Shakespeare

A complementary path can also be traced in the shape of his career. He began as an ambitious and prolific dramatist, ready to take on any subject and any form. He excelled in melodrama as well as history, in farce as well as lyrical pathos. He could do everything. He seemed to have a natural genius for comedy, in which he could improvise effortlessly, but he learned very quickly how to employ other materials. It was only in the course of writing his plays, however, that he managed to discover his vision. It had been waiting for him all along, but he did not properly find it until the middle stage of his life. It was only then that he became truly “Shakespearian.” It may even be that, in the later years, he astounded and terrified himself with these great acts of creation.

CHAPTER 45 Thus Leaning on Mine Elbow I Begin

John Keats wrote that the poetical character “is not itself – it has no I self – it is every thing and nothing – It has no character – it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated.” And thus “a Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity – he is continually in [forming] and filling some other Body.”

All of Shakespeare’s characters have an exultant and self-sufficient energy that lifts them above the realm of nature. That is why the greatest tragic characters are also close to comedy. Their expansiveness and self-assertion provoke delight. It is also why Shakespeare betrays no real interest in motive. His characters are fully alive as soon as they come upon the stage, and no excuse for their conduct is ever necessary. He will even excise their motives, outlined in his sources, simply to augment their inward or obsessive energy. They become mysterious and more challenging, provoking the audience to wonder or alarm. There are other occasions when motive has to be inferred from conduct; the characters have acquired a reality so strong that you must try to see around them.

Their speech and action are all of a piece, and their utterances are so knit together that they manifest a complete and coherent spirit or soul. The very cadence of the voices creates a unique and identifiable personality. In the second scene of the play, on the occasion of his first appearance upon the stage, the rhythms of Othello are deeply embedded in the structure of the verse with a series of half-lines-“’Tis better as it is … Let him do his spite … Not I, I must be found … What is the news? … What’s the matter, think you?” It is the rhythm of Othello’s being.

As far as the great tragic heroes are concerned, there is a corresponding belief in the ruling power of the self. Their destiny does not lie in the stars, in some abstract notion of Fate or, least of all, in some scheme of divine providence. Their movement is so irresistible, their inner life so powerful, that they gather momentum as the drama proceeds. Even in their fall they are wonderful.

Genius must find its time, too, and can quicken only in the general atmosphere of its period. It has been claimed, for example, that the sixteenth century was the age of the adventurer and of the striving individual. We see him first, on the English stage, in Faustus and in Tamburlaine. In that interim between the imperatives of a sixteenth-century religious culture and the claims of “society” in the seventeenth century, the individual being emerged as the object of speculation and enquiry in Montaigne’s work no less than in Marlowe’s. This was also the Shakespearian moment.

Shakespeare’s major protagonists have all the strength and vitality of their creator. Their capacity for life is astonishing. They have a mental, as well as a physical, energy. Even Macbeth retains a mysterious optimism. They are at one with the forces of the universe. Shakespeare’s true villains are pessimists, denying human energy and the capacity for human greatness. They are self-absorbed and melancholy, the enemies of movement and vitality. And here, if anywhere, the true sympathies of Shakespeare’s own nature can be found. Studies of his imagery have also shown that he was in love with movement in all of its forms, as if only in that quick sway and acceleration could he catch the vital life of things.