Pagina-afbeeldingen
PDF
ePub

the Cambridge Shakespeare breaks one line into two, and achieves but an awkward result:

'And [Censorinus] nobly named so,

Twice being [by the people chosen] censor.'

The closeness of Shakespeare's rendering, indicated by this use of italics, is not particular to this passage, but is universal throughout the play. Sometimes he gives a conscious turn to North's unconscious humour; as when, in the Parable of the Belly and the Members, North writes, 'And so the bellie, all this notwithstanding laughed at their follie'; and Shakespeare writes in I. i., For, look you, I may make the belly smile As well as speak.' At others his fidelity leads him into an anachronism. North writes of Coriolanus that he was even such another, as Cato would have a souldier and a captaine to be: not only terrible and fierce to laye aboute him, but to make the enemie afeard with the sound of his voyce and grimness of his countenance.' And Shakespeare, with a frank disregard for chronology, gives the speech, Cato and all, to Titus Lartius (I. iv. 57):

[ocr errors]

"Thou wast a soldier

Even to Cato's wish, not fierce and terrible

Only in strokes; but with thy grim looks and
The thunder-like percussion of thy sounds,
Thou mad'st thine enemies shake.'

But perhaps the most curious evidence of the degree to which Shakespeare steeped himself in North is to be found in passages where he borrowed North's diction and applied it to new purposes. For instance, in North'a goodly horse with a capparison' is offered to Coriolanus; in Shakespeare, at the same juncture, Lartius says of him :

'O General, Here is the steed, we the caparison.'

Shakespeare, that is, not only copies North's picture, he also uses North's palette. Throughout the play he takes the incidents, the images, and the very words of North. You read in North: 'More over he sayed they nourished against themselves, the naughty seede and cockle of insolencie and sedition, which had been sowed and scattered abroade amongst the people.' And in Shakespeare, III. i. 69 :

In soothing them we nourish 'gainst our senate
The cockle of rebellion, insolence, sedition,

Which we ourselves have plough'd for, sow'd and scatter'd.' Of course it is not argued that Shakespeare has not contributed much of incalculable worth: the point is that he found a vast deal which he needed not to change. When Shakespeare adds, IV. vii. 33:

'I think he'll be to Rome

As is the osprey to the fish, who takes it
By sovereignty of nature,'

he is turning prose into poetry. When he creates the character of Menenius Agrippa from North's allusion to certaine of the plesauntest olde men,' he is turning narrative into drama, as he is, too, in his development of Volumnia, from a couple of references and one immortal speech. But these additions and developments can in no way minimise the fact that he takes from North that speech, and the two others which are the pivots of the play, as they stand. There is the one in which Coriolanus discovers himself to Aufidius. I take it from the Cambridge Shakespeare, and print the actual borrowings in italics (IV. v. 53) :

'COR. (Unmuffling)

If, Tullus,

Not yet thou knowest me, and, seeing me, dost not
Think me for the man I am, necessity

Commands me to name myself. . . .

My name is Caius Marcius, who hath done
To thee particularly, and to all the Volsces,
Great hurt and mischief; thereto witness may
My surname, Coriolanus: the painful service,
The extreme dangers, and the drops of blood
Shed for my thankless country, are requited
But with that surname; a good memory,
And witness of the malice and displeasure

Which thou shouldst bear me: only that name remains ;
The cruelty and envy of the people,
Permitted by our dastard nobles, who

Have all forsook me, hath devour'd the rest;
And suffer'd me by the voice of slaves to be
Whoop'd out of Rome. Now, this extremity
Hath brought me to thy hearth: not out of hope-
Mistake me not to save my life, for if

I had fear'd death, of all men i' the world
I would have voided thee; but in mere spite
To be full quit of those my banishers,

Stand I before thee here. Then if thou hast

A heart of wreak in thee, that wilt revenge

Thine own particular wrongs and stop those maims

Of shame seen through thy country, speed thee straight,

And make my misery serve thy turn: so use it

That my revengeful services may prove

As benefits to thee; for I will fight

Against my canker'd country with the spleen

Of all the under fiends. But if so be

Thou darest not this and that to prove more fortunes

Thou 'rt tired, then, in a word, I also am

Longer to live most weary.'

The second, which is Volumnia's (v. iii. 94), is too

long for quotation. It opens thus:

[ocr errors]

Should we be silent and not speak, our raiment

And state of bodies would bewray what life

We have led since thy exile. Think with thyself
How more unfortunate than all living women
Are we come hither' ;

and here, to illustrate Shakespeare's method of rhythmical condensation, is the corresponding

passage in North. 'If we helde our peace (my sonne) and determined not to speake, the state of our poore bodies, and present sight of our raiment, would easily bewray to thee what life we have led at home, since thy exile and abode abroad. But thinke now with thyself, howe much more unfortunately, then all the women livinge we are come hether.' I have indicated by italics the words that are common to both, but even so, I can by no means show the sum of Shakespeare's debt, or so much as hint at the peculiar glory of Sir Thomas's prose. There is no mere question of borrowed language; for North and Shakespeare have each his own excellence, of prose and of verse. Shakespeare has taken over North's vocabulary, and that is much; but it is more that behind that vocabulary he should have found such an intensity of passion as would fill the sails of the highest drama. North has every one of Shakespeare's most powerful effects in his version of the speech: Trust unto it, thou shalt no soner marche forward to assault thy countrie, but thy foote shall treade upon thy mothers wombe, that brought thee first into this world'; 'Doest thou take it honourable for a nobleman to remember the wrongs and injuries done him '; 'Thou hast not hitherto shewed thy poore mother any courtesy: these belong to North, and they are the motors of Shakespeare's emotion. The two speeches, dressed, the one in perfect prose, the other in perfect verse, are both essentially the same under their faintly yet magically varied raiment. The dramatic tension, the main argument, the turns of pleading, even the pause and renewal of entreaty, all are in North, and are expressed by the same spoken words and the same gap of silence. In the blank verse a shorter cadence is disengaged

from the ampler movement of prose; here and there, too, a line is added. 'To tear with thunder the wide cheeks o' the air,' could only have been written by an Elizabethan dramatist; even as

'When she, poor hen, fond of no second brood,
Has clucked thee to the wars, and safely home,'

could only have been written by Shakespeare. The
one is extravagant, the other beautiful; but the
power and the pathos are complete without them,
for these reside in the substance and the texture of
the mother's entreaty, which are wholly North's.
It is just to add that, saving for some crucial touches,
as in the substitution of 'womb' for 'corps,' they
belong also to Amyot. To the mother's immortal
entreaty there follows the son's immortal reply:
the third great speech of Shakespeare's play. It runs
in Amyot: ""O mère, que m'as tu fait ?" et en luy
serrant estroittement la main droitte: "Ha," dit-il,
"mère, tu as vaincu une victoire heureuse pour ton
païs, mais bien malheureuse et mortelle pour ton
filz: car je m'en revois vaincu, par toi seule." ' In
North: "Oh mother, what have you done to
me?
And holding her hard by the right hand,
"Oh mother," sayed he, "you have wonne a happy
victorie for your countrie, but mortall and un-
happy for your sonne; for I see myself vanquished
by you alone."
North accepts the precious jewel
from Amyot, without loss of emotion or addition
of phrase: he repeats the desolate question, the
singultus of repeated apostrophe, the closing note of
unparalleled doom. Shakespeare, too, accepts them
in turn from North; and one is sorry that even he
should have added a word.

[ocr errors]

What, it may be asked, led Shakespeare, amid all

P

« VorigeDoorgaan »