CHAPTER I. SHAKESPEARE'S EARLY ATTEMPTS TO PORTRAY HIMSELF AND HIS WIFE: BIRON, ADRIANA, VALENTINE

In the preceding chapters I have considered those impersonations of Shakespeare which revealed most distinctly the salient features of his character. I now regard this part of my work as finished: the outlines at least of his nature are established beyond dispute, and I may therefore be permitted to return upon my steps, and beginning with the earliest works pass in review most of the other personages who discover him, however feebly or profoundly. Hitherto I have rather challenged contradiction than tried to conciliate or persuade; it was necessary to convince the reader that Shakespeare was indeed Hamlet-Orsino, plus an exquisite sense of humour; and as the proofs of this were almost inexhaustible, and as the stability of the whole structure depended on the firmness of the foundations, I was more than willing to call forth opposition in order once for all to strangle doubt. But now that I have to put in the finer traits of the portrait I have to hope for the goodwill at least of my readers. Even then my task is not easy.

The subtler traits of a man's character often elude accurate description, to say nothing of exact proof; the differences in tone between a dramatist's own experiences of life and his observation of the experiences of others are often so slight as to be all but unnoticeable. In the case of some peculiarities I have only a mere suggestion to go upon, in that of others a bare surmise, a hint so fleeting that it may well seem to the judicious as if the meshes of language were too coarse to catch such evanescent indication.

Fortunately in this work I am not called on to limit myself to that which can be proved beyond question, or to the ordinary man. I think my reader will allow me, or indeed expect me, now to throw off constraint and finish my picture as I please.

In this second book then I shall try to correct Shakespeare's portraits of himself by bringing out his concealed faults and vices—the shortcomings one's vanity slurs over and omits. Above all I shall try to notice anything that throws light upon his life, for I have to tell here the story of his passion and his soul's wreck. At the crisis of his life he revealed himself almost without affectation; in agony men forget to pose. And this more intimate understanding of the man will enable us to reconstruct, partially at least, the happenings of his life, and so trace not only his development, but the incidents of his life's journey from his school days in 1575 till he crept home to Stratford to die nearly forty years later.

The chief academic critics, such as Professor Dowden and Dr. Brandes, take pains to inform us that Biron in “Love's Labour's Lost” is nothing but an impersonation of Shakespeare. This would show much insight on the part of the Professors were it not that Coleridge as usual has been before them, and that Coleridge's statement is to be preferred to theirs. Coleridge was careful to say that the whole play revealed many of Shakespeare's characteristic features, and he added finely, “as in a portrait taken of him in his boyhood.” This is far truer than Dowden's more precise statement that “Berowne is the exponent of Shakespeare's own thought.” For though, of course, Biron is especially the mouthpiece of the poet, yet Shakespeare reveals himself in the first speech of the King as clearly as he does in any speech of Biron:

“Let Fame, that all hunt after in their lives,

Live registered upon our brazen tombs,

And then grace us in the disgrace of death;

When, spite of cormorant devouring Time,

The endeavour of this present breath may buy

That honour which shall 'bate his scythe's keen edge,

And make us heirs of all eternity.”

The King's criticism, too, of Armado in the first scene is more finely characteristic of Shakespeare than Biron's criticism of Boyet in the last act. In this, his first drama, Shakespeare can hardly sketch a sympathetic character without putting something of himself into it.

I regard “Love's Labour's Lost” as Shakespeare's earliest comedy, not only because the greater part of it is in rhymed verse, but also because he was unable in it to individualize his serious personages at all; the comic characters, on the other hand, are already carefully observed and distinctly differenced. Biron himself is scarcely more than a charming sketch: he is almost as interested in language as in love, and he plays with words till they revenge themselves by obscuring his wit; he is filled with the high spirits of youth; in fact, he shows us the form and pressure of the Renaissance as clearly as the features of Shakespeare. It is, however, Biron-Shakespeare, who understands that the real world is built on broader natural foundations than the King's womanless Academe, and therefore predicts the failure of the ascetic experiment. Another trait in Biron that brings us close to Shakespeare is his contempt for book-learning;

“Small have continual plodders ever won

Save bare authority from others' books.

Too much to know is to know nought but fame;

And every godfather can give a name.”

Again and again he returns to the charge:

“To study now it is too late,

Climb o'er the house to unlock the little gate.”

The summing up is triumphant:

“So, study evermore is overshot.”

In fine, Biron ridicules study at such length and with such earnestness and pointed phrase that it is manifest the discussion was intensely interesting to Shakespeare himself. But we should have expected Shakespeare's alter ego to be arguing on the other side; for again and again we have had to notice that Shakespeare was a confirmed lover of books; he was always using bookish metaphors, and Hamlet was a student by nature. This attitude on the part of Biron, then, calls for explanation, and it seems to me that the only possible explanation is to be found in Shakespeare's own experience. Those who know England as she was in the days of Elizabeth, or as she is to-day, will hardly need to be told that when Shakespeare first came to London he was regarded as an unlettered provincial (“with little Latin and less Greek”), and had to bear the mocks and flouts of his beschooled fellows, who esteemed learning and gentility above genius. In his very first independent play he answered the scorners with scorn.

But this disdain of study was not Shakespeare's real feeling; and his natural loyalty to the deeper truth forced him to make Biron contradict and excuse his own argument in a way which seems to me altogether charming; but is certainly undramatic:

“—Though I have for barbarism spoke more

Than for that angel knowledge you can say.”

Undramatic the declaration is because it is at war with the length and earnestness with which Biron has maintained his contempt for learning; but here undoubtedly we find the true Shakespeare who as a youth speaks of “that angel, knowledge,” just as in “Cymbeline” twenty years later he calls reverence, “that angel of the world.”

When we come to his “Life” we shall see that Shakespeare, who was thrown into the scrimmage of existence as a youth, and had to win his own way in the world, had, naturally enough, a much higher opinion of books and book-learning than Goethe, who was bred a student and knew life only as an amateur:

“Einen Blick in's Buch hinein und zwei in's Leben

Das muss die rechte Form dem Geiste geben.”

Shakespeare would undoubtedly have given “two glances” to books and one to life, had he been free to choose; but perhaps after all Goethe was right in warning us that life is more valuable to the artist than any transcript of it.

To return to our theme; Biron is not among Shakespeare's successful portraits of himself. As might be expected in a first essay, the drawing is now over-minute, now too loose. When Biron talks of study, he reveals, as we have seen, personal feelings that are merely transient; on the other hand, when he talks about Boyet he talks merely to hear “the music of his own vain tongue.” He is, however, always nimble-witted and impulsive; “quick Biron” as the Princess calls him, a gentleman of charming manners, of incomparable fluent, graceful, and witty speech, which qualities afterwards came to blossom in Mercutio and Gratiano. The faults in portraiture are manifestly due to inexperience: Shakespeare was still too youthful-timid to paint his chief features boldly, and it is left for Rosaline to picture Biron for us as Shakespeare doubtless desired to appear:

“A merrier man,

Within the limits of becoming mirth,

I never spent an hour's talk withal.

His eye begets occasion for his wit;

For every object that the one doth catch,

The other turns to a mirth-moving jest,

Which his fair tongue, conceit's expositor,

Delivers in such apt and gracious words

That agèd ears play truant at his tales,

And younger hearings are quite ravishèd,

So sweet and voluble is his discourse.”

Every touch of this self-painted portrait deserves to be studied: it is the first photograph of our poet which we possess—a photograph, too, taken in early manhood. Shakespeare's wit we knew, his mirth too, and that his conversation was voluble and sweet enough to ravish youthful ears and enthrall the aged we might have guessed from Jonson's report. But it is delightful to hear of his mirth-moving words and to know that he regarded himself as the best talker in the world. But just as the play at the end turns from love-making and gay courtesies to thoughts of death and “world-without-end” pledges, so Biron's merriment is only the effervescence of youth, and love brings out in him Shakespeare's characteristic melancholy:

“By heaven, I do love, and it hath taught me to

rhyme, and to be melancholy.”

Again and again, as in his apology to Rosaline and his appeal at the end of the play to “honest plain words,” he shows a deep underlying seriousness. The soul of quick talkative mirthful Biron is that he loves beauty whether of women or of words, and though he condemns “taffeta phrases,” he shows his liking for the “silken terms precise” in the very form of his condemnation.

Of course all careful readers know that the greater seriousness of the last two acts of “Love's Labour's Lost,” and the frequent use of blank verse instead of rhymed verse in them, are due to the fact that Shakespeare revised the play in 1597, some eight or nine years probably after he had first written it. Every one must have noticed the repetitions in Biron's long speech at the end of the fourth act, which show the original garment and the later, finer embroidery. As I shall have to return to this revision for other reasons, it will be enough here to remark that it is especially the speeches of Biron which Shakespeare improved in the second handling

Dr. Brandes, or rather Coleridge, tells us that in Biron and his Rosaline we have the first hesitating sketch of the masterly Benedick and Beatrice of “Much Ado about Nothing”; but in this I think Coleridge goes too far. Unformed as Biron is, he is Shakespeare in early youth, whereas in Benedick the likeness is not by any means so clear. In fact, Benedick is merely an admirable stage silhouette and needs to be filled out with an actor's personality. Beatrice, on the other hand, is a woman of a very distinct type, whereas Rosaline needs pages of explanation, which Coleridge never dreamed of. A certain similarity rather of situation than of character seems to have misled Coleridge in this instance. Boyet jests with Maria and Rosaline just as Biron does, and just as Benedick jests with Beatrice: all these scenes simply show how intensely young Shakespeare enjoyed a combat of wits, spiced with the suggestiveness that nearly always shows itself when the combatants are of different sexes.

It is almost certain that “Love's Labour's Lost” was wholly conceived and constructed as well as written by Shakespeare; no play or story has yet been found which might, in this case, have served him as a model. For the first and probably the last time he seems to have taken the entire drama from his imagination, and the result from a playwright's point of view is unfortunate; “Love's Labour's Lost” is his slightest and feeblest play. It is scarcely ever seen on the stage—is, indeed, practically unactable. This fact goes to confirm the view already put forth more than once in these pages, that Shakespeare was not a good playwright and took little or no interest in the external incidents of his dramas. The plot and action of the story, so carefully worked out by the ordinary playwright and so highly esteemed by critics and spectators, he always borrows, as if he had recognized the weakness of this first attempt, and when he sets himself to construct a play, it has no action, no plot—is, indeed, merely a succession of fantastic occurrences that give occasion for light love-making and brilliant talk.

Even in regard to the grouping of characters the construction of his early plays is puerile, mechanical; in “Love's Labour's Lost” the King with his three courtiers is set against the Princess and her three ladies; in “The Two Gentlemen of Verona” there is the faithful Valentine opposed to the inconstant Proteus, and each of them has a comic servant; and when later his plays from this point of view were not manufactured but grew, and thus assumed the beautiful irregular symmetry of life, the incidents were still neglected. Neither the poet nor the philosopher in Shakespeare felt much of the child's interest in the story; he chose his tales for the sake of the characters and the poetry, and whether they were effective stage-tales or not troubled him but little. There is hardly more plot or action in “Lear” than in “Love's Labour's Lost.”

It is probable that “The Comedy of Errors” followed hard on the heels of “Love's Labour's Lost.” It practically belongs to the same period: it has fewer lines of prose in it than “Love's Labour's Lost”; but, on the other hand, the intrigue-spinning is clever, and the whole play shows a riper knowledge of theatrical conditions. Perhaps because the intrigue is more interesting, the character-drawing is even feebler than that of the earlier comedy: indeed, so far as the men go there is hardly anything worth calling character-drawing at all. Shakespeare speaks through this or that mask as occasion tempts him: and if the women are sharply, crudely differentiated, it is because Shakespeare, as I shall show later, has sketched his wife for us in Adriana, and his view of her character is decided enough if not over kind. Still, any and every peculiarity of character deserves notice, for in these earliest works Shakespeare is compelled to use his personal experience, to tell us of his own life and his own feelings, not having any wider knowledge to draw upon.

Every word, therefore, in these first comedies, is important to those who would learn the story of his youth and fathom the idiosyncrasies of his being. When AEgeon, in the opening scenes, tells the Duke about the shipwreck in which he is separated from his wife and child, he declares that he himself “would gladly have embraced immediate death.” No reason is given for this extraordinary contempt of living. It was the “incessant weepings” of his wife, the “piteous plainings of the pretty babes,” that forced him, he says, to exert himself. But wives don't weep incessantly in danger, nor are the “piteous plainings of the pretty babes” a feature of shipwreck; I find here a little picture of Shakespeare's early married life in Stratford—a snapshot of memory. AEgeon concludes his account by saying that his life was prolonged in order

“To tell sad stories of my own mishaps”

—which reminds one of similar words used later by Richard II. This personal, melancholy note is here forced and false, for Aegeon surely lives in hope of finding his wife and child and not in order to tell of his misfortunes. Aegeon is evidently a breath of Shakespeare himself, and not more than a breath, because he only appears again when the play is practically finished. Deep-brooding melancholy was the customary habit of Shakespeare even in youth.

Just as in “Love's Labour's Lost” we find Shakespeare speaking first through the King and then more fully through the hero, Biron, so here he first speaks through Aegeon and then at greater length through the protagonist Antipholus of Syracuse. Antipholus is introduced to us as new come to Ephesus, and Shakespeare is evidently thinking of his own first day in London when he puts in his mouth these words:

“Within this hour it will be dinner-time:

Till that, I'll view the manners of the town,

Peruse the traders, gaze upon the buildings,

And then return and sleep within mine inn;

For with long travel I am stiff and weary.”

Though “stiff and weary” he is too eager-young to rest; he will see everything—even “peruse the traders”—how the bookish metaphor always comes to Shakespeare's lips!—before he will eat or sleep. The utterly needless last line, with its emphatic description—“stiff and weary”—corroborates my belief that Shakespeare in this passage is telling us what he himself felt and did on his first arrival in London. In the second scene of the third act Antipholus sends his servant to the port:

“I will not harbour in this town to-night

If any bark put forth.”

From the fact that Shakespeare represented Antipholus to himself as wishing to leave Ephesus by sea, it is probable that he pictured him coming to Ephesus in a ship. But when Shakespeare begins to tell us what he did on reaching London he recalls his own desires and then his own feelings; he was “stiff and weary” on that first day because he rode, or more probably walked, into London; one does not become “stiff and weary” on board ship. This is another snapshot at that early life of Shakespeare, and his arrival in London, which one would not willingly miss. And surely it is the country-bred lad from Stratford who, fearing all manner of town-tricks, speaks in this way:

“They say this town is full of cozenage;

As, nimble jugglers that deceive the eye,

Dark-working sorcerers that change the mind,

Soul-killing witches that deform the body,

Disguised cheaters, prating mountebanks,

And many such-like liberties of sin:

I greatly fear my money is not safe.”

This Antipholus is most ingenuous-talkative; without being questioned he tells about his servant:

“A trusty villain, sir; that very oft,

When I am dull with care and melancholy,

Lightens my humour with his merry jests.”

And as if this did not mark his peculiar thoughtful temperament sufficiently, he tells the merchant:

“I will go lose myself,

And wander up and down to view the city.”

And when the merchant leaves him, commending him to his own content, he talks to himself in this strain:

“He that commends me to mine own content,

Commends me to the thing I cannot get,

So I, to find a mother and a brother,

In quest of them, unhappy, lose myself.”

A most curious way, it must be confessed, to seek for any one; but perfectly natural to the refined, melancholy, meditative, book-loving temperament which was already Shakespeare's. In this “unhappy” and “mother” I think I hear an echo of Shakespeare's sorrow at parting from his own mother.

This Antipholus, although very free and open, has a reserve of dignity, as we see in the second scene of the second act, when he talks with his servant, who, as he thinks, has played with him:

“Because that I familiarly sometimes

Do use you for my fool, and chat with you,

Your sauciness will jest upon my love,

And make a common of my serious hours.

When the sun shines let foolish gnats make sport,

But creep in crannies when he hides his beams.”

The self-esteem seems a little exaggerated here; but, after all, it is only natural; the whole scene is taken from Shakespeare's experience: the man who will chat familiarly with his servant, and jest with him as well, must expect to have to pull him up at times rather sharply. Antipholus proceeds to play with his servant in a fencing match of wit—a practice Shakespeare seems to have delighted in. But it is when Antipholus falls in love with Luciana that he shows us Shakespeare at his most natural as a lover. Luciana has just taken him to task for not loving her sister Adriana, who, she thinks, is his wife. Antipholus answers her thus:

“Sweet mistress,—what your name is else, I know not,

Nor by what wonder you do hit of mine,—

Less in your knowledge and your face you show not,

Than our earth's wonder; more than earth divine,

Teach me, dear creature, how to think and speak;

Lay open to my earthy-gross conceit,

Smother'd in errors, feeble, shallow, weak,

The folded meaning of your words' deceit. ...”

He declares, in fact, that he loves her and not her sister:

“Sing, siren, for thyself and I will dote:

Spread o'er the silver waves thy golden hairs,

And as a bed I'll take them and there lie;

It is thyself, mine own self's better part,

Mine eye's clear eye, my dear heart's dearer heart.”

And as if this were not enough he goes on:

“My food, my fortune, and my sweet hope's aim,

My sole earth's heaven, and my heaven's claim.”

The word-conceits were a fashion of the time; but in spite of the verbal affectation, the courting shows the cunning of experience, and has, besides, a sort of echo of sincere feeling. How Shakespeare delights in making love! It reminds one of the first flutings of a thrush in early spring; over and over again he tries the notes with delighted iteration till he becomes a master of his music and charms the copses to silence with his song: and so Shakespeare sings of love again and again till at length we get the liquid notes of passion and the trills of joy all perfected in “Romeo and Juliet”; but the voice is the voice we heard before in “Venus and Adonis” and “The Comedy of Errors.”

Antipholus' other appearances are not important. He merely fills his part till in the last scene he assures Luciana that he will make good his earlier protestations of love; but so far as he has any character at all, or distinctive individuality, he is young Shakespeare himself and his experiences are Shakespeare's.

Now a word or two about Adriana. Shakespeare makes her a jealous, nagging, violent scold, who will have her husband arrested for debt, though she will give money to free him. But the comedy of the play would be better brought out if Adriana were pictured as loving and constant, inflicting her inconvenient affection upon the false husband as upon the true. Why did Shakespeare want to paint this unpleasant bitter-tongued wife?

When Adriana appears in the first scene of the second act she is at once sketched in her impatience and jealousy. She wants to know why her husband should have more liberty than she has, and declares that none but asses will be bridled so. Then she will strike her servant. In the first five minutes of this act she is sketched to the life, and Shakespeare does nothing afterwards but repeat and deepen the same strokes: it seems as if he knew nothing about her or would depict nothing of her except her jealousy and nagging, her impatience and violence. We have had occasion to notice more than once that when Shakespeare repeats touches in this way, he is drawing from life, from memory, and not from imagination. Moreover, in this case, he shows us at once that he is telling of his wife, because she defends herself against the accusation of age, which no one brings against her, though every one knows that Shakespeare's wife was eight years older than himself.

“His company must do his minions grace,

Whilst I at home starve for a merry look.

Hath homely age the alluring beauty took

From my poor cheek? then he hath wasted it ...

... My decayed fair

A sunny look of his would soon repair:

But, poor unruly deer, he breaks the pale,

And feeds from home; poor I am but his stale.”

The appeal is pathetic; but Luciana will not see it. She cries:

“Self-harming jealousy! fie, beat it hence!”

In the second scene of this second act Adriana goes on nagging in almost the same way.

In the second scene of the third act there is a phrase from the hero, Antipholus of Syracuse, about Adriana which I find significant:

“She that doth call me husband, even my soul

Doth for a wife abhor!”

There is no reason in the comedy for such strong words. Most men would be amused or pleased by a woman who makes up to them as Adriana makes up to Antipholus. I hear Shakespeare in this uncalled-for, over-emphatic “even my soul doth for a wife abhor.”

In the fifth act Adriana is brought before the Abbess, and is proved to be a jealous scold. Shakespeare will not be satisfied till some impartial great person of Adriana's own sex has condemned her. Adriana admits that she has scolded her husband in public and in private, too; the Abbess replies:

“And thereof came it that the man was mad.”

And she adds:

“The venom clamours of a jealous woman

Poisons more deadly than a mad dog's tooth.”

Again, a needlessly emphatic condemnation. But Adriana will not accept the reproof: she will have her husband at all costs. The whole scene discovers personal feeling. Adriana is the portrait that Shakespeare wished to give us of his wife.

The learned commentators have seemingly conspired to say as little about “The Two Gentlemen of Verona” as possible. No one of them identifies the protagonist, Valentine, with Shakespeare, though all of them identified Biron with Shakespeare, and yet Valentine, as we shall see, is a far better portrait of the master than Biron. This untimely blindness of the critics is, evidently, due to the fact that Coleridge has hardly mentioned “The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” and they have consequently been unable to parrot his opinions.

“The Two Gentlemen of Verona” is manifestly a later work than “Love's Labour's Lost”; there is more blank verse and less rhyme in it, and a considerable improvement in character-drawing. Julia, for example, is individualized and lives for us in her affection and jealousy; her talks with her maid Lucetta are taken from life; they are indeed the first sketch of the delightful talks between Portia and Nerissa, and mark an immense advance upon the wordy badinage of the Princess and her ladies in “Love's Labour's Lost,” where there was no attempt at differentiation of character. It seems indubitable to me that “The Two Gentlemen of Verona” is also later than “The Comedy of Errors,” and just as far beyond doubt that it is earlier than “A Midsummer Night's Dream,” in spite of Dr. Furnival's “Trial Table.”

The first three comedies, “Love's Labour's Lost,” “The Comedy of Errors,” and “The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” are all noteworthy for the light they throw on Shakespeare's early life.

In “The Two Gentlemen of Verona” Shakespeare makes similar youthful mistakes in portraiture to those we noticed in “Love's Labour's Lost”; mistakes which show that he is thinking of himself and his own circumstances. At the beginning of the play the only difference between Proteus and Valentine is that one is in love, and the other, heart-free, is leaving home to go to Milan. In this first scene Shakespeare speaks frankly through both Proteus and Valentine, just as he spoke through both the King and Biron in the first scene of “Love's Labour's Lost,” and through both AEgeon and Antipholus of Syracuse in “The Comedy of Errors.” But whilst the circumstances in the earliest comedy are imaginary and fantastic, the circumstances in “The Two Gentlemen of Verona” are manifestly, I think, taken from the poet's own experience. In the dialogue between Valentine and Proteus I hear Shakespeare persuading himself that he should leave Stratford. Some readers may regard this assumption as far-fetched, but it will appear the more plausible, I think, the more the dialogue is studied. Valentine begins the argument: