The Man Shakespeare by Frank Harris

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THE MAN SHAKESPEARE

AND

HIS TRAGIC LIFE STORY

BY

FRANK HARRIS

I DEDICATE THIS BOOK TO MY FRIEND, ERNEST BECKETT (NOW LORD GRIMTHORPE),
A MAN OF MOST EXCELLENT DIFFERENCES, WHO UNITES TO A GENIUS FOR
PRACTICAL THINGS A PASSIONATE SYMPATHY FOR ALL HIGH ENDEAVOUR IN
LITERATURE AND ART

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

BOOK I
SHAKESPEARE PAINTED BY HIMSELF

CHAPTER
I. Hamlet: Romeo-Jaques
II. Hamlet-Macbeth
III. Duke Vincentio-Posthumus
IV. Shakespeare's Men of Action: the Bastard,
Arthur, and King Richard II
V. Shakespeare's Men of Action (continued): Hotspur,
Prince Henry, and Henry V
VI. Shakespeare's Men of Action (concluded): King
Henry VI. and Richard III
VII. Shakespeare as Lyric Poet: "Twelfth Night"
VIII. Shakespeare's Humour: "Falstaff"

BOOK II

I. Shakespeare's early attempts to portray himself
and his wife: Biron, Adriana, Valentine
II. Shakespeare as Antonio the Merchant
III. Shakespeare's Love-story: the Sonnets: Part I
IV. Shakespeare's Love-story: the Sonnets: Part II
V. Shakespeare's Love-story: the Sonnets: Part III
VI. The First-fruit of the Tree of Knowledge: Brutus
VII. Dramas of Revenge and Jealousy: Hamlet
VIII. Dramas of Revenge and Jealousy: Othello
IX. Dramas of Lust: Part I: Troilus and Cressida
X. Dramas of Lust: Part II: Antony and Cleopatra
XI. The drama of Madness: Lear
XII. The Drama of Despair: Timon of Athens
XIII. The Latest Works: All Copies: "Winter's Tale"; "Cymbeline"; "The
Tempest"
XIV. Shakespeare's Life: Part I
XV. Shakespeare's Life: Part II

INDEX

INTRODUCTION

This book has grown out of a series of articles contributed to "The
Saturday Review" some ten or twelve years ago. As they appeared they
were talked of and criticized in the usual way; a minority of readers
thought "the stuff" interesting; many held that my view of Shakespeare
was purely arbitrary; others said I had used a concordance to such
purpose that out of the mass of words I had managed, by virtue of some
unknown formula, to re-create the character of the man.

The truth is much simpler: I read Shakespeare's plays in boyhood,
chiefly for the stories; every few years later I was fain to re-read
them; for as I grew I always found new beauties in them which I had
formerly missed, and again and again I was lured back by tantalizing
hints and suggestions of a certain unity underlying the diversity of
characters. These suggestions gradually became more definite till at
length, out of the myriad voices in the plays, I began to hear more and
more insistent the accents of one voice, and out of the crowd of faces,
began to distinguish more and more clearly the features of the writer;
for all the world like some lovelorn girl, who, gazing with her soul in
her eyes, finds in the witch's cauldron the face of the beloved.

I have tried in this book to trace the way I followed, step by step; for
I found it effective to rough in the chief features of the man first,
and afterwards, taking the plays in succession, to show how Shakespeare
painted himself at full-length not once, but twenty times, at as many
different periods of his life. This is one reason why he is more
interesting to us than the greatest men of the past, than Dante even, or
Homer; for Dante and Homer worked only at their best in the flower of
manhood. Shakespeare, on the other hand, has painted himself for us in
his green youth with hardly any knowledge of life or art, and then in
his eventful maturity, with growing experience and new powers, in
masterpiece after masterpiece; and at length in his decline with
weakened grasp and fading colours, so that in him we can study the
growth and fruiting and decay of the finest spirit that has yet been
born among men. This tragedy of tragedies, in which "Lear" is only one
scene--this rise to intensest life and widest vision and fall through
abysms of despair and madness to exhaustion and death--can be followed
experience by experience, from Stratford to London and its thirty years
of passionate living, and then from London to village Stratford again,
and the eternal shrouding silence.

As soon as this astonishing drama discovered itself to me in its tragic
completeness I jumped to the conclusion that it must have been set forth
long ago in detail by Shakespeare's commentators, and so, for the first
time, I turned to their works. I do not wish to rail at my forerunners
as Carlyle railed at the historians of Cromwell, or I should talk, as he
talked, about "libraries of inanities...conceited dilettantism and
pedantry...prurient stupidity," and so forth. The fact is, I found all
this, and worse; I waded through tons of talk to no result. Without a
single exception the commentators have all missed the man and the story;
they have turned the poet into a tradesman, and the unimaginable tragedy
of his life into the commonplace record of a successful tradesman's
career. Even to explain this astounding misadventure of the host of
critics is a little difficult. The mistake, of course, arose from the
fact that his contemporaries told very little about Shakespeare; they
left his appearance and even the incidents of his life rather vague.
Being without a guide, and having no clear idea of Shakespeare's
character, the critics created him in their own image, and, whenever
they were in doubt, idealized him according to the national type.

Still, there was at least one exception. Some Frenchman, I think it is
Joubert, says that no great man is born into the world without another
man being born about the same time, who understands and can interpret
him, and Shakespeare was of necessity singularly fortunate in his
interpreter. Ben Jonson was big enough to see him fairly, and to give
excellent-true testimony concerning him. Jonson's view of Shakespeare is
astonishingly accurate and trustworthy so far as it goes; even his
attitude of superiority to Shakespeare is fraught with meaning. Two
hundred years later, the rising tide of international criticism produced
two men, Goethe and Coleridge, who also saw Shakespeare, if only by
glimpses, or rather by divination of kindred genius, recognizing certain
indubitable traits. Goethe's criticism of "Hamlet" has been vastly
over-praised; but now and then he used words about Shakespeare which, in
due course, we shall see were illuminating words, the words of one who
guessed something of the truth. Coleridge, too, with his curious,
complex endowment of philosopher and poet, resembled Shakespeare, saw
him, therefore, by flashes, and might have written greatly about him;
but, alas, Coleridge, a Puritan born, was brought up in epicene
hypocrisies, and determined to see Shakespeare--that child of the
Renascence--as a Puritan, too, and consequently mis-saw him far oftener
than he saw him; misjudged him hideously, and had no inkling of his
tragic history.

There is a famous passage in Coleridge's "Essays on Shakespeare" which
illustrates what I mean. It begins: "In Shakespeare all the elements of
womanhood are holy"; and goes on to eulogize the instinct of chastity
which all his women possess, and this in spite of Doll Tearsheet,
Tamora, Cressida, Goneril, Regan, Cleopatra, the Dark Lady of the
Sonnets, and many other frail and fascinating figures. Yet whatever
gleam of light has fallen on Shakespeare since Coleridge's day has come
chiefly from that dark lantern which he now and then flashed upon the
master.

In one solitary respect, our latter-day criticism has been successful;
it has established with very considerable accuracy the chronology of the
plays, and so the life-story of the poet is set forth in due order for
those to read who can.

This then is what I found--a host of commentators who saw men as trees
walking, and mistook plain facts, and among them one authentic witness,
Jonson, and two interesting though not trustworthy witnesses, Goethe and
Coleridge--and nothing more in three centuries. The mere fact may well
give us pause, pointing as it does to a truth which is still
insufficiently understood. It is the puzzle of criticism, at once the
despair and wonder of readers, that the greatest men of letters usually
pass through life without being remarked or understood by their
contemporaries. The men of Elizabeth's time were more interested in
Jonson than in Shakespeare, and have told us much more about the younger
than the greater master; just as Spaniards of the same age were more
interested in Lope de Vega than in Cervantes, and have left a better
picture of the second-rate playwright than of the world-poet. Attempting
to solve this problem Emerson coolly assumed that the men of the
Elizabethan age were so great that Shakespeare himself walked about
among them unnoticed as a giant among giants. This reading of the riddle
is purely transcendental. We know that Shakespeare's worst plays were
far oftener acted than his best; that "Titus Andronicus" by popular
favour was more esteemed than "Hamlet." The majority of contemporary
poets and critics regarded Shakespeare rather as a singer of "sugred"
verses than as a dramatist. The truth is that Shakespeare passed through
life unnoticed because he was so much greater than his contemporaries
that they could not see him at all in his true proportions. It was
Jonson, the nearest to him in greatness, who alone saw him at all fairly
and appreciated his astonishing genius.

Nothing illustrates more perfectly the unconscious wisdom of the English
race than the old saying that "a man must be judged by his peers." One's
peers, in fact, are the only persons capable of judging one, and the
truth seems to be that three centuries have only produced three men at
all capable of judging Shakespeare. The jury is still being collected.
But from the quality of the first three, and of their praise, it is
already plain that his place will be among the highest. From various
indications, too, it looks as if the time for judging him had come:
"Hamlet" is perhaps his most characteristic creation, and Hamlet, in his
intellectual unrest, morbid brooding, cynical self-analysis and dislike
of bloodshed, is much more typical of the nineteenth or twentieth
century than of the sixteenth. Evidently the time for classifying the
creator of Hamlet is at hand.

And this work of description and classification should be done as a
scientist would do it: for criticism itself has at length bent to the
Time-spirit and become scientific. And just as in science, analysis for
the moment has yielded pride of place to synthesis, so the critical
movement in literature has in our time become creative. The chemist, who
resolves any substance into its elements, is not satisfied till by
synthesis he can re-create the substance out of its elements: this is
the final proof that his knowledge is complete. And so we care little or
nothing to-day for critical analyses or appreciations which are not
creative presentments of the person. "Paint him for us," we say, "in his
habit as he lived, and we will take it that you know something about
him."

One of the chief attempts at creative criticism in English literature,
or, perhaps it would be fairer to say, the only memorable attempt, is
Carlyle's Cromwell. He has managed to build up the man for us quite
credibly out of Cromwell's letters and speeches, showing us the
underlying sincerity and passionate resolution of the great Puritan once
for all. But unfortunately Carlyle was too romantic an artist, too
persuaded in his hero-worship to discover for us Cromwell's faults and
failings. In his book we find nothing of the fanatic who ordered the
Irish massacres, nothing of the neuropath who lived in hourly dread of
assassination. Carlyle has painted his subject all in lights, so to
speak; the shadows are not even indicated, and yet he ought to have
known that in proportion to the brilliancy of the light the shadows must
of necessity be dark. It is not for me to point out that this romantic
painting of great men, like all other make-believes and hypocrisies, has
its drawbacks and shortcomings: it is enough that it has had its day and
produced its pictures of giant-heroes and their worshippers for those
who love such childish toys.

The wonderful age in which we live--this twentieth century with its
X-rays that enable us to see through the skin and flesh of men, and to
study the working of their organs and muscles and nerves--has brought a
new spirit into the world, a spirit of fidelity to fact, and with it a
new and higher ideal of life and of art, which must of necessity change
and transform all the conditions of existence, and in time modify the
almost immutable nature of man. For this new spirit, this love of the
fact and of truth, this passion for reality will do away with the
foolish fears and futile hopes which have fretted the childhood of our
race, and will slowly but surely establish on broad foundations the
Kingdom of Man upon Earth. For that is the meaning and purpose of the
change which is now coming over the world. The faiths and convictions of
twenty centuries are passing away and the forms and institutions of a
hundred generations of men are dissolving before us like the baseless
fabric of a dream. A new morality is already shaping itself in the
spirit; a morality based not on guess-work and on fancies; but on
ascertained laws of moral health; a scientific morality belonging not to
statics, like the morality of the Jews, but to dynamics, and so fitting
the nature of each individual person. Even now conscience with its
prohibitions is fading out of life, evolving into a more profound
consciousness of ourselves and others, with multiplied incitements to
wise giving. The old religious asceticism with its hatred of the body is
dead; the servile acceptance of conditions of life and even of natural
laws is seen to be vicious; it is of the nobility of man to be insatiate
in desire and to rebel against limiting conditions; it is the property
of his intelligence to constrain even the laws of nature to the
attainment of his ideal.

Already we are proud of being students, investigators, servants of
truth, and we leave the great names of demi-gods and heroes a little
contemptuously to the men of bygone times. As student-artists we are no
longer content with the outward presentment and form of men: we want to
discover the protean vanities, greeds and aspirations of men, and to lay
bare, as with a scalpel, the hidden motives and springs of action. We
dream of an art that shall take into account the natural daily decay and
up-building of cell-life; the wars that go on in the blood; the fevers
of the brain; the creeping paralysis of nerve-exhaustion; above all, we
must be able even now from a few bare facts, to re-create a man and make
him live and love again for the reader, just as the biologist from a few
scattered bones can reconstruct some prehistoric bird or fish or mammal.

And we student-artists have no desire to paint our subject as better or
nobler or smaller or meaner than he was in reality; we study his
limitations as we study his gifts, his virtues with as keen an interest
as his vices; for it is in some excess of desire, or in some
extravagance of mentality, that we look for the secret of his
achievement, just as we begin to wonder when we see hands constantly
outstretched in pious supplication, whether a foot is not thrust out
behind in some secret shame, for the biped, man, must keep a balance.

I intend first of all to prove from Shakespeare's works that he has
painted himself twenty times from youth till age at full length: I shall
consider and compare these portraits till the outlines of his character
are clear and certain; afterwards I shall show how his little vanities
and shames idealized the picture, and so present him as he really was,
with his imperial intellect and small snobberies; his giant vices and
paltry self-deceptions; his sweet gentleness and long martyrdom. I
cannot but think that his portrait will thus gain more in truth than it
can lose in ideal beauty. Or let me come nearer to my purpose by means
of a simile. Talking with Sir David Gill one evening on shipboard about
the fixed stars, he pointed one out which is so distant that we cannot
measure how far it is away from us and can form no idea of its
magnitude. "But surely," I exclaimed, "the great modern telescopes must
bring the star nearer and magnify it?" "No," he replied, "no; the best
instruments make the star clearer to us, but certainly not larger." This
is what I wish to do in regard to Shakespeare; make him clearer to men,
even if I do not make him larger.

And if I were asked why I do this, why I take the trouble to re-create a
man now three centuries dead, it is first of all, of course, because he
is worth it--the most complex and passionate personality in the world,
whether of life or letters--because, too, there are certain lessons
which the English will learn from Shakespeare more quickly and easily
than from any living man, and a little because I want to get rid of
Shakespeare by assimilating all that was fine in him, while giving all
that was common and vicious in him as spoil to oblivion. He is like the
Old-Man-of-the-Sea on the shoulders of our youth; he has become an
obsession to the critic, a weapon to the pedant, a nuisance to the man
of genius. True, he has painted great pictures in a superb, romantic
fashion; he is the Titian of dramatic art: but is there to be no
Rembrandt, no Balzac, no greater Tolstoi in English letters? I want to
liberate Englishmen so far as I can from the tyranny of Shakespeare's
greatness. For the new time is upon us, with its new knowledge and new
claims, and we English are all too willing to live in the past, and so
lose our inherited place as leader of the nations.

The French have profited by their glorious Revolution: they trusted
reason and have had their reward; no such leap forward has ever been
made as France made in that one decade, and the effects are still
potent. In the last hundred years the language of Moliere has grown
fourfold; the slang of the studios and the gutter and the laboratory, of
the engineering school and the dissecting table, has been ransacked for
special terms to enrich and strengthen the language in order that it may
deal easily with the new thoughts. French is now a superb instrument,
while English is positively poorer than it was in the time of
Shakespeare, thanks to the prudery of our illiterate middle class.
Divorced from reality, with its activities all fettered in baby-linen,
our literature has atrophied and dwindled into a babble of nursery
rhymes, tragedies of Little Marys, tales of Babes in a Wood. The example
of Shakespeare may yet teach us the value of free speech; he could say
what he liked as he liked: he was not afraid of the naked truth and the
naked word, and through his greatness a Low Dutch dialect has become the
chiefest instrument of civilization, the world-speech of humanity at
large.

FRANK HARRIS.

LONDON, 1909.

BOOK I

SHAKESPEARE PAINTED BY HIMSELF

CHAPTER I

HAMLET: ROMEO--JAQUES

"As I passed by ... I found an altar with this inscription, TO THE
UNKNOWN GOD. Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto
you." This work of Paul--the discovery and proclaiming of an unknown
god--is in every age the main function of the critic.

An unknown god this Shakespeare of ours, whom all are agreed it would be
well to know, if in any way possible. As to the possibility, however,
the authorities are at loggerheads. Hallam, "the judicious," declared
that it was impossible to learn anything certain about "the man,
Shakespeare." Wordsworth, on the other hand (without a nickname to show
a close connection with the common), held that Shakespeare unlocked his
heart with the sonnets for key. Browning jeered at this belief, to be in
turn contradicted by Swinburne. Matthew Arnold gave us in a sonnet "the
best opinion of his time":

"Others abide our question. Thou art free.
We ask and ask--Thou smilest and art still,
Out-topping knowledge."

But alas! the best opinion of one generation is in these matters often
flat unreason to the next, and it may be that in this instance neither
the opinion of Hallam nor Browning nor Arnold will be allowed to count.

As it is the object of a general to win battles so it is the life-work
of the artist to show himself to us, and the completeness with which he
reveals his own individuality is perhaps the best measure of his genius.
One does this like Montaigne, simply, garrulously, telling us his height
and make, his tastes and distastes, his loves and fears and habits, till
gradually the seeming-artless talk brings the man before us, a
sun-warmed fruit of humanity, with uncouth rind of stiff manners and
sweet kindly juices, not perfect in any way, shrivelled on this side by
early frost-bite, and on that softened to corruption through too much
heat, marred here by the bitter-black cicatrice of an ancient injury and
there fortune-spotted, but on the whole healthy, grateful, of a most
pleasant ripeness. Another, like Shakespeare, with passionate
conflicting sympathies and curious impartial intellect cannot discover
himself so simply; needs, like the diamond, many facets to show all the
light in him, and so proceeds to cut them one after the other as
Falstaff or Hamlet, to the dazzling of the purblind.

Yet Shakespeare's purpose is surely the same as Montaigne's, to reveal
himself to us, and it would be hasty to decide that his skill is
inferior. For while Montaigne had nothing but prose at his command, and
not too rich a prose, as he himself complains, Shakespeare in magic of
expression has had no equal in recorded time, and he used the lyric as
well as the dramatic form, poetry as well as prose, to give his soul
utterance.

We are doing Shakespeare wrong by trying to believe that he hides
himself behind his work; the suspicion is as unworthy as the old
suspicion dissipated by Carlyle that Cromwell was an ambitious
hypocrite. Sincerity is the birthmark of genius, and we can be sure that
Shakespeare has depicted himself for us with singular fidelity; we can
see him in his works, if we will take the trouble, "in his habit as he
lived."

We are doing ourselves wrong, too, by pretending that Shakespeare
"out-tops knowledge." He did not fill the world even in his own time:
there was room beside him in the days of Elizabeth for Marlowe and
Spenser, Ben Jonson and Bacon, and since then the spiritual outlook,
like the material outlook, has widened to infinity. There is space in
life now for a dozen ideals undreamed-of in the sixteenth century. Let
us have done with this pretence of doglike humility; we, too, are men,
and there is on earth no higher title, and in the universe nothing
beyond our comprehending. It will be well for us to know Shakespeare and
all his high qualities and do him reverence; it will be well for us,
too, to see his limitations and his faults, for after all it is the
human frailties in a man that call forth our sympathy and endear him to
us, and without love there is no virtue in worship, no attraction in
example.

The doubt as to the personality of Shakespeare, and the subsequent
confusion and contradictions are in the main, I think, due to Coleridge.
He was the first modern critic to have glimpses of the real Shakespeare,
and the vision lent his words a singular authority. But Coleridge was a
hero-worshipper by nature and carried reverence to lyric heights. He
used all his powers to persuade men that Shakespeare was [Greek:
myrionous anaer]--"the myriad-minded man"; a sort of demi-god who
was every one and no one, a Proteus without individuality of his own.
The theory has held the field for nearly a century, probably because it
flatters our national vanity; for in itself it is fantastically absurd
and leads to most ridiculous conclusions. For instance, when Coleridge
had to deal with the fact that Shakespeare never drew a miser, instead
of accepting the omission as characteristic, for it is confirmed by Ben
Jonson's testimony that he was "of an open and free nature," Coleridge
proceeded to argue that avarice is not a permanent passion in humanity,
and that Shakespeare probably for that reason chose to leave it
undescribed. This is an example of the ecstasy of hero-worship; it is
begging the question to assume that whatever Shakespeare did was
perfect; humanity cannot be penned up even in Shakespeare's brain. Like
every other man of genius Shakespeare must have shown himself in his
qualities and defects, in his preferences and prejudices; "a fallible
being," as stout old Dr. Johnson knew, "will fail somewhere."

Even had Shakespeare tried to hide himself in his work, he could not
have succeeded. Now that the print of a man's hand or foot or ear is
enough to distinguish him from all other men, it is impossible to
believe that the mask of his mind, the very imprint, form and pressure
of his soul should be less distinctive. Just as Monsieur Bertillon's
whorl-pictures of a thumb afford overwhelming proofs of a man's
identity, so it is possible from Shakespeare's writings to establish
beyond doubt the main features of his character and the chief incidents
of his life. The time for random assertion about Shakespeare and
unlimited eulogy of him has passed away for ever: the object of this
inquiry is to show him as he lived and loved and suffered, and the
proofs of this and of that trait shall be so heaped up as to stifle
doubt and reach absolute conviction. For not only is the circumstantial
evidence overwhelming and conclusive, but we have also the testimony of
eye-witnesses with which to confirm it, and one of these witnesses, Ben
Jonson, is of rare credibility and singularly well equipped.

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