IV Both in the tragedies and comedies it is essential that we take into account the audiences for whom Shakespeare wrote their credulity (if we can call it so) was extraordinary; witchcraft was treated with respect, as we discover in Reginald Scot's Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584). Fairy lore and astrology occupied the serious attention of vast numbers of the populace-but far more important than this, from our point of view, is the insatiable thirst for poetry, which was almost the most pronounced characteristic of these rough, bloodthirsty men who thronged, afternoon after afternoon, in the theatres, fresh from the Spanish Main or the battle-fields in Flanders. Men were beginning to use their language and extend their vocabulary; new ideas of amazing import were penetrating their senses daily. They began "to go crazy" over poetry; they all wrote it, they all demanded it from their favourite playwrights. Shakespeare, as usual, gave the public what the public wanted; it is a noteworthy feature of his genius that he seemed to pander to the public taste by giving them all their old favourite machinery while changing this machinery in the crucible of his mind into the undying individual men and women we now know. For example, the audience demanded a fool and he gave them Feste and the Fool in Lear. They demanded a Jew who should be baited and he gave them Shylock. They demanded witches and he gave them Macbeth. They demanded blood and he gave them Othello and Hamlet. Most of all they demanded poetry, and he gave them thirty-seven plays so steeped in magic that he caused a Low Dutch dialect to become the chiefest instrument of civilisation, the world-speech of humanity at large. Shakespeare found the blank-verse form a powerful vehicle of dramatic elocution as used by Marlowe and perfected it until in his years of maturity almost unwittingly he seemed to coin a new heaven and a new earth of language; here as elsewhere, however, it is as well to recognise that he was no innovator as Wordsworth was; he did not invent the blank-verse form any more than he invented the plots for his plays: he took whatever he found to be grist for his mill, as all geniuses do, from the store-cupboard of all the writers who had lived before him-discarding here, adding there, with no thought but of benefiting from them and improving upon their mistakes. He must have been an omnivorous reader, much of the same type as Doctor Johnson, who tore the hearts out of books ruthlessly in order to extract the honey out of them expeditiously. The fact that Shakespeare was an actor surely helped him enormously; knowing as he did the exigencies of the stage, he would in his remodelling of old plays know exactly how to adapt them to meet the popular demands, and we shall do well to bear in mind the eight features that Coleridge noted when he tried to particularise on Shakespeare's peculiarities. First he notices that Shakespeare gains his effect always by expectation in preference to surprise; this is ever the way of genius; his business lies in the unravelling of character. Your interest as reader or playgoer is in the development of character, not in sudden surprises. In Macbeth, for instance, we are led gradually to expect the murder of Duncan; that is not the climax of the play; it is the result of the murder upon Macbeth's inner consciousness that so holds our attention that we scarcely dare to draw a breath until the last scene; so it is with Hamlet. It is the strange, unaccountable reluctance in the hero to take the obvious way that so enthralls us; we feel how extraordinarily natural it all is and yet how desperately tragic; the excitement is all the more tense because we are led to expect various things; we don't want the cheap substitution of surprise for expectation. Secondly, Coleridge notices how Shakespeare adheres to the law that opposites attract, a point not even now sufficiently recognised by those who study the psychology of the human race. What was it that attracted the energetic, highly intellectual Hamlet in the anæmic, spiritless doll, Ophelia ? What was it that so endeared the gentle Desdemona to the warrior Othello? Why ever did Emilia marry Iago or Imogen Posthumus? What had Henry the Fifth in common with Falstaff or Falstaff with him? Again and again we see this trait in Shakespeare, only explicable at all if we remember how extraordinarily true it is in real life that opposites have a strange attraction for each other. The third point is that Shakespeare always keeps on the high road; he has no innocent adulteries, no sentimental rat-catchers, no æsthetic butchers; he does not penetrate the obscure corners of life. This is the same feature which Meredith recognised when he said: He probed from hell to hell Of human passions, but of love deflowered His wisdom was not for he knew thee [Mother Earth] well. There is no “sick philosophy" in Shakespeare as there has been in so much of our modern writing; he had no leanings towards an inverted morality which would prove immorality moral and all morality immoral. It is with a sense of getting back to clean, fresh air, after having been immured in a cesspool, that we read Shakespeare after some of our latter-day prophets. Shakespeare's fourth peculiarity is his absolute independence between the dramatic interest and the plot: the plot is simply the canvas, nothing more; it is quite secondary to and independent of the main purpose the unfolding of character. This explains once again why Shakespeare never troubled to invent a plot ; the fifth peculiarity follows from the fourth, and is the independence of the interest on the story as the groundwork of the plot. The sixth feature is the interfusion of the lyrical with, in and through the dramatic. Songs, Coleridge noticed, in Shakespeare are introduced as songs only; and yet how he heightens the humour, tightens the intensity and more forcibly brings home to us the point of view he would have us carry away. His personal love of music to a great extent, of course, accounts for this, but it is as well to remember how here again he takes the old machinery and turns it to his own good purpose. : The seventh point is perhaps the most important of all it is that the characters of the dramatis persona, like those in real life, are to be inferred by the reader; they are not told to him. This is the reason why we come to so many different conclusions in our readings of the different characters; for years we are content to take other men's opinions, and then, suddenly waking up from our lethargic acquiescence in their views, we reread the play again for ourselves and find, perhaps, that Henry the Fifth was not the model man of valour we had been led to think him, nor Falstaff so much of a coward as we had been led to believe. We find that many of his later heroines are scarcely more than milk and watery abstractions, where we had before thought them glorious specimens of perfect English girlhood at its best. Lastly, Coleridge would have us notice how everything, however heterogeneous in Shakespeare, is united, as it is in Nature; in other words, passion is that by which the individual is distinguished from others, not that which makes a different kind of him. These eight peculiarities are specially important for us to notice as we pass along, trying to build up for ourselves the complete picture of our Shakespeare. So far as he goes Coleridge is seldom in the wrong, but there are several points still to be touched on before we can hope to have gained an all-round view. V For instance, Coleridge never mentioned the astonishingly brilliant way in which Shakespeare introduced his very necessary stage directions into the text. When we take into account the absence of all scenery and the fact that these plays were acted in broad daylight, in theatres open alike to sun and rain, we begin to realise with what almost insurmountable difficulties the playwright had to cope, we are lost in admiration at the natural way in which the poet intersperses his hints about the time of day, the attitude and dress of the character, almost unnoticeably in the text. How often, for instance, in the churchyard scene in Romeo and Juliet, does Shakespeare lay stress upon the fact that it is pitch dark? The opening words attune our ears to the general gloom : Give me thy torch, boy: hence and stand aloof, says Paris. Romeo, after he has killed him, pretends that he has not been able to see his opponent's face: "Let me peruse this face." When Friar Laurence enters he begins: What torch is yond', that vainly lends his light |