Short Plays · The Dark Lady of the Sonnets (2/4) (3/4)

Take this as a sample of the sort of compliment from which she was never for a moment safe with Shakespeare. Bear in mind that she was not a comedian; that the Elizabethan fashion of treating brunettes as ugly woman must have made her rather sore on the subject of her complexion; that no human being, male or female, can conceivably enjoy being chaffed on that point in the fourth couplet about the perfumes; that Shakespeare’s revulsions, as the sonnet immediately preceding shows, were as violent as his ardors, and were expressed with the realistic power and horror that makes Hamlet say that the heavens got sick when they saw the queen’s conduct; and then ask Mr. Harris whether any woman could have stood it for long, or have thought the “sugred” compliment worth the cruel wounds, the cleaving of the heart in twain, that seemed to Shakespeare as natural and amusing a reaction as the burlesquing of his heroics by Pistol, his sermons by Falstaff, and his poems by Cloten and Touchstone.

This does not mean that Shakespeare was cruel: evidently he was not; but it was not cruelty that made Jupiter reduce Semele to ashes: it was the fact that he could not help being a god nor she help being a mortal. The one thing Shakespeare’s passion for the Dark Lady was not, was what Mr. Harris in one passage calls it: idolatrous. If it had been, she might have been able to stand it. The man who “dotes yet doubts, suspects, yet strongly loves,” is tolerable even by a spoilt and tyrannical mistress; but what woman could possibly endure a man who dotes without doubting; who knows, and who is hugely amused at the absurdity of his infatuation for a woman of whose mortal imperfections not one escapes him: a man always exchanging grins with Yorick’s skull, and inviting “my lady” to laugh at the sepulchral humor of the fact that though she paint an inch thick (which the Dark Lady may have done), to Yorick’s favor she must come at last. To the Dark Lady he must sometimes have seemed cruel beyond description: an intellectual Caliban. True, a Caliban who could say

Be not afeard: the isle is full of noises

Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.

Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments

Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices,

That, if I then had waked after long sleep

Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming,

The clouds, methought, would open and show riches

Ready to drop on me: that when I wak’d

I cried to dream again.

which is very lovely; but the Dark Lady may have had that vice in her ears which Cloten dreaded: she may not have seen the beauty of it, whereas there can be no doubt at all that of “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun,” etc., not a word was lost on her.

And is it to be supposed that Shakespeare was too stupid or too modest not to see at last that it was a case of Jupiter and Semele? Shakespeare was most certainly not modest in that sense. The timid cough of the minor poet was never heard from him.

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments

Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme

is only one out of a dozen passages in which he (possibly with a keen sense of the fun of scandalizing the modest coughers) proclaimed his place and his power in “the wide world dreaming of things to come.” The Dark Lady most likely thought this side of him insufferably conceited; for there is no reason to suppose that she liked his plays any better than Minna Wagner liked Richard’s music dramas: as likely as not, she thought The Spanish Tragedy worth six Hamlets. He was not stupid either: if his class limitations and a profession that cut him off from actual participation in great affairs of State had not confined his opportunities of intellectual and political training to private conversation and to the Mermaid Tavern, he would probably have become one of the ablest men of his time instead of being merely its ablest playwright. One might surmise that Shakespeare found out that the Dark Lady’s brains could no more keep pace with his than Anne Hathaway’s, if there were any evidence that their friendship ceased when he stopped writing sonnets to her. As a matter of fact the consolidation of a passion into an enduring intimacy generally puts an end to sonnets.

That the Dark Lady broke Shakespeare’s heart, as Mr. Harris will have it she did, is an extremely unShakespearian hypothesis. “Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them; but not for love,” says Rosalind. Richard of Gloster, into whom Shakespeare put all his own impish superiority to vulgar sentiment, exclaims

And this word “love,” which greybeards call divine,

Be resident in men like one another

And not in me: I am myself alone.

Hamlet has not a tear for Ophelia: her death moves him to fierce disgust for the sentimentality of Laertes by her grave; and when he discusses the scene with Horatio immediately after, he utterly forgets her, though he is sorry he forgot himself, and jumps at the proposal of a fencing match to finish the day with. As against this view Mr. Harris pleads Romeo, Orsino, and even Antonio; and he does it so penetratingly that he convinces you that Shakespeare did betray himself again and again in these characters; but self-betrayal is one thing; and self-portrayal, as in Hamlet and Mercutio, is another. Shakespeare never “saw himself,” as actors say, in Romeo or Orsino or Antonio. In Mr. Harris’s own play Shakespeare is presented with the most pathetic tenderness. He is tragic, bitter, pitiable, wretched and broken among a robust crowd of Jonsons and Elizabeths; but to me he is not Shakespeare because I miss the Shakespearian irony and the Shakespearian gaiety. Take these away and Shakespeare is no longer Shakespeare: all the bite, the impetus, the strength, the grim delight in his own power of looking terrible facts in the face with a chuckle, is gone; and you have nothing left but that most depressing of all things: a victim. Now who can think of Shakespeare as a man with a grievance? Even in that most thoroughgoing and inspired of all Shakespeare’s loves: his love of music (which Mr. Harris has been the first to appreciate at anything like its value), there is a dash of mockery. “Spit in the hole, man; and tune again.” “Divine air! Now is his soul ravished. Is it not strange that sheep’s guts should hale the souls out of men’s bodies?” “An he had been a dog that should have howled thus, they would have hanged him.” There is just as much Shakespeare here as in the inevitable quotation about the sweet south and the bank of violets.

I lay stress on this irony of Shakespeare’s, this impish rejoicing in pessimism, this exultation in what breaks the hearts of common men, not only because it is diagnostic of that immense energy of life which we call genius, but because its omission is the one glaring defect in Mr. Harris’s otherwise extraordinarily penetrating book. Fortunately, it is an omission that does not disable the book as (in my judgment) it disabled the hero of the play, because Mr. Harris left himself out of his play, whereas he pervades his book, mordant, deep-voiced, and with an unconquerable style which is the man.

There is even an advantage in having a book on Shakespeare with the Shakespearian irony left out of account. I do not say that the missing chapter should not be added in the next edition: the hiatus is too great: it leaves the reader too uneasy before this touching picture of a writhing worm substituted for the invulnerable giant. But it is nonetheless probable that in no other way could Mr. Harris have got at his man as he has. For, after all, what is the secret of the hopeless failure of the academic Bardolaters to give us a credible or even interesting Shakespeare, and the easy triumph of Mr. Harris in giving us both? Simply that Mr. Harris has assumed that he was dealing with a man, whilst the others have assumed that they were writing about a god, and have therefore rejected every consideration of fact, tradition, or interpretation, that pointed to any human imperfection in their hero. They thus leave themselves with so little material that they are forced to begin by saying that we know very little about Shakespeare. As a matter of fact, with the plays and sonnets in our hands, we know much more about Shakespeare than we know about Dickens or Thackeray: the only difficulty is that we deliberately suppress it because it proves that Shakespeare was not only very unlike the conception of a god current in Clapham, but was not, according to the same reckoning, even a respectable man. The academic view starts with a Shakespeare who was not scurrilous; therefore the verses about “lousy Lucy” cannot have been written by him, and the cognate passages in the plays are either strokes of character-drawing or gags interpolated by the actors. This ideal Shakespeare was too well behaved to get drunk; therefore the tradition that his death was hastened by a drinking bout with Jonson and Drayton must be rejected, and the remorse of Cassio treated as a thing observed, not experienced: nay, the disgust of Hamlet at the drinking customs of Denmark is taken to establish Shakespeare as the superior of Alexander in self-control, and the greatest of teetotallers.

Now this system of inventing your great man to start with, and then rejecting all the materials that do not fit him, with the ridiculous result that you have to declare that there are no materials at all (with your wastepaper basket full of them), ends in leaving Shakespeare with a much worse character than he deserves. For though it does not greatly matter whether he wrote the lousy Lucy lines or not, and does not really matter at all whether he got drunk when he made a night of it with Jonson and Drayton, the sonnets raise an unpleasant question which does matter a good deal; and the refusal of the academic Bardolaters to discuss or even mention this question has had the effect of producing a silent verdict against Shakespeare. Mr. Harris tackles the question openly, and has no difficulty whatever in convincing us that Shakespeare was a man of normal constitution sexually, and was not the victim of that most cruel and pitiable of all the freaks of nature: the freak which transposes the normal aim of the affections. Silence on this point means condemnation; and the condemnation has been general throughout the present generation, though it only needed Mr. Harris’s fearless handling of the matter to sweep away what is nothing but a morbid and very disagreeable modern fashion. There is always some stock accusation brought against eminent persons. When I was a boy every well-known man was accused of beating his wife. Later on, for some unexplained reason, he was accused of psychopathic derangement. And this fashion is retrospective. The cases of Shakespeare and Michelangelo are cited as proving that every genius of the first magnitude was a sufferer; and both here and in Germany there are circles in which such derangement is grotesquely reverenced as part of the stigmata of heroic powers. All of which is gross nonsense. Unfortunately, in Shakespeare’s case, prudery, which cannot prevent the accusation from being whispered, does prevent the refutation from being shouted. Mr. Harris, the deep-voiced, refuses to be silenced. He dismisses with proper contempt the stupidity which places an outrageous construction on Shakespeare’s apologies in the sonnets for neglecting that “perfect ceremony” of love which consists in returning calls and making protestations and giving presents and paying the trumpery attentions which men of genius always refuse to bother about, and to which touchy people who have no genius attach so much importance. No leader who had not been tampered with by the psychopathic monomaniacs could ever put any construction but the obvious and innocent one on these passages. But the general vocabulary of the sonnets to Pembroke (or whoever “Mr. W. H.” really was) is so overcharged according to modern ideas that a reply on the general case is necessary.

That reply, which Mr. Harris does not hesitate to give, is twofold: first, that Shakespeare was, in his attitude towards earls, a sycophant; and, second, that the normality of Shakespeare’s sexual constitution is only too well attested by the excessive susceptibility to the normal impulse shown in the whole mass of his writings. This latter is the really conclusive reply. In the case of Michelangelo, for instance, one must admit that if his works are set beside those of Titian or Paul Veronese, it is impossible not to be struck by the absence in the Florentine of that susceptibility to feminine charm which pervades the pictures of the Venetians. But, as Mr. Harris points out (though he does not use this particular illustration) Paul Veronese is an anchorite compared to Shakespeare. The language of the sonnets addressed to Pembroke, extravagant as it now seems, is the language of compliment and fashion, transfigured no doubt by Shakespeare’s verbal magic, and hyperbolical, as Shakespeare always seems to people who cannot conceive so vividly as he, but still unmistakable for anything else than the expression of a friendship delicate enough to be wounded, and a manly loyalty deep enough to be outraged. But the language of the sonnets to the Dark Lady is the language of passion: their cruelty shows it. There is no evidence that Shakespeare was capable of being unkind in cold blood. But in his revulsions from love, he was bitter, wounding, even ferocious; sparing neither himself nor the unfortunate woman whose only offence was that she had reduced the great man to the common human denominator.

In seizing on these two points Mr. Harris has made so sure a stroke, and placed his evidence so featly that there is nothing left for me to do but to plead that the second is sounder than the first, which is, I think, marked by the prevalent mistake as to Shakespeare’s social position, or, if you prefer it, the confusion between his actual social position as a penniless tradesman’s son taking to the theatre for a livelihood, and his own conception of himself as a gentleman of good family. I am prepared to contend that though Shakespeare was undoubtedly sentimental in his expressions of devotion to Mr. W. H. even to a point which nowadays makes both ridiculous, he was not sycophantic if Mr. W. H. was really attractive and promising, and Shakespeare deeply attached to him. A sycophant does not tell his patron that his fame will survive, not in the renown of his own actions, but in the sonnets of his sycophant. A sycophant, when his patron cuts him out in a love affair, does not tell his patron exactly what he thinks of him. Above all, a sycophant does not write to his patron precisely as he feels on all occasions; and this rare kind of sincerity is all over the sonnets. Shakespeare, we are told, was “a very civil gentleman.” This must mean that his desire to please people and be liked by them, and his reluctance to hurt their feelings, led him into amiable flattery even when his feelings were not strongly stirred. If this be taken into account along with the fact that Shakespeare conceived and expressed all his emotions with a vehemence that sometimes carried him into ludicrous extravagance, making Richard offer his kingdom for a horse and Othello declare of Cassio that

Had all his hairs been lives, my great revenge

Had stomach for them all,

we shall see more civility and hyperbole than sycophancy even in the earlier and more coldblooded sonnets.