| Introduction, continued |
| Exactly how Shakespeare felt about the risky theatrical
profession he had chosen, and by which he was advancing himself
and promising to make a good income, is not known. But we may
guess - and the majority has agreed - that his highest ideal
(however sceptical or otherwise he might have been about its
attainability) was to be an author of poems. Sonnet 111, presumably
written after his two early narrative efforts, is often quoted
in this connection (the sonnet is addressed to "the Friend"
- a convenient name for the young man addressed in the sequence): |
| |
O for my sake doe you wish fortune chide,
The guiltie goddesse of my harmfull deeds,
That did not better for my life provide,
Then publick means which publick manners breeds.
Thence comes it that my name receives a brand,
And almost thence my nature is subdu'd
To what it works in, like the Dyer's hand ... |
| Here Shakespeare is being both sarcastic and ironic
at the friend's expense; but "harmful deeds" does
refer (as every commentator has taken it to do) to his own success
in the theatre. Yet, whether the presence of irony is accepted
or not, the reference to his name receiving a "brand"
- in the eyes of the man addressed - because of his theatrical
associations is unmistakable. The American scholar O. J. Campbell,
editor of the valuable reference book A Shakespeare Encyclopaedia
(1966), as well as of an edition of the Sonnets, went
so far as to write that there was "little doubt for which
achievement he wished to be remembered: the preservation of
the plays is owed to the efforts of others [Campbell refers
to the initiators of the First Folio], the [two early narrative]
poems Shakespeare seems to have seen through the press himself".
There is no evidence whatsoever for, and a plenitude against,
of Shakespeare himself ever overseeing any of the quarto editions
of his plays. |
| Although it contains the kernel of the truth,
Campbell did not realise the full implications of his remark:
invaluable though his work was within its academic limitations,
he was a polite and therefore a sentimental - rather than a
psychologically realistic - scholar, blind to all but wholly
unequivocal irony, who preferred to pretend (as so many have)
that one of the main themes of the Sonnets is "Renaissance
friendship" rather than friendship and (or interfered
with by) elements of what we should call homosexual feeling.
But we shall come to that. For although the famous Sonnet 20
has been perceived as denying this, and may well in fact deny
any sexual relationship (formed at that stage), its true implications
have usually been missed in the interests of preserving Shakespeare's
name from any "taint". Commentators are only just
beginning to grow up in this respect, and to recognise that
one cannot judge Shakespeare or his times in the terms of one's
own culture or personal hang-ups. It was only thirty or so years
ago that an editor, Douglas Bush, could write, in prim and somewhat
endearing parentheses: "The few indecent sonnets, by the
way, may be regretted, not because obscenity cannot be functional,
as it often is in the plays, but because here the tone is brittle
and jarring"! He could not consider that the obscenity
might have been deliberate! Nor, until my own edition of the
Sonnets of 1963, were their "indecencies" ever
made fully explicit. At that time the determined efforts that
were made to suppress the edition, by Charles Jasper Sisson
(not to be confused with the poet C. H. - Charles Hubert - Sisson
and Robert Gittings in particular did) not come at all unexpectedly.
My publisher and their general editor (James Reeves) were at
that time undoubtedly courageous in the support they gave to
the edition. Indeed, writing quite some time after 1963, the
late journalist Marghanita Laski - supposedly a well informed
person, and one with a declared interest in the English language
- exclaimed that such indecencies were so unpleasant as, surely,
to be scarcely possible from such a source as Shakespeare. If,
she was forced to concede, they could exist, then they
were, simply, "horrid". That was candid on her part;
but it was unhelpful to an understanding of Shakespeare. |
| O. J. Campbell was right here because, although
he could hardly acknowledge it, Shakespeare's fullest achievement
(his plays) came about by a kind of accident. His true achievement
as a non-dramatic poet is contained not in the two early narratives
but in the sequence called the Sonnets (whenever these
were written). But it is not likely that he wished this to see
the light of day: for the most and the best part lacking in
the kind of fine artifice that characterises the early narratives,
the Sonnets were torn from him by a painful and private
experience, although we may be sure that they are not "autobiographical"
in the strictest sense: they do not give a blow-by-blow record
of the experiences that occasioned them. That, however, in Wordsworth's
words, with "this key [the sonnet form] Shakespeare unlocked
his heart", does add to their interest and importance.
We need to be reminded, too, no doubt, that Robert Browning
countered Wordsworth's suggestion with: "If so, the less
Shakespeare he". But that has more to do with Browning's
problems than with Shakespeare's, and is in fact obscure. Browning's
work, like that of some other Victorians, is often vitiated
by what might be described as an astonishing failure of candour.
Hence the unpleasant bluster of a highly gifted poet. |
| Not only was the writing of non-dramatic poetry
still regarded as a higher form of art: it also attracted social
prestige. Being a playwright, just of itself, certainly did
not. Indeed, connection with the theatre could attract quite
the opposite, and in practice often did. Most playwrights (Jonson,
Chapman, Marston, but never, it seems, Shakespeare), spent periods
in prison for annoying the authorities. The young "university
wit" Christopher Marlowe, the boldest, most gifted, most
recklessly subversive of them all - he too had spent time in
gaol - was assassinated in 1593. |
| Shakespeare himself was by no means without interest
in social prestige, as we know from his purchases of property
in his native town. In 1596 he "became a gentleman"
when his father John, after various reverses probably owed to
his Roman Catholicism (he had previously been listed as a recusant),
was granted a coat of arms. It is an added irony, then, that
at least one of the themes of the Sonnets, in which Shakespeare
achieved most as a non-dramatic poet, was too "scandalous"
in subject matter to gain him any of that purely social prestige
that went with achievement as a poet. That much is clear, and
militates strongly against the view that he felt he could publish
the Sonnets as openly as he had published the two early
narrative poems. The Sonnets certainly at the very least
look as though they might be love poems to a young
man. A record of complicated feelings for a young man (as well
as lust for a woman) can hardly properly be classed as "love
poetry", it might be thought; but the general public, then
as now, is not and does not like to be subtle in the making
of such distinctions. We shall see that when the unscrupulous
liar John Benson came to reprint most of the Sonnets
in 1640, in his unauthorised edition of Shakespeare's Poems,
he felt impelled to declare in a roundabout kind of way that
they possessed "Purity". Why? What did he think he
meant by that? |
| It is a common view that Shakespeare was a philosophically
ambitious "artist" and "thinker" who carefully
and fully consciously planned his plays in order to "make
statements" about his "view of life" - rather
than just turned them out under the high pressure of day-to-day
necessity. This is a position that many, when they are forced
to consider the question, tend to take: "He must have been
aware of his high status as a philosopher and thinker as well
as a poet, and carefully planned it". I have myself been
confronted with an earnest British Council official (a critic
and translator) who was "morally certain" that Shakespeare
jotted down "philosophical notes": such notes would
have presumably read as follows: "Dealt with old age in
Lear, will see to stoicism in Cymbeline, did I
see enough to hesitation theme in Hamlet? - new play?
Must tackle concepts of 'extension' and substance' in medieval
philosophy" and so forth. |
| But the view that Shakespeare found himself in
a profession in which he could make money, and so had to devote
himself to it, is the far more likely one: had Shakespeare,
at least initially, held the high regard for his plays that
he had for poetry "proper", then he would have blotted
far too many lines ever to have produced more than one or two
.... "He wanted art," the more pedantic Ben Jonson
burst out, none too seriously, to William Drummond. No wonder!
He had little time for much more art than he already had. And,
curiously (some may think), his considerable "art"
is nowhere better exemplified than in his two early narrative
poems, almost the least interesting (by his standards) of his
works. We should be grateful that he left that sort of art behind
in the interests of grinding out a living. After all, he had
enough of it in any case. A poet does not, in fact, discover
that he is a supreme exponent of the sonnet-form by planning
to demonstrate it. It happens under the pressure of experience.
One notable and useful American critic was not embarrassed to
leave on record that among his ambitions was "to write
six perfect poems". Alas, it does not happen in that way,
and indeed, one of the qualities that lies at the heart of all
true poetry is a recognition of failure to achieve perfection.
This kind of charming (and eminently understandable) naiveté
on the part of the otherwise often subtle (if also too austere)
Austin Warren characterises too much criticism. |
| But, for all that, the poetry in the plays was
not - of course - a merely casual affair. It was not achieved
by Shakespeare wholly "despite himself". Rather, he
never had a great deal of time to think about it, to sickly
it over with the pale cast of too much thought. Knowing about
all that, about how we tend to impose over-intellectual cogitation
upon matters such as poetry (and sexual activity) that are as
emotional and instinctive as they are intellectual, he doubtless
preferred not to, even when he could. The almost miraculous
nature of his achievement is thus owed, not to conscious "planning",
but to the sheer pressures of combined circumstances. If there
is something special about Shakespeare, and it is hard to deny
that there is, then there is precisely something that is also
unspecial, ordinary, too. The paradox is difficult
but is unavoidable if we are to consider this achievement in
a realistic manner. But Campbell, unwittingly or no (one feels
that it was unwitting because of the tenor of his criticism
in general), was right: he would, at least initially, have liked
to have been a successful poet rather than a mere playwright;
when he had to become the latter in order to exist, it was at
first a regret to him. |
| So the true poetry did pour out, but without his
ever being fully aware that he could achieve it in dramatic
form. It might be put thus: he did not feel that he had time
to achieve the kind of poetry he most desired to achieve, and
so he achieved it. The quite extraordinary, the unique, degree
of that achievement - unique because it is so boldly wise about
such an astonishingly wide range of human concerns - led Matthew
Arnold to his celebrated statement to the effect that Shakespeare
is "beyond criticism" ("Others abide our question,
thou art free"). |
| This is not only irritating but, strictly speaking,
quite untrue - as well as against the spirit of Jonson's remarks
quoted above - but at least we can very easily understand the
feelings that led Arnold to make his over-emotional statement.
He can even be defended on the grounds that when he wrote he
was wishing to leave a record of such an irresistibly over-emotional
statement! From time to time, arguing about the achievements
of other major poets such as Dante, Chaucer, Wordsworth, even
Goethe, we do all share them. Much nonsense, therefore, has
been poured out on the subject of Shakespeare's "greatness".
Henry Irving, one of the half-dozen actor-managers most famous
for their interpretations of his creations, even went on record
as comparing him favourably with Socrates and Christ. But, even
if crass nonsense, this kind of nonsense is a sympathetic, or
at least a common, sort of crass nonsense. To adapt a little
what the wise Dr Johnson said about the existence of ghosts:
there is hardly likely to have been such a universal fuss if
there were not, after all, something very special and extraordinary
indeed to investigate. The matter of the psychological circumstances
under which the phenomenon came into existence is of vital interest.
|
| It seems, then, that, although he hardly knew
it, or gave himself time to know it, Shakespeare needed the
vehicle of the then comparatively "vulgar" dramatic
form - and the pressures the successful pursuit of it entailed
- in order to give his poetic genius its fullest expression.
It is obvious beyond doubt that Venus and Lucrece
were written by the young and developing author of the early
plays. But, comparatively immature though these plays are, they
have more true energy than the two more aspiring and more artificial
poems. In the plays the young author was grappling with more
than just the fashions of his time. Nor do his two poems often
have quite that edge of mockery that he has already begun to
achieve in the plays. The comedy The Two Gentleman of Verona
was written at just about the same time as Venus and
Lucrece, and what small amount of poetry there is in
it is superior in at least one sense: it has just that satiric
and knowing edge - that extra touch of psychological sophistication
and vitality that is lacking in Shakespeare's poems until the
Sonnets. But the Sonnets are private poetry, written
under creative pressure; and Shakespeare, most commentators
believe, was unwilling to publish them. |
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