SHAKESPEARE’S TREATMENT OF LOVE AND MARRIAGE AND OTHER ESSAYS

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SHAKESPEARE’S TREATMENT OF LOVE & MARRIAGE AND OTHER ESSAYS By C. H. HERFORD

HONORARY PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER

T. FISHER UNWIN LTD

LONDON: ADELPHI TERRACE

First published in 1921

(All rights reserved)

TO MY STUDENTS, PAST AND PRESENT, IN THE UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER 1901-1921

PREFACE

THE following essays, mainly concerned with famous and familiar names, are less heterogeneous, and it is hoped less hackneyed, than some of the titles may suggest. They are all occupied ultimately with some aspect of a single problem in what I would call the psychology of poetic experience, did not the phrase imply a scientific rigour of method hardly as yet achieved, in this region, by psychological science itself, and in any case beyond the reach of the present writer. How is the gift of imaginative creation affected by the presence in the same mind of one or other of the spiritual energies which have a different, even an alien, perhaps incompatible, aim or goal; or simply by a bias of ingrained ethical habitudes or ideals? What terms does poetry make with philosophy, or religion, or patriotism, or politics, or love, when one of these is urgent, also, in the mind of a poet? I say ‘terms’ advisedly, for nothing is more certain than that the outcome is determined by a process of give and take. Every complex experience involves a certain compromise

among its disparate or contending factors; a compromise in great part, indeed, involuntary, resulting from the fact that, even in the least[8] integrated personalities, the field of consciousness is a continuous unity, into which no fresh element enters without modifying, and being itself modified by, the rest. In the class of cases with which we are here concerned the modification may be loss or gain, or both together. We think of Dante or Lucretius as great philosophical poets, and many people assume, because there are longueurs in the Paradiso, and tough blocks of versified mechanics in the De Rerum Natura, that these great poets would have produced better poems had they pursued poetry ‘for its own sake.’ What is certain is that, without the passion for truth, without the passionate desire to understand the universe, without, too, the missionary passion to save souls by communicating their own uplifting and fortifying faith, each would have been less occasionally tedious, doubtless, but also would have missed some of those heights in poetry which they

in fact achieved. A chorus of critics denounce the ‘didactic poem,’ and clearly the impulse to instruct is more likely to act as slag than as fuel upon the flame of poetic creation. But the prophet is only the schoolmaster writ large, and vates is one of the oldest names of the poet. Matthew Arnold made fun of the educational theorizing in The Excursion, but no one better understood the grandeur of Wordsworth the prophet, and he and Goethe are doubtless chiefly accountable for the Arnoldian definition of poetry as ‘criticism of life.’

Analogous problems are touched in the essays on Keats and on d’Annunzio. These two very dissimilar poets, both recently invested with topical[9] interest by the hazards of a centenary and of a political adventure, have this in common, that into the life of both came, at a certain moment, an experience of grandeur, which told decisively, though in utterly different ways, upon the scale and contents of their imaginative vision. Keats in 1818 for the first time looked upon ‘grand mountains’ (his own phrase); d’Annunzio, in the early nineties, was captivated by the Nietzschean revelation of the Superman. Upon Keats, the effect, complicated as we know, with other influences, was wholly astringent and bracing; it concurred with the strenuous art of Milton to wean him from the ‘luxury’ of his earlier song and inspire the colossal imaginings of Hyperion. Upon d’Annunzio the effect was less entirely happy. The fiery declamations of the Destroyer (as his Italian disciple called Nietzsche), who aspired to rear an ideally potent and perfect race upon the ruins

of present-day humanity, enlarged his intellectual horizons and quickened his patriotic ambition, but also tinged his thinking and his action, whether as a poet or as a publicist, henceforth, with a megalomania hazardous for him in both capacities.

Shakespeare may seem to offer little foothold for this kind of study, or at least to illustrate aspects of it too familiar to be discussed. No one now imagines him a passionless artist, holding up the mirror to a world in which he had no further concern. He was in any case a devoted lover of his country, and patriotism contributed vitally to the making of one, not the least splendid or memorable, division of his drama. National pride has occasionally impaired the poetry of the English[10] Histories, though the vulgar Joan of Arc scenes in 1 Henry VI be no misdeed of his; it has again and again caught the poet up to towering heights. But in some other, perhaps less obvious, ways Shakespeare’s mentality, as we divine it, seems to stand in a like double relation to his poetry; here tributory and creative, there, if not impairing its quality, limiting its scope. With all his apparent spontaneity, and the thousand unblotted lines which astonished his editors and offended Ben, he was hardly pure poet, hardly ‘of imagination all compact’; the man of ‘sovran alchemy’ had his share

of the still untransmuted stuff. His poetry, compared with Spenser’s or Shelley’s, is in intimate touch with fact, far richer and deeper than theirs, but also nearer to the temper which is the negation of poetry. His glorious humanity is not without preferences and exclusions; and these are largely of a kind which he shares with the respectable citizen rather than with the finer and rarer spirits. He has not Browning’s taste for eccentric or exceptional types, his interest is not on the dangerous edge of things; and if each of his great creations is in some sense unique, they are rich beyond all others in traits which make them seem our kin. He unmistakably prefers order to turmoil; ‘degree, priority and place’ to the romance and heroics of revolution; observance of custom, other things being the same, to the breach of it; the normal to the irregular. His temperament was thus of a type which has affinities with some great and with some less estimable things: it is allied on the one side to the noble harmonies and symmetries of classical art, on the other to unreflecting[11]

habit and dull routine. It is the aim of the opening essay to trace the effects of what I may then call Shakespeare’s bias for normality in a single sphere of his art—his treatment of Love and Marriage. His ideal of love is a state in which passion and sense and intellect are united in happy balance, and we owe to it a series of creations of incomparable loveliness, from Rosalind and Portia to Imogen and Perdita. But it is plain that Shakespeare has sounded only a few notes of the gamut of love poetry. He gives us a few exquisite simple melodies; he rarely hints its complex music, the difficult harmonies extorted from dissonance and conflict. He rather conspicuously avoids, save for special dramatic purposes, irregular, illicit, or criminal passion. It is not merely accident or stage fashion that has prevented our having from Shakespeare more than occasional approximations to a Vittoria Corombona or a Francesca da Rimini, a Gretchen or a Rebekka West.

The fifth essay, finally, asks a question which may appear futile, or academic, but at least arises very naturally for the student in this field. Does the creative activity of poetry, so readily fed and fanned, or obstructed and impaired, by philosophical or religious preoccupation, itself react upon the poet’s beliefs, his outlook upon the world, in any definable way? We may be inclined to reply, with the young Tennyson, that the poet stands apart from beliefs, ‘holding no form of creed, but contemplating all’; or to object, on the contrary, that poets are the most sensitive of men, apt to be rather less than others exempt from subjection to the idols of their place and time. Certainly there[12] is no ‘poet’s creed.’ But there may be a common bent or bias which poetic creation tends to impress upon creeds and convictions otherwise derived; and a survey of the modifications actually undergone by philosophies and theologies in the crucible of poetry suggests that this bent will be towards the faith which, in one guise or another, exalts the

place and function of spirit in the universe, and in the last resort finds in spiritual energy the heart of reality.

I desire to express my acknowledgments to the Council of the British Academy, for permission to reprint the fifth Essay; to the Keats’ Memorial Committee, for permission to reprint the third; to the Council of the Rylands Library, for permission to reprint the second and fourth; and to the proprietors of Edda (Christiania) for permission to reprint the first. Most of them have been extensively revised and in part re-written for the present volume. I am indebted to my colleagues, Prof. E. Gardner and Signor A. Valgimigli, for kindly reading the fourth essay. Neither is in any way responsible for the opinions expressed. The translations throughout the volume, unless the contrary is stated, are original.

[13]

I SHAKESPEARE’S TREATMENT OF LOVE AND MARRIAGE

[17]

I

SHAKESPEARE’S TREATMENT OF LOVE AND MARRIAGE

THE Shakesperean world is impressed, as a whole, with an unmistakable joy in healthy living. This tells habitually as a pervading spirit, a contagious temper, not as a creed put forward, or an example set up. It is as clear in the presentment of Falstaff or Iago, as of Horatio or Imogen. And nowhere is it clearer than in his handling of the relations between men and women. For here Shakespeare’s preferences and repugnances are unusually transparent; what pleased him in the ways of lovers and wedded folks he drew again and again, and what repelled him he rarely and only for special reasons drew at all. Criminal love, of any kind, holds a quite subordinate place in his art; and, on the other hand, if ideal figures are to be found there, it is among his devoted, passionate, but arch and joyous women.

It is thus possible to lay down a Shakesperean norm or ideal type of love-relations. It is most distinct in the mature Comedies, where he is shaping his image of life with serene freedom; but also in the Tragedies, where a Portia or a Desdemona innocently perishes in the web of death. Even in[18] the Histories it occasionally asserts itself (as in Richard II’s devoted queen, historically a mere child) against the stress of recorded fact. In the earlier Comedies it is approached through various stages of erratic or imperfect forms. And both in Comedy and Tragedy he makes use, though not largely, of other than the ‘normal’ love for definitely comic or tragic ends.

The present study will follow the plan thus indicated. The first section defines the ‘norm.’ The second describes the kinds of appeal and effect, in Comedy and Tragedy, to which the drama of ‘normal’ love lent itself. The third traces the gradual approach to the norm in the early Comedies. The fourth and fifth sections, finally, discuss the treatment, in Comedy and Tragedy, of Love-types other than the norm.

I

The Shakesperean norm of love,[1] thus understood, may be described somewhat as follows. Love is a passion, kindling heart, brain, and senses alike in natural and happy proportions; ardent but not sensual, tender but not sentimental, pure but not ascetic, moral but not puritanic, joyous but not frivolous, mirthful and witty but not cynical. His lovers look forward to marriage as a matter of course, and they neither anticipate its rights nor turn their affections elsewhere. They commonly love at first sight and once for all. Love-relations which do not contemplate marriage occur rarely and in subordination to other dramatic[19] purposes. Tragedy like that of Gretchen does not attract him. Romeo’s amour with Rosalind is a mere foil to his greater passion, Cassio’s with Bianca merely a mesh in the network of Iago’s intrigue; Claudio’s with Juliet is the indispensable condition of the plot. The course of love rarely runs smooth; but rival suitors proposed by parents are quietly resisted or merrily abused, never, even by the gentlest, accepted. Crude young girls like

Hermia, delicate-minded women like Desdemona and Imogen, the rapturous Juliet and the homely Anne Page, the discreet Silvia and the naïve Miranda, are all at one on this point. And they all carry the day. The dramatically powerful situations which arise from forced marriage—as when Ford’s Penthea (The Broken Heart) or Corneille’s Chimène (Le Cid) is torn by the conflict between love and honour—lie, like this conflict in general, outside Shakespeare’s chosen field. And with this security of possession his loving women combine a capacity for mirth and jest not usual in the dramatic representation of passion. Rosalind is more intimately Shakesperean than Juliet.

Married life, as Shakespeare habitually represents it, is the counterpart, mutatis mutandis, of his representation of unmarried lovers. His husbands and wives have less of youthful abandon; they rarely speak of love, and still more rarely with lyric ardour, or coruscations of poetic wit. But they are no less true. The immense field of dramatic motives based upon infringements of marriage, so fertile in the hands of his successors, and in most other schools of drama, did not attract Shakespeare, and he touched it only occasionally and for particular[20] purposes. Heroines like Fletcher’s Evadne (A Maid’s Tragedy), who marries a nominal husband to screen her guilty relations with the King, or Webster’s Vittoria Corombona (The White Devil), who conspires with her lover to murder her husband, or Chapman’s Tamyra (Bussy d’Ambois), whose husband kills her lover in her chamber; even Heywood’s erring wife, whom her husband elects to ‘kill with kindness,’ are definitely un-Shakesperean.

II

The norm of love lent itself both to comic and to tragic situation, but only within somewhat narrow limits. The richness, depth and constancy of the passion precluded a whole world of comic effects. It precluded the comedy of the coquette and the prude, of the affected gallant and the cynical roué, of the calf-lover and the doting husband; the comedy of the fantastic tricks played by love under the obsession of pride, self-interest, meticulous scruple, or superstition. Into this field Shakespeare made brilliant incursions, but it hardly engaged his rarest powers, and to large parts of it his ‘universal’ genius remained strange. We have only to recall, among a crowd of other examples, Moreto’s Diana (El Desden con el Desden), Molière’s Alceste and Célimène, Congreve’s Millamant, in Shakespeare’s century; or, in the modern novel, a long line of figures from Jane Austen to The Egoist and Ibsen’s Love’s Comedy—to recognize that Shakespeare, with all the beauty, wit and charm of his work, touched only the fringes of the Comedy of love.

[21]

The normal love, not being itself ridiculous, could thus yield material for the comic spirit only through some fact or situation external to it. It may be brought before us only in ludicrous parody. We laugh at the ‘true love’ of Pyramus and Thisbe in the ‘tedious brief’ play of the Athenian artisans, or at that of Phœbe and Silvius, because Shakespeare is chaffing the literary pastoral of his day. Hamlet’s love, itself moving, even tragic, becomes a source of comedy in the solemn analysis of Polonius. Or again, the source of fun lies in the wit and humour of the lovers themselves. Some of them, like Rosalind and Beatrice, virtually create and sustain the wit-fraught atmosphere of the play single-handed. But Shakespeare habitually heightens this source of fun by some piquancy of situation—almost always one arising from delusion, particularly through confusion of identity. It is a mark of the easy-going habits of his art in comedy that he never threw aside this rather elementary device, though subjecting it, no doubt, to successive

refinements which become palpable enough when we pass from the Two Gentlemen to Cymbeline. But his genius made perennially delightful even the crude forms of confusion which create grotesque infatuations like those of Titania, Malvolio, Phœbe, Olivia. More refined, and yet more delightful, are the confusions which bring true and destined lovers together, like the arch make-believe courtship with which Rosalind’s wit amuses and consoles her womanhood, and that other which liberates the natural congeniality of Beatrice and Benedict from their ‘merry war.’ In cases like[22] these, Shakespeare’s humour has the richer and finer effluence which derives from a hidden ground of passion or tears. Rosalind’s wit is that of a woman many fathoms deep in love; Beatrice’s ears tingle with remorse at the tale of Benedick’s secret attachment; Viola’s gallant bravado to Olivia conceals her own unspoken maiden love. And Portia crowns her home-coming to her husband and her splendid service to his friend with the madcap jest of the rings. Such jesting is in

Shakespeare a part of the language of love; and like its serious or lyrical speech, is addressed with predilection to love’s object.

Again, the normal love offered in itself equally little promise of tragedy. No deformed or morbid passion, but the healthy and natural self-fulfilment of man and woman, calling heart and wit and senses alike into vigorous play, it provided equally little hold for the criminal erotics in which most of Shakespeare’s contemporaries sought the tragic thrill, and for the bitter disenchantment and emotional decay which generate the subtle tragedy of Anna Karénina or Modern Love. Tragic these healthy lovers of themselves will never become; they have to be led into the realm of pity and fear, as into that of laughter and mirth, by the incitement or the onthrust of alien forces. Here, too, Shakespeare’s habitual instrument is delusion; only now it is not the delusion which deftly entangles and pleasantly infatuates, but that which horribly perplexes and rends apart. The blindness, of Claudio, of Othello, of Posthumus, of Leontes, is provoked by circumstances of very various cogency, but in each case it wrecks a love relation[23] in which we are allowed to see no flaw. The

situation of innocent, slandered, heart-stricken womanhood clearly appealed strongly to him, and against his wont he repeated it again and again. Even after leaving the stage, he was allured by the likeness of the story of Henry VIII’s slandered queen to his Hermione, to reopen the magic ‘book’ he had ‘drowned.’ He was no sentimentalist; his pathos is never morbid; but it is in imagining souls of texture fine and pure enough to be wrought upon to the most piteous extreme by slander from the man they love, that Shakespeare found most of his loveliest and most authentically Shakesperean characters of women. Hermione and Hero, Desdemona and Imogen, are to his graver art what Rosalind and Beatrice and Portia are to his comedy.