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Part XI.—The Approach of Tragedy'

By Hamilton W. Mabie

ITH the advent of the seventeenth century, Shakespeare entered the greatest period of his life as an artist-the period of the Tragedies. During eight eventful years he was brooding over the deepest problems of human experience, and facing, with searching and unfaltering gaze, the darkest aspects of life. That this absorption in themes which bore their fruit in the Tragedies was due primarily to a prolonged crisis in his own spiritual life is rendered practically certain by the persistence of the somber mood, by the poet's evident sensitiveness to and dependence upon conditions and experience, and by a series of facts of tragical import in the lives of some of his friends. His development in thought and art was so evidently one of definite progression, of the deepening of feeling and broadening of vision through the unfolding of his nature, that it is impossible to dissociate the marked change of mood which came over him about 1600 from events which touched and searched his own spirit.

Until about 1595 Shakespeare had been serving his apprenticeship by doing work which was to a considerable extent imitative, and to a larger extent experimental; he had tried his hand at several kinds of writing, and had revealed unusual power of observation, astonishing dexterity of mind, and signal skill in making the traditional characters of the drama live before the eyes and in the imagination of the theater-goers who made up his earliest constituency. From about 1594 to 1600 he had grown into harmonious and vital relations with his age, he had disclosed poetic genius of a very high order, and he had gone far in his education as a dramatist. He had written the Sonnets, and he had created Portia, Beatrice, Rosalind, Juliet, Romeo, Mercutio, Benedict, Henry V., Falstaff, Shylock, Hotspur, and Dogberry. If he had died in 1600, his place would have been secure.

1 Copyright, 1900, by Hamilton W. Mabię.

utation was firmly established, and he had won the hearts of his contemporaries by the charm of his nature no less than by the fascination of his genius.

His serenity, poise, and sweetness are evidenced not only by his work but by the representations of his face which remain. Of these the bust in the chancel of Holy Trinity Church at Stratford, made by Gerard Jonson, a native of Amsterdam, and a stone-mason of Southwark in the poet's time, and the Droeshout portrait, which appeared on the title-page of the First Folio edition of the poet's works, issued in 1623, were accepted by his friends and contemporaries, and must present at least a general resemblance to the poet's features. They are so crude in execution that they cannot do justice to the finer lines of structure or to the delicacy of coloring of Shakespeare's face and head, but they make the type sufficiently clear. They represent a face of singular harmony and regularity of feature, crowned by a noble and finely proportioned head. The eyes were hazel in color, the hair auburn; the expression, deeply meditative and kindly, was that of a man of thoughtful temper, genial nature, and thorough selfcontrol. In figure Shakespeare was of medium stature and compactly built.

It is significant that, after the first outburst of jealousy of the young dramatist's growing popularity in Greene's "A Groatsworth of Wit Bought with a Million of Repentance," the expressions of Shakespeare's contemporaries indicate unusual warmth of personal regard, culminating in a magnificent eulogy from his greatest rival, and one who had reason to fear him most.

That he was of a social disposition, and met men easily and on pleasant terms, is evident from the extraordinary range. of his knowledge of men and manners in the taverns of his time-those predecessors of the modern club. That he enHis rep-joyed the society of men of his own craft is evident both from his own disposition

and from the fact that he stood so distinctly outside the literary and theatrical quarrels of his time. The tradition which associates him with the Mermaid Tavern which stood in Bread Street, not far from Milton's birthplace, is entirely credible. There he would have found many of the most brilliant men of his time. Beaumont's well-known description inclines one to believe that under no roof in England has better talk been heard:

What things have we seen Done at the Mermaid? heard words that have been

So nimble and so full of subtle flame,
As if that every one from whence they came
Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest,
And had resolved to live a fool the rest
Of his dull life.

The age was eminently social in instinct and habit; society, in the modern sense of the word, was taking shape; and men found great attraction in the easy intercourse and frank speech of tavern meetings. Writing much later, but undoubt edly reporting the impression of Shakespeare's contemporaries, Thomas Fuller says, in his "Worthies :" "Which two I beheld like a Spanish great gallion and an English man-of-war: Master Johnson (like the former) was built far higher up in learning; solid, but slow in his performances. Shake-spear, with the English man-of-war, lesser in bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about, and take advantage of all winds, by the quickness of his wit and invention."

At the end of the sixteenth century Shakespeare was on the flood-tide of a prosperous life; at the very beginning of the seventeenth century a deep and significant change came over his spirit. In external affairs his fortunes rose steadily until his death; but in his spiritual life momentous experiences changed for a time the current of his thought, and clouded the serene skies in the light of which nature had been so radiant and life so absorbingly interesting to him. While it is highly improbable that the sonnets record in chronological order two deep and searching emotional experiences, the autobiographic note in them is unmistakable; it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that they express, if they do not literally report, a prolonged emotional experience culminating in a crisis which shook the very bases of his nature; which brought him

in the beginning an intense and passionate joy, slowly dissolving into a great and bitter agony of spirit; and issuing at last, through the moralization of a searching insight, in a larger and deeper harmony with the order of life. This experience, in which friendship and love contended for supremacy in his soul; in which he entered into a new and humiliating consciousness of weakness in his own spirit, and in which he knew, apparently for the first time, that bitterness of disenchantment and disillusion which to a nature of such sensitiveness and emotional capacity as his is the bitterest cup ever held to the lips, found him gay, light-hearted, buoyant, full of a creative energy, and radiant with the charm and the dreams of youth; it left him saddened in spirit, burdened with the consciousness of weakness, face to face with those tragic collisions which seem at times to disclose the play of the irony of fate, but out of which, in agony and apparent defeat, the larger and more inclusive harmony of the individual with the divine and the human order of society is secured and disclosed.

Shakespeare drank deep of the cup of suffering before he set in the order of art, with a hand at once stern and tender, the colossal sorrows of his kind. Like all artists of the deepest insight, the keenest sensitiveness to beauty, and that subtle and elusive but magical spiritual sympathy which we call genius, which puts its possessor in command of the secret experience of his kind, Shakespeare's art waited upon his experience for its full capacity of thought and feeling, and touched its highest points of achievement only when his own spirit had sounded the depths of self-knowledge and of selfsurrender. In the great Tragedies life and art are so completely merged that they are no longer separable in thought; these dramas disclose the ultimate harmony between spirit and form.

This searching inward experience was contemporaneous in Shakespeare's life at the beginning of the seventeenth century with fierce dissensions between his personal friends in his own profession, with growing bitterness of feeling and sharper antagonism between the two great parties in England, and with a gradual but unmistakable overshadowing of the splendors of the "spacious days of great Elizabeth."

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What is known as "The War of the Theaters" was at its height between 1598 and 1602; the chief combatants being Ben Jonson on one side, and Dekker and Marston on the other; the weapons of warfare, satirical plays. Thirteen or fourteen dramas are enumerated as having their origin in the antagonism between the rival playwrights, the best known and most important of these plays being Jonson's striking and characteristic comedy "Every Man in His Humour," and his "Poetaster." Dekker's "Satiromastix and Marston's "What You Will " chiefly interesting as forming part of the record of this vociferous war, and “The Return from Parnassus on account of one interesting but obscure reference to Shakespeare which it contains: "Few of the University pen plaies well, they smell too much of that writer Ovid, and that writer Metamorphosis, and talke too much of Proserpina and Juppiter. Why, heres our fellow Shakespeare puts them all downe, I and Ben Jonson too. O, that Ben Jonson is a pestilent fellow, he brought up Horace giving the Poets a pill, but our fellow Shakespeare hath given him a purge that made him beray his credit." These words were put into the mouth of the actor Kempe and spoken to the well-known actor Burbage, and Mr. Ward suggests that their meaning may be put into plain speech: "Our fellow, Shakespeare, aye, and Ben Jonson, too, puts down all the university play-writers."

The reference to a purge administered by Shakespeare to Jonson has led to much speculation regarding Shakespeare's part in this professional quarrel, and "Troilus and Cressida" has sometimes been placed among the plays which contributed either light or heat to the discussion; many of Shakespeare's characters have been identified by different critics with the leading combatants and with others among his contemporaries; in no case, however, has any speculation in this field secured a proper basis of proof. This very fact, taken in connection with Shakespeare's long and cordial relations with Jonson, make it more than probable that the dramatist stood outside the arena, maintaining a friendly attitude toward both parties to the strife.

The relations between Jonson and Shakespeare are in the highest degree

creditable to both; but it is probable that Shakespeare's sweetness of nature was the chief element in holding them on so high a plane. By gifts, temperament, difference of early opportunity, methods of work, conceptions of art, the two were for many years rivals for supremacy in the playwright's field. The contrast between them could hardly have been more marked. Jonson was nine years the junior of Shakespeare, having been born in 1573. His grandfather had been a clergyman, and he was the descendant of men of gentle blood. He was city born and bred; at Westminster he came under the teaching of a man of great learning, William Camden, who made him a student and put the stamp of the scholar on his mind. He became a devout lover of the classics and a patient and thorough intellectual worker. Poverty forced him to work with his hands for a time, and when the War of the Theaters was at its height, his antagonists did not hesitate to remind him that he had been a bricklayer in his stepfather's employ. From this uncongenial occupation he found escape by taking service in the Netherlands, where he proved his courage by at least one notable exploit. He returned to London, and married at about the age at which Shakespeare took the same important step. He was a loyal and affectionate father, and a constant if not an adoring husband; he described his wife many years after his marriage as "a shrew, yet honest."

Like Shakespeare, he turned to the theater as a means of support; appeared as an actor; revised and, in part, rewrote older plays; collaborated with other playwrights. He lacked the faculty of adaptation, the capacity for practical affairs, and the personal charm which made Shakespeare successful as a man of business; but, through persistent and intelligent work, he placed himself at the head of his profession.

He was of massive build; his face strong rather than sensitive or expressive; his mind vigorous, orderly, and logical, rather than creative, vital, and spontaneous; he was, by instinct, habit, and conviction, a scholar; saturated with the classical spirit, absolutely convinced of the fixed and final value of the classical conceptions and methods in art; with a

touch of the scholar's contempt for inaccuracy, grace, ease, flexibility. He was a poet by intention, as Shakespeare was a poet by nature; a follower and expounder of the classic tradition, as Shakespeare was essentially a romanticist; he achieved with labor what Shakespeare seemed to accomplish by magic; he wrought out his . plots with the most scrupulous care for unity and consistency, while Shakespeare appeared to take whatever material came to hand with easy-going indifference to the niceties of craftsmanship. To a man of Jonson's rugged and somewhat somber temper, the success and love which Shakespeare evoked with such ease must have seemed out of proportion to his desert; while Shakespeare's methods of work must have seemed to him fundamentally defective and superficial. It was a case of great dramatic intelligence matched against great dramatic genius. When it is remembered that the two men were working in the same field and for the same audience, the intensity of their rivalry, and the provocations to jealousy and ill feeling which would naturally rise out of it, become very clear.

Shakespeare's generous nature, rein forced by his breadth of vision, apparently kept him free all his life from any touch of professional jealousy or animosity. Jonson saw his rival pass him in the race for popular favor, and could hardly have been blind to the fact that Shakespeare distinctly distanced him in artistic achievement. He was a conscientious man, standing loyally for the ideals of his art; he was a scholar, to whom accuracy in every detail was a matter of artistic morals; but as the immense vitality of the age seemed to penetrate to the very source of his massive intellect and lift it above its laborious methods of work into the region of art, and to turn its painstaking patience into lyrical ease and grace, so Jonson's essential integrity of nature and largeness of mind forced upon him a recognition of his rival's greatness. It is true he sometimes criticised Shakespeare; he commented sharply on certain passages in "Julius Cæsar," where Shakespeare was on his own ground; he declared that Shakespeare had "small Latine and less Greek;" that he "wanted art;" that he ought to have "blotted a thousand" lines; that he had an excellent fancy; brave

notions and gentle expressions; wherein he flowed with that facility that sometimes it was necessary he should be stopped;" but all these adverse opinions, for which there was, from Jonson's point of view, substantial ground, fall into true perspective and are evidences of discriminating judgment rather than uncritical eulogy when the passage in which they stand is taken in its entirety, to say nothing of the noble lines which appear in the First Folio. "I loved the man," wrote Jonson, "and do honor his memory, on this side idolatry, as much as any. He was indeed honest, and of an open and free nature; had an excellent fancy; brave notions and gentle expressions. There was more in him to be praised than pardoned."

That there were occasional outbursts of impatience with Shakespeare's ease, spontaneity, and indifference to the taste and standards of men who were primarily scholars and only secondarily poets, is highly probable; it could hardly have been otherwise. To men of plodding temper, of methodical habits of work, of trained faculties rather than of force and freedom of imagination, the facility of the man of genius often seems not quite normal and sound; it is incomprehensible to them, and therefore they regard it with a certain suspicion. It is greatly to Jonson's credit, when his temper and circumstances are taken into account, that he judged Shakespeare so fairly and recognized his genius so frankly.

There is good reason to believe that Shakespeare kept aloof from the professional quarrels of his time among his fellow-craftsmen, and that he was a kind of peacemaker among them; his kindliness went far to disarm the hostility of those who differed with him most widely on fundamental questions of art. It is an open question, which has been discussed with ability on both sides, whether Jonson had Shakespeare in mind in a striking passage in "The Poetaster;" it is quite certain that he could hardly have described Shakespeare's genius more aptly: His learning savours not the school-like glass That most consists in echoing words and terms,

And soonest wins a man an empty name;
Nor any long or far-fetch'd circumstance

Wrapp'd in the curious generalities of arts,
By a direct and analytic sum

Of all the worth and first effects of art.
And for his poesy, 'tis so ramm'd with life,
That it shall gather strength of life, with being,

And live hereafter more admired than now.

Deeper matters than occasional references to his lack of scholarship, and sharp antagonisms among the men with whom he worked and among whom he lived, pressed on Shakespeare's mind and heart in the opening years of the seventeenth century. The reign of Elizabeth was drawing to its close, under a sky full of ominous signs. The splendor of the earlier years, which has given the reign a place among the most magnificent epochs in the annals of royalty, had suffered, not an eclipse, but a slow clouding of the sky, a visible fading of the day. The Queen had become an old and exacting woman, craving a love which she knew was not given her, and an admiration which she could no longer evoke. She still held her place, but she understood how eagerly many who surrounded her with service and protestations of devotion were waiting for the end and the chances of promotion in a new court. While they were praising her immortal youth they were writing to James in Scotland that she was aging rapidly and that the end was at hand. There were faces, too, that must have been missed by the lonely sovereign as she looked about her. When she signed the death-warrant of Essex, she ended the career of one of the most brilliant men of the age, and of one of her most devoted servants. Southampton was sentenced to death at the same time, but his sentence was commuted to imprisonment for life. The people firmly believed in Essex's innocence of any designs upon the Queen, and her haughty refusal to listen to the pleas made in his behalf turned their hearts against her. The Earl of Southampton was not a man of sound judgment or of cool temper; but there were in him a generosity of spirit, a loyalty to his friends, and a charm of temper and manners which bound men to his person and his fortunes.

Through him there is every reason to believe that Shakespeare was drawn into close relations with Essex, who was, like Southampton, a man who lacked the qualities of character necessary for success in a period of conflicting movements and sharp antagonistic influences, but who

had a winning personality. In the prologue to the fifth act of "Henry V." Shakespeare made an unmistakable allu

sion to Essex, and one which showed how near Southampton's friend was to his heart:

Were now the general of our gracious empress,
As in good time he may, from Ireland coming,
Bringing rebellion broached on his sword,
How many would the peaceful city quit
To welcome him!

Later, when the plot against the ruling party at the court was on the point of execution, the play of "Richard II." was put on the stage of the Globe Theater and elsewhere for the purpose of awakening and giving direction to popular indignation against the men about the Queen. It is probable that the play produced under these circumstances, and at the instigation of the organizers of the ill-fated enterprise, was Shakespeare's well-known drama. This play never had the approval of the Queen, who disliked its theme. There is no evidence beyond this fact to connect Shakespeare with the plot which sent Essex to the block. It is highly improbable that so rash an enterprise would have secured his support. It was not necessary that he should follow Essex's fortunes in order to love him.

Deficient in strength and ability both as a soldier and a politician, Essex knew how to charm not only the crowd but those who stood near him. His face has that touch of distinction which is far more captivating than many more solid qualities. He had the gracious air of a benefactor; there was an atmosphere of romance and adventure about him; he was a lover of the arts and the friend and patron of writers, who recognized and rewarded his generosity in a flood of dedications full of melodious praise. The temper of the age was personified in these two ardent, passionate, adventurous, brilliant personalities far more truly than in many men of cooler temper and more calculating spirit. It is significant that the representative men of the Elizabethan period rarely husbanded the fruits of their genius and perils; they lived too much in the imagination to secure those substantial gains which men of lesser ability but greater prudence laid up for themselves. Drake, Raleigh, Sidney, Essex, Spenser, were splendid spenders of energy, time,

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