A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, forward by John Bayley, Penguin Books, London, 1991
Bradley… He talks about Shakespeare and Shakespeare’s character as if he were discussing friends or colleagues, or the people he has met with in a memorable novel. (Forward, 1)
The plays…[for Bradley’s readership] came, of course, as dramatic experiences to read, and to read about, rather than as something to be seen in the theatre. (2)
Shakespeare, like the novel, was a reading experience, for only the reader could assay and estimate the full potentiality of the drama, even though Bradely was keenly interested in ways in which the actos of his own or an earlier time interpreted a part. (2)
Together with debate on such details goes an inconspicuous but meticulous sholarship on textual matters. But Bradley clearly felt that the place for these things was in notes rather than in the mainstream of his expository narrative. If the drama should be experienced like a novel, so, in a sense, should be his commentary on it. / Drama is not necessarily a matter for the theatre. (2)
Shakespeare, it would now be seen, reached across the centuries to inform and inspire the genre of the novel at its most developed and its most sophisticated. Drama and fiction could be seen as the same process, read by the same light, without need for the artificial claims of the theatre. / For the theatre could only simplify, and it was of the essence of the Shakespearean drama, as of the novel, both to naturalize and to complicate. (3)
…many Shakespearean critics who have reacted against him, and who have come to patronize his approach to Shakespeare, and especially his preoccupation about questions of ‘character’. To [3] them this is mostly a fuss about nothing, since the play is a piece of mechanism for the theatre, spatially determined by its own enactment, rather than a continuous event in imagined time, a complex life accompanying us through our own lives. As a piece of immediate mechanism, to be manipulated in each performance by a director, the play has no room for the thought that Cordelia actually had to grow up with those two awful sisters, nor for the question of whether the Macbeths had children once, … (3-4)
Macbeth says to Banquo, ‘Fail not our feast’, and he replies, ‘My lord, I will not.’ Nor does he, but, as Bradley points out, ‘the irony would escape an audience ignorant of the story watching the play for the first time,’ which indicates ‘that Shakespeare did not write solely for immediate stage purposes’. (4)
Deconstructionist theories of literature today proclaim the disappearance of the author, the ways in which a work of art becomes our reception to it. Bradley, in a sense, had suggested this too; but without any deployment of a theory whose vocabulary is bound to distance itself from the work under construction. (6)
Although Roland Barthes and the critics who followed him would not have know about Bradley he is their precursor none the less. (6)
Pushkin, for example, who learned much from a cursory reading of Shakespeare’s plays in a French translation, observed in a letter that Shakespeare was never afraid to ‘compromise’ his characters; by which he meant that they don’t necessarily act in accordance with the requirements of the part. Shylock, for instance, is a devoted though tyrannical father, a man of powerful emotions and strong latent personality which may at a crisis prevent him from acting in his own best interests. (7)
…like any cultivated novel-reader at the end of the nineteenth century Bradley took it [the potential of a contrast between the inside and outside of a character] for granted and responded to it almost without conscious awareness. This is shown by the great interest he takes in the character of Iago, the extreme example in Shakespearean, or any other, art… (8)
Shakespearean dualism, moreover, may present itself to modern critics and directors in a different way than it did to Bradley. They have made us familiar with the notion that, for example, Othello and King Lear can appear in a ridiculous light as well as seeming tragic and moving. The tragic hero can also be the tragic fool, egoist, self-deceiver. To a contemporary audience Lear may [9] be presented as an imbecile father, Othello as a pathetic buffoon. / That was not how Bradley saw the working of Shakespearean tragedy. He was fascinated by Iago because … ‘finally, he is not simply a man of action; he is an artist’. An artist in lies and deceptions, but at the same time (Bradley here is quoting Swinburne) ‘the very subtlest and strongest component of his complex nature is the instinct of … an inarticulate poet’. He ‘broods over his plot … gradually seeing it develop and clarify as he works upon it or lets it work. Here at any rate Shakespeare put a good deal of himself with Iago. But the tragedian in real life was not the equal of the tragic poet…And so his catastrophe came out wrong, and his piece was ruined.’ …Bradley was the first person to see that Othello could indeed be called the tragedy of an artist, and to infer that in all Shakespearean tragedy—most notably in Hamlet too—the idea of tragedy itself is closely linked with a consciousness which records and structures its progress. …The special feature of Iago is that he himself is entirely responsible for organizing and orchestrating the tragedy, and thus he can claim a special place, close to Shakespeare himself. Shakespeare knew that ‘the truest poetry is the most feigning’, that lies and deception are the artist’s stock in trade; and there is therefore a grim irony in his portrait of the artist as a man as cold, as gross, and as alienating as Iago. However different in spirit, Shakespeare’s own sonnets have something of the quality of Iago’s soliloquies—a weaving of plots and possibilities in relation to the desires and the drama of the self—and the ‘I am that I am’ of Sonnet 121 is the cousin of Iago’s reflections on his own being and unawareness—‘I am not what I am’. (9-10)
And yet for some later critics his analysis of Othello is precisely the weak spot in the structure of Bradley’s technique. F. R. Leavis was especially contemptuous of it, … took essentially the same view of Shakespeare’s art as Bradley did himself—the interest, that is to say, of a novel-reader concerned with Shakespeare as a psychologist and delineator of character in action. In his essay ‘The Sentimentalist’s Othello’, which appeared in Scrutiny in 1938, Leavis exactly reverses Bradley’s view of the play’s dynamic. For him it is not the inner nature of Iago which is under the microscope; it is that of Othello himself. Othello is portrayed by Shakespeare… as… a man who… in an unfamiliar emotional crisis can only reveal just how inadequate are his true resources of mind and temper. He has no sense of others, no understanding, sympathy or compassion; he has devoted himself solely to impressing his employers with his undeniable skill and energy in the art of war. …and Iago, so far [12] from being a figure of consummate evil and guile, is a coarse, ill-natured person who happens to have ‘rumbled’ his general’s real weakness, and cannot resist demonstrating it to all the world. / Such an Othello… arises, of course, from Shakespeare’s greatest strength as a dramatist: the freedom of being which Maurice Morgann long ago perceived in the figure of Falstaff…Dramatically Othello must be vulnerable to Iago because utterly unlike him. But there is no such graphic contrast in the original story, and Shakespeare’s Othello, too, may have the freedom to be not what he seems. Which of us are, after all? (12-13)
If Bradely’s is an ‘Oxford’ Othello, dating from the pre-war days and from the home of lost causes, Leavis’s is decidedly a ‘Cambridge’ Othello, as revealed in the critical moral atmosphere and the bleak climate of post-war disillusionment. …Leavis’s scorn for heroism in war and romance in love, instead of feeling obvious admiration for them. (14)
Bradley’s lectures on King Lear are his weakest, because the play’s overpowering dimension hardly lends itself to his rational and conversational approach. To speculate about Cordelia’s childhood, for instance, is less relevant than it would be in the case of any other Shakespearean character, because Shakespeare has taken good care to remove from Cordelia any compromising trace of human ordinariness, and he presents her to us as a ‘character’ as little as he can. (16)
Where Bradley scorns is in his sense of Shakespeare’s instinctive seizure of a character, a process entirely different from that whereby a writer, in any spirit, makes a study of character. We cannot believe that Othello is a deliberate study by Shakespeare of egoism in action, just as we do not believe him to be study of a racial type. (16)
The drawback, by contrast, of Wilson Knight’s ‘spatial’ view is that it presents each play as self-sufficient, self-enclosed in its own aesthetic continuum. In that marvelous construct there is no room or relevancy for the thought that Cordelia was a little girl once, playing with her sisters. (17)
Romeo and Juliet, for instance, is a pure tragedy, but it is an early work, and in some respects an immature one. Richard III and Richard II, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus are tragic histories or historical tragedies, in which Shakespeare acknowledged in practice a certain obligation to follow his authority, even when that authority offered him an undramatic material. (Introduction, 21)
We cannot arrive at Shakespeare’s whole dramatic way of looking at the world from his tragedies alone, as we can arrive at Milton’s way of regarding things, or at Wordsworth’s or at Shelley’s, by examining almost any one of their important works. Speaking very broadly, one may say that these poets at their best always look at things in one light; but Hamlet and Henry IV and Cymbeline reflect things from quite distinct positions, and Shakespeare’s whole dramatic view is not to be identified with any one of these reflections. And, in the second place, … we cannot be sure, as with those other poets we can, that in his works he expressed his deepest and most cherished convictions on ultimate questions, or even that he had any. (The Substance of Shakespearean Tragedy, 24)
…no play at the end of which the hero remains alive is, in the full Shakespearean sense, a tragedy; and we no longer class Troilus and Cressida or Cymbeline as such, as did the editors of the Folio. (25)
[Chaucer’s] Monk’s Tale is… A total reverse of fortune, coming unawares upon a man who ‘stood in high degree’, happy and apparently secure—such was the tragic fact to the medieval mind. … It frightened men and awed them. It made them feel that man is blind and helpless, the plaything of an inscrutable power, called by the name of Fortune or some other name— … (26)
The ‘story’ or ‘action’ of a Shakespearean tragedy does not consist, of course, solely of human actions or deeds; but the deeds are the predominant factor. And these deeds are, for the most part, actions in the full sense of the word; not things done ‘ ’tween asleep and wake’, but acts or omissions thoroughly expressive of the doer—characteristic deeds. The centre of the tragedy, therefore, may be said with equal truth to lie in action issuing form character, or in character issuing in action. / Shakespeare’s main interest lay here. (29)
It is possible to find places where he has given a certain indulgence to his love of poetry, and even to his turn for general reflections; but it would be very difficult, and in his later tragedies perhaps impossible, to detect passages where he has allowed such freedom to the interest in character apart from action. But for the opposite extreme, for the abstraction of mere ‘plot’ (which is a very different thing from tragic ‘action’), for the kind of interest which predominates in a novel like The Woman in White, it is clear that he cared even less. (29)
[what elements are to be found in the ‘story’ or ‘action’, occasionally or frequently, beside the characteristic deeds, and the sufferings and circumstances, of the person.] … (a) Shakespeare, occasionally and for reasons which need not be discussed here, represents abnormal conditions of mind; insanity, for example, somnambulism, hallucinations. And deeds issuing from these are certainly not what we call deeds in the fullest sense, deeds expressive of character. No; but these abnormal conditions are never introduced as the origins of deeds of any dramatic moment. … Macbeth did not murder Duncan because he saw a dagger in the air; he saw the dagger because he was about to murder Duncan. … if Hamlet were really mad at any time in the story, they would case to be tragic characters. (30)
(b) Shakespeare also introduces the supernatural into some of his tragedies; … to describe human character, with circumstances, as always the sole motive force in this action would be a serious error. But the supernatural is always placed in the closest relation with character. It gives a confirmation and a distinct form to inward movements already present and exerting an influence; … Moreover, its influence is [30] never of a compulsive kind. … we are never allowed to feel that it has removed his capacity or responsibility for dealing with this problem. (30-31)
(c) Shakespeare, lastly, inmost of his tragedies allows to ‘chance’ or ‘accidents’ an appreciable influence at some point in the action. … any occurrence (not supernatural, of course) which enters the dramatic sequence neither from the agency or a character, nor from the obvious surrounding circumstances. [Even a deed would, I think, be counted an ‘accident’, if it were the deed of a very minor person whose character had not been indicated; because such a deed would not issue from the little world to which the dramatist had confined our attention.] … an accident that the pirate ship attacked Hamlet’s ship, so that he was able to return forthwith to Denmark. … That men may start a course of events but can neither calculate nor control it, is a tragic fact. … On the other hand, any large admission of chance into the tragic sequence [Comedy stands in a different position. The tricks played by chance often form a principal part of the comic action.] would certainly weaken, and might destroy, the sense of the causal connection of character, deed, and catastrophe. [31] … Thus it appears that these three elements in the ‘action’ are subordinate, while the dominant factor consists in deeds which issue from character. (31-32)
Hegel’s view of the tragic conflict … as Hegel was well aware, applies only imperfectly to the idea of Shakespeare. (32)
…the type of tragedy in which the hero opposes to a hostile force an undivided soul, is not the Shakespearean type. The souls of those who contend with the hero may be thus undivided; they generally are; … (34)
If further we compare the earlier tragedies with the later, we find that it is in the latter, the maturest works, that this inward struggle [in the hero] is most emphasized. (34)
His tragic characters are made of the stuff we find within ourselves and within the persons who surround them. But, by an intensification of the life which they share with others, they are raised above them; and the greatest are raised so far that, if we fully realize all that is implied in their words and actions, we become conscious that in real life we have known scarcely any one resembling them. (35)
[note:] … I do not dream of suggesting that in any of his dramas Shakespeare imagined two abstract principles or passions conflicting, and incorporated them in persons; or that there is any necessity for a reader to define for himself the particular forces which conflict in a given case. (35)
Dramas like Cymbeline and the Winter’s Tale, which might seem destined to end tragically, but actually end otherwise, owe their happy ending largely to the fact that the principal characters fail to reach tragic dimensions. And, conversely, if these persons were put in the place of the tragic heroes, the dramas in which they appeared would cease to be tragedies. (36)
One reason why the end of the Merchant of Venice fails to satisfy us is that Shylock is a tragic character, and that we cannot believe in his accepting his defeat and the conditions imposed of him. This [36] was a case where Shakespeare’s imagination ran away with him, … (36-37)
Richard and Macbeth are the only heroes who do what they themselves recognize to be villainous. It is important to observe that Shakespeare does admit such heroes, [Aristotle apparently would exclude them.] … (37)
…a Shakespearean tragedy is never, like some mis-called tragedies, depressing. No one ever closes the book with the feeling that man is a poor mean creature. He may be wretched and me may be awful, but he is not small. His lot may be heart-rending and mysterious, but it is not contemptible. The most confirmed of cynics ceases to be a cynic while he reads these plays. … This central feeling is the impression of waste. With Shakespeare, at any rate, the pity and fear which are stirred by the tragic story seem to unite with, and even to merge in, a profound sense of sadness and mystery, which is due to this impression of waste. (38)
…the experience is the matter to be interpreted, … But it is extremely hard to make out exactly what this experience is, because, in the very effort to make it out, our reflecting mind, full of everyday ideas, is always tending to transform it by the application of these ideas, and so to elicit a result which, instead of representing the fact, conventionalizes it. And the consequence is not only mistaken theories; it is that many a man will declare that he feels in reading a tragedy what he never really felt, while he fails to recognize what he actually did feel. (39)
For although this or that dramatis persona may speak of gods or of God, of evil spirits or of Satan, of heaven and of hell, and although the poet may show us ghosts from another world, these ideas do not materially influence his representation of life, nor are they used to throw light on the mystery of its tragedy. The Elizabethan drama was almost wholly secular; and while Shakespeare was writing he practically confined his view to the world of non-theological observation and thought, … (40)
…the tragic fact as he represents it: … something piteous, fearful and mysterious; … it follows that the ultimate power in the tragic world is not adequately described as a law or order which we can see to be just and benevolent—as, in that sense, a ‘moral order’: … (40)
… this ultimate power is not adequately describe as a fate, whether malicious and cruel, or blind and indifferent to human happiness and goodness: for in that case the spectacle would leave us desperate or rebellious. (41)
If we do not feel at times that the hero is, in some sense, a doomed man; that he and others drift struggling to destruction like helpless creatures… we have failed to received an essential part of the full tragic effect. (41)
We find practically no trace of fatalism in its more primitive, crude and obvious forms. Nothing, again, makes us think of the actions and sufferings of the person as somehow arbitrarily fixed beforehand without regard to their feelings, thoughts and resolutions. (43)
…whether this system or order is best called by the name of fate or no, it can hardly be denied that it does appear as the ultimate power in the tragic world, … this order shows characteristics of quite another kind from those which made us give it the name of fate, characteristics which certainly should not induce us to forget those others, but which would lead us to describe it as a moral order and its necessity as a moral necessity. [order = fate ←→ moral order] (44)
The catastrophe is, in the main, the return of this action on the head of the agent. It is an example of justice; ... [but] ‘poetic justice’ is in flagrant contradiction with the facts of life, and it is absent from Shakespeare’s tragic picture of life; … [e.g. Ophelia] [45] I venture to say that it is a mistake to use at all these terms of justice and merit or desert. … We might not object to the statement that Lear deserved to suffer for his folly, selfishness and tyranny; but to assert that he deserved to suffer what he did suffer is to do violence not merely to language but to any healthy moral sense. It is, moreover, to obscure the tragic fact that the consequence of action cannot be limited to that which would appear to us to follow ‘justly’ from them. … [46] Let us understand the statement that the ultimate power or order is ‘moral’ to mean that it does not show itself indifferent to good and evil, or equally favourable or unfavourable to both, but shows itself akin to good and alien from evil. [Ophelia?] (46-47)
The ultimate power which shows itself disturbed by this evil and reacts against it, must have a nature alien to it. Indeed its reaction is so vehement and ‘relentless’ that it would seem to be bent on nothing short of good in perfection, and to be ruthless in its demand for it. (48)
The whole or order against which the individual part shows itself powerless seems to be animated by a passion for perfection: we cannot otherwise explain its behaviour towards evil. Yet it appears to engender this evil within itself, and in its effort to overcome and expel it it is agonized with pain, and driven to mutilate its own substance and to lose not only evil but priceless good. (50)
As a Shakespearean tragedy represents a conflict which terminates in a catastrophe, any such tragedy may roughly be divided into three parts. The first of these sets forth or expounds the [52] situation, or state of affairs, out of which the conflict arises; and it may, therefore, be called the Exposition. The second deals with the definite beginning, the growth and the vicissitudes of the conflict. It forms accordingly the bulk of the play, comprising the Second, Third and Fourth Acts, and usually a part of the First and a part of the Fifth. The final section of the tragedy shows the issue of the conflict in a catastrophe. [In the same way a comedy will consist of three parts, showing the ‘situation’, the ‘complication’ or ‘entanglement’, and the denouement or ‘solution’.] / The application of this scheme of division is naturally more or less arbitrary. The first part glides into the second, and the second into the third, and there may often be difficulty in drawing the lines between them. (Construction in Shakespeare’s Tragedies, 53)
…the process of merely acquiring information is unpleasant, … he must conceal from his auditors the fact that they are being informed, and must tell them what he wants them to know by means which are interesting on their own account. (54)
…in general Shakespeare’s expositions are masterpieces. [This is one of several reasons why many people enjoy reading him, who, on the whole, dislike reading plays.] (54)
…a good drama of our own time show noting approaching to the regularity with which in the plays of Shakespeare and of his contemporaries the principle is applied. And the main cause of this difference lies simply in a change of theatrical arrangements. In Shakespeare’s theatre, as there was no scenery, scene followed scene with scarcely any pause; and so the readiest, though not the only, way to vary the emotional pitch was to interpose a whole scene where the tension was low between scenes where it was high. In our theatres there is a great deal of scenery, which takes a long time to set and change; and therefore the number of scenes is small, and the variations of tension have to be provided within the scenes, and still more by the pauses between them. (59)
… (1) a situation not yet one of conflict, [61] (2) the rise and development of the conflict, in which A or B advances on the whole till it reaches (3) the Crisis, on which follows (4) the decline of A or B towards (5) the Catastrophe. … Macbeth, hurrying, in spite of much inward resistance, to the murder of Duncan, attains the crown, the upward movement being extraordinarily rapid, and the crisis arriving early: his causes then turns slowly downward, and soon hastens to ruin. In both these tragedies the simplicity of the constructional effect, it should be noticed, depends in part on the fact that the contending forces may quite naturally be identified with certain persons, and partly again on the fact that the defeat of one side is the victory of the other. (61-62)
King Lear… it is impossible, I think, form the point of view of construction, to regard the hero as the leading figure. If we attempt to do so, we must either find the crisis in the First Act (for after it Lear’s course is downward), and this is absurd; or else we must say that the usual movement is present but its direction is reversed, the hero’s cause first sinking to the lowest point (in the storm-scenes) and then rising again. But this also will not do; for though his fortunes may be said to rise again for a time, they rise only to fall once more to a catastrophe. The truth is, that after the First Act, which is really filled by the exposition, Lear suffers but hardly initiates action at all; and the right way to look at the matter, from the point of view of construction, is to regard Goneril, Regan and Edmund as the leading characters. It is they who, in the conflict, initiates action. (63)
Good critics—writers who have criticized Shakespeare’s dramas from within, instead of applying to them some standard ready-made by themselves or derived from dramas and a theatre of quite other kinds than his—have held that some of his greatest tragedies fall off in the Fourth Act, and that one or two never wholly recover themselves. (66)
…the scene (IV.vii) where Lear wakes from sleep and finds Cordelia bending over him, perhaps the most tear-compelling passage in literature. (69)
From the moment when Iago begins to poison Othello’s mind we hold our breath. Othello from this point onwards is certainly the most exciting of Shakespeare’s plays, unless possibly Macbeth in its first part may be held to rival it. (72)
…the conflict develops very slowly, or, as in Othello, remains in a state of incubation during the first part of a tragedy, …Shakespeare has filled it with a kind of preliminary conflict between the hero and Brabantio—a personage who then vanishes from the stage. … the fact that Shakespeare can make a plan succeed does not show that the plan is, abstractly considered, a good plan; and if the scheme of construction in Othello were placed, in the shape of a mere outline, before a playwright ignorant of the actual drama, he would certainly, I believe, feel grave misgivings about the first half of the play. (73)
…one who studies the theory of the art, and even writes with an eye to its ‘rules’. And we know it was long a favourite idea that Shakespeare was totally ignorant of the ‘rules’. Yet this is quite incredible. The rules referred to, such as they were, were not buried in Aristotle’s Greek nor even hidden away in Italian treatises. He could find pretty well all of them in a book so current and famous as Sidney’s Defense of Poetry. Even if we suppose that he refused to open this book (which is most unlikely), how could he possibly remain ignorant of the rules in a society of actors and dramatists and amateurs who must have been incessantly talking about plays and play-writing, and some of whom were ardent champions of the rules and full of contempt for the lawlessness of the popular drama? Who can doubt that at the Mermaid Shakespeare heard from Jonson’s lips much more censure of his offences against ‘art’ than Jonson ever confided to Drummond or to paper? (76)
If Shakespeare, then, broke some of the ‘rules’, it was not from ignorance. Probably he refused, on grounds of art itself, to trouble himself with rules derived from forms of drama long extinct. And it is not unlikely that he was little interested in theory as such, and more than likely that he was pedantic distinction between ‘pastoral-comical, historical-pastorical, tragical-historica, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable or poem unlimited’. But that would not prove that he never reflected on his art, or could not explain, if he cared to, what he thought would be good general rules for the drama of his own time. He could give advice about play-acting. Why should we suppose that he could not give advice about play-making? (77)
…that the story, in most of the comedies any many of the tragedies of the Elizabethans, was intended to be strange and wonderful. These plays were tales of romance dramatized, and they were meant in part to satisfy the same love of wonder to which the romance appealed. (77)
…the improbability of the opening of King Lear, so often censured, is no defect. It is not out of character, it is only extremely unusual and strange. But it was meant to be so; like the marriage of the black Othello with Desdemona, the Venetian senator’s daughter. (78)
To come then to real defects, (a) one may be found in places where Shakespeare strings together a number of scenes, some very short, in which the dramatis personae are frequently changed; as though a novelist were to tell his story in a succession of short chapters, in which he flitted from one group of his characters to another. … it appears most decidedly where the historical material was undramatic, as it the middle part of Antony and Cleopatra. … considered abstractly, it is a defective method, and, even as used by Shakespeare, it sometimes reminds us of the merely narrative arrangement common in plays before his time. (78)
(b) We may take next the introduction or excessive development of matter neither required by the plot nor essential to the exhibition of character: e.g. the references in Hamlet to theatre-quarrels of the day, … (78)
(c) … It will be agreed that in listening to a soliloquy we ought never to feel [78] that we are being addressed. And in this respect, as in others, many of the soliloquies are masterpieces. But certainly in some the purpose of giving information lies bare, and in one or two the actor openly speaks to the audience. Such faults are found chiefly in the early plays, though there is a glaring instance at the end of Balarius’s speech in(c) … It will be agreed that in listening to a soliloquy we ought never to feel [78] that we are being addressed. And in this respect, as in others, many of the soliloquies are masterpieces. But certainly in some the purpose of giving information lies bare, and in one or two the actor openly speaks to the audience. Such faults are found chiefly in the early plays, though there is a glaring instance at the end of Balarius’s speech in Cymbeline (III.iii.99ff). (78-79)
(d) …questions are suggested to the reader which it is impossible for him to answer with certainty. For instance, some of the indications of the lapse of time between Othello’s marriage and the events of the later Acts flatly contradict one another; and it is impossible to make out whether Hamlet was at Court or at the University when his father was murdered. But it should be noticed that often what seems a defect of this latter kind is not really a defect. For instance, the difficulty about Hamlet’s age (even if it cannot be resolved by the text alone) did not exist for Shakespeare’s audience. The moment Burbage entered it must have been clear whether the hero was twenty or thirty. (79)
(e) To turn to another field, the early critics were no doubt often provokingly wrong when they censured the language of particular passage in Shakespeare as obscure, inflated, tasteless, or ‘pestered with metaphors’; … (80)
(f) Once more, to say that Shakespeare makes all his serious characters talk alike, and that he constantly speaks through the mouths of his dramatis personae without regard to their individual natures, would be to exaggerate absurdly; but it is true that in his earlier plays these faults are traceable in some degree, and even in Hamlet there are striking passages where dramatic appropriateness is sacrificed to some other object. When Laertes speaks the lines beginning, ‘For nature, crescent, does not grow alone/ In thews and bulk,/’ who can help feeling that Shakespeare is speaking rather than Laertes? Or when the player-king discourses for more than twenty lines on the instability of human purpose, and when King Claudius afterwards insists to Laertes on the same subject at almost equal length, who does not see that Shakespeare, thinking but little of dramatic fitness, wishes in part simply to write poetry, and partly to impress on the audience thoughts which will help them to understand, not the player-king nor yet King Claudius, but Hamlet himself, who, on his side—and here quite in character—has already enlarged on the same topic in the most famous of his soliloquies? (80)
(g) … like nearly all the dramatists of his day and of times much earlier, Shakespeare was fond of ‘gnomic’ pass-[80]ages, and introduces them probably not more freely than his readers like, but more freely than, I suppose, a good play-wright now would care to do. These passages, it may be observed, are frequently rhymed (e.g. Othello, I.iii.201ff., II.i.149ff.). (80-81)
Most of the defects in his writings must be due to indifference or want of care. … nine-tenths of his defects are not, I believe, the errors of an inspired genius, ignorant of art, but the sins of a great but negligent artist. He was often, no doubt, overworked and pressed for time. He knew that the immense majority of his audience were incapable of distinguishing between rough and finished work. He often felt the degradation of having to live by pleasing them. (81)
Shakespeare lacked the conscience of the artist who is determined to make everything as good as he can. Such poets as Milton, Pope, Tennyson, habitually show this conscience. (82)
It is very possible to look for subtlety in the wrong places in Shakespeare, but in the right places it is not possible to find too much. (83)
…from about 1601 to about 1608, comes tragedy after tragedy—Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Timon of Athens, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus; … The existence of this distinct tragic period, … has naturally helped to suggest the idea that the ‘man’ also, in these years of middle age, from thirty-seven to fourty-four, … (85)
Coriolanus. It is a much nobler play as it stands than it would have been if Shakespeare had made the hero persist, and we had seen him amid the flaming ruins of Rome, awaking suddenly to the enormity of his deed and taking vengeance on himself; but that would surely have been an ending more strictly tragic than the close of Shakespeare’s play. Whether this close was simply due to his unwillingness to contradict his [88] historical authority on a point of such magnitude we need not ask. In any case Coriolanus is, in more than an outward sense, the end of his tragic period. It marks the transition to his latest works, in which the powers of repentance and forgiveness charm to rest the tempest raised by error and guilt. (88-89)
The ‘honey-tongued’ sweetness and beauty of Shakespeare’s early writing, as seen in Romeo and Juliet or the Midsummer Night’s Dream, remain; the ease and lucidity remain; but there is an accession of force and weight. We find no great change from this style when we come to Julius Caesar, which may be taken to mark its culmination. At this point in Shakespeare’s literary development … We receive an impression of easy mastery and complete harmony, but not so strong an impression of inner power bursting into outer life. Shakespeare’s style is perhaps nowhere else so free from defects, and yet almost every one of his subsequent plays contains writing which is greater. … in many parts (for there is in the writing of Hamlet an unusual variety) we are conscious of a decided change. The style in these parts is [89] more rapid and vehement, less equable and less simple; and there is a change of the same kind in the versification. But on the whole the type is the same as in Julius Caesar, and the resemblance of the two plays is decidedly more marked than the different. (89-90)
…after Hamlet this music is heard no more. It is followed by a music vaster and deeper, but not the same. (91)
The versification, … After Hamlet the style, in the more emotional passages, is heightened. It becomes grander, sometimes wilder, sometimes more swelling, even tumid. It is also more concentrated, rapid, varied, and, in construction, less regular, not seldom twisted [91] or elliptical. It is, therefore, not so easy and lucid, and in the more ordinary dialogue it is sometimes involved and obscure, and from these and other cause deficient in charm. [This, if we confine ourselves to the tragedies, is, I think, especially the case in King Lear and Timon] On the other hand, it is always full of life and movement, and in great passages produces sudden, strange, electrifying effects which are rarely found in earlier plays, and not so often even in Hamlet. The more pervading effect of beauty gives place to what may almost be called explosions of sublimity or pathos. … It may be that, for the purposes of tragedy, the highest point was reached during the progress [92] of these changes, in the most critical passages of Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. [The first, at any rate, of these three plays is, of course, much nearer to Hamlet, especially in versification, that to Antony and Cleopatra, in which Shakespeare’s final style first shows itself practically complete. It has been impossible, in the brief treatment of this subject, to say what is required of the individual plays.] (91-93)
…we find by the side of the hero no other figure of tragic [93] proportions, no one like Lady Macbeth or Iago, no one even like Cordelia or Desdemona; so that, in Hamlet’s absence, the remaining characters could not yield a Shakespearean tragedy at all. (93-94)
(1) To come, then, to our typical views, we may lay it down, first, that no theory will hold water which finds the cause of Hamlet’s delay merely, or mainly, or even to any considerable extent, in external difficulties. [97] … (a) From beginning to end of the play, Hemlet never makes the slightest reference to any external difficulty. How is it possible to explain this fact in conformity with the theory? For what conceivable reason should Shakespeare conceal from us so carefully the key to the problem? / (b) Not only does Hamlet fail to allude to such difficulties, but he always assumes that he can obey the Ghost, and he once asserts this in so many words (‘Sith I have cause and will and strength and means To do’t’, IV. Iv. 45). (c) Again, why does Shakespeare exhibit Laertes quite easily raising the people against the King? Why but to show how much more easily Hamlet, whom the people loved, could have done the same thing, if that was the plan he preferred? [98] … (e) Again, Hamlet never once talks, or shows a sign of thinking, of the plan of bringing the King to public justice; he always talks of using his ‘sword’ or his ‘arm’. (97-99)
And, finally, in his shrinking from the deed there was probably, together with much else, something which may be called a moral, though not a conscientious, repulsion: I mean a repugnance to the idea of falling suddenly on a man who could not defend himself. This, so far as we can see, was the only plan that Hamlet ever contemplated. There is no positive evidence in the play that he regarded it with the aversion that any brave and honourable man, one must suppose, would feel for it; but, as Hamlet certainly was brave and honourable, we may presume that he did do. (103)
…sentimental view of Hamlet…Its germ may perhaps be found in an unfortunate phrase of Goethe’s (who of course is not responsible for the whole view) : ‘a lovely, pure and most moral nature, without the strength of nerve which forms a hero, sinks beneath the burden which it cannot bear and must not case away’. When this idea is isolated, developed and popularized, we get the pictures of a graceful youth, sweet and sensitive, full of delicate sympathies and yearning aspirations, shrinking from the touch of everything gross and earthly; but frail and weak, a kind of Werther, with a face like Shelley’s and a voice like Mr Tree’s. And then we ask in tender pity, how could such a man perform the terrible duty laid on him? [103] … But for the ‘sentimental’ Hamlet you can feel only pity not unmingled with contempt. Whatever else he is, he is not a hero. / But consider the text. This shrinking, flower-like youth—how could he possibly have done what we see Hamlet do? (103-104)
Grant, again, that his cruelty to Ophelia was partly due to misunderstanding, partly forced on him, partly feigned; still one surely cannot altogether so account for it, and still less can one so account for the disgusting and insulting grossness of his language to her in the play-scene. I know this is said to be merely an example of the custom of Shakespeare’s time. But it is not so. It is such language as you will find addressed to a woman by no other hero of Shakespeare’s, not even in that dreadful scene where Othello accuses Desdemona. It is a great mistake to ignore these things, or to try to soften the impression which they naturally make on one. That this embitterment, callousness, grossness, brutality, should be induced on a soul so pure and noble is profoundly tragic; … (105)
There remains, finally, a class of view which may be named after Schlegel and Coleridge. According to this, Hamlet is the tragedy of reflection. The cause of the hero’s delay is irresolution; and the cause of this irresolution is excess of the reflective or speculative habit of mind. (106)
Coleridge finds in Hamlet ‘an almost enormous intellectual activity and a proportionate aversion to real action consequent upon it’ (no citation, 107)
The theory describes, therefore, a man in certain respects like Coleridge himself, on one side a man of genius, on the other side, the side of will, deplorably weak, always procrastinating and avoiding unpleasant duties, and often reproaching himself in vain; [108] … Hamlet, according to all the indications in the text, was not naturally or normally such a man, but rather, I venture to affirm, a man who at any other time and in any other circumstances than those presented would have been perfectly equal to his task; and it is, in fact, the very cruelty of his fate that the crisis of his life comes on him at the one moment when he cannot meet it, and when his highest gifts, instead of helping him, conspire to paralyze him. (108-109)
For the cause was not directly or mainly an habitual excess of reflectiveness. The direct cause was a state of mind quite abnormal and induced by special circumstance—a state of profound melancholy. Now, Hamlet’s reflectiveness doubtless played a certain part in the production of that melancholy, … (109)
Nobody regards him as a mere scholar who has ‘never formed a resolution or executed a deed’. In a court which certainly would not much admire such a person he is the observed of all observers. [109] … he is the favourite of the people, who are not given to worship philosophers. Fortinbras, a sufficiently practical man, considered that he was likely, had he been put on, to have proved most royally. He has Hamlet borne by four captains ‘like a soldier’ to his grave; and Ophelia says that Hamlet was a soldier. … He must always have been fearless—in the play he appears insensible to fear of any ordinary kind. And, finally, he must have been quick and impetuous in action; for it is downright impossible that the man we see rushing after the Ghost, killing Polonius, dealing with the King’s commission on the ship, boarding the pirate, leaping into the grave, executing his final vengeance, could ever heave been shrinking or slow in an emergency. Imagine Coleridge doing any of these things! (109-110)
Trying to reconstruct form the Hamlet of the play, one would not judge that his temperament was melancholy in the present sense of the word; there seems nothing to show that; [110] but one would judge that by temperament he was inclined to nervous instability, to rapid and perhaps extreme changes of feeling and mood, and that he was disposed to be, for the time, absorbed in the feeling or mood that possessed him, whether it were joyous or depressed. This temperament the Elizabethans would have called melancholic; and Hamlet seems to be an example of it, as Lear is of a temperament mixedly choleric and sanguine. And the doctrine of temperaments was so familiar in Shakespeare’s time—as Burton, and earlier prose-writers, and many of the dramatists show—that Shakespeare may quite well have given this temperament to Hamlet consciously and deliberately. … He gives to Hamlet a temperament which would not develop into melancholy unless under some exceptional strain, but which still involved a danger. In the play we see the danger realized, and find a melancholy quite unlike any that Shakespeare had as yet depicted, because the temperament of Hamlet is quite different. (110-111)
He had the soul of the youthful poet as Shelley and Tennyson have described it, an undoubted delight [111] and faith in everything good and beautiful. … ‘What a piece of work is a man! … it is the language of a heart thrilled with wonder and swelling into ecstacy. (111-112)
Where else in Shakespeare is there anything like Hamlet’s adoration of his father? The words melt into music whenever he speaks of him. And, if there are no signs of any such feeling towards his mother, though many signs of love, it is characteristic that he evidently never entertained a suspicion of anything unworthy in her—characteristic, and significant of his tendency to see only what is good unless he is forced to see the reverse. For we find this tendency elsewhere, and find it going so far that we must call it a disposition to idealize, to see something better than what is there, or at least to ignore deficiencies. He says to Laertes, ‘I loved you ever’, and he describes Laertes as a ‘very noble youth’, wich he was far from being. In his first greeting of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, where his old self revives, we trace the same affectionateness and readiness to take men at their best. His love for Ophelia, too, which seems strange to some, is surely the most natural thing in the world. He saw her innocence, simplicity and sweetness, and it was like him to ask no more; and it is noticeable that Horatio, though entirely worthy of his friendship, is, like Ophelia, intellectually not remarkable. To this very end, however clouded, this generous disposition, this ‘free and open nature’, this unsuspiciousness survive. (112)
In fact, if the message of the Ghost had come to him within a week of his father’s death, I see no reason to doubt that he would have acted on it as decisively as Othello himself, though probably after a longer and more anxious deliberation. And therefore the Schlegel-Coleridge view (apart from its descriptive value) seems to me fatally untrue, for it implies that Hamlet’s procrastination was the normal response of an over-speculation nature confronted with a difficult practical problem. (116)
…first words Hamlet utters when he is alone; … Here are a sickness of life, and even a longing for death, … And what has caused them? … It was not the vague suspicion that we know Hamlet felt. Still less was it the loss of the crown, for though the subserviency of the electors might well disgust him, there is not a reference to the subject in the soliloquy, nor any sign elsewhere that it greatly occupied his mind. It was the moral shock of the sudden ghastly disclosure of his mother’s true nature, … (117)
…she married again, and married Hamlet’s uncle, … married him in what to Hamlet was incestuous wedlock; [This aspect of the matter leaves us comparatively unaffected, but Shakespeare evidently means it to be of importance. The Ghost speaks of it twice, and Hamlet thrice (once in his last furious words to the King). If, as we must suppose, the marriage was universally admitted to be incestuous, the corrupt acquiescence of the court and the electors to the crown would naturally have a strong effect on Hamlet’s mind.] (118)
…her son was forced to see in her action not only an astounding shallowness of feeling but an eruption of coarse sensuality, ‘rank and gross’, speeding post-haste to its horrible delight. Is it possible to conceive an experience more desolating to a man such as we have seen Hamlet to be; and is its result anything but perfectly natural? It bewildered horror, then loathing, then despair of human nature. His whole mind is poisoned. He can never see Ophelia in the same light again: she is a woman, and his mother is a woman: if she mentions the word ‘brief’ to him, the answer drops from his lips like venom, ‘as woman’s love’. [118] … A nature morally blunter would have felt even so dreadful a revelation less keenly. A slower and more limited and positive mind might not have extended so widely through its world the disgust and disbelief that have entered it. But Hamlet has the imagination which, for evil as well as good, feels and sees all things in one. (119)
That Hamlet was not far from insanity is very probable. His adoption of the pretence of madness may well have been due in part to fear of the reality; to an instinct of self-preservation, a fore-feeling that the pretence would enable him to give some utterance to the load that pressed on his heart and brain, and a fear that he would be unable altogether to repress such utterance. (120)
Hamlet’s melancholy… Hamlet’s condition may truly be called diseased. No exertion of will could have dispelled it. Even if he had been able at once to do the bidding of the Ghost he would doubtless have still remained for some time under the cloud. (120)
But this melancholy is something very different from insanity, … It is a totally different thing from the madness which he feigns; [120] … capable of being a tragic agent, which an insane person, at any rate according to Shakespeare’s practice, is not. (121)
…melancholy…the body is inert, the mind indifferent or worse; its response is, ‘it does not matter’, ‘it is not worth while’, ‘it is no good’. And the action required of Hamlet is very exception. (121)
Schlegel-Coleridge theory…those endless questions (as we may imagine them), ‘Was I deceived by the Ghost? How am I to do the deed? When? Where? What will be the consequence of attempting it—success, my death, utter misunderstanding, mere mischief to the State? Can it be right to do it, or noble to kill a defenceless man? What is the good of doing it in such a world as this?’ … otiose thinking hardly deserving the name of thought, an unconscious weaving of pretexts for inactions, … (122)
[Schlegel-Coleridge theory] … accounts for Hamlet’s energy as well as for his lassitude, … keen satisfaction which some of these actions give to him. He arranges the play-scene with lively interest, and exults in its success, not really because it brings him nearer to his goal, but partly because it has hurt his enemy and partly because it has demonstrated his own skill (III.ii.186-304). He looks forward almost with glee to countermining the King’s designs in sending his away (III.iv.209), and looks back with obvious satisfaction, even with pride, to the address and vigour he displayed on the voyage (V.ii.1-55). [122] … It accounts for the pleasure with which he meets old acquaintances, like his ‘school-fellows’ or the actors. (122-123)
…having once given its due weight to the fact of Hamlet’s melancholy, we may freely admit, or rather may be anxious to insist, that this pathological condition would excite but little, if any, tragic interest if it were not the condition of a nature distinguished by that speculative genius on which the Schlegel-Coleridge type of theory lays stress. (125)
…in the great ideal movement which began towards the close of the eighteenth century, this tragedy acquired a position unique among Shakespeare’s dramas, and shared only by Goethe’s Faust. It was not that Hamlet is Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy or most perfect work of art; it was that Hamlet most brings home to us at once the sense of the soul’s infinity, and the sense of the doom which not only circumscribes that infinity but appears to be its offspring. (126)
…he comes upon the King, alone, kneeling, conscience-stricken and attempting to pray. [131] … If he killed the villain now he would send his soul to heaven; …That this again is an unconscious excuse for delay is now pretty generally agreed, and it is needless to describe again the state of mind which, on the view explained in our last lecture, is the real cause of Hamlet’s failure here. … And any reader who may retain a doubt should observe the fact that, when the Ghost reappears, Hamlet does not think of justifying his delay by the plea that he was waiting for a more perfect vengeance. … The reason for refusing to accept his own version of his motive in sparing Claudius is not that his sentiments are horrible, but that elsewhere, and also in the opening of his speech here, we can see that his reluctance to act is due to other causes. (Lecture IV, Hamlet. 131-132)
…Shakeaspeare has taken care to give this perfect opportunity so repulsive a character that we can hardly bring ourselves to wish that the hero should accept it. One of his minor difficulties, we have see, probably was that he seemed to be required to attack a defenceless man; … (133)
…she is terrified, cries out, ‘Thou wilt not murder me?’ and screams for help. Polonius, behind the arras, echoes her call; and in a moment Hamlet, hoping the concealed person is the King, runs the old man through the body. / Evidently this act is intended to stand in sharp contrast with Hamlet’s sparing of his enemy. The King would have been just as defenceless behind the arras as he had been on his knees; but here Hamlet is already excited and in action, and the chance comes to him so suddenly that he has no time to ‘scan’ it. …the audience would wholly sympathize with Hamlet’s attempt here, as directed against an enemy who is lurking to entrap him, instead of being engaged in a business which perhaps to the bulk of the audience then, as now, seemed to have a ‘relish of salvation in’t’. (134)
…a ghost, in Shakespeare’s day, was able for any sufficient reason to confine its manifestation to a single person in a company; and here the sufficient reason, that of sparing the Queen, is obvious. (136)
…in the Fifth Act we have no soliloquy. But in the earlier Acts the feelings referred to do not appear merely in soliloquy, and I incline to think that Shakespeare means to show in the Hamlet of the Fifth Act a slight thinning of the dark cloud of melancholy, and means us to feel it tragic that this change comes too late. (139)
Hamlet answers; he had his father’s signet in his purse. And though he has a presentiment of evil about the fencing-match he refuses to yield to it: ‘we defy augury: there is special providence in the fall of a sparrow…the readiness of all’. … I find it impossible to believe, with some critics, that they indicate any material change in his general condition, or the formation of any effective resolution to fulfill the appointed duty. On the contrary, they seem to express that kind of religious resignation which, however beautiful in one aspect, really deserves the name of fatalism… [140] …the Hamlet of the Fifth Act shows a kind of sad or indifferent self-abandonment, as if he secretly despaired of forcing himself to action, and were ready to leave his duty to some other power than his own. This is really the main change which appears in him after his return to Denmark, … (141)
…Good night, sweet prince,/And flights of angels sign thee to thy rest./’ Why did Shakespeare here, so much against his custom, introduce this reference to another life? Did he remember that Hamlet is the only one of his tragic heroes whom he has not allowed us to see in the days when this life smiled on him? Did he feel that, while for the others we might be content to imagine after life’s fitful fever nothing more than release and silence, we must ask more for one whose ‘godlike reason’ and passionate love of goodness have only gleamed upon us through the heavy clouds of melancholy, … (143)
…his love-letter to Ophelia [This letter, of course, was written before the time when the action of the drama begins, for we know that Ophelia, after her father’s commands in I. iii, received no more letters (II. i. 109)] he uses for the most part the fantastic language of Court Euphusim. (145)
…Hamlet, we may safely assert, is the only one of the tragic heroes who can be called a humorist, his humour being first cousin to that speculative tendency which keeps his mental world in perpetual movement. … The truth probably is that it was the kind of humour most natural to Shakespeare himself, and that here, as in some other traits of the poet’s greatest creation, we come into close contact with Shakespeare the man. (147)
The actor who plays the part of Hamlet must make up his mind as to the interpretation of every word and deed of the character. Even if at some point he feels no certainty as to which of two interpretations is right, he must still choose one or the other. The mere critic is not obliged to do this. Where he remains in doubt he may say so, and, if the matter is of importance, he ought to say so. / This is the position in which I find myself in regard to Hamlet’s love for Ophelia. I am unable to arrive at a conviction as to the meaning of some of his words and deeds, … On two points no reasonable doubt can, I think, be felt. [147] (1) Hamlet was at one time sincerely and ardently in love with Ophelia. For she herself says that he had importuned her with love in honourable fashion, and had given countenance to his speech with almost all the holy vows of heaven (I.iii.110f.). ‘I loved Ophelia; forty thousand brother/Could not, with all their quantity of love,/Make up my sum,/’ he must have spoken sincerely; and, further, we may take it for granted that he used the past tense, ‘loved’, merely because Ophelia was dead, … (147-148)
…most popular view. … Hamlet’s love for Ophelia never changed. On the revelation made by the Ghost, however, he felt that he must put aside all thoughts of it; and it also seemed to him necessary to convince Ophelia, as well as others, that he was insane,… Now this theory, … [148] is certainly wrong at one point, viz., in so far as it supposes that Hamlet’s bitterness to Ophelia was a mere pretence forced on him by his design of feigning to be insane; … How is it that in his first soliloquy Hamlet makes no reference whatever to Ophelia? (148-149)
[note] There are signs that Hamlet was haunted by the horrible idea that he had been deceived in Ophelia as he had been in his mother; that she was shallow and artificial, and even that what had seemed simple and affectionate love might really have been something very different. The grossness of his language at the play-scene, and some lines in the nunnery-scene, suggest this; and, considering the state of his mind, there is nothing unnatural in his suffering from such a suspicion. I do not suggest that he believed in it, and in the nunnery-scene it is clear that his healthy perception of her innocence is in conflict with it. / He seems to have divined that Polonius suspected him of dishonourable intentions towards Ophelia; and there are also traces of the idea that Polonius had been quite ready to let his daughter run the risk as long as Hamlet was prosperous. But it is dangerous, of course, to lay stress on inferences drawn from his conversations with Polonius. (151)
His main object in the visit appears to have been to convince others, through her, that his insanity was not due to any mysterious unknown cause, but to this disappointment, and so to allay the suspicions of the King. But if his feeling for her had been simply that of love, however unhappy, and had not been in any degree that of suspicions or resentment, would he have adopted a plan which must involve her in so much suffering? (150)
In what way are Hamlet’s insults to Ophelia at the play-scene necessary either to his purpose of convincing her of his insanity or to his purpose of revenge? And, even if he did regard them as somehow means to these ends, is it conceivable [150] that he would have uttered them, if his feeling for her were one of hopeless but unmingled love? (150-151)
If the popular theory is true, how is it that neither in the nunnery-scene nor at the play-scene does Shakespeare insert anything to make the truth plain? Four words like Othello’s ‘O hardness to dissemble’ would have sufficed. / These considerations, coupled with others as to Hamlet’s state of mind, seem to point out conclusions. They suggest, first, Hamlet’s love, though never lost, was, after Ophelia’s apparent rejection of him, mingled with suspicion and resentment, and that his treatment of her was due in part to this cause. And I find it impossible to resist this conclusion. But the question of how much of his harshness is meant to be real, and how much assumed, seems to me impossible in some places to answer. For example, his behaviour at the play-scene seems to me to show an intention to hurt and insult; but in the nunnery-scene (which cannot be discussed briefly) he is evidently acting a part and suffering acutely, while at the same time his invective, however exaggerated, seems to spring from real feelings; (151)
Hamlet’s love, they seem to show, was not only mingled with bitterness, it was also, like all his healthy feelings, weakened and deadened by his melancholy. …when he declared that it was such a love as forty thousand brothers could not equal, he spoke sincerely indeed but not truly. What he said was true, if I may put it thus, of the inner healthy self which doubtless in time would have fully reasserted itself; … psychologically it is quite sound, for a frequent symptom of such melancholy as Hamlet’s is a more or less complete paralysis, or even perversion, of the emotion of love. (152)
I am not satisfied that the explanation of Hamlet’s silence regarding Ophelia lies in it [melancholy] …I never noticed it myself till I began to try to solve the problem of Hamlet’s relation to Ophelia; and that even now, when I read the play through without pausing to consider particular questions, it scarcely strikes me. Now Shakespeare wrote primarily for the theatre and not for [152] students, and therefore great weight should be attached tot the immediate impression made by his works. And so it seems at least possible that the explanation of Hamlet’s silence may be that Shakespeare, having already a very difficult task to perform in the soliloquies—that of showing the state of mind which caused Hamlet to delay his vengeance—did not choose to make his task more difficult by introducing matter which would not only add to the complexity of the subject but might, from its ‘sentimental’ interest, distract attention from the main point; while, from his theatrical experience, he knew that the audience would not observe how unnatural it was that a man deeply in love, and forced not only to renounce but to wound the woman he loved, should not think of her when he was alone. But, as this explanation is no more completely convincing to me than the other, I am driven to suspend judgment, … (152-153)
Ophelia…Shakespearean literature and the experience of teachers show that … a large number of readers feel a kind of [153] personal irritation against her. They seem unable to forgive her for not having been a heroine, and they fancy her much weaker than she was. They think she ought to have been able to help Hamlet to fulfill his task. And they betray, it appears to me, the strangest misconceptions as to what she actually did. (154)
Now it was essential to Shakespeare’s purpose that too great an interest should not be aroused in the love-story; essential, therefore, that Ophelia should be merely one of the subordinate characters; and necessary, accordingly, that she should not be the equal, in spirit, power and intelligence, of his famous heroines. If she had been an Imogen, a Cordelia, even a Portia or a Juliet, the story must have taken another shape. (154)
Ophelia is plainly quite young and inexperienced. She has lost her mother, and has only a father and a brother, affectionate but worldly, to take care of her. Everyone in the drama who has any heart is drawn to her. (154)
Naturally she is incapable of understanding Hamlet’s mind, though she can feel its beauty. (155)
Still, we are told, it was ridiculously weak in her to lose her reason. And here again her critics seem hardly to realize the situation, hardly to put themselves in the place of a girl whose lover, estranged from her, goes mad and kills her father. They seem to forget also that Ophelia must have believed that these frightful calamities were not mere calamities, but followed from her action in repelling her lover. (157)
In her madness Ophelia continues sweet and loveable. ‘Thought and affliction, passion, hell itself,/She turns to favour and to prettiness./’ In her wanderings we hear from time to time an undertone of the deepest sorrow, but never the agonized cry of fear or [157] horror which makes madness dreadful or shocking. And the picture of her death, if our eyes grow dim in watching it, is still purely beautiful. (157-158)
The answers to two questions asked about the Queen are, it seems to me, practically certain. (1) She did not merely marry a second time with indecent haste; she was false to her husband while he lived. This is surely the most natural interpretation of the words of the Ghosts (I.v.41f.), … On the other hand, she was not privy to the murder of her husband, either before the deed or after it. … The representation of the murder in the play-scene does not move her; and when her husband starts from his throne, she innocently asks him, ‘How fares my lord?’ (159)
The Queen was not a bad-hearted woman, not at all the woman to think little of murder. But she had a soft animal nature, and was very dull and very shallow. She loved to be [159] happy, like a sheep in the sun; and, to do her justice, it pleased her to see others happy, like more sheep in the sun. She never saw that drunkenness is disgusting till Hamlet told her so; and though she knew that he considered her marriage ‘o’er-hasty’ (II.ii.57), she was untroubled by any shame at the feelings which had led to it. (159-160)
When affliction comes to her, the good in her nature struggles to the surface through the heavy mass of sloth. Like other faulty characters in Shakespeare’s tragedies, she dies a better woman than she had lived. When Hamlet shows her what she had done she feels genuine remorse. (160)
King Cladius … is very interesting, both psychologically and dramatically. …He nowhere shows cowardice, and when Laertes and the mob force their way into the palace, he confronts a dangerous situation with coolness and address. His love for his ill-gotten wife seems to be quite genuine, and there is no ground for suspecting him of having used her as a mere means to the crown. … He was no villain of force, who thought of winning his brother’s crown by a bold and open stroke, but a cut-purse who stole the diadem form a shelf and put it in his pocket. He had the inclination of natures physically weak and morally small towards intrigue and crooked dealing. (162)
He seems to have been soft-spoken, ingratiating in manner, and given to smiling on the person he addressed (‘that one may smile, and smile, and be a villain’). …Hamlet scarcely ever speaks of him without an insult, but he never shows resentment, hardly ever annoyance. [162] …He has a sanguine disposition. (162-163)
More—it is one of the grimmest things in Shakespeare, but he puts such things so quietly that we are apt to miss them—when the King is praying for pardon for his first murder he has just made his final arrangements for a second, the murder of Hamlet. But he does not allude to that fact in his prayer. (163)
… ‘accident’ is introduced into the plot in its barest and least dramatic form, when Hamlet is brought back to Denmark by the chance of the meeting with the pirate ship. This incident has been therefore severely criticized as a lame expedient, but it appears probable that the ‘accident’ is meant to impress the imagination as the very reverse of accidental, and with many readers it certainly does so. And that this was the intention is made the more likely by a second fact, the fact that in connection with the events of the voyage Shakespeare introduces that feeling, on Hamlet part, of his being in the hands of Providence. The repeated expressions of this feeling are not, I have maintained, a sign that Hamlet has now formed a fixed resolution to do his duty forthwith; but their effects is to strengthen in the spectator the feeling that, whatever may become of Hamlet, and whether he wills it or not, his task will surely be accomplished, because it is the purpose of a power against which both he and his enemy are impotent, and which makes of them the instruments of its own will. (165)
…while Hamlet certainly cannot be called in the specific sense a ‘religious drama’, there is in it nevertheless both a freer use of popular religious ideas, and a more decided, though always imaginative, intimation of a supreme power concerned in human evil and good, than can be found in any other of Shakespeare’s tragedies. And this is probably one of the causes of the special popularity of this play, … (166)
…the conflict begins late, and advances without appreciable pause and with accelerating speed to the catastrophe, is a main cause of the painful tension just described. To this may be added that, after the conflict has begun, there is very little relief by way of the ridiculous. Henceforward at any rate Iago’s humour never raises a smile. The clown is a poor one; we hardly attend to him and quickly forget him; I believe most readers of Shakespeare, if asked whether there is a clown in Othello, would answer No. (Lecture V, Othello. 169)
…the suffering of Desdemona. This is, unless I mistake, the most nearly intolerable spectacle that Shakespeare offers us. … Desdemona is helplessly passive. … She is helpless because her nature is infinitely sweet and her love absolute. (170)
Nowhere else in Shakespeare do we hold our breath in such anxiety and for so long a time as in the later Acts of Othello. (171)
The distaste to which I refer is due chiefly to two causes. First, to many readers in our time, men as well as women, the subject of sexual jealousy, treated with Elizabethan fullness and frankness, is not merely painful but so repulsive that not even the intense tragic emotions which the story generates can overcome this repulsion. (174)
…mistaken view… [176] that the play is primarily a study of a noble barbarian, who has become a Christian and has imbibed some of the civilization of his employers, but who retains beneath the surface the savage passions of his Moorish blood and also the suspiciousness regarding female chastity common among Oriental peoples, and that the last three Acts depicts the outburst of these original feelings through the thin crust of Venetian culture. … If he thinks it is like Shakespeare to look at things in this manner; that he has a historical mind… that he laboured to make his Romans perfectly Roman, … the reader will also think this interpretation of Othello probable. To me it appears hopelessly un-Shakespearean. … I do not mean that Othello’s race is a matter of no account. It has, as we shall presently see, its importance in the play. It makes a difference to our idea of him; it makes a difference to the action and catastrophe. But in regard to the essentials of his character it is not important; … (176-177)
[note] If the reader has ever chanced to see an African violently excited, he may have been startled to observe how completely at a loss he was to interpret those bodily expressions of passion which in a fellow-countryman he understands at once, and in a European foreigner with somewhat less certainty. (183)
The deed he is bound to do is no murder, but a sacrifice. He is to save Desdemona from herself, not in hate but in honour; in honour, and also in love. His anger has passed; a boundless sorrow has taken its place; … (186)
I will not say that Shakespeare imagined him as a Negro and not as a Moor, for that might imply that he distinguished Negroes and Moors, for that might imply that he distinguished Negroes and Moors precisely as we do; but what appears to me nearly certain is that he imagined Othello as a black man, and not as a light-brown one. / In the first place, we must remember that the brown or bronze to which we are now accustomed in the Othellos of our [187] theatres in a recent innovation. Down to Edmund Kean’s time, so far as is known, Othello was always quite black. This stage-tradition goes back to the Restoration, and it almost settles our question. … we know that sixteenth-century writers called any dark North African a Moor, or a black Moor, or a blackamoor. Sir Thomas Elyot, according to Hunter, calls Ethiopians Moors; and the following are the first two illustrations of ‘Blackamoor’ in the Oxford English Dictionary: 1547, ‘I am a blake More borne in Barbary’; 1548, ‘Ethiopo, a blake More, or a man of Ethiope.’ Thus geographical names can tell us nothings about the question how Shakespeare imagined Othello. (187-188)
The horror of most American critics (Mr Furness is a bright exception) at the idea of a black Othello is very amusing, and their arguments are highly instructive. But they were anticipated, I regret to say, by Coleridge, and we will hear him. ‘No doubt Desdemona saw Othello’s visage in his mind; yet, as we are constituted, and most surely as an English audience was disposed in the beginning of the seventeenth century, it would by something monstrous to conceive this beautiful Venetian girl falling in love with a veritable Negro. It would argue a disproportionateness, a want of balance, in Desdemona, which Shakespeare does not appear to have in the least contemplated. [Lectures on Shakespeare, ed. Ashe, p. 386] … the suggestion that such love [189] would aruge ‘disproportionateness’ is precisely the suggestion that Iago did make in Desdemona’s case: ‘Foh! one may smell in such a will most rank,/Foul disproportion, thoughts unnatural./’ … Thus the argument of Coleridge and others points straight to the conclusion against which they argue. (189-190)
[note] I will not discuss the further question whether, granted that to Shakespeare Othello was a black, he should be represented as a black in our theatres now. I dare say not. We do not like the real Shakespeare. We like to have his language pruned and his conceptions flattened into something that suits our mouths and minds. And even if we were prepared to make an effort, still, as Lamb observes, to imagine is one thing and to see is another. Perhaps if we saw Othello coal-black with the bodily eye, the aversion to our blood, an aversion which comes as near to being merely physical as anything human can, would overpower our imagination and sink us below not Shakespeare only but the audiences of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. (190)
It is that when first we hear of her marriage we have not yet seen the Desdemona of the later Acts; and therefore we do not perceive how astonishing this love and boldness must have been in a maiden so quiet and submissive. And when we watch her in her suffering and death we are so penetrated by the sense of her heavenly sweetness and self-surrender that we almost forget that she had shown herself quite as exceptional in the active assertion of her own soul and will. (191)
…to compare Iago with the Satan of Paradise Lost seems almost absurd, so immensely does Shakespeare’s man exceed Milton’s Fiend in evil. (Lecture VI, Othello, 195)
It is only in Goethe’s Mephistopheles that a fit companion for Iago can be found. Here there is something of the same deadly coldness, the same gaiety in destruction. But then Mephistopheles, like so many scores of literary villains, has Iago for his father. And Mephistopheles, besides, is not, in the strict sense, a character. He is half person, half symbol. (196)
Of Shakespeare’s characters Falstaff, Hamlet, Iago, and Cleopatra (I name them in the order of their births) are probably the most wonderful. Of these, again, Hamlet and Iago, whose births come nearest together, are perhaps the most subtle. (196)
…false interpretations, …. Convert his Iago into an ordinary villain. …The second group of false interpretations is much smaller, … Here Iago is a being who hates good simply because it is good, and loves evil purely for [196] itself. His action is not prompted by any plain motive like revenge, jealousy or ambition. It springs from a ‘motiveless malignity’, or a disinterested delight in the pain of others; and Othello, Cassio and Desdemona are scarcely more than the material requisite for the full attainment of this delight. … he is, if not a psychological impossibility, at any rate not a human being. He might be in place, therefore, in a symbolical poem like Faust, but in a purely human drama like Othello he would be ruinous blunder. (196-197)
Coleridge, the author of that misleading phrase ‘motiveless malignity’, has some fine remarks on Iago; … (197)
No doubt the belief in that Italian villainy was prevalent in Shakespeare’s time, and it may perhaps have influenced him in some slight degree…But even this slight influence seems to me doubtful. (197)
…Iago certainly cannot be taken to exemplify the popular Elizabethan idea of a disciple of Macchiavelli. There is no sign that he is in theory an atheist or even an unbeliever in the received religion. On the contrary, he uses its language, … (198)
One must constantly remember not to believe a syllable that Iago utters on any subject, including himself, until one has tested his statement by comparing it with known facts and with other statements of his own or of other people, and by considering whether he had in the particular circumstances any reason for telling a lie or for telling the truth. … I will take as an instance the very first assertions made by Iago. In the opening scene he tells his dupe Roderigo that three great men [198] of Venice went to Othello and begged him to make Iago his lieutenant; that Othello, out of pride and obstinacy, refused; that in refusing he talked a deal of military rigmarole, and ended by declaring (falsely, we are to understand) that he had already filled up the vacancy; that Cassio, whom he chose, had absolutely no practical knowledge of war, nothing but bookish theoric, mere prattle, arithmetic, whereas Iago himself had often fought by Othello’s side, and by ‘old gradation’ too ought to have been preferred. Most or all of this is repeated by some critics as though it were information given by Shakespeare, and the conclusion is quite naturally drawn that Iago had some reason to feel aggrieved. But if we ask ourselves how much of all this is true we shall answer, I believe, as follows. It is absolutely certain that Othello appointed Cassio his lieutenant, and nothing else is absolutely certain. But there is no reason to doubt the statement that Iago had seen service with him, nor is there anything inherently improbable in the statement that he was solicited by three great personages on Iago’s behalf. On the other hand, the suggestions that he refused out of pride and obstinacy, and that he lied in saying he had already chosen his officer, have no verisimilitude; and if there is any fact at all (as there probably is) behind Iago’s account of the conversation, it doubtless is the fact that Iago himself was ignorant of military science, while Cassio was an expert, and that Othello explained this to the great personages. That Cassio, again, was an interloper and a mere closet-student without experience of war is incredible, considering first that Othello chose him for lieutenant, and secondly that the Senate appointed him to succeed Othello in command at Cyprus; and we have direct evidence that part of Iago’s statement is a lie, for Desdemona happens to mention that Cassio was a man who ‘all his time’ had ‘founded his good fortunes’ on Othello’s love and had ‘shared dangers’ with him (III.iv.93). [199] …What is certain, finally, in the whole business is that Othello’s mind was perfectly at ease about the appointment, and that he never dreamed of Iago’s being discontented at it, not even when the intrigue was disclosed and he asked himself how he had offended Iago. (198-200)
Iago, we gather, was a Venetian soldier, eight-and-twenty years of age, who had seen a good deal of service and had a high reputation for courage. Of his origin we are ignorant, but, unless I am mistaken, he was not of gentle birth or breeding. He does not strike one as a degraded man of culture: for all his great powers, he is vulgar, and his probable want of military science may well be significant. He was married to a wife evidently lacked refinement, and who [200] appears in the drama in the relation of a servant to Desdemona. His manner was that of a blunt, bluff soldier, who spoke his mind freely and plainly. He was often hearty, and could be thoroughly jovial; but he was not seldom rather rough and caustic of speech, and he was given to making remark somewhat disparaging to human nature. He was aware of this trait in himself, and frankly admitted that he was nothing if not critical, … ‘Honest’ is the word that springs to the lips of everyone who speaks of him. It is applied to him some fifteen times in the play, … (200-201)
Iago…had worn this mask for years, and he had apparently never enjoyed, like Richard, occasional explosions of the reality within him. …Iago was able to find a certain relief from the discomfort of hypocrisy in those caustic or cynical speeches which, being misinterpreted, only heightened confidence in his honesty. They acted as a safety-valve, very much as Hamlet’s pretended insanity did. (203)
…he was by no means a man of strong feelings and passions, like Richard, but decidedly cold by temperament. …Iago, though [203] thoroughly selfish and unfeeling, was not by nature malignant, nor even morose, but that, on the contrary, he had a superficial good-nature, the kind of good-nature that wins popularity and is often taken as the sign, not of a good digestion, but of a good heart. (203-204)
…Iago had never been detected in any serious offence and may even never have been guilty of one, but had pursued a selfish but outwardly decent life, … never yet meeting with any sufficient temptation to risk his position and advancement by a dangerous crime. So that, in fact, the tragedy of Othello is in a sense his tragedy too. It shows us not a violent man, like Richard, who spends his life in murder, but a thoroughly bad, cold man, who is at last tempted to let loose the forces within him, and is at once destroyed. (204)
Iago’s…quickness and versatility in dealing with sudden difficulties and unforeseen opportunities, have probably no parallel among dramatic characters. Equally remarkable is his strength of will. Not Socrates himself, not the ideal sage of the Stoics, was more lord of himself that Iago appears to be. It is not merely that he never betrays his true nature; he seems to be master of all the motions that might affect his will. In the most dangerous moments of his plot, when the least slip or accident would be fatal, he never shows a trace of nervousness. (204)
His creed—for he is no sceptic, he has a definite creed—is that absolute egoism is the only rational and proper attitude, and that conscience or honour or any kind of regard for others is an absurdity. He does not deny that this absurdity exist. He does not suppose that most people secretly share his creed, while pretending to hold and practice another. On the contrary, he regards most people as honest fools. He declares that he has never yet met a man who knew how to love himself; and his one expression of admiration in the play is for servants ‘Who, trimmed in forms and visages of duty,/Keep yet their hearts attending on themselves.’ (205)
When Iago has no dislike or hostility to a person he does not show pleasure in the suffering of that person: he shows at most the absence of pain. There is, for instance, not the least sign of his enjoying the distress of Desdemona. (206)
Iago has been represented as an incarnation of envy, … But this idea, though containing truth, seems much exaggerated. …if he were an eagerly ambitious man, … surely too, with his great powers, he would already have risen high, instead of being a mere ensign, short of money, and playing Captain Rook to Roderigo’s Mr Pigeon. Taking all the facts, one must conclude that his desires were comparatively moderate and his ambition weak; that he probably enjoyed war keenly, but, if he had money enough, did not exert himself greatly to acquire reputation or position; … But what is clear is that Iago is keenly to anything that touches his pride of self-esteem. It would be most unjust to call him vain, but he has a high opinion of himself and a great contempt for others. He is quite of his superiority to them in certain respects; and he either disbelieves in or despises [206] the qualities in which they are superior to him. Whatever disturbes or wounds his sense of superiority irritates him at once; and in that sense he is highly competitive. This is why the appointment of Cassio provokes him. (206-207)
For much the same reason he has a spite against goodness in men (for it is characteristic that he is less blind to its existence in men, the stronger, than in women, the weaker). He has a spite against it, not from any love of evil for evil’s sake, but partly because it annoys his intellect as a stupidity; partly (though he hardly knows this) because it weakens his satisfaction with himself, and disturbes his faith that egoism is right and proper thing; partly because, the world being such a fool, goodness is popular and prospers. …wounds his pride. Good therefore annoys him. He is always ready to scoff at it, and would like to strike at it. In ordinary circumstances these feelings of irritation are not vivid in Iago—no feeling is so—but they are constantly present. (207)
…Othello’s: ‘Will you, I pray, demand that demi-devil/Why he hath thus ensnared my soul and body?’ This question Why? is the question about Iago, just as the question Why did Hamlet delay? is the question about Hamlet. [207] Iago refused to answer it; but I will venture to say that he could not have answered it, … But Shakespeare knew the answer, … (207-208)
The answer of the most popular view will be, ‘Yes. Iago was, as he says, chiefly incited by two things, the desire of advancement, and a hatred of Othello due principally to the affair of the lieutenancy. These are perfectly intelligible causes; we have only to add to them unusual ability and cruelty, …If your view is correct, why should Iago be considered an extraordinary creation; … The difficulty about this popular view is, in the first place, that it attributes to Iago what cannot be found in the Iago of the play. Its Iago is impelled by passions, a passion of ambition and a passion of hatred; for no ambition or hatred short of passion could drive a man who is evidently so clear-sighted, and who must hitherto have been so prudent, into a plot so extremely hazardous. … Passion, in Shakespeare’s plays, is perfectly easy to recognize. What vestige of it, of passion unsatisfied or of passion gratified, is visible in Iago? None: that is the very horror of him. He has less passion that an ordinary man, and yet he does these frightful things. The only ground for attributing to him, I do not say a passionate hatred, but anything deserving the same of hatred at all, is his own statement, ‘I hate Othello’; and we know what his statement are worth. (209)
[popular account] …fails to perceive how unnatural, how strange and suspicious, his own account is. Certainly he assigns motives enough; the difficulty is that he assigns so many. A man moved by simple passions due to simple causes does not stand fingering his feelings, industriously enumerating their sources, and groping about for new ones. But this is what Iago does. And this is not all. These motives appear and disappear in the most extraordinary manner. (210)
What is the meaning of all this? Unless Shakespeare was out of his mind, it must have a meaning. (210)
…I would venture to describe Iago in these soliloquies as a man setting out on a project which strongly attracts his desire, but at the same time conscious of a resistance to the desire, and unconsciously trying to argue the resistance away by assigning reason for the project. (211)
Are we to fall back on the idea of a ‘motiveless malignity’; that is to say, a disinterested love of evil, or a delight in the pain of others as simple and direct as the delight in one’s own pleasure? Surely not. I will not insist that this thing or these things are inconceivable, mere phrases, not ideas; for, even so, it would remain possible that Shakespeare had tried to represent an inconceivability. (211)
Still, desire of advancement and resentment about the lieutenancy, though factors and indispensible factors in the cause of Iago’s action, are neither the principal nor the most characteristic factors. (212)
The most delightful thing to such a man would be something that gave an extreme satisfaction to his sense of power and superiority; and if it involved, secondly, the triumphant exertion of his abilities, and, thirdly, the excitement of danger, [212] his delight would be consummated. And the consummated. And the moment most dangerous to such a man would be one when his sense of superiority had met with an affront, so that its habitual craving was reinforced by resentment, while at the same time he saw an opportunity of satisfying it by subjecting to his will the very persons who had affronted it. Now, this is the temptation that comes to Iago. Othello’s eminence, Othello’s goodness, and his own dependence on Othello, must have been a perpetual annoyance to him. At any time he would have enjoyed befooling and tormenting Othello. Under ordinary circumstances he was restrained, chiefly by self-interest, in some slight degree perhaps by the faint pulsations of conscience or humanity. But disappointment at the loss of the lieutenancy supplied the touch of lively resentment that was required to overcome these obstacles; and the prospect of satisfying the sense of power by mastering Othello through an intricate and hazardous intrigue now became irresistible. Iago did not clearly understand what was moving his desire; … (212-213)
[note] Coleridge…When he speaks of ‘the motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity’, he does not mean by the last two words that ‘disinterested love of evil’ or ‘love of evil for evil’s sake’ of which I spoke just now, and which other critics attributes to Iago. He means really that Iago’s malignity does not spring from the causes to which Iago himself refers it, nor from any ‘motive’ in the sense of an idea present to consciousness. (212)
To ‘plume up the will’, to heighten the sense of power or superiority—this seems to be the unconscious motive of many acts of cruelty which evidently do not spring chiefly from ill-will, and which therefore puzzle and sometimes horrify us most. It is often this that makes a man bully the wife or children of whom he is fond. The boy who torments another boy, as we say, ‘for no reason’, or who without any hatred for frogs tortures a frog, is pleased with his victim’s pain, not from any disinterested love of evil or pleasure in pain, but mainly because this pain is the unmistakable proof of his own power over his victim. (213)
…absolute evil is united with supreme intellectual power. Why is the representation tolerable, and why do we not accuse its author either of untruth or of a desperate pessimism? (217)
…sense of power, delight in performing a difficult and dangerous action, delight in the exercise of artistic skill—are not at all evil things. (217)
…Iago’s insight, dexterity, quickness, address, and the like, are in themselves admirable things; … (217)
They are frightful, but if they were absolute Iago would be a monster, not a man. The fact is, he tries to make them absolute and cannot succeed; and the traces of conscience, shame and humanity, though faint, are discernible. If his egoism were absolute he would be perfectly indifferent to the opinion of others; and he clearly is not so. (218)
…if he really possessed no moral sense, we should never have heard those soliloquies which so clearly betray his uneasiness and his unconscious desire to persuade himself that he has some excuse for the villainy he contemplates. (218)
Iago never meant his plot to be so dangerous to himself. He knew that jealousy is painful, but the jealousy of a love like Othello’s he could not imagine, and he found himself involved in murders which were no part of his original design. …The foulness of his own soul made him so ignorant that he built into the marvelous structure of his plot a piece of crass stupidity. (220)
Emilia… She nowhere shows any sign of having a bad heart; but she is common, sometimes vulgar, in minor matters far from scrupulous, blunt in perception and feeling, and quite destitute of imagination. [222]… a certain coarseness of nature. [223] …And yet how all this, and all her defects, vanish into nothingness when we see her face to face with that which she can understand and feel! From the moment of her appearance after the murder to the moment of her death she is transfigured; and yet she remains perfectly true to herself, and we would not have her one atom less herself. She is the only person who utters for us the violent common emotions which we feel, together with those more tragic emotions which we feel, together with those more tragic emotions which she does not comprehend. (224)
King Lear…Some twenty years after the Restoration, Nahum Tate altered King Lear for the stage, giving it a happy ending, and putting Edgar in the place of the King of France as Cordelia’s lover. From that time Shakespeare’s tragedy in its original form was never seen on the stage for a century and a half. Betterton acted Tate’s version; Garrick acted it and Dr Johnson approved it. Kemble acted it, Kean acted it. In 1823 Kean, ‘stimulated by Hazlitt’s remonstrances and Charles Lamb’s essays’, restored the original tragic ending. At last, in 1838, Macready returned to Shakespeare’s text throughout. (Lecture VII, King Lear, 224)
When I regard it strictly as a drama, it appears to me, though in certain parts overwhelming, decidedly inferior as a whole to Hamlet, Othello and Macbeth. When I am feeling that it is greater than any of these, and the fullest revelation of Shakespeare’s power, I find I am not regarding it simply as a drama, but am grouping it in my mind with works like the Prometheus Vinctus and the Divine Comedy, and even with the greatest symphonies of Beethoven and the statues in the Medici Chapel. (226)
This weakness in King Lear is not due , however, to anything intrinsically undramatic in the story, but to characteristics which were necessary to an effort not wholly dramatic. The stage is the test of strictly dramatic quality, and King Lear is too huge for the stage. (228)
…that which makes the peculiar greatness of King Lear—the immense scope of the work; the mass and variety of intense experience which it contains; the interpretation of sublime imagination, piercing pathos, and humour almost as moving as the pathos; the vastness of the convolution both of nature and of human passion; the vagueness of the scene where the action takes place, and the movements of the figures which cross this scene; the strange atmosphere, cold and dark, which strikes on us as we enter this scene, enfolding these figures and [228] magnifying their dim outlines like a winter mist; the half-realized suggestions of vast universal powers working in the world of individual fates and passions—all this interferes with dramatic clearness even when the play is read, and in the theatre not only refuses to reveal itself fully through the sense but seems to be almost in contradiction with their reports. (228-229)
…King Lear, as a whole, is imperfectly dramatic, and there is something in its very essence which is at war with the senses, and demands a purely imaginative realization. It is therefore Shakespeare’s greatest work, but it is not what Hazlitt called it, the best of his plays; and its comparative unpopularity is due, not merely to the extreme painfulness of the catastrophe, but in part to its dramatic defects, and in part to a failure in many readers to catch the peculiar effects to which I have referred—a failure which is natural because the appeal is made not so much to dramatic perception as to a rarer and more strictly poetic kind of imagination. For this reason, too, even the best attempts at exposition of King Lear are disappointing; … (229)
The oft-repeated judgment that the first scene of King Lear is absurdly improbable, and that no sane man would think of dividing his kingdom among his daughters in proportion to the strength of their several protestations of love, is much too harsh…It is merely strange, like so many of the stories on which our romantic dramas are based. …The very first words of the drama, as Coleridge pointed out, tell us that the division of the kingdom is already settled in all its details, so that only the public announcement of it remains. …That then which is censured as absurd, the dependence of the division on the speeches of the daughters, was in Lear’s intention a mere form, devised as a childish scheme to gratify his love of absolute power and his hunger for assurances of devotion. [230] … He loved Cordelia most and knew that she loved him best, and the supreme moment to which he looked forward was that in which she should outdo her sisters in expressions of affections, … Part of the absurdity of Lear’s plan is taken to be his idea of living with his three daughters in turn. But he never meant to do this. He meant to live with Cordelia, and with her alone. (230-231)
In fact his whole original plan, though foolish and rash, was not a ‘hideous rashness’ or incredible folly. If carried out it would have had no such consequences as followed its alteration. It would probably have led quickly to war, but not to the agony which culminated in the storm upon the heath. The first scene, therefore, is not absurd, though it must be pronounced dramatically faulty in so far as it discloses the true position of affairs only to an attention more alert than can be expected in a theatrical audience or has been found in many critics of the play. (231)
The blinding of Gloster on the stage has been condemned almost universally; and surely with justice, because the mere physical horror of such a spectacle would in the theatre be a sensation so violent as to overpower the purely tragic emotions, and therefore the spectacle would seem revolting or shocking. But it is otherwise in reading. For mere imagination the physical horror, though not lost, is so far deadened that it can do its duty as a stimulus to pity, and to that appalled dismay at the extremity of human cruelty which it is of the essence of the tragedy to excite. (232)
If I read King Lear simply as a drama, I find that my feelings call for this ‘happy ending’. I do not mean the human, the philanthropic, feelings, but the dramatic sense. The former wish Hamlet and Othello to escape their doom; the latter does not; but it does wish Lear and Cordelia to be saved. Surely, it says, the tragic emotions have been sufficiently stirred already. Surely the tragic outcome of Lear’s error and his daughters’ ingratitude has been made clear enough and moving enough. And, still more surely, such a tragic catastrophe as this should seem inevitable. But this catastrophe, unlike those of all the other mature tragedies, does not seem at all inevitable. It is not even satisfactorily motivated. [I mean that no sufficiently clear reason is supplied for Edmund’s delay in attempting to save Cordelia and Lear.] In fact it seems expressly designated to fall suddenly [233] like a bolt form a sky cleared by the vanished storm. And although from a wider point of view one may fully recognize the value of this effect, and may even reject with horror the wish for a ‘happy ending’, this wider point of view, I must maintain, is not strictly speaking or tragic. (233-234)
…what we desire for him during the brief remainder of his days is not ‘the childish pleasure of getting his gilt robes and scepter again’, not what Tate gives him, but what Shakespeare himself might have given him, but what happiness by Cordelia’s fireside. (234)
The principal structural weakness of King Lear… The number of essential characters is so large, their actions and movements are so complicated, and events towards the close crowd on one another so thickly, that the reader’s attention, rapidly transferred from one centre of interest to another, is overstrained. He becomes, if not intellectually confused, at least emotionally fatigued. (235)
…that this multiplicity is not in itself a fatal obstacle is evident from the last two Acts of Hamlet, and especially from the final scene. This is in all respects one of Shakespeare’s triumphs, yet the stage is crowded with characters. Only they are not leading characters. The plot is single; Hamlet and the King are the ‘mighty opposites’; and Ophelia, the only other person in whom we are obliged to take a vivid interest, has already disappeared. It is therefore natural and right that the deaths of Laertes and the Queen should affect us comparatively little. But in King Lear, because the plot is double, we have present in the last scene no less than five persons who are technically of the first importance—Lear, his three daughters and Edmund; … Shakespeare has too vast a material to use with complete dramatic effectiveness, however essential this very vastness was for effects of another kind. (236)
The improbabilities in King Lear surely far surpass those of the other great tragedies in number and in grossness. And they are particularly noticeable in the secondary plot. (236)
…it seems doubtful whether his failure to give information about the fate of the Fool was due to anything more than carelessness or an impatient desire to reduce his overloaded material. (238)
…we know, broadly speaking, where the person live and what their journeys are. The text makes this plain, for example, almost throughout Hamlet, Othello and Macbeth; and the imagination is therefore untroubled. But in King Lear the indications are so scanty that the reader’s mind is left not seldom both vague and bewildered. [238] … Something of the confusion which bewilders the readers’s mind in King Lear recurs in Antony and Cleopatra, the most faultily constructed of all the tragedies; but there it is due not so much to the absence or vagueness of the indications as to the necessity of taking frequent and fatiguing journeys over thousands of miles. Shakespeare could not help himself in the Roman play: in King Lear he did not choose to help himself, perhaps deliberately chose to be vague. (239)
…to take at once two of the simplest examples of this, that very vagueness in the sense of locality which we have just considered, and again that excess in the bulk of the material and the number of figures, events and movements, … give the feeling of vastness, the feeling not of a scene or particular place, but of a world; … This world is dim to us, partly from its immensity, and partly because it is filled with gloom; and in the gloom shapes approach and recede, whose half-seen faces and motions touch us with dread, horror, or the most painful pity—sympathies and antipathies which we seem to be feeling not only for them but for the whole race. (204)
…the sub-plot simply repeats the theme of the main story. …This repetition does not simply double to pain with which the tragedy is witnessed: it startles and terrifies by suggesting that the folly of Lear and the ingratitude of his daughters are no accident or merely individual aberrations, … [note: This effects of the double action seems to have been pointed out first by Schlegel.] [241] …with the possible exception of Lear himself, no one of the characters strikes us as psychologically a wonderful creation, like Hamlet or Iago or even Macbeth; one or two seem even to be somewhat faint and thin. And, what is more significant, it is not quite natural to us to regard them from this point of view at all. Rather we observe a most unusual circumstance. If Lear, Gloster and Albany are set apart, the rest fall into two distinct groups, which are strongly, even violently, contrasted: Cordelia, Kent, Edger, the Fool on one side, Goneril, Reagan, Edmund, Cornwall, Oswald on the other. (242)
…a tendency which produces symbols, allegories, personifications of qualities and abstract ideas; and we are accustomed to think it quite foreign to Shakespeare’s genius, which was in the highest degree concrete. No doubt in the main we are right here; but it is hazardous to set limits to that genius. The Sonnets, if nothing else, may show us how easy it was to Shakespeare’s mind to move in a world of ‘Platonic’ ideas, and, while it would be going too far to suggest that he was employing conscious symbolism or allegory in King Lear, it does appear to disclose a mode of imagination not so very far removed from the mode with which, we must remember, Shakespeare was perfectly familiar in Morality plays and in the Fairly Queen. (243)
…striking characteristic of King Lear—one in which it has no parallel except Timon—the incessant references to the lower animals and man’s likeness to them. (244)
And the only comfort he might seem to hold out to us is the prospect that at least this bestial race, strong only where it is vile, cannot endure: … (246)
…effect of theatrical exhibition… The storm-scenes in King Lear gain nothing and their very essence is destroyed. It is [247] comparatively a small thing that the theatrical storm, not to drown the dialogue, must be silent whenever a human being wishes to speak, and is wretchedly inferior to many a storm we have witnessed. Nor is it simply that, as Lamb observed, the corporal presence of Lear, ‘an old man tottering about the stage with a walking-stick’, disturbs and depresses the sense of the greatness of his mind which fills the imagination. (248)
Surely something not less, but much more, than these helpless words convey, is what comes to us in these astounding scenes; and if, translated thus into the language of prose, [i.e. the stage] it becomes confused and inconsistent, the reason is simply that it itself is poetry, and such poetry as cannot be transferred to the space behind the footlights, but has its being only imagination. Here then is Shakespeare at his very greatest, but not the mere dramatist Shakespeare. [Nor it is believable that Shakespeare, whose means of imitating a storm were so greatly inferior even to ours, had the stage-performance only or chiefly in view in composing these scenes. He may not have thought of readers (or he may), but he must in any case have written to satisfy his own imagination.] (248)
What can be the ultimate power that moves it, that excites this gigantic war and waste, or, perhaps, that suffers them and overrules them? And in King Lear this question is not left to us to ask, it is raised by the characters themselves. References to religious or irreligious beliefs and feelings are more frequent than is usual in Shakespeare’s tragedies, as frequent perhaps as in his final plays. He introduces characteristic differences in the language of the different persons about fortune or the stars or the gods, and shows how the question What rules the world? is forced upon their minds. (249)
Almost throughout the latter half of the drama we note in most the better characters a preoccupation with the question of the ultimate power, and a passionate need to explain by reference to it what otherwise would drive them to despair. And the influence of this preoccupation and need joins with other influences in affecting the imagination, and in causing it to receive from King Lear an impression which is at least as near of kin to the Divine Comedy as to Othello. (251)
Its final and total result is one in which pity and terror, carried perhaps to the extreme limits of art, are so blended with a sense of law and beauty that we feel at last, not depression and much less despair, but a consciousness of greatness in pain, and of solemnity in the mystery we cannot fathom. (257)
Lear, we see, is also choleric by temperament—the first of Shakespeare’s heroes who is so. (Lecture VIII, King Lear, 259)
There is nothing more noble and beautiful in literature than Shakespeare’s exposition of the effect of suffering in reviving the greatness and eliciting the sweetness of Lear’s nature. The occasional recurrence, during his madness, of autocratic impatience or of desire for revenge serves only to heighten this effect, and the moments when his insanity becomes merely infinitely piteous do not weaken it. The old King who in pleading with his daughters feels so intensely his own humiliation and their horrible ingratitude, and who yet, at fourscore and upward, constrains himself to practice a self-control and patience so many years disused; who out of old affection for his Fool, and in repentance for his injustice to the Fool’s beloved mistress, tolerates incessant and cutting reminders of his own folly and wrong; in whom the rage of the storm awakes a power and a poetic grandeur surpassing even that of Othello’s anguish; who comes in his affliction to think of others first, and to seek, in tender solicitude for his poor boy, the shelter he scorns for his own bare head; who learns to feel and to pray for the miserable and houseless poor, to discern the falseness of flattery and the brutality of authority, and to pierce below the differences of rank and raiment to the common humanity beneath; whose sight is so purged by scalding tears that it sees at last how power and place and all things in the world are vanity except love; who tastes in his last hours the extremes both of love’s rapture and of its agony, but could never, if he lived on or lived again, care a jot for aught beside—there is no figure, surely, in the world of poetry at once so grand, so pathetic, and so beautiful as his. (262)
Lear’s insanity, which destroys the coherence, also reduces the poetry of his imagination. What it stimulates is that power of moral perception and reflection which had already been quickened by his sufferings. This, however partial and however disconnectedly used, first appears, quite soon after the insanity has declared itself, in the idea that the naked beggar represents truth and reality, in contrast with those conventions, flatteries, and corruptions of the great world, by which Lear has so long been deceived and will never be deceived again: .. (266)
I spoke of Lear’s ‘recovery’, but the word is too strong. The Lear of the Fifth Act is not indeed insane, but his mind is greatly enfeebled. (267)
…Lear’s last speech… consists almost wholly of monosyllables of native origin, composed in very brief sentences of the plainest structure, it presents an extraordinary contrast to the dying speech of Hamlet and the last words of Othello to the bystanders. The fact that Lear speaks in passion is one cause of the difference, but not the sole cause. The language is more than simple, it is [269] familiar. And this familiarity is characteristic of Lear (except at certain moments, already referred to) from the time of his madness onwards, and is the source of the peculiarity poignant effect of some of his sentences (such as ‘The little dogs and all…’). We feel in them the loss of power to sustain his royal dignity; … (269-270)
Goneril…She is the most hideous human being (if she is one) that Shakespeare ever drew. (277)
…there is no fool in the last of the pure tragedies, Macbeth. / But the Fool is one of Shakespeare’s triumphs in King Lear. Imagine the tragedy without him, and you hardly know it. … One can almost imagine that Shakespeare, going home from an evening at the Mermaid, where he had listened to Jonson fulminating against fools in general and perhaps criticizing the Clown in Twelfth Night in particular, had said to himself: … I will have a fool in the most tragic. He shall not play a little part. … Instead of amusing the king’s idle hours, he shall stand by him in the very tempest and whirlwind of passion. Before I have [286] done you shall confess, between laughter and tears, that he is of the very essence of life, that you have known him all your days though you never recognized him till now, and that you would as soon go without Hamlet as miss him.’ (286-287)
…unless we suppose that he is touched in the brain we lose half the effect of his appearance in the storm-scenes. The effect of those scenes (to state the matter as plainly as possible) depends largely on the presence of three characters, and on the affinities and contrasts between them; on our perception that the differences of station in King, Fool, and beggar-noble, are leveled by one blast of calamity; but also on our perception of the differences between these three in one respect—viz. in regard to the peculiar affliction of insanity. The insanity of the King differs widely in its nature from that of the Fool, and that of the Fool from that of the beggar. But the insanity of the King differs from that of the beggar not only in its nature, but also in the fact that one is real and the other simply a pretence. Are we to suppose then that the insanity of the third character, the Fool, is, in this respect, a mere repetition of that of the second, the beggar—that it too is mere pretence? To suppose this is not only to impoverish miserably the impression made by the trio as a whole, it is also to diminish the heroic and pathetic effect of the character of the Fool. For his heroism consists largely in this, that his efforts to outjest his master’s injuries are the efforts of a being to whom a responsible use of language, is at the best of times difficult, and from whom it is never at the best of times expected. It is a heroism something like that of Lear himself in his endeavour to learn patience at the age of eighty. (287)
Cordelia appears in the only four of twenty-six scenes of King Lear, she speaks—it is hard to believe it—scarcely more than a hundred lines; and yet no character in Shakespeare is more absolutely individual or more ineffaceably stamped on the memory of his readers. [290] … the suggestion of infinite wealth and beauty conveyed by the very refusal to reveal this beauty in expansive speech—this is at once the nature of Cordelia herself and the chief characteristic of Shakespeare’s art in representing it. …It was natural to Hamlet to examine himself minutely, to discuss himself at large, and yet to remain a mystery to himself; and Shakespeare’s method of drawing the character answers to it; it is extremely detailed and searching, and yet its effect is to enhance the sense of mystery. The results in the two cases differ correspondingly. No one hesitates to enlarge upon Hamlet, who speaks of himself so much; but to use may words about Cordelia seems to be a kind of impiety. (290-291)
I am obliged to speak of her chiefly because the devotion she inspires almost inevitably obscures her part in the tragedy. This devotion is composed, so to speak, of two contrary elements, reverence and pity. [291] … Of all Shakespeare’s heroines she knew least of joy. She grew up with Goneril and Regan for sister. … The memory of Cordelia thus becomes detached in a manner from the action of the drama. The reader refuses to admit into it any idea of imperfection, and is outraged when any share in her father’s sufferings is attributed to the part she plays in the opening scene. Because she was deeply wronged he is ready to insist that she was wholly right. He refuses, that is, to take the tragic point of view, and, when it is taken, he imagines that Cordelia is being attacked, or is being declared to have ‘deserved’ all that befell her. But Shakespeare’s was the tragic point of view. …the cause of her failure—a failure a thousandfold redeemed—is a compared in which imperfect-[292]tion appears so intimately mingled with the noblest qualities that—if we are true to Shakespeare—we do not think either of justifying her or of blaming her: we feel simply the tragic emotions of fear and pity. [293] … And even if truth were the one and only obligation, to tell much less than truth is not to tell it. And Cordelia’s speech not only tells much less than truth about her love, it actually perverts the truth when it implies that to give love to a husband is to take it from a father. (291-295)
When she dies we regard her, practically speaking, simply as we regard Ophelia or Desdemona, as an innocent victim swept away in the convulsion caused by the error or guilt of others. … It is obviously the other side of the fact that the effects of good spread far and wide beyond the doer of good; and we should ask ourselves whether we really could wish (supposing it conceivable) to see this double-sided fact abolished. (297)
…the touch of reconciliation that we feel in contemplating the death of Cordelia… it is a feeling not confined to King Lear, but present at the close of other tragedies; [297] The feeling I mean is the impression that the heroic being, though in one sense and outwardly he has failed, is yet in some way which we do not seek to define, untouched by the doom that overtakes him; and is rather set free from life than deprived of it. … [It follows from the above that, if this idea were made explicit and accompanied our reading of a tragedy throughout, it would confuse or even destroy the tragic impression. So would the constant presence of Christian beliefs. The reader most attached to these beliefs holds them in temporary suspension while he is immersed in a Shakespearean tragedy. (297-298)
Throughout that stupendous Third Act the good are seen growing better through suffering, and the bad worse through success. The warm castle is a room in hell, the storm-swept heath a sanctuary. The judgment of this world is a lie; its goods, which we covert, corrupt us; its ills, which break our bodies, set our souls free; … Let us renounce the world, hate it, and lose it gladly. The only real thing in it is the soul, with its courage, patience, devotion. And nothing outward can touch that. [300] … This, if we like to use the word, is Shakespeare’s ‘pessimism’ in King Lear. … Pursued further and allowed to dominate, it would destroy the tragedy; for it is necessary to tragedy that we should feel that suffering and death do matter greatly, and that happiness and life are not to be renounced as worthless. Pursued further, again, it leads to the idea that the world, in that obvious appearance of it which tragedy cannot dissolve without dissolving itself, is illusive. And its tendency towards this idea is traceable in King Lear, in the shape of the notion that this ‘great world’ is transitory, or ‘will wear out to nought’ like the little world called ‘man’ (IV.vi.137), or that humanity will destroy itself. (300-301)
Macbeth, it is probable, was the last-written of the four great tragedies, and immediately preceded Antony and Cleopatra. In that play Shakespeare’s final style appears for the first time completely formed, and the transition to this style is much more decidedly visible in Macbeth than in King Lear. Yet in certain respects Macbeth recalls Hamlet rather than Othello or King Lear. (Lecture IX, Macbeth, 305)
The special popularity of Hamlet and Macbeth is due in part to some of these common characteristics, notably to the fascination of the supernatural, the absence of the spectacle of extreme undeserved suffering, the absence of characters which horrify and repel and yet are destitute of grandeur. The reader who looks unwillingly at Iago gazes at Lady Macbeth in awe, because though she is dreadful she is also sublime. The whole tragedy is sublime. (305)
The diction has in places a huge and rugged grandeur, which degenerates here and there into tumidity. (306)
Macbeth is very much shorter than the other three tragedies, but our experience in traversing it is so crowded and intense that it leaves an impression not of brevity but of speed. It is the most vehement, the most concentrated, perhaps we may say the most tremendous, of the tragedies. (306)
Darkness, we may even say blackness, broods over this tragedy. It is remarkable that almost all the scenes which at once recur to memory take place either at night or in some dark spot. [307] … The atmosphere of Macbeth, however, is not that of unrelieved blackness. On the contrary, as compared with King Lear and its cold dim gloom, Macbeth leaves a decided impression of colour; it is really the impression of a black night broken by flashes of light and colour, sometimes vivid and even glaring. (307-308)
…constant, allusions to sleep, man’s strange half-conscious life; to the misery of its withholding; to the terrible dreams of remorse; to the cursed thoughts from which Banquo is free by day, but which tempt him in his sleep: and again to abnormal disturbances of sleep; … (311)
…Irony. I do not refer to irony in the ordinary sense; to speeches, for example, where the speaker is intentionally ironical, … I refer to irony on the part of the author himself, to ironical juxtapositions of person and events, and especially to the ‘Sophoclean irony’ by which a speaker is made to use words bearing to the audience, in addition to his own meaning, a further and ominous sense, … (311)
On the one hand the Witches, whose contribution to the ‘atmosphere’ of Macbeth can hardly be exaggerated, are credited with far too great an influence upon the action; sometimes they are described as goddesses, or even as fates, whom Macbeth is powerless to resist. And this is perversion. On the other hand, we are told that, great as is their influence on the action, it is so because they are merely symbolic representations of the unconscious or half-conscious guilt in Macbeth himself. And this is inadequate. (313)
His Witches owe all their power to the spirits; they are ‘instruments of darkness’; the spirits are their ‘masters’ (IV.i.63). Fancy the fates having masters! (315)
Banquo, ambitious but perfectly honest, is scarcely even startled by them, and he remains throughout the scene indifferent to them. But when Macbeth heard them he was not an innocent man. Precisely how far his mind was guilty may be a question; but no innocent man would have started, as he did, with a start of fear at the mere prophecy of a crown, or have conceived thereupon immediately the thought of murder. (316)
…Macbeth himself nowhere betrays a suspicion that his action is, or has been, thrust on him by an external power. He curses the Witches for deceiving him, but he never attempts to shift to them the burden of his guilt. Neither has Shakespeare placed in the mouth of any other character in this play such fatalistic expressions as may be found in King Lear and occasionally elsewhere. (317)
The Witches nowadays takes a room in Bond Street and charge a guinea; and when the victim enters they hail him the possessor of (pound) 1,000 a year, or prophecy to him of journeys, wives, and children. But though he is struck dumb by their prescience, it does not even cross his mind that he is going to lose his glorious ‘freedom’…This whole difficulty is undramatic; and I may add Shakespeare nowhere shows, like Chaucer, any interest in speculative problems concerning foreknowledge, predestination and freedom. (318)
We may deal more briefly with the opposite interpretation. According to it the Witches and their prophecies are to be taken merely as symbolical representations of thoughts and desires which have slumbered in Macbeth’s breast and now rise into consciousness and confront him. … But it is evident that it is rather a ‘philosophy’ of the Witches than an immediate dramatic [318] apprehension of them; and even so it will be found both incomplete and, in other respects, inadequate. / It is incomplete because it cannot possibly be applied to all the facts. (318-319)
Macbeth had evidently no suspicion of that treachery in Cawdor through which he himself became Thane; and who will suggest that he had any idea, however subconscious, about Birnam Wood or the man not born of woman? (319)
The words of the Witches are fatal to the hero only because there is in him something which leaps into light at the sound of them; but they are at the same time the witness of forces which never cease to work in the world around him, and, on the instant of his surrender to them, entangle him inextricably in the web of Fate. (320)
The way to be untrue to Shakespeare here, as always, is to relax the tension of imagination, to conventionalize, to conceive Macbeth, for example, as a half-hearted cowardly criminal, and Lady Macbeth as a whole-hearted fiend. (320)
[note] The assertion that Lady Macbeth sought a crown for herself, or sought anything for herself, apart from her husband, is absolutely unjustifiable by anything in the play. It is based on a sentence of Holinshed’s which Shakespeare did not use. (321)
Their attitudes towards the projected murder of Duncan are quite different; and it produces in them equally different effects. In consequence, they appear in the earlier part of the play as of equal importance, if indeed Lady Macbeth does not overshadow her husband; but afterwards she retires more and more into the background, and he becomes unmistakably the leading figure. His is indeed far the more complex character: … (322)
Macbeth…great personal courage, a quality which he continues to display throughout the drama in regard to all plain dangers. …great warrior, somewhat masterful, rough, and abrupt, a man to inspire some fear and much admiration. He was thought ‘honest’, or honourable; he was trusted, apparently, by everyone; …We have no warrant, I think, for describing him, with many writers, as of a ‘noble’ nature, like Hamlet or Othello [The word is used of him (I.ii.67), but not in a way that decides this question or even bears on it.]; but he had a keen sense both of honour and of the worth of a good name. (322)
…there is in Macbeth one marked peculiarity, the true apprehension of which is the key to Shakespeare’s conception. This bold ambitious man of action has, within certain limits, the imagination of a poet—an imagination on the one hand extremely sensitive to impressions of a certain kind, and, on the other, productive of violent disturbance both of mind and body. Through it he is kept in contact with supernatural impressions and is liable to supernatural fears. And through it, especially, come to him the intimations of conscience and honour. Macbeth’s better nature—to put the matter for clearness’ sake too broadly—instead of speaking to him in the overt language or moral ideas, commands and prohibitions, incorporates itself in images which alarm and horrify. (323)
…his inability to understand himself is repeated and exaggerated in the interpretations of actors and critics, who represent him as a coward, cold-blooded, calculating, and pitiless, who shrinks from crime simply because he is not safe. In reality his courage is frightful. He strides from crime to crime, though his soul never ceases to bar his advance with shapes of terror, …he must always have been incapable of Hamlet’s reflections on man’s noble reason and infinite faculty, or of seeing with Hamlet’s eyes ‘this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire’. Nor could he feel, like Othello, the romance of war or the infinity of love. … His imagination is excitable and intense, but narrow. That which stimulates it is, almost solely, that which thrills [324] with sudden, startling, and often supernatural fear. [It is the consequent insistence on the idea of fear, and the frequent repetition of the word, that have principally led to misinterpretation.] (324-325)
As the first ‘horrid image’ of Duncan’s murder—of himself murdering Duncan—rises from unconscious and confronts him, his hair stands on end and the outward scene vanishes from his eyes. Why? For fear of ‘consequences’? The idea is ridiculous. Or because the deed is bloody? The man who with his ‘smoking’ steel ‘carved out his passage’ to the rebel leader, and ‘unseame’d him from the nave to the chaps’, would hardly be frightened by blood. [325] … shows us that what really holds him back is the hideous vileness of the deed: (325-326)
So long as Macbeth’s imagination is active, we watch him fascinated; we feel suspense, horror, awe; in which are latent, also, admiration and sympathy. But so soon as it is quiescent these feeling vanish. He is no longer ‘infirm of purpose’: he becomes domineering, even brutal, or he becomes a cool pitiless hypocrite. (327)
The whole flood of evil in his nature is now let loose. He becomes an open tyrant, dreaded by everyone about him, and a terror to his country. (333)
His ruin seems complete. / Yet it is never complete. To the end he never totally loses our sympathy; we never feel towards him as we do to those who appear the born children of darkness. There remains something sublime in the defiance with which, even when cheated of his last hope, he faces earth and hell and heaven. (334)
To regard Macbeth as a play, like the love-tragedies Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra, in which there are two central characters of equal importance, is certainly a mistake. But Shakespeare himself is in a measure responsible for it, because the first half of Macbeth is great than the second, and in the first half Lady Macbeth not only appears more than in the second but exerts the ultimate deciding influence on the action. And, in the opening Act at least, Lady Macbeth is the most commanding and perhaps the most awe-inspiring figure that Shakespeare drew. (Lecture X, Macbeth, 336)
The greatness of Lady Macbeth lies almost wholly in courage and force of will. It is an error to regard her as remarkable on the intellectual side. In acting a part she shows immense self-control, but not much skill. (340)
The Witches are practically nothing to her. …The simple facts, and are referred to their true sources. The knocking has no mystery for her: it comes from ‘the south entry’. (341)
Even in the awful scene where her imagination breaks loose in sleep she uses no such images as Macbeth’s. It is the direct appeal of the facts to sense that has fastened on her memory. …Hers, like some of her other speeches, are the more moving, from their greater simplicity… (342)
Scotland, the glory of her dream has faded. She enters, disillusioned, and weary with want of sleep: she has thrown away everything and gained nothing: … Henceforth she has no initiative: …Her will remains, and she does her best to help him; but he rarely needs her help. …He plans the murder of Banquo without her knowledge (not in order to spare her, I think, for he never shows love of this quality, but merely because he does not need her now); and even when she is told vaguely of his intention she appears but little interested. (344)
The main interest of the character of Banquo arises from the charges that take place in him, and from the influence of the Witches upon him. And it is curious that Shakespeare’s intention here is so frequently missed. Banquo being at first strongly contrasted with Macbeth, as an innocent man with a guilty, it seems to be supposed that this contrast must be continued to his death; while, in reality, through it is never removed, it is gradually diminished. Banquo in fact may be described much more truly than Macbeth as the victim of the Witches. …when they meet the Witches they are traversing the ‘blasted heath’ alone together. Banquo accosts the strange shapes without the slightest fear. They lay their fingers on their lips, as if to signify that they will not, or must not, speak to him. To Macbeth’s brief appeal, ‘Speak, if you can: what are you?’ they at once reply, … (348)
Macbeth leaves on most readers a profound impression of the misery of a guilty conscience and the retribution of crime. And the strength of this impression is one of the reasons why the tragedy is admired by readers who shrink from Othello and are made unhappy by Lear. But what Shakespeare perhaps felt even more deeply, when he wrote this play, was the incalculability of evil—that in meddling with it human beings do they know not what. The soul, he seems to feel, is a thing of such inconceivable depth, complexity, and delicacy, that when you introduce into it, or suffer to develop in it, any change, and particularly the change called evil, you can form only the vaguest idea of the reaction you will provoke. (354)
Apart form his story Banquo’s character is not very interesting, nor is it, I think, perfectly individual. And this holds good of the rest of the minor characters. They are sketched lightly, and are seldom developed further than the strict purposes of the action required. From this point of view they are inferior to several of the less important figures in each of the other three tragedies. (355)
Macbeth is distinguished by its simplicity—by grandeur in simplicity, no doubt, but still by simplicity. The two great figures indeed can hardly be called simple, except in comparison with such characters as Hamlet and Iago; but in almost every other respect the tragedy has this quality. Its plot is quite plain. It has very little intermixture of humour. It has little pathos except of the sternest kind. The style, for Shakespeare, has not much variety, being generally kept at a higher pitch than in the other tree tragedies; and there is much less than usual of the interchange of verse and prose. [The percentage of prose is, roughly, in Hamlet 30 2/3, in Othello 16 1/3, in King Lear 27 1/3, in Macbeth 8 ½.] All this makes for simplicity of effect. And, this being so, is it not possible that Shakespeare instinctively felt, or consciously feared, that to give much individuality or attraction to the subordinate figures would diminish this effect, and so, like a good artist, sacrificed a part to the whole? And was he wrong? He has certainly avoided the overloading which distresses us in King Lear, and has produced a tragedy utterly unlike it, not much less great as a dramatic poem, and as a drama superior. (356)
The Porter does not make me smile: the moment is too terrific. He is grotesque; no doubt the contrast he affords is humorous as well as ghastly; I dare say the groundlings roared with [362] laughter at his coarsest remarks. But they are not comic enough to allow one to forget for a moment what has preceded and what must follow. And I am far from complaining of this. I believe that it is what Shakespeare intended, and that he despised the groundlings if they laughed. Of course he could have written without the least difficulty speeches five times as humourous; but he knew better. (363-363)
Shakespeare’s… general rule to assign prose to person whose state of mind is abnormal. Thus, to illustrate from these four plays, Hamlet when playing the madman speaks prose, … Ophelia in her madness either sings snatches of songs or speaks prose. Almost all Lear’s speeches, after he ahs become definitely insane, are in prose; where he wakes from sleep recovered, the verse returns. (365)
