CHAPTER VII. SHAKESPEARE, HIS DRAMATIC WORK. I. THE classical system and the Shakespearian one are not merely different, they are opposed; one is the counterpart, the reverse of the other. One simplifies, selects, harmonises tints carefully chosen and few in number; the other complicates, accumulates, delights in the resplendence of multi-coloured sights. Reserve, sobriety, measure are the ideal of the one; the preference of the other goes to violent contrasts, to unbridled passions, to the inaccessible, the abject, the incommensurable. One clips its yews in geometric shapes, the other adds brambles to its landscapes to make them appear more wild. The windows of Versailles look out straight ahead; English bay windows, projecting and many-sided, open their panes in all directions. We must restrain and master ourselves, thinks the classic, select subjects afar off in time or space, so as to be able to treat them with more dignity and self-possession. We must loosen all bonds, thinks the Elizabethan 1 A peculiarity already noted by French travellers in the seventeenth century. Windows, "par toute l'Angleterre . . . s'avancent en forme de balcon ou en demi cercle." This allows one to discover "ce qui est à côté dans les rues, au lieu que nous ne voyons par les nôtres que ce qui est au devant de nous.”— S. de Sorbière, "Relation d'un Voyage en Angleterre," Cologne, 1666, p. 20 (1st ed. 1664). dramatist, pass all limits, natural or arbitrary, of time, place, propriety, and likelihood; we must interest, excite, stir up, and all means will be good for that end; our public enjoys extremes, we will take care not to offer it what could not please. We will treat, preferably, subjects as near to it as possible, and when the subjects are distant, the thoughts and costumes, at least, shall be English and modern. Ce qu'on ne doit point voir, qu'un récit nous l'expose, Boileau has said. But, thought Londoners, what should not be seen is precisely what interests us most. The indecent, the horrible to contemplate, the impossible to show, that is exactly what the public in theatres clamours for. It will be indulgent to the means, provided the intention be there; if "three rusty swords" are all that is available to figure "York and Lancaster's long jars," as Jonson ironically wrote, it will not haggle about the number, and will be grateful to an author who has endeavoured to represent the battle of Bosworth. The interior of one of those ill-famed houses neighbouring the theatres is, of all things, what "should not be exhibited"; but as such a sight will be for this unrefined public a great amusement and a source of laughter, it shall be offered to view, and the realism will even be carried to the last degree. The pulleys creak, and too visible ropes suspend in the air the throne on which Jupiter is seated; the spectators will not laugh with Jonson, but will applaud Shakespeare, who shows what cannot be seen in Fleet street nor elsewhere. A ridiculous poet, the grotesque character in a French play, reveals as follows his dramatic ideal: Trois voyages sur mer, les combats d'une guerre, Un retour au pays, l'appareil d'un tombeau, Les états assemblés pour faire un roi nouveau, Et la princesse en deuil qui les y vient surprendre .. I At these words the Parisian public, under Louis XIII., burst out laughing; but the London public would not have laughed; they would have said: It is "Hamlet," or something like it. On one point alone French and English authors were in Jaccord: the great rule is to please, thought Shakespeare, Corneille, and Molière alike. "Je voudrais bien savoir si la grande règle de toutes les règles n'est pas de plaire," said Molière; but to please in Paris in the seventeenth century one had to be simple, and to please in London in the sixteenth one had to be complicated. Artists of the greatest genius having conscientiously applied, in both countries, each his own method, the results have been so utterly dissimilar that hardly even now, after so many years, are the dramatic masterpieces of the one country accepted in their entirety, as masterpieces absolute, in the other.2 In the classical play, few characters, one single hero, centre of the drama and attracting all eyes, as the “Grand Monarque" is the centre of the kingdom; and even if the hero actually resembles the "Grand Monarque," all the better: Que Racine, enfantant des miracles nouveaux, De ses héros sur lui forme tous ses tableaux an ominous piece of advice from Boileau to his friend. In the classical drama, one event, one day, one place. * Saint Sorlin, "Les Visionnaires,” ii. 4. 2 44 On this different evolution of the two theatres and the resistance of a group of independents in France and a group of classics in England, see 'Shakespeare in France under the Ancien Régime," chap. ii. and Epilogue. Time, place, characters, all is simplified, reduced to f essentials. ▾ In the Shakespearian play, it is just the reverse: not one event, but a succession of events, that will sometimes lead to a final catastrophe, sometimes not; instead of a crisis a story, and a complex story, with its origins, its developments, its incidents and ramifications, at times even several stories. There is no question of twenty-four hours; the periods of time are short or long as occasion demands four hours in "The Tempest," sixteen years in "The Winter's Tale"; changes of place occur in every act and every scene; all Europe serves as theatre for the action; journeys are so rapid, from one end of the map to the other, that the characters sometimes exchange compliments on their quickness: The swiftest harts have posted you by land, It is the method of the old Mysteries that still survives : "Now, gentyll marraner . . . help me ower the se.”—We are arrived, "her is the lond of Mercylle" (Marseilles).2 And this variability and these changes accord so well with English taste that, in the very midst of the classical period, the king of letters, Samuel Johnson, declared that, in Shakespeare's "Antony and Cleopatra," the "power of delighting is derived principally from the frequent changes of the scene." 3 Shakespeare requires a whole host of characters: thirty- | nine in "Richard III.," forty in "Henry V.," while Racine has seven in "Britannicus" and eight in "Phèdre.” These I 66 2 46 "Digby Mysteries," ed. Furnivall, pp. 125, 127; above, vol. I. p. 473. 3 "General Observations on the Plays of Shakespeare"; Works, ed. Murphy, 1806, vol. ii. p. 215. characters of the Shakespearian drama are not only numerous, they are of a variety as great as in real life, and even more so, for the poet includes in his lists supernatural beings, fairies, spirits, ghosts, witches, monsters. By the side of kings, princes and archbishops, figure peasants, maniacs, clowns, drunkards, several dogs and a bear. "The peasant or the drunkard," La Bruyère wrote, "supplies some scene to a farce writer. . . . Such characters, people say, are natural; thus, by such a rule, a whole audience will soon be offered the sight of a valet who whistles, a sick man in his privy, a drunkard who sleeps or vomits. Is there anything more natural ? " Such irony would have been incomprehensible to Elizabethan dramatists, and to Shakespeare in particular; the extreme examples imagined by La Bruyère as being the height of the monstrous and of the impossible, seemed to them, as he says, quite "natural." They judged them, besides, to be advantageous and profitable, as furnishing opportunities for contrasts and strong effects, keeping alive the attention of the audience. The mind of the brawny-sinewed, square-shouldered spectators was somewhat sluggish; they came full of goodwill, ready to admire, but they had eaten and drunk a good deal before coming; they ate and drank again at the theatre. It was important to prevent their falling asleep; it would have been difficult to fix their attention long on subtle nuances. They had to be roused now and then from their torpor by the report of cannon, and when they were well awake, then was the time for sweet music, spring breezes and the nightingale's song. Hence that quantity of means employed to amuse and divert: comic interludes, shows to please the eyes, practical jokes and mystifications (of such infallible effect that the characters in the play explain them beforehand, dream of them at night, go into ecstasies of admiration when they |