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THE AUTHOR — SOME GENERAL FEATURES
[84] THE first task — following the course just outlined — must be to form, from a general survey of the position as a whole, and from a review of the contents of the writings, some conception of the outstanding characteristics of the author. This should include some legitimate surmises as to what we might expect to be the conditions of his life, and the relationship of his contemporaries towards him.
Although we are obliged, from the nature of our problem, to assume that his contemporaries generally were not aware of his producing the great works, it is hardly probable that one endowed with so commanding a genius should have been able to conceal the greatness of his powers wholly from those with whom he habitually associated; and therefore we may reasonably expect to find him a man of recognized and recorded genius. At the same time the mysteriousness in which he has chosen to involve the production of his works ought not to have escaped the observation of others. Consequently we may suppose that he would appear to many of the people about him something of the enigma he has proved to posterity. We must not look, however, for an exact representation of actual facts in any recorded impressions of the personality and actions of the man. Between what contemporary records represent him as being, and what he really was, we ought, indeed, to be prepared to find some striking discrepancies: the important thing is that there must be some notable agreement in essentials. Certain discordances may, however, [85] become important evidence in his favour. For example, a man who has produced so large an amount of work of the highest quality, and was not seen doing it, must have passed a considerable part of his life in what would appear to others like doing nothing of any consequence. The record of a wasted genius is, therefore, what we might reasonably look for in any contemporary account of him.
Again, unless some special reasons should appear to account for his self-effacement we are bound to recognize that the whole manner of his anonymity marks the writer as being, in a manner, something of an eccentric: his nature, or his circumstances, or probably both, were not normal. And, when the indications of his intense impressionability are considered, along with his peculiar power of entering into and reflecting vividly the varied moods, fierce passions and subtle movements of man's mind and heart, when the magnitude of his creative efforts is weighed, and account taken of the mental exhaustion which frequently follows from such efforts, we may even suppose that he was not altogether immune from the penalties that have sometimes accompanied such powers and performances. Altogether we may say his poetic temperament and the exuberance of his poetic fancy mark him as a man much more akin mentally to Byron or Shelley than to the placid Shakespeare suggested by the Stratford tradition. Add to this his marvellous insight into human nature, revealing to him, as it must have done, such springs and motives of human actions as would be hidden from his associates, and we may naturally expect to find him giving vent to himself in acts and words which must have seemed extraordinary and inexplicable to other men: for the man who sees most deeply into the inner workings of the human mind must often act upon knowledge of which he may not speak. It ought not, therefore, to surprise us if his contemporaries found him, not merely eccentric in his bearing, as they have frequently found the genius whom they could not understand, but even [86] on occasion, guilty of what seemed to them vagaries of a pronounced type.
The possession of abnormal powers, and a highly strung temperament like that of Byron or of Shelley, interposes a barrier between a man and his social environment. The mediocrity, and what seems like the insensibility of the average people about him, place him in an irritating milieu, against which he tends to protect himself by a mannerism, sometimes merely cold and aloof, at times even repellent or defiant. To be a general social favourite a man needs to combine with personal graces a certain average of intellect and sensibility, which assimilates him to the generality of the people about him. The poetic genius has always, therefore, been more or less a man apart, whose very aloofness is provocative of hostility in smaller men. Towards these he tries to assume a mask, often most difficult to penetrate but which, once pierced, may necessitate a complete reversal of former judgments — one of the most difficult things to accomplish once such judgment has passed beyond mere individual opinion, and has taken firm root in the social mind.
We venture to say that, whatever course the discussion may take, either now or in a distant future, one of the most serious hindrances to the formation of correct views will be the necessity of reversing judgments that have had a long standing social sanction. We shall first have to dissociate from the writings the conception of such an author as the steady, complacent, business-like man-of-the-world, suggested by the Stratford Shakspere. Then there will be the more arduous task of raising to a most exalted position the name and personality possibly of some obscure man hitherto regarded as quite unequal to the work with which he is at last to be credited. And this will further compel us to re-read our greatest national classics from a totally new personal standpoint. The work in question being the [87] highest literary product of the age, it cannot be otherwise than that the author, whoever he may have been, when he is discovered must seem in some measure below the requirements of the situation; unequal, that is, to the production of such work. We shall therefore be called upon in his case radically to modify and correct a judgment of three hundred years' standing.
Although apparently unequal to the full measure of Shakespeare's capacity, there is a natural limit to such allowable inferiority in appearance. It might, in a given instance, be so great as to make it absurd to entertain the thought of connecting the man with the work. His writings being masterpieces of English literature, and all the world's literary masterpieces having been produced by men who wrote in their mother-tongue of matters in which they were keenly interested, and to whom writing, or more properly speaking the mental occupation of composing, has been a master passion, we are entitled to require in the person put forward as the author a body of credentials corresponding to the character of the work. That is to say, we are bound to assume that the writer was an Englishman with dominating literary tastes, to whom the classical literature of the world, the history of England during the period of the Lancastrians and Yorkists, and Italian literature, which form the staple materials of his work, were matters of absorbing interest, furnishing the milieu in which his mind habitually worked. To think of him as one who made an excursion into literature in order to win a competency for himself, and who retired from literary pursuits when that purpose had been served, is to contradict everything that is known of the production of such masterpieces. Other interests he may have had, just as men who were chiefly occupied with social and political affairs, dabbled also in literature, poetry, or the drama; but what to them was a mere hobby or pastime would be to him a central and consuming purpose. Unless, then, we are to recast all our ideas of [88] how the great things of literature have been achieved, we cannot think of him otherwise than as one who had been swept by the irresistible force of his own genius into the strong literary current of his times. The fact that he was himself busy producing such works, he may have hidden from the men of his day, but it is inconceivable that he should have hidden from them where his chief interest lay.
Again, the great mass of the literature he has given to the world being in the form of dramas, we may repeat in relation to this particular class of work what has already been said of literature generally: namely, that an intense, even passionate devotion to the special form of art in which his masterpieces are produced is invariably characteristic of a genius. And although, again, this writer's absorption may have been partially concealed, it is hardly possible that it could have been wholly so. We are entitled, therefore, to expect that "Shakespeare" appeared to his contemporaries as a man over whom the theatre and all that pertained to play-acting exercised an irresistible fascination.
Carlyle treats of this matter as though play-writing were but an incidental element in "Shakespeare's" work: almost an accident of circumstances, arising out of the material necessities of life. He "had to write for the Globe Playhouse: his great soul had to crush itself, as it could, into that and no other mould" — the particular mould in which he worked having evidently no necessary connection with his distinctive genius. For what perversions of fundamental truths has not the orthodox view of the authorship been responsible! The world's greatest productions in a given art coming from a man to whom the art and its essential accessories furnished but an uncongenial medium of expression! His special domain chosen for him, not by the force of his peculiar genius, but by the need for money! If this proved true, the plays of Shakespeare would, from that point of view alone, probably remain for all time unique amongst the masterpieces of art. It is much more [89] reasonable, however, to suppose that the dramatist was one who was prepared to give both himself and his substance to the drama, rather than one who was engaged in extorting a subsistence from it.
That he was one over whom the theatre exercised a strong attraction is, moreover, borne out by the contents of the plays themselves. There is no better key to the interests that stir the enthusiasm of poets than, on the one hand the imagery they employ, and on the other the passages in their works which arrest the attention of their readers and fix themselves in the popular memory. It hardly needs pointing out how frequently in Shakespeare's works, the simile of the "stage" recurs, and how commonly the passages are quoted. We must expect, therefore, to find the author of the writings well known as a literary and dramatic enthusiast.
To represent him as a man who, having made a snug competency for himself, left dramatic pursuits behind him voluntarily whilst still in the full enjoyment of his marvellous powers, abandoning some of his unfinished manuscripts to be finished by strangers and given to the world as his, in order that he might be at liberty to devote himself more exclusively to houses, lands and business generally, is to suggest a miracle of self-stultification in himself and an equal miracle of credulity in us. Yet this is the exact position into which the orthodox view forces so eminent a scholar and literary authority as Sir Sidney Lee. "Shakespeare," he says, "in middle life brought to practical affairs a singularly sane and sober temperament," acting on the following advice, "'when thou feelest thy purse well lined buy thou some piece of lordship in the country, that growing weary of playing, thy money may bring thee to dignity and reputation.' It was this prosaic course that Shakespeare followed. . . . If in 1611 Shakespeare finally abandoned dramatic composition, there seems little doubt that he left with the manager of the company more than one play that others [90] were summoned at a later date to complete." Thus must incongruities be piled increasingly upon one another if we are to make the man who has got himself credited with the authorship adjusted to the role that Fate has called upon him to play. Once, however, the old theory is repudiated we are bound to look for an author who believed with his whole soul in the greatness of drama and the high humanizing possibilities of the actor's vocation.
Whether attention be directed to the contents of the dramas or to his other writings, no one will question his title to a foremost place amongst the lyric poets of his time. It is questionable whether any other dramatist has enriched his plays with an equal quantity — to say nothing of the superior quality — of lyrical verse; whilst his sonnets, "Venus and Adonis," and other lyric poems, place him easily amongst the best of the craftsmen in that art. Now, although his contemporaries may not have known that he was producing masterpieces of drama, it is extremely improbable that his production of lyric verse was as completely concealed. He may have hidden lengthy poems like "Venus and Adonis" or "Lucrece," or brought them out under a nom-de-plume. But that no fugitive pieces of lyric verse should ever have gained currency under his own name is hardly possible. The writer with the facile pen for lyrics is only too prone to throw out his spontaneous products lavishly, sometimes in a cruder form than his better judgment would approve. Whilst, therefore, he may have concealed the actual authorship in the case of works involving prolonged and arduous application, we may be sure that some of those short lyrics, which are the spontaneous expression of passing moods, would be known and appreciated. We may expect, therefore, that he was actually known as a writer of lyric verse.
At the same time it would be unreasonable to look for anything like a large volume of such poems in addition to the Shakespearean writings. This would have necessitated his living an additional lifetime. A few scattered [91] fragments of lyric verse, under his own name, is all that we should expect to find. Elizabethan poetry is, however, characterized by the mass of its lyric pieces of unknown or doubtful authorship. The mere fact that a person's name or initials are attached to a fragment is never a sufficient guarantee that he actually wrote it. Tradition alone, or the mere fact that it was found among his papers, may be the only ground upon which he is credited with the authorship. Nevertheless, after full allowance has been made for the peculiar conditions under which the writing and issuing of poetry was at that time conducted, it remains highly probable that the writer of Shakespeare's works has left something authentic published under his own name amongst the lyric poetry of the days of Queen Elizabeth.
In no matter has the hitherto accepted view of the authorship of the Shakespearean writings played such sad havoc with common sense as in the matter of the relationship of genius to learning. Place the documents before any mixed jury of educated, semi-educated, and ignorant men, men of practical common sense, and stupid men, and, unless for some prepossession, they would unanimously declare, without hesitation, that the writer was one whose education had been of the very best that the times could offer. And even a moderately educated set of men would assure us that it was not the mere bookish learning of the poor, plodding student who in loneliness had wrested from an adverse fate an education beyond what was enjoyed by his class. There is nothing in Shakespeare suggestive of the close poring over books by which a man of scanty educational advantages might have embellished his pages with learned allusions. Everything indicates a man in contact at every point with life itself, and to whom books were but the adjunct to an habitual intercourse with men of intellectual interests similar to his own. His is the learning which belonged to a man who added to the advantages of a first class education at the start, a continued association with the best [92] educated people of his day. No ordinary theory of genius would account for the production of the plays otherwise; the intervention of some preternatural agency would be required.
In respect of the leading feature of his learning one would judge it to have lain in the direction of classic poetry. There is "law" in his works, but it is open to question whether it is the law of a professional lawyer, or that of an intelligent man who had had a fair amount of important business to transact with lawyers, and was himself interested in the study of law as many laymen have been. It may be claimed that there is "medicine" in his writings, but it is more suggestive of the man accustomed to treat his own common ailments, than that of a medical man accustomed to handle patients. There are indications of the dawning movement of modern science in his works, but they are such as suggest a man alive to the intellectual currents of his time, but no enthusiast for a merely materialistic science. But over all these there presides constantly a dominant interest in classic poetry.
Summing up the general inferences treated in this chapter, supplemented by conclusions drawn from the preceding one, we may say of Shakespeare that he was:
1. A matured man of recognized genius.
2. Apparently eccentric and mysterious.
3. Of intense sensibility — a man apart.
4. Unconventional.
5. Not adequately appreciated.
6. Of pronounced and known literary tastes.
7. An enthusiast in the world of drama.
8. A lyric poet of recognized talent.
9. Of superior education — classical — the habitual associate of educated people.