All the world knows Will Shakespeare’s story: how he married in haste and repented without leisure, how he fled to London, became an actor, revamped old plays with his own light and fire, and “did” the town with wild Kit Marlowe, believing that “all things are with more spirit chased than enjoyed” how he fenced with wit against Chapman and Rare Ben Jonson at the Mermaid Tavern; how he declared war against the rising Puritans, and challenged them merrily—“Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?”—how he read Plutarch, Froissart and Holinshed and learned history, how he read Montaigne and learned philosophy; how at last through learning, suffering, and failure he became William the Conqueror to all the dramatists of his time, and has ruled the English-speaking world ever since.
His rich and riotous energy was the source of his genius and his faults; it brought him the depth and passion of his plays, and it brought him twins and an early death. He could not even go home to Stratford without doing mischief on the way; for always he stopped at Mrs. Davenant’s inn at Oxford (Street-ford and Ox-ford were fording places on the stagecoach route to Ire-land), and finally left behind him there a young William Davenant, who became a minor poet, and never complained of his paternity. Once the boy was running to the inn when a wit stopped him with the query, whither he was bound? “To see my godfather,William Shakespeare,” replied the lad. “My boy,” said the wit, “do not take God’s name in vain.”
Invited to present plays at court, he basked for a time in the sunshine of fair ladies and brave men, and fell madly in love with Mary Fitton, or some other “Dark Lady” of some other name. Dame Quickly and Doll Tearsheet disappeared from his plays, and stately Portia entered. His soul bubbled over with romance and comedy, and his spirit frolicked in creating Viola and Rosalind and Ariel. But love is never quite content; in its secret heart is a poisonous anxiety, a premonition of alienation and decay. “Love,” says Rosalind, “is merely a madness, and, I tell you, deserves a dark-house and a whip as madmen do.” “By heaven!” says Biron, “I do love, and it hath taught me melancholy.”
For this was the heart of Shakespeare’s tragedy, and the nadir of his life, that his dearest friend, “W. H.,” to whom he had addressed sonnets of limitless love, came now and stole from him the Dark Lady of his new passion. He raged, and added to the Sonnets songs of madness and doubt; he sank into a hell of suffering, gnawed his heart out with brooding grief, and laid it bare for all to see in Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth,Timon, and Lear. But his torture deepened him; now he passed from easy comedies and simple characters to complex personalities moving through intricate tragedies to black inevitable destinies. He became through despair the greatest poet of all.
What we like in him most is the madness and richness of his speech. His style is as his life was, full of energy, riot, color, and excess; “nothing succeeds like excess.” It is all hurried and breathless, this style; Shakespeare wrote in haste, and never found leisure to repent. He never erased a line or read a proof; the notion that his plays would some day be read rather than performed did not enter his head. Thoughtless of the future, he wrote with unrestrained passion. Words, images, phrases and ideas rush from him in an inexhaustible and astounding flood; one wonders from what turbulent springs they pour. He has “a mint of phrases in his brain,” and his fine frenzy is of imagination all compact.
No man had ever mastered language, or used it with such lordly abandon. Anglo-Saxon words, French words, Latin words, alehouse words, medical words, legal words; tripping monosyllabic lines and sonorous sesquipedalian speech; pretty ladylike euphuisms and rough idiomatic obscenities: only an Elizabethan could have dared to write such English. We have better manners now, and less power.Yes, the plots are impossible, as Tolstoi said; the puns are puerile, the errors of scholarship are un-Baconianly legion, and the philosophy is one of surrender and despair—it does not matter. What matters is that on every page is a godlike energy of soul, and for that we will forgive a man anything. Life is beyond criticism, and Shakespeare is more alive than life.
8. JOHN KEATS Let us pause for a moment, and count the great whom we have passed by unsung. First Sappho, flinging her lyric love from a Lesbian promontory; then Aeschylus and Sophocles, winning the Dionysian prize so many times oftener than Euripides; subtle Catullus, courtly Horace, lively Ovid, and mellifluous Virgil; Petrarch and Tasso, Omar-Fitzgerald, Chaucer and Villon. But this is small offense by the side of the sins we must yet commit; even Milton and Goethe are to be called but not chosen; even Blake and Burns, Byron and Tennyson, Hugo and Verlaine, Heine and Poe. Heine the imp of verse, and Poe the better half of poetry; to leave them out seems unforgivable. Tennyson, whose every song was beautiful, and Byron, whose very life was a lyric tragedy; who are the greater ones for whom these must make way? Worse yet, not to take Milton in, who wrote like princes, potentates, and powers, and made English to thunder and blare like the Hebrew of Isaiah. Worst of all, to leave Goethe aside, the very soul of Germany, who wrote in his youth like Heine, in his maturity like Euripides, and in his old age like a Gothic cathedral—confused and endlessly surprising; what good German, or good European, will put up with this? Never mind; let us sin bravely, and name not the philosopher Goethe, but the poet, John Keats.
Stricken down with consumption in 1819, Keats, after weeks in bed, wrote to Fanny Brawne: “Now I have had opportunities of passing nights anxious and awake, I have found thoughts obtrude upon me.‘If I should die,’ said I to myself,‘I have left no immortal work behind me—nothing to make my friends proud of my memory—but I have loved the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remembered.’” “If I had had time”—this is the tragedy of all great men. Keats never wrote anything of importance after that; nevertheless, his friends are remembered because of him, and he has left behind him poems as immortal as English, and more perfect than Shakespeare.We shall say no more about him, but refresh ourselves with himself. He sings to the nightingale:
Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod.
And this to Melancholy:
She dwells with Beauty, Beauty that must die;
And Joy,whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips;
Ay, in the very temple of Delight,