PROFESSOR DOWDEN'S "INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE ." * No doubt different
people have different experiences in their study of Shakespeare. One reads him only as a teller of good stories, one as a poet, some few as a philosopher, and many as the great diagnosis-maker of man. The present writer read him in all these lights. First, as a child, he was so amused with Lamb's tales that he was eager to read the plays themselves, and his fascination was so great that he worried his parents to take him to see these romances acted. How he wept over Prince Arthur, laughed at Falstaff and the Comedy of Errors, was entranced at the fairy-land of the Tempest and Midsummer Night's Dream, and horror-struck at Macbeth! Hie father, being a purist, would not allow him to see King Lear. Then he read him as a poet, but having fared hitherto only on the poets who so frequently satisfy youths—Young, Pope, and Byron—he did not so much approve of him. His faith in "The Night Thoughts" was very soon completely shaken by Lord John Russell's statement that sleep, so far from forsaking the wicked, took them in his arms because they had no conscience. Pope's Essay on Man drove him to metaphysics ; and finding nothing about this cloudy science in the blue sky of the dramatist, he looked down upon him, preferring "the Absolute" and the " Relative " to what he considered so objective and unideal in him. Then he visited a friend, where he found Ulric/ on Shakespeare, which he read with immense exaltation, although his friend told him that the philosopher put things into the mouth of the poet which he had never uttered or intended to utter. But it did him much good, for it made him see that Shakespeare, though he did not use metaphysical language, was a profound and true philosopher. Then came his second stage of poetry, for from the same book he had learned that the philosopher
* introduction to Shasperc. By Edward Bowden. London: Blaokie and Son.
was still greater as a poet. But what of man? He failed to discover Shakespeare's profound knowledge of man till he was much older, and by intercourse with man had begun to know himself and his fellow-creatures also. The Germans have certainly worked a great work in waking us up to a right appreciation of our own Shakespeare, whom before we had regarded merely as a dramatist. Even Coleridge owed much to the Germans, for his lectures are decidedly flavoured with German thought on his merits.
Now, we do not expect in Professor Dowden's little book to be newly awakened to the merits of the author whose life and works it so accurately describes, but we are more than con- tent with what it does teach us ; and we feel from the very beginning that, if he makes an thiqualified statement of a fact in the biography, it is true, and that if it is only probably true, he will not fail to say so. Many of our readers know all that is to be known of the life of the poet and the numerous editions of his works, and have read all that is to be read in English and German writers about the ideal and practical meaning of his characters and plots ; but some there are who will be glad to be informed or refreshed about these points. De Quincey summed up Shakespeare's life, work, and character in a few words : "He lived, he died, and he was a little lower than the angels,"—because there is not much more about him that is undisputed. Curiously, Professor Dowden says :—" Our wonder as regards Shakspere should be, not that we know so little, but that we know so much ;" and we may take this as the text of our own remarks, which are mainly extracted from his, and we leave our readers to distinguish from them what is not known.
At the age of eighteen, a powerful influence drove Shake- speare to begin active life, and to do what he could to better himself, for he took a better-half in the person of Anne Hathaway, seven years older than himself. What shall we sacrifice to the manes of this young woman, who unknowingly may have been the cause of her husband's glory and of her country's pride and edification? But the Professor throws a wet blanket over our fire of imagination, and calls the marriage imprudent. However, it did the couple no harm, although the husband suggests :— "Let still the woman take An elder than herself."
Her impulse at first did no more for him than to get him the em- ployment of holding the horses of gentlemen who bad ridden to the playhouse; but he soon became so popular in this vocation that he had to hire lads to assist him, who were called "Shake- speare's Boys." We learn very little about his early years at the theatre which is to be depended upon, but we are told that the impulse urged him to hold the steeds of one or more Pho3bus, which, in the more accurate words of the Professor, means : "He revised and adapted the work of early contemporaries ;" and this prepared him for mounting the chariot of Phcebus himself, for "he learned to distinguish between what is effec- tive and ineffective on the stage ; he acquired the art of carrying on the action of a piece without falling into tedious speech-making, he studied the links and transitions of the dramatic events, he came to see how these should be manipu- lated, he learned how to develop a dramatic character, how to regulate imagery and diction, so that they should never pass into the epical ; and while amending the pieces of others his own genius would have enough of play to gain in. strength, and enough of restraint to save it from the waste of exuberant power." No doubt, Ben Jonson said, " Would that also he had been urged to study, not to amend, the plays of Sophocles," —then the barbarism, which Voltaire complains of, would have been amended ; and even a Frenchman would have looked upon him with favour.
The reason why his early plays were not published by the press is that "they formed in the eyes of his contemporaries hardly a part of literature, and could not compete in dignity with his 'Venus and Adonis,' of which edition followed edition during a series of years." In 1594, he published hie, " Lucrece," and in the same year the Benchers of the Inner Temple witnessed in their hall, which still exists, the per- formance of Twelfth Night. In 1599, the Globe Theatre was built of wood, so called from its sign of Atlas carrying his load, close by London Bridge. The inhabitants of the dis- trict petitioned against its establishment on account of the dangers and annoyances which they would suffer from it. He soon after wrote a play, Love's Labour's Won, which possibly, if it is not lost, was All's Well that Ends Well. He became a grandfather at the age of forty-four, and he soon turned his longing eyes towards his dear native town, 'here he had bought land and houses, and laid out an orchard In which to pick his own fruit. He was as good a hand in making a bargain as in writing a tragedy. "If you bargain with William Shakspere, or receive money therefor, bring your money home that you may," writes the father of a man who was probably going to have some dealing with the poet. He died from hard drinking in company with Ben Jonson and Drayton ; but Halliwell-Phillips attributes his death to blood-poisoning :—" If truth, and not romance, is to be invoked, were there the woodbine and sweet honeysuckle within reach of the poet's death-bed, their fragrance would have been neutralised by their vicinity to middens, fetid water-courses, mud walls, and piggeries ;" and "the transfer of bones from graves to the charnel-house was then an ordinary practice at Stratford-on.Avon." So then, Shakespeare, if he had lived now, might have enjoyed forty more years of life.
The Professor makes some very happy remarks on the ortunate moment of the poet's advent to the stage. The people were "upon the top of happy hours," the classical culture of the Renaissance had been united with the grave thought and the moral earnestness of the Reformation. The fires of Smithfield were extinct, and a spirit of unbounded energy was abroad, and everybody saw the tragic side of things, and none the less enjoyed the comedy of human existence. He adds some valuable information on the develop- ment of the style and rhythm of the poet. His criticism on various plays is just and short. For the butchery of Titus Andronicus he excuses the poet by inserting the legend that he was a butcher's apprentice at Stratford. He also furnishes a short account of the best actors of the plays, and gives the preference to Garrick and Edmund Kean. Our readers will find much interest in the modest little book, which has served as an introduction to the "Irving Shakspere."
We give one little criticism of our own, which we have never seen suggested elsewhere. The most thrilling scene of any author that we have ever read, is that where Iago hisses in an undertone to his master Othello his suspicions about Desdemona. It should be remembered that it is a mere conversation between two men, with no bloody murder in the course of perpetration, as in the Agamemon ; no Prometheus is defying the great god Zeus for his injustice and tyranny ; no devil is on the point of snatching away the maddened Margaret to eternal torment, as he thinks, in the prison-scene of Faust ; no Day of Judgment with all its terrors are de- scribed, as in the sermon on "Le Petit Nombre des Elus," of Massillon; but all is quiet in the silent room and the calm breast of the Moor.
Previous page
