open this book
(which is most unlikely), how could he possibly remain ignorant of the
rules in a society of actors and dramatists and amateurs who must have
been incessantly talking about plays and play-writing, and some of
whom were ardent champions of the rules and full of contempt for the
lawlessness of the popular drama? Who can doubt that at the Mermaid
Shakespeare heard from Jonson's lips much more censure of his offences
against 'art' than Jonson ever confided to Drummond or to paper? And
is it not most probable that those battles between the two which
Fuller imagines, were waged often on the field of dramatic criticism?
If Shakespeare, then, broke some of the 'rules,' it was not from
ignorance. Probably he refused, on grounds of art itself, to trouble
himself with rules derived from forms of drama long extinct. And it is
not unlikely that he was little interested in theory as such, and more
than likely that he was impatient of pedantic distinctions between
'pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical,
tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable or poem
unlimited.' But that would not prove that he never reflected on his
art, or could not explain, if he cared to, what _he_ thought would be
good general rules for the drama of his own time. He could give advice
about play-acting. Why should we suppose that he could not give advice
about play-making?

Still Shakespeare, though in some considerable degree a 'conscious'
artist, frequently sins against art; and if his sins were not due to
ignorance or inspiration, they must be accounted for otherwise. Neither
can there be much doubt about their causes (for they have more than one
cause), as we shall see if we take some illustrations of the defects
themselves.

Among these are not to be reckoned certain things which in dramas
written at the present time would rightly be counted defects. There are,
for example, in most Elizabethan plays peculiarities of construction
which would injure a play written for our stage but were perfectly
well-fitted for that very different stage,--a stage on which again some
of the best-constructed plays of our time would appear absurdly faulty.
Or take the charge of improbability. Shakespeare certainly has
improbabilities which are defects. They are most frequent in the winding
up of his comedies (and how many comedies are there in the world which
end satisfactorily?). But his improbabilities are rarely psychological,
and in some of his plays there occurs one kind of improbability which is
no defect, but simply a characteristic which has lost in our day much of
its former attraction. I mean that the story, in most of the comedies
and many of the tragedies of the Elizabethans, was _intended_ to be
strange and wonderful. These plays were tales of romance dramatised, and
they were meant in part to satisfy the same love of wonder to which the
romances appealed. It is no defect in the Arthurian legends, or the old
French romances, or many of the stories in the _Decameron_, that they
are improbable: it is a virtue. To criticise them as though they were of
the same species as a realistic novel, is, we should all say, merely
stupid. Is it anything else to criticise in the same way _Twelfth Night_
or _As You Like It_? And so, even when the difference between comedy and
tragedy is allowed for, the improbability of the opening of _King Lear_,
so often censured, is no defect. It is not out of character, it is only
extremely unusual and strange. But it was meant to be so; like the
marriage of the black Othello with Desdemona, the Venetian senator's
daughter.

To come then to real defects, (_a_) one may be found in places where
Shakespeare strings together a number of scenes, some very short, in
which the _dramatis personae_ are frequently changed; as though a
novelist were to tell his story in a succession of short chapters, in
which he flitted from one group of his characters to another. This
method shows itself here and there in the pure tragedies (_e.g._ in the
last Act of _Macbeth_), but it appears most decidedly where the
historical material was undramatic, as in the middle part of _Antony and
Cleopatra_. It was made possible by the absence of scenery, and
doubtless Shakespeare used it because it was the easiest way out of a
difficulty. But, considered abstractedly, it is a defective method, and,
even as used by Shakespeare, it sometimes reminds us of the merely
narrative arrangement common in plays before his time.

(_b_) We may take next the introduction or excessive development of
matter neither required by the plot nor essential to the exhibition of
character: _e.g._ the references in _Hamlet_ to theatre-quarrels of the
day, and the length of the player's speech and also of Hamlet's
directions to him respecting the delivery of the lines to be inserted in
the 'Murder of Gonzago.' All this was probably of great interest at the
time when _Hamlet_ was first presented; most of it we should be very
sorry to miss; some of it seems to bring us close to Shakespeare
himself; but who can defend it from the point of view of constructive
art?

(_c_) Again, we may look at Shakespeare's soliloquies. It will be agreed
that in listening to a soliloquy we ought never to feel that we are
being addressed. And in this respect, as in others, many of the
soliloquies are master-pieces. But certainly in some the purpose of
giving information lies bare, and in one or two the actor openly speaks
to the audience. Such faults are found chiefly in the early plays,
though there is a glaring instance at the end of Belarius's speech in
_Cymbeline_ (III. iii. 99 ff.), and even in the mature tragedies
something of this kind may be traced. Let anyone compare, for example,
Edmund's soliloquy in _King Lear_, I. ii., 'This is the excellent
foppery of the world,' with Edgar's in II. iii., and he will be
conscious that in the latter the purpose of giving information is
imperfectly disguised.[23]

(_d_) It cannot be denied, further, that in many of Shakespeare's plays,
if not in all, there are inconsistencies and contradictions, and also
that questions are suggested to the reader which it is impossible for
him to answer with certainty. For instance, some of the indications of
the lapse of time between Othello's marriage and the events of the later
Acts flatly contradict one another; and it is impossible to make out
whether Hamlet was at Court or at the University when his father was
murdered. But it should be noticed that often what seems a defect of
this latter kind is not really a defect. For instance, the difficulty
about Hamlet's age (even if it cannot be resolved by the text alone) did
not exist for Shakespeare's audience. The moment Burbage entered it must
have been clear whether the hero was twenty or thirty. And in like
manner many questions of dramatic interpretation which trouble us could
never have arisen when the plays were first produced, for the actor
would be instructed by the author how to render any critical and
possibly ambiguous passage. (I have heard it remarked, and the remark I
believe is just, that Shakespeare seems to have relied on such
instructions less than most of his contemporaries; one fact out of
several which might be adduced to prove that he did not regard his plays
as mere stage-dramas of the moment.)

(_e_) To turn to another field, the early critics were no doubt often
provokingly wrong when they censured the language of particular passages
in Shakespeare as obscure, inflated, tasteless, or 'pestered with
metaphors'; but they were surely right in the general statement that his
language often shows these faults. And this is a subject which later
criticism has never fairly faced and examined.

(_f_) Once more, to say that Shakespeare makes all his serious
characters talk alike,[24] and that he constantly speaks through the
mouths of his _dramatis personae_ without regard to their individual
natures, would be to exaggerate absurdly; but it is true that in his
earlier plays these faults are traceable in some degree, and even in
_Hamlet_ there are striking passages where dramatic appropriateness is
sacrificed to some other object. When Laertes speaks the lines
beginning,

     For nature, crescent, does not grow alone
     In thews and bulk,

who can help feeling that Shakespeare is speaking rather than Laertes?
Or when the player-king discourses for more than twenty lines on the
instability of human purpose, and when King Claudius afterwards insists
to Laertes on the same subject at almost equal length, who does not see
that Shakespeare, thinking but little of dramatic fitness, wishes in
part simply to write poetry, and partly to impress on the audience
thoughts which will help them to understand, not the player-king nor yet
King Claudius, but Hamlet himself, who, on his side,--and here quite in
character--has already enlarged on the same topic in the most famous of
his soliloquies?

(_g_) Lastly, like nearly all the dramatists of his day and of times
much earlier, Shakespeare was fond of 'gnomic' passages, and introduces
them probably not more freely than his readers like, but more freely
than, I suppose, a good play-wright now would care to do. These
passages, it may be observed, are frequently rhymed (_e.g._ _Othello_,
I. iii. 201 ff., II. i. 149 ff.). Sometimes they were printed in early
editions with inverted commas round them, as are in the First Quarto
Polonius's 'few precepts' to Laertes.

If now we ask whence defects like these arose, we shall observe that
some of them are shared by the majority of Shakespeare's contemporaries,
and abound in the dramas immediately preceding his time. They are
characteristics of an art still undeveloped, and, no doubt, were not
perceived to be defects. But though it is quite probable that in regard
to one or two kinds of imperfection (such as the superabundance of
'gnomic' passages) Shakespeare himself erred thus ignorantly, it is very
unlikely that in most cases he did so, unless in the first years of his
career of authorship. And certainly he never can have thought it
artistic to leave inconsistencies, obscurities, or passages of bombast
in his work. Most of the defects in his writings must be due to
indifference or want of care.

I do not say that all were so. In regard, for example, to his occasional
bombast and other errors of diction, it seems hardly doubtful that his
perception was sometimes at fault, and that, though he used the English
language like no one else, he had not that _sureness_ of taste in words
which has been shown by some much smaller writers. And it seems not
unlikely that here he suffered from his comparative want of
'learning,'--that is, of familiarity with the great writers of
antiquity. But nine-tenths of his defects are not, I believe, the errors
of an inspired genius, ignorant of art, but the sins of a great but
negligent artist. He was often, no doubt, over-worked and pressed for
time. He knew that the immense majority of his audience were incapable
of distinguishing between rough and finished work. He often felt the
degradation of having to live by pleasing them. Probably in hours of
depression he was quite indifferent to fame, and perhaps in another mood
the whole business of play-writing seemed to him a little thing. None of
these thoughts and feelings influenced him when his subject had caught
hold of him. To imagine that _then_ he 'winged his roving flight' for
'gain' or 'glory,' or wrote from any cause on earth but the necessity of
expression, with all its pains and raptures, is mere folly. He was
possessed: his mind must have been in a white heat: he worked, no doubt,
with the _furia_ of Michael Angelo. And if he did not succeed at
once--and how can even he have always done so?--he returned to the
matter again and again. Such things as the scenes of Duncan's murder or
Othello's temptation, such speeches as those of the Duke to Claudio and
of Claudio to his sister about death, were not composed in an hour and
tossed aside; and if they have defects, they have not what Shakespeare
thought defects. Nor is it possible that his astonishingly individual
conceptions of character can have been struck out at a heat: prolonged
and repeated thought must have gone to them. But of small
inconsistencies in the plot he was often quite careless. He seems to
have finished off some of his comedies with a hasty and even
contemptuous indifference, as if it mattered nothing how the people got
married, or even who married whom, so long as enough were married
somehow. And often, when he came to parts of his scheme that were
necessary but not interesting to him, he wrote with a slack hand, like a
craftsman of genius who knows that his natural gift and acquired skill
will turn out something more than good enough for his audience: wrote
probably fluently but certainly negligently, sometimes only half saying
what he meant, and sometimes saying the opposite, and now and then, when
passion was required, lapsing into bombast because he knew he must
heighten his style but would not take the trouble to inflame his
imagination. It may truly be said that what injures such passages is not
inspiration, but the want of it. But, as they are mostly passages where
no poet could expect to be inspired, it is even more true to say that
here Shakespeare lacked the conscience of the artist who is determined
to make everything as good as he can. Such poets as Milton, Pope,
Tennyson, habitually show this conscience. They left probably scarcely
anything that they felt they could improve. No one could dream of saying
that of Shakespeare.

Hence comes what is perhaps the chief difficulty in interpreting his
works. Where his power or art is fully exerted it really does resemble
that of nature. It organises and vitalises its product from the centre
outward to the minutest markings on the surface, so that when you turn
upon it the most searching light you can command, when you dissect it
and apply to it the test of a microscope, still you find in it nothing
formless, general or vague, but everywhere structure, character,
individuality. In this his great things, which seem to come whenever
they are wanted, have no companions in literature except the few
greatest things in Dante; and it is a fatal error to allow his
carelessness elsewhere to make one doubt whether here one is not seeking
more than can be found. It is very possible to look for subtlety in the
wrong places in Shakespeare, but in the right places it is not possible
to find too much. But then this characteristic, which is one source of
his endless attraction, is also a source of perplexity. For in those
parts of his plays which show him neither in his most intense nor in his
most negligent mood, we are often unable to decide whether something
that seems inconsistent, indistinct, feeble, exaggerated, is really so,
or whether it was definitely meant to be as it is, and has an intention
which we ought to be able to divine; whether, for example, we have
before us some unusual trait in character, some abnormal movement of
mind, only surprising to us because we understand so very much less of
human nature than Shakespeare did, or whether he wanted to get his work
done and made a slip, or in using an old play adopted hastily something
that would not square with his own conception, or even refused to
trouble himself with minutiae which we notice only because we study him,
but which nobody ever notices in a stage performance. We know well
enough what Shakespeare is doing when at the end of _Measure for
Measure_ he marries Isabella to the Duke--and a scandalous proceeding it
is; but who can ever feel sure that the doubts which vex him as to some
not unimportant points in _Hamlet_ are due to his own want of eyesight
or to Shakespeare's want of care?

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 16: The famous critics of the Romantic Revival seem to have
paid very little attention to this subject. Mr. R.G. Moulton has written
an interesting book on _Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist_ (1885). In
parts of my analysis I am much indebted to Gustav Freytag's _Technik des
Dramas_, a book which deserves to be much better known than it appears
to be to Englishmen interested in the drama. I may add, for the benefit
of classical scholars, that Freytag has a chapter on Sophocles. The
reader of his book will easily distinguish, if he cares to, the places
where I follow Freytag, those where I differ from him, and those where I
write in independence of him. I may add that in speaking of construction
I have thought it best to assume in my hearers no previous knowledge of
the subject; that I have not attempted to discuss how much of what is
said of Shakespeare would apply also to other dramatists; and that I
have illustrated from the tragedies generally, not only from the chosen
four.]

[Footnote 17: This word throughout the lecture bears the sense it has
here, which, of course, is not its usual dramatic sense.]

[Footnote 18: In the same way a comedy will consist of three parts,
showing the 'situation,' the 'complication' or 'entanglement,' and the
_dénouement_ or 'solution.']

[Footnote 19: It is possible, of course, to open the tragedy with the
conflict already begun, but Shakespeare never does so.]

[Footnote 20: When the subject comes from English history, and
especially when the play forms one of a series, some knowledge may be
assumed. So in _Richard III._ Even in _Richard II._ not a little
knowledge seems to be assumed, and this fact points to the existence of
a popular play on the earlier part of Richard's reign. Such a play
exists, though it is not clear that it is a genuine Elizabethan work.
See the _Jahrbuch d. deutschen Sh.-gesellschaft_ for 1899.]

[Footnote 21: This is one of several reasons why many people enjoy
reading him, who, on the whole, dislike reading plays. A main cause of
this very general dislike is that the reader has not a lively enough
imagination to carry him with pleasure through the exposition, though in
the theatre, where his imagination is helped, he would experience little
difficulty.]

[Footnote 22: The end of _Richard III._ is perhaps an exception.]

[Footnote 23: I do not discuss the general question of the justification
of soliloquy, for it concerns not Shakespeare only, but practically all
dramatists down to quite recent times. I will only remark that neither
soliloquy nor the use of verse can be condemned on the mere ground that
they are 'unnatural.' No dramatic language is 'natural'; _all_ dramatic
language is idealised. So that the question as to soliloquy must be one
as to the degree of idealisation and the balance of advantages and
disadvantages. (Since this lecture was written I have read some remarks
on Shakespeare's soliloquies to much the same effect by E. Kilian in the
_Jahrbuch d. deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft_ for 1903.)]

[Footnote 24: If by this we mean that these characters all speak what is
recognisably Shakespeare's style, of course it is true; but it is no
accusation. Nor does it follow that they all speak alike; and in fact
they are far from doing so.]

 

LECTURE III

SHAKESPEARE'S TRAGIC PERIOD--HAMLET

1

Before we come to-day to _Hamlet_, the first of our four tragedies, a
few remarks must be made on their probable place in Shakespeare's
literary career. But I shall say no more than seems necessary for our
restricted purpose, and, therefore, for the most part shall merely be
stating widely accepted results of investigation, without going into the
evidence on which they rest.[25]

Shakespeare's tragedies fall into two distinct groups, and these groups
are separated by a considerable interval. He wrote tragedy--pure, like
_Romeo and Juliet_; historical, like _Richard III._--in the early years
of his career of authorship, when he was also writing such comedies as
_Love's Labour's Lost_ and the _Midsummer-Night's Dream_. Then came a
time, lasting some half-dozen years, during which he composed the most
mature and humorous of his English History plays (the plays with
Falstaff in them), and the best of his romantic comedies (the plays with
Beatrice and Jaques and Viola in them). There are no tragedies belonging
to these half-dozen years, nor any dramas approaching tragedy. But now,
from about 1601 to about 1608, comes tragedy after tragedy--_Julius
Caesar_, _Hamlet_, _Othello_, _King Lear_, _Timon of Athens_, _Macbeth_,
_Antony and Cleopatra_ and _Coriolanus_; and their companions are plays
which cannot indeed be called tragedies, but certainly are not comedies
in the same sense as _As You Like It_ or the _Tempest_. These seven
years, accordingly, might, without much risk of misunderstanding, be
called Shakespeare's tragic period.[26] And after it he wrote no more
tragedies, but chiefly romances more serious and less sunny than _As You
Like It_, but not much less serene.

The existence of this distinct tragic period, of a time when the
dramatist seems to have been occupied almost exclusively with deep and
painful problems, has naturally helped to suggest the idea that the
'man' also, in these years of middle age, from thirty-seven to
forty-four, was heavily burdened in spirit; that Shakespeare turned to
tragedy not merely for change, or because he felt it to be the greatest
form of drama and felt himself equal to it, but also because the world
had come to look dark and terrible to him; and even that the railings of
Thersites and the maledictions of Timon express his own contempt and
hatred for mankind. Discussion of this large and difficult subject,
however, is not necessary to the dramatic appreciation of any of his
works, and I shall say nothing of it here, but shall pass on at once to
draw attention to certain stages and changes which may be observed
within the tragic period. For this purpose too it is needless to raise
any question as to the respective chronological positions of _Othello_,
_King Lear_ and _Macbeth_. What is important is also generally admitted:
that _Julius Caesar_ and _Hamlet_ precede these plays, and that _Antony
and Cleopatra_ and _Coriolanus_ follow them.[27]

If we consider the tragedies first on the side of their substance, we
find at once an obvious difference between the first two and the
remainder. Both Brutus and Hamlet are highly intellectual by nature and
reflective by habit. Both may even be called, in a popular sense,
philosophic; Brutus may be called so in a stricter sense. Each, being
also a 'good' man, shows accordingly, when placed in critical
circumstances, a sensitive and almost painful anxiety to do right. And
though they fail--of course in quite different ways--to deal
successfully with these circumstances, the failure in each case is
connected rather with their intellectual nature and reflective habit
than with any yielding to passion. Hence the name 'tragedy of thought,'
which Schlegel gave to _Hamlet_, may be given also, as in effect it has
been by Professor Dowden, to _Julius Caesar_. The later heroes, on the
other hand, Othello, Lear, Timon, Macbeth, Antony, Coriolanus, have, one
and all, passionate natures, and, speaking roughly, we may attribute the
tragic failure in each of these cases to passion. Partly for this
reason, the later plays are wilder and stormier than the first two. We
see a greater mass of human nature in commotion, and we see
Shakespeare's own powers exhibited on a larger scale. Finally,
examination would show that, in all these respects, the first tragedy,
_Julius Caesar_, is further removed from the later type than is the
second, _Hamlet_.

These two earlier works are both distinguished from most of the
succeeding tragedies in another though a kindred respect. Moral evil is
not so intently scrutinised or so fully displayed in them. In _Julius
Caesar_, we may almost say, everybody means well. In _Hamlet_, though we
have a villain, he is a small one. The murder which gives rise to the
action lies outside the play, and the centre of attention within the
play lies in the hero's efforts to do his duty. It seems clear that
Shakespeare's interest, since the early days when under Marlowe's
influence he wrote _Richard III._, has not been directed to the more
extreme or terrible forms of evil. But in the tragedies that follow
_Hamlet_ the presence of this interest is equally clear. In Iago, in the
'bad' people of _King Lear_, even in Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, human
nature assumes shapes which inspire not mere sadness or repulsion but
horror and dismay. If in _Timon_ no monstrous cruelty is done, we still
watch ingratitude and selfishness so blank that they provoke a loathing
we never felt for Claudius; and in this play and _King Lear_ we can
fancy that we hear at times the _saeva indignatio_, if not the despair,
of Swift. This prevalence of abnormal or appalling forms of evil, side
by side with vehement passion, is another reason why the convulsion
depicted in these tragedies seems to come from a deeper source, and to
be vaster in extent, than the conflict in the two earlier plays. And
here again _Julius Caesar_ is further removed than _Hamlet_ from
_Othello_, _King Lear_, and _Macbeth_.

But in regard to this second point of difference a reservation must be
made, on which I will speak a little more fully, because, unlike the
matter hitherto touched on, its necessity seems hardly to have been
recognised. _All_ of the later tragedies may be called tragedies of
passion, but not all of them display these extreme forms of evil.
Neither of the last two does so. Antony and Coriolanus are, from one
point of view, victims of passion; but the passion that ruins Antony
also exalts him, he touches the infinite in it; and the pride and
self-will of Coriolanus, though terrible in bulk, are scarcely so in
quality; there is nothing base in them, and the huge creature whom they
destroy is a noble, even a lovable, being. Nor does either of these
dramas, though the earlier depicts a corrupt civilisation, include even
among the minor characters anyone who can be called villainous or
horrible. Consider, finally, the impression left on us at the close of
each. It is remarkable that this impression, though very strong, can
scarcely be called purely tragic; or, if we call it so, at least the
feeling of reconciliation which mingles with the obviously tragic
emotions is here exceptionally well-marked. The death of Antony, it will
be remembered, comes before the opening of the Fifth Act. The death of
Cleopatra, which closes the play, is greeted by the reader with sympathy
and admiration, even with exultation at the thought that she has foiled
Octavius; and these feelings are heightened by the deaths of Charmian
and Iras, heroically faithful to their mistress, as Emilia was to hers.
In _Coriolanus_ the feeling of reconciliation is even stronger. The
whole interest towards the close has been concentrated on the question
whether the hero will persist in his revengeful design of storming and
burning his native city, or whether better feelings will at last
overpower his resentment and pride. He stands on the edge of a crime
beside which, at least in outward dreadfulness, the slaughter of an
individual looks insignificant. And when, at the sound of his mother's
voice and the sight of his wife and child, nature asserts itself and he
gives way, although we know he will lose his life, we care little for
that: he has saved his soul. Our relief, and our exultation in the power
of goodness, are so great that the actual catastrophe which follows and
mingles sadness with these feelings leaves them but little diminished,
and as we close the book we feel, it seems to me, more as we do at the
close of _Cymbeline_ than as we do at the close of _Othello_. In saying
this I do not in the least mean to criticise _Coriolanus_. It is a much
nobler play as it stands than it would have been if Shakespeare had made
the hero persist, and we had seen him amid the flaming ruins of Rome,
awaking suddenly to the enormity of his deed and taking vengeance on
himself; but that would surely have been an ending more strictly tragic
than the close of Shakespeare's play. Whether this close was simply due
to his unwillingness to contradict his historical authority on a point
of such magnitude we need not ask. In any case _Coriolanus_ is, in more
than an outward sense, the end of his tragic period. It marks the
transition to his latest works, in which the powers of repentance and
forgiveness charm to rest the tempest raised by error and guilt.

If we turn now from the substance of the tragedies to their style and
versification, we find on the whole a corresponding difference between
the earlier and the later. The usual assignment of _Julius Caesar_, and
even of _Hamlet_, to the end of Shakespeare's Second Period--the period
of _Henry V._--is based mainly, we saw, on considerations of form. The
general style of the serious parts of the last plays from English
history is one of full, noble and comparatively equable eloquence. The
'honey-tongued' sweetness and beauty of Shakespeare's early writing, as
seen in _Romeo and Juliet_ or the _Midsummer-Night's Dream_, remain; the
ease and lucidity remain; but there is an accession of force and weight.
We find no great change from this style when we come to _Julius
Caesar_,[28] which may be taken to mark its culmination. At this point
in Shakespeare's literary development he reaches, if the phrase may be
pardoned, a limited perfection. Neither thought on the one side, nor
expression on the other, seems to have any tendency to outrun or contend
with its fellow. We receive an impression of easy mastery and complete
harmony, but not so strong an impression of inner power bursting into
outer life. Shakespeare's style is perhaps nowhere else so free from
defects, and yet almost every one of his subsequent plays contains
writing which is greater. To speak familiarly, we feel in _Julius
Caesar_ that, although not even Shakespeare could better the style he
has chosen, he has not let himself go.

In reading _Hamlet_ we have no such feeling, and in many parts (for
there is in the writing of _Hamlet_ an unusual variety[29]) we are
conscious of a decided change. The style in these parts is more rapid
and vehement, less equable and less simple; and there is a change of the
same kind in the versification. But on the whole the _type_ is the same
as in _Julius Caesar_, and the resemblance of the two plays is decidedly
more marked than the difference. If Hamlet's soliloquies, considered
simply as compositions, show a great change from Jaques's speech, 'All
the world's a stage,' and even from the soliloquies of Brutus, yet
_Hamlet_ (for instance in the hero's interview with his mother) is like
_Julius Caesar_, and unlike the later tragedies, in the fulness of its
eloquence, and passages like the following belong quite definitely to
the style of the Second Period:

     _Mar._ It faded on the crowing of the cock.
     Some say that ever 'gainst that season comes
     Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated,
     The bird of dawning singeth all night long;
     And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad;
     The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike,
     No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,
     So hallow'd and so gracious is the time.

     _Hor._ So have I heard and do in part believe it.
     But, look, the morn, in russet mantle clad,
     Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastward hill.

This bewitching music is heard again in Hamlet's farewell to Horatio:

     If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,
     Absent thee from felicity awhile,
     And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
     To tell my story.

But after _Hamlet_ this music is heard no more. It is followed by a
music vaster and deeper, but not the same.

The changes observable in _Hamlet_ are afterwards, and gradually, so
greatly developed that Shakespeare's style and versification at last
become almost new things. It is extremely difficult to illustrate this
briefly in a manner to which no just exception can be taken, for it is
almost impossible to find in two plays passages bearing a sufficiently
close resemblance to one another in occasion and sentiment. But I will
venture to put by the first of those quotations from _Hamlet_ this from
_Macbeth_:

     _Dun._ This castle hath a pleasant seat; the air
     Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself
     Unto our gentle senses.

     _Ban._                 This guest of summer,
     The temple-haunting martlet, does approve,
     By his loved mansionry, that the heaven's breath
     Smells wooingly here: no jutty, frieze,
     Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird
     Hath made his pendent bed and procreant cradle;
     Where they most breed and haunt, I have observed,
     The air is delicate;

and by the second quotation from _Hamlet_ this from _Antony and
Cleopatra_:

     The miserable change now at my end
     Lament nor sorrow at; but please your thoughts
     In feeding them with those my former fortunes
     Wherein I lived, the greatest prince o' the world,
     The noblest; and do now not basely die,
     Not cowardly put off my helmet to
     My countryman,--a Roman by a Roman
     Valiantly vanquish'd. Now my spirit is going;
     I can no more.

It would be almost an impertinence to point out in detail how greatly
these two passages, and especially the second, differ in effect from
those in _Hamlet_, written perhaps five or six years earlier. The
versification, by the time we reach _Antony and Cleopatra_, has assumed
a new type; and although this change would appear comparatively slight
in a typical passage from _Othello_ or even from _King Lear_, its
approach through these plays to _Timon_ and _Macbeth_ can easily be
traced. It is accompanied by a similar change in diction and
construction. After _Hamlet_ the style, in the more emotional passages,
is heightened. It becomes grander, sometimes wilder, sometimes more
swelling, even tumid. It is also more concentrated, rapid, varied, and,
in construction, less regular, not seldom twisted or elliptical. It is,
therefore, not so easy and lucid, and in the more ordinary dialogue it
is sometimes involved and obscure, and from these and other causes
deficient in charm.[30] On the other hand, it is always full of life and
movement, and in great passages produces sudden, strange, electrifying
effects which are rarely found in earlier plays, and not so often even
in _Hamlet_. The more pervading effect of beauty gives place to what may
almost be called explosions of sublimity or pathos.

There is room for differences of taste and preference as regards the
style and versification of the end of Shakespeare's Second Period, and
those of the later tragedies and last romances. But readers who miss in
the latter the peculiar enchantment of the earlier will not deny that
the changes in form are in entire harmony with the inward changes. If
they object to passages where, to exaggerate a little, the sense has
rather to be discerned beyond the words than found in them, and if they
do not wholly enjoy the movement of so typical a speech as this,

     Yes, like enough, high-battled Caesar will
     Unstate his happiness, and be staged to the show,
     Against a sworder! I see men's judgements are
     A parcel of their fortunes; and things outward
     Do draw the inward quality after them,
     To suffer all alike. That he should dream,
     Knowing all measures, the full Caesar will
     Answer his emptiness! Caesar, thou hast subdued
     His judgement too,

they will admit that, in traversing the impatient throng of thoughts not
always completely embodied, their minds move through an astonishing
variety of ideas and experiences, and that a style less generally poetic
than that of _Hamlet_ is also a style more invariably dramatic. It may
be that, for the purposes of tragedy, the highest point was reached
during the progress of these changes, in the most critical passages of
_Othello_, _King Lear_ and _Macbeth_.[31]

2

Suppose you were to describe the plot of _Hamlet_ to a person quite
ignorant of the play, and suppose you were careful to tell your hearer
nothing about Hamlet's character, what impression would your sketch make
on him? Would he not exclaim: 'What a sensational story! Why, here are
some eight violent deaths, not to speak of adultery, a ghost, a mad
woman, and a fight in a grave! If I did not know that the play was
Shakespeare's, I should have thought it must have been one of those
early tragedies of blood and horror from which he is said to have
redeemed the stage'? And would he not then go on to ask: 'But why in the
world did not Hamlet obey the Ghost at once, and so save seven of those
eight lives?'

This exclamation and this question both show the same thing, that the
whole story turns upon the peculiar character of the hero. For without
this character the story would appear sensational and horrible; and yet
the actual _Hamlet_ is very far from being so, and even has a less
terrible effect than _Othello_, _King Lear_ or _Macbeth_. And again, if
we had no knowledge of this character, the story would hardly be
intelligible; it would at any rate at once suggest that wondering
question about the conduct of the hero; while the story of any of the
other three tragedies would sound plain enough and would raise no such
question. It is further very probable that the main change made by
Shakespeare in the story as already represented on the stage, lay in a
new conception of Hamlet's character and so of the cause of his delay.
And, lastly, when we examine the tragedy, we observe two things which
illustrate the same point. First, we find by the side of the hero no
other figure of tragic proportions, no one like Lady Macbeth or Iago, no
one even like Cordelia or Desdemona; so that, in Hamlet's absence, the
remaining characters could not yield a Shakespearean tragedy at all.
And, secondly, we find among them two, Laertes and Fortinbras, who are
evidently designed to throw the character of the hero into relief. Even
in the situations there is a curious parallelism; for Fortinbras, like
Hamlet, is the son of a king, lately dead, and succeeded by his brother;
and Laertes, like Hamlet, has a father slain, and feels bound to avenge
him. And with this parallelism in situation there is a strong contrast
in character; for both Fortinbras and Laertes possess in abundance the
very quality which the hero seems to lack, so that, as we read, we are
tempted to exclaim that either of them would have accomplished Hamlet's
task in a day. Naturally, then, the tragedy of _Hamlet_ with Hamlet left
out has become the symbol of extreme absurdity; while the character
itself has probably exerted a greater fascination, and certainly has
been the subject of more discussion, than any other in the whole
literature of the world.

Before, however, we approach the task of examining it, it is as well to
remind ourselves that the virtue of the play by no means wholly depends
on this most subtle creation. We are all aware of this, and if we were
not so the history of _Hamlet_, as a stage-play, might bring the fact
home to us. It is to-day the most popular of Shakespeare's tragedies on
our stage; and yet a large number, perhaps even the majority of the
spectators, though they may feel some mysterious attraction in the hero,
certainly do not question themselves about his character or the cause of
his delay, and would still find the play exceptionally effective, even
if he were an ordinary brave young man and the obstacles in his path
were purely external. And this has probably always been the case.
_Hamlet_ seems from the first to have been a favourite play; but until
late in the eighteenth century, I believe, scarcely a critic showed that
he perceived anything specially interesting in the character. Hanmer, in
1730, to be sure, remarks that 'there appears no reason at all in nature
why this young prince did not put the usurper to death as soon as
possible'; but it does not even cross his mind that this apparent
'absurdity' is odd and might possibly be due to some design on the part
of the poet. He simply explains the absurdity by observing that, if
Shakespeare had made the young man go 'naturally to work,' the play
would have come to an end at once! Johnson, in like manner, notices that
'Hamlet is, through the whole piece, rather an instrument than an
agent,' but it does not occur to him that this peculiar circumstance can
be anything but a defect in Shakespeare's management of the plot.
Seeing, they saw not. Henry Mackenzie, the author of _The Man of
Feeling_, was, it would seem, the first of our critics to feel the
'indescribable charm' of Hamlet, and to divine something of
Shakespeare's intention. 'We see a man,' he writes, 'who in other
circumstances would have exercised all the moral and social virtues,
placed in a situation in which even the amiable qualities of his mind
serve but to aggravate his distress and to perplex his conduct.'[32] How
significant is the fact (if it be the fact) that it was only when the
slowly rising sun of Romance began to flush the sky that the wonder,
beauty and pathos of this most marvellous of Shakespeare's creations
began to be visible! We do not know that they were perceived even in his
own day, and perhaps those are not wholly wrong who declare that this
creation, so far from being a characteristic product of the time, was a
vision of

                  the prophetic soul
     Of the wide world dreaming on things to come.

But the dramatic splendour of the whole tragedy is another matter, and
must have been manifest not only in Shakespeare's day but even in
Hanmer's.

It is indeed so obvious that I pass it by, and proceed at once to the
central question of Hamlet's character. And I believe time will be
saved, and a good deal of positive interpretation may be introduced, if,
without examining in detail any one theory, we first distinguish classes
or types of theory which appear to be in various ways and degrees
insufficient or mistaken. And we will confine our attention to sane
theories;--for on this subject, as on all questions relating to
Shakespeare, there are plenty of merely lunatic views: the view, for
example, that Hamlet, being a disguised woman in love with Horatio,
could hardly help seeming unkind to Ophelia; or the view that, being a
very clever and wicked young man who wanted to oust his innocent uncle
from the throne, he 'faked' the Ghost with this intent.

But, before we come to our types of theory, it is necessary to touch on
an idea, not unfrequently met with, which would make it vain labour to
discuss or propose any theory at all. It is sometimes said that Hamlet's
character is not only intricate but unintelligible. Now this statement
might mean something quite unobjectionable and even perhaps true and
important. It might mean that the character cannot be _wholly_
understood. As we saw, there may be questions which we cannot answer
with certainty now, because we have nothing but the text to guide us,
but which never arose for the spectators who saw _Hamlet_ acted in
Shakespeare's day; and we shall have to refer to such questions in these
lectures. Again, it may be held without any improbability that, from
carelessness or because he was engaged on this play for several years,
Shakespeare left inconsistencies in his exhibition of the character
which must prevent us from being certain of his ultimate meaning. Or,
possibly, we may be baffled because he has illustrated in it certain
strange facts of human nature, which he had noticed but of which we are
ignorant. But then all this would apply in some measure to other
characters in Shakespeare, and it is not this that is meant by the
statement that Hamlet is unintelligible. What is meant is that
Shakespeare _intended_ him to be so, because he himself was feeling
strongly, and wished his audience to feel strongly, what a mystery life
is, and how impossible it is for us to understand it. Now here, surely,
we have mere confusion of mind. The mysteriousness of life is one thing,
the psychological unintelligibility of a dramatic character is quite
another; and the second does not show the first, it shows only the
incapacity or folly of the dramatist. If it did show the first, it would
be very easy to surpass Shakespeare in producing a sense of mystery: we
should simply have to portray an absolutely nonsensical character. Of
course _Hamlet_ appeals powerfully to our sense of the mystery of life,
but so does _every_ good tragedy; and it does so not because the hero is
an enigma to us, but because, having a fair understanding of him, we
feel how strange it is that strength and weakness should be so mingled
in one soul, and that this soul should be doomed to such misery and
apparent failure.

(1) To come, then, to our typical views, we may lay it down, first, that
no theory will hold water which finds the cause of Hamlet's delay
merely, or mainly, or even to any considerable extent, in external
difficulties. Nothing is easier than to spin a plausible theory of this
kind. What, it may be asked,[33] was Hamlet to do when the Ghost had
left him with its commission of vengeance? The King was surrounded not
merely by courtiers but by a Swiss body-guard: how was Hamlet to get at
him? Was he then to accuse him publicly of the murder? If he did, what
would happen? How would he prove the charge? All that he had to offer in
proof was--a ghost-story! Others, to be sure, had seen the Ghost, but no
one else had heard its revelations. Obviously, then, even if the court
had been honest, instead of subservient and corrupt, it would have voted
Hamlet mad, or worse, and would have shut him up out of harm's way. He
could not see what to do, therefore, and so he waited. Then came the
actors, and at once with admirable promptness he arranged for the
play-scene, hoping that the King would betray his guilt to the whole
court. Unfortunately the King did not. It is true that immediately
afterwards Hamlet got his chance; for he found the King defenceless on
his knees. But what Hamlet wanted was not a private revenge, to be
followed by his own imprisonment or execution; it was public justice. So
he spared the King; and, as he unluckily killed Polonius just
afterwards, he had to consent to be despatched to England. But, on the
voyage there, he discovered the King's commission, ordering the King of
England to put him immediately to death; and, with this in his pocket,
he made his way back to Denmark. For now, he saw, the proof of the
King's attempt to murder him would procure belief also for the story of
the murder of his father. His enemy, however, was too quick for him, and
his public arraignment of that enemy was prevented by his own death.

A theory like this sounds very plausible--so long as you do not remember
the text. But no unsophisticated mind, fresh from the reading of
_Hamlet_, will accept it; and, as soon as we begin to probe it, fatal
objections arise in such numbers that I choose but a few, and indeed I
think the first of them is enough.

(_a_) From beginning to end of the play, Hamlet never makes the
slightest reference to any external difficulty. How is it possible to
explain this fact in conformity with the theory? For what conceivable
reason should Shakespeare conceal from us so carefully the key to the
problem?

(_b_) Not only does Hamlet fail to allude to such difficulties, but he
always assumes that he _can_ obey the Ghost,[34] and he once asserts
this in so many words ('Sith I have cause and will and strength and
means To do't,' IV. iv. 45).

(_c_) Again, why does Shakespeare exhibit Laertes quite easily raising
the people against the King? Why but to show how much more easily
Hamlet, whom the people loved, could have done the same thing, if that
was the plan he preferred?

(_d_) Again, Hamlet did _not_ plan the play-scene in the hope that the
King would betray his guilt to the court. He planned it, according to
his own account, in order to convince _himself_ by the King's agitation
that the Ghost had spoken the truth. This is perfectly clear from II.
ii. 625 ff. and from III. ii. 80 ff. Some readers are misled by the
words in the latter passage:

                     if his occulted guilt
     Do not itself unkennel in one speech,
     It is a damned ghost that we have seen.

The meaning obviously is, as the context shows, 'if his hidden guilt do
not betray itself _on occasion of_ one speech,' viz., the 'dozen or
sixteen lines' with which Hamlet has furnished the player, and of which
only six are delivered, because the King does not merely show his guilt
in his face (which was all Hamlet had hoped, III. ii. 90) but
rushes from the room.

It may be as well to add that, although Hamlet's own account of his
reason for arranging the play-scene may be questioned, it is impossible
to suppose that, if his real design had been to provoke an open
confession of guilt, he could have been unconscious of this design.

(_e_) Again, Hamlet never once talks, or shows a sign of thinking, of
the plan of bringing the King to public justice; he always talks of
using his 'sword' or his 'arm.' And this is so just as much after he has
returned to Denmark with the commission in his pocket as it was before
this event. When he has told Horatio the story of the voyage, he does
not say, 'Now I can convict him': he says, 'Now am I not justified in
using this arm?'

This class of theory, then, we must simply reject. But it suggests two
remarks. It is of course quite probable that, when Hamlet was 'thinking
too precisely on the event,' he was considering, among other things, the
question how he could avenge his father without sacrificing his own life
or freedom. And assuredly, also, he was anxious that his act of
vengeance should not be misconstrued, and would never have been content
to leave a 'wounded name' behind him. His dying words prove that.

(2) Assuming, now, that Hamlet's main difficulty--almost the whole of
his difficulty--was internal, I pass to views which, acknowledging this,
are still unsatisfactory because they isolate one element in his
character and situation and treat it as the whole.

According to the first of these typical views, Hamlet was restrained by
conscience or a moral scruple; he could not satisfy himself that it was
right to avenge his father.

This idea, like the first, can easily be made to look very plausible if
we vaguely imagine the circumstances without attending to the text. But
attention to the text is fatal to it. For, on the one hand, scarcely
anything can be produced in support of it, and, on the other hand, a
great deal can be produced in its disproof. To take the latter point
first, Hamlet, it is impossible to deny, habitually assumes, without any
questioning, that he _ought_ to avenge his father. Even when he doubts,
or thinks that he doubts, the honesty of the Ghost, he expresses no
doubt as to what his duty will be if the Ghost turns out honest: 'If he
but blench I know my course.' In the two soliloquies where he reviews
his position (II. ii., 'O what a rogue and peasant slave am I,'
and IV. iv., 'How all occasions do inform against me') he
reproaches himself bitterly for the neglect of his duty. When he
reflects on the possible causes of this neglect he never mentions among
them a moral scruple. When the Ghost appears in the Queen's chamber he
confesses, conscience-stricken, that, lapsed in time and passion, he has
let go by the acting of its command; but he does not plead that his
conscience stood in his way. The Ghost itself says that it comes to whet
his 'almost blunted purpose'; and conscience may unsettle a purpose but
does not blunt it. What natural explanation of all this can be given on
the conscience theory?

And now what can be set against this evidence? One solitary passage.[35]
Quite late, after Hamlet has narrated to Horatio the events of his
voyage, he asks him (V. ii. 63):

     Does it not, thinks't thee, stand me now upon--
     He that hath kill'd my king and whored my mother,
     Popp'd in between the election and my hopes,
     Thrown out his angle for my proper life,
     And with such cozenage--is't not perfect conscience
     To quit him with this arm? and is't not to be damn'd
     To let this canker of our nature come
     In further evil?

Here, certainly, is a question of conscience in the usual present sense
of the word; and, it may be said, does not this show that all along
Hamlet really has been deterred by moral scruples? But I ask first how,
in that case, the facts just adduced are to be explained: for they must
be explained, not ignored. Next, let the reader observe that even if
this passage did show that _one_ hindrance to Hamlet's action was his
conscience, it by no means follows that this was the sole or the chief
hindrance. And, thirdly, let him observe, and let him ask himself
whether the coincidence is a mere accident, that Hamlet is here almost
repeating the words he used in vain self-reproach some time before
(IV. iv. 56):

                             How stand I then,
     That have a father kill'd, a mother stain'd,
     Excitements of my reason and my blood,
     And let all sleep?

Is it not clear that he is speculating just as vainly now, and that this
question of conscience is but one of his many unconscious excuses for
delay? And, lastly, is it not so that Horatio takes it? He declines to
discuss that unreal question, and answers simply,

     It must be shortly known to him from England
     What is the issue of the business there.

In other words, 'Enough of this endless procrastination. What is wanted
is not reasons for the deed, but the deed itself.' What can be more
significant?

Perhaps, however, it may be answered: 'Your explanation of this passage
may be correct, and the facts you have mentioned do seem to be fatal to
the theory of conscience in its usual form. But there is another and
subtler theory of conscience. According to it, Hamlet, so far as his
explicit consciousness went, was sure that he ought to obey the Ghost;
but in the depths of his nature, and unknown to himself, there was a
moral repulsion to the deed. The conventional moral ideas of his time,
which he shared with the Ghost, told him plainly that he ought to avenge
his father; but a deeper conscience in him, which was in advance of his
time, contended with these explicit conventional ideas. It is because
this deeper conscience remains below the surface that he fails to
recognise it, and fancies he is hindered by cowardice or sloth or
passion or what not; but it emerges into light in that speech to
Horatio. And it is just because he has this nobler moral nature in him
that we admire and love him.'

Now I at once admit not only that this view is much more attractive and
more truly tragic than the ordinary conscience theory, but that it has
more verisimilitude. But I feel no doubt that it does not answer to
Shakespeare's meaning, and I will simply mention, out of many objections
to it, three which seem to be fatal. (_a_) If it answers to
Shakespeare's meaning, why in the world did he conceal that meaning
until the last Act? The facts adduced above seem to show beyond question
that, on the hypothesis, he did so. That he did so is surely next door
to incredible. In any case, it certainly requires an explanation, and
certainly has not received one. (_b_) Let us test the theory by
reference to a single important passage, that where Hamlet finds the
King at prayer and spares him. The reason Hamlet gives himself for
sparing the King is that, if he kills him now, he will send him to
heaven, whereas he desires to send him to hell. Now, this reason may be
an unconscious excuse, but is it believable that, if the real reason had
been the stirrings of his deeper conscience, _that_ could have masked
itself in the form of a desire to send his enemy's soul to hell? Is not
the idea quite ludicrous? (_c_) The theory requires us to suppose that,
when the Ghost enjoins Hamlet to avenge the murder of his father, it is
laying on him a duty which _we_ are to understand to be no duty but the
very reverse. And is not that supposition wholly contrary to the natural
impression which we all receive in reading the play? Surely it is clear
that, whatever we in the twentieth century may think about Hamlet's
duty, we are meant in the play to assume that he _ought_ to have obeyed
the Ghost.

The conscience theory, then, in either of its forms we must reject. But
it may remind us of points worth noting. In the first place, it is
certainly true that Hamlet, in spite of some appearances to the
contrary, was, as Goethe said, of a most moral nature, and had a great
anxiety to do right. In this anxiety he resembles Brutus, and it is
stronger in him than in any of the later heroes. And, secondly, it is
highly probable that in his interminable broodings the kind of paralysis
with which he was stricken masked itself in the shape of conscientious
scruples as well as in many other shapes. And, finally, in his shrinking
from the deed there was probably, together with much else, something
which may be called a moral, though not a conscientious, repulsion: I
mean a repugnance to the idea of falling suddenly on a man who could not
defend himself. This, so far as we can see, was the only plan that
Hamlet ever contemplated. There is no positive evidence in the play that
he regarded it with the aversion that any brave and honourable man, one
must suppose, would feel for it; but, as Hamlet certainly was brave and
honourable, we may presume that he did so.

(3) We come next to what may be called the sentimental view of Hamlet, a
view common both among his worshippers and among his defamers. Its germ
may perhaps be found in an unfortunate phrase of Goethe's (who of course
is not responsible for the whole view): 'a lovely, pure and most moral
nature, _without the strength of nerve which forms a hero_, sinks
beneath a burden which it cannot bear and must not cast away.' When this
idea is isolated, developed and popularised, we get the picture of a
graceful youth, sweet and sensitive, full of delicate sympathies and
yearning aspirations, shrinking from the touch of everything gross and
earthly; but frail and weak, a kind of Werther, with a face like
Shelley's and a voice like Mr. Tree's. And then we ask in tender pity,
how could such a man perform the terrible duty laid on him?

How, indeed! And what a foolish Ghost even to suggest such a duty! But
this conception, though not without its basis in certain beautiful
traits of Hamlet's nature, is utterly untrue. It is too kind to Hamlet
on one side, and it is quite unjust to him on another. The 'conscience'
theory at any rate leaves Hamlet a great nature which you can admire and
even revere. But for the 'sentimental' Hamlet you can feel only pity not
unmingled with contempt. Whatever else he is, he is no _hero_.

But consider the text. This shrinking, flower-like youth--how could he
possibly have done what we _see_ Hamlet do? What likeness to him is
there in the Hamlet who, summoned by the Ghost, bursts from his
terrified friends with the cry:

                          Unhand me, gentlemen!
     By heaven, I'll make a ghost of him that lets me;

the Hamlet who scarcely once speaks to the King without an insult, or to
Polonius without a gibe; the Hamlet who storms at Ophelia and speaks
daggers to his mother; the Hamlet who, hearing a cry behind the arras,
whips out his sword in an instant and runs the eavesdropper through; the
Hamlet who sends his 'school-fellows' to their death and never troubles
his head about them more; the Hamlet who is the first man to board a
pirate ship, and who fights with Laertes in the grave; the Hamlet of the
catastrophe, an omnipotent fate, before whom all the court stands
helpless, who, as the truth breaks upon him, rushes on the King, drives
his foil right through his body,[36] then seizes the poisoned cup and
forces it violently between the wretched man's lips, and in the throes
of death has force and fire enough to wrest the cup from Horatio's hand
('By heaven, I'll have it!') lest he should drink and die? This man, the
Hamlet of the play, is a heroic, terrible figure. He would have been
formidable to Othello or Macbeth. If the sentimental Hamlet had crossed
him, he would have hurled him from his path with one sweep of his arm.

This view, then, or any view that approaches it, is grossly unjust to
Hamlet, and turns tragedy into mere pathos. But, on the other side, it
is too kind to him. It ignores the hardness and cynicism which were
indeed no part of his nature, but yet, in this crisis of his life, are
indubitably present and painfully marked. His sternness, itself left out
of sight by this theory, is no defect; but he is much more than stern.
Polonius possibly deserved nothing better than the words addressed to
his corpse:

     Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell!
     I took thee for thy better: take thy fortune:
     Thou find'st to be too busy is some danger;

yet this was Ophelia's father, and, whatever he deserved, it pains us,
for Hamlet's own sake, to hear the words:

     This man shall set me packing:
     I'll lug the guts into the neighbour room.

There is the same insensibility in Hamlet's language about the fate of
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; and, observe, their deaths were not in the
least required by his purpose. Grant, again, that his cruelty to Ophelia
was partly due to misunderstanding, partly forced on him, partly
feigned; still one surely cannot altogether so account for it, and still
less can one so account for the disgusting and insulting grossness of
his language to her in the play-scene. I know this is said to be merely
an example of the custom of Shakespeare's time. But it is not so. It is
such language as you will find addressed to a woman by no other hero of
Shakespeare's, not even in that dreadful scene where Othello accuses
Desdemona. It is a great mistake to ignore these things, or to try to
soften the impression which they naturally make on one. That this
embitterment, callousness, grossness, brutality, should be induced on a
soul so pure and noble is profoundly tragic; and Shakespeare's business
was to show this tragedy, not to paint an ideally beautiful soul
unstained and undisturbed by the evil of the world and the anguish of
conscious failure.[37]

(4) There remains, finally, that class of view which may be named after
Schlegel and Coleridge. According to this, _Hamlet_ is the tragedy of
reflection. The cause of the hero's delay is irresolution; and the cause
of this irresolution is excess of the reflective or speculative habit of
mind. He has a general intention to obey the Ghost, but 'the native hue
of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought.' He is
'thought-sick.' 'The whole,' says Schlegel, 'is intended to show how a
calculating consideration which aims at exhausting, so far as human
foresight can, all the relations and possible consequences of a deed,
cripples[38] the power of acting.... Hamlet is a hypocrite towards
himself; his far-fetched scruples are often mere pretexts to cover his
want of determination.... He has no firm belief in himself or in
anything else.... He loses himself in labyrinths of thought.' So
Coleridge finds in Hamlet 'an almost enormous intellectual activity and
a proportionate aversion to real action consequent upon it' (the
aversion, that is to say, is consequent on the activity). Professor
Dowden objects to this view, very justly, that it neglects the emotional
side of Hamlet's character, 'which is quite as important as the
intellectual'; but, with this supplement, he appears on the whole to
adopt it. Hamlet, he says, 'loses a sense of fact because with him each
object and event transforms and expands itself into an idea.... He
cannot steadily keep alive within himself a sense of the importance of
any positive, limited thing,--a deed, for example.' And Professor Dowden
explains this condition by reference to Hamlet's life. 'When the play
opens he has reached the age of thirty years ... and he has received
culture of every kind except the culture of active life. During the
reign of the strong-willed elder Hamlet there was no call to action for
his meditative son. He has slipped on into years of full manhood still a
haunter of the university, a student of philosophies, an amateur in art,
a ponderer on the things of life and death, who has never formed a
resolution or executed a deed' (_Shakspere, his Mind and Art_, 4th ed.,
pp. 132, 133).

On the whole, the Schlegel-Coleridge theory (with or without Professor
Dowden's modification and amplification) is the most widely received
view of Hamlet's character. And with it we come at last into close
contact with the text of the play. It not only answers, in some
fundamental respects, to the general impression produced by the drama,
but it can be supported by Hamlet's own words in his soliloquies--such
words, for example, as those about the native hue of resolution, or
those about the craven scruple of thinking too precisely on the event.
It is confirmed, also, by the contrast between Hamlet on the one side
and Laertes and Fortinbras on the other; and, further, by the occurrence
of those words of the King to Laertes (IV. vii. 119 f.), which,
if they are not in character, are all the more important as showing what
was in Shakespeare's mind at the time:

                     that we would do
     We should do when we would; for this 'would' changes,
     And hath abatements and delays as many
     As there are tongues, are hands, are accidents;
     And then this 'should' is like a spendthrift sigh
     That hurts by easing.

And, lastly, even if the view itself does not suffice, the _description_
given by its adherents of Hamlet's state of mind, as we see him in the
last four Acts, is, on the whole and so far as it goes, a true
description. The energy of resolve is dissipated in an endless brooding
on the deed required. When he acts, his action does not proceed from
this deliberation and analysis, but is sudden and impulsive, evoked by
an emergency in which he has no time to think. And most of the reasons
he assigns for his procrastination are evidently not the true reasons,
but unconscious excuses.

Nevertheless this theory fails to satisfy. And it fails not merely in
this or that detail, but as a whole. We feel that its Hamlet does not
fully answer to our imaginative impression. He is not nearly so
inadequate to this impression as the sentimental Hamlet, but still we
feel he is inferior to Shakespeare's man and does him wrong. And when we
come to examine the theory we find that it is partial and leaves much
unexplained. I pass that by for the present, for we shall see, I
believe, that the theory is also positively misleading, and that in a
most important way. And of this I proceed to speak.

Hamlet's irresolution, or his aversion to real action, is, according to
the theory, the _direct_ result of 'an almost enormous intellectual
activity' in the way of 'a calculating consideration which attempts to
exhaust all the relations and possible consequences of a deed.' And this
again proceeds from an original one-sidedness of nature, strengthened by
habit, and, perhaps, by years of speculative inaction. The theory
describes, therefore, a man in certain respects like Coleridge himself,
on one side a man of genius, on the other side, the side of will,
deplorably weak, always procrastinating and avoiding unpleasant duties,
and often reproaching himself in vain; a man, observe, who at _any_ time
and in _any_ circumstances would be unequal to the task assigned to
Hamlet. And thus, I must maintain, it degrades Hamlet and travesties the
play. For Hamlet, according to all the indications in the text, was not
naturally or normally such a man, but rather, I venture to affirm, a man
who at any _other_ time and in any _other_ circumstances than those
presented would have been perfectly equal to his task; and it is, in
fact, the very cruelty of his fate that the crisis of his life comes on
him at the one moment when he cannot meet it, and when his highest
gifts, instead of helping him, conspire to paralyse him. This aspect of
the tragedy the theory quite misses; and it does so because it
misconceives the cause of that irresolution which, on the whole, it
truly describes. For the cause was not directly or mainly an habitual
excess of reflectiveness. The direct cause was a state of mind quite
abnormal and induced by special circumstances,--a state of profound
melancholy. Now, Hamlet's reflectiveness doubtless played a certain part
in the _production_ of that melancholy, and was thus one indirect
contributory cause of his irresolution. And, again, the melancholy, once
established, displayed, as one of its _symptoms_, an excessive
reflection on the required deed. But excess of reflection was not, as
the theory makes it, the _direct_ cause of the irresolution at all; nor
was it the _only_ indirect cause; and in the Hamlet of the last four
Acts it is to be considered rather a symptom of his state than a cause
of it.

These assertions may be too brief to be at once clear, but I hope they
will presently become so.

3

Let us first ask ourselves what we can gather from the play, immediately
or by inference, concerning Hamlet as he was just before his father's
death. And I begin by observing that the text does not bear out the idea
that he was one-sidedly reflective and indisposed to action. Nobody who
knew him seems to have noticed this weakness. Nobody regards him as a
mere scholar who has 'never formed a resolution or executed a deed.' In
a court which certainly would not much admire such a person he is the
observed of all observers. Though he has been disappointed of the throne
everyone shows him respect; and he is the favourite of the people, who
are not given to worship philosophers. Fortinbras, a sufficiently
practical man, considered that he was likely, had he been put on, to
have proved most royally. He has Hamlet borne by four captains 'like a
soldier' to his grave; and Ophelia says that Hamlet _was_ a soldier. If
he was fond of acting, an aesthetic pursuit, he was equally fond of
fencing, an athletic one: he practised it assiduously even in his worst
days.[39] So far as we can conjecture from what we see of him in those
bad days, he must normally have been charmingly frank, courteous and
kindly to everyone, of whatever rank, whom he liked or respected, but by
no means timid or deferential to others; indeed, one would gather that
he was rather the reverse, and also that he was apt to be decided and
even imperious if thwarted or interfered with. He must always have been
fearless,--in the play he appears insensible to fear of any ordinary
kind. And, finally, he must have been quick and impetuous in action; for
it is downright impossible that the man we see rushing after the Ghost,
killing Polonius, dealing with the King's commission on the ship,
boarding the pirate, leaping into the grave, executing his final
vengeance, could _ever_ have been shrinking or slow in an emergency.
Imagine Coleridge doing any of these things!

If we consider all this, how can we accept the notion that Hamlet's was
a weak and one-sided character? 'Oh, but he spent ten or twelve years at
a University!' Well, even if he did, it is possible to do that without
becoming the victim of excessive thought. But the statement that he did
rests upon a most insecure foundation.[40]

Where then are we to look for the seeds of danger?

(1) Trying to reconstruct from the Hamlet of the play, one would not
judge that his temperament was melancholy in the present sense of the
word; there seems nothing to show that; but one would judge that by
temperament he was inclined to nervous instability, to rapid and
perhaps extreme changes of feeling and mood, and that he was disposed to
be, for the time, absorbed in the feeling or mood that possessed him,
whether it were joyous or depressed. This temperament the Elizabethans
would have called melancholic; and Hamlet seems to be an example of it,
as Lear is of a temperament mixedly choleric and sanguine. And the
doctrine of temperaments was so familiar in Shakespeare's time--as
Burton, and earlier prose-writers, and many of the dramatists show--that
Shakespeare may quite well have given this temperament to Hamlet
consciously and deliberately. Of melancholy in its developed form, a
habit, not a mere temperament, he often speaks. He more than once laughs
at the passing and half-fictitious melancholy of youth and love; in Don
John in _Much Ado_ he had sketched the sour and surly melancholy of
discontent; in Jaques a whimsical self-pleasing melancholy; in Antonio
in the _Merchant of Venice_ a quiet but deep melancholy, for which
neither the victim nor his friends can assign any cause.[41] He gives to
Hamlet a temperament which would not develop into melancholy unless
under some exceptional strain, but which still involved a danger. In the
play we see the danger realised, and find a melancholy quite unlike any
that Shakespeare had as yet depicted, because the temperament of Hamlet
is quite different.

(2) Next, we cannot be mistaken in attributing to the Hamlet of earlier
days an exquisite sensibility, to which we may give the name 'moral,' if
that word is taken in the wide meaning it ought to bear. This, though
it suffers cruelly in later days, as we saw in criticising the
sentimental view of Hamlet, never deserts him; it makes all his
cynicism, grossness and hardness appear to us morbidities, and has an
inexpressibly attractive and pathetic effect. He had the soul of the
youthful poet as Shelley and Tennyson have described it, an unbounded
delight and faith in everything good and beautiful. We know this from
himself. The world for him was _herrlich wie am ersten Tag_--'this
goodly frame the earth, this most excellent canopy the air, this brave
o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire.'
And not nature only: 'What a piece of work is a man! how noble in
reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and
admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god!'
This is no commonplace to Hamlet; it is the language of a heart thrilled
with wonder and swelling into ecstasy.

Doubtless it was with the same eager enthusiasm he turned to those
around him. Where else in Shakespeare is there anything like Hamlet's
adoration of his father? The words melt into music whenever he speaks of
him. And, if there are no signs of any such feeling towards his mother,
though many signs of love, it is characteristic that he evidently never
entertained a suspicion of anything unworthy in her,--characteristic,
and significant of his tendency to see only what is good unless he is
forced to see the reverse. For we find this tendency elsewhere, and find
it going so far that we must call it a disposition to idealise, to see
something better than what is there, or at least to ignore deficiencies.
He says to Laertes, 'I loved you ever,' and he describes Laertes as a
'very noble youth,' which he was far from being. In his first greeting
of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, where his old self revives, we trace
the same affectionateness and readiness to take men at their best. His
love for Ophelia, too, which seems strange to some, is surely the most
natural thing in the world. He saw her innocence, simplicity and
sweetness, and it was like him to ask no more; and it is noticeable that
Horatio, though entirely worthy of his friendship, is, like Ophelia,
intellectually not remarkable. To the very end, however clouded, this
generous disposition, this 'free and open nature,' this unsuspiciousness
survive. They cost him his life; for the King knew them, and was sure
that he was too 'generous and free from all contriving' to 'peruse the
foils.' To the very end, his soul, however sick and tortured it may be,
answers instantaneously when good and evil are presented to it, loving
the one and hating the other. He is called a sceptic who has no firm
belief in anything, but he is never sceptical about _them_.

And the negative side of his idealism, the aversion to evil, is perhaps
even more developed in the hero of the tragedy than in the Hamlet of
earlier days. It is intensely characteristic. Nothing, I believe, is to
be found elsewhere in Shakespeare (unless in the rage of the
disillusioned idealist Timon) of quite the same kind as Hamlet's disgust
at his uncle's drunkenness, his loathing of his mother's sensuality, his
astonishment and horror at her shallowness, his contempt for everything
pretentious or false, his indifference to everything merely external.
This last characteristic appears in his choice of the friend of his
heart, and in a certain impatience of distinctions of rank or wealth.
When Horatio calls his father 'a goodly king,' he answers, surely with
an emphasis on 'man,'

     He was a man, take him for all in all,
     I shall not look upon his like again.

He will not listen to talk of Horatio being his 'servant.' When the
others speak of their 'duty' to him, he answers, 'Your love, as mine to
you.' He speaks to the actor precisely as he does to an honest courtier.
He is not in the least a revolutionary, but still, in effect, a king and
a beggar are all one to him. He cares for nothing but human worth, and
his pitilessness towards Polonius and Osric and his 'school-fellows' is
not wholly due to morbidity, but belongs in part to his original
character.

Now, in Hamlet's moral sensibility there undoubtedly lay a danger. Any
great shock that life might inflict on it would be felt with extreme
intensity. Such a shock might even produce tragic results. And, in fact,
_Hamlet_ deserves the title 'tragedy of moral idealism' quite as much as
the title 'tragedy of reflection.'

(3) With this temperament and this sensibility we find, lastly, in the
Hamlet of earlier days, as of later, intellectual genius. It is chiefly
this that makes him so different from all those about him, good and bad
alike, and hardly less different from most of Shakespeare's other
heroes. And this, though on the whole the most important trait in his
nature, is also so obvious and so famous that I need not dwell on it at
length. But against one prevalent misconception I must say a word of
warning. Hamlet's intellectual power is not a specific gift, like a
genius for music or mathematics or philosophy. It shows itself,
fitfully, in the affairs of life as unusual quickness of perception,
great agility in shifting the mental attitude, a striking rapidity and
fertility in resource; so that, when his natural belief in others does
not make him unwary, Hamlet easily sees through them and masters them,
and no one can be much less like the typical helpless dreamer. It shows
itself in conversation chiefly in the form of wit or humour; and, alike
in conversation and in soliloquy, it shows itself in the form of
imagination quite as much as in that of thought in the stricter sense.
Further, where it takes the latter shape, as it very often does, it is
not philosophic in the technical meaning of the word. There is really
nothing in the play to show that Hamlet ever was 'a student of
philosophies,' unless it be the famous lines which, comically enough,
exhibit this supposed victim of philosophy as its critic:

     There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
     Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.[42]

His philosophy, if the word is to be used, was, like Shakespeare's own,
the immediate product of the wondering and meditating mind; and such
thoughts as that celebrated one, 'There is nothing either good or bad
but thinking makes it so,' surely needed no special training to produce
them. Or does Portia's remark, 'Nothing is good without respect,'
_i.e._, out of relation, prove that she had studied metaphysics?

Still Hamlet had speculative genius without being a philosopher, just as
he had imaginative genius without being a poet. Doubtless in happier
days he was a close and constant observer of men and manners, noting his
results in those tables which he afterwards snatched from his breast to
make in wild irony his last note of all, that one may smile and smile
and be a villain. Again and again we remark that passion for
generalisation which so occupied him, for instance, in reflections
suggested by the King's drunkenness that he quite forgot what it was he
was waiting to meet upon the battlements. Doubtless, too, he was always
considering things, as Horatio thought, too curiously. There was a
necessity in his soul driving him to penetrate below the surface and to
question what others took for granted. That fixed habitual look which
the world wears for most men did not exist for him. He was for ever
unmaking his world and rebuilding it in thought, dissolving what to
others were solid facts, and discovering what to others were old truths.
There were no old truths for Hamlet. It is for Horatio a thing of course
that there's a divinity that shapes our ends, but for Hamlet it is a
discovery hardly won. And throughout this kingdom of the mind, where he
felt that man, who in action is only like an angel, is in apprehension
like a god, he moved (we must imagine) more than content, so that even
in his dark days he declares he could be bounded in a nutshell and yet
count himself a king of infinite space, were it not that he had bad
dreams.

If now we ask whether any special danger lurked _here_, how shall we
answer? We must answer, it seems to me, 'Some danger, no doubt, but,
granted the ordinary chances of life, not much.' For, in the first
place, that idea which so many critics quietly take for granted--the
idea that the gift and the habit of meditative and speculative thought
tend to produce irresolution in the affairs of life--would be found by
no means easy to verify. Can you verify it, for example, in the lives of
the philosophers, or again in the lives of men whom you have personally
known to be addicted to such speculation? I cannot. Of course,
individual peculiarities being set apart, absorption in _any_
intellectual interest, together with withdrawal from affairs, may make a
man slow and unskilful in affairs; and doubtless, individual
peculiarities being again set apart, a mere student is likely to be more
at a loss in a sudden and great practical emergency than a soldier or a
lawyer. But in all this there is no difference between a physicist, a
historian, and a philosopher; and again, slowness, want of skill, and
even helplessness are something totally different from the peculiar kind
of irresolution that Hamlet shows. The notion that speculative thinking
specially tends to produce _this_ is really a mere illusion.

In the second place, even if this notion were true, it has appeared that
Hamlet did _not_ live the life of a mere student, much less of a mere
dreamer, and that his nature was by no means simply or even one-sidedly
intellectual, but was healthily active. Hence, granted the ordinary
chances of life, there would seem to be no great danger in his
intellectual tendency and his habit of speculation; and I would go
further and say that there was nothing in them, taken alone, to unfit
him even for the extraordinary call that was made upon him. In fact, if
the message of the Ghost had come to him within a week of his father's
death, I see no reason to doubt that he would have acted on it as
decisively as Othello himself, though probably after a longer and more
anxious deliberation. And therefore the Schlegel-Coleridge view (apart
from its descriptive value) seems to me fatally untrue, for it implies
that Hamlet's procrastination was the normal response of an
over-speculative nature confronted with a difficult practical problem.

On the other hand, under conditions of a peculiar kind, Hamlet's
reflectiveness certainly might prove dangerous to him, and his genius
might even (to exaggerate a little) become his doom. Suppose that
violent shock to his moral being of which I spoke; and suppose that
under this shock, any possible action being denied to him, he began to
sink into melancholy; then, no doubt, his imaginative and generalising
habit of mind might extend the effects of this shock through his whole
being and mental world. And if, the state of melancholy being thus
deepened and fixed, a sudden demand for difficult and decisive action in
a matter connected with the melancholy arose, this state might well have
for one of its symptoms an endless and futile mental dissection of the
required deed. And, finally, the futility of this process, and the shame
of his delay, would further weaken him and enslave him to his melancholy
still more. Thus the speculative habit would be _one_ indirect cause of
the morbid state which hindered action; and it would also reappear in a
degenerate form as one of the _symptoms_ of this morbid state.

       *       *       *       *       *

Now this is what actually happens in the play. Turn to the first words
Hamlet utters when he is alone; turn, that is to say, to the place where
the author is likely to indicate his meaning most plainly. What do you
hear?

     O, that this too too solid flesh would melt,
     Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
     Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd
     His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!
     How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,
     Seem to me all the uses of this world!
     Fie on't! ah fie! 'tis an unweeded garden,
     That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
     Possess it merely.

Here are a sickness of life, and even a longing for death, so intense
that nothing stands between Hamlet and suicide except religious awe. And
what has caused them? The rest of the soliloquy so thrusts the answer
upon us that it might seem impossible to miss it. It was not his
father's death; that doubtless brought deep grief, but mere grief for
some one loved and lost does not make a noble spirit loathe the world as
a place full only of things rank and gross. It was not the vague
suspicion that we know Hamlet felt. Still less was it the loss of the
crown; for though the subserviency of the electors might well disgust
him, there is not a reference to the subject in the soliloquy, nor any
sign elsewhere that it greatly occupied his mind. It was the moral shock
of the sudden ghastly disclosure of his mother's true nature, falling on
him when his heart was aching with love, and his body doubtless was
weakened by sorrow. And it is essential, however disagreeable, to
realise the nature of this shock. It matters little here whether
Hamlet's age was twenty or thirty: in either case his mother was a
matron of mature years. All his life he had believed in her, we may be
sure, as such a son would. He had seen her not merely devoted to his
father, but hanging on him like a newly-wedded bride, hanging on him

     As if increase of appetite had grown
     By what it fed on.

He had seen her following his body 'like Niobe, all tears.' And then
within a month--'O God! a beast would have mourned longer'--she married
again, and married Hamlet's uncle, a man utterly contemptible and
loathsome in his eyes; married him in what to Hamlet was incestuous
wedlock;[43] married him not for any reason of state, nor even out of
old family affection, but in such a way that her son was forced to see
in her action not only an astounding shallowness of feeling but an
eruption of coarse sensuality, 'rank and gross,'[44] speeding post-haste
to its horrible delight. Is it possible to conceive an experience more
desolating to a man such as we have seen Hamlet to be; and is its result
anything but perfectly natural? It brings bewildered horror, then
loathing, then despair of human nature. His whole mind is poisoned. He
can never see Ophelia in the same light again: she is a woman, and his
mother is a woman: if she mentions the word 'brief' to him, the answer
drops from his lips like venom, 'as woman's love.' The last words of the
soliloquy, which is _wholly_ concerned with this subject, are,

     But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue!

He can do nothing. He must lock in his heart, not any suspicion of his
uncle that moves obscurely there, but that horror and loathing; and if
his heart ever found relief, it was when those feelings, mingled with
the love that never died out in him, poured themselves forth in a flood
as he stood in his mother's chamber beside his father's
marriage-bed.[45]

If we still wonder, and ask why the effect of this shock should be so
tremendous, let us observe that _now_ the conditions have arisen under
which Hamlet's highest endowments, his moral sensibility and his genius,
become his enemies. A nature morally blunter would have felt even so
dreadful a revelation less keenly. A slower and more limited and
positive mind might not have extended so widely through its world the
disgust and disbelief that have entered it. But Hamlet has the
imagination which, for evil as well as good, feels and sees all things
in one. Thought is the element of his life, and his thought is
infected. He cannot prevent himself from probing and lacerating the
wound in his soul. One idea, full of peril, holds him fast, and he cries
out in agony at it, but is impotent to free himself ('Must I remember?'
'Let me not think on't'). And when, with the fading of his passion, the
vividness of this idea abates, it does so only to leave behind a
boundless weariness and a sick longing for death.

And this is the time which his fate chooses. In this hour of uttermost
weakness, this sinking of his whole being towards annihilation, there
comes on him, bursting the bounds of the natural world with a shock of
astonishment and terror, the revelation of his mother's adultery and his
father's murder, and, with this, the demand on him, in the name of
everything dearest and most sacred, to arise and act. And for a moment,
though his brain reels and totters,[46] his soul leaps up in passion to
answer this demand. But it comes too late. It does but strike home the
last rivet in the melancholy which holds him bound.

     The time is out of joint! O cursed spite
     That ever I was born to set it right,--

so he mutters within an hour of the moment when he vowed to give his
life to the duty of revenge; and the rest of the story exhibits his vain
efforts to fulfil this duty, his unconscious self-excuses and unavailing
self-reproaches, and the tragic results of his delay.

4

'Melancholy,' I said, not dejection, nor yet insanity. That Hamlet was
not far from insanity is very probable. His adoption of the pretence of
madness may well have been due in part to fear of the reality; to an
instinct of self-preservation, a fore-feeling that the pretence would
enable him to give some utterance to the load that pressed on his heart
and brain, and a fear that he would be unable altogether to repress such
utterance. And if the pathologist calls his state melancholia, and even
proceeds to determine its species, I see nothing to object to in that; I
am grateful to him for emphasising the fact that Hamlet's melancholy was
no mere common depression of spirits; and I have no doubt that many
readers of the play would understand it better if they read an account
of melancholia in a work on mental diseases. If we like to use the word
'disease' loosely, Hamlet's condition may truly be called diseased. No
exertion of will could have dispelled it. Even if he had been able at
once to do the bidding of the Ghost he would doubtless have still
remained for some time under the cloud. It would be absurdly unjust to
call _Hamlet_ a study of melancholy, but it contains such a study.

But this melancholy is something very different from insanity, in
anything like the usual meaning of that word. No doubt it might develop
into insanity. The longing for death might become an irresistible
impulse to self-destruction; the disorder of feeling and will might
extend to sense and intellect; delusions might arise; and the man might
become, as we say, incapable and irresponsible. But Hamlet's melancholy
is some way from this condition. It is a totally different thing from
the madness which he feigns; and he never, when alone or in company with
Horatio alone, exhibits the signs of that madness. Nor is the dramatic
use of this melancholy, again, open to the objections which would justly
be made to the portrayal of an insanity which brought the hero to a
tragic end. The man who suffers as Hamlet suffers--and thousands go
about their business suffering thus in greater or less degree--is
considered irresponsible neither by other people nor by himself: he is
only too keenly conscious of his responsibility. He is therefore, so
far, quite capable of being a tragic agent, which an insane person, at
any rate according to Shakespeare's practice, is not.[47] And, finally,
Hamlet's state is not one which a healthy mind is unable sufficiently to
imagine. It is probably not further from average experience, nor more
difficult to realise, than the great tragic passions of Othello, Antony
or Macbeth.

Let me try to show now, briefly, how much this melancholy accounts for.

It accounts for the main fact, Hamlet's inaction. For the _immediate_
cause of that is simply that his habitual feeling is one of disgust at
life and everything in it, himself included,--a disgust which varies in
intensity, rising at times into a longing for death, sinking often into
weary apathy, but is never dispelled for more than brief intervals. Such
a state of feeling is inevitably adverse to _any_ kind of decided
action; the body is inert, the mind indifferent or worse; its response
is, 'it does not matter,' 'it is not worth while,' 'it is no good.' And
the action required of Hamlet is very exceptional. It is violent,
dangerous, difficult to accomplish perfectly, on one side repulsive to a
man of honour and sensitive feeling, on another side involved in a
certain mystery (here come in thus, in their subordinate place, various
causes of inaction assigned by various theories). These obstacles would
not suffice to prevent Hamlet from acting, if his state were normal; and
against them there operate, even in his morbid state, healthy and
positive feelings, love of his father, loathing of his uncle, desire of
revenge, desire to do duty. But the retarding motives acquire an
unnatural strength because they have an ally in something far stronger
than themselves, the melancholic disgust and apathy; while the healthy
motives, emerging with difficulty from the central mass of diseased
feeling, rapidly sink back into it and 'lose the name of action.' We
_see_ them doing so; and sometimes the process is quite simple, no
analytical reflection on the deed intervening between the outburst of
passion and the relapse into melancholy.[48] But this melancholy is
perfectly consistent also with that incessant dissection of the task
assigned, of which the Schlegel-Coleridge theory makes so much. For
those endless questions (as we may imagine them), 'Was I deceived by the
Ghost? How am I to do the deed? When? Where? What will be the
consequence of attempting it--success, my death, utter misunderstanding,
mere mischief to the State? Can it be right to do it, or noble to kill a
defenceless man? What is the good of doing it in such a world as
this?'--all this, and whatever else passed in a sickening round through
Hamlet's mind, was not the healthy and right deliberation of a man with
such a task, but otiose thinking hardly deserving the name of thought,
an unconscious weaving of pretexts for inaction, aimless tossings on a
sick bed, symptoms of melancholy which only increased it by deepening
self-contempt.

Again, (_a_) this state accounts for Hamlet's energy as well as for his
lassitude, those quick decided actions of his being the outcome of a
nature normally far from passive, now suddenly stimulated, and producing
healthy impulses which work themselves out before they have time to
subside. (_b_) It accounts for the evidently keen satisfaction which
some of these actions give to him. He arranges the play-scene with
lively interest, and exults in its success, not really because it brings
him nearer to his goal, but partly because it has hurt his enemy and
partly because it has demonstrated his own skill (III. ii.
286-304). He looks forward almost with glee to countermining the King's
designs in sending him away (III. iv. 209), and looks back with
obvious satisfaction, even with pride, to the address and vigour he
displayed on the voyage (V. ii. 1-55). These were not _the_
action on which his morbid self-feeling had centred; he feels in them
his old force, and escapes in them from his disgust. (_c_) It accounts
for the pleasure with which he meets old acquaintances, like his
'school-fellows' or the actors. The former observed (and we can observe)
in him a 'kind of joy' at first, though it is followed by 'much forcing
of his disposition' as he attempts to keep this joy and his courtesy
alive in spite of the misery which so soon returns upon him and the
suspicion he is forced to feel. (_d_) It accounts no less for the
painful features of his character as seen in the play, his almost savage
irritability on the one hand, and on the other his self-absorption, his
callousness, his insensibility to the fates of those whom he despises,
and to the feelings even of those whom he loves. These are frequent
symptoms of such melancholy, and (_e_) they sometimes alternate, as they
do in Hamlet, with bursts of transitory, almost hysterical, and quite
fruitless emotion. It is to these last (of which a part of the
soliloquy, 'O what a rogue,' gives a good example) that Hamlet alludes
when, to the Ghost, he speaks of himself as 'lapsed in _passion_,' and
it is doubtless partly his conscious weakness in regard to them that
inspires his praise of Horatio as a man who is not 'passion's
slave.'[49]

Finally, Hamlet's melancholy accounts for two things which seem to be
explained by nothing else. The first of these is his apathy or
'lethargy.' We are bound to consider the evidence which the text
supplies of this, though it is usual to ignore it. When Hamlet mentions,
as one possible cause of his inaction, his 'thinking too precisely on
the event,' he mentions another, 'bestial oblivion'; and the thing
against which he inveighs in the greater part of that soliloquy
(IV. iv.) is not the excess or the misuse of reason (which for
him here and always is god-like), but this _bestial_ oblivion or
'_dullness_,' this 'letting all _sleep_,' this allowing of heaven-sent
reason to 'fust unused':

                            What is a man,
     If his chief good and market of his time
     Be but to _sleep_ and feed? a _beast_, no more.[50]

So, in the soliloquy in II. ii. he accuses himself of being 'a
_dull_ and muddy-mettled rascal,' who 'peaks [mopes] like John-a-dreams,
unpregnant of his cause,' dully indifferent to his cause.[51] So, when
the Ghost appears to him the second time, he accuses himself of being
tardy and lapsed in _time_; and the Ghost speaks of his purpose being
almost _blunted_, and bids him not to _forget_ (cf. 'oblivion'). And so,
what is emphasised in those undramatic but significant speeches of the
player-king and of Claudius is the mere dying away of purpose or of
love.[52] Surely what all this points to is not a condition of excessive
but useless mental activity (indeed there is, in reality, curiously
little about that in the text), but rather one of dull, apathetic,
brooding gloom, in which Hamlet, so far from analysing his duty, is not
thinking of it at all, but for the time literally _forgets_ it. It seems
to me we are driven to think of Hamlet _chiefly_ thus during the long
time which elapsed between the appearance of the Ghost and the events
presented in the Second Act. The Ghost, in fact, had more reason than we
suppose at first for leaving with Hamlet as his parting injunction the
command, 'Remember me,' and for greeting him, on re-appearing, with the
command, 'Do not forget.'[53] These little things in Shakespeare are not
accidents.

The second trait which is fully explained only by Hamlet's melancholy is
his own inability to understand why he delays. This emerges in a marked
degree when an occasion like the player's emotion or the sight of
Fortinbras's army stings Hamlet into shame at his inaction. '_Why_,' he
asks himself in genuine bewilderment, 'do I linger? Can the cause be
cowardice? Can it be sloth? Can it be thinking too precisely of the
event? And does _that_ again mean cowardice? What is it that makes me
sit idle when I feel it is shameful to do so, and when I have _cause,
and will, and strength, and means_, to act?' A man irresolute merely
because he was considering a proposed action too minutely would not feel
this bewilderment. A man might feel it whose conscience secretly
condemned the act which his explicit consciousness approved; but we have
seen that there is no sufficient evidence to justify us in conceiving
Hamlet thus. These are the questions of a man stimulated for the moment
to shake off the weight of his melancholy, and, because for the moment
he is free from it, unable to understand the paralysing pressure which
it exerts at other times.

I have dwelt thus at length on Hamlet's melancholy because, from the
psychological point of view, it is the centre of the tragedy, and to
omit it from consideration or to underrate its intensity is to make
Shakespeare's story unintelligible. But the psychological point of view
is not equivalent to the tragic; and, having once given its due weight
to the fact of Hamlet's melancholy, we may freely admit, or rather may
be anxious to insist, that this pathological condition would excite but
little, if any, tragic interest if it were not the condition of a nature
distinguished by that speculative genius on which the Schlegel-Coleridge
type of theory lays stress. Such theories misinterpret the connection
between that genius and Hamlet's failure, but still it is this
connection which gives to his story its peculiar fascination and makes
it appear (if the phrase may be allowed) as the symbol of a tragic
mystery inherent in human nature. Wherever this mystery touches us,
wherever we are forced to feel the wonder and awe of man's godlike
'apprehension' and his 'thoughts that wander through eternity,' and at
the same time are forced to see him powerless in his petty sphere of
action, and powerless (it would appear) from the very divinity of his
thought, we remember Hamlet. And this is the reason why, in the great
ideal movement which began towards the close of the eighteenth century,
this tragedy acquired a position unique among Shakespeare's dramas, and
shared only by Goethe's _Faust_. It was not that _Hamlet_ is
Shakespeare's greatest tragedy or most perfect work of art; it was that
_Hamlet_ most brings home to us at once the sense of the soul's
infinity, and the sense of the doom which not only circumscribes that
infinity but appears to be its offspring.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 25: It may be convenient to some readers for the purposes of
this book to have by them a list of Shakespeare's plays, arranged in
periods. No such list, of course, can command general assent, but the
following (which does not throughout represent my own views) would
perhaps meet with as little objection from scholars as any other. For
some purposes the Third and Fourth Periods are better considered to be
one. Within each period the so-called Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies
are respectively grouped together; and for this reason, as well as for
others, the order within each period does not profess to be
chronological (_e.g._ it is not implied that the _Comedy of Errors_
preceded _1 Henry VI._ or _Titus Andronicus_). Where Shakespeare's
authorship of any considerable part of a play is questioned, widely or
by specially good authority, the name of the play is printed in italics.

_First Period_ (to 1595?).--Comedy of Errors, Love's Labour's Lost, Two
Gentlemen of Verona, Midsummer-Night's Dream; _1 Henry VI._, _2 Henry
VI._, _3 Henry VI._, Richard III., Richard II.; _Titus Andronicus_,
Romeo and Juliet.

_Second Period_ (to 1602?).--Merchant of Venice, All's Well (better in
Third Period?), _Taming of the Shrew_, Much Ado, As You Like it, Merry
Wives, Twelfth Night; King John, 1 Henry IV., 2 Henry IV., Henry V.;
Julius Caesar, Hamlet.

_Third Period_ (to 1608?).--Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure;
Othello, King Lear, _Timon of Athens_, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra,
Coriolanus.

_Fourth Period._--_Pericles_, Cymbeline, Winter's Tale, Tempest, _Two
Noble Kinsmen_, _Henry VIII._]

[Footnote 26: The reader will observe that this 'tragic period' would
not exactly coincide with the 'Third Period' of the division given in
the last note. For _Julius Caesar_ and _Hamlet_ fall in the Second
Period, not the Third; and I may add that, as _Pericles_ was entered at
Stationers' Hall in 1608 and published in 1609, it ought strictly to be
put in the Third Period--not the Fourth. The truth is that _Julius
Caesar_ and _Hamlet_ are given to the Second Period mainly on the ground
of style; while a Fourth Period is admitted, not mainly on that ground
(for there is no great difference here between _Antony_ and _Coriolanus_
on the one side and _Cymbeline_ and the _Tempest_ on the other), but
because of a difference in substance and spirit. If a Fourth Period were
admitted on grounds of form, it ought to begin with _Antony and
Cleopatra_.]

[Footnote 27: I should go perhaps too far if I said that it is generally
admitted that _Timon of Athens_ also precedes the two Roman tragedies;
but its precedence seems to me so nearly certain that I assume it in
what follows.]

[Footnote 28: That play, however, is distinguished, I think, by a
deliberate endeavour after a dignified and unadorned simplicity,--a
Roman simplicity perhaps.]

[Footnote 29: It is quite probable that this may arise in part from the
fact, which seems hardly doubtful, that the tragedy was revised, and in
places re-written, some little time after its first composition.]

[Footnote 30: This, if we confine ourselves to the tragedies, is, I
think, especially the case in _King Lear_ and _Timon_.]

[Footnote 31: The first, at any rate, of these three plays is, of
course, much nearer to _Hamlet_, especially in versification, than to
_Antony and Cleopatra_, in which Shakespeare's final style first shows
itself practically complete. It has been impossible, in the brief
treatment of this subject, to say what is required of the individual
plays.]

[Footnote 32: _The Mirror_, 18th April, 1780, quoted by Furness,
_Variorum Hamlet_, ii. 148. In the above remarks I have relied mainly on
Furness's collection of extracts from early critics.]

[Footnote 33: I do not profess to reproduce any one theory, and, still
less, to do justice to the ablest exponent of this kind of view, Werder
(_Vorlesungen über Hamlet_, 1875), who by no means regards Hamlet's
difficulties as _merely_ external.]

[Footnote 34: I give one instance. When he spares the King, he speaks of
killing him when he is drunk asleep, when he is in his rage, when he is
awake in bed, when he is gaming, as if there were in none of these cases
the least obstacle (III. iii. 89 ff.).]

[Footnote 35: It is surprising to find quoted, in support of the
conscience view, the line 'Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,'
and to observe the total misinterpretation of the soliloquy _To be or
not to be_, from which the line comes. In this soliloquy Hamlet is not
thinking of the duty laid upon him at all. He is debating the question
of suicide. No one oppressed by the ills of life, he says, would
continue to bear them if it were not for speculation about his possible
fortune in another life. And then, generalising, he says (what applies
to himself, no doubt, though he shows no consciousness of the fact) that
such speculation or reflection makes men hesitate and shrink like
cowards from great actions and enterprises. 'Conscience' does not mean
moral sense or scrupulosity, but this reflection on the _consequences_
of action. It is the same thing as the 'craven scruple of thinking too
precisely on the event' of the speech in IV. iv. As to this use
of 'conscience,' see Schmidt, _s.v._ and the parallels there given. The
_Oxford Dictionary_ also gives many examples of similar uses of
'conscience,' though it unfortunately lends its authority to the
misinterpretation criticised.]

[Footnote 36: The King does not die of the _poison_ on the foil, like
Laertes and Hamlet. They were wounded before he was, but they die after
him.]

[Footnote 37: I may add here a word on one small matter. It is
constantly asserted that Hamlet wept over the body of Polonius. Now, if
he did, it would make no difference to my point in the paragraph above;
but there is no warrant in the text for the assertion. It is based on
some words of the Queen (IV. i. 24), in answer to the King's
question, 'Where is he gone?':

     To draw apart the body he hath killed:
     O'er whom his very madness, like some ore
     Among a mineral of metals base,
     Shows itself pure; he weeps for what is done.

But the Queen, as was pointed out by Doering, is trying to screen her
son. She has already made the false statement that when Hamlet, crying,
'A rat! a rat!', ran his rapier through the arras, it was because he
heard _something stir_ there, whereas we know that what he heard was a
man's voice crying, 'What ho! help, help, help!' And in this scene she
has come straight from the interview with her son, terribly agitated,
shaken with 'sighs' and 'profound heaves,' in the night (line 30). Now
we know what Hamlet said to the body, and of the body, in that
interview; and there is assuredly no sound of tears in the voice that
said those things and others. The only sign of relenting is in the words
(III. iv. 171):

                         For this same lord,
     I do repent: but heaven hath pleased it so,
     To punish me with this and this with me,
     That I must be their scourge and minister.

His mother's statement, therefore, is almost certainly untrue, though it
may be to her credit. (It is just conceivable that Hamlet wept at
III. iv. 130, and that the Queen supposed he was weeping for
Polonius.)

Perhaps, however, he may have wept over Polonius's body afterwards?
Well, in the _next_ scene (IV. ii.) we see him _alone_ with the
body, and are therefore likely to witness his genuine feelings. And his
first words are, 'Safely stowed'!]

[Footnote 38: Not 'must cripple,' as the English translation has it.]

[Footnote 39: He says so to Horatio, whom he has no motive for deceiving
(V. ii. 218). His contrary statement (II. ii. 308) is made to
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.]

[Footnote 40: See Note B.]

[Footnote 41: The critics have laboured to find a cause, but it seems to
me Shakespeare simply meant to portray a pathological condition; and a
very touching picture he draws. Antonio's sadness, which he describes in
the opening lines of the play, would never drive him to suicide, but it
makes him indifferent to the issue of the trial, as all his speeches in
the trial-scene show.]

[Footnote 42: Of course 'your' does not mean Horatio's philosophy in
particular. 'Your' is used as the Gravedigger uses it when he says that
'your water is a sore decayer of your ... dead body.']

[Footnote 43: This aspect of the matter leaves _us_ comparatively
unaffected, but Shakespeare evidently means it to be of importance. The
Ghost speaks of it twice, and Hamlet thrice (once in his last furious
words to the King). If, as we must suppose, the marriage was universally
admitted to be incestuous, the corrupt acquiescence of the court and the
electors to the crown would naturally have a strong effect on Hamlet's
mind.]

[Footnote 44: It is most significant that the metaphor of this soliloquy
reappears in Hamlet's adjuration to his mother (III. iv. 150):

     Repent what's past; avoid what is to come;
     And do not spread the compost on the weeds
     To make them ranker.]

[Footnote 45: If the reader will now look at the only speech of Hamlet's
that precedes the soliloquy, and is more than one line in length--the
speech beginning 'Seems, madam! nay, it _is_'--he will understand what,
surely, when first we come to it, sounds very strange and almost
boastful. It is not, in effect, about Hamlet himself at all; it is about
his mother (I do not mean that it is intentionally and consciously so;
and still less that she understood it so).]

[Footnote 46: See Note D.]

[Footnote 47: See p. 13.]

[Footnote 48: _E.g._ in the transition, referred to above, from
desire for vengeance into the wish never to have been born; in
the soliloquy, 'O what a rogue'; in the scene at Ophelia's grave.
The Schlegel-Coleridge theory does not account for the psychological
movement in these passages.]

[Footnote 49: Hamlet's violence at Ophelia's grave, though probably
intentionally exaggerated, is another example of this want of
self-control. The Queen's description of him (V. i. 307),

               This is mere madness;
     And thus awhile the fit will work on him;
     Anon, as patient as the female dove,
     When that her golden couplets are disclosed,
     His silence will sit drooping.

may be true to life, though it is evidently prompted by anxiety to
excuse his violence on the ground of his insanity. On this passage see
further Note G.]

[Footnote 50: Throughout, I italicise to show the connection of ideas.]

[Footnote 51: Cf. _Measure for Measure_, IV. iv. 23, 'This deed
 ... makes me unpregnant and dull to all proceedings.']

[Footnote 52: III. ii. 196 ff., IV. vii. 111 ff.:
_e.g._,

     Purpose is but the slave to _memory_,
     Of violent birth but poor validity.]

[Footnote 53: So, before, he had said to him:

     And duller should'st thou be than the fat weed
     That roots itself in ease on Lethe wharf,
     Would'st thou not stir in this.

On Hamlet's soliloquy after the Ghost's disappearance see Note D.]

 

LECTURE IV

HAMLET

The only way, if there is any way, in which a conception of Hamlet's
character could be proved true, would be to show that it, and it alone,
explains all the relevant facts presented by the text of the drama. To
attempt such a demonstration here would obviously be impossible, even if
I felt certain of the interpretation of all the facts. But I propose now
to follow rapidly the course of the action in so far as it specially
illustrates the character, reserving for separate consideration one
important but particularly doubtful point.

1

We left Hamlet, at the close of the First Act, when he had just received
his charge from the spirit of his father; and his condition was vividly
depicted in the fact that, within an hour of receiving this charge, he
had relapsed into that weariness of life or longing for death which is
the immediate cause of his later inaction. When next we meet him, at the
opening of the Second Act, a considerable time has elapsed, apparently
as much as two months.[54] The ambassadors sent to the King of Norway
(I. ii. 27) are just returning. Laertes, whom we saw leaving Elsinore
(I. iii.), has been in Paris long enough to be in want of fresh
supplies. Ophelia has obeyed her father's command (given in I. iii.),
and has refused to receive Hamlet's visits or letters. What has Hamlet
done? He has put on an 'antic disposition' and established a reputation
for lunacy, with the result that his mother has become deeply anxious
about him, and with the further result that the King, who was formerly
so entirely at ease regarding him that he wished him to stay on at
Court, is now extremely uneasy and very desirous to discover the cause
of his 'transformation.' Hence Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have been
sent for, to cheer him by their company and to worm his secret out of
him; and they are just about to arrive. Beyond exciting thus the
apprehensions of his enemy Hamlet has done absolutely nothing; and, as
we have seen, we must imagine him during this long period sunk for the
most part in 'bestial oblivion' or fruitless broodings, and falling
deeper and deeper into the slough of despond.

Now he takes a further step. He suddenly appears unannounced in
Ophelia's chamber; and his appearance and behaviour are such as to
suggest both to Ophelia and to her father that his brain is turned by
disappointment in love. How far this step was due to the design of
creating a false impression as to the origin of his lunacy, how far to
other causes, is a difficult question; but such a design seems certainly
present. It succeeds, however, only in part; for, although Polonius is
fully convinced, the King is not so, and it is therefore arranged that
the two shall secretly witness a meeting between Ophelia and Hamlet.
Meanwhile Rosencrantz and Guildenstern arrive, and at the King's request
begin their attempts, easily foiled by Hamlet, to pluck out the heart of
his mystery. Then the players come to Court, and for a little while one
of Hamlet's old interests revives, and he is almost happy. But only for
a little while. The emotion shown by the player in reciting the speech
which tells of Hecuba's grief for her slaughtered husband awakes into
burning life the slumbering sense of duty and shame. He must act. With
the extreme rapidity which always distinguishes him in his healthier
moments, he conceives and arranges the plan of having the 'Murder of
Gonzago' played before the King and Queen, with the addition of a speech
written by himself for the occasion. Then, longing to be alone, he
abruptly dismisses his guests, and pours out a passion of self-reproach
for his delay, asks himself in bewilderment what can be its cause,
lashes himself into a fury of hatred against his foe, checks himself in
disgust at his futile emotion, and quiets his conscience for the moment
by trying to convince himself that he has doubts about the Ghost, and by
assuring himself that, if the King's behaviour at the play-scene shows
but a sign of guilt, he 'knows his course.'

Nothing, surely, can be clearer than the meaning of this famous
soliloquy. The doubt which appears at its close, instead of being the
natural conclusion of the preceding thoughts, is totally inconsistent
with them. For Hamlet's self-reproaches, his curses on his enemy, and
his perplexity about his own inaction, one and all imply his faith in
the identity and truthfulness of the Ghost. Evidently this sudden doubt,
of which there has not been the slightest trace before, is no genuine
doubt; it is an unconscious fiction, an excuse for his delay--and for
its continuance.

A night passes, and the day that follows it brings the crisis. First
takes place that interview from which the King is to learn whether
disappointed love is really the cause of his nephew's lunacy. Hamlet is
sent for; poor Ophelia is told to walk up and down, reading her
prayer-book; Polonius and the King conceal themselves behind the arras.
And Hamlet enters, so deeply absorbed in thought that for some time he
supposes himself to be alone. What is he thinking of? 'The Murder of
Gonzago,' which is to be played in a few hours, and on which everything
depends? Not at all. He is meditating on suicide; and he finds that what
stands in the way of it, and counterbalances its infinite attraction, is
not any thought of a sacred unaccomplished duty, but the doubt, quite
irrelevant to that issue, whether it is not ignoble in the mind to end
its misery, and, still more, whether death _would_ end it. Hamlet, that
is to say, is here, in effect, precisely where he was at the time of his
first soliloquy ('O that this too too solid flesh would melt') two
months ago, before ever he heard of his father's murder.[55] His
reflections have no reference to this particular moment; they represent
that habitual weariness of life with which his passing outbursts of
emotion or energy are contrasted. What can be more significant than the
fact that he is sunk in these reflections on the very day which is to
determine for him the truthfulness of the Ghost? And how is it possible
for us to hope that, if that truthfulness should be established, Hamlet
will be any nearer to his revenge?[56]

His interview with Ophelia follows; and its result shows that his delay
is becoming most dangerous to himself. The King is satisfied that,
whatever else may be the hidden cause of Hamlet's madness, it is not
love. He is by no means certain even that Hamlet is mad at all. He has
heard that infuriated threat, 'I say, we will have no more marriages;
those that are married, all but one, shall live; the rest shall keep as
they are.' He is thoroughly alarmed. He at any rate will not delay. On
the spot he determines to send Hamlet to England. But, as Polonius is
present, we do not learn at once the meaning of this purpose.

Evening comes. The approach of the play-scene raises Hamlet's spirits.
He is in his element. He feels that he is doing _something_ towards his
end, striking a stroke, but a stroke of intellect. In his instructions
to the actor on the delivery of the inserted speech, and again in his
conversation with Horatio just before the entry of the Court, we see the
true Hamlet, the Hamlet of the days before his father's death. But how
characteristic it is that he appears quite as anxious that his speech
should not be ranted as that Horatio should observe its effect upon the
King! This trait appears again even at that thrilling moment when the
actor is just going to deliver the speech. Hamlet sees him beginning to
frown and glare like the conventional stage-murderer, and calls to him
impatiently, 'Leave thy damnable faces and begin!'[57]

Hamlet's device proves a triumph far more complete than he had dared to
expect. He had thought the King might 'blench,' but he does much more.
When only six of the 'dozen or sixteen lines' have been spoken he starts
to his feet and rushes from the hall, followed by the whole dismayed
Court. In the elation of success--an elation at first almost
hysterical--Hamlet treats Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who are sent to
him, with undisguised contempt. Left to himself, he declares that now he
could

                   drink hot blood,
     And do such bitter business as the day
     Would quake to look on.

He has been sent for by his mother, and is going to her chamber; and so
vehement and revengeful is his mood that he actually fancies himself in
danger of using daggers to her as well as speaking them.[58]

In this mood, on his way to his mother's chamber, he comes upon the
King, alone, kneeling, conscience-stricken and attempting to pray. His
enemy is delivered into his hands.

     Now might I do it pat, now he is praying:
     And now I'll do it: and so he goes to heaven:
     And so am I revenged.[59] That would be scanned.

He scans it; and the sword that he drew at the words, 'And now I'll do
it,' is thrust back into its sheath. If he killed the villain now he
would send his soul to heaven; and he would fain kill soul as well as
body.

That this again is an unconscious excuse for delay is now pretty
generally agreed, and it is needless to describe again the state of mind
which, on the view explained in our last lecture, is the real cause of
Hamlet's failure here. The first five words he utters, 'Now might I do
it,' show that he has no effective _desire_ to 'do it'; and in the
little sentences that follow, and the long pauses between them, the
endeavour at a resolution, and the sickening return of melancholic
paralysis, however difficult a task they set to the actor, are plain
enough to a reader. And any reader who may retain a doubt should observe
the fact that, when the Ghost reappears, Hamlet does not think of
justifying his delay by the plea that he was waiting for a more perfect
vengeance. But in one point the great majority of critics, I think, go
astray. The feeling of intense hatred which Hamlet expresses is not the
cause of his sparing the King, and in his heart he knows this; but it
does not at all follow that this feeling is unreal. All the evidence
afforded by the play goes to show that it is perfectly genuine, and I
see no reason whatever to doubt that Hamlet would have been very sorry
to send his father's murderer to heaven, nor much to doubt that he would
have been glad to send him to perdition. The reason for refusing to
accept his own version of his motive in sparing Claudius is not that his
sentiments are horrible, but that elsewhere, and also in the opening of
his speech here, we can see that his reluctance to act is due to other
causes.

The incident of the sparing of the King is contrived with extraordinary
dramatic insight. On the one side we feel that the opportunity was
perfect. Hamlet could not possibly any longer tell himself that he had
no certainty as to his uncle's guilt. And the external conditions were
most favourable; for the King's remarkable behaviour at the play-scene
would have supplied a damning confirmation of the story Hamlet had to
tell about the Ghost. Even now, probably, in a Court so corrupt as that
of Elsinore, he could not with perfect security have begun by charging
the King with the murder; but he could quite safely have killed him
first and given his justification afterwards, especially as he would
certainly have had on his side the people, who loved him and despised
Claudius. On the other hand, Shakespeare has taken care to give this
perfect opportunity so repulsive a character that we can hardly bring
ourselves to wish that the hero should accept it. One of his minor
difficulties, we have seen, probably was that he seemed to be required
to attack a defenceless man; and here this difficulty is at its maximum.

This incident is, again, the turning-point of the tragedy. So far,
Hamlet's delay, though it is endangering his freedom and his life, has
done no irreparable harm; but his failure here is the cause of all the
disasters that follow. In sparing the King, he sacrifices Polonius,
Ophelia, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Laertes, the Queen and himself.
This central significance of the passage is dramatically indicated in
the following scene by the reappearance of the Ghost and the repetition
of its charge.

Polonius is the first to fall. The old courtier, whose vanity would not
allow him to confess that his diagnosis of Hamlet's lunacy was mistaken,
had suggested that, after the theatricals, the Queen should endeavour in
a private interview with her son to penetrate the mystery, while he
himself would repeat his favourite part of eaves-dropper (III. i. 184
ff.). It has now become quite imperative that the Prince should be
brought to disclose his secret; for his choice of the 'Murder of
Gonzago,' and perhaps his conduct during the performance, have shown a
spirit of exaggerated hostility against the King which has excited
general alarm. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern discourse to Claudius on the
extreme importance of his preserving his invaluable life, as though
Hamlet's insanity had now clearly shown itself to be homicidal.[60]
When, then, at the opening of the interview between Hamlet and his
mother, the son, instead of listening to her remonstrances, roughly
assumes the offensive, she becomes alarmed; and when, on her attempting
to leave the room, he takes her by the arm and forces her to sit down,
she is terrified, cries out, 'Thou wilt not murder me?' and screams for
help. Polonius, behind the arras, echoes her call; and in a moment
Hamlet, hoping the concealed person is the King, runs the old man
through the body.

Evidently this act is intended to stand in sharp contrast with Hamlet's
sparing of his enemy. The King would have been just as defenceless
behind the arras as he had been on his knees; but here Hamlet is already
excited and in action, and the chance comes to him so suddenly that he
has no time to 'scan' it. It is a minor consideration, but still for the
dramatist not unimportant, that the audience would wholly sympathise
with Hamlet's attempt here, as directed against an enemy who is lurking
to entrap him, instead of being engaged in a business which perhaps to
the bulk of the audience then, as now, seemed to have a 'relish of
salvation in't.'

We notice in Hamlet, at the opening of this interview, something of the
excited levity which followed the _dénouement_ of the play-scene. The
death of Polonius sobers him; and in the remainder of the interview he
shows, together with some traces of his morbid state, the peculiar
beauty and nobility of his nature. His chief desire is not by any means
to ensure his mother's silent acquiescence in his design of revenge; it
is to save her soul. And while the rough work of vengeance is repugnant
to him, he is at home in this higher work. Here that fatal feeling, 'it
is no matter,' never shows itself. No father-confessor could be more
selflessly set upon his end of redeeming a fellow-creature from
degradation, more stern or pitiless in denouncing the sin, or more eager
to welcome the first token of repentance. There is something infinitely
beautiful in that sudden sunshine of faith and love which breaks out
when, at the Queen's surrender,

     O Hamlet, thou hast cleft my heart in twain,

he answers,

     O throw away the worser part of it,
     And live the purer with the other half.

The truth is that, though Hamlet hates his uncle and acknowledges the
duty of vengeance, his whole heart is never in this feeling or this
task; but his whole heart is in his horror at his mother's fall and in
his longing to raise her. The former of these feelings was the
inspiration of his first soliloquy; it combines with the second to form
the inspiration of his eloquence here. And Shakespeare never wrote more
eloquently than here.

I have already alluded to the significance of the reappearance of the
Ghost in this scene; but why does Shakespeare choose for the particular
moment of its reappearance the middle of a speech in which Hamlet is
raving against his uncle? There seems to be more than one reason. In the
first place, Hamlet has already attained his object of stirring shame
and contrition in his mother's breast, and is now yielding to the old
temptation of unpacking his heart with words, and exhausting in useless
emotion the force which should be stored up in his will. And, next, in
doing this he is agonising his mother to no purpose, and in despite of
her piteous and repeated appeals for mercy. But the Ghost, when it gave
him his charge, had expressly warned him to spare her; and here again
the dead husband shows the same tender regard for his weak unfaithful
wife. The object of his return is to repeat his charge:

     Do not forget: this visitation
     Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose;

but, having uttered this reminder, he immediately bids the son to help
the mother and 'step between her and her fighting soul.'

And, whether intentionally or not, another purpose is served by
Shakespeare's choice of this particular moment. It is a moment when the
state of Hamlet's mind is such that we cannot suppose the Ghost to be
meant for an hallucination; and it is of great importance here that the
spectator or reader should not suppose any such thing. He is further
guarded by the fact that the Ghost proves, so to speak, his identity by
showing the same traits as were visible on his first appearance--the
same insistence on the duty of remembering, and the same concern for the
Queen. And the result is that we construe the Ghost's interpretation of
Hamlet's delay ('almost blunted purpose') as the truth, the dramatist's
own interpretation. Let me add that probably no one in Shakespeare's
audience had any doubt of his meaning here. The idea of later critics
and readers that the Ghost is an hallucination is due partly to failure
to follow the indications just noticed, but partly also to two mistakes,
the substitution of our present intellectual atmosphere for the
Elizabethan, and the notion that, because the Queen does not see and
hear the Ghost, it is meant to be unreal. But a ghost, in Shakespeare's
day, was able for any sufficient reason to confine its manifestation to
a single person in a company; and here the sufficient reason, that of
sparing the Queen, is obvious.[61]

At the close of this scene it appears that Hamlet has somehow learned of
the King's design of sending him to England in charge of his two
'school-fellows.' He has no doubt that this design covers some
villainous plot against himself, but neither does he doubt that he will
succeed in defeating it; and, as we saw, he looks forward with pleasure
to this conflict of wits. The idea of refusing to go appears not to
occur to him. Perhaps (for here we are left to conjecture) he feels that
he could not refuse unless at the same time he openly accused the King
of his father's murder (a course which he seems at no time to
contemplate); for by the slaughter of Polonius he has supplied his enemy
with the best possible excuse for getting him out of the country.
Besides, he has so effectually warned this enemy that, after the death
of Polonius is discovered, he is kept under guard (IV. iii. 14). He
consents, then, to go. But on his way to the shore he meets the army of
Fortinbras on its march to Poland; and the sight of these men going
cheerfully to risk death 'for an egg-shell,' and 'making mouths at the
invisible event,' strikes him with shame as he remembers how he, with so
much greater cause for action, 'lets all sleep;' and he breaks out into
the soliloquy, 'How all occasions do inform against me!'

This great speech, in itself not inferior to the famous 'To be or not to
be,' is absent not only from the First Quarto but from the Folio. It is
therefore probable that, at any rate by the time when the Folio appeared
(1623), it had become customary to omit it in theatrical representation;
and this is still the custom. But, while no doubt it is dramatically the
least indispensable of the soliloquies, it has a direct dramatic value,
and a great value for the interpretation of Hamlet's character. It shows
that Hamlet, though he is leaving Denmark, has not relinquished the idea
of obeying the Ghost. It exhibits very strikingly his inability to
understand why he has delayed so long. It contains that assertion which
so many critics forget, that he has 'cause and will and strength and
means to do it.' On the other hand--and this was perhaps the principal
purpose of the speech--it convinces us that he has learnt little or
nothing from his delay, or from his failure to seize the opportunity
presented to him after the play-scene. For, we find, both the motive and
the gist of the speech are precisely the same as those of the soliloquy
at the end of the Second Act ('O what a rogue'). There too he was
stirred to shame when he saw a passionate emotion awakened by a cause
which, compared with his, was a mere egg-shell. There too he stood
bewildered at the sight of his own dulness, and was almost ready to
believe--what was justly incredible to him--that it was the mask of mere
cowardice. There too he determined to delay no longer: if the King
should but blench, he knew his course. Yet this determination led to
nothing then; and why, we ask ourselves in despair, should the bloody
thoughts he now resolves to cherish ever pass beyond the realm of
thought?

Between this scene (IV. iv.) and the remainder of the play we must again
suppose an interval, though not a very long one. When the action
recommences, the death of Polonius has led to the insanity of Ophelia
and the secret return of Laertes from France. The young man comes back
breathing slaughter. For the King, afraid to put Hamlet on his trial (a
course likely to raise the question of his own behaviour at the play,
and perhaps to provoke an open accusation),[62] has attempted to hush up
the circumstances of Polonius's death, and has given him a hurried and
inglorious burial. The fury of Laertes, therefore, is directed in the
first instance against the King: and the ease with which he raises the
people, like the King's fear of a judicial enquiry, shows us how purely
internal were the obstacles which the hero had to overcome. This
impression is intensified by the broad contrast between Hamlet and
Laertes, who rushes headlong to his revenge, and is determined to have
it though allegiance, conscience, grace and damnation stand in his way
(IV. v. 130). But the King, though he has been hard put to it, is now in
his element and feels safe. Knowing that he will very soon hear of
Hamlet's execution in England, he tells Laertes that his father died by
Hamlet's hand, and expresses his willingness to let the friends of
Laertes judge whether he himself has any responsibility for the deed.
And when, to his astonishment and dismay, news comes that Hamlet has
returned to Denmark, he acts with admirable promptitude and address,
turns Laertes round his finger, and arranges with him for the murder of
their common enemy. If there were any risk of the young man's resolution
faltering, it is removed by the death of Ophelia. And now the King has
but one anxiety,--to prevent the young men from meeting before the
fencing-match. For who can tell what Hamlet might say in his defence, or
how enchanting his tongue might prove?[63]

Hamlet's return to Denmark is due partly to his own action, partly to
accident. On the voyage he secretly possesses himself of the royal
commission, and substitutes for it another, which he himself writes and
seals, and in which the King of England is ordered to put to death, not
Hamlet, but Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Then the ship is attacked by a
pirate, which, apparently, finds its intended prize too strong for it,
and makes off. But as Hamlet 'in the grapple,' eager for fighting, has
boarded the assailant, he is carried off in it, and by promises induces
the pirates to put him ashore in Denmark.

In what spirit does he return? Unquestionably, I think, we can observe a
certain change, though it is not great. First, we notice here and there
what seems to be a consciousness of power, due probably to his success
in counter-mining Claudius and blowing the courtiers to the moon, and to
his vigorous action in the sea-fight. But I doubt if this sense of power
is more marked than it was in the scenes following the success of the
'Murder of Gonzago.' Secondly, we nowhere find any direct expression of
that weariness of life and that longing for death which were so marked
in the first soliloquy and in the speech 'To be or not to be.' This may
be a mere accident, and it must be remembered that in the Fifth Act we
have no soliloquy. But in the earlier Acts the feelings referred to do
not appear _merely_ in soliloquy, and I incline to think that
Shakespeare means to show in the Hamlet of the Fifth Act a slight
thinning of the dark cloud of melancholy, and means us to feel it tragic
that this change comes too late. And, in the third place, there is a
trait about which doubt is impossible,--a sense in Hamlet that he is in
the hands of Providence. This had, indeed, already shown itself at the
death of Polonius,[64] and perhaps at Hamlet's farewell to the King,[65]
but the idea seems now to be constantly present in his mind. 'There's a
divinity that shapes our ends,' he declares to Horatio in speaking of
the fighting in his heart that would not let him sleep, and of his
rashness in groping his way to the courtiers to find their commission.
How was he able, Horatio asks, to seal the substituted commission?

     Why, even in that was heaven ordinant,

Hamlet answers; he had his father's signet in his purse. And though he
has a presentiment of evil about the fencing-match he refuses to yield
to it: 'we defy augury: there is special providence in the fall of a
sparrow ... the readiness is all.'

Though these passages strike us more when put together thus than when
they come upon us at intervals in reading the play, they have a marked
effect on our feeling about Hamlet's character and still more about the
events of the action. But I find it impossible to believe, with some
critics, that they indicate any material change in his general
condition, or the formation of any effective resolution to fulfil the
appointed duty. On the contrary, they seem to express that kind of
religious resignation which, however beautiful in one aspect, really
deserves the name of fatalism rather than that of faith in Providence,
because it is not united to any determination to do what is believed to
be the will of Providence. In place of this determination, the Hamlet of
the Fifth Act shows a kind of sad or indifferent self-abandonment, as if
he secretly despaired of forcing himself to action, and were ready to
leave his duty to some other power than his own. _This_ is really the
main change which appears in him after his return to Denmark, and which
had begun to show itself before he went,--this, and not a determination
to act, nor even an anxiety to do so.

For when he returns he stands in a most perilous position. On one side
of him is the King, whose safety depends on his death, and who has done
his best to murder him; on the other, Laertes, whose father and sister
he has sent to their graves, and of whose behaviour and probable
attitude he must surely be informed by Horatio. What is required of him,
therefore, if he is not to perish with his duty undone, is the utmost
wariness and the swiftest resolution. Yet it is not too much to say
that, except when Horatio forces the matter on his attention, he shows
no consciousness of this position. He muses in the graveyard on the
nothingness of life and fame, and the base uses to which our dust
returns, whether it be a court-jester's or a world-conqueror's. He
learns that the open grave over which he muses has been dug for the
woman he loved; and he suffers one terrible pang, from which he gains
relief in frenzied words and frenzied action,--action which must needs
intensify, if that were possible, the fury of the man whom he has,
however unwittingly, so cruelly injured. Yet he appears absolutely
unconscious that he has injured Laertes at all, and asks him:

     What is the reason that you use me thus?

And as the sharpness of the first pang passes, the old weary misery
returns, and he might almost say to Ophelia, as he does to her brother:

     I loved you ever: but it is no matter.

'It is no matter': _nothing_ matters.

The last scene opens. He narrates to Horatio the events of the voyage
and his uncle's attempt to murder him. But the conclusion of the story
is no plan of action, but the old fatal question, 'Ought I not to
act?'[66] And, while he asks it, his enemies have acted. Osric enters
with an invitation to him to take part in a fencing-match with Laertes.
This match--he is expressly told so--has been arranged by his deadly
enemy the King; and his antagonist is a man whose hands but a few hours
ago were at his throat, and whose voice he had heard shouting 'The devil
take thy soul!' But he does not think of that. To fence is to show a
courtesy, and to himself it is a relief,--action, and not the one
hateful action. There is something noble in his carelessness, and also
in his refusal to attend to the presentiment which he suddenly feels
(and of which he says, not only 'the readiness is all,' but also 'it is
no matter'). Something noble; and yet, when a sacred duty is still
undone, ought one to be so ready to die? With the same carelessness, and
with that trustfulness which makes us love him, but which is here so
fatally misplaced, he picks up the first foil that comes to his hand,
asks indifferently, 'These foils have all a length?' and begins. And
Fate descends upon his enemies, and his mother, and himself.

But he is not left in utter defeat. Not only is his task at last
accomplished, but Shakespeare seems to have determined that his hero
should exhibit in his latest hour all the glorious power and all the
nobility and sweetness of his nature. Of the first, the power, I spoke
before,[67] but there is a wonderful beauty in the revelation of the
second. His body already labouring in the pangs of death, his mind soars
above them. He forgives Laertes; he remembers his wretched mother and
bids her adieu, ignorant that she has preceded him. We hear now no word
of lamentation or self-reproach. He has will, and just time, to think,
not of the past or of what might have been, but of the future; to forbid
his friend's death in words more pathetic in their sadness than even his
agony of spirit had been; and to take care, so far as in him lies, for
the welfare of the State which he himself should have guided. Then in
spite of shipwreck he reaches the haven of silence where he would be.
What else could his world-wearied flesh desire?

But _we_ desire more; and we receive it. As those mysterious words, 'The
rest is silence,' die upon Hamlet's lips, Horatio answers:

     Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince,
     And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

Why did Shakespeare here, so much against his custom, introduce this
reference to another life? Did he remember that Hamlet is the only one
of his tragic heroes whom he has not allowed us to see in the days when
this life smiled on him? Did he feel that, while for the others we might
be content to imagine after life's fitful fever nothing more than
release and silence, we must ask more for one whose 'godlike reason' and
passionate love of goodness have only gleamed upon us through the heavy
clouds of melancholy, and yet have left us murmuring, as we bow our
heads, 'This was the noblest spirit of them all'?

2

How many things still remain to say of Hamlet! Before I touch on his
relation to Ophelia, I will choose but two. Neither of them, compared
with the matters so far considered, is of great consequence, but both
are interesting, and the first seems to have quite escaped observation.

(1) Most people have, beside their more essential traits of character,
little peculiarities which, for their intimates, form an indissoluble
part of their personality. In comedy, and in other humorous works of
fiction, such peculiarities often figure prominently, but they rarely do
so, I think, in tragedy. Shakespeare, however, seems to have given one
such idiosyncrasy to Hamlet.

It is a trick of speech, a habit of repetition. And these are simple
examples of it from the first soliloquy:

                            O _God! God!_
     How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable
     Seem to me all the uses of this world!
     _Fie_ on't! ah _fie!_

Now I ask your patience. You will say: 'There is nothing individual
here. Everybody repeats words thus. And the tendency, in particular, to
use such repetitions in moments of great emotion is well-known, and
frequently illustrated in literature--for example, in David's cry of
lament for Absalom.'

This is perfectly true, and plenty of examples could be drawn from
Shakespeare himself. But what we find in Hamlet's case is, I believe,
_not_ common. In the first place, this repetition is a _habit_ with him.
Here are some more instances: 'Thrift, thrift, Horatio'; 'Indeed,
indeed, sirs, but this troubles me'; 'Come, deal justly with me: come,
come'; 'Wormwood, wormwood!' I do not profess to have made an exhaustive
search, but I am much mistaken if this _habit_ is to be found in any
other serious character of Shakespeare.[68]

And, in the second place--and here I appeal with confidence to lovers of
Hamlet--some of these repetitions strike us as intensely characteristic.
Some even of those already quoted strike one thus, and still more do the
following:

     (_a_)  _Horatio._   It would have much amazed you.
            _Hamlet._    Very like, very like. Stay'd it long?

     (_b_)  _Polonius._  What do you read, my lord?
            _Hamlet._    Words, words, words.

     (_c_)  _Polonius._  My honourable lord, I will most humbly take
                           my leave of you.
            _Hamlet._    You cannot, sir, take from me anything that I
                           will more willingly part withal: except my
                           life, except my life, except my life.

     (_d_)  _Ophelia._                  Good my lord,
                         How does your honour for this many a day?
            _Hamlet._    I humbly thank you, well, well, well.

Is there anything that Hamlet says or does in the whole play more
unmistakably individual than these replies?[69]

(2) Hamlet, everyone has noticed, is fond of quibbles and word-play, and
of 'conceits' and turns of thought such as are common in the poets whom
Johnson called Metaphysical. Sometimes, no doubt, he plays with words
and ideas chiefly in order to mystify, thwart and annoy. To some extent,
again, as we may see from the conversation where Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern first present themselves (II. ii. 227), he is merely
following the fashion of the young courtiers about him, just as in his
love-letter to Ophelia[70] he uses for the most part the fantastic
language of Court Euphuism. Nevertheless in this trait there is
something very characteristic. We should be greatly surprised to find it
marked in Othello or Lear or Timon, in Macbeth or Antony or Coriolanus;
and, in fact, we find it in them hardly at all. One reason of this may
perhaps be that these characters are all later creations than Hamlet,
and that Shakespeare's own fondness for this kind of play, like the
fondness of the theatrical audience for it, diminished with time. But
the main reason is surely that this tendency, as we see it in Hamlet,
betokens a nimbleness and flexibility of mind which is characteristic of
him and not of the later less many-sided heroes. Macbeth, for instance,
has an imagination quite as sensitive as Hamlet's to certain
impressions, but he has none of Hamlet's delight in freaks and twists of
thought, or of his tendency to perceive and play with resemblances in
the most diverse objects and ideas. Though Romeo shows this tendency,
the only tragic hero who approaches Hamlet here is Richard II., who
indeed in several ways recalls the emasculated Hamlet of some critics,
and may, like the real Hamlet, have owed his existence in part to
Shakespeare's personal familiarity with the weaknesses and dangers of an
imaginative temperament.

That Shakespeare meant this trait to be characteristic of Hamlet is
beyond question. The very first line the hero speaks contains a play on
words:

     A little more than kin and less than kind.

The fact is significant, though the pun itself is not specially
characteristic. Much more so, and indeed absolutely individual, are the
uses of word-play in moments of extreme excitement. Remember the awe and
terror of the scene where the Ghost beckons Hamlet to leave his friends
and follow him into the darkness, and then consider this dialogue:

     _Hamlet._                    It waves me still.
                   Go on; I'll follow thee.

     _Marcellus._  You shall not go, my lord.

     _Hamlet._                    Hold off your hands.

     _Horatio._    Be ruled; you shall not go.

     _Hamlet._                    My fate cries out,
                   And makes each petty artery in this body
                   As hardy as the Nemean lion's nerve.
                   Still am I called. Unhand me, gentlemen.
                   _By heaven I'll make a ghost of him that lets me._

Would any other character in Shakespeare have used those words? And,
again, where is Hamlet more Hamlet than when he accompanies with a pun
the furious action by which he compels his enemy to drink the 'poison
tempered by himself'?

     Here, thou incestuous, murderous, damn'd Dane,
     Drink off this potion. Is thy union here?
     Follow my mother.

The 'union' was the pearl which Claudius professed to throw into the
cup, and in place of which (as Hamlet supposes) he dropped poison in.
But the 'union' is also that incestuous marriage which must not be
broken by his remaining alive now that his partner is dead. What rage
there is in the words, and what a strange lightning of the mind!

Much of Hamlet's play with words and ideas is imaginatively humorous.
That of Richard II. is fanciful, but rarely, if ever, humorous. Antony
has touches of humour, and Richard III. has more; but Hamlet, we may
safely assert, is the only one of the tragic heroes who can be called a
humorist, his humour being first cousin to that speculative tendency
which keeps his mental world in perpetual movement. Some of his quips
are, of course, poor enough, and many are not distinctive. Those of his
retorts which strike one as perfectly individual do so, I think, chiefly
because they suddenly reveal the misery and bitterness below the
surface; as when, to Rosencrantz's message from his mother, 'She desires
to speak with you in her closet, ere you go to bed,' he answers, 'We
shall obey, were she ten times our mother'; or as when he replies to
Polonius's invitation, 'Will you walk out of the air, my lord?' with
words that suddenly turn one cold, 'Into my grave.' Otherwise, what we
justly call Hamlet's characteristic humour is not his exclusive
property, but appears in passages spoken by persons as different as
Mercutio, Falstaff and Rosalind. The truth probably is that it was the
kind of humour most natural to Shakespeare himself, and that here, as in
some other traits of the poet's greatest creation, we come into close
contact with Shakespeare the man.

3

The actor who plays the part of Hamlet must make up his mind as to the
interpretation of every word and deed of the character. Even if at some
point he feels no certainty as to which of two interpretations is right,
he must still choose one or the other. The mere critic is not obliged to
do this. Where he remains in doubt he may say so, and, if the matter is
of importance, he ought to say so.

This is the position in which I find myself in regard to Hamlet's love
for Ophelia. I am unable to arrive at a conviction as to the meaning of
some of his words and deeds, and I question whether from the mere text
of the play a sure interpretation of them can be drawn. For this reason
I have reserved the subject for separate treatment, and have, so far as
possible, kept it out of the general discussion of Hamlet's character.

On two points no reasonable doubt can, I think, be felt. (1) Hamlet was
at one time sincerely and ardently in love with Ophelia. For she herself
says that he had importuned her with love in honourable fashion, and had
given countenance to his speech with almost all the holy vows of heaven
(I. iii. 110 f.). (2) When, at Ophelia's grave, he declared,

     I loved Ophelia; forty thousand brothers
     Could not, with all their quantity of love,
     Make up my sum,

he must have spoken sincerely; and, further, we may take it for granted
that he used the past tense, 'loved,' merely because Ophelia was dead,
and not to imply that he had once loved her but no longer did so.

So much being assumed, we come to what is doubtful, and I will begin by
stating what is probably the most popular view. According to this view,
Hamlet's love for Ophelia never changed. On the revelation made by the
Ghost, however, he felt that he must put aside all thoughts of it; and
it also seemed to him necessary to convince Ophelia, as well as others,
that he was insane, and so to destroy her hopes of any happy issue to
their love. This was the purpose of his appearance in her chamber,
though he was probably influenced also by a longing to see her and bid
her a silent farewell, and possibly by a faint hope that he might safely
entrust his secret to her. If he entertained any such hope his study of
her face dispelled it; and thereafter, as in the Nunnery-scene (III. i.)
and again at the play-scene, he not only feigned madness, but, to
convince her that he had quite lost his love for her, he also addressed
her in bitter and insulting language. In all this he was acting a part
intensely painful to himself; the very violence of his language in the
Nunnery-scene arose from this pain; and so the actor should make him
show, in that scene, occasional signs of a tenderness which with all his
efforts he cannot wholly conceal. Finally, over her grave the truth
bursts from him in the declaration quoted just now, though it is still
impossible for him to explain to others why he who loved her so
profoundly was forced to wring her heart.

Now this theory, if the view of Hamlet's character which I have taken is
anywhere near the truth, is certainly wrong at one point, viz., in so
far as it supposes that Hamlet's bitterness to Ophelia was a _mere_
pretence forced on him by his design of feigning to be insane; and I
proceed to call attention to certain facts and considerations, of which
the theory seems to take no account.

1. How is it that in his first soliloquy Hamlet makes no reference
whatever to Ophelia?

2. How is it that in his second soliloquy, on the departure of the
Ghost, he again says nothing about her? When the lover is feeling that
he must make a complete break with his past, why does it not occur to
him at once that he must give up his hopes of happiness in love?

3. Hamlet does not, as the popular theory supposes, break with Ophelia
directly after the Ghost appears to him; on the contrary, he tries to
see her and sends letters to her (II. i. 109). What really happens is
that Ophelia suddenly repels his visits and letters. Now, _we_ know that
she is simply obeying her father's order; but how would her action
appear to Hamlet, already sick at heart because of his mother's
frailty,[71] and now finding that, the moment fortune has turned against
him, the woman who had welcomed his love turns against him too? Even if
he divined (as his insults to Polonius suggest) that her father was
concerned in this change, would he not still, in that morbid condition
of mind, certainly suspect her of being less simple than she had
appeared to him?[72] Even if he remained free from _this_ suspicion, and
merely thought her deplorably weak, would he not probably feel anger
against _her_, an anger like that of the hero of _Locksley Hall_ against
his Amy?

4. When Hamlet made his way into Ophelia's room, why did he go in the
garb, the conventionally recognised garb, of the distracted _lover_? If
it was necessary to convince Ophelia of his insanity, how was it
necessary to convince her that disappointment in _love_ was the cause of
his insanity? His _main_ object in the visit appears to have been to
convince _others_, through her, that his insanity was not due to any
mysterious unknown cause, but to this disappointment, and so to allay
the suspicions of the King. But if his feeling for her had been simply
that of love, however unhappy, and had not been in any degree that of
suspicion or resentment, would he have adopted a plan which must involve
her in so much suffering?[73]

5. In what way are Hamlet's insults to Ophelia at the play-scene
necessary either to his purpose of convincing her of his insanity or to
his purpose of revenge? And, even if he did regard them as somehow means
to these ends, is it conceivable that he would have uttered them, if his
feeling for her were one of hopeless but unmingled love?

6. How is it that neither when he kills Polonius, nor afterwards, does
he appear to reflect that he has killed Ophelia's father, or what the
effect on Ophelia is likely to be?

7. We have seen that there is no reference to Ophelia in the soliloquies
of the First Act. Neither is there the faintest allusion to her in any
one of the soliloquies of the subsequent Acts, unless possibly in the
words (III. i. 72) 'the pangs of despised love.'[74] If the popular
theory is true, is not this an astounding fact?

8. Considering this fact, is there no significance in the further fact
(which, by itself, would present no difficulty) that in speaking to
Horatio Hamlet never alludes to Ophelia, and that at his death he says
nothing of her?

9. If the popular theory is true, how is it that neither in the
Nunnery-scene nor at the play-scene does Shakespeare insert anything to
make the truth plain? Four words like Othello's 'O hardness to
dissemble' would have sufficed.

These considerations, coupled with others as to Hamlet's state of mind,
seem to point to two conclusions. They suggest, first, that Hamlet's
love, though never lost, was, after Ophelia's apparent rejection of him,
mingled with suspicion and resentment, and that his treatment of her was
due in part to this cause. And I find it impossible to resist this
conclusion. But the question how much of his harshness is meant to be
real, and how much assumed, seems to me impossible in some places to
answer. For example, his behaviour at the play-scene seems to me to show
an intention to hurt and insult; but in the Nunnery-scene (which cannot
be discussed briefly) he is evidently acting a part and suffering
acutely, while at the same time his invective, however exaggerated,
seems to spring from real feelings; and what is pretence, and what
sincerity, appears to me an insoluble problem. Something depends here on
the further question whether or no Hamlet suspects or detects the
presence of listeners; but, in the absence of an authentic stage
tradition, this question too seems to be unanswerable.

But something further seems to follow from the considerations adduced.
Hamlet's love, they seem to show, was not only mingled with bitterness,
it was also, like all his healthy feelings, weakened and deadened by his
melancholy.[75] It was far from being extinguished; probably it was
_one_ of the causes which drove him to force his way to Ophelia;
whenever he saw Ophelia, it awoke and, the circumstances being what they
were, tormented him. But it was not an absorbing passion; it did not
habitually occupy his thoughts; and when he declared that it was such a
love as forty thousand brothers could not equal, he spoke sincerely
indeed but not truly. What he said was true, if I may put it thus, of
the inner healthy self which doubtless in time would have fully
reasserted itself; but it was only partly true of the Hamlet whom we see
in the play. And the morbid influence of his melancholy on his love is
the cause of those strange facts, that he never alludes to her in his
soliloquies, and that he appears not to realise how the death of her
father must affect her.

The facts seem almost to force this idea on us. That it is less
'romantic' than the popular view is no argument against it. And
psychologically it is quite sound, for a frequent symptom of such
melancholy as Hamlet's is a more or less complete paralysis, or even
perversion, of the emotion of love. And yet, while feeling no doubt that
up to a certain point it is true, I confess I am not satisfied that the
explanation of Hamlet's silence regarding Ophelia lies in it. And the
reason of this uncertainty is that scarcely any spectators or readers of
_Hamlet_ notice this silence at all; that I never noticed it myself till
I began to try to solve the problem of Hamlet's relation to Ophelia; and
that even now, when I read the play through without pausing to consider
particular questions, it scarcely strikes me. Now Shakespeare wrote
primarily for the theatre and not for students, and therefore great
weight should be attached to the immediate impressions made by his
works. And so it seems at least possible that the explanation of
Hamlet's silence may be that Shakespeare, having already a very
difficult task to perform in the soliloquies--that of showing the state
of mind which caused Hamlet to delay his vengeance--did not choose to
make his task more difficult by introducing matter which would not only
add to the complexity of the subject but might, from its 'sentimental'
interest, distract attention from the main point; while, from his
theatrical experience, he knew that the audience would not observe how
unnatural it was that a man deeply in love, and forced not only to
renounce but to wound the woman he loved, should not think of her when
he was alone. But, as this explanation is no more completely convincing
to me than the other, I am driven to suspend judgment, and also to
suspect that the text admits of no sure interpretation. [This paragraph
states my view imperfectly.]

This result may seem to imply a serious accusation against Shakespeare.
But it must be remembered that if we could see a contemporary
representation of _Hamlet_, our doubts would probably disappear. The
actor, instructed by the author, would make it clear to us by looks,
tones, gestures, and by-play how far Hamlet's feigned harshness to
Ophelia was mingled with real bitterness, and again how far his
melancholy had deadened his love.

4

As we have seen, all the persons in _Hamlet_ except the hero are minor
characters, who fail to rise to the tragic level. They are not less
interesting on that account, but the hero has occupied us so long that I
shall refer only to those in regard to whom Shakespeare's intention
appears to be not seldom misunderstood or overlooked.

It may seem strange that Ophelia should be one of these; and yet
Shakespearean literature and the experience of teachers show that there
is much difference of opinion regarding her, and in particular that a
large number of readers feel a kind of personal irritation against her.
They seem unable to forgive her for not having been a heroine, and they
fancy her much weaker than she was. They think she ought to have been
able to help Hamlet to fulfil his task. And they betray, it appears to
me, the strangest misconceptions as to what she actually did.

Now it was essential to Shakespeare's purpose that too great an interest
should not be aroused in the love-story; essential, therefore, that
Ophelia should be merely one of the subordinate characters; and
necessary, accordingly, that she should not be the equal, in spirit,
power or intelligence, of his famous heroines. If she had been an
Imogen, a Cordelia, even a Portia or a Juliet, the story must have taken
another shape. Hamlet would either have been stimulated to do his duty,
or (which is more likely) he would have gone mad, or (which is
likeliest) he would have killed himself in despair. Ophelia, therefore,
was made a character who could not help Hamlet, and for whom on the
other hand he would not naturally feel a passion so vehement or profound
as to interfere with the main motive of the play.[76] And in the love
and the fate of Ophelia herself there was introduced an element, not of
deep tragedy but of pathetic beauty, which makes the analysis of her
character seem almost a desecration.

Ophelia is plainly quite young and inexperienced. She has lost her
mother, and has only a father and a brother, affectionate but worldly,
to take care of her. Everyone in the drama who has any heart is drawn to
her. To the persons in the play, as to the readers of it, she brings the
thought of flowers. 'Rose of May' Laertes names her.

             Lay her in the earth,
     And from her fair and unpolluted flesh
     May violets spring!

--so he prays at her burial. 'Sweets to the sweet' the Queen murmurs, as
she scatters flowers on the grave; and the flowers which Ophelia herself
gathered--those which she gave to others, and those which floated about
her in the brook--glimmer in the picture of the mind. Her affection for
her brother is shown in two or three delicate strokes. Her love for her
father is deep, though mingled with fear. For Hamlet she has, some say,
no deep love--and perhaps she is so near childhood that old affections
have still the strongest hold; but certainly she has given to Hamlet all
the love of which her nature is as yet capable. Beyond these three
beloved ones she seems to have eyes and ears for no one. The Queen is
fond of her, but there is no sign of her returning the Queen's
affection. Her existence is wrapped up in these three.

On this childlike nature and on Ophelia's inexperience everything
depends. The knowledge that 'there's tricks in the world' has reached
her only as a vague report. Her father and brother are jealously anxious
for her because of her ignorance and innocence; and we resent their
anxiety chiefly because we know Hamlet better than they. Her whole
character is that of simple unselfish affection. Naturally she is
incapable of understanding Hamlet's mind, though she can feel its
beauty. Naturally, too, she obeys her father when she is forbidden to
receive Hamlet's visits and letters. If we remember not what _we_ know
but what _she_ knows of her lover and her father; if we remember that
she had not, like Juliet, confessed her love; and if we remember that
she was much below her suitor in station, her compliance surely must
seem perfectly natural, apart from the fact that the standard of
obedience to a father was in Shakespeare's day higher than in ours.

'But she does more than obey,' we are told; 'she runs off frightened to
report to her father Hamlet's strange visit and behaviour; she shows to
her father one of Hamlet's letters, and tells him[77] the whole story of
the courtship; and she joins in a plot to win Hamlet's secret from him.'
One must remember, however, that she had never read the tragedy.
Consider for a moment how matters looked to _her_. She knows nothing
about the Ghost and its disclosures. She has undergone for some time the
pain of repelling her lover and appearing to have turned against him.
She sees him, or hears of him, sinking daily into deeper gloom, and so
transformed from what he was that he is considered to be out of his
mind. She hears the question constantly discussed what the cause of this
sad change can be; and her heart tells her--how can it fail to tell
her?--that her unkindness is the chief cause. Suddenly Hamlet forces his
way into her chamber; and his appearance and his behaviour are those of
a man crazed with love. She is frightened--why not? She is not Lady
Macbeth. Rosalind would have been frightened. Which of her censors would
be wholly unmoved if his room were invaded by a lunatic? She is
frightened, then; frightened, if you will, like a child. Yes, but,
observe, her one idea is to help Hamlet. She goes, therefore, at once to
her father. To whom else should she go? Her brother is away. Her father,
whom she saw with her own eyes and not with Shakespeare's, is kind, and
the wisest of men, and concerned about Hamlet's state. Her father finds,
in her report, the solution of the mystery: Hamlet is mad because she
has repulsed him. Why should she not tell her father the whole story and
give him an old letter which may help to convince the King and the
Queen? Nay, why should she not allow herself to be used as a 'decoy' to
settle the question why Hamlet is mad? It is all-important that it
should be settled, in order that he may be cured; all her seniors are
simply and solely anxious for his welfare; and, if her unkindness _is_
the cause of his sad state, they will permit her to restore him by
kindness (III. i. 40). Was she to refuse to play a part just because it
would be painful to her to do so? I find in her joining the 'plot' (as
it is absurdly called) a sign not of weakness, but of unselfishness and
strength.

'But she practised deception; she even told a lie. Hamlet asked her
where her father was, and she said he was at home, when he was really
listening behind a curtain.' Poor Ophelia! It is considered angelic in
Desdemona to say untruly that she killed herself, but most immoral or
pusillanimous in Ophelia to tell _her_ lie. I will not discuss these
casuistical problems; but, if ever an angry lunatic asks me a question
which I cannot answer truly without great danger to him and to one of my
relations, I hope that grace may be given me to imitate Ophelia.
Seriously, at such a terrible moment was it weak, was it not rather
heroic, in a simple girl not to lose her presence of mind and not to
flinch, but to go through her task for Hamlet's sake and her father's?
And, finally, is it really a thing to be taken as matter of course, and
no matter for admiration, in this girl that, from beginning to end, and
after a storm of utterly unjust reproach, not a thought of resentment
should even cross her mind?

Still, we are told, it was ridiculously weak in her to lose her reason.
And here again her critics seem hardly to realise the situation, hardly
to put themselves in the place of a girl whose lover, estranged from
her, goes mad and kills her father. They seem to forget also that
Ophelia must have believed that these frightful calamities were not mere
calamities, but followed from _her_ action in repelling her lover. Nor
do they realise the utter loneliness that must have fallen on her. Of
the three persons who were all the world to her, her father has been
killed, Hamlet has been sent out of the country insane, and her brother
is abroad. Horatio, when her mind gives way, tries to befriend her, but
there is no sign of any previous relation between them, or of Hamlet's
having commended her to his friend's care. What support she can gain
from the Queen we can guess from the Queen's character, and from the
fact that, when Ophelia is most helpless, the Queen shrinks from the
very sight of her (IV. v. 1). She was left, thus, absolutely alone, and
if she looked for her brother's return (as she did, IV. v. 70), she
might reflect that it would mean danger to Hamlet.

Whether this idea occurred to her we cannot tell. In any case it was
well for her that her mind gave way before Laertes reached Elsinore; and
pathetic as Ophelia's madness is, it is also, we feel, the kindest
stroke that now could fall on her. It is evident, I think, that this was
the effect Shakespeare intended to produce. In her madness Ophelia
continues sweet and lovable.

     Thought and affliction, passion, hell itself,
     She turns to favour and to prettiness.

In her wanderings we hear from time to time an undertone of the deepest
sorrow, but never the agonised cry of fear or horror which makes madness
dreadful or shocking.[78] And the picture of her death, if our eyes grow
dim in watching it, is still purely beautiful. Coleridge was true to
Shakespeare when he wrote of 'the affecting death of Ophelia,--who in
the beginning lay like a little projection of land into a lake or
stream, covered with spray-flowers quietly reflected in the quiet
waters, but at length is undermined or loosened, and becomes a fairy
isle, and after a brief vagrancy sinks almost without an eddy.'[79]

5

I reluctantly pass by Polonius, Laertes and the beautiful character of
Horatio, to say something in conclusion of the Queen and the King.

The answers to two questions asked about the Queen are, it seems to me,
practically certain, (1) She did not merely marry a second time with
indecent haste; she was false to her husband while he lived. This is
surely the most natural interpretation of the words of the Ghost (I. v.
41 f.), coming, as they do, before his account of the murder. And
against this testimony what force has the objection that the queen in
the 'Murder of Gonzago' is not represented as an adulteress? Hamlet's
mark in arranging the play-scene was not his mother, whom besides he had
been expressly ordered to spare (I. v. 84 f.).

(2) On the other hand, she was _not_ privy to the murder of her husband,
either before the deed or after it. There is no sign of her being so,
and there are clear signs that she was not. The representation of the
murder in the play-scene does not move her; and when her husband starts
from his throne, she innocently asks him, 'How fares my lord?' In the
interview with Hamlet, when her son says of his slaughter of Polonius,

     'A bloody deed!' Almost as bad, good mother,
     As kill a king and marry with his brother,

the astonishment of her repetition 'As kill a king!' is evidently
genuine; and, if it had not been so, she would never have had the
hardihood to exclaim:

     What have I done, that thou darest wag thy tongue
     In noise so rude against me?

Further, it is most significant that when she and the King speak
together alone, nothing that is said by her or to her implies her
knowledge of the secret.

The Queen was not a bad-hearted woman, not at all the woman to think
little of murder. But she had a soft animal nature, and was very dull
and very shallow. She loved to be happy, like a sheep in the sun; and,
to do her justice, it pleased her to see others happy, like more sheep
in the sun. She never saw that drunkenness is disgusting till Hamlet
told her so; and, though she knew that he considered her marriage
'o'er-hasty' (II. ii. 57), she was untroubled by any shame at the
feelings which had led to it. It was pleasant to sit upon her throne and
see smiling faces round her, and foolish and unkind in Hamlet to persist
in grieving for his father instead of marrying Ophelia and making
everything comfortable. She was fond of Ophelia and genuinely attached
to her son (though willing to see her lover exclude him from the
throne); and, no doubt, she considered equality of rank a mere trifle
compared with the claims of love. The belief at the bottom of her heart
was that the world is a place constructed simply that people may be
happy in it in a good-humoured sensual fashion.

Her only chance was to be made unhappy. When affliction comes to her,
the good in her nature struggles to the surface through the heavy mass
of sloth. Like other faulty characters in Shakespeare's tragedies, she
dies a better woman than she had lived. When Hamlet shows her what she
has done she feels genuine remorse. It is true, Hamlet fears it will not
last, and so at the end of the interview (III. iv. 180 ff.) he adds a
warning that, if she betrays him, she will ruin herself as well.[80] It
is true too that there is no sign of her obeying Hamlet in breaking off
her most intimate connection with the King. Still she does feel remorse;
and she loves her son, and does not betray him. She gives her husband a
false account of Polonius's death, and is silent about the appearance of
the Ghost. She becomes miserable;

     To her sick soul, as sin's true nature is,
     Each toy seems prologue to some great amiss.

She shows spirit when Laertes raises the mob, and one respects her for
standing up for her husband when she can do nothing to help her son. If
she had sense to realise Hamlet's purpose, or the probability of the
King's taking some desperate step to foil it, she must have suffered
torture in those days. But perhaps she was too dull.

The last we see of her, at the fencing-match, is most characteristic.
She is perfectly serene. Things have slipped back into their groove, and
she has no apprehensions. She is, however, disturbed and full of
sympathy for her son, who is out of condition and pants and perspires.
These are afflictions she can thoroughly feel for, though they are even
more common than the death of a father. But then she meets her death
because she cannot resist the wish to please her son by drinking to his
success. And more: when she falls dying, and the King tries to make out
that she is merely swooning at the sight of blood, she collects her
energies to deny it and to warn Hamlet:

     No, no, the drink, the drink,--O my dear Hamlet,--
     The drink, the drink! I am poison'd.                [_Dies._

Was ever any other writer at once so pitiless and so just as
Shakespeare? Did ever any other mingle the grotesque and the pathetic
with a realism so daring and yet so true to 'the modesty of nature'?

       *       *       *       *       *

King Claudius rarely gets from the reader the attention he deserves. But
he is very interesting, both psychologically and dramatically. On the
one hand, he is not without respectable qualities. As a king he is
courteous and never undignified; he performs his ceremonial duties
efficiently; and he takes good care of the national interests. He
nowhere shows cowardice, and when Laertes and the mob force their way
into the palace, he confronts a dangerous situation with coolness and
address. His love for his ill-gotten wife seems to be quite genuine, and
there is no ground for suspecting him of having used her as a mere means
to the crown.[81] His conscience, though ineffective, is far from being
dead. In spite of its reproaches he plots new crimes to ensure the prize
of the old one; but still it makes him unhappy (III. i. 49 f., III. iii.
35 f.). Nor is he cruel or malevolent.

On the other hand, he is no tragic character. He had a small nature. If
Hamlet may be trusted, he was a man of mean appearance--a mildewed ear,
a toad, a bat; and he was also bloated by excess in drinking. People
made mouths at him in contempt while his brother lived; and though, when
he came to the throne, they spent large sums in buying his portrait, he
evidently put little reliance on their loyalty. He was no villain of
force, who thought of winning his brother's crown by a bold and open
stroke, but a cut-purse who stole the diadem from a shelf and put it in
his pocket. He had the inclination of natures physically weak and
morally small towards intrigue and crooked dealing. His instinctive
predilection was for poison: this was the means he used in his first
murder, and he at once recurred to it when he had failed to get Hamlet
executed by deputy. Though in danger he showed no cowardice, his first
thought was always for himself.

     I like him not, nor stands it safe with _us_
     To let his madness range,

--these are the first words we hear him speak after the play-scene. His
first comment on the death of Polonius is,

     It had been so with _us_ had we been there;

and his second is,

     Alas, how shall this bloody deed be answered?
     It will be laid to _us_.

He was not, however, stupid, but rather quick-witted and adroit. He won
the Queen partly indeed by presents (how pitifully characteristic of
her!), but also by 'witch-craft of his wit' or intellect. He seems to
have been soft-spoken, ingratiating in manner, and given to smiling on
the person he addressed ('that one may smile, and smile, and be a
villain'). We see this in his speech to Laertes about the young man's
desire to return to Paris (I. ii. 42 f.). Hamlet scarcely ever speaks to
him without an insult, but he never shows resentment, hardly even
annoyance. He makes use of Laertes with great dexterity. He had
evidently found that a clear head, a general complaisance, a willingness
to bend and oblige where he could not overawe, would lead him to his
objects,--that he could trick men and manage them. Unfortunately he
imagined he could trick something more than men.

This error, together with a decided trait of temperament, leads him to
his ruin. He has a sanguine disposition. When first we see him, all has
fallen out to his wishes, and he confidently looks forward to a happy
life. He believes his secret to be absolutely safe, and he is quite
ready to be kind to Hamlet, in whose melancholy he sees only excess of
grief. He has no desire to see him leave the court; he promises him his
voice for the succession (I. ii. 108, III. ii. 355); he will be a father
to him. Before long, indeed, he becomes very uneasy, and then more and
more alarmed; but when, much later, he has contrived Hamlet's death in
England, he has still no suspicion that he need not hope for happiness:

                       till I know 'tis done,
     Howe'er my haps, my _joys_ were ne'er begun.

Nay, his very last words show that he goes to death unchanged:

     Oh yet defend me, friends, I am but hurt [=wounded],

he cries, although in half a minute he is dead. That his crime has
failed, and that it could do nothing else, never once comes home to him.
He thinks he can over-reach Heaven. When he is praying for pardon, he is
all the while perfectly determined to keep his crown; and he knows it.
More--it is one of the grimmest things in Shakespeare, but he puts such
things so quietly that we are apt to miss them--when the King is praying
for pardon for his first murder he has just made his final arrangements
for a second, the murder of Hamlet. But he does not allude to that fact
in his prayer. If Hamlet had really wished to kill him at a moment that
had no relish of salvation in it, he had no need to wait.[82] So we are
inclined to say; and yet it was not so. For this was the crisis for
Claudius as well as Hamlet. He had better have died at once, before he
had added to his guilt a share in the responsibility for all the woe and
death that followed. And so, we may allow ourselves to say, here also
Hamlet's indiscretion served him well. The power that shaped his end
shaped the King's no less.

For--to return in conclusion to the action of the play--in all that
happens or is done we seem to apprehend some vaster power. We do not
define it, or even name it, or perhaps even say to ourselves that it is
there; but our imagination is haunted by the sense of it, as it works
its way through the deeds or the delays of men to its inevitable end.
And most of all do we feel this in regard to Hamlet and the King. For
these two, the one by his shrinking from his appointed task, and the
other by efforts growing ever more feverish to rid himself of his enemy,
seem to be bent on avoiding each other. But they cannot. Through devious
paths, the very paths they take in order to escape, something is pushing
them silently step by step towards one another, until they meet and it
puts the sword into Hamlet's hand. He himself must die, for he needed
this compulsion before he could fulfil the demand of destiny; but he
_must_ fulfil it. And the King too, turn and twist as he may, must reach
the appointed goal, and is only hastening to it by the windings which
seem to lead elsewhere. Concentration on the character of the hero is
apt to withdraw our attention from this aspect of the drama; but in no
other tragedy of Shakespeare's, not even in _Macbeth_, is this aspect so
impressive.[83]

I mention _Macbeth_ for a further reason. In _Macbeth_ and _Hamlet_ not
only is the feeling of a supreme power or destiny peculiarly marked, but
it has also at times a peculiar tone, which may be called, in a sense,
religious. I cannot make my meaning clear without using language too
definite to describe truly the imaginative impression produced; but it
is roughly true that, while we do not imagine the supreme power as a
divine being who avenges crime, or as a providence which supernaturally
interferes, our sense of it is influenced by the fact that Shakespeare
uses current religious ideas here much more decidedly than in _Othello_
or _King Lear_. The horror in Macbeth's soul is more than once
represented as desperation at the thought that he is eternally 'lost';
the same idea appears in the attempt of Claudius at repentance; and as
_Hamlet_ nears its close the 'religious' tone of the tragedy is deepened
in two ways. In the first place, 'accident' is introduced into the plot
in its barest and least dramatic form, when Hamlet is brought back to
Denmark by the chance of the meeting with the pirate ship. This incident
has been therefore severely criticised as a lame expedient,[84] but it
appears probable that the 'accident' is meant to impress the imagination
as the very reverse of accidental, and with many readers it certainly
does so. And that this was the intention is made the more likely by a
second fact, the fact that in connection with the events of the voyage
Shakespeare introduces that feeling, on Hamlet's part, of his being in
the hands of Providence. The repeated expressions of this feeling are
not, I have maintained, a sign that Hamlet has now formed a fixed
resolution to do his duty forthwith; but their effect is to strengthen
in the spectator the feeling that, whatever may become of Hamlet, and
whether he wills it or not, his task will surely be accomplished,
because it is the purpose of a power against which both he and his enemy
are impotent, and which makes of them the instruments of its own will.

Observing this, we may remember another significant point of resemblance
between _Hamlet_ and _Macbeth_, the appearance in each play of a
Ghost,--a figure which seems quite in place in either, whereas it would
seem utterly out of place in _Othello_ or _King Lear_. Much might be
said of the Ghost in _Hamlet_, but I confine myself to the matter which
we are now considering. What is the effect of the appearance of the
Ghost? And, in particular, why does Shakespeare make this Ghost so
_majestical_ a phantom, giving it that measured and solemn utterance,
and that air of impersonal abstraction which forbids, for example, all
expression of affection for Hamlet and checks in Hamlet the outburst of
pity for his father? Whatever the intention may have been, the result is
that the Ghost affects imagination not simply as the apparition of a
dead king who desires the accomplishment of _his_ purposes, but also as
the representative of that hidden ultimate power, the messenger of
divine justice set upon the expiation of offences which it appeared
impossible for man to discover and avenge, a reminder or a symbol of the
connexion of the limited world of ordinary experience with the vaster
life of which it is but a partial appearance. And as, at the beginning
of the play, we have this intimation, conveyed through the medium of the
received religious idea of a soul come from purgatory, so at the end,
conveyed through the similar idea of a soul carried by angels to its
rest, we have an intimation of the same character, and a reminder that
the apparent failure of Hamlet's life is not the ultimate truth
concerning him.

If these various peculiarities of the tragedy are considered, it will be
agreed that, while _Hamlet_ certainly cannot be called in the specific
sense a 'religious drama,' there is in it nevertheless both a freer use
of popular religious ideas, and a more decided, though always
imaginative, intimation of a supreme power concerned in human evil and
good, than can be found in any other of Shakespeare's tragedies. And
this is probably one of the causes of the special popularity of this
play, just as _Macbeth_, the tragedy which in these respects most nearly
approaches it, has also the place next to it in general esteem.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 54: In the First Act (I. ii. 138) Hamlet says that his father
has been dead not quite two months. In the Third Act (III. ii. 135)
Ophelia says King Hamlet has been dead 'twice two months.' The events of
the Third Act are separated from those of the Second by one night (II.
ii. 565).]

[Footnote 55: The only difference is that in the 'To be or not to be'
soliloquy there is no reference to the idea that suicide is forbidden by
'the Everlasting.' Even this, however, seems to have been present in the
original form of the speech, for the version in the First Quarto has a
line about our being 'borne before an everlasting Judge.']

[Footnote 56: The present position of the 'To be or not to be'
soliloquy, and of the interview with Ophelia, appears to have been due
to an after-thought of Shakespeare's; for in the First Quarto they
precede, instead of following, the arrival of the players, and
consequently the arrangement for the play-scene. This is a notable
instance of the truth that 'inspiration' is by no means confined to a
poet's first conceptions.]

[Footnote 57: Cf. again the scene at Ophelia's grave, where a strong
strain of aesthetic disgust is traceable in Hamlet's 'towering passion'
with Laertes: 'Nay, an thou'lt mouth, I'll rant as well as thou' (V. i.
306).]

[Footnote 58:

     O heart, lose not thy nature; let not ever
     The soul of Nero enter this firm bosom:

Nero, who put to death his mother who had poisoned her husband. This
passage is surely remarkable. And so are the later words (III. iv. 28):

     A bloody deed! almost as bad, good mother,
     As kill a king, and marry with his brother.

Are we to understand that at this time he really suspected her of
complicity in the murder? We must remember that the Ghost had not told
him she was innocent of that.]

[Footnote 59: I am inclined to think that the note of interrogation put
after 'revenged' in a late Quarto is right.]

[Footnote 60: III. iii. 1-26. The state of affairs at Court at this
time, though I have not seen it noticed by critics, seems to me
puzzling. It is quite clear from III. ii. 310 ff., from the passage just
cited, and from IV. vii. 1-5 and 30 ff., that everyone sees in the
play-scene a gross and menacing insult to the King. Yet no one shows any
sign of perceiving in it also an accusation of murder. Surely that is
strange. Are we perhaps meant to understand that they do perceive this,
but out of subservience choose to ignore the fact? If that were
Shakespeare's meaning, the actors could easily indicate it by their
looks. And if it were so, any sympathy we may feel for Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern in their fate would be much diminished. But the mere text
does not suffice to decide either this question or the question whether
the two courtiers were aware of the contents of the commission they bore
to England.]

[Footnote 61: This passage in _Hamlet_ seems to have been in Heywood's
mind when, in _The Second Part of the Iron Age_ (Pearson's reprint, vol.
iii., p. 423), he makes the Ghost of Agamemnon appear in order to
satisfy the doubts of Orestes as to his mother's guilt. No reader could
possibly think that this Ghost was meant to be an hallucination; yet
Clytemnestra cannot see it. The Ghost of King Hamlet, I may add, goes
further than that of Agamemnon, for he is audible, as well as visible,
to the privileged person.]

[Footnote 62: I think it is clear that it is this fear which stands in
the way of the obvious plan of bringing Hamlet to trial and getting him
shut up or executed. It is much safer to hurry him off to his doom in
England before he can say anything about the murder which he has somehow
discovered. Perhaps the Queen's resistance, and probably Hamlet's great
popularity with the people, are additional reasons. (It should be
observed that as early as III. i. 194 we hear of the idea of 'confining'
Hamlet as an alternative to sending him to England.)]

[Footnote 63: I am inferring from IV. vii., 129, 130, and the last words
of the scene.]

[Footnote 64: III. iv. 172:

                         For this same lord,
     I do repent: but heaven hath pleased it so,
     To punish me with this and this with me,
     That I must be their scourge and minister:

_i.e._ the scourge and minister of 'heaven,' which has a plural sense
elsewhere also in Shakespeare.]

[Footnote 65: IV. iii. 48:

     _Ham._   For England!

     _King._               Ay, Hamlet.

     _Ham._                            Good.

     _King._  So is it, if thou knew'st our purposes.

     _Ham._   I see a cherub that sees them.]

[Footnote 66: On this passage see p. 98. Hamlet's reply to Horatio's
warning sounds, no doubt, determined; but so did 'I know my course.' And
is it not significant that, having given it, he abruptly changes the
subject?]

[Footnote 67: P. 102.]

[Footnote 68: It should be observed also that many of Hamlet's
repetitions can hardly be said to occur at moments of great emotion,
like Cordelia's 'And so I am, I am,' and 'No cause, no cause.'

Of course, a habit of repetition quite as marked as Hamlet's may be
found in comic persons, _e.g._ Justice Shallow in _2 Henry IV._]

[Footnote 69: Perhaps it is from noticing this trait that I find
something characteristic too in this coincidence of phrase: 'Alas, poor
ghost!' (I. v. 4), 'Alas, poor Yorick!' (V. i. 202).]

[Footnote 70: This letter, of course, was written before the time when
the action of the drama begins, for we know that Ophelia, after her
father's commands in I. iii., received no more letters (II. i. 109).]

[Footnote 71: 'Frailty, thy name is woman!' he had exclaimed in the
first soliloquy. Cf. what he says of his mother's act (III. iv. 40):

                               Such an act
     That blurs the grace and blush of modesty,
     Calls virtue hypocrite, takes off the rose
     From the fair forehead of an innocent love
     And sets a blister there.]

[Footnote 72: There are signs that Hamlet was haunted by the horrible
idea that he had been deceived in Ophelia as he had been in his mother;
that she was shallow and artificial, and even that what had seemed
simple and affectionate love might really have been something very
different. The grossness of his language at the play-scene, and some
lines in the Nunnery-scene, suggest this; and, considering the state of
his mind, there is nothing unnatural in his suffering from such a
suspicion. I do not suggest that he _believed_ in it, and in the
Nunnery-scene it is clear that his healthy perception of her innocence
is in conflict with it.

He seems to have divined that Polonius suspected him of dishonourable
intentions towards Ophelia; and there are also traces of the idea that
Polonius had been quite ready to let his daughter run the risk as long
as Hamlet was prosperous. But it is dangerous, of course, to lay stress
on inferences drawn from his conversations with Polonius.]

[Footnote 73: Many readers and critics imagine that Hamlet went straight
to Ophelia's room after his interview with the Ghost. But we have just
seen that on the contrary he tried to visit her and was repelled, and it
is absolutely certain that a long interval separates the events of I. v.
and II. i. They think also, of course, that Hamlet's visit to Ophelia
was the first announcement of his madness. But the text flatly
contradicts that idea also. Hamlet has for some time appeared totally
changed (II. ii. 1-10); the King is very uneasy at his 'transformation,'
and has sent for his school-fellows in order to discover its cause.
Polonius now, after Ophelia has told him of the interview, comes to
announce his discovery, not of Hamlet's madness, but of its cause (II.
ii. 49). That, it would seem, was the effect Hamlet aimed at in his
interview. I may add that Ophelia's description of his intent
examination of her face suggests doubt rather as to her 'honesty' or
sincerity than as to her strength of mind. I cannot believe that he ever
dreamed of confiding his secret to her.]

[Footnote 74: If this _is_ an allusion to his own love, the adjective
'despised' is significant. But I doubt the allusion. The other
calamities mentioned by Hamlet, 'the oppressor's wrong, the proud man's
contumely, the law's delay, the insolence of office, and the spurns that
patient merit of the unworthy takes,' are not at all specially his own.]

[Footnote 75: It should be noticed that it was not apparently of long
standing. See the words 'of late' in I. iii. 91, 99.]

[Footnote 76: This, I think, may be said on almost any sane view of
Hamlet's love.]

[Footnote 77: Polonius says so, and it _may_ be true.]

[Footnote 78: I have heard an actress in this part utter such a cry as
is described above, but there is absolutely nothing in the text to
justify her rendering. Even the exclamation 'O, ho!' found in the
Quartos at IV. v. 33, but omitted in the Folios and by almost all modern
editors, coming as it does after the stanza, 'He is dead and gone,
lady,' evidently expresses grief, not terror.]

[Footnote 79: In the remarks above I have not attempted, of course, a
complete view of the character, which has often been well described; but
I cannot forbear a reference to one point which I do not remember to
have seen noticed. In the Nunnery-scene Ophelia's first words
pathetically betray her own feeling:

                       Good my lord,
     How does your honour _for this many a day_?

She then offers to return Hamlet's presents. This has not been suggested
to her by her father: it is her own thought. And the next lines, in
which she refers to the sweet words which accompanied those gifts, and
to the unkindness which has succeeded that kindness, imply a reproach.
So again do those most touching little speeches:

     _Hamlet._    ... I did love you once.

     _Ophelia._  Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so.

     _Hamlet._   You should not have believed me ... I loved you not.

     _Ophelia._  I was the more deceived.

Now the obvious surface fact was not that Hamlet had forsaken her, but
that _she_ had repulsed _him_; and here, with his usual unobtrusive
subtlety, Shakespeare shows how Ophelia, even though she may have
accepted from her elders the theory that her unkindness has driven
Hamlet mad, knows within herself that she is forsaken, and cannot
repress the timid attempt to win her lover back by showing that her own
heart is unchanged.

I will add one note. There are critics who, after all the help given
them in different ways by Goethe and Coleridge and Mrs. Jameson, still
shake their heads over Ophelia's song, 'To-morrow is Saint Valentine's
day.' Probably they are incurable, but they may be asked to consider
that Shakespeare makes Desdemona, 'as chaste as ice, as pure as snow,'
sing an old song containing the line,

     If I court moe women, you'll couch with moe men.]

[Footnote 80: _I.e._ the King will kill _her_ to make all sure.]

[Footnote 81: I do not rely so much on his own statement to Laertes (IV.
vii. 12 f.) as on the absence of contrary indications, on his tone in
speaking to her, and on such signs as his mention of her in soliloquy
(III. iii. 55).]

[Footnote 82: This also is quietly indicated. Hamlet spares the King, he
says, because if the King is killed praying he will _go to heaven_. On
Hamlet's departure, the King rises from his knees, and mutters:

     My words fly up, my thoughts remain below:
     Words without thoughts _never to heaven go_.]

[Footnote 83: I am indebted to Werder in this paragraph.]

[Footnote 84: The attempt to explain this meeting as pre-arranged by
Hamlet is scarcely worth mention.]

 

LECTURE V

OTHELLO

There is practically no doubt that _Othello_ was the tragedy written
next after _Hamlet_. Such external evidence as we possess points to this
conclusion, and it is confirmed by similarities of style, diction and
versification, and also by the fact that ideas and phrases of the
earlier play are echoed in the later.[85] There is, further (not to
speak of one curious point, to be considered when we come to Iago), a
certain resemblance in the subjects. The heroes of the two plays are
doubtless extremely unlike, so unlike that each could have dealt without
much difficulty with the situation which proved fatal to the other; but
still each is a man exceptionally noble and trustful, and each endures
the shock of a terrible disillusionment. This theme is treated by
Shakespeare for the first time in _Hamlet_, for the second in _Othello_.
It recurs with modifications in _King Lear_, and it probably formed the
attraction which drew Shakespeare to refashion in part another writer's
tragedy of _Timon_. These four dramas may so far be grouped together in
distinction from the remaining tragedies.

But in point of substance, and, in certain respects, in point of style,
the unlikeness of _Othello_ to _Hamlet_ is much greater than the
likeness, and the later play belongs decidedly to one group with its
successors. We have seen that, like them, it is a tragedy of passion, a
description inapplicable to _Julius Caesar_ or _Hamlet_. And with this
change goes another, an enlargement in the stature of the hero. There is
in most of the later heroes something colossal, something which reminds
us of Michael Angelo's figures. They are not merely exceptional men,
they are huge men; as it were, survivors of the heroic age living in a
later and smaller world. We do not receive this impression from Romeo or
Brutus or Hamlet, nor did it lie in Shakespeare's design to allow more
than touches of this trait to Julius Caesar himself; but it is strongly
marked in Lear and Coriolanus, and quite distinct in Macbeth and even in
Antony. Othello is the first of these men, a being essentially large and
grand, towering above his fellows, holding a volume of force which in
repose ensures preeminence without an effort, and in commotion reminds
us rather of the fury of the elements than of the tumult of common human
passion.

1

What is the peculiarity of _Othello_? What is the distinctive impression
that it leaves? Of all Shakespeare's tragedies, I would answer, not even
excepting _King Lear_, _Othello_ is the most painfully exciting and the
most terrible. From the moment when the temptation of the hero begins,
the reader's heart and mind are held in a vice, experiencing the
extremes of pity and fear, sympathy and repulsion, sickening hope and
dreadful expectation. Evil is displayed before him, not indeed with the
profusion found in _King Lear_, but forming, as it were, the soul of a
single character, and united with an intellectual superiority so great
that he watches its advance fascinated and appalled. He sees it, in
itself almost irresistible, aided at every step by fortunate accidents
and the innocent mistakes of its victims. He seems to breathe an
atmosphere as fateful as that of _King Lear_, but more confined and
oppressive, the darkness not of night but of a close-shut murderous
room. His imagination is excited to intense activity, but it is the
activity of concentration rather than dilation.

I will not dwell now on aspects of the play which modify this
impression, and I reserve for later discussion one of its principal
sources, the character of Iago. But if we glance at some of its other
sources, we shall find at the same time certain distinguishing
characteristics of _Othello_.

(1) One of these has been already mentioned in our discussion of
Shakespeare's technique. _Othello_ is not only the most masterly of the
tragedies in point of construction, but its method of construction is
unusual. And this method, by which the conflict begins late, and
advances without appreciable pause and with accelerating speed to the
catastrophe, is a main cause of the painful tension just described. To
this may be added that, after the conflict has begun, there is very
little relief by way of the ridiculous. Henceforward at any rate Iago's
humour never raises a smile. The clown is a poor one; we hardly attend
to him and quickly forget him; I believe most readers of Shakespeare, if
asked whether there is a clown in _Othello_, would answer No.

(2) In the second place, there is no subject more exciting than sexual
jealousy rising to the pitch of passion; and there can hardly be any
spectacle at once so engrossing and so painful as that of a great nature
suffering the torment of this passion, and driven by it to a crime which
is also a hideous blunder. Such a passion as ambition, however terrible
its results, is not itself ignoble; if we separate it in thought from
the conditions which make it guilty, it does not appear despicable; it
is not a kind of suffering, its nature is active; and therefore we can
watch its course without shrinking. But jealousy, and especially sexual
jealousy, brings with it a sense of shame and humiliation. For this
reason it is generally hidden; if we perceive it we ourselves are
ashamed and turn our eyes away; and when it is not hidden it commonly
stirs contempt as well as pity. Nor is this all. Such jealousy as
Othello's converts human nature into chaos, and liberates the beast in
man; and it does this in relation to one of the most intense and also
the most ideal of human feelings. What spectacle can be more painful
than that of this feeling turned into a tortured mixture of longing and
loathing, the 'golden purity' of passion split by poison into fragments,
the animal in man forcing itself into his consciousness in naked
grossness, and he writhing before it but powerless to deny it entrance,
gasping inarticulate images of pollution, and finding relief only in a
bestial thirst for blood? This is what we have to witness in one who was
indeed 'great of heart' and no less pure and tender than he was great.
And this, with what it leads to, the blow to Desdemona, and the scene
where she is treated as the inmate of a brothel, a scene far more
painful than the murder scene, is another cause of the special effect of
this tragedy.[86]

(3) The mere mention of these scenes will remind us painfully of a third
cause; and perhaps it is the most potent of all. I mean the suffering of
Desdemona. This is, unless I mistake, the most nearly intolerable
spectacle that Shakespeare offers us. For one thing, it is _mere_
suffering; and, _ceteris paribus_, that is much worse to witness than
suffering that issues in action. Desdemona is helplessly passive. She
can do nothing whatever. She cannot retaliate even in speech; no, not
even in silent feeling. And the chief reason of her helplessness only
makes the sight of her suffering more exquisitely painful. She is
helpless because her nature is infinitely sweet and her love absolute. I
would not challenge Mr. Swinburne's statement that we _pity_ Othello
even more than Desdemona; but we watch Desdemona with more unmitigated
distress. We are never wholly uninfluenced by the feeling that Othello
is a man contending with another man; but Desdemona's suffering is like
that of the most loving of dumb creatures tortured without cause by the
being he adores.

(4) Turning from the hero and heroine to the third principal character,
we observe (what has often been pointed out) that the action and
catastrophe of _Othello_ depend largely on intrigue. We must not say
more than this. We must not call the play a tragedy of intrigue as
distinguished from a tragedy of character. Iago's plot is Iago's
character in action; and it is built on his knowledge of Othello's
character, and could not otherwise have succeeded. Still it remains true
that an elaborate plot was necessary to elicit the catastrophe; for
Othello was no Leontes, and his was the last nature to engender such
jealousy from itself. Accordingly Iago's intrigue occupies a position in
the drama for which no parallel can be found in the other tragedies; the
only approach, and that a distant one, being the intrigue of Edmund in
the secondary plot of _King Lear_. Now in any novel or play, even if the
persons rouse little interest and are never in serious danger, a
skilfully-worked intrigue will excite eager attention and suspense. And
where, as in _Othello_, the persons inspire the keenest sympathy and
antipathy, and life and death depend on the intrigue, it becomes the
source of a tension in which pain almost overpowers pleasure. Nowhere
else in Shakespeare do we hold our breath in such anxiety and for so
long a time as in the later Acts of _Othello_.

(5) One result of the prominence of the element of intrigue is that
_Othello_ is less unlike a story of private life than any other of the
great tragedies. And this impression is strengthened in further ways. In
the other great tragedies the action is placed in a distant period, so
that its general significance is perceived through a thin veil which
separates the persons from ourselves and our own world. But _Othello_ is
a drama of modern life; when it first appeared it was a drama almost of
contemporary life, for the date of the Turkish attack on Cyprus is 1570.
The characters come close to us, and the application of the drama to
ourselves (if the phrase may be pardoned) is more immediate than it can
be in _Hamlet_ or _Lear_. Besides this, their fortunes affect us as
those of private individuals more than is possible in any of the later
tragedies with the exception of _Timon_. I have not forgotten the
Senate, nor Othello's position, nor his service to the State;[87] but
his deed and his death have not that influence on the interests of a
nation or an empire which serves to idealise, and to remove far from our
own sphere, the stories of Hamlet and Macbeth, of Coriolanus and Antony.
Indeed he is already superseded at Cyprus when his fate is consummated,
and as we leave him no vision rises on us, as in other tragedies, of
peace descending on a distracted land.

(6) The peculiarities so far considered combine with others to produce
those feelings of oppression, of confinement to a comparatively narrow
world, and of dark fatality, which haunt us in reading _Othello_. In
_Macbeth_ the fate which works itself out alike in the external conflict
and in the hero's soul, is obviously hostile to evil; and the
imagination is dilated both by the consciousness of its presence and by
the appearance of supernatural agencies. These, as we have seen, produce
in _Hamlet_ a somewhat similar effect, which is increased by the hero's
acceptance of the accidents as a providential shaping of his end. _King
Lear_ is undoubtedly the tragedy which comes nearest to _Othello_ in the
impression of darkness and fatefulness, and in the absence of direct
indications of any guiding power.[88] But in _King Lear_, apart from
other differences to be considered later, the conflict assumes
proportions so vast that the imagination seems, as in _Paradise Lost_,
to traverse spaces wider than the earth. In reading _Othello_ the mind
is not thus distended. It is more bound down to the spectacle of noble
beings caught in toils from which there is no escape; while the
prominence of the intrigue diminishes the sense of the dependence of the
catastrophe on character, and the part played by accident[89] in this
catastrophe accentuates the feeling of fate. This influence of accident
is keenly felt in _King Lear_ only once, and at the very end of the
play. In _Othello_, after the temptation has begun, it is incessant and
terrible. The skill of Iago was extraordinary, but so was his good
fortune. Again and again a chance word from Desdemona, a chance meeting
of Othello and Cassio, a question which starts to our lips and which
anyone but Othello would have asked, would have destroyed Iago's plot
and ended his life. In their stead, Desdemona drops her handkerchief at
the moment most favourable to him,[90] Cassio blunders into the presence
of Othello only to find him in a swoon, Bianca arrives precisely when
she is wanted to complete Othello's deception and incense his anger into
fury. All this and much more seems to us quite natural, so potent is the
art of the dramatist; but it confounds us with a feeling, such as we
experience in the _Oedipus Tyrannus_, that for these star-crossed
mortals--both [Greek: dysdaimones]--there is no escape from fate, and
even with a feeling, absent from that play, that fate has taken sides
with villainy.[91] It is not surprising, therefore, that _Othello_
should affect us as _Hamlet_ and _Macbeth_ never do, and as _King Lear_
does only in slighter measure. On the contrary, it is marvellous that,
before the tragedy is over, Shakespeare should have succeeded in toning
down this impression into harmony with others more solemn and serene.

But has he wholly succeeded? Or is there a justification for the fact--a
fact it certainly is--that some readers, while acknowledging, of course,
the immense power of _Othello_, and even admitting that it is
dramatically perhaps Shakespeare's greatest triumph, still regard it
with a certain distaste, or, at any rate, hardly allow it a place in
their minds beside _Hamlet_, _King Lear_ and _Macbeth_?

The distaste to which I refer is due chiefly to two causes. First, to
many readers in our time, men as well as women, the subject of sexual
jealousy, treated with Elizabethan fulness and frankness, is not merely
painful but so repulsive that not even the intense tragic emotions which
the story generates can overcome this repulsion. But, while it is easy
to understand a dislike of _Othello_ thus caused, it does not seem
necessary to discuss it, for it may fairly be called personal or
subjective. It would become more than this, and would amount to a
criticism of the play, only if those who feel it maintained that the
fulness and frankness which are disagreeable to them are also needless
from a dramatic point of view, or betray a design of appealing to
unpoetic feelings in the audience. But I do not think that this is
maintained, or that such a view would be plausible.

To some readers, again, parts of _Othello_ appear shocking or even
horrible. They think--if I may formulate their objection--that in these
parts Shakespeare has sinned against the canons of art, by representing
on the stage a violence or brutality the effect of which is
unnecessarily painful and rather sensational than tragic. The passages
which thus give offence are probably those already referred to,--that
where Othello strikes Desdemona (IV. i. 251), that where he affects to
treat her as an inmate of a house of ill-fame (IV. ii.), and finally the
scene of her death.

The issues thus raised ought not to be ignored or impatiently dismissed,
but they cannot be decided, it seems to me, by argument. All we can
profitably do is to consider narrowly our experience, and to ask
ourselves this question: If we feel these objections, do we feel them
when we are reading the play with all our force, or only when we are
reading it in a half-hearted manner? For, however matters may stand in
the former case, in the latter case evidently the fault is ours and not
Shakespeare's. And if we try the question thus, I believe we shall find
that on the whole the fault is ours. The first, and least important, of
the three passages--that of the blow--seems to me the most doubtful. I
confess that, do what I will, I cannot reconcile myself with it. It
seems certain that the blow is by no means a tap on the shoulder with a
roll of paper, as some actors, feeling the repulsiveness of the passage,
have made it. It must occur, too, on the open stage. And there is not, I
think, a sufficiently overwhelming tragic feeling in the passage to make
it bearable. But in the other two scenes the case is different. There,
it seems to me, if we fully imagine the inward tragedy in the souls of
the persons as we read, the more obvious and almost physical sensations
of pain or horror do not appear in their own likeness, and only serve to
intensify the tragic feelings in which they are absorbed. Whether this
would be so in the murder-scene if Desdemona had to be imagined as
dragged about the open stage (as in some modern performances) may be
doubtful; but there is absolutely no warrant in the text for imagining
this, and it is also quite clear that the bed where she is stifled was
within the curtains,[92] and so, presumably, in part concealed.

Here, then, _Othello_ does not appear to be, unless perhaps at one
point,[93] open to criticism, though it has more passages than the other
three tragedies where, if imagination is not fully exerted, it is
shocked or else sensationally excited. If nevertheless we feel it to
occupy a place in our minds a little lower than the other three (and I
believe this feeling, though not general, is not rare), the reason lies
not here but in another characteristic, to which I have already
referred,--the comparative confinement of the imaginative atmosphere.
_Othello_ has not equally with the other three the power of dilating the
imagination by vague suggestions of huge universal powers working in the
world of individual fate and passion. It is, in a sense, less
'symbolic.' We seem to be aware in it of a certain limitation, a partial
suppression of that element in Shakespeare's mind which unites him with
the mystical poets and with the great musicians and philosophers. In one
or two of his plays, notably in _Troilus and Cressida_, we are almost
painfully conscious of this suppression; we feel an intense intellectual
activity, but at the same time a certain coldness and hardness, as
though some power in his soul, at once the highest and the sweetest,
were for a time in abeyance. In other plays, notably in the _Tempest_,
we are constantly aware of the presence of this power; and in such cases
we seem to be peculiarly near to Shakespeare himself. Now this is so in
_Hamlet_ and _King Lear_, and, in a slighter degree, in _Macbeth_; but
it is much less so in _Othello_. I do not mean that in _Othello_ the
suppression is marked, or that, as in _Troilus and Cressida_, it strikes
us as due to some unpleasant mood; it seems rather to follow simply from
the design of a play on a contemporary and wholly mundane subject. Still
it makes a difference of the kind I have attempted to indicate, and it
leaves an impression that in _Othello_ we are not in contact with the
whole of Shakespeare. And it is perhaps significant in this respect that
the hero himself strikes us as having, probably, less of the poet's
personality in him than many characters far inferior both as dramatic
creations and as men.

2

The character of Othello is comparatively simple, but, as I have dwelt
on the prominence of intrigue and accident in the play, it is desirable
to show how essentially the success of Iago's plot is connected with
this character. Othello's description of himself as

              one not easily jealous, but, being wrought,
     Perplexed in the extreme,

is perfectly just. His tragedy lies in this--that his whole nature was
indisposed to jealousy, and yet was such that he was unusually open to
deception, and, if once wrought to passion, likely to act with little
reflection, with no delay, and in the most decisive manner conceivable.

Let me first set aside a mistaken view. I do not mean the ridiculous
notion that Othello was jealous by temperament, but the idea, which has
some little plausibility, that the play is primarily a study of a noble
barbarian, who has become a Christian and has imbibed some of the
civilisation of his employers, but who retains beneath the surface the
savage passions of his Moorish blood and also the suspiciousness
regarding female chastity common among Oriental peoples, and that the
last three Acts depict the outburst of these original feelings through
the thin crust of Venetian culture. It would take too long to discuss
this idea,[94] and it would perhaps be useless to do so, for all
arguments against it must end in an appeal to the reader's understanding
of Shakespeare. If he thinks it is like Shakespeare to look at things in
this manner; that he had a historical mind and occupied himself with
problems of 'Culturgeschichte'; that he laboured to make his Romans
perfectly Roman, to give a correct view of the Britons in the days of
Lear or Cymbeline, to portray in Hamlet a stage of the moral
consciousness not yet reached by the people around him, the reader will
also think this interpretation of _Othello_ probable. To me it appears
hopelessly un-Shakespearean. I could as easily believe that Chaucer
meant the Wife of Bath for a study of the peculiarities of
Somersetshire. I do not mean that Othello's race is a matter of no
account. It has, as we shall presently see, its importance in the play.
It makes a difference to our idea of him; it makes a difference to the
action and catastrophe. But in regard to the essentials of his character
it is not important; and if anyone had told Shakespeare that no
Englishman would have acted like the Moor, and had congratulated him on
the accuracy of his racial psychology, I am sure he would have laughed.

Othello is, in one sense of the word, by far the most romantic figure
among Shakespeare's heroes; and he is so partly from the strange life of
war and adventure which he has lived from childhood. He does not belong
to our world, and he seems to enter it we know not whence--almost as if
from wonderland. There is something mysterious in his descent from men
of royal siege; in his wanderings in vast deserts and among marvellous
peoples; in his tales of magic handkerchiefs and prophetic Sibyls; in
the sudden vague glimpses we get of numberless battles and sieges in
which he has played the hero and has borne a charmed life; even in
chance references to his baptism, his being sold to slavery, his sojourn
in Aleppo.

And he is not merely a romantic figure; his own nature is romantic. He
has not, indeed, the meditative or speculative imagination of Hamlet;
but in the strictest sense of the word he is more poetic than Hamlet.
Indeed, if one recalls Othello's most famous speeches--those that begin,
'Her father loved me,' 'O now for ever,' 'Never, Iago,' 'Had it pleased
Heaven,' 'It is the cause,' 'Behold, I have a weapon,' 'Soft you, a word
or two before you go'--and if one places side by side with these
speeches an equal number by any other hero, one will not doubt that
Othello is the greatest poet of them all. There is the same poetry in
his casual phrases--like 'These nine moons wasted,' 'Keep up your bright
swords, for the dew will rust them,' 'You chaste stars,' 'It is a sword
of Spain, the ice-brook's temper,' 'It is the very error of the
moon'--and in those brief expressions of intense feeling which ever
since have been taken as the absolute expression, like

                      If it were now to die,
     'Twere now to be most happy; for, I fear,
     My soul hath her content so absolute
     That not another comfort like to this
     Succeeds in unknown fate,

or

     If she be false, O then Heaven mocks itself.
     I'll not believe it;

or

     No, my heart is turned to stone; I strike it, and it hurts my hand,

or

     But yet the pity of it, Iago! O Iago, the pity of it, Iago!

or

                                 O thou weed,
     Who art so lovely fair and smell'st so sweet
     That the sense aches at thee, would thou hadst ne'er been born.

And this imagination, we feel, has accompanied his whole life. He has
watched with a poet's eye the Arabian trees dropping their med'cinable
gum, and the Indian throwing away his chance-found pearl; and has gazed
in a fascinated dream at the Pontic sea rushing, never to return, to the
Propontic and the Hellespont; and has felt as no other man ever felt
(for he speaks of it as none other ever did) the poetry of the pride,
pomp, and circumstance of glorious war.

So he comes before us, dark and grand, with a light upon him from the
sun where he was born; but no longer young, and now grave,
self-controlled, steeled by the experience of countless perils,
hardships and vicissitudes, at once simple and stately in bearing and in
speech, a great man naturally modest but fully conscious of his worth,
proud of his services to the state, unawed by dignitaries and unelated
by honours, secure, it would seem, against all dangers from without and
all rebellion from within. And he comes to have his life crowned with
the final glory of love, a love as strange, adventurous and romantic as
any passage of his eventful history, filling his heart with tenderness
and his imagination with ecstasy. For there is no love, not that of
Romeo in his youth, more steeped in imagination than Othello's.

The sources of danger in this character are revealed but too clearly by
the story. In the first place, Othello's mind, for all its poetry, is
very simple. He is not observant. His nature tends outward. He is quite
free from introspection, and is not given to reflection. Emotion excites
his imagination, but it confuses and dulls his intellect. On this side
he is the very opposite of Hamlet, with whom, however, he shares a great
openness and trustfulness of nature. In addition, he has little
experience of the corrupt products of civilised life, and is ignorant of
European women.

In the second place, for all his dignity and massive calm (and he has
greater dignity than any other of Shakespeare's men), he is by nature
full of the most vehement passion. Shakespeare emphasises his
self-control, not only by the wonderful pictures of the First Act, but
by references to the past. Lodovico, amazed at his violence, exclaims:

     Is this the noble Moor whom our full Senate
     Call all in all sufficient? Is this the nature
     Whom passion could not shake? whose solid virtue
     The shot of accident nor dart of chance
     Could neither graze nor pierce?

Iago, who has here no motive for lying, asks:

     Can he be angry? I have seen the cannon
     When it hath blown his ranks into the air,
     And, like the devil, from his very arm
     Puffed his own brother--and can he be angry?[95]

This, and other aspects of his character, are best exhibited by a single
line--one of Shakespeare's miracles--the words by which Othello silences
in a moment the night-brawl between his attendants and those of
Brabantio:

     Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them.

And the same self-control is strikingly shown where Othello endeavours
to elicit some explanation of the fight between Cassio and Montano.
Here, however, there occur ominous words, which make us feel how
necessary was this self-control, and make us admire it the more:

                          Now, by heaven,
     My blood begins my safer guides to rule,
     And passion, having my best judgment collied,
     Assays to lead the way.

We remember these words later, when the sun of reason is 'collied,'
blackened and blotted out in total eclipse.

Lastly, Othello's nature is all of one piece. His trust, where he
trusts, is absolute. Hesitation is almost impossible to him. He is
extremely self-reliant, and decides and acts instantaneously. If stirred
to indignation, as 'in Aleppo once,' he answers with one lightning
stroke. Love, if he loves, must be to him the heaven where either he
must live or bear no life. If such a passion as jealousy seizes him, it
will swell into a well-nigh incontrollable flood. He will press for
immediate conviction or immediate relief. Convinced, he will act with
the authority of a judge and the swiftness of a man in mortal pain.
Undeceived, he will do like execution on himself.

This character is so noble, Othello's feelings and actions follow so
inevitably from it and from the forces brought to bear on it, and his
sufferings are so heart-rending, that he stirs, I believe, in most
readers a passion of mingled love and pity which they feel for no other
hero in Shakespeare, and to which not even Mr. Swinburne can do more
than justice. Yet there are some critics and not a few readers who
cherish a grudge against him. They do not merely think that in the later
stages of his temptation he showed a certain obtuseness, and that, to
speak pedantically, he acted with unjustifiable precipitance and
violence; no one, I suppose, denies that. But, even when they admit that
he was not of a jealous temper, they consider that he _was_ 'easily
jealous'; they seem to think that it was inexcusable in him to feel any
suspicion of his wife at all; and they blame him for never suspecting
Iago or asking him for evidence. I refer to this attitude of mind
chiefly in order to draw attention to certain points in the story. It
comes partly from mere inattention (for Othello did suspect Iago and did
ask him for evidence); partly from a misconstruction of the text which
makes Othello appear jealous long before he really is so;[96] and partly
from failure to realise certain essential facts. I will begin with
these.

(1) Othello, we have seen, was trustful, and thorough in his trust. He
put entire confidence in the honesty of Iago, who had not only been his
companion in arms, but, as he believed, had just proved his faithfulness
in the matter of the marriage. This confidence was misplaced, and we
happen to know it; but it was no sign of stupidity in Othello. For his
opinion of Iago was the opinion of practically everyone who knew him:
and that opinion was that Iago was before all things 'honest,' his very
faults being those of excess in honesty. This being so, even if Othello
had not been trustful and simple, it would have been quite unnatural in
him to be unmoved by the warnings of so honest a friend, warnings
offered with extreme reluctance and manifestly from a sense of a
friend's duty.[97] _Any_ husband would have been troubled by them.

(2) Iago does not bring these warnings to a husband who had lived with a
wife for months and years and knew her like his sister or his
bosom-friend. Nor is there any ground in Othello's character for
supposing that, if he had been such a man, he would have felt and acted
as he does in the play. But he was newly married; in the circumstances
he cannot have known much of Desdemona before his marriage; and further
he was conscious of being under the spell of a feeling which can give
glory to the truth but can also give it to a dream.

(3) This consciousness in any imaginative man is enough, in such
circumstances, to destroy his confidence in his powers of perception. In
Othello's case, after a long and most artful preparation, there now
comes, to reinforce its effect, the suggestions that he is not an
Italian, not even a European; that he is totally ignorant of the
thoughts and the customary morality of Venetian women;[98] that he had
himself seen in Desdemona's deception of her father how perfect an
actress she could be. As he listens in horror, for a moment at least the
past is revealed to him in a new and dreadful light, and the ground
seems to sink under his feet. These suggestions are followed by a
tentative but hideous and humiliating insinuation of what his honest and
much-experienced friend fears may be the true explanation of Desdemona's
rejection of acceptable suitors, and of her strange, and naturally
temporary, preference for a black man. Here Iago goes too far. He sees
something in Othello's face that frightens him, and he breaks off. Nor
does this idea take any hold of Othello's mind. But it is not surprising
that his utter powerlessness to repel it on the ground of knowledge of
his wife, or even of that instinctive interpretation of character which
is possible between persons of the same race,[99] should complete his
misery, so that he feels he can bear no more, and abruptly dismisses his
friend (III. iii. 238).

Now I repeat that _any_ man situated as Othello was would have been
disturbed by Iago's communications, and I add that many men would have
been made wildly jealous. But up to this point, where Iago is dismissed,
Othello, I must maintain, does not show jealousy. His confidence is
shaken, he is confused and deeply troubled, he feels even horror; but he
is not yet jealous in the proper sense of that word. In his soliloquy
(III. iii. 258 ff.) the beginning of this passion may be traced; but it
is only after an interval of solitude, when he has had time to dwell on
the idea presented to him, and especially after statements of fact, not
mere general grounds of suspicion, are offered, that the passion lays
hold of him. Even then, however, and indeed to the very end, he is quite
unlike the essentially jealous man, quite unlike Leontes. No doubt the
thought of another man's possessing the woman he loves is intolerable to
him; no doubt the sense of insult and the impulse of revenge are at
times most violent; and these are the feelings of jealousy proper. But
these are not the chief or the deepest source of Othello's suffering. It
is the wreck of his faith and his love. It is the feeling,

     If she be false, oh then Heaven mocks itself;

the feeling,

     O Iago, the pity of it, Iago!

the feeling,

     But there where I have garner'd up my heart,
     Where either I must live, or bear no life;
     The fountain from the which my current runs,
     Or else dries up--to be discarded thence....

You will find nothing like this in Leontes.

Up to this point, it appears to me, there is not a syllable to be said
against Othello. But the play is a tragedy, and from this point we may
abandon the ungrateful and undramatic task of awarding praise and blame.
When Othello, after a brief interval, re-enters (III. iii. 330), we see
at once that the poison has been at work and 'burns like the mines of
sulphur.'

     Look where he comes! Not poppy, nor mandragora,
     Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world,
     Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep
     Which thou owedst yesterday.

He is 'on the rack,' in an agony so unbearable that he cannot endure the
sight of Iago. Anticipating the probability that Iago has spared him the
whole truth, he feels that in that case his life is over and his
'occupation gone' with all its glories. But he has not abandoned hope.
The bare possibility that his friend is deliberately deceiving
him--though such a deception would be a thing so monstrously wicked that
he can hardly conceive it credible--is a kind of hope. He furiously
demands proof, ocular proof. And when he is compelled to see that he is
demanding an impossibility he still demands evidence. He forces it from
the unwilling witness, and hears the maddening tale of Cassio's dream.
It is enough. And if it were not enough, has he not sometimes seen a
handkerchief spotted with strawberries in his wife's hand? Yes, it was
his first gift to her.

     I know not that; but such a handkerchief--
     I am sure it was your wife's--did I to-day
     See Cassio wipe his beard with.

'If it be that,' he answers--but what need to test the fact? The
'madness of revenge' is in his blood, and hesitation is a thing he never
knew. He passes judgment, and controls himself only to make his sentence
a solemn vow.

The Othello of the Fourth Act is Othello in his fall. His fall is never
complete, but he is much changed. Towards the close of the
Temptation-scene he becomes at times most terrible, but his grandeur
remains almost undiminished. Even in the following scene (III. iv.),
where he goes to test Desdemona in the matter of the handkerchief, and
receives a fatal confirmation of her guilt, our sympathy with him is
hardly touched by any feeling of humiliation. But in the Fourth Act
'Chaos has come.' A slight interval of time may be admitted here. It is
but slight; for it was necessary for Iago to hurry on, and terribly
dangerous to leave a chance for a meeting of Cassio with Othello; and
his insight into Othello's nature taught him that his plan was to
deliver blow on blow, and never to allow his victim to recover from the
confusion of the first shock. Still there is a slight interval; and when
Othello reappears we see at a glance that he is a changed man. He is
physically exhausted, and his mind is dazed.[100] He sees everything
blurred through a mist of blood and tears. He has actually forgotten the
incident of the handkerchief, and has to be reminded of it. When Iago,
perceiving that he can now risk almost any lie, tells him that Cassio
has confessed his guilt, Othello, the hero who has seemed to us only
second to Coriolanus in physical power, trembles all over; he mutters
disjointed words; a blackness suddenly intervenes between his eyes and
the world; he takes it for the shuddering testimony of nature to the
horror he has just heard,[101] and he falls senseless to the ground.
When he recovers it is to watch Cassio, as he imagines, laughing over
his shame. It is an imposition so gross, and should have been one so
perilous, that Iago would never have ventured it before. But he is safe
now. The sight only adds to the confusion of intellect the madness of
rage; and a ravenous thirst for revenge, contending with motions of
infinite longing and regret, conquers them. The delay till night-fall is
torture to him. His self-control has wholly deserted him, and he strikes
his wife in the presence of the Venetian envoy. He is so lost to all
sense of reality that he never asks himself what will follow the deaths
of Cassio and his wife. An ineradicable instinct of justice, rather than
any last quiver of hope, leads him to question Emilia; but nothing could
convince him now, and there follows the dreadful scene of accusation;
and then, to allow us the relief of burning hatred and burning tears,
the interview of Desdemona with Iago, and that last talk of hers with
Emilia, and her last song.

But before the end there is again a change. The supposed death of Cassio
(V. i.) satiates the thirst for vengeance. The Othello who enters the
bed-chamber with the words,

     It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul,

is not the man of the Fourth Act. The deed he is bound to do is no
murder, but a sacrifice. He is to save Desdemona from herself, not in
hate but in honour; in honour, and also in love. His anger has passed; a
boundless sorrow has taken its place; and

                  this sorrow's heavenly:
     It strikes where it doth love.

Even when, at the sight of her apparent obduracy, and at the hearing of
words which by a crowning fatality can only reconvince him of her guilt,
these feelings give way to others, it is to righteous indignation they
give way, not to rage; and, terribly painful as this scene is, there is
almost nothing here to diminish the admiration and love which heighten
pity.[102] And pity itself vanishes, and love and admiration alone
remain, in the majestic dignity and sovereign ascendancy of the close.
Chaos has come and gone; and the Othello of the Council-chamber and the
quay of Cyprus has returned, or a greater and nobler Othello still. As
he speaks those final words in which all the glory and agony of his
life--long ago in India and Arabia and Aleppo, and afterwards in Venice,
and now in Cyprus--seem to pass before us, like the pictures that flash
before the eyes of a drowning man, a triumphant scorn for the fetters of
the flesh and the littleness of all the lives that must survive him
sweeps our grief away, and when he dies upon a kiss the most painful of
all tragedies leaves us for the moment free from pain, and exulting in
the power of 'love and man's unconquerable mind.'

3

The words just quoted come from Wordsworth's sonnet to Toussaint
l'Ouverture. Toussaint was a Negro; and there is a question, which,
though of little consequence, is not without dramatic interest, whether
Shakespeare imagined Othello as a Negro or as a Moor. Now I will not say
that Shakespeare imagined him as a Negro and not as a Moor, for that
might imply that he distinguished Negroes and Moors precisely as we do;
but what appears to me nearly certain is that he imagined Othello as a
black man, and not as a light-brown one.

In the first place, we must remember that the brown or bronze to which
we are now accustomed in the Othellos of our theatres is a recent
innovation. Down to Edmund Kean's time, so far as is known, Othello was
always quite black. This stage-tradition goes back to the Restoration,
and it almost settles our question. For it is impossible that the colour
of the original Othello should have been forgotten so soon after
Shakespeare's time, and most improbable that it should have been changed
from brown to black.

If we turn to the play itself, we find many references to Othello's
colour and appearance. Most of these are indecisive; for the word
'black' was of course used then where we should speak of a 'dark'
complexion now; and even the nickname 'thick-lips,' appealed to as proof
that Othello was a Negro, might have been applied by an enemy to what we
call a Moor. On the other hand, it is hard to believe that, if Othello
had been light-brown, Brabantio would have taunted him with having a
'sooty bosom,' or that (as Mr. Furness observes) he himself would have
used the words,

                    her name, that was as fresh
     As Dian's visage, is now begrimed and black
     As mine own face.

These arguments cannot be met by pointing out that Othello was of royal
blood, is not called an Ethiopian, is called a Barbary horse, and is
said to be going to Mauritania. All this would be of importance if we
had reason to believe that Shakespeare shared our ideas, knowledge and
terms. Otherwise it proves nothing. And we know that sixteenth-century
writers called any dark North-African a Moor, or a black Moor, or a
blackamoor. Sir Thomas Elyot, according to Hunter,[103] calls Ethiopians
Moors; and the following are the first two illustrations of 'Blackamoor'
in the Oxford _English Dictionary_: 1547, 'I am a blake More borne in
Barbary'; 1548, '_Ethiopo_, a blake More, or a man of Ethiope.' Thus
geographical names can tell us nothing about the question how
Shakespeare imagined Othello. He may have known that a Mauritanian is
not a Negro nor black, but we cannot assume that he did. He may have
known, again, that the Prince of Morocco, who is described in the
_Merchant of Venice_ as having, like Othello, the complexion of a devil,
was no Negro. But we cannot tell: nor is there any reason why he should
not have imagined the Prince as a brown Moor and Othello as a
Blackamoor.

_Titus Andronicus_ appeared in the Folio among Shakespeare's works. It
is believed by some good critics to be his: hardly anyone doubts that he
had a hand in it: it is certain that he knew it, for reminiscences of it
are scattered through his plays. Now no one who reads _Titus Andronicus_
with an open mind can doubt that Aaron was, in our sense, black; and he
appears to have been a Negro. To mention nothing else, he is twice
called 'coal-black'; his colour is compared with that of a raven and a
swan's legs; his child is coal-black and thick-lipped; he himself has a
'fleece of woolly hair.' Yet he is 'Aaron the Moor,' just as Othello is
'Othello the Moor.' In the _Battle of Alcazar_ (Dyce's _Peele_, p. 421)
Muly the Moor is called 'the negro'; and Shakespeare himself in a single
line uses 'negro' and 'Moor' of the same person (_Merchant of Venice_,
III. v. 42).

The horror of most American critics (Mr. Furness is a bright exception)
at the idea of a black Othello is very amusing, and their arguments are
highly instructive. But they were anticipated, I regret to say, by
Coleridge, and we will hear him. 'No doubt Desdemona saw Othello's
visage in his mind; yet, as we are constituted, and most surely as an
English audience was disposed in the beginning of the seventeenth
century, it would be something monstrous to conceive this beautiful
Venetian girl falling in love with a veritable negro. It would argue a
disproportionateness, a want of balance, in Desdemona, which Shakespeare
does not appear to have in the least contemplated.'[104] Could any
argument be more self-destructive? It actually _did_ appear to Brabantio
'something monstrous to conceive' his daughter falling in love with
Othello,--so monstrous that he could account for her love only by drugs
and foul charms. And the suggestion that such love would argue
'disproportionateness' is precisely the suggestion that Iago _did_ make
in Desdemona's case:

     Foh! one may smell in such a will most rank,
     Foul _disproportion_, thoughts unnatural.

In fact he spoke of the marriage exactly as a filthy-minded cynic now
might speak of the marriage of an English lady to a negro like
Toussaint. Thus the argument of Coleridge and others points straight to
the conclusion against which they argue.

But this is not all. The question whether to Shakespeare Othello was
black or brown is not a mere question of isolated fact or historical
curiosity; it concerns the character of Desdemona. Coleridge, and still
more the American writers, regard her love, in effect, as Brabantio
regarded it, and not as Shakespeare conceived it. They are simply
blurring this glorious conception when they try to lessen the distance
between her and Othello, and to smooth away the obstacle which his
'visage' offered to her romantic passion for a hero. Desdemona, the
'eternal womanly' in its most lovely and adorable form, simple and
innocent as a child, ardent with the courage and idealism of a saint,
radiant with that heavenly purity of heart which men worship the more
because nature so rarely permits it to themselves, had no theories about
universal brotherhood, and no phrases about 'one blood in all the
nations of the earth' or 'barbarian, Scythian, bond and free'; but when
her soul came in sight of the noblest soul on earth, she made nothing of
the shrinking of her senses, but followed her soul until her senses took
part with it, and 'loved him with the love which was her doom.' It was
not prudent. It even turned out tragically. She met in life with the
reward of those who rise too far above our common level; and we continue
to allot her the same reward when we consent to forgive her for loving a
brown man, but find it monstrous that she should love a black one.[105]

There is perhaps a certain excuse for our failure to rise to
Shakespeare's meaning, and to realise how extraordinary and splendid a
thing it was in a gentle Venetian girl to love Othello, and to assail
fortune with such a 'downright violence and storm' as is expected only
in a hero. It is that when first we hear of her marriage we have not yet
seen the Desdemona of the later Acts; and therefore we do not perceive
how astonishing this love and boldness must have been in a maiden so
quiet and submissive. And when we watch her in her suffering and death
we are so penetrated by the sense of her heavenly sweetness and
self-surrender that we almost forget that she had shown herself quite as
exceptional in the active assertion of her own soul and will. She tends
to become to us predominantly pathetic, the sweetest and most pathetic
of Shakespeare's women, as innocent as Miranda and as loving as Viola,
yet suffering more deeply than Cordelia or Imogen. And she seems to lack
that independence and strength of spirit which Cordelia and Imogen
possess, and which in a manner raises them above suffering. She appears
passive and defenceless, and can oppose to wrong nothing but the
infinite endurance and forgiveness of a love that knows not how to
resist or resent. She thus becomes at once the most beautiful example of
this love, and the most pathetic heroine in Shakespeare's world. If her
part were acted by an artist equal to Salvini, and with a Salvini for
Othello, I doubt if the spectacle of the last two Acts would not be
pronounced intolerable.

Of course this later impression of Desdemona is perfectly right, but it
must be carried back and united with the earlier before we can see what
Shakespeare imagined. Evidently, we are to understand, innocence,
gentleness, sweetness, lovingness were the salient and, in a sense, the
principal traits in Desdemona's character. She was, as her father
supposed her to be,

                         a maiden never bold,
     Of spirit so still and quiet that her motion
     Blushed at herself.

But suddenly there appeared something quite different--something which
could never have appeared, for example, in Ophelia--a love not only full
of romance but showing a strange freedom and energy of spirit, and
leading to a most unusual boldness of action; and this action was
carried through with a confidence and decision worthy of Juliet or
Cordelia. Desdemona does not shrink before the Senate; and her language
to her father, though deeply respectful, is firm enough to stir in us
some sympathy with the old man who could not survive his daughter's
loss. This then, we must understand, was the emergence in Desdemona, as
she passed from girlhood to womanhood, of an individuality and strength
which, if she had lived, would have been gradually fused with her more
obvious qualities and have issued in a thousand actions, sweet and good,
but surprising to her conventional or timid neighbours. And, indeed, we
have already a slight example in her overflowing kindness, her boldness
and her ill-fated persistence in pleading Cassio's cause. But the full
ripening of her lovely and noble nature was not to be. In her brief
wedded life she appeared again chiefly as the sweet and submissive being
of her girlhood; and the strength of her soul, first evoked by love,
found scope to show itself only in a love which, when harshly repulsed,
blamed only its own pain; when bruised, only gave forth a more exquisite
fragrance; and, when rewarded with death, summoned its last labouring
breath to save its murderer.

Many traits in Desdemona's character have been described with
sympathetic insight by Mrs. Jameson, and I will pass them by and add but
a few words on the connection between this character and the catastrophe
of _Othello_. Desdemona, as Mrs. Jameson remarks, shows less quickness
of intellect and less tendency to reflection than most of Shakespeare's
heroines; but I question whether the critic is right in adding that she
shows much of the 'unconscious address common in women.' She seems to me
deficient in this address, having in its place a frank childlike
boldness and persistency, which are full of charm but are unhappily
united with a certain want of perception. And these graces and this
deficiency appear to be inextricably intertwined, and in the
circumstances conspire tragically against her. They, with her innocence,
hinder her from understanding Othello's state of mind, and lead her to
the most unlucky acts and words; and unkindness or anger subdues her so
completely that she becomes passive and seems to drift helplessly
towards the cataract in front.

In Desdemona's incapacity to resist there is also, in addition to her
perfect love, something which is very characteristic. She is, in a
sense, a child of nature. That deep inward division which leads to clear
and conscious oppositions of right and wrong, duty and inclination,
justice and injustice, is alien to her beautiful soul. She is not good,
kind and true in spite of a temptation to be otherwise, any more than
she is charming in spite of a temptation to be otherwise. She seems to
know evil only by name, and, her inclinations being good, she acts on
inclination. This trait, with its results, may be seen if we compare
her, at the crises of the story, with Cordelia. In Desdemona's place,
Cordelia, however frightened at Othello's anger about the lost
handkerchief, would not have denied its loss. Painful experience had
produced in her a conscious principle of rectitude and a proud hatred of
falseness, which would have made a lie, even one wholly innocent in
spirit, impossible to her; and the clear sense of justice and right
would have led her, instead, to require an explanation of Othello's
agitation which would have broken Iago's plot to pieces. In the same
way, at the final crisis, no instinctive terror of death would have
compelled Cordelia suddenly to relinquish her demand for justice and to
plead for life. But these moments are fatal to Desdemona, who acts
precisely as if she were guilty; and they are fatal because they ask for
something which, it seems to us, could hardly be united with the
peculiar beauty of her nature.

This beauty is all her own. Something as beautiful may be found in
Cordelia, but not the same beauty. Desdemona, confronted with Lear's
foolish but pathetic demand for a profession of love, could have done, I
think, what Cordelia could not do--could have refused to compete with
her sisters, and yet have made her father feel that she loved him well.
And I doubt if Cordelia, 'falsely murdered,' would have been capable of
those last words of Desdemona--her answer to Emilia's 'O, who hath done
this deed?'

               Nobody: I myself. Farewell.
     Commend me to my kind lord. O, farewell!

Were we intended to remember, as we hear this last 'falsehood,' that
other falsehood, 'It is not lost,' and to feel that, alike in the
momentary child's fear and the deathless woman's love, Desdemona is
herself and herself alone?[106]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 85: One instance is worth pointing out, because the passage in
_Othello_ has, oddly enough, given trouble. Desdemona says of the maid
Barbara: 'She was in love, and he she loved proved mad And did forsake
her.' Theobald changed 'mad' to 'bad.' Warburton read 'and he she loved
forsook her, And she proved mad'! Johnson said 'mad' meant only 'wild,
frantic, uncertain.' But what Desdemona says of Barbara is just what
Ophelia might have said of herself.]

[Footnote 86: The whole force of the passages referred to can be felt
only by a reader. The Othello of our stage can never be Shakespeare's
Othello, any more than the Cleopatra of our stage can be his Cleopatra.]

[Footnote 87: See p. 9.]

[Footnote 88: Even here, however, there is a great difference; for
although the idea of such a power is not suggested by _King Lear_ as it
is by _Hamlet_ and _Macbeth_, it is repeatedly expressed by persons _in_
the drama. Of such references there are very few in _Othello_. But for
somewhat frequent allusions to hell and the devil the view of the
characters is almost strictly secular. Desdemona's sweetness and
forgivingness are not based on religion, and her only way of accounting
for her undeserved suffering is by an appeal to Fortune: 'It is my
wretched fortune' (IV. ii. 128). In like manner Othello can only appeal
to Fate (V. ii. 264):

           but, oh vain boast!
     Who can control his fate?]

[Footnote 89: Ulrici has good remarks, though he exaggerates, on this
point and the element of intrigue.]

[Footnote 90: And neither she nor Othello observes what handkerchief it
is. Else she would have remembered how she came to lose it, and would
have told Othello; and Othello, too, would at once have detected Iago's
lie (III. iii. 438) that he had seen Cassio wipe his beard with the
handkerchief 'to-day.' For in fact the handkerchief had been lost _not
an hour_ before Iago told that lie (line 288 of the _same scene_), and
it was at that moment in his pocket. He lied therefore most rashly, but
with his usual luck.]

[Footnote 91: For those who know the end of the story there is a
terrible irony in the enthusiasm with which Cassio greets the arrival of
Desdemona in Cyprus. Her ship (which is also Iago's) sets out from
Venice a week later than the others, but reaches Cyprus on the same day
with them:

     Tempests themselves, high seas and howling winds,
     The gutter'd rocks and congregated sands--
     Traitors ensteep'd to clog the guiltless keel--
     As having sense of beauty, do omit
     Their mortal natures, letting go safely by
     The divine Desdemona.

So swiftly does Fate conduct her to her doom.]

[Footnote 92: The dead bodies are not carried out at the end, as they
must have been if the bed had been on the main stage (for this had no
front curtain). The curtains within which the bed stood were drawn
together at the words, 'Let it be hid' (V. ii. 365).]

[Footnote 93: Against which may be set the scene of the blinding of
Gloster in _King Lear_.]

[Footnote 94: The reader who is tempted by it should, however, first ask
himself whether Othello does act like a barbarian, or like a man who,
though wrought almost to madness, does 'all in honour.']

[Footnote 95: For the actor, then, to represent him as violently angry
when he cashiers Cassio is an utter mistake.]

[Footnote 96: I cannot deal fully with this point in the lecture. See
Note L.]

[Footnote 97: It is important to observe that, in his attempt to arrive
at the facts about Cassio's drunken misdemeanour, Othello had just had
an example of Iago's unwillingness to tell the whole truth where it must
injure a friend. No wonder he feels in the Temptation-scene that 'this
honest creature doubtless Sees and knows more, much more, than he
unfolds.']

[Footnote 98: To represent that Venetian women do not regard adultery so
seriously as Othello does, and again that Othello would be wise to
accept the situation like an Italian husband, is one of Iago's most
artful and most maddening devices.]

[Footnote 99: If the reader has ever chanced to see an African violently
excited, he may have been startled to observe how completely at a loss
he was to interpret those bodily expressions of passion which in a
fellow-countryman he understands at once, and in a European foreigner
with somewhat less certainty. The effect of difference in blood in
increasing Othello's bewilderment regarding his wife is not sufficiently
realised. The same effect has to be remembered in regard to Desdemona's
mistakes in dealing with Othello in his anger.]

[Footnote 100: See Note M.]

[Footnote 101: Cf. _Winter's Tale_, I. ii. 137 ff.:

              Can thy dam?--may't be?--
     Affection! thy intention stabs the centre:
     Thou dost make possible things not so held,
     Communicatest with dreams;--how can this be?
     With what's unreal thou coactive art,
     And fellow'st nothing: then 'tis very credent
     Thou may'st cojoin with something; and thou dost,
     And that beyond commission, and I find it,
     And that to the infection of my brains
     And hardening of my brows.]

[Footnote 102: See Note O.]

[Footnote 103: New Illustrations, ii. 281.]

[Footnote 104: _Lectures on Shakespeare_, ed. Ashe, p. 386.]

[Footnote 105: I will not discuss the further question whether, granted
that to Shakespeare Othello was a black, he should be represented as a
black in our theatres now. I dare say not. We do not like the real
Shakespeare. We like to have his language pruned and his conceptions
flattened into something that suits our mouths and minds. And even if we
were prepared to make an effort, still, as Lamb observes, to imagine is
one thing and to see is another. Perhaps if we saw Othello coal-black
with the bodily eye, the aversion of our blood, an aversion which comes
as near to being merely physical as anything human can, would overpower
our imagination and sink us below not Shakespeare only but the audiences
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

As I have mentioned Lamb, I may observe that he differed from Coleridge
as to Othello's colour, but, I am sorry to add, thought Desdemona to
stand in need of excuse. 'This noble lady, with a singularity rather to
be wondered at than imitated, had chosen for the object of her
affections a Moor, a black.... Neither is Desdemona to be altogether
condemned for the unsuitableness of the person whom she selected for her
lover' (_Tales from Shakespeare_). Others, of course, have gone much
further and have treated all the calamities of the tragedy as a sort of
judgment on Desdemona's rashness, wilfulness and undutifulness. There is
no arguing with opinions like this; but I cannot believe that even Lamb
is true to Shakespeare in implying that Desdemona is in some degree to
be condemned. What is there in the play to show that Shakespeare
regarded her marriage differently from Imogen's?]

[Footnote 106: When Desdemona spoke her last words, perhaps that line of
the ballad which she sang an hour before her death was still busy in her
brain,

     Let nobody blame him: his scorn I approve.

Nature plays such strange tricks, and Shakespeare almost alone among
poets seems to create in somewhat the same manner as Nature. In the same
way, as Malone pointed out, Othello's exclamation, 'Goats and monkeys!'
(IV. i. 274) is an unconscious reminiscence of Iago's words at III. iii.
403.]

 

LECTURE VI

OTHELLO

1

Evil has nowhere else been portrayed with such mastery as in the
character of Iago. Richard III., for example, beside being less subtly
conceived, is a far greater figure and a less repellent. His physical
deformity, separating him from other men, seems to offer some excuse for
his egoism. In spite of his egoism, too, he appears to us more than a
mere individual: he is the representative of his family, the Fury of the
House of York. Nor is he so negative as Iago: he has strong passions, he
has admirations, and his conscience disturbs him. There is the glory of
power about him. Though an excellent actor, he prefers force to fraud,
and in his world there is no general illusion as to his true nature.
Again, to compare Iago with the Satan of _Paradise Lost_ seems almost
absurd, so immensely does Shakespeare's man exceed Milton's Fiend in
evil. That mighty Spirit, whose

                   form had yet not lost
     All her original brightness, nor appeared
     Less than archangel ruined and the excess
     Of glory obscured;

who knew loyalty to comrades and pity for victims; who

               felt how awful goodness is, and saw
     Virtue in her shape how lovely; saw, and pined
     His loss;

who could still weep--how much further distant is he than Iago from
spiritual death, even when, in procuring the fall of Man, he completes
his own fall! It is only in Goethe's Mephistopheles that a fit companion
for Iago can be found. Here there is something of the same deadly
coldness, the same gaiety in destruction. But then Mephistopheles, like
so many scores of literary villains, has Iago for his father. And
Mephistopheles, besides, is not, in the strict sense, a character. He is
half person, half symbol. A metaphysical idea speaks through him. He is
earthy, but could never live upon the earth.

Of Shakespeare's characters Falstaff, Hamlet, Iago, and Cleopatra (I
name them in the order of their births) are probably the most wonderful.
Of these, again, Hamlet and Iago, whose births come nearest together,
are perhaps the most subtle. And if Iago had been a person as attractive
as Hamlet, as many thousands of pages might have been written about him,
containing as much criticism good and bad. As it is, the majority of
interpretations of his character are inadequate not only to
Shakespeare's conception, but, I believe, to the impressions of most
readers of taste who are unbewildered by analysis. These false
interpretations, if we set aside the usual lunacies,[107] fall into two
groups. The first contains views which reduce Shakespeare to
commonplace. In different ways and degrees they convert his Iago into
an ordinary villain. Their Iago is simply a man who has been slighted
and revenges himself; or a husband who believes he has been wronged, and
will make his enemy suffer a jealousy worse than his own; or an
ambitious man determined to ruin his successful rival--one of these, or
a combination of these, endowed with unusual ability and cruelty. These
are the more popular views. The second group of false interpretations is
much smaller, but it contains much weightier matter than the first. Here
Iago is a being who hates good simply because it is good, and loves evil
purely for itself. His action is not prompted by any plain motive like
revenge, jealousy or ambition. It springs from a 'motiveless malignity,'
or a disinterested delight in the pain of others; and Othello, Cassio
and Desdemona are scarcely more than the material requisite for the full
attainment of this delight. This second Iago, evidently, is no
conventional villain, and he is much nearer to Shakespeare's Iago than
the first. Only he is, if not a psychological impossibility, at any rate
not a _human_ being. He might be in place, therefore, in a symbolical
poem like _Faust_, but in a purely human drama like _Othello_ he would
be a ruinous blunder. Moreover, he is not in _Othello_: he is a product
of imperfect observation and analysis.

Coleridge, the author of that misleading phrase 'motiveless malignity,'
has some fine remarks on Iago; and the essence of the character has been
described, first in some of the best lines Hazlitt ever wrote, and then
rather more fully by Mr. Swinburne,--so admirably described that I am
tempted merely to read and illustrate these two criticisms. This plan,
however, would make it difficult to introduce all that I wish to say. I
propose, therefore, to approach the subject directly, and, first, to
consider how Iago appeared to those who knew him, and what inferences
may be drawn from their illusions; and then to ask what, if we judge
from the play, his character really was. And I will indicate the points
where I am directly indebted to the criticisms just mentioned.

But two warnings are first required. One of these concerns Iago's
nationality. It has been held that he is a study of that peculiarly
Italian form of villainy which is considered both too clever and too
diabolical for an Englishman. I doubt if there is much more to be said
for this idea than for the notion that Othello is a study of Moorish
character. No doubt the belief in that Italian villainy was prevalent in
Shakespeare's time, and it may perhaps have influenced him in some
slight degree both here and in drawing the character of Iachimo in
_Cymbeline_. But even this slight influence seems to me doubtful. If Don
John in _Much Ado_ had been an Englishman, critics would have admired
Shakespeare's discernment in making his English villain sulky and
stupid. If Edmund's father had been Duke of Ferrara instead of Earl of
Gloster, they would have said that Edmund could have been nothing but an
Italian. Change the name and country of Richard III., and he would be
called a typical despot of the Italian Renaissance. Change those of
Juliet, and we should find her wholesome English nature contrasted with
the southern dreaminess of Romeo. But this way of interpreting
Shakespeare is not Shakespearean. With him the differences of period,
race, nationality and locality have little bearing on the inward
character, though they sometimes have a good deal on the total
imaginative effect, of his figures. When he does lay stress on such
differences his intention is at once obvious, as in characters like
Fluellen or Sir Hugh Evans, or in the talk of the French princes before
the battle of Agincourt. I may add that Iago certainly cannot be taken
to exemplify the popular Elizabethan idea of a disciple of Macchiavelli.
There is no sign that he is in theory an atheist or even an unbeliever
in the received religion. On the contrary, he uses its language, and
says nothing resembling the words of the prologue to the _Jew of Malta_:

     I count religion but a childish toy,
     And hold there is no sin but ignorance.

Aaron in _Titus Andronicus_ might have said this (and is not more likely
to be Shakespeare's creation on that account), but not Iago.

I come to a second warning. One must constantly remember not to believe
a syllable that Iago utters on any subject, including himself, until one
has tested his statement by comparing it with known facts and with other
statements of his own or of other people, and by considering whether he
had in the particular circumstances any reason for telling a lie or for
telling the truth. The implicit confidence which his acquaintances
placed in his integrity has descended to most of his critics; and this,
reinforcing the comical habit of quoting as Shakespeare's own statement
everything said by his characters, has been a fruitful source of
misinterpretation. I will take as an instance the very first assertions
made by Iago. In the opening scene he tells his dupe Roderigo that three
great men of Venice went to Othello and begged him to make Iago his
lieutenant; that Othello, out of pride and obstinacy, refused; that in
refusing he talked a deal of military rigmarole, and ended by declaring
(falsely, we are to understand) that he had already filled up the
vacancy; that Cassio, whom he chose, had absolutely no practical
knowledge of war, nothing but bookish theoric, mere prattle, arithmetic,
whereas Iago himself had often fought by Othello's side, and by 'old
gradation' too ought to have been preferred. Most or all of this is
repeated by some critics as though it were information given by
Shakespeare, and the conclusion is quite naturally drawn that Iago had
some reason to feel aggrieved. But if we ask ourselves how much of all
this is true we shall answer, I believe, as follows. It is absolutely
certain that Othello appointed Cassio his lieutenant, and _nothing_ else
is absolutely certain. But there is no reason to doubt the statement
that Iago had seen service with him, nor is there anything inherently
improbable in the statement that he was solicited by three great
personages on Iago's behalf. On the other hand, the suggestions that he
refused out of pride and obstinacy, and that he lied in saying he had
already chosen his officer, have no verisimilitude; and if there is any
fact at all (as there probably is) behind Iago's account of the
conversation, it doubtless is the fact that Iago himself was ignorant of
military science, while Cassio was an expert, and that Othello explained
this to the great personages. That Cassio, again, was an interloper and
a mere closet-student without experience of war is incredible,
considering first that Othello chose him for lieutenant, and secondly
that the senate appointed him to succeed Othello in command at Cyprus;
and we have direct evidence that part of Iago's statement is a lie, for
Desdemona happens to mention that Cassio was a man who 'all his time had
founded his good fortunes' on Othello's love and had 'shared dangers'
with him (III. iv. 93). There remains only the implied assertion that,
if promotion had gone by old gradation, Iago, as the senior, would have
been preferred. It may be true: Othello was not the man to hesitate to
promote a junior for good reasons. But it is just as likely to be a pure
invention; and, though Cassio was young, there is nothing to show that
he was younger, in years or in service, than Iago. Iago, for instance,
never calls him 'young,' as he does Roderigo; and a mere youth would not
have been made Governor of Cyprus. What is certain, finally, in the
whole business is that Othello's mind was perfectly at ease about the
appointment, and that he never dreamed of Iago's being discontented at
it, not even when the intrigue was disclosed and he asked himself how he
had offended Iago.

2

It is necessary to examine in this manner every statement made by Iago.
But it is not necessary to do so in public, and I proceed to the
question what impression he made on his friends and acquaintances. In
the main there is here no room for doubt. Nothing could be less like
Iago than the melodramatic villain so often substituted for him on the
stage, a person whom everyone in the theatre knows for a scoundrel at
the first glance. Iago, we gather, was a Venetian[108] soldier,
eight-and-twenty years of age, who had seen a good deal of service and
had a high reputation for courage. Of his origin we are ignorant, but,
unless I am mistaken, he was not of gentle birth or breeding.[109] He
does not strike one as a degraded man of culture: for all his great
powers, he is vulgar, and his probable want of military science may well
be significant. He was married to a wife who evidently lacked
refinement, and who appears in the drama almost in the relation of a
servant to Desdemona. His manner was that of a blunt, bluff soldier, who
spoke his mind freely and plainly. He was often hearty, and could be
thoroughly jovial; but he was not seldom rather rough and caustic of
speech, and he was given to making remarks somewhat disparaging to human
nature. He was aware of this trait in himself, and frankly admitted that
he was nothing if not critical, and that it was his nature to spy into
abuses. In these admissions he characteristically exaggerated his fault,
as plain-dealers are apt to do; and he was liked none the less for it,
seeing that his satire was humorous, that on serious matters he did not
speak lightly (III. iii. 119), and that the one thing perfectly obvious
about him was his honesty. 'Honest' is the word that springs to the lips
of everyone who speaks of him. It is applied to him some fifteen times
in the play, not to mention some half-dozen where he employs it, in
derision, of himself. In fact he was one of those sterling men who, in
disgust at gush, say cynical things which they do not believe, and then,
the moment you are in trouble, put in practice the very sentiment they
had laughed at. On such occasions he showed the kindliest sympathy and
the most eager desire to help. When Cassio misbehaved so dreadfully and
was found fighting with Montano, did not Othello see that 'honest Iago
looked dead with grieving'? With what difficulty was he induced, nay,
compelled, to speak the truth against the lieutenant! Another man might
have felt a touch of satisfaction at the thought that the post he had
coveted was now vacant; but Iago not only comforted Cassio, talking to
him cynically about reputation, just to help him over his shame, but he
set his wits to work and at once perceived that the right plan for
Cassio to get his post again was to ask Desdemona to intercede. So
troubled was he at his friend's disgrace that his own wife was sure 'it
grieved her husband as if the case was his.' What wonder that anyone in
sore trouble, like Desdemona, should send at once for Iago (IV. ii.
106)? If this rough diamond had any flaw, it was that Iago's warm loyal
heart incited him to too impulsive action. If he merely heard a friend
like Othello calumniated, his hand flew to his sword; and though he
restrained himself he almost regretted his own virtue (I. ii. 1-10).

Such seemed Iago to the people about him, even to those who, like
Othello, had known him for some time. And it is a fact too little
noticed but most remarkable, that he presented an appearance not very
different to his wife. There is no sign either that Emilia's marriage
was downright unhappy, or that she suspected the true nature of her
husband.[110] No doubt she knew rather more of him than others. Thus we
gather that he was given to chiding and sometimes spoke shortly and
sharply to her (III. iii. 300 f.); and it is quite likely that she gave
him a good deal of her tongue in exchange (II. i. 101 f.). He was also
unreasonably jealous; for his own statement that he was jealous of
Othello is confirmed by Emilia herself, and must therefore be believed
(IV. ii. 145).[111] But it seems clear that these defects of his had not
seriously impaired Emilia's confidence in her husband or her affection
for him. She knew in addition that he was not quite so honest as he
seemed, for he had often begged her to steal Desdemona's handkerchief.
But Emilia's nature was not very delicate or scrupulous about trifles.
She thought her husband odd and 'wayward,' and looked on his fancy for
the handkerchief as an instance of this (III. iii. 292); but she never
dreamed he was a villain, and there is no reason to doubt the sincerity
of her belief that he was heartily sorry for Cassio's disgrace. Her
failure, on seeing Othello's agitation about the handkerchief, to form
any suspicion of an intrigue, shows how little she doubted her husband.
Even when, later, the idea strikes her that some scoundrel has poisoned
Othello's mind, the tone of all her speeches, and her mention of the
rogue who (she believes) had stirred up Iago's jealousy of her, prove
beyond doubt that the thought of Iago's being the scoundrel has not
crossed her mind (IV. ii. 115-147). And if any hesitation on the subject
could remain, surely it must be dispelled by the thrice-repeated cry of
astonishment and horror, 'My husband!', which follows Othello's words,
'Thy husband knew it all'; and by the choking indignation and desperate
hope which we hear in her appeal when Iago comes in:

     Disprove this villain if thou be'st a man:
     He says thou told'st him that his wife was false:
     I know thou did'st not, thou'rt not such a villain:
     Speak, for my heart is full.

Even if Iago _had_ betrayed much more of his true self to his wife than
to others, it would make no difference to the contrast between his true
self and the self he presented to the world in general. But he never did
so. Only the feeble eyes of the poor gull Roderigo were allowed a
glimpse into that pit.

The bearing of this contrast upon the apparently excessive credulity of
Othello has been already pointed out. What further conclusions can be
drawn from it? Obviously, to begin with, the inference, which is
accompanied by a thrill of admiration, that Iago's powers of
dissimulation and of self-control must have been prodigious: for he was
not a youth, like Edmund, but had worn this mask for years, and he had
apparently never enjoyed, like Richard, occasional explosions of the
reality within him. In fact so prodigious does his self-control appear
that a reader might be excused for feeling a doubt of its possibility.
But there are certain observations and further inferences which, apart
from confidence in Shakespeare, would remove this doubt. It is to be
observed, first, that Iago was able to find a certain relief from the
discomfort of hypocrisy in those caustic or cynical speeches which,
being misinterpreted, only heightened confidence in his honesty. They
acted as a safety-valve, very much as Hamlet's pretended insanity did.
Next, I would infer from the entire success of his hypocrisy--what may
also be inferred on other grounds, and is of great importance--that he
was by no means a man of strong feelings and passions, like Richard, but
decidedly cold by temperament. Even so, his self-control was wonderful,
but there never was in him any violent storm to be controlled. Thirdly,
I would suggest that Iago, though thoroughly selfish and unfeeling, was
not by nature malignant, nor even morose, but that, on the contrary, he
had a superficial good-nature, the kind of good-nature that wins
popularity and is often taken as the sign, not of a good digestion, but
of a good heart. And lastly, it may be inferred that, before the giant
crime which we witness, Iago had never been detected in any serious
offence and may even never have been guilty of one, but had pursued a
selfish but outwardly decent life, enjoying the excitement of war and of
casual pleasures, but never yet meeting with any sufficient temptation
to risk his position and advancement by a dangerous crime. So that, in
fact, the tragedy of _Othello_ is in a sense his tragedy too. It shows
us not a violent man, like Richard, who spends his life in murder, but a
thoroughly bad, _cold_ man, who is at last tempted to let loose the
forces within him, and is at once destroyed.

3

In order to see how this tragedy arises let us now look more closely
into Iago's inner man. We find here, in the first place, as has been
implied in part, very remarkable powers both of intellect and of will.
Iago's insight, within certain limits, into human nature; his ingenuity
and address in working upon it; his quickness and versatility in dealing
with sudden difficulties and unforeseen opportunities, have probably no
parallel among dramatic characters. Equally remarkable is his strength
of will. Not Socrates himself, not the ideal sage of the Stoics, was
more lord of himself than Iago appears to be. It is not merely that he
never betrays his true nature; he seems to be master of _all_ the
motions that might affect his will. In the most dangerous moments of his
plot, when the least slip or accident would be fatal, he never shows a
trace of nervousness. When Othello takes him by the throat he merely
shifts his part with his usual instantaneous adroitness. When he is
attacked and wounded at the end he is perfectly unmoved. As Mr.
Swinburne says, you cannot believe for a moment that the pain of torture
will ever open Iago's lips. He is equally unassailable by the
temptations of indolence or of sensuality. It is difficult to imagine
him inactive; and though he has an obscene mind, and doubtless took his
pleasures when and how he chose, he certainly took them by choice and
not from weakness, and if pleasure interfered with his purposes the
holiest of ascetics would not put it more resolutely by. 'What should I
do?' Roderigo whimpers to him; 'I confess it is my shame to be so fond;
but it is not in my virtue to amend it.' He answers: 'Virtue! a fig!
'tis in ourselves that we are thus and thus. It all depends on our will.
Love is merely a lust of the blood and a permission of the will. Come,
be a man.... Ere I would say I would drown myself for the love of a
guinea-hen, I would change my humanity with a baboon.' Forget for a
moment that love is for Iago the appetite of a baboon; forget that he is
as little assailable by pity as by fear or pleasure; and you will
acknowledge that this lordship of the will, which is his practice as
well as his doctrine, is great, almost sublime. Indeed, in intellect
(always within certain limits) and in will (considered as a mere power,
and without regard to its objects) Iago _is_ great.

To what end does he use these great powers? His creed--for he is no
sceptic, he has a definite creed--is that absolute egoism is the only
rational and proper attitude, and that conscience or honour or any kind
of regard for others is an absurdity. He does not deny that this
absurdity exists. He does not suppose that most people secretly share
his creed, while pretending to hold and practise another. On the
contrary, he regards most people as honest fools. He declares that he
has never yet met a man who knew how to love himself; and his one
expression of admiration in the play is for servants

     Who, trimmed in forms and visages of duty,
     Keep yet their hearts attending on themselves.

'These fellows,' he says, 'have some soul.' He professes to stand, and
he, attempts to stand, wholly outside the world of morality.

The existence of Iago's creed and of his corresponding practice is
evidently connected with a characteristic in which he surpasses nearly
all the other inhabitants of Shakespeare's world. Whatever he may once
have been, he appears, when we meet him, to be almost destitute of
humanity, of sympathetic or social feeling. He shows no trace of
affection, and in presence of the most terrible suffering he shows
either pleasure or an indifference which, if not complete, is nearly so.
Here, however, we must be careful. It is important to realise, and few
readers are in danger of ignoring, this extraordinary deadness of
feeling, but it is also important not to confuse it with a general
positive ill-will. When Iago has no dislike or hostility to a person he
does _not_ show pleasure in the suffering of that person: he shows at
most the absence of pain. There is, for instance, not the least sign of
his enjoying the distress of Desdemona. But his sympathetic feelings are
so abnormally feeble and cold that, when his dislike is roused, or when
an indifferent person comes in the way of his purpose, there is scarcely
anything within him to prevent his applying the torture.

What is it that provokes his dislike or hostility? Here again we must
look closely. Iago has been represented as an incarnation of envy, as a
man who, being determined to get on in the world, regards everyone else
with enmity as his rival. But this idea, though containing truth, seems
much exaggerated. Certainly he is devoted to himself; but if he were an
eagerly ambitious man, surely we should see much more positive signs of
this ambition; and surely too, with his great powers, he would already
have risen high, instead of being a mere ensign, short of money, and
playing Captain Rook to Roderigo's Mr. Pigeon. Taking all the facts, one
must conclude that his desires were comparatively moderate and his
ambition weak; that he probably enjoyed war keenly, but, if he had money
enough, did not exert himself greatly to acquire reputation or position;
and, therefore, that he was not habitually burning with envy and
actively hostile to other men as possible competitors.

But what is clear is that Iago is keenly sensitive to anything that
touches his pride or self-esteem. It would be most unjust to call him
vain, but he has a high opinion of himself and a great contempt for
others. He is quite aware of his superiority to them in certain
respects; and he either disbelieves in or despises the qualities in
which they are superior to him. Whatever disturbs or wounds his sense of
superiority irritates him at once; and in _that_ sense he is highly
competitive. This is why the appointment of Cassio provokes him. This is
why Cassio's scientific attainments provoke him. This is the reason of
his jealousy of Emilia. He does not care for his wife; but the fear of
another man's getting the better of him, and exposing him to pity or
derision as an unfortunate husband, is wormwood to him; and as he is
sure that no woman is virtuous at heart, this fear is ever with him. For
much the same reason he has a spite against goodness in men (for it is
characteristic that he is less blind to its existence in men, the
stronger, than in women, the weaker). He has a spite against it, not
from any love of evil for evil's sake, but partly because it annoys his
intellect as a stupidity; partly (though he hardly knows this) because
it weakens his satisfaction with himself, and disturbs his faith that
egoism is the right and proper thing; partly because, the world being
such a fool, goodness is popular and prospers. But he, a man ten times
as able as Cassio or even Othello, does not greatly prosper. Somehow,
for all the stupidity of these open and generous people, they get on
better than the 'fellow of some soul' And this, though he is not
particularly eager to get on, wounds his pride. Goodness therefore
annoys him. He is always ready to scoff at it, and would like to strike
at it. In ordinary circumstances these feelings of irritation are not
vivid in Iago--_no_ feeling is so--but they are constantly present.

4

Our task of analysis is not finished; but we are now in a position to
consider the rise of Iago's tragedy. Why did he act as we see him acting
in the play? What is the answer to that appeal of Othello's:

     Will you, I pray, demand that demi-devil
     Why he hath thus ensnared my soul and body?

This question Why? is _the_ question about Iago, just as the question
Why did Hamlet delay? is _the_ question about Hamlet. Iago refused to
answer it; but I will venture to say that he _could_ not have answered
it, any more than Hamlet could tell why he delayed. But Shakespeare knew
the answer, and if these characters are great creations and not blunders
we ought to be able to find it too.

Is it possible to elicit it from Iago himself against his will? He makes
various statements to Roderigo, and he has several soliloquies. From
these sources, and especially from the latter, we should learn
something. For with Shakespeare soliloquy generally gives information
regarding the secret springs as well as the outward course of the plot;
and, moreover, it is a curious point of technique with him that the
soliloquies of his villains sometimes read almost like explanations
offered to the audience.[112] Now, Iago repeatedly offers explanations
either to Roderigo or to himself. In the first place, he says more than
once that he 'hates' Othello. He gives two reasons for his hatred.
Othello has made Cassio lieutenant; and he suspects, and has heard it
reported, that Othello has an intrigue with Emilia. Next there is
Cassio. He never says he hates Cassio, but he finds in him three causes
of offence: Cassio has been preferred to him; he suspects _him_ too of
an intrigue with Emilia; and, lastly, Cassio has a daily beauty in his
life which makes Iago ugly. In addition to these annoyances he wants
Cassio's place. As for Roderigo, he calls him a snipe, and who can hate
a snipe? But Roderigo knows too much; and he is becoming a nuisance,
getting angry, and asking for the gold and jewels he handed to Iago to
give to Desdemona. So Iago kills Roderigo. Then for Desdemona: a
fig's-end for her virtue! but he has no ill-will to her. In fact he
'loves' her, though he is good enough to explain, varying the word, that
his 'lust' is mixed with a desire to pay Othello in his own coin. To be
sure she must die, and so must Emilia, and so would Bianca if only the
authorities saw things in their true light; but he did not set out with
any hostile design against these persons.

Is the account which Iago gives of the causes of his action the true
account? The answer of the most popular view will be, 'Yes. Iago was, as
he says, chiefly incited by two things, the desire of advancement, and a
hatred of Othello due principally to the affair of the lieutenancy.
These are perfectly intelligible causes; we have only to add to them
unusual ability and cruelty, and all is explained. Why should Coleridge
and Hazlitt and Swinburne go further afield?' To which last question I
will at once oppose these: If your view is correct, why should Iago be
considered an extraordinary creation; and is it not odd that the people
who reject it are the people who elsewhere show an exceptional
understanding of Shakespeare?

The difficulty about this popular view is, in the first place, that it
attributes to Iago what cannot be found in the Iago of the play. Its
Iago is impelled by _passions_, a passion of ambition and a passion of
hatred; for no ambition or hatred short of passion could drive a man who
is evidently so clear-sighted, and who must hitherto have been so
prudent, into a plot so extremely hazardous. Why, then, in the Iago of
the play do we find no sign of these passions or of anything approaching
to them? Why, if Shakespeare meant that Iago was impelled by them, does
he suppress the signs of them? Surely not from want of ability to
display them. The poet who painted Macbeth and Shylock understood his
business. Who ever doubted Macbeth's ambition or Shylock's hate? And
what resemblance is there between these passions and any feeling that we
can trace in Iago? The resemblance between a volcano in eruption and a
flameless fire of coke; the resemblance between a consuming desire to
hack and hew your enemy's flesh, and the resentful wish, only too
familiar in common life, to inflict pain in return for a slight.
Passion, in Shakespeare's plays, is perfectly easy to recognise. What
vestige of it, of passion unsatisfied or of passion gratified, is
visible in Iago? None: that is the very horror of him. He has _less_
passion than an ordinary man, and yet he does these frightful things.
The only ground for attributing to him, I do not say a passionate
hatred, but anything deserving the name of hatred at all, is his own
statement, 'I hate Othello'; and we know what his statements are worth.

But the popular view, beside attributing to Iago what he does not show,
ignores what he does show. It selects from his own account of his
motives one or two, and drops the rest; and so it makes everything
natural. But it fails to perceive how unnatural, how strange and
suspicious, his own account is. Certainly he assigns motives enough; the
difficulty is that he assigns so many. A man moved by simple passions
due to simple causes does not stand fingering his feelings,
industriously enumerating their sources, and groping about for new ones.
But this is what Iago does. And this is not all. These motives appear
and disappear in the most extraordinary manner. Resentment at Cassio's
appointment is expressed in the first conversation with Roderigo, and
from that moment is never once mentioned again in the whole play. Hatred
of Othello is expressed in the First Act alone. Desire to get Cassio's
place scarcely appears after the first soliloquy, and when it is
gratified Iago does not refer to it by a single word. The suspicion of
Cassio's intrigue with Emilia emerges suddenly, as an after-thought, not
in the first soliloquy but the second, and then disappears for
ever.[113] Iago's 'love' of Desdemona is alluded to in the second
soliloquy; there is not the faintest trace of it in word or deed either
before or after. The mention of jealousy of Othello is followed by
declarations that Othello is infatuated about Desdemona and is of a
constant nature, and during Othello's sufferings Iago never shows a sign
of the idea that he is now paying his rival in his own coin. In the
second soliloquy he declares that he quite believes Cassio to be in love
with Desdemona; it is obvious that he believes no such thing, for he
never alludes to the idea again, and within a few hours describes Cassio
in soliloquy as an honest fool. His final reason for ill-will to Cassio
never appears till the Fifth Act.

What is the meaning of all this? Unless Shakespeare was out of his mind,
it must have a meaning. And certainly this meaning is not contained in
any of the popular accounts of Iago.

Is it contained then in Coleridge's word 'motive-hunting'? Yes,
'motive-hunting' exactly answers to the impression that Iago's
soliloquies produce. He is pondering his design, and unconsciously
trying to justify it to himself. He speaks of one or two real feelings,
such as resentment against Othello, and he mentions one or two real
causes of these feelings. But these are not enough for him. Along with
them, or alone, there come into his head, only to leave it again, ideas
and suspicions, the creations of his own baseness or uneasiness, some
old, some new, caressed for a moment to feed his purpose and give it a
reasonable look, but never really believed in, and never the main forces
which are determining his action. In fact, I would venture to describe
Iago in these soliloquies as a man setting out on a project which
strongly attracts his desire, but at the same time conscious of a
resistance to the desire, and unconsciously trying to argue the
resistance away by assigning reasons for the project. He is the
counterpart of Hamlet, who tries to find reasons for his delay in
pursuing a design which excites his aversion. And most of Iago's reasons
for action are no more the real ones than Hamlet's reasons for delay
were the real ones. Each is moved by forces which he does not
understand; and it is probably no accident that these two studies of
states psychologically so similar were produced at about the same
period.

What then were the real moving forces of Iago's action? Are we to fall
back on the idea of a 'motiveless malignity;'[114] that is to say, a
disinterested love of evil, or a delight in the pain of others as simple
and direct as the delight in one's own pleasure? Surely not. I will not
insist that this thing or these things are inconceivable, mere phrases,
not ideas; for, even so, it would remain possible that Shakespeare had
tried to represent an inconceivability. But there is not the slightest
reason to suppose that he did so. Iago's action is intelligible; and
indeed the popular view contains enough truth to refute this desperate
theory. It greatly exaggerates his desire for advancement, and the
ill-will caused by his disappointment, and it ignores other forces more
important than these; but it is right in insisting on the presence of
this desire and this ill-will, and their presence is enough to destroy
Iago's claims to be more than a demi-devil. For love of the evil that
advances my interest and hurts a person I dislike, is a very different
thing from love of evil simply as evil; and pleasure in the pain of a
person disliked or regarded as a competitor is quite distinct from
pleasure in the pain of others simply as others. The first is
intelligible, and we find it in Iago. The second, even if it were
intelligible, we do not find in Iago.

Still, desire of advancement and resentment about the lieutenancy,
though factors and indispensable factors in the cause of Iago's action,
are neither the principal nor the most characteristic factors. To find
these, let us return to our half-completed analysis of the character.
Let us remember especially the keen sense of superiority, the contempt
of others, the sensitiveness to everything which wounds these feelings,
the spite against goodness in men as a thing not only stupid but, both
in its nature and by its success, contrary to Iago's nature and
irritating to his pride. Let us remember in addition the annoyance of
having always to play a part, the consciousness of exceptional but
unused ingenuity and address, the enjoyment of action, and the absence
of fear. And let us ask what would be the greatest pleasure of such a
man, and what the situation which might tempt him to abandon his
habitual prudence and pursue this pleasure. Hazlitt and Mr. Swinburne do
not put this question, but the answer I proceed to give to it is in
principle theirs.[115]

The most delightful thing to such a man would be something that gave an
extreme satisfaction to his sense of power and superiority; and if it
involved, secondly, the triumphant exertion of his abilities, and,
thirdly, the excitement of danger, his delight would be consummated. And
the moment most dangerous to such a man would be one when his sense of
superiority had met with an affront, so that its habitual craving was
reinforced by resentment, while at the same time he saw an opportunity
of satisfying it by subjecting to his will the very persons who had
affronted it. Now, this is the temptation that comes to Iago. Othello's
eminence, Othello's goodness, and his own dependence on Othello, must
have been a perpetual annoyance to him. At _any_ time he would have
enjoyed befooling and tormenting Othello. Under ordinary circumstances
he was restrained, chiefly by self-interest, in some slight degree
perhaps by the faint pulsations of conscience or humanity. But
disappointment at the loss of the lieutenancy supplied the touch of
lively resentment that was required to overcome these obstacles; and the
prospect of satisfying the sense of power by mastering Othello through
an intricate and hazardous intrigue now became irresistible. Iago did
not clearly understand what was moving his desire; though he tried to
give himself reasons for his action, even those that had some reality
made but a small part of the motive force; one may almost say they were
no more than the turning of the handle which admits the driving power
into the machine. Only once does he appear to see something of the
truth. It is when he uses the phrase '_to plume up my will_ in double
knavery.'

To 'plume up the will,' to heighten the sense of power or
superiority--this seems to be the unconscious motive of many acts of
cruelty which evidently do not spring chiefly from ill-will, and which
therefore puzzle and sometimes horrify us most. It is often this that
makes a man bully the wife or children of whom he is fond. The boy who
torments another boy, as we say, 'for no reason,' or who without any
hatred for frogs tortures a frog, is pleased with his victim's pain, not
from any disinterested love of evil or pleasure in pain, but mainly
because this pain is the unmistakable proof of his own power over his
victim. So it is with Iago. His thwarted sense of superiority wants
satisfaction. What fuller satisfaction could it find than the
consciousness that he is the master of the General who has undervalued
him and of the rival who has been preferred to him; that these worthy
people, who are so successful and popular and stupid, are mere puppets
in his hands, but living puppets, who at the motion of his finger must
contort themselves in agony, while all the time they believe that he is
their one true friend and comforter? It must have been an ecstasy of
bliss to him. And this, granted a most abnormal deadness of human
feeling, is, however horrible, perfectly intelligible. There is no
mystery in the psychology of Iago; the mystery lies in a further
question, which the drama has not to answer, the question why such a
being should exist.

Iago's longing to satisfy the sense of power is, I think, the strongest
of the forces that drive him on. But there are two others to be noticed.
One is the pleasure in an action very difficult and perilous and,
therefore, intensely exciting. This action sets all his powers on the
strain. He feels the delight of one who executes successfully a feat
thoroughly congenial to his special aptitude, and only just within his
compass; and, as he is fearless by nature, the fact that a single slip
will cost him his life only increases his pleasure. His exhilaration
breaks out in the ghastly words with which he greets the sunrise after
the night of the drunken tumult which has led to Cassio's disgrace: 'By
the mass, 'tis morning. Pleasure and action make the hours seem short.'
Here, however, the joy in exciting action is quickened by other
feelings. It appears more simply elsewhere in such a way as to suggest
that nothing but such actions gave him happiness, and that his happiness
was greater if the action was destructive as well as exciting. We find
it, for instance, in his gleeful cry to Roderigo, who proposes to shout
to Brabantio in order to wake him and tell him of his daughter's flight:

     Do, with like timorous[116] accent and dire yell
     As when, by night and negligence, the fire
     Is spied in populous cities.

All through that scene; again, in the scene where Cassio is attacked and
Roderigo murdered; everywhere where Iago is in physical action, we catch
this sound of almost feverish enjoyment. His blood, usually so cold and
slow, is racing through his veins.

But Iago, finally, is not simply a man of action; he is an artist. His
action is a plot, the intricate plot of a drama, and in the conception
and execution of it he experiences the tension and the joy of artistic
creation. 'He is,' says Hazlitt, 'an amateur of tragedy in real life;
and, instead of employing his invention on imaginary characters or
long-forgotten incidents, he takes the bolder and more dangerous course
of getting up his plot at home, casts the principal parts among his
newest friends and connections, and rehearses it in downright earnest,
with steady nerves and unabated resolution.' Mr. Swinburne lays even
greater stress on this aspect of Iago's character, and even declares
that 'the very subtlest and strongest component of his complex nature'
is 'the instinct of what Mr. Carlyle would call an inarticulate poet.'
And those to whom this idea is unfamiliar, and who may suspect it at
first sight of being fanciful, will find, if they examine the play in
the light of Mr. Swinburne's exposition, that it rests on a true and
deep perception, will stand scrutiny, and might easily be illustrated.
They may observe, to take only one point, the curious analogy between
the early stages of dramatic composition and those soliloquies in which
Iago broods over his plot, drawing at first only an outline, puzzled how
to fix more than the main idea, and gradually seeing it develop and
clarify as he works upon it or lets it work. Here at any rate
Shakespeare put a good deal of himself into Iago. But the tragedian in
real life was not the equal of the tragic poet. His psychology, as we
shall see, was at fault at a critical point, as Shakespeare's never was.
And so his catastrophe came out wrong, and his piece was ruined.

Such, then, seem to be the chief ingredients of the force which,
liberated by his resentment at Cassio's promotion, drives Iago from
inactivity into action, and sustains him through it. And, to pass to a
new point, this force completely possesses him; it is his fate. It is
like the passion with which a tragic hero wholly identifies himself, and
which bears him on to his doom. It is true that, once embarked on his
course, Iago _could_ not turn back, even if this passion did abate; and
it is also true that he is compelled, by his success in convincing
Othello, to advance to conclusions of which at the outset he did not
dream. He is thus caught in his own web, and could not liberate himself
if he would. But, in fact, he never shows a trace of wishing to do so,
not a trace of hesitation, of looking back, or of fear, any more than of
remorse; there is no ebb in the tide. As the crisis approaches there
passes through his mind a fleeting doubt whether the deaths of Cassio
and Roderigo are indispensable; but that uncertainty, which does not
concern the main issue, is dismissed, and he goes forward with
undiminished zest. Not even in his sleep--as in Richard's before his
final battle--does any rebellion of outraged conscience or pity, or any
foreboding of despair, force itself into clear consciousness. His
fate--which is himself--has completely mastered him: so that, in the
later scenes, where the improbability of the entire success of a design
built on so many different falsehoods forces itself on the reader, Iago
appears for moments not as a consummate schemer, but as a man absolutely
infatuated and delivered over to certain destruction.

5

Iago stands supreme among Shakespeare's evil characters because the
greatest intensity and subtlety of imagination have gone to his making,
and because he illustrates in the most perfect combination the two facts
concerning evil which seem to have impressed Shakespeare most. The first
of these is the fact that perfectly sane people exist in whom
fellow-feeling of any kind is so weak that an almost absolute egoism
becomes possible to them, and with it those hard vices--such as
ingratitude and cruelty--which to Shakespeare were far the worst. The
second is that such evil is compatible, and even appears to ally itself
easily, with exceptional powers of will and intellect. In the latter
respect Iago is nearly or quite the equal of Richard, in egoism he is
the superior, and his inferiority in passion and massive force only
makes him more repulsive. How is it then that we can bear to contemplate
him; nay, that, if we really imagine him, we feel admiration and some
kind of sympathy? Henry the Fifth tells us:

     There is some soul of goodness in things evil,
     Would men observingly distil it out;

but here, it may be said, we are shown a thing absolutely evil,
and--what is more dreadful still--this absolute evil is united with
supreme intellectual power. Why is the representation tolerable, and why
do we not accuse its author either of untruth or of a desperate
pessimism?

To these questions it might at once be replied: Iago does not stand
alone; he is a factor in a whole; and we perceive him there and not in
isolation, acted upon as well as acting, destroyed as well as
destroying.[117] But, although this is true and important, I pass it by
and, continuing to regard him by himself, I would make three remarks in
answer to the questions.

In the first place, Iago is not merely negative or evil--far from it.
Those very forces that moved him and made his fate--sense of power,
delight in performing a difficult and dangerous action, delight in the
exercise of artistic skill--are not at all evil things. We sympathise
with one or other of them almost every day of our lives. And,
accordingly, though in Iago they are combined with something detestable
and so contribute to evil, our perception of them is accompanied with
sympathy. In the same way, Iago's insight, dexterity, quickness,
address, and the like, are in themselves admirable things; the perfect
man would possess them. And certainly he would possess also Iago's
courage and self-control, and, like Iago, would stand above the impulses
of mere feeling, lord of his inner world. All this goes to evil ends in
Iago, but in itself it has a great worth; and, although in reading, of
course, we do not sift it out and regard it separately, it inevitably
affects us and mingles admiration with our hatred or horror.

All this, however, might apparently co-exist with absolute egoism and
total want of humanity. But, in the second place, it is not true that in
Iago this egoism and this want are absolute, and that in this sense he
is a thing of mere evil. They are frightful, but if they were absolute
Iago would be a monster, not a man. The fact is, he _tries_ to make them
absolute and cannot succeed; and the traces of conscience, shame and
humanity, though faint, are discernible. If his egoism were absolute he
would be perfectly indifferent to the opinion of others; and he clearly
is not so. His very irritation at goodness, again, is a sign that his
faith in his creed is not entirely firm; and it is not entirely firm
because he himself has a perception, however dim, of the goodness of
goodness. What is the meaning of the last reason he gives himself for
killing Cassio:

     He hath a daily beauty in his life
     That makes me ugly?

Does he mean that he is ugly to others? Then he is not an absolute
egoist. Does he mean that he is ugly to himself? Then he makes an open
confession of moral sense. And, once more, if he really possessed no
moral sense, we should never have heard those soliloquies which so
clearly betray his uneasiness and his unconscious desire to persuade
himself that he has some excuse for the villainy he contemplates. These
seem to be indubitable proofs that, against his will, Iago is a little
better than his creed, and has failed to withdraw himself wholly from
the human atmosphere about him. And to these proofs I would add, though
with less confidence, two others. Iago's momentary doubt towards the end
whether Roderigo and Cassio must be killed has always surprised me. As a
mere matter of calculation it is perfectly obvious that they must; and I
believe his hesitation is not merely intellectual, it is another symptom
of the obscure working of conscience or humanity. Lastly, is it not
significant that, when once his plot has begun to develop, Iago never
seeks the presence of Desdemona; that he seems to leave her as quickly
as he can (III. iv. 138); and that, when he is fetched by
Emilia to see her in her distress (IV. ii. 110 ff.), we fail to
catch in his words any sign of the pleasure he shows in Othello's
misery, and seem rather to perceive a certain discomfort, and, if one
dare say it, a faint touch of shame or remorse? This interpretation of
the passage, I admit, is not inevitable, but to my mind (quite apart
from any theorising about Iago) it seems the natural one.[118] And if it
is right, Iago's discomfort is easily understood; for Desdemona is the
one person concerned against whom it is impossible for him even to
imagine a ground of resentment, and so an excuse for cruelty.[119]

There remains, thirdly, the idea that Iago is a man of supreme
intellect who is at the same time supremely wicked. That he is supremely
wicked nobody will doubt; and I have claimed for him nothing that will
interfere with his right to that title. But to say that his intellectual
power is supreme is to make a great mistake. Within certain limits he
has indeed extraordinary penetration, quickness, inventiveness,
adaptiveness; but the limits are defined with the hardest of lines, and
they are narrow limits. It would scarcely be unjust to call him simply
astonishingly clever, or simply a consummate master of intrigue. But
compare him with one who may perhaps be roughly called a bad man of
supreme intellectual power, Napoleon, and you see how small and negative
Iago's mind is, incapable of Napoleon's military achievements, and much
more incapable of his political constructions. Or, to keep within the
Shakespearean world, compare him with Hamlet, and you perceive how
miserably close is his intellectual horizon; that such a thing as a
thought beyond the reaches of his soul has never come near him; that he
is prosaic through and through, deaf and blind to all but a tiny
fragment of the meaning of things. Is it not quite absurd, then, to call
him a man of supreme intellect?

And observe, lastly, that his failure in perception is closely connected
with his badness. He was destroyed by the power that he attacked, the
power of love; and he was destroyed by it because he could not
understand it; and he could not understand it because it was not in him.
Iago never meant his plot to be so dangerous to himself. He knew that
jealousy is painful, but the jealousy of a love like Othello's he could
not imagine, and he found himself involved in murders which were no part
of his original design. That difficulty he surmounted, and his changed
plot still seemed to prosper. Roderigo and Cassio and Desdemona once
dead, all will be well. Nay, when he fails to kill Cassio, all may still
be well. He will avow that he told Othello of the adultery, and persist
that he told the truth, and Cassio will deny it in vain. And then, in a
moment, his plot is shattered by a blow from a quarter where he never
dreamt of danger. He knows his wife, he thinks. She is not
over-scrupulous, she will do anything to please him, and she has learnt
obedience. But one thing in her he does not know--that she _loves_ her
mistress and would face a hundred deaths sooner than see her fair fame
darkened. There is genuine astonishment in his outburst 'What! Are you
mad?' as it dawns upon him that she means to speak the truth about the
handkerchief. But he might well have applied to himself the words she
flings at Othello,

                          O gull! O dolt!
     As ignorant as dirt!

The foulness of his own soul made him so ignorant that he built into the
marvellous structure of his plot a piece of crass stupidity.

To the thinking mind the divorce of unusual intellect from goodness is a
thing to startle; and Shakespeare clearly felt it so. The combination of
unusual intellect with extreme evil is more than startling, it is
frightful. It is rare, but it exists; and Shakespeare represented it in
Iago. But the alliance of evil like Iago's with _supreme_ intellect is
an impossible fiction; and Shakespeare's fictions were truth.

6

The characters of Cassio and Emilia hardly require analysis, and I will
touch on them only from a single point of view. In their combination of
excellences and defects they are good examples of that truth to nature
which in dramatic art is the one unfailing source of moral instruction.

Cassio is a handsome, light-hearted, good-natured young fellow, who
takes life gaily, and is evidently very attractive and popular. Othello,
who calls him by his Christian name, is fond of him; Desdemona likes him
much; Emilia at once interests herself on his behalf. He has warm
generous feelings, an enthusiastic admiration for the General, and a
chivalrous adoration for his peerless wife. But he is too easy-going. He
finds it hard to say No; and accordingly, although he is aware that he
has a very weak head, and that the occasion is one on which he is bound
to run no risk, he gets drunk--not disgustingly so, but ludicrously
so.[120] And, besides, he amuses himself without any scruple by
frequenting the company of a woman of more than doubtful reputation, who
has fallen in love with his good looks. Moralising critics point out
that he pays for the first offence by losing his post, and for the
second by nearly losing his life. They are quite entitled to do so,
though the careful reader will not forget Iago's part in these
transactions. But they ought also to point out that Cassio's looseness
does not in the least disturb our confidence in him in his relations
with Desdemona and Othello. He is loose, and we are sorry for it; but we
never doubt that there was 'a daily beauty