Queen. One of them became the hero of a delightful ballad, The Four Indian Kings (telling "How a beautiful Lady conquered one of the Indian Kings "), of which the Harvard University Library has three copies in "broadside" and one in "garland" style. And further, they were made the subject of a Tatler paper by Steele (No. 171, May 13, 1710) and of a Spectator paper by Addison (No. 50, April 27, 1711). The bulk of Addison's paper is a pretended translation from a bundle of papers left behind by "King Sa Ga Yean Qua Rash Tow" when he quitted his lodgings. This manuscript records a savage's impressions of English customs and institutions, with mildly satirical intent. Swift, in the Journal to Stella (April 28, 1711), takes credit for having suggested this device to Steele, and repents that he did not make use of the subject himself.

In the Scots Magazine for February, 1742 (IV, 73), is a four-page continuation of the observations in the Spectator, "translated from the original manuscript, and communicated by a correspondent to the Universal Spectator." This again has a satirical object.

It is interesting to note that the chief's name had been used for satirical purposes before Freneau's time. In 1758 Tombo-Chiqui: or the American Savage, a Dramatic Entertainment in three acts was published in London. This play (said to have been "taken from a French piece, entitled Harlequin Sauvage") is described in the Monthly Review for June of that year (XVIII, 648) as "a satire on the foibles of those European nations, who deem themselves superior to the rest of the world, on account of their polite accomplishments: which, in the opinion of the honest American Savage, are only vicious deviations from the original simplicity and integrity of nature.”

"The original simplicity and integrity of nature" is the characteristic note in Freneau's The Dying Indian Tomo-Chequi, as it is in most Indian pieces of the eighteenth century, with the exception of those which are purely of the Son of Alknomock type. In the latter, as we have seen, bravado and manly endurance are the motives. One who is familiar with the sentimental literary tastes of the second half of the century finds no difficulty in understanding why both types of the Dying Indian should frequently appear in the British and American poetry of that era.

1 The speech alleged to have been made to the Queen was reprinted in the Gentleman's Magazine, XVIII, 60 (1748), and again in the London Magazine, XVII, 81 (also in 1748). For further information and references, see Drake, Bk. v, pp. 13 ff.

११

HAMLET AND IAGO

ELMER EDGAR STOLL

He is the counterpart of Hamlet, who tries to find reasons for his delay in pursuing a design which excites his aversion. And most of Iago's reasons. for action are no more the real ones than Hamlet's reasons for delay are the real ones. Each is moved by forces which he does not understand." Embedded in this observation of Professor Bradley's lies a truth of fundamental importance, I think, when viewed in the light of historical criticism. Hamlet and Iago are not actuated by the motives which they allege. But, as I see it, their designs excite in them no aversion, and the forces which move them are not obscure.

As has been suggested elsewhere,1 the Elizabethan soliloquy is the truth itself, and though in real life a liar may lie to everybody, even to himself in a way, Iago cannot be lying when he expresses his ambitious jealousy of Cassio, his sexual jealousy of Othello, and his lust for Desdemona, any more than Autolycus can be lying when he tells the audience that his traffic is sheets and for the life to come he sleeps out the thought of it. The soliloquy or aside, and the confidence of friend to friend, are for information, like prologue and chorus, and in treating them psychologically Shakespearean criticism has ignored dramatic convention, whether it be in England or on the Continent, in ancient or in modern times. By it, in Shakespeare, any curious bit of human nature is labelled, any devious path in the intrigue is placarded. Cordelia is not permitted to say to her father, "Nothing, my lord," without two previous asides to the effect of "love and be silent"; and Desdemona, when merry with Iago as she awaits her lord's belated arrival at the quay, must hasten to apprise the audience that she is beguiling the thing she is by seeming otherwise. How, then, when the placard is misleading, is an audience, before so tenderly guided, to know it, and find its way to the truth behind these confidences of Iago or behind Hamlet's theological reason for sparing the king at prayer? If either character really deceives himself, it is he himself—as Hamlet when he falls a-cursing like a very drab, or Iago when for the moment he dallies with the notion that he is not a villain - that detects it.

Hence we may say that the technique of Shakespeare and his times was incapable of coping with the unconscious or subconscious. The character himself detects the self-deception and then it is no longer self-deception. Nor

1 In my article "Anachronism in Shakespeare Criticism," Modern Philology, April, 1910.

of a subtler technique had the poet any need. Even the philosophy of his time, of which he had as little as of Greek, knew not the unconscious. The doctrines of Neoplatonism, of Bruno, Boehme, and Paracelsus, the scientific interest in magic, alchemy, and animistic medicine turned the world and every atom of it, as did popular superstition, for that matter, into beings full of passion and knowledge. There were spirits of the heart and brain as well as of earth and water; and by Shakespeare and the other poets Fate, conscience (even in the bosom of a man incapable of one), all the vague stirrings and impulses of the soul, and the sympathetic throes of dumb nature itself are given a voice. "Genug, das Geheimniss muss heraus," as Goethe well says, "und sollten es die Steine verkünden." Motives, when not merely neglected, come boldly to the light of day, instead of betraying themselves casually and unawares as in present-day drama and in real life. So far, indeed, are poet and people from a notion of the relative and unconscious that the motives appear, not in the subdued colors in which they are seen by the soul itself, but in the glaring black or white of vice or virtue, as if a cherub saw them. The poet who made Brutus and Othello so conscious of their own virtue, and Iago and Lady Macbeth so cheerfully aware of others' virtue and the wickedness of their own doings and intents, had not looked much into the dimmer chambers of the soul.

Yet Hamlet and Iago do not act or recoil from action for the reasons they allege. Most of his motives Iago touches on but once, and he demeans himself, as Professor Bradley says, not at all like one stung with resentment, fired by ambition, or consumed with hatred, the poisonous mineral of sexual jealousy, or lust. He takes no particular pleasure in Cassio's place once he has got it, and his glee at the success of his intrigue is not that of an injured husband or a libertine, getting even, wife for wife. Having motives, then, he acts as if he had them not. Shall we, therefore, discard them, and, like the critics, get him new ones of our own? In so doing we discard Shakespeare, and, unawares, cease from criticism. Rather let Iago run his course regardless of motive, like Aaron, Richard III, or Marlowe's Barabas, the badge of whose lineage he bears, being a Machiavel, or stage villain, who is utterly given over to evil and shrinks at none. As such he has a charter to do evil, liberal as the wind. And roundly he goes to work intriguing and destroying, fired by no particular passion, but flaring up again and again with the central flame of hell:

Work on,

My medicine, work! Thus credulous fools are caught,

And many worthy and chaste dames even thus

All guiltless meet reproach.2

१९

1 See my article on 'Criminals in Shakespeare and Science," Modern Philology, July, 1912, pp. 5-6, 17-20.

2 Cf. II, iii, 366-369, where he delights in turning Desdemona's virtue into pitch, although he has no grudge against her. "Hell and night,” etc.

That Iago loves evil for its own sake Professor Bradley denies, finding in him, on the contrary, traces of the obscure working of conscience, and subconscious motives of so neutral a character as a sense of superiority and a delight in the pain of his victim as a proof of his power. Even a safety valve he provides for him, as for that other self-deceived one, Hamlet, to relieve him from the discomfort of hypocrisy. Space forbids me to enter upon the question further than to say that here very evidently Mr. Bradley's counsel is darkened by the notions not only of modern psychology but of modern metaphysics. The Kantian "resistance" of the moral law in every man's bosom (therefore in Iago's), and so monistic a motive as the "sense of power," are ill in keeping with the dualistic Machiavel, who scoffs at conscience, and revels in his villainy and the help he has from "all the tribe of hell." Far from being a discomfort, hypocrisy is part of Iago's program and profession, sweeter to him than honey and the honeycomb. The conscience darkly working within him is no more than that familiarity with the true moral values of which we have already taken notice. He puts himself in the wrong by virtue of his own self-consciousness—by virtue of his maker's naïveté. And the motive-hunting in his earlier soliloquies is no sign of "uneasiness" or "aversion." Coolly and clearly he sees that he has no cause, and therefore acts. The very accumulation of his motives and the uncertainty and flimsiness of his suspicions but show the hellishness of his purpose. Instead of denying the devil a conscience or moral sense, as we should do, for good and all, it is according to Shakespeare's lights to give him one, but perverted, turned upside down.

Nor does this mean that we too discard Shakespeare and discredit Iago in his confidences to gallery and pit. Apart from the impression that Iago is bent upon villainy, Shakespeare saw no necessity whatever of carrying over the motives Iago professes into his part in the play. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, as for the crown they commit murder after murder, think not of the crown, but of the horrors of murder and the spirits that tend on mortal thoughts. Hamlet, who says that he loved Ophelia more than could forty thousand brothers, kills her father without remorse, and before or after, in his soliloquies or serious moments, never gives her a word or a thought. Timon, in his misanthropic meditations after his friends forsake him, shows no trace of wounded affection, and Lear, Hamlet, and he dwell on the delinquencies of officers of the law, women who lisp and paint, prostitutes, and the incontinent, with all of which they have little or nothing to do. To-day we demand in a work of art concentration and point, not unity only but identity, complete integration and interpenetration of part and part, form and thought, plot and character. If Ibsen's Krogstad and Mortensgard have certain grudges and cravings to satisfy, they are suffered to talk and act only as such men would, and not like scoundrels let loose upon the town. In Iago, on the other hand, Shakespeare keeps to the Machiavel type, and finely as in the

turn of his speech he individualizes him, never thinks of making any particular motive or motives shine through thought or deed.

So it is, I think, with Hamlet. Except, as we have seen, when he himself detects it, he is not deceiving himself, and he honestly believes that the ghost may have been a devil, has the play performed really to catch the conscience of the king, and fails to kill him afterward only because he fears that in so doing he should waft his soul to heaven. No weak-kneed dreamer, when he takes Polonius for the king he kills him on the spot, slips his own neck out of the noose and the two innocent gentlemen's into it with all his heart and soul, grapples with the pirate and boards him, and kills the king at the end of the fifth act as soon as ever the dramatist himself has got ready. And yet

whether it be

Bestial oblivion or some craven scruple

Of thinking too precisely on the event

A thought which, quartered, hath but one part wisdom

And ever three parts coward - I do not know

Why yet I live to say "This thing's to do,"

Sith I have cause and will and strength and means
To do it.

Though he brings these vague and conflicting charges of cowardice against himself twice over,1 he again quite as truly protests that he is no coward.2 Contradiction upon contradiction, for the play is but a story. In the plot there is the customary Shakespearean explicitness; in the character-witness the four thousand treatises! — an unwonted obscurity and confusion. On the one hand, the heroic quality must be preserved; on the other, some show of reason must be furnished for Hamlet's not killing the king (if the bull may be pardoned me) before the play is over. So he accuses himself, and the contradictory charges and excuses cancel one another. Such motivation as this is an epical device rather than a dramatic. The character is sacrificed to plot, and is rescued like the darlings of the gods in old fable, as it were, by being enveloped in a cloud or mist. "I do not know why yet I live to say 'This thing's to do,'" whereas he avows what can be known by no man that he hoodwinks himself; and all the other characters in Shakespeare, even those who, like Lear, would in real life have known themselves "but slenderly," know their weaknesses very well. Sooner or later their friends know them too, as the Fool and Kent know Lear's, Lady Macbeth her husband's, Enobarbus Antony's; but Horatio, Ophelia, Gertrude, Laertes, Fortinbras, who at the end avers that as a king he would have proved right royally, even Claudius himself, find in Hamlet none at all. And "bestial oblivion," mere forgetfulness or neglect, which is the main explanation of his delay, - what a reason or dramatic motive have we there! "Remember me,"

1 See II, ii, final speech, as well as the passage quoted above.

2 II, ii, 597-604.