SHAKSPEARE’S BORROWINGS.

An English student of Italian literature has been at great pains to investigate Mr. William Shakspeare’s indebtedness for his plots and backgrounds to the Italian novelists. He publishes the result of his studies in the Gentleman’s Magazine, and it is an article all students of literature will want to read. It reveals the fine audacity of Mr. Shakspeare, and shows how the world of readers gains when great genius takes its own where it finds it.

These Italian novelists were fine workmen, and ingenious story tellers, but Shakspeare clothed their creations in the flesh and blood of perennial humanity. They made the puppets of passion, true to the fashions and humors of their day, and invaluable as such; Shakspeare took them and gave them that philosophy and humanity that rings true through all the changes of custom, and knowledge and philosophy.

These writers had the faculty of invention, of incident and situation, and dramatic movement and climax. Shakspeare may have really lacked these ingenious faculties of mind, but yet he had the dramatic perception of life—the whole of life, quick and stirring, all emotion and thought and passion. In his day the play was the thing in England, and he needed a strong current of human action to show the soul of life on the stage as he saw it in the commonplaces of everyday existence. So he borrowed from the Italians, who supplied him with the very plots he needed to develop his own philosophy of life, in a fashion that gave thought its real place in life, as a concrete force on a level with action.

If the novel had been established in England earlier, if the English writers had borrowed the form of the novel from the Italians bodily, instead of their plots, Shakspeare might have been our psychological novelist; for it seems that his dramatic power was of the deeper sort that seizes the heart and soul of life, rather than that which devises effective scenes and climaxes. That is, if this English writer is to be trusted, and he seems to write with authority. He says Cymbeline and All’s Well That Ends Well were taken from Boccaccio’s Decameron, The Merchant of Venice and The Merry Wives of Windsor from Florentino’s Pecarone, Romeo and Juliet, Much Ado about Nothing, Two Gentlemen of Verona and Twelfth Night from Bandello, and Measure for Measure and Othello from Giraldi’s Ecatommiti.

If any contemporary writer put himself in such indebtedness the critics would probably howl. And yet the richest imaginations, the most fantastic fancy, the keenest wit and widest comprehension of human nature and life is often given to a writer who is destitute of the mere dramatic knack of improvising a story to carry on the frame of life as he knows and sees it.

Half our so-called creative and imaginative writers of today are merely ingenious plot and puppet makers, with no real gift of creation or imagination at all. The exceptions in English are Meredith, Hardy, Zangwill, Gissing and a baker’s dozen or so others. The man of real imaginative gifts, and the philosophic insight that invariably accompanies them, is seldom recognized in his true office and capacity; for he so often lacks the melodramatic and theatrical ingenuity, that perverts the course of human destiny for mere effectiveness. Since the deeper things of existence are usually excluded from fiction it is ten to one he is writing criticism or essays, and is thought to be prosy and dull by the majority of readers, to whom imaginative writing means simply the romance of abducted duchesses and bloody encounters by moonlight. But creation, as Emerson pointed out long ago, is insight.

A gory era is at this hour upon us. Let us hope that the true imaginative literature of insight, philosophy, poetry and analysis of character will yet emerge, when Ibsen and Maeterlinck and Sudermann and the rest are relieved by process of time of the stigma attached to all original observers, thinkers and innovators.

Shakespeare, if he were alive today, would be in the forefront of this new movement for freedom in literature, and he would steal right and left from Science!

Walter Blackburn Harte.