PART XVII

SHAKESPEARE AND THE DRAMA

I

An article by Ernest Howard Crosby⁠[135] on Shakespeare’s attitude towards the people has suggested to me the idea of expressing the opinion I formed long ago about Shakespeare’s works, an opinion quite contrary to that established throughout the European world. Recalling the struggle with doubts, the pretences, and the efforts to attune myself to Shakespeare, that I went through owing to my complete disagreement with the general adulation, and supposing that many people have experienced and are experiencing the same perplexity, I think it may be of some use definitely and frankly to express this disagreement of mine with the opinion held by the majority, especially as the conclusions I came to on examining the causes of my disagreement are, it seems to me, not devoid of interest and significance.

My disagreement with the established opinion about Shakespeare is not the result of a casual mood or of a lighthearted attitude towards the subject, but it is the result of repeated and strenuous efforts, extending over many years, to harmonise my views with the opinions about Shakespeare accepted throughout the whole educated Christian world.

I remember the astonishment I felt when I first read Shakespeare. I had expected to receive a great esthetic pleasure, but on reading, one after another, the works regarded as his best, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and Macbeth, not only did I not experience pleasure but I felt an insuperable repulsion and tedium, and a doubt whether I lacked sense, since I considered works insignificant and simply bad, which are regarded as the summit of perfection by the whole educated world; or whether the importance that educated world attributed to Shakespeare’s works lacks sense. My perplexity was increased by the fact that I have always keenly felt the beauties of poetry in all its forms: why then did Shakespeare’s works, recognised by the whole world as works of artistic genius, not only fail to please me, but even seem detestable? I long distrusted my judgment, and to check my conclusions, during fifty years I repeatedly set to work to read Shakespeare in all possible forms—in Russian, in English, and in German in Schlegel’s translation, as I was advised to. I read the tragedies, comedies, and historical plays, several times over, and I invariably experienced the same feelings—repulsion, weariness, and bewilderment. Now, before writing this article, as an old man of 75,⁠[136] wishing once more to check my conclusions, I have again read the whole of Shakespeare, including the historical plays, the Henrys, Troilus and Cressida, The Tempest, and Cymbeline, etc., and have experienced the same feeling still more strongly, no longer with perplexity but with a firm indubitable conviction that the undisputed fame Shakespeare enjoys as a great genius, which makes writers of our time imitate him and readers and spectators, distorting their esthetic and ethical sense, seek non-existent qualities in him, is a great evil—as every falsehood is.

Although I know that the majority of people have such faith in Shakespeare’s greatness that on reading this opinion of mine they will not even admit the possibility of its being correct, and will not pay any attention to it, I shall nevertheless try as best I can to show why I think Shakespeare cannot be admitted to be either a great writer of genius, or even an average one.

For this purpose I will take one of the most admired of Shakespeare’s dramas—King Lear, in enthusiastic praise of which most of the critics agree.

“The tragedy of Lear is deservedly celebrated among the dramas of Shakespeare,” says Dr. Johnson. “There is perhaps no play which keeps the attention so strongly fixed, which so much agitates our passions and interests our curiosity.”

“We wish that we could pass this play over and say nothing about it,” says Hazlitt. “All that we can say must fall far short of the subject, or even of what we ourselves conceive of it. To attempt to give a description of the play itself or of its effects upon the mind is mere impertinence; yet we must say something. It is then the best of Shakespeare’s plays, for it is the one in which he was most in earnest.”

“If the originality of invention did not so much stamp almost every play of Shakespeare,” says Hallam, “that to name one as the most original seems a disparagement to others, we might say that this great prerogative of genius was exercised above all in Lear. It diverges more from the model of regular tragedy than Macbeth or Othello, or even more than Hamlet, but the fable is better constructed than in the last of these and it displays full as much of the almost superhuman inspiration of the poet as the other two.”

“King Lear may be recognised as the perfect model of the dramatic art of the whole world,” says Shelley.

“I am not minded to say much of Shakespeare’s Arthur”; says Swinburne. “There are one or two figures in the world of his work of which there are no words that would be fit or good to say. Another of these is Cordelia. The place they have in our lives and thoughts is not one for talk. The niche set apart for them to inhabit in our secret hearts is not penetrable by the lights and noises of common day. There are chapels in the cathedral of man’s highest art, as in that of his inmost life, not made to be set open to the eyes and feet of the world. Love and Death and Memory keep charge for us in silence of some beloved names. It is the crowning glory of genius, the final miracle and transcendent gift of poetry that it can add to the number of these and engrave on the very heart of our remembrance fresh names and memories of its own creation.”

“Lear, c’est l’occasion de Cordelia,” says Victor Hugo. “La maternité de la fille sur le père; sujet profonde; la maternité vénérable entre toutes, si admirablement traduite par la légend de cette romaine, nourrice, au fond d’un cachot, de son père veillard. La jeune mammelle près de la barbe blanche, il n’est point de spectacle plus sacré. Cette mammelle filiale c’est Cordelia.

“Une fois cette figure rêvée et trouvée Shakespeare a créé son drame.... Shakespeare, portant Cordelia dans sa pensée, a créé cette tragédie comme un dieu, qui ayant une aurore à placer, ferait tout exprès un monde pour l’y mettre.”⁠[137]

“In Lear Shakespeare’s vision sounded the abyss of horror to its very depths, and his spirit showed neither fear, nor giddiness, nor faintness at the sight,” says Brandes. “On the threshold of this work, a feeling of awe comes over one, as on the threshold of the Sistine Chapel, with its ceiling-frescoes by Michael Angelo, only that the suffering here is far more intense, the wail wilder, the harmonies of beauty more definitely shattered by the discords of despair.”

Such are the judgments of the critics on this drama, and therefore, I think I am justified in choosing it as an example of Shakespeare’s best plays.

I will try as impartially as possible to give the contents of the play, and then show why it is not the height of perfection, as it is said to be by the learned critics, but is something quite different.

II

The tragedy of Lear begins with a scene in which two courtiers, Kent and Gloucester, are talking. Kent, pointing to a young man who is present, asks Gloucester whether that is his son. Gloucester says that he has often blushed to acknowledge the young man as his son, but has now ceased to do so. Kent says: “I cannot conceive you.” Then Gloucester, in the presence of his son, says: “Sir, this young fellow’s mother could; whereupon she grew round-wombed, and had, indeed, sir, a son for her cradle ere she had a husband for her bed....” He goes on to say that he had another son who was legitimate, but “though this knave came somewhat saucily before he was sent for, yet was his mother fair, there was good sport at his making, and the whoreson must be acknowledged.”

Such is the introduction. Not to speak of the vulgarity of these words of Gloucester, they are also out of place in the mouth of a man whom it is intended to represent as a noble character. It is impossible to agree with the opinion of some critics that these words are put into Gloucester’s mouth to indicate the contempt for illegitimacy from which Edmund suffered. Were that so, it would in the first place have been necessary to make the father express the contempt felt by people in general, and secondly Edmund, in his monologue about the injustice of those who despise him for his birth, should have referred to his father’s words. But this is not done, and therefore these words of Gloucester’s at the very beginning of the piece, were merely for the purpose of informing the public in an amusing way of the fact that Gloucester has a legitimate and an illegitimate son.

After this trumpets are blown, King Lear enters with his daughters and sons-in-law and makes a speech about being aged and wishing to stand aside from affairs and divide his kingdom between his daughters. In order to know how much he should give to each daughter, he announces that to the daughter who tells him she loves him most he will give most. The eldest daughter, Goneril, says that there are no words to express her love, that she loves him “dearer than eyesight, space, and liberty,” and she loves him so much that it “makes her breath poor.” King Lear immediately allots on the map to this daughter her share, with fields, woods, rivers and meadows, and puts the same question to his second daughter. The second daughter, Regan, says that her sister has correctly expressed her own feelings, but insufficiently. She, Regan, loves her father so that everything is abhorrent to her except his love. The king rewards this daughter also, and asks his youngest, favourite daughter, in whom, according to his expression, “the wine of France and milk of Burgundy strive to be interess’d”—that is, who is courted by the King of France and the Duke of Burgundy—asks Cordelia how she loves him. Cordelia, who personifies all the virtues as the two elder sisters personify all the vices, says quite inappropriately, as if on purpose to vex her father, that though she loves and honours him and is grateful to him, yet, if she marries, her love will not all belong to him, but she will love her husband also.

On hearing these words the king is beside himself, and immediately curses his favourite daughter with most terrible and strange maledictions, saying, for instance, that he will love a man who eats his own children as much as he now loves her who was once his daughter.

The courtier, Kent, takes Cordelia’s part, and, wishing to bring the king to reason, upbraids him with his injustice and speaks reasonably about the evil of flattery. Lear, without attending to Kent, banishes him under threat of death, and calling to him Cordelia’s two suitors, the King of France and the Duke of Burgundy, proposes to each in turn to take Cordelia without a dowry. The Duke of Burgundy says plainly that he will not take Cordelia without a dowry, but the King of France takes her without dowry, and leads her away. After this the elder sisters, there and then conversing with one another, prepare to offend their father who had endowed them. So ends the first scene.

Not to mention the inflated, characterless style in which Lear—like all Shakespeare’s kings—talks, the reader or spectator cannot believe that a king, however old and stupid, could believe the words of the wicked daughters with whom he had lived all their lives, and not trust his favourite daughter, but curse and banish her; therefore the reader or spectator cannot share the feeling of the persons who take part in this unnatural scene.

Scene II begins with Edmund, Gloucester’s illegitimate son, soliloquising on the injustice of men who concede rights and respect to a legitimate son but deny them to an illegitimate son, and he determines to ruin Edgar and usurp his place. For this purpose he forges a letter to himself, as from Edgar, in which the latter is made to appear to wish to kill his father. Having waited till Gloucester appears, Edmund, as if against his own desire, shows him this letter, and the father immediately believes that his son Edgar, whom he tenderly loves, wishes to kill him. The father goes away, Edgar enters, and Edmund suggests to him that his father for some reason wishes to kill him. Edgar also at once believes him, and flees from his father.

The relations between Gloucester and his two sons and the feelings of these characters, are as unnatural as Lear’s relation to his daughters, if not more so; and therefore it is even more difficult for the spectator to put himself into the mental condition of Gloucester and his sons and to sympathise with them, than it was in regard to Lear and his daughters.

In Scene IV the banished Kent, disguised, so that Lear does not recognise him, presents himself to the king who is now staying with Goneril. Lear asks who he is, to which Kent, one does not know why, replies in a jocular tone quite inappropriate to his position: “A very honest-hearted fellow and as poor as the King.” “If thou be’st as poor for a subject as he’s for a King, thou art poor enough,” replies Lear. “How old art thou?” “Not so young, sir, to love a woman for singing, nor so old as to dote on her for anything,” to which the King replies that if he likes him not worse after dinner, he will let him remain in his service.

This talk fits in neither with Lear’s position nor with Kent’s relation to him, and is evidently put into their mouths only because the author thought it witty and amusing.

Goneril’s steward appears and is rude to Lear, for which Kent trips him up. The King, who still does not recognise Kent, gives him money for this, and takes him into his service. After this the fool appears, and a talk begins between the fool and the King, quite out of accord with the situation, leading to nothing, prolonged, and intended to be amusing. Thus for instance the fool says, “Give me an egg, and I’ll give thee two crowns.” The King asks what crowns they shall be. “Why, after I have cut the egg i’the middle and eat up the meat, the two crowns of the egg. When thou clovest thy crown i’the middle, and gavest away both parts, thou borest thine ass on thy back o’er the dirt; thou hadst little wit in thy bald crown when thou gavest thy golden one away. If I speak like myself in this, let him be whipped that first finds it so.”

In this manner prolonged conversations go on, producing in the spectator or reader a sense of wearisome discomfort such as one experiences when listening to dull jokes.

This conversation is interrupted by the arrival of Goneril. She demands that her father should diminish his retinue: instead of a hundred courtiers he should be satisfied with fifty. On hearing this proposal Lear is seized with terrible, unnatural rage, and asks:

and so forth.

Meanwhile the fool unceasingly interpolates his humourless jokes. Goneril’s husband appears and wishes to appease Lear, but Lear curses Goneril, invoking sterility upon her, or the birth of such a child as would repay with ridicule and contempt her maternal cares, and would thereby show her all the horror and suffering caused by a child’s ingratitude.

These words, which express a genuine feeling, might have been touching had only this been said, but they are lost among long high-flown speeches Lear continually utters quite inappropriately. Now he calls down blasts and fogs on his daughter’s head, now desires that curses should “pierce every sense about thee,” or addressing his own eyes, says that if they weep he will pluck them out and cast them, with the waters that they lose, “to temper clay.”

After this, Lear sends Kent, whom he still does not recognise, to his other daughter, and notwithstanding the despair he has just expressed he talks with the fool and incites him to jests. The jests continue to be mirthless, and besides the unpleasant feeling akin to shame that one feels at unsuccessful witticisms, they are so long-drawn-out as to be wearisome. So for instance the fool asks the King, “Canst thou tell why one’s nose stands i’ the middle of one’s face?” Lear says he does not know.

“Why, to keep one’s eyes of either side one’s nose: that what a man cannot smell out he may spy into.”

“Canst tell how an oyster makes his shell?” the fool asks.

“No.”

“Nor I neither; but I can tell why a snail has a house.”

“Why?”

“Why, to put his head in; not to give it away to his daughters, and leave his horns without a case.”

“Be my horses ready?” asks Lear.

“Thy asses are gone about ’em. The reason why the seven stars are no more than seven is a pretty reason.”

“Because they are not eight?” says Lear.

“Yes, indeed; thou wouldst make a good fool,” says the fool, and so forth.

After this long scene a gentleman comes and announces that the horses are ready. The fool says:

and goes off.

Scene I of Act II begins with the villain Edmund persuading his brother, when his father enters, to pretend that they are fighting with their swords. Edgar agrees, though it is quite incomprehensible why he should do so. The father finds them fighting. Edgar runs away and Edmund scratches his own arm to draw blood, and persuades his father that Edgar was using charms to kill his father and had wanted Edmund to help him, but that he had refused to do so and Edgar had then thrown himself upon him and wounded him in the arm. Gloucester believes everything, curses Edgar, and transfers all the rights of his elder and legitimate son to the illegitimate Edmund. The Duke of Cornwall, hearing of this, also rewards Edmund.

In Scene II before Gloucester’s castle, Lear’s new servant Kent, still unrecognised by Lear, begins without any reason to abuse Oswald (Goneril’s steward), calling him “a knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; ... the son and heir of a mongrel bitch,” and so on. Then drawing his sword he demands that Oswald should fight him, saying that he will make of him a “sop o’ the moonshine,” words no commentator has been able to explain, and when he is stopped, he continues to give vent to the strangest abuse, saying, for instance, that he, Oswald, has been made by a tailor, because “a stone-cutter, or a painter, could not have made him so ill, though they had been but two hours at the trade.” He also says that, if he is allowed, he will tread this unbolted villain into mortar, and daub the wall of a privy with him.

And in this way Kent, whom nobody recognises,—though both the king and the Duke of Cornwall, as well as Gloucester who is present, should know him well,—continues to brawl, in the character of a new servant of Lear’s, until he is seized and put in the stocks.

Scene III takes place on a heath. Edgar, flying from his father’s pursuit, hides himself in a tree, and he tells the audience what kinds of lunatics there are, beggars who go about naked, thrust pins and wooden pricks into their bodies, and scream with wild voices and enforce charity, and he says that he intends to play the part of such a lunatic in order to escape from the pursuit. Having told the audience this he goes off.

Scene IV is again before Gloucester’s castle. Lear and the fool enter. Lear sees Kent in the stocks and, still not recognising him, is inflamed with anger against those who have dared so to treat his messenger, and he calls for the Duke and Regan. The fool goes on with his queer sayings. Lear with difficulty restrains his anger. The Duke and Regan enter. Lear complains of Goneril, but Regan justifies her sister. Lear curses Goneril and, when Regan tells him he had better go back to her sister, he is indignant and says: “Ask her forgiveness?” and goes on his knees, showing how improper it would be for him abjectly to beg food and clothing as charity from his own daughter, and he curses Goneril with the most terrible curses, and asks who has dared to put his messenger in the stocks. Before Regan can answer Goneril arrives. Lear becomes yet more angry and again curses Goneril, and when he is told that the Duke had ordered the stocks he says nothing, for at this moment Regan tells him that she cannot receive him now and that he had better return with Goneril, and in a month’s time she will herself receive him but not with a hundred but with only fifty followers. Lear again curses Goneril and does not want to go with her, still hoping that Regan will receive him with all his hundred followers, but Regan says she will only accept him with twenty-five, and then Lear decides to go back with Goneril who allows fifty. Then, when Goneril says that even twenty-five are too many, Lear utters a long discourse about the superfluous and sufficient being conditional conceptions, and says that if a man is allowed only as much as is necessary he is no different from a beast. And here Lear, or rather the actor who plays Lear, addresses himself to a finely-dressed woman in the audience, and says that she too does not need her finery, which does not keep her warm. After this he becomes madly angry, says that he will do something terrible to be revenged upon his daughters but will not weep, and so he departs. The noise of a storm that is commencing is heard.

Such is the second Act, full of unnatural occurrences, and still more unnatural speeches not flowing from the speaker’s circumstances, and finishing with the scene between Lear and his daughters which might be powerful if it were not overloaded with speeches most naïvely absurd and unnatural and quite inappropriate moreover, put in Lear’s mouth. Exceedingly touching would be Lear’s vacillations between pride, anger, and hope of concessions from his daughters, were they not spoilt by these verbose absurdities which he utters about being ready to divorce Regan’s dead mother should Regan not be glad to see him, or about evoking “fen-sucked fogs” to infect his daughter, or about the heavens being obliged to protect old men as they themselves are old, and much else.

Act III begins with thunder, lightning, and storm—a special kind of storm such as there never was before, as one of the characters in the play says. On the heath a gentleman tells Kent that Lear, expelled by his daughters from their houses, is wandering about the heath alone, tearing his hair and throwing it to the winds, and that only the fool is with him. Kent tells the gentleman that the Dukes have quarrelled, and that a French army has landed at Dover, and having communicated this, he despatches the gentleman to Dover to meet Cordelia.

Scene II of Act III also takes place on the heath. Lear walks about the heath and utters words intended to express despair: he wishes the winds to blow so hard that they (the winds) should crack their cheeks, and that the rain should drench everything, and that the lightning should singe his white head and thunder strike the earth flat and destroy all the germs “that make ingrateful man!” The fool keeps uttering yet more senseless words. Kent enters. Lear says that, for some reason, in this storm all criminals shall be discovered and exposed. Kent, still not recognised by Lear, persuades Lear to take shelter in a hovel. The fool thereupon utters a prophecy quite unrelated to the situation, and they all go off.

Scene III is again transferred to Gloucester’s castle. Gloucester tells Edmund that the French king has already landed with an army and intends to help Lear. On learning this, Edmund decides to accuse his father of treason in order to supplant him.

Scene IV is again on the heath in front of the hovel. Kent invites Lear to enter the hovel, but Lear replies that he has no reason to shelter himself from the storm, that he does not feel it as the tempest in his mind, aroused by his daughter’s ingratitude, overpowers all else. This true feeling, if expressed in simple words, might evoke sympathy, but amid his inflated and incessant ravings it is hard to notice it and it loses its significance.

The hovel to which Lear is led turns out to be the same that Edgar has entered disguised as a madman, that is to say, without clothes. Edgar comes out of the hovel and, though they all know him, nobody recognises him any more than they recognise Kent, and Edgar, Lear, and the fool, begin to talk nonsense which continues with intervals for six pages. In the midst of this scene Gloucester enters (who also fails to recognise either Kent or his own son Edgar), and tells them how his son Edgar wished to kill him.

This scene is again interrupted by one in Gloucester’s castle, during which Edmund betrays his father and the Duke declares he will be revenged on Gloucester. The scene again shifts to Lear. Kent, Edgar, Gloucester, Lear, and the fool, are in a farm-house and are talking. Edgar says: “Frateretto calls me and tells me, Nero is an angler in the lake of darkness....” The fool says: “Nuncle, tell me, whether a madman be a gentleman, or a yeoman?” Lear, who is out of his mind, says that a madman is a king. The fool says: “No, he’s a yeoman, that has a gentleman to his son; for he’s a mad yeoman, that sees his son a gentleman before him.” Lear cries out: “To have a thousand with red burning spits come hissing in upon them.” And Edgar shrieks that the foul fiend bites his back. Then the fool utters an adage that one cannot trust “the tameness of a wolf, a horse’s health, a boy’s love, or a whore’s oath.” Then Lear imagines that he is trying his daughters. “Most learned justicer,” says he addressing the naked Edgar. “Thou, sapient sir, sit here. Now, you she foxes!” To this Edgar says:

and the fool sings:

Edgar again says something, and Kent begs Lear to lie down, but Lear continues his imaginary trial.

“Pur! the cat is grey,” cries Edgar.

“Arraign her first; ’t is Goneril,” says Lear. “I here take my oath before this honourable assembly, she kicked the poor King her father.”

Fool: Come hither, mistress. Is your name Goneril? (addressing a joint-stool)

Lear: And here’s another.... Stop her there! Arms, arms, sword, fire! Corruption in the place! False justicer, why hast thou let her ’scape?

and so on.

This raving ends by Lear falling asleep, and Gloucester persuading Kent, still without recognising him, to take the King to Dover. Kent and the fool carry Lear off.

The scene changes to Gloucester’s castle. Gloucester himself is accused of treason, and is brought in and bound. The Duke of Cornwall tears out one of his eyes and stamps on it. Regan says that one eye is still whole and that this healthy eye is laughing at the other eye, and urges the Duke to crush it too. The Duke wishes to do so, but for some reason one of the servants suddenly takes Gloucester’s part and wounds the Duke. Regan kills the servant. The servant dies and tells Gloucester that he has still one eye to see that the evil-doer is punished. The Duke says: “Lest it see more, prevent it: out, vile jelly!” and tears out Gloucester’s other eye and throws it on the floor. Here Regan mentions that Edmund has denounced his father, and Gloucester suddenly understands that he has been deceived and that Edgar did not wish to kill him.

This ends the third Act. Act IV is again in the open country. Edgar, still in the guise of a maniac, talks in artificial language about the perversities of fate and the advantages of a humble lot. Then, curiously enough, to the very spot on the open heath where he is comes his father, blind Gloucester, led by an old man, and he too talks about the perversities of fate in that curious Shakespearean language the chief peculiarity of which is that the thoughts arise either from the sound of the words, or by contrast. He tells the old man who leads him to leave him. The old man says that without eyes one cannot go alone, because one cannot see the way. Gloucester says:

“I have no way, and therefore want no eyes.”

And he argues that he stumbled when he saw and that our defects often save us.

“Ah! dear son Edgar,” adds he,

Edgar, naked, in the character of a lunatic, hears this, but does not disclose himself; he takes the place of the old man who had acted as guide, and talks with his father, who does not recognise his voice and believes him to be a madman. Gloucester takes the opportunity to utter a witticism about “when madmen lead the blind,” and insists on driving away the old man, obviously not from motives which might be natural to him at that moment, but merely, when left alone with Edgar, to enact an imaginary leap over the cliff. Edgar, though he has only just seen his blinded father and learned that he repents of having driven him away, utters quite unnecessary sayings, which Shakespeare might know, having read them in Harsnet’s book,⁠[138] but which Edgar had no means of becoming acquainted with, and which, above all, it is quite unnatural for him to utter in his then condition. He says:

“Five fiends have been in poor Tom at once: of lust, as Obidicut; Hobbididence, prince of dumbness; Mahu, of stealing; Modo, of murder; and Flibbertigibbet, of mopping and mowing, who since possesses chamber-maids and waiting-women.”

On hearing these words, Gloucester gives Edgar his purse saying:

Having uttered these strange words, the blind Gloucester demands that Edgar should lead him to a cliff that he does not himself know, but that hangs over the sea, and they depart.

Scene II of Act IV takes place before the Duke of Albany’s palace. Goneril is not only cruel but also dissolute. She despises her husband, and discloses her love to the villain. Edmund, who has obtained his father’s title of Gloucester. Edmund goes away, and a conversation takes place between Goneril and her husband. The Duke of Albany, the only character who shows human feelings, has already grown dissatisfied with his wife’s treatment of her father and now definitely takes Lear’s part, but he expresses himself in words which destroy one’s belief in his feelings. He says that a bear would lick Lear’s reverence, and that if the heavens do not send their visible spirits to tame these vile offences, humanity must prey on itself like monsters, and so forth.

Goneril does not listen to him, and he then begins to denounce her.

He says:

“O vain fool!” says Goneril.

continues the Duke.

After this a messenger enters and announces that the Duke of Cornwall, wounded by a servant while he was tearing out Gloucester’s eyes, has died. Goneril is glad, but already anticipates with fear that Regan, being now a widow, will snatch Edmund from her. This ends the second scene.

Scene III of Act IV represents the French camp. From a conversation between Kent and a gentleman, the reader or spectator learns that the King of France is not in the camp and that Cordelia has received a letter from Kent and is greatly grieved by what she learns about her father. The gentleman says that her face reminded one of sunshine and rain.

and so forth. The gentleman says that Cordelia desires to see her father, but Kent says that Lear is ashamed to see the daughter he has treated so badly.

In Scene IV Cordelia, talking with a physician, tells him that Lear has been seen, and that he is quite mad, wearing on his head a wreath of various weeds and roaming about, and that she has sent soldiers to find him, and she adds the wish that all secret medicinal virtues of the earth may spring to him in her tears, and so forth.

She is told that the forces of the Dukes are approaching; but she is only concerned about her father, and goes off.

In Scene V of Act IV, which is in Gloucester’s castle, Regan talks with Oswald, Goneril’s steward, who is carrying a letter from Goneril to Edmund, and tells him that she also loves Edmund and that as she is a widow it is better for her to marry him than for Goneril to do so, and she asks Oswald to persuade her sister of this. Moreover she tells him that it was very unwise to put out Gloucester’s eyes and yet to let him live, and therefore she advises Oswald, if he meets Gloucester, to kill him, and promises him a great reward if he does so.

In Scene VI Gloucester again appears with his unrecognised son Edgar, who, now dressed as a peasant, is leading his father to the cliff. Gloucester is walking along on level ground, but Edgar assures him that they are with difficulty ascending a steep hill. Gloucester believes this. Edgar tells his father that the noise of the sea is audible; Gloucester believes this also. Edgar stops on a level place and assures his father that he has ascended the cliff and that below him is a terrible abyss, and he leaves him alone. Gloucester, addressing the gods, says that he shakes off his affliction as he could not bear it longer without condemning them, the gods, and having said this he leaps on the level ground and falls, imagining that he has jumped over the cliff. Edgar thereupon utters to himself a yet more confused phrase:

and he goes up to Gloucester pretending to be again a different man, and expresses astonishment at the latter not having been killed by his fall from such a dreadful height. Gloucester believes that he has fallen, and prepares to die, but he feels that he is alive, and begins to doubt having fallen. Then Edgar assures him that he really did jump from a terrible height, and says that the man who was with him at the top was a fiend, for he had eyes like two full moons, and a thousand noses, and wavy horns.

Gloucester believes this, and is persuaded that his despair was caused by the devil, and therefore decides that he will despair no longer but will quietly await death. Just then Lear enters, for some reason all covered with wild flowers. He has gone mad, and utters speeches yet more meaningless than before. He talks about coining money, about a bow, calls for a clothier’s yard, then he cries out that he sees a mouse which he wishes to entice with a piece of cheese, and then he suddenly asks the password of Edgar, who at once replies with the words, “Sweet Marjoram.” Lear says, “Pass!” and the blind Gloucester, who did not recognise his son’s or Kent’s, recognises the King’s voice.

Then the King, after his disconnected utterances, suddenly begins to speak ironically about flatterers who said “ay and no” like the theologians and assured him that he could do everything, but when he got into a storm without shelter, he saw that this was not true; and then he goes on to say that as all creatures are wanton, and as Gloucester’s bastard son was kinder to his father than his own daughters had been to him (though Lear, according to the course of the play, could know nothing of Edmund’s treatment of Gloucester), therefore let copulation thrive, especially as he, a King, lacks soldiers. And thereupon he addresses an imaginary, hypocritically virtuous lady who acts the prude while at the same time, like an animal in heat, she is addicted to lust. All women “but to the girdle do the gods inherit. Beneath is all the fiend’s ...” and saying this Lear screams and spits with horror. This monologue is evidently meant to be addressed by actor to audience, and probably produces an effect on the stage, but is quite uncalled for in the mouth of Lear—as is his desire to wipe his hand because it “smells of mortality” when Gloucester wishes to kiss it. Then Gloucester’s blindness is referred to, which gives an opportunity for a play of words on eyes and Cupid’s blindness, and for Lear to say that Gloucester has “no eyes in your head, nor no money in your purse? Your eyes are in a heavy case, your purse in a light.” Then Lear declaims a monologue on the injustice of legal judgment, which is quite out of place in his mouth seeing that he is insane. Then a gentleman enters with attendants sent by Cordelia to fetch her father. Lear continues to behave madly and runs away. The gentleman sent to fetch Lear does not run after him but continues to tell Edgar lengthily about the position of the French and the British armies.

Oswald enters and, seeing Gloucester and wishing to obtain the reward promised by Regan, attacks him; but Edgar, with his stave, kills Oswald, who when dying gives Edgar (the man who has killed him) Goneril’s letter to Edmund, the delivery of which will earn a reward. In this letter Goneril promises to kill her husband and marry Edmund. Edgar drags out Oswald’s body by the legs, and then returns and leads his father away.

Scene VII of Act IV takes place in a tent in the French camp. Lear is asleep on a bed. Cordelia enters with Kent, still in disguise. Lear is awakened by music and, seeing Cordelia, does not believe she is alive but thinks her an apparition, and does not believe that he is himself alive. Cordelia assures him that she is his daughter, and begs him to bless her. He goes on his knees before her, begs forgiveness, admits himself to be old and foolish, and says he is ready to take poison, which he thinks she probably has prepared for him, as he is persuaded that she must hate him.

Then little by little he comes to his senses and ceases to rave. His daughter suggests that he should take a little walk. He consents and says:

They go off. The gentleman and Kent, who remain on the scene, talk in order to explain to the audience that Edmund is at the head of the forces and that a battle must soon begin between Lear’s defenders and his enemies. So Act IV ends.

In this Fourth Act the scene between Lear and his daughter might have been touching had it not been preceded in three previous acts by the tedious monotonous ravings of Lear, and also had it been the final scene expressing his feelings, but it is not the last.

In Act V Lear’s former cold pompous artificial ravings are repeated, destroying the impression the preceding scene might have produced.

Scene I of Act V shows us Edmund and Regan (who is jealous of her sister and offers herself to Edmund). Then Goneril comes on with her husband and soldiers. The Duke of Albany, though he pities Lear, considers it his duty to fight against the French who have invaded his country, and so prepares himself for battle.

Then Edgar enters, still disguised, and hands the Duke of Albany the letter, and says that if the Duke wins the battle he should let a herald sound a trumpet, and then (this is 800 years B. C.) a champion will appear who will prove that the contents of the letter are true.

In Scene II Edgar enters leading his father, whom he seats by a tree, and himself goes off. The sounds of a battle are heard, Edgar runs back and says that the battle is lost; Lear and Cordelia are prisoners. Gloucester is again in despair. Edgar, still not disclosing himself to his father, tells him that he should not despair, and Gloucester at once agrees with him.

Scene III opens with a triumphal progress of Edmund the victor. Lear and Cordelia are prisoners. Lear, though he is now no longer insane, still utters the same sort of senseless, inappropriate words, as, for instance, that in prison with Cordelia,

(This kneeling down comes three times over.) He also says that when they are in prison they will wear out poor rogues and “sects of great ones that ebb and flow by the moon,” that he and she are sacrifices upon which “the gods throw incense,” that “he that parts them shall bring a brand from heaven, and fire us hence like foxes” and that

and so forth.

Edmund orders Lear and his daughter to be led away to prison, and having ordered a captain to do them some hurt, asks him whether he will fulfil it. The captain replies “I cannot draw a cart, nor eat dried oats; but if it be man’s work I will do it.” The Duke of Albany, Goneril, and Regan enter. The Duke wishes to take Lear’s part, but Edmund opposes this. The sisters intervene and begin to abuse each other, being jealous of Edmund. Here everything becomes so confused that it is difficult to follow the action. The Duke of Albany wants to arrest Edmund, and tells Regan that Edmund had long ago entered into guilty relations with his wife and that therefore Regan must give up her claim on Edmund, and if she wishes to marry should marry him, the Duke of Albany.

Having said this, the Duke challenges Edmund and orders the trumpet to be sounded, and if no one appears intends himself to fight him.

At this point Regan, whom Goneril has evidently poisoned, writhes with pain. Trumpets are sounded and Edgar enters with a visor which conceals his face, and without giving his name challenges Edmund. Edgar abuses Edmund; Edmund casts back all the abuse on Edgar’s head. They fight and Edmund falls. Goneril is in despair.

The Duke of Albany shows Goneril her letter. Goneril goes off.

Edmund while dying recognises that his opponent is his brother. Edgar raises his visor and moralises to the effect that for having an illegitimate son, Edmund, his father has paid with the loss of his sight. After this Edgar tells the Duke of Albany of his adventures and that he has only now, just before coming to this combat, disclosed himself to his father, and his father could not bear it and died of excitement. Edmund, who is not yet dead, asks what else happened.

Then Edgar relates that while he was sitting by his father’s body a man came, embraced him closely, cried out as if he would burst heaven, threw himself on his father’s corpse, and told a most piteous tale about Lear and himself, and having told it “the strings of life began to crack,” but just then the trumpet sounded twice and he, Edgar, left him “tranced.” And this was Kent. Before Edgar had finished telling this story a gentleman runs in with a bloody knife, shouting, “Help!” To the question “Who has been killed?” the gentleman says that Goneril is dead, who had poisoned her sister. She had confessed this. Kent enters, and at this moment the bodies of Regan and Goneril are brought in. Edmund thereupon says that evidently the sisters loved him greatly, as the one had poisoned the other and then killed herself for his sake. At the same time he confesses that he had given orders to kill Lear and hang Cordelia in prison, under the pretence that she had committed suicide; but that he now wishes to prevent this, and having said so, he dies and is carried out.

After this Lear enters with Cordelia’s dead body in his arms (though he is over eighty years of age and ill). And again there begin his terrible ravings which make one feel as ashamed as one does when listening to unsuccessful jokes. Lear demands that they should all howl, and alternately believes that Cordelia is dead and that she is alive. He says:

Then he recounts how he has killed the slave who hanged Cordelia. Next he says that his eyes see badly, and thereupon recognises Kent whom all along he had not recognised.

The Duke of Albany says that he resigns his power as long as Lear lives, and that he will reward Edgar and Kent and all who have been true to him. At that moment news is brought that Edmund has died; and Lear, continuing his ravings, begs that they will undo one of his buttons, the same request he made when he was roaming about the heath. He expresses his thanks for this, tells them all to look somewhere, and with these words he dies.

In conclusion the Duke of Albany, who remains alive, says:

All go off to the sound of a dead march. This ends Act V of the play.

III

Such is this celebrated play. Absurd as it may appear in this rendering (which I have tried to make as impartial as possible), I can confidently say that it is yet more absurd in the original. To any man of our time, were he not under the hypnotic influence of the suggestion that this play is the height of perfection, it would be enough to read it to the end, had he patience to do so, to convince himself that far from being the height of perfection it is a very poor, carelessly constructed work which, if it may have been of interest to a certain public of its own day, can among us evoke nothing but aversion and weariness. And any man of our day free from such suggestion would receive just the same impression from the other much praised dramas of Shakespeare, not to speak of the absurd dramatised tales, Pericles, Twelfth Night, The Tempest, Cymbeline, and Troilus and Cressida.

But such free-minded people, not pre-disposed to Shakespeare worship, are no longer to be found in our time and in our Christian society. Into every man of our society and time, from an early period of his conscious life, has been instilled the idea that Shakespeare is a poetic and dramatic genius and that all his works are the height of perfection. And therefore, superfluous as it would seem, I will try to indicate in the play of King Lear which I have chosen, the defects characteristic of all Shakespeare’s tragedies and comedies, as a result of which they not only fail to furnish models of dramatic art but fail to satisfy the most elementary and generally recognised requirements of art.

According to the laws laid down by those very critics who extol Shakespeare, the conditions of every tragedy are that the persons who appear should, as a result of their own characters, actions, and the natural movement of events, be brought into conditions in which, finding themselves in opposition to the world around them, they should struggle with it and in that struggle display their inherent qualities.

In the tragedy of King Lear the persons represented are indeed externally placed in opposition to the surrounding world and struggle against it. But the struggle does not result from a natural course of events and from their own characters, but is quite arbitrarily arranged by the author, and therefore cannot produce on the reader that illusion which constitutes the chief condition of art. Lear is under no necessity, and has no reason, to resign his power. And having lived all their lives with his daughters he also has no reason to believe the words of the two elder, and not to believe the truthful statement of the youngest; yet on this the whole tragedy of his position is built.

Equally unnatural is the secondary and very similar plot: the relation of Gloucester to his sons. The position of Gloucester and Edgar arises from the fact that Gloucester, just like Lear, immediately believes the very grossest deception, and does not even try to ask the son who had been deceived, whether the accusation against him is true, but curses him and drives him away.

The fact that the relation of Lear to his daughters is just the same as that of Gloucester to his sons, makes one feel even more strongly that they are both arbitrarily invented and do not flow from the characters or the natural course of events. Equally unnatural and obviously invented is the fact that all through the play Lear fails to recognise his old courtier, Kent; and so the relations of Lear and Kent fail to evoke the sympathy of reader or hearer. This applies in an even greater degree to the position of Edgar, whom nobody recognises, who acts as guide to his blind father and persuades him that he has leapt from a cliff when Gloucester has really jumped on level ground.

These positions in which the characters are quite arbitrarily placed are so unnatural that the reader or spectator is unable either to sympathise with their sufferings or even to be interested in what he reads or hears. That in the first place.

Secondly, there is the fact that both in this and in Shakespeare’s other dramas all the people live, think, speak, and act, quite out of accord with the given period and place. The action of King Lear takes place 800 years B. C., and yet the characters in it are placed in conditions possible only in the Middle Ages: Kings, dukes, armies, illegitimate children, gentlemen, courtiers, doctors, farmers, officers, soldiers, knights in armour, and so on, appear in it. Perhaps such anachronisms (of which all Shakespeare’s plays are full) did not infringe the possibility of illusion in the 16th century and the beginning of the 17th, but in our time it is no longer possible to interest oneself in the development of events one knows could not have occurred in the conditions the author describes in detail.

The artificiality of the positions, which do not arise from a natural course of events and from the characters of the people engaged, and their incompatibility with the period and the place, is further increased by the coarse embellishments Shakespeare continually makes use of in passages meant to be specially touching. The extraordinary storm during which Lear roams about the heath, or the weeds which for some reason he puts on his head, as Ophelia does in Hamlet, or Edgar’s attire—all these effects, far from strengthening the impression, produce a contrary effect. “Man sieht die Absicht und man wird verstimmt”⁠[139] as Goethe says. It often happens—as for instance with such obviously intentional effects as the dragging out of half-a-dozen corpses by the legs, with which Shakespeare often ends his tragedies—that instead of feeling fear and pity one feels the absurdity of the thing.

IV

But not only are the characters in Shakespeare’s plays placed in tragic positions which are quite impossible, do not result from the course of events, and are inappropriate to the period and the place, but they also behave in a way not in accord with their own definite characters and that is quite arbitrary. It is customary to assert that in Shakespeare’s dramas character is particularly well expressed, and that with all his vividness his people are as many-sided as real people, and that while exhibiting the nature of a certain given individual they also show the nature of man in general. It is customary to say that Shakespeare’s delineation of character is the height of perfection. This is asserted with great confidence and repeated by everyone as an indisputable verity, but much as I have tried to find confirmation of this in Shakespeare’s dramas, I have always found the reverse.

From the very beginning of reading any of Shakespeare’s plays I was at once convinced that it was perfectly evident that he is lacking in the chief, if not the sole, means of portraying character, which is individuality of language—that each person should speak in a way suitable to his own character. That is lacking in Shakespeare. All his characters speak, not a language of their own but always one and the same Shakespearean, affected, unnatural language, which not only could they not speak, but which no real people could ever have spoken anywhere.

No real people could speak, or could have spoken, as Lear does—saying that, “I would divorce me from thy mother’s tomb” if Regan did not receive him, or telling the winds to “crack your cheeks,” or bidding “the wind blow the earth into the sea,” or “swell the curl’d waters ’bove the main,” as the gentleman describes what Lear said to the storm, or that it is easier to bear one’s griefs and “the mind much sufferance doth o’erskip, when grief hath mates, and bearing fellowship” (“bearing” meaning suffering), that Lear is “childed, as I father’d,” as Edgar says, and so forth—unnatural expressions such as overload the speeches of the people in all Shakespeare’s dramas.

But it is not only that the characters all talk as no real people ever talked or could talk; they are also all afflicted by a common intemperance of language.

In love, preparing for death, fighting or dying, they all talk at great length and unexpectedly about quite irrelevant matters, guided more by the sound of the words and by puns than by the thoughts.

And they all talk alike. Lear raves just as Edgar does when feigning madness. Kent and the fool both speak alike. The words of one person can be put into the mouth of another, and by the character of the speech it is impossible to know who is speaking. If there is a difference in the speech of Shakespeare’s characters, it is only that Shakespeare makes different speeches for his characters, and not that they speak differently.

Thus Shakespeare always speaks for his kings in one and the same inflated, empty language. Similarly all his women who are intended to be poetic, speak the same pseudo-sentimental Shakespearean language: Juliet, Desdemona, Cordelia, and Mariana. In just the same way also it is Shakespeare who always speaks for his villains: Richard, Edmund, Iago, and Macbeth—expressing for them those malignant feelings which villains never express. And yet more identical is the talk of his madmen, with their terrible words, and the speeches of his fools with their mirthless witticisms.

So that the individual speech of living people—that individual speech which in drama is the chief means of presenting character—is lacking in Shakespeare. (If gesture is also a means of expressing character, as in the ballet, it is only a subsidiary means.) If the characters utter whatever comes to hand and as it comes to hand and all in one and the same way, as in Shakespeare, even the effect of gesture is lost; and therefore whatever blind worshippers of Shakespeare may say, Shakespeare does not show us characters.

Those persons who in his dramas stand out as characters, are characters borrowed by him from earlier works which served as the bases of his plays, and they are chiefly depicted, not in the dramatic manner which consists of making each person speak in his own diction, but in the epic manner, by one person describing the qualities of another.

The excellence of Shakespeare’s depiction of character is asserted chiefly on the ground of the characters of Lear, Cordelia, Othello, Desdemona, Falstaff, and Hamlet. But these characters, like all the others, instead of belonging to Shakespeare, are taken by him from previous dramas, chronicles, and romances. And these characters were not merely not strengthened by him, but for the most part weakened and spoilt. This is very evident in the drama of King Lear which we are considering, and which was taken by Shakespeare from the play of King Leir by an unknown author. The characters of this drama, such as Lear himself and in particular Cordelia, were not only not created by Shakespeare, but have been strikingly weakened by him and deprived of personality, as compared with the older play.

In the older play Leir resigns his power because, having become a widower, he thinks only of saving his soul. He asks his daughters about their love for him in order, by means of a cunning device, to keep his youngest and favourite daughter with him on his island. The two eldest are betrothed, while the youngest does not wish to contract a loveless marriage with any of the neighbouring suitors Leir offers her, and he is afraid she may marry some distant potentate.

The device he has planned, as he explains to his courtier Perillus (Shakespeare’s Kent), is this: that when Cordelia tells him that she loves him more than anyone, or as much as her elder sisters do, he will say that in proof of her love she must marry a prince he will indicate on his island.

All these motives of Lear’s conduct are lacking in Shakespeare’s play. Then, when (according to the older play) Leir asks his daughters about their love for him, Cordelia does not reply (as Shakespeare has it) that she will not give her father all her love but will also love her husband if she marries—to say which is quite unnatural—but simply says that she cannot express her love in words but hopes her actions will prove it. Goneril and Regan make remarks to the effect that Cordelia’s answer is not an answer, and that their father cannot quietly accept such indifference. So that in the older play there is an explanation, lacking in Shakespeare, of Leir’s anger at the youngest daughter’s reply. Leir is vexed at the non-success of his cunning device, and the venomous words of his elder daughters add to his irritation. After the division of his kingdom between the two eldest daughters in the older play comes a scene between Cordelia and the King of Gaul which, instead of the impersonal Shakespearean Cordelia, presents us with a very definite and attractive character in the truthful, tender, self-denying youngest daughter. While Cordelia, not repining at being deprived of a share in the inheritance, sits grieving that she has lost her father’s love and looking forward to earning her bread by her own toil, the King of Gaul enters, who in the disguise of a pilgrim wishes to choose a bride from among Leir’s daughters. He asks Cordelia the cause of her grief. She tells him her woe. He, having fallen in love with her, in his pilgrim guise woos her for the King of Gaul, but Cordelia says she will only marry a man she loves. Then the pilgrim offers her his hand and heart, and Cordelia confesses that she loves him and, notwithstanding the poverty and privation that she thinks awaits her, agrees to marry him. Then the pilgrim discloses to her that he is himself the King of Gaul, and Cordelia marries him.

Instead of this scene Lear, according to Shakespeare, proposes to Cordelia’s two suitors to take her without dowry, and one cynically refuses, while the other takes her without our knowing why.

After this in the older play, as in Shakespeare, Leir undergoes insults from Goneril to whose house he has gone, but he bears these insults in a very different way from that represented by Shakespeare: he feels that by his conduct to Cordelia he has deserved them, and he meekly submits. As in Shakespeare so also in the older play, the courtier, Perillus (Kent) who has taken Cordelia’s part and has therefore been punished, comes to Leir, only not disguised, but simply as a faithful servant who does not abandon his King in a moment of need, and assures him of his love. Leir says to him what in Shakespeare Lear says to Cordelia in the last scene—that if his daughters whom he has benefited hate him, surely one to whom he has done evil cannot love him. But Perillus (Kent) assures the King of his love, and Leir, pacified goes on to Regan. In the older play there are no tempests or tearing out of grey hairs, but there is a weakened old Leir, overpowered by grief and humbled, and driven out by his second daughter also, who even wishes to kill him. Turned out by his eldest daughters, Leir in the older play, as a last resource, goes with Perillus to Cordelia. Instead of the unnatural expulsion of Leir during a tempest and his roaming about the heath, in the old play Leir with Perillus during their journey to France very naturally come to the last degree of want. They sell their clothes to pay for the sea-crossing, and exhausted by cold and hunger they approach Cordelia’s house in fishermen’s garb. Here again, instead of the unnatural conjoint ravings of the fool, Lear, and Edgar, as presented by Shakespeare, we have in the older play a natural scene of the meeting between the daughter and father. Cordelia—who notwithstanding her happiness has all the time been grieving about her father and praying God to forgive her sisters who have done him so much wrong—meets him, now in the last stage of want, and wishes immediately to disclose herself to him, but her husband advises her not to do so for fear of agitating the weak old man. She agrees and takes Leir into her house, and without revealing herself to him takes care of him. Leir revives little by little, and then the daughter asks him who he is, and how he lived formerly. If, says Leir,

Cordelia replies:

And Leir relates all he has suffered from his elder daughters, and says that he now wishes to find shelter with the one who would be right should she condemn him to death. “If, however,” he says, “she will receive me with love, it will be God’s and her work, and not my merit!” To this Cordelia replies, “Oh, I know for certain that thy daughter will lovingly receive thee!” “How canst thou know this without knowing her?” says Leir. “I know,” says Cordelia, “because not far from here, I had a father who acted towards me as badly as thou hast acted towards her, yet if I were only to see his white head, I would creep to meet him on my knees.” “No, this cannot be,” says Leir, “for there are no children in the world so cruel as mine.” “Do not condemn all for the sins of some,” says Cordelia, falling on her knees. “Look here, dear father,” she says, “look at me: I am thy loving daughter.” The father recognises her and says: “It is not for thee, but for me to beg thy pardon on my knees for all my sins towards thee.”

Is there anything approaching this charming scene in Shakespeare’s drama?

Strange as the opinion may appear to Shakespeare’s devotees, the whole of this older play is in all respects beyond compare better than Shakespeare’s adaptation. It is so, first because in it those superfluous characters—the villain Edmund and the unnatural Gloucester and Edgar, who only distract one’s attention—do not appear. Secondly, it is free from the perfectly false “effects” of Lear’s roaming about on the heath, his talks with the fool, and all those impossible disguises, non-recognitions, and wholesale deaths—above all because in this play there is the simple, natural, and deeply touching character of Leir, and the yet more touching and clearly defined character of Cordelia, which are lacking in Shakespeare. And also because there is in the older drama, instead of Shakespeare’s daubed scene of Lear’s meeting with Cordelia and her unnecessary murder, the exquisite scene of Leir’s meeting with Cordelia, which is unequalled by anything in Shakespeare’s drama.

The older play also terminates more naturally and more in accord with the spectators’ moral demands than does Shakespeare’s, namely, by the King of the Gauls conquering the husbands of the elder sisters, and Cordelia not perishing, but replacing Leir in his former position.

This is the position as regards the drama we are examining, borrowed from the old play King Leir.

It is the same with Othello, which is taken from an Italian story, and it is the same again with the famous Hamlet. The same may be said of Antony, Brutus, Cleopatra, Shylock, Richard, and all Shakespeare’s characters; they are all taken from antecedent works. Shakespeare, taking the characters already given in previous plays, stories, chronicles, or in Plutarch’s Lives, not only fails to make them more true to life and more vivid, as his adulators assert, but on the contrary always weakens them and often quite destroys them, as in King Leir: making his characters commit actions unnatural to them, and making them, above all, talk in a way natural neither to them nor to any human being. So in Othello, though this is—we will not say the best, but the least bad—the least overloaded with pompous verbosity, of all Shakespeare’s dramas, the characters of Othello, Iago, Cassio, Emilia are far less natural and alive in Shakespeare than in the Italian romance. In Shakespeare Othello suffers from epilepsy, of which he has an attack on the stage. Afterwards in Shakespeare the murder of Desdemona is preceded by a strange vow uttered by Othello on his knees, and besides this, Othello in Shakespeare’s play is a negro and not a Moor. All this is unusual, inflated, unnatural, and infringes the unity of the character. And there is none of all this in the romance. In the romance also the causes of Othello’s jealousy are more naturally presented than in Shakespeare. In the romance Cassio, knowing whose the handkerchief is, goes to Desdemona to return it, but when approaching the back door of Desdemona’s house he sees Othello coming and runs away from him. Othello perceives Cassio running away, and this it is that chiefly confirms his suspicion. This is omitted in Shakespeare, and yet this casual incident explains Othello’s jealousy more than anything else. In Shakespeare this jealousy is based entirely on Iago’s machinations, which are always successful, and on his crafty speeches, which Othello blindly believes. Othello’s monologue over the sleeping Desdemona, to the effect that he wishes that she when killed should look as she is when alive, and that he will love her when she is dead and now wishes to inhale her “balmy breath” and so forth, is quite impossible. A man who is preparing to murder someone he loves cannot utter such phrases, and still less after the murder can he say that the sun and the moon ought now to be eclipsed and the globe to yawn, nor can he, whatever kind of a nigger he may be, address devils, inviting them to roast him in sulphur, and so forth. And finally, however effective may be his suicide (which does not occur in the romance) it quite destroys the conception of his firm character. If he really suffers from grief and remorse then, when intending to kill himself, he would not utter phrases about his own services, about a pearl, about his eyes dropping tears “as fast as the Arabian trees their medicinable gum,” and still less could he talk about the way a Turk scolded a Venetian, and how “thus” he punished him for it! So that despite the powerful movement of feeling in Othello, when under the influence of Iago’s hints jealousy rises in him, and afterwards in his scene with Desdemona, one’s conception of Othello’s character is constantly infringed by false pathos and by the unnatural speeches he utters.

So it is with the chief character—Othello. But notwithstanding the disadvantageous alterations it has undergone in comparison with the character from which he is taken in the romance, Othello still remains a character. But all the other personages have been quite spoilt by Shakespeare.

Iago in Shakespeare’s play is a complete villain, a deceiver, a thief, and avaricious; he robs Roderigo, succeeds in all sorts of impossible designs, and therefore is a quite unreal person. In Shakespeare the motive of his villainy is, first, that he is offended at Othello not having given him a place he desired; secondly, that he suspects Othello of an intrigue with his wife; and thirdly that, as he says, he feels a strange sort of love for Desdemona. There are many motives, but they are all vague. In the romance there is one motive, and it is simple and clear: Iago’s passionate love for Desdemona, changing into hatred of her and of Othello after she had preferred the Moor to him and had definitely repulsed him. Yet more unnatural is the quite unnecessary figure of Roderigo, whom Iago deceives and robs, promising him Desdemona’s love and obliging him to do as he is ordered: to make Cassio drunk, to provoke him, and then to kill him. Emilia, who utters anything it occurs to the author to put into her mouth, bears not even the slightest resemblance to a real person.

“But Falstaff, the wonderful Falstaff!” Shakespeare’s eulogists will say. “It is impossible to assert that he is not a live person, and that, having been taken out of an anonymous comedy, he has been weakened.”

Falstaff, like all Shakespeare’s characters, was taken from a play by an unknown author, written about a real person, a Sir John Oldcastle, who was the friend of some Duke. This Oldcastle had once been accused of heresy, but had been saved by his friend the Duke. But afterwards he was condemned and burnt at the stake for his religious beliefs, which clashed with Catholicism. To please the Roman Catholic public an unknown author wrote a play about Oldcastle, ridiculing this martyr for his faith and exhibiting him as a worthless man, a boon companion of the Duke; and from this play Shakespeare took not only the character of Falstaff but also his own humorous attitude towards him. In the first plays of Shakespeare’s in which this character appears he was called Oldcastle; but afterwards, when under Elizabeth Protestantism had again triumphed, it was awkward to mock at this martyr of the struggle with Catholicism, and besides, Oldcastle’s relatives had protested, and Shakespeare changed the name from Oldcastle to Falstaff—also an historical character, notorious for having run away at the battle of Agincourt.

Falstaff is really a thoroughly natural and characteristic personage, almost the only natural and characteristic one depicted by Shakespeare. And he is natural and characteristic because, of all Shakespeare’s characters, he alone speaks in a way proper to himself. He speaks in a manner proper to himself because he talks just that Shakespearean language, filled with jests that lack humour and unamusing puns, which, while unnatural to all Shakespeare’s other characters, is quite in harmony with the boastful, distorted, perverted character of the drunken Falstaff. That is the only reason why this figure really presents a definite character. Unfortunately the artistic effect of the character is spoilt by the fact that it is so repulsive in its gluttony, drunkenness, debauchery, rascality, mendacity, and cowardice, that it is difficult to share the feeling of merry humour Shakespeare adopts towards it. Such is the case with Falstaff.

But in none of Shakespeare’s figures is, I will not say his inability but his complete indifference, to giving his people characters so strikingly noticeable as in the case of Hamlet, and with no other of Shakespeare’s works is the blind worship of Shakespeare so strikingly noticeable—that unreasoning hypnotism which does not even admit the thought that any production of his can be other than a work of genius, or that any leading character in a drama of his can fail to be the expression of a new and profoundly conceived character.

Shakespeare takes the ancient story—not at all bad of its kind—relating: avec quelle ruse Amlet qui depuis fût Roy de Dannemarch, vengea la mort de son père Horwendille, occis par Fengon, son frère, et autre occurrence de son histoire, or a drama that was written on the same theme fifteen years before him; and he writes his play on this subject introducing inappropriately (as he constantly does) into the mouth of the chief character all such thoughts of his own as seem to him worthy of attention. Putting these thoughts into his hero’s mouth: about life (the grave-diggers); about death (“To be or not to be”); those he had expressed in his sixty-sixth sonnet about the theatre and about women—he did not at all concern himself as to the circumstances under which these speeches are delivered, and it naturally results that the person uttering these various thoughts becomes a mere phonograph of Shakespeare, deprived of any character of his own; and his actions and words do not agree.

In the legend Hamlet’s personality is quite intelligible: he is revolted by the conduct of his uncle and his mother, wishes to be revenged on them, but fears that his uncle may kill him as he had killed his father, and therefore pretends to be mad, wishing to wait and observe all that was going on at court. But his uncle and his mother, being afraid of him, wish to find out whether he is feigning, or is really mad, and send a girl he loves to him. He keeps up his rôle, and afterwards sees his mother alone, kills a courtier who was eavesdropping, and convicts his mother of her sin. Then he is sent to England. He intercepts letters, returns from England, and revenges himself on his enemies, burning them all.

This is all intelligible and flows from Hamlet’s character and position. But Shakespeare, by putting into Hamlet’s mouth speeches he wished to publish and making him perform actions he needed to secure effective scenes, destroys all that forms Hamlet’s character in the legend. Throughout the whole tragedy Hamlet does not do what he might wish to do, but what is needed for the author’s plans: now he is frightened by his father’s ghost, and now he begins to chaff it, calling it “old mole”; now he loves Ophelia, now he teases her, and so on. There is no possibility of finding any explanation of Hamlet’s actions and speeches, and therefore no possibility of attributing any character to him.

But as it is accepted that Shakespeare, the genius, could write nothing bad, learned men devote all the power of their minds to discovering extraordinary beauties in what is an obvious and glaring defect—particularly obvious in Hamlet—namely, that the chief person in the play has no character at all. And, lo and behold, profound critics announce that in this drama, in the person of Hamlet, is most powerfully presented a perfectly new and profound character, consisting in this, that the person has no character; and that in this absence of character lies an achievement of genius—the creation of a profound character! And having decided this, the learned critics write volumes upon volumes, until the laudations and explanations of the grandeur and importance of depicting the character of a man without a character fill whole libraries. It is true that some critics timidly express the thought that there is something strange about this person, and that Hamlet is an unsolved riddle; but no one ventures to say, as in Hans Andersen’s story, that the king is naked; that it is clear as day that Shakespeare was unable, and did not even wish, to give Hamlet any character and did not even understand that this was necessary! And learned critics continue to study and praise this enigmatical production, which reminds one of the famous inscribed stone found by Pickwick at a cottage doorstep,—which divided the scientific world into two hostile camps.

So that neither the character of Lear, nor of Othello, nor of Falstaff, and still less of Hamlet, at all confirms the existing opinion that Shakespeare’s strength lies in the delineation of character.

If in Shakespeare’s plays some figures are met with that have characteristic traits (mostly secondary figures as Polonius in Hamlet, and Portia in The Merchant of Venice) these few life-like figures—among the five hundred or more secondary figures, and with the complete absence of character in the principal figures—are far from proving that the excellence of Shakespeare’s dramas lies in the presentation of character.

That a great mastery in the presentation of character is attributed to Shakespeare arises from his really possessing a peculiarity which, when helped out by the play of good actors, may appear to superficial observers to be a capacity to manage scenes in which a movement of feeling is expressed. However arbitrary the positions in which he puts his characters, however unnatural to them the language he makes them speak, however lacking in individuality they may be, the movement of feeling itself, its increase and change and the combination of many contrary feelings, are often expressed correctly and powerfully in some of Shakespeare’s scenes. And this, when performed by good actors, evokes, if but for a while, sympathy for the persons represented.

Shakespeare, himself an actor and a clever man, knew not only by speeches but by exclamations, gestures, and the repetition of words, how to express the state of mind and changes of feeling occurring in the persons represented. So that in many places Shakespeare’s characters instead of speaking, merely exclaim, or weep, or in the midst of a monologue indicate the pain of their position by gesture (as when Lear asks to have a button undone), or at a moment of strong excitement they repeat a question several times and cause a word to be repeated which strikes them, as is done by Othello, Macduff, Cleopatra, and others. Similar clever methods of expressing a movement of feeling—giving good actors a chance to show their powers—have often been taken by many critics for the expression of character. But however strongly the play of feeling may be expressed in one scene, a single scene cannot give the character of a person, when, after the appropriate exclamations or gesture, that person begins to talk lengthily not in a natural manner proper to him, but according to the author’s whim—uttering things unnecessary and not in harmony with his character.

V

“Well, but the profound utterances and sayings delivered by Shakespeare’s characters?” Shakespeare’s eulogists will exclaim. “Lear’s monologue on punishment, Kent’s on vengeance, Edgar’s on his former life, Gloucester’s reflections on the perversity of fate, and in other dramas the famous monologues of Hamlet, Antony and others?”

Thoughts and sayings may be appreciated, I reply, in prose works, in essays, in collections of aphorisms, but not in artistic dramatic works the aim of which is to elicit sympathy with what is represented. And therefore the monologues and sayings of Shakespeare, even if they contained many very profound and fresh thoughts, which is not the case, cannot constitute the excellence of an artistic and poetic work. On the contrary, these speeches, uttered in unnatural conditions, can only spoil artistic works.

An artistic poetic work, especially a drama, should first of all evoke in reader or spectator the illusion that what the persons represented are living through and experiencing, is being lived through and experienced by himself. And for this purpose it is not more important for the dramatist to know precisely what he should make his acting characters do and say, than it is to know what he should not make them say and do so as not to infringe the reader’s or spectator’s illusion. However eloquent and profound they may be, speeches put into the mouths of acting characters if they are superfluous and do not accord with the situation and the characters, infringe the main condition of dramatic work—the illusion causing the reader or spectator to experience the feelings of the persons represented. One may without infringing the illusion leave much unsaid: the reader or spectator will himself supply what is needed and sometimes as a result of this his illusion is even increased; but to say what is superfluous is like jerking and scattering a statue made up of small pieces, or taking the lamp out of a magic lantern. The reader’s or spectator’s attention is distracted, the reader sees the author, the spectator sees the actor, the illusion is lost, and to recreate it is sometimes impossible. And therefore without a sense of proportion there cannot be an artist, especially a dramatist. And Shakespeare is entirely devoid of this feeling.

Shakespeare’s characters continually do and say what is not merely unnatural to them but quite unnecessary. I will not cite examples of this, for I think that a man who does not himself perceive this striking defect in all Shakespeare’s dramas will not be convinced by any possible examples or proofs. It is sufficient to read King Lear alone, with the madness, the murders, the plucking out of eyes, Gloucester’s jump, the poisonings, and the torrents of abuse—not to mention Pericles, A Winter’s Tale—or The Tempest, to convince oneself of this. Only a man quite devoid of the sense of proportion and taste could produce the types of Titus Andronicus and Troilus and Cressida, and so mercilessly distort the old drama of King Leir.

Gervinus tries to prove that Shakespeare possessed a feeling of beauty, Schönheit’s Sinn, but all Gervinus’s proofs only show that he himself, Gervinus, completely lacked it. In Shakespeare everything is exaggerated: the actions are exaggerated, so are their consequences, the speeches of the characters are exaggerated, and therefore at every step the possibility of artistic impression is infringed.

Whatever people may say, however they may be enraptured by Shakespeare’s works, whatever merits they may attribute to them, it is certain that he was not an artist, and that his works are not artistic productions. Without a sense of proportion there never was or could be an artist, just as without a sense of rhythm there cannot be a musician. And Shakespeare may be anything you like—only not an artist.

“But one must not forget the times in which Shakespeare wrote,” says his belauders. “It was a time of cruel and coarse manners, a time of the then fashionable euphuism, that is, an artificial manner of speech—a time of forms of life strange to us, and therefore to judge Shakespeare one must keep in view the times when he wrote. In Homer, as in Shakespeare, there is much that is strange to us, but this does not prevent our valuing the beauties of Homer,” say the belauders. But when one compares Shakespeare with Homer, as Gervinus does, the infinite distance separating true poetry from its imitation emerges with special vividness. However distant Homer is from us, we can without the slightest effort transport ourselves into the life he describes. And we are thus transported chiefly because, however alien to us may be the events Homer describes, he believes in what he says and speaks seriously of what he is describing, and therefore he never exaggerates and the sense of measure never deserts him. And therefore it happens that, not to speak of the wonderfully distinct, life-like, and excellent characters of Achilles, Hector, Priam, Odysseus, and the eternally touching scenes of Hector’s farewell, of Priam’s embassy, of the return of Odysseus, and so forth, the whole of the Iliad and particularly the Odyssey, is as naturally close to us all as if we had lived and were now living among the gods and heroes. But it is not so with Shakespeare. From his first words exaggeration is seen: exaggeration of events, exaggeration of feeling, and exaggeration of expressions. It is at once evident that he does not believe in what he is saying, that he doesn’t need it, that he is inventing the occurrences he describes, is indifferent to his characters, and has devised them merely for the stage, and therefore makes them do and say what may strike his public; and so we do not believe either in the events, or in the actions, or in the sufferings of his characters. Nothing so clearly shows the complete absence of esthetic feeling in Shakespeare, as a comparison between him and Homer. The works which we call the works of Homer, are artistic, poetic, original works, lived through by their author or authors.

But Shakespeare’s works are compositions devised for a particular purpose and having absolutely nothing in common with art or poetry.

VI

But perhaps the loftiness of Shakespeare’s conception of life is such as, even though he does not satisfy the demands of esthetics, discloses to us so new and important a view of life that in consideration of its value all his artistic defects become unnoticeable. This is indeed what some belauders of Shakespeare say. Gervinus plainly says that besides Shakespeare’s significance in the sphere of dramatic poetry, in which in his opinion he is the equal of “Homer in the sphere of the epic; Shakespeare being the greatest judge of the human soul, is a teacher of most indisputable ethical authority, and the most select leader in the world and in life.”

In what then does this indubitable authority of the most select teacher in the world and in life consist? Gervinus devotes the concluding chapter of his second volume (some fifty pages) to an explanation of this.

The ethical authority of this supreme teacher of life, in the opinion of Gervinus, consists in the following: “Shakespeare’s moral view starts from the simple point,” says Gervinus, “that man is born with powers of activity,” and therefore, first of all, says Gervinus, Shakespeare regarded it as “an obligation to use our inherent power of action.” (As if it were possible for man not to act!)⁠[140]

“Die thatkräftigen Männer, Fortinbras, Bolingbroke, Alcibiades, Octavius spielen hier die gegensätzlichen Rollen gegen die verschiedenen Thatlosen; nicht ihre Charaktere verdienen ihnen Allen ihr Glück und Gedeihen etwa durch eine grosse Ueberlegenheit ihre Natur, sondern trotz ihrer geringern Anlage stellt sich ihre Thatkraft an sich über die Unthätigkeit der Anderen hinaus, gleichviel aus wie schöner Quelle diese Passivität, aus wie schlechter jene Thatigkeit fliesse.”⁠[141]

That is to say, that active people like Fortinbras, Bolingbroke, Alcibiades and Octavius, Gervinus informs us, are contrasted by Shakespeare with various characters who do not display energetic activity. And, according to Shakespeare, happiness and success are attained by people who possess this active character, not at all as a result of their superiority of nature. On the contrary, in spite of their inferior talents, their energy in itself always gives them the advantage over the inactive people, no matter whether their inactivity results from excellent impulses, or the activity of the others from base ones. Activity is good, inactivity is evil. Activity transforms evil into good, says Shakespeare, according to Gervinus. “Shakespeare prefers the principle of Alexander to that of Diogenes,” says Gervinus. In other words, according to him, Shakespeare prefers death and murder from ambition, to self-restraint and wisdom.⁠[142]

According to Gervinus, Shakespeare considers that humanity should not set itself ideals, but that all that is necessary is healthy activity, and a golden mean in everything. Indeed Shakespeare is so imbued with this wise moderation that, in the words of Gervinus, he even allows himself to deny Christian morality, which makes exaggerated demands on human nature. “How thoroughly penetrated Shakespeare was with this principle of wise moderation,” says Gervinus, “is shewn perhaps most strongly in this, that he ventured even to oppose Christian laws which demand an overstraining of human nature; for he approved not that the limits of duty should be extended beyond the intention of nature. He taught therefore the wise and human medium between the Christian and heathen precepts” (p. 917)—a reasonable mean, natural to man, between Christian and pagan injunctions—on the one hand, love of one’s enemies, and on the other, hatred of them!

“That it is possible to do too much in good things, is an express doctrine of Shakespeare, both in word and example.... Thus excessive liberality ruins Timon, whilst moderate generosity keeps Antonio in honour; the genuine ambition which makes Henry V great overthrows Percy, in whom it rises too high. Exaggerated virtue brings Angelo to ruin; and when in those near him the excess of punishment proves harmful and cannot hinder sin, then mercy, the most Godlike gift that man possesses, is also exhibited in its excess, as the producer of sin.”

Shakespeare, says Gervinus, taught that one may do too much good. He teaches, says Gervinus, “that morality, like politics, is a matter so complicated with relations, conditions of life, and motives, that it is impossible to bring it to final principles” (p. 918).

“In Shakespeare’s opinion (and here also he is one with Bacon and Aristotle) there is no positive law of religion or morals which could form a rule of moral action in precepts ever binding and suitable for all cases.”

Gervinus most clearly expresses Shakespeare’s whole moral theory by saying that Shakespeare does not write for those classes for whom definite religious principles and laws are suitable (that is to say, for 999 out of 1000 of mankind), but for the cultivated, who have made their own a healthy tact in life and such an instinctive feeling as, united with conscience reason and will, can direct them to worthy aims of life. But even for these fortunate ones, in the opinion of Gervinus, this teaching may be dangerous if it is taken incompletely. It must be taken whole. “There are classes,” says Gervinus, “whose morality is best provided for by the positive letter of religion and law; but for such as these Shakespeare’s writings are in themselves inaccessible; they are only readable and comprehensible to the cultivated, of whom it can be required that they should appropriate to themselves the healthy measure of life, and that self-reliance in which the guiding and inherent powers of conscience and reason, united with the will, are, when consciously apprehended, worthy aims of life” (p. 919). “But even for the cultivated also, Shakespeare’s doctrine may not always be without danger.... The condition on which his doctrine is entirely harmless is this, that it should be fully and completely received and without any expurging and separating. Then it is not only without danger, but it is also more unmistakable and more infallible, and therefore more worthy of our confidence, than any system of morality can be,” (p. 919).

And in order to accept it all, one should understand that according to his teaching it is insane and harmful for an individual to rise against, or “disregard the bonds of religion and the state” (p. 921). For Shakespeare would abhor a free and independent personality who strong in spirit should oppose any law in politics or morals and should disregard the union of the state and religion “which has kept society together for centuries” (p. 921). “For in his opinion the practical wisdom of man would have no higher aim than to carry into society the utmost possible nature and freedom, but for that very reason, and that he might maintain sacred and inviolable the natural laws of society, he would respect existing forms, yet at the same time penetrate into their rational substance with sound criticism, not forgetting nature in civilization, nor, equally, civilization in nature.” Property, the family, the state, are sacred. But the aspiration to recognize the equality of man, is insane. “It’s realization would bring the greatest harm to humanity” (p. 925).

“No man has fought more strongly against rank and class prejudices, than Shakespeare, but how could his liberal principles have been pleased with the doctrines of those who would have done away with the prejudices of the rich and cultivated, only to replace them with the interests and prejudices of the poor and uncultivated? How would this man, who allures so eloquently to the course of honour, have approved, if in annulling rank, degrees of merit, distinction, we extinguish every impulse to greatness, and by the removal of all degrees, ‘shake the ladder to all high designs’? If indeed no surreptitious honour and false power were longer to oppress mankind, how would the poet have acknowledged the most fearful force of all, the power of barbarity? In consequence of these modern doctrines of equality, he would have apprehended that everything would resolve itself into power; or if this were not the final lot which awaited mankind from these aspirations after equality, if love between nationalities and endless peace were not that ‘nothing’ of impossibility, as Alonso expresses it in the Tempest, but could be an actual fruit of these efforts after equality, then the poet would have believed with this time the old age and decrepitude of the world to have arrived, in which it were worthless to the active to live” (p. 925).