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

149

'justice,' Qq.

150

=approve.

151

The direction 'Storm and tempest' at the end of this speech is not modern, it is in the Folio.

152

The gods are mentioned many times in King Lear, but 'God' only here (v. ii. 16).

153

The whole question how far Shakespeare's works represent his personal feelings and attitude, and the changes in them, would carry us so far beyond the bounds of the four tragedies, is so needless for the understanding of them, and is so little capable of decision, that I have excluded it from these lectures; and I will add here a note on it only as it concerns the 'tragic period.'

There are here two distinct sets of facts, equally important, (1) On the one side there is the fact that, so far as we can make out, after Twelfth Night Shakespeare wrote, for seven or eight years, no play which, like many of his earlier works, can be called happy, much less merry or sunny. He wrote tragedies; and if the chronological order Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Timon, Macbeth, is correct, these tragedies show for some time a deepening darkness, and King Lear and Timon lie at the nadir. He wrote also in these years (probably in the earlier of them) certain 'comedies,' Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida, and perhaps All's Well. But about these comedies there is a peculiar air of coldness; there is humour, of course, but little mirth; in Measure for Measure perhaps, certainly in Troilus and Cressida, a spirit of bitterness and contempt seems to pervade an intellectual atmosphere of an intense but hard clearness. With Macbeth perhaps, and more decidedly in the two Roman tragedies which followed, the gloom seems to lift; and the final romances show a mellow serenity which sometimes warms into radiant sympathy, and even into a mirth almost as light-hearted as that of younger days. When we consider these facts, not as barely stated thus but as they affect us in reading the plays, it is, to my mind, very hard to believe that their origin was simply and solely a change in dramatic methods or choice of subjects, or even merely such inward changes as may be expected to accompany the arrival and progress of middle age.

(2) On the other side, and over against these facts, we have to set the multitudinousness of Shakespeare's genius, and his almost unlimited power of conceiving and expressing human experience of all kinds. And we have to set more. Apparently during this period of years he never ceased to write busily, or to exhibit in his writings the greatest mental activity. He wrote also either nothing or very little (Troilus and Cressida and his part of Timon are the possible exceptions) in which there is any appearance of personal feeling overcoming or seriously endangering the self-control or 'objectivity' of the artist. And finally it is not possible to make out any continuously deepening personal note: for although Othello is darker than Hamlet it surely strikes one as about as impersonal as a play can be; and, on grounds of style and versification, it appears (to me, at least) impossible to bring Troilus and Cressida chronologically close to King Lear and Timon; even if parts of it are later than others, the late parts must be decidedly earlier than those plays.

The conclusion we may very tentatively draw from these sets of facts would seem to be as follows. Shakespeare during these years was probably not a happy man, and it is quite likely that he felt at times even an intense melancholy, bitterness, contempt, anger, possibly even loathing and despair. It is quite likely too that he used these experiences of his in writing such plays as Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, King Lear, Timon. But it is evident that he cannot have been for any considerable time, if, ever, overwhelmed by such feelings, and there is no appearance of their having issued in any settled 'pessimistic' conviction which coloured his whole imagination and expressed itself in his works. The choice of the subject of ingratitude, for instance, in King Lear and Timon, and the method of handling it, may have been due in part to personal feeling; but it does not follow that this feeling was particularly acute at this particular time, and, even if it was, it certainly was not so absorbing as to hinder Shakespeare from representing in the most sympathetic manner aspects of life the very reverse of pessimistic. Whether the total impression of King Lear can be called pessimistic is a further question, which is considered in the text.

154

A Study of Shakespeare, pp. 171, 172.

155

A flaw, I mean, in a work of art considered not as a moral or theological document but as a work of art,—an aesthetic flaw. I add the word 'considerable' because we do not regard the effect in question as a flaw in a work like a lyric or a short piece of music, which may naturally be taken as expressions merely of a mood or a subordinate aspect of things.

156

Caution is very necessary in making comparisons between Shakespeare and the Greek dramatists. A tragedy like the Antigone stands, in spite of differences, on the same ground as a Shakespearean tragedy; it is a self-contained whole with a catastrophe. A drama like the Philoctetes is a self-contained whole, but, ending with a solution, it corresponds not with a Shakespearean tragedy but with a play like Cymbeline. A drama like the Agamemnon or the Prometheus Vinctus answers to no Shakespearean form of play. It is not a self-contained whole, but a part of a trilogy. If the trilogy is considered as a unit, it answers not to Hamlet but to Cymbeline. If the part is considered as a whole, it answers to Hamlet, but may then be open to serious criticism. Shakespeare never made a tragedy end with the complete triumph of the worse side: the Agamemnon and Prometheus, if wrongly taken as wholes, would do this, and would so far, I must think, be bad tragedies. [It can scarcely be necessary to remind the reader that, in point of 'self-containedness,' there is a difference of degree between the pure tragedies of Shakespeare and some of the historical.]

157

I leave it to better authorities to say how far these remarks apply also to Greek Tragedy, however much the language of 'justice' may be used there.

158

Of course I do not mean that he is beginning to be insane, and still less that he is insane (as some medical critics suggest).

159

I must however point out that the modern stage-directions are most unfortunate in concealing the fact that here Cordelia sees her father again for the first time. See Note W.

160

What immediately follows is as striking an illustration of quite another quality, and of the effects which make us think of Lear as pursued by a relentless fate. If he could go in and sleep after his prayer, as he intends, his mind, one feels, might be saved: so far there has been only the menace of madness. But from within the hovel Edgar—the last man who would willingly have injured Lear—cries, 'Fathom and half, fathom and half! Poor Tom!'; the Fool runs out terrified; Edgar, summoned by Kent, follows him; and, at sight of Edgar, in a moment something gives way in Lear's brain, and he exclaims:

Hast thou given allTo thy two daughters? And art thou come to this?

Henceforth he is mad. And they remain out in the storm.

I have not seen it noticed that this stroke of fate is repeated—surely intentionally—in the sixth scene. Gloster has succeeded in persuading Lear to come into the 'house'; he then leaves, and Kent after much difficulty induces Lear to lie down and rest upon the cushions. Sleep begins to come to him again, and he murmurs,

'Make no noise, make no noise; draw the curtains; so, so, so. We'll go to supper i' the morning. So, so, so.'

At that moment Gloster enters with the news that he has discovered a plot to kill the King; the rest that 'might yet have balm'd his broken senses' is again interrupted; and he is hurried away on a litter towards Dover. (His recovery, it will be remembered, is due to a long sleep artificially induced.)

161

iii. iv. 49. This is printed as prose in the Globe edition, but is surely verse. Lear has not yet spoken prose in this scene, and his next three speeches are in verse. The next is in prose, and, ending, in his tearing off his clothes, shows the advance of insanity.

162

[Lear's death is thus, I am reminded, like père Goriot's.] This interpretation may be condemned as fantastic, but the text, it appears to me, will bear no other. This is the whole speech (in the Globe text):

And my poor fool is hang'd! No, no, no life!Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,And thou no breath at all? Thou'lt come no more,Never, never, never, never, never!Pray you, undo this button: thank you, sir.Do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips,Look there, look there!

The transition at 'Do you see this?' from despair to something more than hope is exactly the same as in the preceding passage at the word 'Ha!':

A plague upon you, murderers, traitors all!I might have saved her; now she's gone for ever!Cordelia, Cordelia, stay a little.Ha!What is't thou say'st? Her voice was ever soft,Gentle, and low, an excellent thing in woman.

As to my other remarks, I will ask the reader to notice that the passage from Lear's entrance with the body of Cordelia to the stage-direction He dies (which probably comes a few lines too soon) is 54 lines in length, and that 30 of them represent the interval during which he has absolutely forgotten Cordelia. (It begins when he looks up at the Captain's words, line 275.) To make Lear during this interval turn continually in anguish to the corpse, is to act the passage in a manner irreconcilable with the text, and insufferable in its effect. I speak from experience. I have seen the passage acted thus, and my sympathies were so exhausted long before Lear's death that his last speech, the most pathetic speech ever written, left me disappointed and weary.

163

The Quartos give the 'Never' only thrice (surely wrongly), and all the actors I have heard have preferred this easier task. I ought perhaps to add that the Quartos give the words 'Break, heart; I prithee, break!' to Lear, not Kent. They and the Folio are at odds throughout the last sixty lines of King Lear, and all good modern texts are eclectic.

164

The connection of these sufferings with the sin of earlier days (not, it should be noticed, of youth) is almost thrust upon our notice by the levity of Gloster's own reference to the subject in the first scene, and by Edgar's often quoted words 'The gods are just,' etc. The following collocation, also, may be intentional (iii. iv. 116):

Fool. Now a little fire in a wild field were like an old lecher's heart; a small spark, all the rest on's body cold. Look, here comes a walking fire. [Enter Gloster with a torch.]

Pope destroyed the collocation by transferring the stage-direction to a point some dozen lines later.

165

The passages are here printed together (iii. iv. 28 ff. and iv. i. 67 ff.):

Lear. Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are,That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend youFrom seasons such as these? O, I have ta'enToo little care of this! Take physic, pomp;Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,And show the heavens just.Glo. Here, take this purse, thou whom the heavens' plaguesHave humbled to all strokes: that I am wretchedMakes thee the happier: heavens, deal so still!Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man,That slaves your ordinance, that will not seeBecause he doth not feel, feel your power quickly;So distribution should undo excess,And each man have enough.

166

Schmidt's idea—based partly on the omission from the Folios at i. ii. 103 (see Furness' Variorum) of the words 'To his father that so tenderly and entirely loves him'—that Gloster loved neither of his sons, is surely an entire mistake. See, not to speak of general impressions, iii. iv. 171 ff.

167

Imagination demands for Lear, even more than for Othello, majesty of stature and mien. Tourgénief felt this and made his 'Lear of the Steppes' a gigantic peasant. If Shakespeare's texts give no express authority for ideas like these, the reason probably is that he wrote primarily for the theatre, where the principal actor might not be a large man.

168

He is not present, of course, till France and Burgundy enter; but while he is present he says not a word beyond 'Here's France and Burgundy, my noble lord.' For some remarks on the possibility that Shakespeare imagined him as having encouraged Lear in his idea of dividing the kingdom see Note T. It must be remembered that Cornwall was Gloster's 'arch and patron.'

169

In this she stands alone among the more notable characters of the play. Doubtless Regan's exclamation 'O the blest gods' means nothing, but the fact that it is given to her means something. For some further remarks on Goneril see Note T. I may add that touches of Goneril reappear in the heroine of the next tragedy, Macbeth; and that we are sometimes reminded of her again by the character of the Queen in Cymbeline, who bewitched the feeble King by her beauty, and married him for greatness while she abhorred his person (Cymbeline, v. v. 62 f., 31 f.); who tried to poison her step-daughter and intended to poison her husband; who died despairing because she could not execute all the evil she purposed; and who inspirited her husband to defy the Romans by words that still stir the blood (Cymbeline, iii. i. 14 f. Cf. King Lear, iv. ii. 50 f.).

170

i. ii. 1 f. Shakespeare seems to have in mind the idea expressed in the speech of Ulysses about the dependence of the world on degree, order, system, custom, and about the chaos which would result from the free action of appetite, the 'universal wolf' (Troilus and Cr. i. iii. 83 f.). Cf. the contrast between 'particular will' and 'the moral laws of nature and of nations,' ii. ii. 53, 185 ('nature' here of course is the opposite of the 'nature' of Edmund's speech).

171

The line last quoted is continued by Edmund in the Folios thus: 'Th' hast spoken right; 'tis true,' but in the Quartos thus: 'Thou hast spoken truth,' which leaves the line imperfect. This, and the imperfect line 'Make instruments to plague us,' suggest that Shakespeare wrote at first simply,

Make instruments to plague us.Edm.Th' hast spoken truth.

The Quartos show other variations which seem to point to the fact that the MS. was here difficult to make out.

172

iv. i. 1-9. I am indebted here to Koppel, Verbesserungsvorschläge zu den Erläuterungen und der Textlesung des Lear (1899).

173

See i. i. 142 ff. Kent speaks, not of the injustice of Lear's action, but of its 'folly,' its 'hideous rashness.' When the King exclaims 'Kent, on thy life, no more,' he answers:

My life I never held but as a pawnTo wage against thy enemies; nor fear to lose it,Thy safety being the motive.

(The first Folio omits 'a,' and in the next line reads 'nere' for 'nor.' Perhaps the first line should read 'My life I ne'er held but as pawn to wage.')

174

See ii. ii. 162 to end. The light-heartedness disappears, of course, as Lear's misfortunes thicken.

175

This difference, however, must not be pressed too far; nor must we take Kent's retort,

Now by Apollo, king,Thou swear'st thy gods in vain,

for a sign of disbelief. He twice speaks of the gods in another manner (i. i. 185, iii. vi. 5), and he was accustomed to think of Lear in his 'prayers' (i. i. 144).

176

The 'clown' in Antony and Cleopatra is merely an old peasant. There is a fool in Timon of Athens, however, and he appears in a scene (ii. ii.) generally attributed to Shakespeare. His talk sometimes reminds one of Lear's fool; and Kent's remark, 'This is not altogether fool, my lord,' is repeated in Timon, ii. ii. 122, 'Thou art not altogether a fool.'

177

[This is no obstacle. There could hardly be a stage tradition hostile to his youth, since he does not appear in Tate's version, which alone was acted during the century and a half before Macready's production. I had forgotten this; and my memory must also have been at fault regarding an engraving to which I referred in the first edition. Both mistakes were pointed out by Mr. Archer.]

178

In parts of what follows I am indebted to remarks by Cowden Clarke, quoted by Furness on i. iv. 91.

179

See also Note T.

180

'Our last and least' (according to the Folio reading). Lear speaks again of 'this little seeming substance.' He can carry her dead body in his arms.

181

Perhaps then the 'low sound' is not merely metaphorical in Kent's speech in i. i. 153 f.:

answer my life my judgment,Thy youngest daughter does not love thee least;Nor are those empty-hearted whose low soundReverbs no hollowness.

182

i. i. 80. 'More ponderous' is the reading of the Folios, 'more richer' that of the Quartos. The latter is usually preferred, and Mr. Aldis Wright says 'more ponderous' has the appearance of being a player's correction to avoid a piece of imaginary bad grammar. Does it not sound more like the author's improvement of a phrase that he thought a little flat? And, apart from that, is it not significant that it expresses the same idea of weight that appears in the phrase 'I cannot heave my heart into my mouth'?

183

Cf. Cornwall's satirical remarks on Kent's 'plainness' in ii. ii. 101 ff.,—a plainness which did no service to Kent's master. (As a matter of fact, Cordelia had said nothing about 'plainness.')

184

Who, like Kent, hastens on the quarrel with Goneril.

185

I do not wish to complicate the discussion by examining the differences, in degree or otherwise, in the various cases, or by introducing numerous qualifications; and therefore I do not add the names of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth.

186

It follows from the above that, if this idea were made explicit and accompanied our reading of a tragedy throughout, it would confuse or even destroy the tragic impression. So would the constant presence of Christian beliefs. The reader most attached to these beliefs holds them in temporary suspension while he is immersed in a Shakespearean tragedy. Such tragedy assumes that the world, as it is presented, is the truth, though it also provokes feelings which imply that this world is not the whole truth, and therefore not the truth.

187

Though Cordelia, of course, does not occupy the position of the hero.

188

E.g. in King Lear the servants, and the old man who succours Gloster and brings to the naked beggar 'the best 'parel that he has, come on't what will,' i.e. whatever vengeance Regan can inflict. Cf. the Steward and the Servants in Timon. Cf. there also (v. i. 23), 'Promising is the very air o' the time … performance is ever the duller for his act; and, but in the plainer and simpler kind of people, the deed of saying [performance of promises] is quite out of use.' Shakespeare's feeling on this subject, though apparently specially keen at this time of his life, is much the same throughout (cf. Adam in As You Like It). He has no respect for the plainer and simpler kind of people as politicians, but a great respect and regard for their hearts.

189

'I stumbled when I saw,' says Gloster.

190

Our advantages give us a blind confidence in our security. Cf. Timon, iv. iii. 76,

Alc.I have heard in some sort of thy miseries.Tim.Thou saw'st them when I had prosperity.

191

Biblical ideas seem to have been floating in Shakespeare's mind. Cf. the words of Kent, when Lear enters with Cordelia's body, 'Is this the promised end?' and Edgar's answer, 'Or image of that horror?' The 'promised end' is certainly the end of the world (cf. with 'image' 'the great doom's image,' Macbeth, ii. iii. 83); and the next words, Albany's 'Fall and cease,' may be addressed to the heavens or stars, not to Lear. It seems probable that in writing Gloster's speech about the predicted horrors to follow 'these late eclipses' Shakespeare had a vague recollection of the passage in Matthew xxiv., or of that in Mark xiii., about the tribulations which were to be the sign of 'the end of the world.' (I do not mean, of course, that the 'prediction' of i. ii. 119 is the prediction to be found in one of these passages.)

192

Cf. Hamlet, iii. i. 181:

This something-settled matter in his heart,Whereon his brains still beating puts him thusFrom fashion of himself.

193

I believe the criticism of King Lear which has influenced me most is that in Prof. Dowden's Shakspere, his Mind and Art (though, when I wrote my lectures, I had not read that criticism for many years); and I am glad that this acknowledgment gives me the opportunity of repeating in print an opinion which I have often expressed to students, that anyone entering on the study of Shakespeare, and unable or unwilling to read much criticism, would do best to take Prof. Dowden for his guide.

194

See note BB.

195

'Hell is murky' (v. i. 35). This, surely, is not meant for a scornful repetition of something said long ago by Macbeth. He would hardly in those days have used an argument or expressed a fear that could provoke nothing but contempt.

196

Whether Banquo's ghost is a mere illusion, like the dagger, is discussed in Note FF.

197

In parts of this paragraph I am indebted to Hunter's Illustrations of Shakespeare.

198

The line is a foot short.

199

It should be observed that in some cases the irony would escape an audience ignorant of the story and watching the play for the first time,—another indication that Shakespeare did not write solely for immediate stage purposes.

200

Their influence on spectators is, I believe, very inferior. These scenes, like the Storm-scenes in King Lear, belong properly to the world of imagination.

201

'By yea and no, I think the 'oman is a witch indeed: I like not when a 'oman has a great peard' (Merry Wives, iv. ii. 202).

202

Even the metaphor in the lines (ii. iii. 127),

What should be spoken here, where our fate,Hid in an auger-hole, may rush and seize us?

was probably suggested by the words in Scot's first chapter, 'They can go in and out at awger-holes.'

203