CHAPTER V

SHAKESPEARE AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES

After "Richard II" and "King John," Shakespeare turned aside from tragedy, and within the next half-dozen years produced his masterpieces of romantic comedy and non-tragical history. With the exception of "t.i.tus Andronicus"

and "Romeo and Juliet," the first half of his dramatic career was devoted entirely to comedy and history. With "Julius Caesar," about 1600, began the period of tragedies and bitter comedies, which lasted until about 1608, when he turned again to romantic comedy and tragicomedy. In these main divisions and turning-points of his dramatic activity there is a correspondence with the development of the contemporary drama which we are able to mark with an approach to definiteness. Both romantic comedy and chronicle history had their hey-day during the dozen years that he was devoting to those species. Then at the close of the century various influences produced an abandonment of those forms, a revival of tragedy, and an extensive production of satirical and domestic comedy. About 1608, again, the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher led a return to romance. The Shakespearean period of tragedy may thus be separated from the Marlowean by an interval, during which few tragedies of importance appeared; and its beginning was coincident with new and important developments in the drama.

The leading force in initiating these changes was apparently Ben Jonson, whose prologue to "Every Man in His Humour" (acted 1598) avowed the principles which that play exemplified, and proclaimed the establishment of a comedy of humors. This change was heralded as the result of a more critical and conscious art, of a desire to free the drama from the absurdities and lawlessness of the past, and to supply it with literary standards and artistic aims. His practice, which during the next ten years was mostly in accord with his preaching, was followed or paralleled in many respects by most of the other dramatists. At the date of "Every Man in His Humour" Shakespeare was proclaiming in the choruses of "Henry V" his sense of the incongruities of the chronicle history play and bidding farewell to a form of drama that he had made preeminently his own; and Chapman and Middleton were forsaking romantic comedy for realistic comedies of London life. Perhaps a little earlier, the satires of Donne, Hall, and Marston had created considerable stir and doubtless had a share in turning literary endeavor from sentiment to satire. This satire and exposure of the follies and evils of society also received encouragement from the moral and social change that was working in England and especially in London. The healthy and aspiring national life that had found expression in the sound morality and the imaginative idealism of the earlier drama was now giving place to the moral corruption, social laxity, and lack of national pride that render the reign of James I notorious. At all events, whatever the causes, the comedy of the next seven or eight years was prevailingly realistic, domestic, or satirical.

In tragedy the changes were similar, though less distinct. The protest against the lawlessness of the early drama was manifested in the infrequency of chronicle plays and the appearance of tragedies presenting foreign, and especially Roman, history with due regard for both historical truth and tragic structure. Realism appeared just at the beginning of the century in a number of domestic tragedies that violated the established conventions by dealing with actual events, contemporary society, and humble persons. Satire of contemporary manners became frequent in tragedy, and satirical comedies often dealt with tragic events and exercised an influence on pure tragedy similar to that exercised by romantic comedy in the earlier period. Up to this time popular tragedy had hardly received critical consideration even from the dramatists themselves. Marlowe, Kyd, Shakespeare, and others had been mainly concerned in telling stories on the stage without much consciousness of theory or of the types of drama which they were creating. In this period, however, the demarcation between tragedy and comedy and the definition of a conception of tragedy became positive both in occasional critical comment and in the practice of the dramatists. The old types, however, survived. Medleys of various kinds of tragedy and comedy, such as "Old Fortunatus" or "The Downfall and Death of Robert, Earl of Huntingdon," are not found much after the beginning of the century; but the revenge tragedy received a remarkable development by Marston, Chettle, Tourneur, Chapman, and Jonson, to say nothing of Shakespeare.

Practically synchronous with the period of Shakespeare's great tragedies are these several interesting developments: the domestic tragedies, and especially the allied work of Heywood; the Roman historical tragedies, especially the two by Jonson; the French historical tragedies by Chapman; and the various revenge plays, beginning with Marston's "Antonio and Mellida." These dramatists, however, were mainly occupied with comedy, and no one of them devoted himself as exclusively to tragedy as did Shakespeare. Nor did any of them equal him in immediate popularity. The imitative methods of his artistic apprenticeship had given place to a maturity and independence of art that at once won a supremacy in tragedy even greater than that already attained in comedy. Yet in themes and treatment there is no divorce from the practice of his fellow dramatists.

His genius continued responsive to the demands of the stage of the day, and it felt the changes in dramatic conditions, of which we have been noticing some symptoms, and which made the tragedies of others as well as his own more satirical and realistic than those of Marlowe's time, more concerned with the problem of evil, more conscious and critical in their art, and in their style less lyrical and descriptive, more reflective and sententious.

Of the domestic tragedies, very much in fashion from 1597 to 1603, the few survivors show little advance over "Arden of Feversham." These presentations of hideous contemporary crimes maintain the protest initiated by that play against the conventionalities of "the ghost and revenge"

drama, and echo its demand for realism. The satirical description of Tragedy in the induction to "A Warning for Fair Women" (1599) is particularly noteworthy as indicating the definiteness which the current conception of tragedy had a.s.sumed. The epilogue reiterates the cry of the realist in an era of romanticism:--

"Perhaps it may seem strange unto you all, That one hath not avenged another's death After the observation of such course: The reason is that now of truth I sing."

A second of these plays, "Two Lamentable Tragedies" (1601), is a curious combination of the story of the babes in the wood and that of the recent murder of one Beech. A third, "A Yorkshire Tragedy," acted by Shakespeare's company about 1605, and published with his name (1608), is remarkable for its naked realism and the vividness and rapidity of some of its prose.

With these plays may be grouped Heywood's "A Woman Killed with Kindness"

(1607, acted 1603), for, although it does not deal with real events, it lacks the usual accompaniments of tragedy, courts, kings, ghosts, and battles, and presents a story of current English life. Its themes are the common ones of adultery and revenge, but it gives them an entirely novel treatment, the husband refusing to take vengeance on his guilty wife, who dies repentant and forgiven. After a fashion soon to become general, there is an underplot which, like the main plot, presents a problem of social ethics, the question of the sacrifice of chast.i.ty to save a brother's honor. Similar problems are common in contemporary comedy, and the play might be cla.s.sed indifferently as a domestic tragedy or a tearful comedy.

It is Heywood's masterpiece and exemplifies the qualities that won him the affection of Lamb, "generosity, courtesy, temperance in the depth of pa.s.sion, sweetness, in a word, and gentleness." The wife falls too easily and repents too sentimentally to be of much interest, but the character of Frankfort is finely conceived and, especially in the great scene of the discovery, executed with a power and truth of feeling rarely combined outside of Shakespeare. In a very similar play, "The English Traveller,"

written long afterwards, Heywood speaks of two hundred and twenty plays in which he had a main finger. Some of these lost plays must have further exemplified the method of "A Woman Killed with Kindness"; but his success failed to encourage other dramatists to attempt domestic themes and to abandon the tragic conventions. Such realism as his was left to comedy, and tragedy continued to seek its stories in romance or history.

Ben Jonson's two tragedies, "Seja.n.u.s" and "Catiline," reveal an effort to treat Roman history with accuracy and dignity, and to enforce on the public stage what he regarded as the essential rules of tragedy. Such representations of Roman history as "The Wounds of Civil War" or the still more incongruous medley of Heywood's "Lucrece" must have excited in him still greater condemnation than did the English chronicle plays. Even Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" provoked a sneer, though its dramatization of Plutarch's portraits of the great conspirators apparently excited his emulation and suggested much in his treatment of Seja.n.u.s and Catiline.

Incongruous spectacle and farce disappear from these plays, and the events are treated upon a well thought out theory of historical tragedy. Jonson strove to present the main events and characters with accurate fidelity to authorities, and even minor persons and deeds in constant harmony with the historical narrative. But the scholar overtopped the dramatist. "Seja.n.u.s"

has a paraphernalia of notes like a doctor's dissertation; and "Catiline"

long excerpts from Cicero's orations.

His plays, however, were intended for the public stage, and are by no means to be cla.s.sed with closet dramas like Daniel's "Philotas," the tragedies of Fulke Greville and Alexander, or the earlier translations of Kyd and the Countess of Pembroke. Jonson started with current popular forms, with "Julius Caesar" rather than the Senecan models for a basis. His purpose was to rebuild these, not without some recognition of current dramatic method, but with his main reliance upon cla.s.sical rules. His cardinal error was his acceptance of the current cla.s.sical theory of tragedy, the belief that the essential difference between epic and dramatic fable lay in the observance of the three unities and similar proprieties. As he was forced to confess, the ambitious careers of Seja.n.u.s and Catiline and the style of action demanded by the audiences of the day did not lend themselves easily to such limitations. But he persevered in his doughty fashion. If in "Seja.n.u.s" he gave up the unity of time, he maintained the unity of place; if he retained the comic scenes of the courtesan, he avoided any grotesque mixture of the comic and tragic; he omitted battles, jigs, and spectacles, and secured a coherent development of the main action. In "Catiline," which he boldly proclaimed a "dramatic poem," he adopted the Senecan technic of an introductory ghost and a segregated chorus. But though the action be one, perfect and entire, according to Jonson's understanding of those terms, he never learned Shakespeare's art of focusing events about a spiritual conflict.

Yet in characterization Jonson's interest, like that of his contemporaries, largely centres. Catiline, Cicero, Seja.n.u.s, and Tiberius are thoughtfully conceived and faithfully represented. The representation, indeed, is that of exposition, each scene ill.u.s.trating and emphasizing some trait without securing much illusion of life. The style, especially in the long speeches, is too often rhetorical, and rarely displays great beauty or dramatic power. Yet it is masterly in its way, careful and competent to its purposes, and free from obscurity or over-richness. His plays mark another failure to turn popular tragedy back into the cla.s.sical mould. They contributed, perhaps, to a greater regularity of action on the part of his contemporaries and to a more serious consideration of the functions of drama, but the scholarly student of history failed to make it live, the author of "Bartholomew Fair" did not find his best opportunity in the acceptance of cla.s.sicist theory.

Chapman's tragedies attempted a field hitherto untried except in Marlowe's "Ma.s.sacre," that of contemporary French history. While treating historical events with freedom of invention, he dealt with real persons and careers familiar to his audience. In the long-popular tragedy of "The Death of Bussy D'Ambois" (1607, acted 1600-1604) he turned to the court of Henry III and centred a story of treasonable ambition, conspiracy, and adultery about the interesting personality of the insolent and indomitable D'Ambois. After the fashion of Kyd and Marston, he followed "The Death" with a "Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois," which adopted the established technic of the revenge plays, with less alteration than might have been expected after Shakespeare's transformation in "Hamlet." The avenger, Clermont, is a "Senecal man," and his sententious and rhetorical philosophizing was doubtless incited by "Hamlet," though it followed a long-established precedent. The "Conspiracy and Tragedy of Byron" (two parts, 1608, acted 1607) dealt with important affairs in the reign of Henry IV that were still fresh in the memory of the audience, Biron having been executed in 1602.

In the original form of the play, in fact, Queen Elizabeth was represented, and the French queen boxed the ears of her husband's mistress, but the protest of the French amba.s.sador made a revision necessary.

The new material of these plays did not lead Chapman to attempt any variations in form from the current drama, nor did it result in any advance in method; his fondness for long speeches and narrations resulting rather in a treatment more epical and less dramatic than is found in any of his contemporaries. Nor did his study of contemporary memoirs for his sources and his interest in political philosophy result in any advance in reality or vividness of characterization, though here he is often very felicitous, as in his portrait of Henry IV, and though his arrogant protagonists are interesting and original variations of the Marlowean tragic hero, not without successors in the later drama. But for Chapman, tragedy was in the main, as for the writers whom Gosson derided, an opportunity "to show the majesty of his pen in tragical speeches." The abundance, ingenuity, and beauty of his figurative language are simply amazing. Every person, deed, or sentiment calls for ill.u.s.tration and lets loose a flood of similes.

Finished verse, a highly picturesque sense of the value of words, a remarkable union of pregnant sententiousness with vividness of description, have made his plays the delight of many a reader, though perhaps most of his admirers have experienced a fatigue that found satisfaction in Dryden's perverse criticism, "dwarfish thought dressed up in gigantic words, repet.i.tion in abundance, looseness of expression, and gross hyperboles."

For, though the thought is by no means dwarfish, the dress is often too big for it. We are wearied by the constant effort to write up to the tragic opportunity for a heightened and sententious eloquence. In this respect, Chapman's style partakes of the faults of his day. It has not the spontaneity and ease of Marlowe, Peele, and "Romeo and Juliet"; it is difficult, involved, pretentious, and self-conscious, yet its splendors remain. Its abundance of resource, its imaginative condensation, its suggestive power again and again compel comparison with Shakespeare himself.

Revenge directed by a ghost found favor with both Jonson and Chapman, but they were preceded in the use of this popular motive by John Marston. In 1598, at the age of twenty-three, he made something of a sensation by his satires and immediately proceeded to carry his censoriousness of human frailties into the drama. His earliest play, "Antonio and Mellida" (two parts, 1602, acted 1599-1600), reveals in Part I the still dominant influence of romantic comedy, despite its tragic trend; but Part II, "Antonio's Revenge," is a tragedy of the Kydian type. The play was followed by a number of comedies, all outspoken in satire of contemporary manners and in the exposure of social immorality. Several dealt with tragic material, and one, "The Malcontent," is a notable combination of a tragedy of blood and a satirical comedy. Its protagonist is of a type represented in the other comedies and not without influence on contemporary dramatists.

Marston's malcontents are men of virtue and honor "who hate not man but man's lewd qualities"; in disfavor and out of joint with the world; given to melancholy and a showy pessimism that finds fitting expression only in images of filth and putrefaction. His tragedy "Sophonisba" (1606), which he seems to have deemed the most important of his plays, treats history with great freedom, and unites melodramatic horrors with his usual unflinching fondness for rankness of thought and imagery. The horrible realism of the Erichtho scenes comes in strange contrast with the songs, dances, and musical accompaniment suited to a performance by the child actors for whom all of Marston's plays were written.

"Antonio's Revenge" is the earliest representative in this period of the Kydian type of revenge tragedy. The satirical pa.s.sages in "A Warning for Fair Women" indicate the popularity of ghosts and revenge, and there are many evidences of the continued vogue of "The Spanish Tragedy" from 1597 to 1602. Marston's play was evidently modeled on "The Spanish Tragedy," and probably still more directly on the Kydian "Hamlet." The story is the revenge of a son for a father murdered by a villanous duke who seeks to wed the hero's mother; the revenge is directed by the ghost of the father; the hero is driven to hesitation, irresolution, and the verge of madness; he pretends to be a fool; intrigue and trickery are indulged in by both hero and villain, and the revenge is accomplished with an abundance of bloodshed. There is a minor story of revenge, enforcing the main situation as does the Laertes story in "Hamlet" and the scene with the Senex in "The Spanish Tragedy"; and, doubtless as in the early "Hamlet," the pa.s.sion of the murderer for the widow of his victim now becomes an important motive in the action. Moreover, the play abounds in psychological introspection and meditative philosophy set forth for the most part through the soliloquies of the hero.

The indebtedness to the earlier revenge plays extends to details of the stage presentation. Revenge is accomplished much as in "The Spanish Tragedy," though by means of a masque instead of a play, and without the death of the hero. From similar scenes in the old "Hamlet" were probably derived the appearance of the ghost at midnight, the cry "Antonio, revenge!" and the second appearance of the ghost to the hero and his mother. The dumb show exhibiting the wooing of Maria, the use of the churchyard, the banquets, carousals, funerals, exhibition of the dead bodies, and the oaths of the conspirators were perhaps already conventional accompaniments of a revenge play. "Antonio's Revenge," however, is not wanting in inventiveness; its abundant horrors and its melodramatically ingenious stage effects were probably recognized as an advance upon the old favorites, and they excited the emulation of succeeding dramatists.

The hero, too, is of the Kydian type. Like both Hieronimo and Hamlet, he is a scholar, interested in philosophy and also in theatrical performances.

Like them he is distinguished by a tendency to reflection, and struggles in solitary meditation at each crisis in his career. Like them he is driven to the verge of madness by the pressure of his heavy responsibility and by his awakened sense of evil in the universe. Though he does not seek further proof, yet, like Hamlet after the revelations of the play, he becomes frantic and irresolute, neglects an opportunity to kill the duke, and wastes his vengeance upon an innocent child. Like Hieronimo and Hamlet, he is tricky, wild, and ranting. With all his overdrawn pa.s.sion, however, his mental struggle occasionally attains intellectual depth and tragic power.

As he tells us, it was "the stings of anguish," "the bruising stroke of chance" which made him run mad "as one confounded in a maze of mischief."

Several years, then, before Shakespeare's "Hamlet," we have a play dealing with the old story of a revenge of a son for a father, following closely the methods introduced by Kyd, appealing to a taste that delighted in extravagant violence and melodramatic sensationalism, but also striving to simulate profundity of thought and a pa.s.sionate sense of evil. It is difficult to-day to take Marston seriously. His plays have little merit, while his bombastic sententiousness gives an air of insincerity to everything that he wrote; yet a serious purpose and a considerable influence on later drama cannot be denied to his efforts in tragedy. Like so many others, he deserves to be remembered for what he attempted rather than for what he did. Absurd though "Antonio's Revenge" be as an artistic achievement, it is historically of importance as indicating an ambitious attempt to give poetical expression to the spiritual conflict of a mind brought to face dreadful evil. The prologue that he addressed to his London audience testifies sufficiently to his serious and ambitious intentions, and to the clear separation of tragedy from other forms of drama, which he and other poets were trying to force upon the theatre.

"Therefore we proclaim, If any spirit breathes within this round Uncapable of weighty pa.s.sion, (As from his birth being hugged in the arms And nuzled 'twixt the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of Happiness,) Who winks and shuts his apprehension up From common sense of what men were, and are; Who would not know what men must be: let such Hurry amain from our black-visaged shows; We shall affright their eyes. But if a breast, Nail'd to the earth with grief; if any heart, Pierced through with anguish, pant within this ring; If there be any blood, whose heat is choked And stifled with true sense of misery: If aught of these strains fill this consort up, They arrive most welcome."

A number of plays dealing with "revenge for a father" followed. In 1602 "The Revenge of Hamlet" was entered in the Stationers' Register; and the first quarto, a pirated and very corrupt edition, appeared in the following year. This quarto, in the opinion of a majority of critics, represents Shakespeare's partial revision of the old play, which was put on the stage by Burbage's company in 1601-02. In the same years Ben Jonson was receiving pay from Henslowe of the rival company for two sets of additions to "The Spanish Tragedy," and these were published in 1602. In that year Henslowe also paid Chettle for a tragedy, "Hoffman" (1631); and in 1602-03 Tourneur's "Atheist's Tragedy" (1611) was probably acted.[18] By 1603 Shakespeare had given "Hamlet" its final form as represented by the second quarto (1604). The almost simultaneous appearance of these various plays is sufficient testimony to the popularity of the old revenge story with both audiences and authors. Dealing with similar plots, they naturally have many elements in common, but they exhibit few or no signs of servile imitation of one another. They represent independent developments of the type that Kyd had introduced a dozen years before and that Marston had revived, each retaining many of the old conventions, and each adding much that was new.

Jonson's additions to "The Spanish Tragedy" are distinct from the rest of the play and affect the proportion and movement of the action rather for the worse. They deal in the main with Hieronimo; his irony is increased and made more effective; his reflections become more elaborate and pregnant; above all, his madness gains enormously in reality and intensity. His madness, indeed, receives a disproportionate development. Throughout the additions Jonson is picturing a mind diseased by grief, sometimes conscious of life's unrelaxing pain and again lost in frenzied delirium. Thus, the imaginative impulses that responded to the demand for revenge plays here stirred a great poet to a rehabilitation of the crude ravings of the old Hieronimo in a form more intellectual, more vitally human, and of immensely greater imaginative range.

"Hoffman" is a sensational melodrama by a hack writer not unskillful in using prevailing conventions with theatrical effectiveness. The story is again the revenge of a son for a father, but there is no ghost, only the skeleton to excite him to vengeance. He banishes "clouds of melancholy" at the start and shows no hesitation in carrying out the revenge until turned from his purpose by his pa.s.sion for the mother of his chief victim.

Intrigue and slaughter reign supreme; and, as in "Locrine," there are two plots of revenge--Hoffman seeking revenge for his father and every one else seeking revenge on Hoffman. In the pathetic situation of Lucibella, driven insane by grief, Chettle made use of a character and a situation familiar on the stage in much the same fashion as they must have been presented in the old "Hamlet." Lucibella's madness, however, is made the instrument of some telling hits at the villain and the means of discovering his iniquity.

While Ophelia's madness has no influence on the main action, that of Lucibella leads directly to the _denouement_. Dramatically this is a very important difference and seems due to Chettle's invention. Unlike Marston or Jonson, he made little effort to give the story either imaginative intensity or philosophical significance. He took common theatrical motives and situations, added much and changed much, and constructed a good acting play not without some grace of verse. A play that was popular thirty years after it was written must have successfully met the stage demand.

Tourneur's "Atheist's Tragedy" differs in many respects from all preceding revenge plays. The revenge is for a father murdered by an uncle and directed by a ghost. The revenge, however, is left to Providence; the ghost is Christian; the avenging son not only hesitates, but after a little irresolution overcomes his inclinations to revenge, and, obeying the ghost's behests, resignedly awaits the judgment of heaven. In stage presentation the play also shows a wide departure from Kyd, especially in the indescribable comic underplot. There are, however, three appearances of the ghost,--one to soldiers on watch,--churchyard scenes, banquets, sword fights, suicides, scaffolds, and death's-heads. In the acc.u.mulation of horrors, in the development of the villain's character, in the emphasis on new sensational motives at the expense of revenge, and in the more elaborate handling of the intrigue, it may be said to carry the general development of the revenge tragedy a step farther than Marston or Chettle, and a step nearer to Webster. On the other hand, in its definite attempt to present an intellectual conception not lacking in moral grandeur, it sometimes, more closely than any of the other plays considered, approaches "Hamlet." The change in the revenge motive is especially manifest in the soliloquies and reflective pa.s.sages, which unite in a fairly well connected argument that points the moral of the action, the omnipotence of G.o.d's providence.

When, after an interval of some half dozen years, Shakespeare returned to tragedy, evidently both the demands of the theatres and the artistic impulses of the poets were different from those of Marlowe's day. The plays of Marlowe and Kyd were still active forces in the drama, but in 1600-01, when Shakespeare was perhaps writing both "Julius Caesar" and the first revision of "Hamlet," the man of the hour in tragedy was Marston.

In "Julius Caesar" Shakespeare availed himself of a theme already a favorite. The story of the overthrow of a tyrant, the progress of a conspiracy, the fall of a prince, and his revenge upon the murderers furnished material well approved for tragedy, while the greatness of the events and the actors both gave a.s.surance of popular interest and incited the poet to his best. Shakespeare was not directed by scrupulous regard for historical accuracy, but his genius was stirred by that of Plutarch to give the events of the Roman civil war the interest and vitality he had given to the reigns of English kings. In dealing with a story that followed so closely the standard lines of tragedy,--the murder and the revenge,--Shakespeare adopted some of the methods current in contemporary plays. There is really no evidence to support Mr. Fleay's ingenious surmise that the play was originally in two parts,--I, The Death, and II, The Revenge of Caesar,--but the play seems to have separated itself naturally into those two divisions. The rise of the action traces the rise of the conspiracy to Caesar's death; the return of the action proceeds to the failure and deaths of the conspirators. But from the beginning Shakespeare must have found his interest engaged less by the story of conspiracy or revenge, or even by the presentation of the turmoil of an empire, than by the delineation of the character of Brutus. There, for him, lay the kernel of the tragedy, in the struggle of a highly gifted nature with a task unfit for his accomplishment. The play became not a tragedy of over-reaching ambition, as Marlowe might have made "The Tragedy of Caesar," nor the tragedy of supernaturally ordained revenge, as Kyd might have made "Caesar's Revenge," but the tragedy of Brutus,--the fateful struggle of a n.o.ble mind against counter actors and against chance, and also against an incurable deficiency in his own temperament.

Similarly, in revising the old "Hamlet," Shakespeare must have been attracted by the possibilities in the character of the hesitating avenger.

Here, however, as we have seen, the influence of his contemporaries was considerable and complex. The plot, situations, types of character, and leading motives of the old "Hamlet" were already familiar to the stage in several plays. Revenge, directed by a ghost, hesitation on the part of the hero, insanity real or feigned, intrigue, copious bloodshed, a secondary revenge plot, meditative philosophizing in the form of soliloquies, were all essential elements probably of the Kydian "Hamlet," certainly of several other revenge plays. The refusal of an opportunity to kill the villain, the songs and wild talk of a mad woman, the murder of an innocent intruder, scenes in a churchyard, the appearance of the ghost to soldiers of the watch, the play within the play,--all these as well as many more minor conventionalities, such as the swearing on the sword hilt, or the voice of the ghost in the cellar, had appeared in other plays than the old "Hamlet." And Hamlet himself, wild and ranting at times, crafty and dissimulating at others, cynical and ironical, given to melancholy and meditation, hesitating in bewilderment, hara.s.sed by the unavoidable "whips and scorns of time,"--so far as we can a.n.a.lyze the tragic hero, his characteristics had been already used by contemporary dramatists. Dramatic ingenuity was all that was required to make a new play out of this abundance of old material. Chettle succeeded in doing just this. Marston, Jonson, and Tourneur, however, had been trying to give the old story philosophical significance and a highly imaginative phrasing. They had glimpses of the dramatic and poetic possibilities that lay in the situation of the hesitating revenger, and at moments they succeeded in realizing these. Shakespeare set himself to their task, and naturally enough he was in many ways limited and directed by their efforts. It was perfectly possible for him to change the plot completely, or to omit the ghost in the cellar, or to remove the bloodthirsty and intriguing elements from the part of Hamlet, or to give a more Christian interpretation to the revenge; but in these and other matters he followed the practice of the earlier plays.

There was no dramatic need of so many long soliloquies; the meditative avenger need not have been ironical; insanity might have received less elaboration; but in these respects Shakespeare was in agreement with his contemporaries. The themes which they took inspired him. He succeeded in doing what they vainly attempted.

He by no means neglected the external story or denied the theatrical demand for sensation. He, perhaps, did not radically change the course of events as depicted in the old play, but he unquestionably improved on any preceding tragedy in the mere effectiveness of the scenic presentation of a sensational story. How great this effectiveness is may be judged by the continued popularity of "Hamlet" as a stage performance even before unlettered auditors. We may surmise that had poetry and philosophy both perished, it would still draw its crowds as it does to-day on the remote borders of civilization. This theatrical triumph is due in part to dramatic excellence of structure and presentation. From the old play probably came a story restricted by semi-Senecan technic to a great emotional crisis; but Shakespeare at least resisted the temptation, to which his contemporaries succ.u.mbed, of extending the action over the events leading up to the murder. And a.s.suredly to him rather than to Kyd or another is due the recognition of the dramatic values of the story's beginning, middle, and end. Magnificent as is his development of the ghost scenes at the beginning, still more important structurally is his realization of the value of the middle of the tragedy and treatment of the play within the play and its immediate sequences; and if the end is developed with an Elizabethan looseness of coherence that will not correspond to any logical scheme of structure, yet the pathos of the Ophelia scenes and the wonderful grotesquery of the graveyard excite and renew the spectator's interest to the final catastrophe. The scenic presentation, while telling a sensational story with preeminent effectiveness, becomes as never before in English drama the means for exhibiting the inner struggle of the protagonist.

Parallel with the external conflict between murderer and avenger, beginning with the advent of the ghost and ending with a holocaust, there runs the story of a man's moods and thoughts; and this story of doubt and melancholy overpowering resolution imposes its unity of structure and emotional tone upon the external conflict so full of visible action. The throng of dreadful happenings becomes a foil to set off the inner struggle of thought. Their climax is only the brink of resolution from which Hamlet shrinks. Their catastrophe is the end of irresolution in silence.

The reflections and moralizings and broodings over misfortunes inherited from Seneca, and long an essential element in the revenge plays, are also, like the sensational incidents, integrated and humanized by the conception of the hero's character. The soliloquies, though keeping to the themes and methods of contemporary drama, become landmarks in the depiction of the inner struggle and in the general progress of the action. The absurd convention of speaking aloud one's unformed and unbidden thoughts becomes theatrically exciting, dramatically essential, and, through the reach of Shakespeare's imaginative expression, representative of the eternal battle of human frailty against the mysteries of chance and evil.

a.n.a.lysis might, indeed, continue to discover in the multiform impressiveness of the characterization and the poetry survivals of old conventions and hints of the method of Shakespeare's transformation. Taken apart, various pa.s.sages seem overburdened with rhetoric, after the style of the day, and others over-sententious. Taken piece by piece, the sarcasm, the irony, the pessimism, the stoic philosophy, even the pa.s.sionate protest against destiny, have much in common with the ideas then current in other plays. But here again the transformation accomplished through unrivaled powers of expression and knowledge of human nature seems to result from an absorbing interest in the meditating and hesitating temperament of the hero. The union of a drama of blood-vengeance with a drama of thought, a union that had been often attempted by others, is finally achieved, because here for the first time there is full recognition of the tragic interest, movement, and significance of a man's battle with himself. The tragic drama of character has been consummated.

In Shakespeare's conception of the tragic hero we find many characteristics and some incongruities that belong to the old avengers; but there is new penetration into the sources of human motive that results in an essentially new view of the functions and scope of the tragic drama. As in most tragedies since "Tamburlaine," the play is a one-part play, presenting a hero far above the average in mental and moral power, but for the time mainly under the sway of one dominating mood or emotion. Like the other heroes of revenge tragedies, Hamlet is a good man brought suddenly face to face with evil. Again, like the heroes of Seneca and of most tragedies dealing with a reversal of fortune, Hamlet is a strong man brought to face the enmity of chance. He is an individual forced to struggle against a hostile environment. Again, he is a man in a tragic crisis that requires the exercise of all possible powers on his part if he is to avoid disaster, who finds himself afflicted with a temperamental weakness that makes failure possible or indeed inevitable. Critics emphasize now one and now another element of his character as they emphasize one or another of these conflicts as the most important. Shakespeare here, as again in later plays, united in one hero all the varieties of conflict catalogued by the critics. But if we ask which is most peculiarly Shakespearean, it must be said to be the conflict with his own temperamental unfitness, call that irresolution, melancholy, meditativeness, or what you will. Here lies Shakespeare's main differentiation from preceding tragedy, though one distinctly presaged in "Julius Caesar." At all events, we have a conception of tragedy carried out in his succeeding plays. The hero, n.o.ble and righteous, is brought into conflict with the results of evil and circ.u.mstance, and he is crippled by his own inability or weakness. Tragedy becomes inherent in character, in the incompleteness that marks the best and mightiest of mankind.

Our consideration of "Hamlet" has been prolonged partly because its relations to contemporary drama can be traced more readily than those of Shakespeare's other tragedies, and partly because it is the first of his plays to afford a full definition of tragedy, a conception of prime importance both in the development of Shakespeare's art and in the future history of the drama. A sensational struggle is presented, and the abounding incidents are wrought into effective if loosely connected stage-scenes, dealing with material similar to that then current in the theatres,--villains, ghosts, murders, insanity, grim farce, meditations, aphorisms. But the scenic presentation and the dramatic structure are to express not only an external conflict between hero and counter-force, but an inner struggle of the hero himself. They are to be the effects and results, nay, the very mirror of the inner thought and feeling. And the disaster that falls upon the hero and those by him beloved comes home to us as due not merely to external forces or circ.u.mstances or to evil working within, but also to an inherent unfitness of his own.

This conception of tragedy found further exemplification in "Oth.e.l.lo,"[19]

freer from Elizabethan methods than any of the other tragedies, and the most masterful of all as a play. The fable was found in an Italian novella that related, like so many of its cla.s.s, a bald story of love, jealousy, and villany. The very baldness of the narrative in comparison with the fullness of incident and characterization of the chronicles or Plutarch, gave Shakespeare's imagination an untrammeled opportunity. The ingredients of the story, common in romantic comedy and already combined by Shakespeare in "Much Ado about Nothing," were also not unfamiliar in tragedy, but Shakespeare enlarged and interpreted them to fit the conception of his two preceding tragedies, the presentation of a spiritual struggle in which goodness is attacked by evil at its point of greatest vulnerability. The credulity of Oth.e.l.lo, however, is a.s.saulted by a more active agent of evil than in "Julius Caesar" or "Hamlet." Malignant evil is embodied in Iago, and it is against his machinations that the n.o.bly idealized characters of Oth.e.l.lo and Desdemona prove incompetent and defenseless. He is the person who dominates the action and gives explanation and plausibility to the circ.u.mstances. He not only opposes the hero in the external action, he creates through his insinuations all the evil suspicions that struggle in Oth.e.l.lo's mind. He might almost be considered the protagonist of the tragedy.

In structure there is a notable advance over preceding plays, accomplished apparently in part through deliberate intent. The first act with its account of Iago's craft and the marriage is a distinct introduction. The remaining four acts present a practically continuous action, confined to Cyprus and representing about thirty-six hours. Moreover, by a skillful ambiguity, which Christopher North called "the double clock," Shakespeare, while securing this rapid and uninterrupted process of time, has succeeded in conveying an impression of protracted intrigue and slowly-developing motives. Thus, without lessening the variety and importance of the events and emotions, he gains, by a closer observance of unity than in the other tragedies, a greater degree of theatrical illusion and of dramatic intensity. Again, "Oth.e.l.lo" technically is noticeable among the tragedies for its relinquishment of many current methods. It is neither a chronicle history nor a Senecan tragedy. There is no presentation of history and little of court ceremonies. There are no battles, no long exposition, no spectacles, no ghosts, no insanity, and almost no comedy. It has few persons and virtually a single action. The underplot is subordinated and closely united to the main action, and there are no delays and new excitements between crisis and catastrophe as in "Hamlet" and "Lear."

Nowhere else in Shakespeare is the progress of character, emotion, and deed toward the final event so consecutive and so uninterrupted. This advance in coherence and proportion seems due less to the contributing causes just enumerated than to the explanation of action by character. Accept the unbelievable malignity of Iago--and you do accept it before you have proceeded far--and every step of the appalling chain of intrigue seems a natural outcome of the motives of the persons before us.

In consequence of this integration of character and action, the characters are, more than in the other tragedies, distinct and unmistakable. As if to make stronger the contrast between good and evil, the good man is a Moor, apparently, as in the case of the Moors in "t.i.tus Andronicus" and "Selimus," hardly distinguishable from a negro; and the bad man is deprived of the motive which in the _novella_ rendered his wickedness intelligible.

Yet nowhere, even in Shakespeare, are generosity and greatness of soul more admirable than in Oth.e.l.lo, nowhere is villany more human than in Iago. The stage villain here receives his apotheosis as the avenging hero did in "Hamlet." The source of all the evil in the play, the Machiavellian machinator, the subtle hypocrite whose every action is a pose to conceal its purpose, the simulator of honesty and bluntness, the shameless egoist who proudly avows his villany and bawls it to the gallery, the intellectual master who plays every one for a dupe, and especially his accomplice--all this had been embodied in the villains of Kyd and Marlowe. Although intelligible to Elizabethan psychology and theology, and credible in the light of Tudor politics and feuds, such a type would seem to lack enduring truth. While preserving all the attributes of the stage type, Shakespeare made it the means for that searching a.n.a.lysis of human depravity to which his contemporaries were less successfully dedicating their efforts. This soliloquizing devil becomes identified with the suggestions and sinuosities of evil that partake of the flux of our consciousness. Hypocrisy, cynicism, cruelty, the absence of human sympathies, the pride and malignity of intellectual superiority have henceforth their symbol in Iago. Impossible, diabolical, inhuman as Barabas or Richard III, he is never for a moment unplausible, because he ever unearths a corresponding potentiality in us.

The persons of the play, while unusually effective on the stage, and while human and real in their discourse, have a universality of appeal essential in the greatest works of art, desired by Aristotle and dimly foreshadowed in Elizabethan efforts after greatness and typicality. Oth.e.l.lo, Desdemona, and Iago create fresh reflection and new impulse in every reader of every generation. And to each they are not only real persons but also symbols and ideals of the generosity, sweetness, and iniquity of the universe. This idealization of character is accomplished with wonderful clarity by means of an expression, splendidly eloquent, untroubled by conceit or obscurity, equally masterful in prose or verse, magnificently adapted to the representation of every mood or temperament. Shakespeare here realized the ideal toward which English tragedy under the leadership of Marlowe had been struggling, the presentation of human greatness in blank verse beautiful and dramatic.