But not only are the characters in Shakespeare’s plays placed in tragic positions which are quite impossible, do not result from the course of events, and are inappropriate to the period and the place, but they also behave in a way not in accord with their own definite characters and that is quite arbitrary. It is customary to assert that in Shakespeare’s dramas character is particularly well expressed, and that with all his vividness his people are as many-sided as real people, and that while exhibiting the nature of a certain given individual they also show the nature of man in general. It is customary to say that Shakespeare’s delineation of character is the height of perfection. This is asserted with great confidence and repeated by everyone as an indisputable verity, but much as I have tried to find confirmation of this in Shakespeare’s dramas, I have always found the reverse.
From the very beginning of reading any of Shakespeare’s plays I was at once convinced that it was perfectly evident that he is lacking in the chief, if not the sole, means of portraying character, which is individuality of language--that each person should speak in a way suitable to his own character. That is lacking in Shakespeare. All his characters speak, not a language of their own but always one and the same Shakespearean, affected, unnatural language, which not only could they not speak, but which no real people could ever have spoken anywhere.
No real people could speak, or could have spoken, as Lear does--saying that, “I would divorce me from thy mother’s tomb” if Regan did not receive him, or telling the winds to “crack your cheeks,” or bidding “the wind blow the earth into the sea,” or “swell the curl’d waters ’bove the main,” as the gentleman describes what Lear said to the storm, or that it is easier to bear one’s griefs and “the mind much sufferance doth o’erskip, when grief hath mates, and bearing fellowship” (“bearing” meaning suffering), that Lear is “childed, as I father’d,” as Edgar says, and so forth--unnatural expressions such as overload the speeches of the people in all Shakespeare’s dramas.
But it is not only that the characters all talk as no real people ever talked or could talk; they are also all afflicted by a common intemperance of language.
In love, preparing for death, fighting or dying, they all talk at great length and unexpectedly about quite irrelevant matters, guided more by the sound of the words and by puns than by the thoughts.
And they all talk alike. Lear raves just as Edgar does when feigning madness. Kent and the fool both speak alike. The words of one person can be put into the mouth of another, and by the character of the speech it is impossible to know who is speaking. If there is a difference in the speech of Shakespeare’s characters, it is only that Shakespeare makes different speeches for his characters, and not that they speak differently.
Thus Shakespeare always speaks for his kings in one and the same inflated, empty language. Similarly all his women who are intended to be poetic, speak the same pseudo-sentimental Shakespearean language: Juliet, Desdemona, Cordelia, and Mariana. In just the same way also it is Shakespeare who always speaks for his villains: Richard, Edmund, Iago, and Macbeth--expressing for them those malignant feelings which villains never express. And yet more identical is the talk of his madmen, with their terrible words, and the speeches of his fools with their mirthless witticisms.
So that the individual speech of living people--that individual speech which in drama is the chief means of presenting character--is lacking in Shakespeare. (If gesture is also a means of expressing character, as in the ballet, it is only a subsidiary means.) If the characters utter whatever comes to hand and as it comes to hand and all in one and the same way, as in Shakespeare, even the effect of gesture is lost; and therefore whatever blind worshippers of Shakespeare may say, Shakespeare does not show us characters.
Those persons who in his dramas stand out as characters, are characters borrowed by him from earlier works which served as the bases of his plays, and they are chiefly depicted, not in the dramatic manner which consists of making each person speak in his own diction, but in the epic manner, by one person describing the qualities of another.
The excellence of Shakespeare’s depiction of character is asserted chiefly on the ground of the characters of Lear, Cordelia, Othello, Desdemona, Falstaff, and Hamlet. But these characters, like all the others, instead of belonging to Shakespeare, are taken by him from previous dramas, chronicles, and romances. And these characters were not merely not strengthened by him, but for the most part weakened and spoilt. This is very evident in the drama of King Lear which we are considering, and which was taken by Shakespeare from the play of _King Leir_ by an unknown author. The characters of this drama, such as Lear himself and in particular Cordelia, were not only not created by Shakespeare, but have been strikingly weakened by him and deprived of personality, as compared with the older play.
In the older play Leir resigns his power because, having become a widower, he thinks only of saving his soul. He asks his daughters about their love for him in order, by means of a cunning device, to keep his youngest and favourite daughter with him on his island. The two eldest are betrothed, while the youngest does not wish to contract a loveless marriage with any of the neighbouring suitors Leir offers her, and he is afraid she may marry some distant potentate.
The device he has planned, as he explains to his courtier Perillus (Shakespeare’s Kent), is this: that when Cordelia tells him that she loves him more than anyone, or as much as her elder sisters do, he will say that in proof of her love she must marry a prince he will indicate on his island.
All these motives of Lear’s conduct are lacking in Shakespeare’s play. Then, when (according to the older play) Leir asks his daughters about their love for him, Cordelia does not reply (as Shakespeare has it) that she will not give her father all her love but will also love her husband if she marries--to say which is quite unnatural--but simply says that she cannot express her love in words but hopes her actions will prove it. Goneril and Regan make remarks to the effect that Cordelia’s answer is not an answer, and that their father cannot quietly accept such indifference. So that in the older play there is an explanation, lacking in Shakespeare, of Leir’s anger at the youngest daughter’s reply. Leir is vexed at the non-success of his cunning device, and the venomous words of his elder daughters add to his irritation. After the division of his kingdom between the two eldest daughters in the older play comes a scene between Cordelia and the King of Gaul which, instead of the impersonal Shakespearean Cordelia, presents us with a very definite and attractive character in the truthful, tender, self-denying youngest daughter. While Cordelia, not repining at being deprived of a share in the inheritance, sits grieving that she has lost her father’s love and looking forward to earning her bread by her own toil, the King of Gaul enters, who in the disguise of a pilgrim wishes to choose a bride from among Leir’s daughters. He asks Cordelia the cause of her grief. She tells him her woe. He, having fallen in love with her, in his pilgrim guise woos her for the King of Gaul, but Cordelia says she will only marry a man she loves. Then the pilgrim offers her his hand and heart, and Cordelia confesses that she loves him and, notwithstanding the poverty and privation that she thinks awaits her, agrees to marry him. Then the pilgrim discloses to her that he is himself the King of Gaul, and Cordelia marries him.
Instead of this scene Lear, according to Shakespeare, proposes to Cordelia’s two suitors to take her without dowry, and one cynically refuses, while the other takes her without our knowing why.
After this in the older play, as in Shakespeare, Leir undergoes insults from Goneril to whose house he has gone, but he bears these insults in a very different way from that represented by Shakespeare: he feels that by his conduct to Cordelia he has deserved them, and he meekly submits. As in Shakespeare so also in the older play, the courtier, Perillus (Kent) who has taken Cordelia’s part and has therefore been punished, comes to Leir, only not disguised, but simply as a faithful servant who does not abandon his King in a moment of need, and assures him of his love. Leir says to him what in Shakespeare Lear says to Cordelia in the last scene--that if his daughters whom he has benefited hate him, surely one to whom he has done evil cannot love him. But Perillus (Kent) assures the King of his love, and Leir, pacified goes on to Regan. In the older play there are no tempests or tearing out of grey hairs, but there is a weakened old Leir, overpowered by grief and humbled, and driven out by his second daughter also, who even wishes to kill him. Turned out by his eldest daughters, Leir in the older play, as a last resource, goes with Perillus to Cordelia. Instead of the unnatural expulsion of Leir during a tempest and his roaming about the heath, in the old play Leir with Perillus during their journey to France very naturally come to the last degree of want. They sell their clothes to pay for the sea-crossing, and exhausted by cold and hunger they approach Cordelia’s house in fishermen’s garb. Here again, instead of the unnatural conjoint ravings of the fool, Lear, and Edgar, as presented by Shakespeare, we have in the older play a natural scene of the meeting between the daughter and father. Cordelia--who notwithstanding her happiness has all the time been grieving about her father and praying God to forgive her sisters who have done him so much wrong--meets him, now in the last stage of want, and wishes immediately to disclose herself to him, but her husband advises her not to do so for fear of agitating the weak old man. She agrees and takes Leir into her house, and without revealing herself to him takes care of him. Leir revives little by little, and then the daughter asks him who he is, and how he lived formerly. If, says Leir,
... from the first I should relate the cause, I would make a heart of adamant to weep. And thou, poor soul, Kind-hearted as thou art, Dost weep already ere I do begin.
Cordelia replies:
For God’s love tell it, and when you have done, I’ll tell the reason why I weep so soon.
And Leir relates all he has suffered from his elder daughters, and says that he now wishes to find shelter with the one who would be right should she condemn him to death. “If, however,” he says, “she will receive me with love, it will be God’s and her work, and not my merit!” To this Cordelia replies, “Oh, I know for certain that thy daughter will lovingly receive thee!” “How canst thou know this without knowing her?” says Leir. “I know,” says Cordelia, “because not far from here, I had a father who acted towards me as badly as thou hast acted towards her, yet if I were only to see his white head, I would creep to meet him on my knees.” “No, this cannot be,” says Leir, “for there are no children in the world so cruel as mine.” “Do not condemn all for the sins of some,” says Cordelia, falling on her knees. “Look here, dear father,” she says, “look at me: I am thy loving daughter.” The father recognises her and says: “It is not for thee, but for me to beg thy pardon on my knees for all my sins towards thee.”
Is there anything approaching this charming scene in Shakespeare’s drama?
Strange as the opinion may appear to Shakespeare’s devotees, the whole of this older play is in all respects beyond compare better than Shakespeare’s adaptation. It is so, first because in it those superfluous characters--the villain Edmund and the unnatural Gloucester and Edgar, who only distract one’s attention--do not appear. Secondly, it is free from the perfectly false “effects” of Lear’s roaming about on the heath, his talks with the fool, and all those impossible disguises, non-recognitions, and wholesale deaths--above all because in this play there is the simple, natural, and deeply touching character of Leir, and the yet more touching and clearly defined character of Cordelia, which are lacking in Shakespeare. And also because there is in the older drama, instead of Shakespeare’s daubed scene of Lear’s meeting with Cordelia and her unnecessary murder, the exquisite scene of Leir’s meeting with Cordelia, which is unequalled by anything in Shakespeare’s drama.
The older play also terminates more naturally and more in accord with the spectators’ moral demands than does Shakespeare’s, namely, by the King of the Gauls conquering the husbands of the elder sisters, and Cordelia not perishing, but replacing Leir in his former position.
This is the position as regards the drama we are examining, borrowed from the old play _King Leir_.
It is the same with _Othello_, which is taken from an Italian story, and it is the same again with the famous _Hamlet_. The same may be said of Antony, Brutus, Cleopatra, Shylock, Richard, and all Shakespeare’s characters; they are all taken from antecedent works. Shakespeare, taking the characters already given in previous plays, stories, chronicles, or in Plutarch’s _Lives_, not only fails to make them more true to life and more vivid, as his adulators assert, but on the contrary always weakens them and often quite destroys them, as in _King Leir_: making his characters commit actions unnatural to them, and making them, above all, talk in a way natural neither to them nor to any human being. So in _Othello_, though this is--we will not say the best, but the least bad--the least overloaded with pompous verbosity, of all Shakespeare’s dramas, the characters of Othello, Iago, Cassio, Emilia are far less natural and alive in Shakespeare than in the Italian romance. In Shakespeare Othello suffers from epilepsy, of which he has an attack on the stage. Afterwards in Shakespeare the murder of Desdemona is preceded by a strange vow uttered by Othello on his knees, and besides this, Othello in Shakespeare’s play is a negro and not a Moor. All this is unusual, inflated, unnatural, and infringes the unity of the character. And there is none of all this in the romance. In the romance also the causes of Othello’s jealousy are more naturally presented than in Shakespeare. In the romance Cassio, knowing whose the handkerchief is, goes to Desdemona to return it, but when approaching the back door of Desdemona’s house he sees Othello coming and runs away from him. Othello perceives Cassio running away, and this it is that chiefly confirms his suspicion. This is omitted in Shakespeare, and yet this casual incident explains Othello’s jealousy more than anything else. In Shakespeare this jealousy is based entirely on Iago’s machinations, which are always successful, and on his crafty speeches, which Othello blindly believes. Othello’s monologue over the sleeping Desdemona, to the effect that he wishes that she when killed should look as she is when alive, and that he will love her when she is dead and now wishes to inhale her “balmy breath” and so forth, is quite impossible. A man who is preparing to murder someone he loves cannot utter such phrases, and still less after the murder can he say that the sun and the moon ought now to be eclipsed and the globe to yawn, nor can he, whatever kind of a nigger he may be, address devils, inviting them to roast him in sulphur, and so forth. And finally, however effective may be his suicide (which does not occur in the romance) it quite destroys the conception of his firm character. If he really suffers from grief and remorse then, when intending to kill himself, he would not utter phrases about his own services, about a pearl, about his eyes dropping tears “_as fast as the Arabian trees their medicinable gum_,” and still less could he talk about the way a Turk scolded a Venetian, and how “_thus_” he punished him for it! So that despite the powerful movement of feeling in Othello, when under the influence of Iago’s hints jealousy rises in him, and afterwards in his scene with Desdemona, one’s conception of Othello’s character is constantly infringed by false pathos and by the unnatural speeches he utters.
So it is with the chief character--Othello. But notwithstanding the disadvantageous alterations it has undergone in comparison with the character from which he is taken in the romance, Othello still remains a character. But all the other personages have been quite spoilt by Shakespeare.
Iago in Shakespeare’s play is a complete villain, a deceiver, a thief, and avaricious; he robs Roderigo, succeeds in all sorts of impossible designs, and therefore is a quite unreal person. In Shakespeare the motive of his villainy is, first, that he is offended at Othello not having given him a place he desired; secondly, that he suspects Othello of an intrigue with his wife; and thirdly that, as he says, he feels a strange sort of love for Desdemona. There are many motives, but they are all vague. In the romance there is one motive, and it is simple and clear: Iago’s passionate love for Desdemona, changing into hatred of her and of Othello after she had preferred the Moor to him and had definitely repulsed him. Yet more unnatural is the quite unnecessary figure of Roderigo, whom Iago deceives and robs, promising him Desdemona’s love and obliging him to do as he is ordered: to make Cassio drunk, to provoke him, and then to kill him. Emilia, who utters anything it occurs to the author to put into her mouth, bears not even the slightest resemblance to a real person.
“But Falstaff, the wonderful Falstaff!” Shakespeare’s eulogists will say. “It is impossible to assert that he is not a live person, and that, having been taken out of an anonymous comedy, he has been weakened.”
Falstaff, like all Shakespeare’s characters, was taken from a play by an unknown author, written about a real person, a Sir John Oldcastle, who was the friend of some Duke. This Oldcastle had once been accused of heresy, but had been saved by his friend the Duke. But afterwards he was condemned and burnt at the stake for his religious beliefs, which clashed with Catholicism. To please the Roman Catholic public an unknown author wrote a play about Oldcastle, ridiculing this martyr for his faith and exhibiting him as a worthless man, a boon companion of the Duke; and from this play Shakespeare took not only the character of Falstaff but also his own humorous attitude towards him. In the first plays of Shakespeare’s in which this character appears he was called Oldcastle; but afterwards, when under Elizabeth Protestantism had again triumphed, it was awkward to mock at this martyr of the struggle with Catholicism, and besides, Oldcastle’s relatives had protested, and Shakespeare changed the name from Oldcastle to Falstaff--also an historical character, notorious for having run away at the battle of Agincourt.
Falstaff is really a thoroughly natural and characteristic personage, almost the only natural and characteristic one depicted by Shakespeare. And he is natural and characteristic because, of all Shakespeare’s characters, he alone speaks in a way proper to himself. He speaks in a manner proper to himself because he talks just that Shakespearean language, filled with jests that lack humour and unamusing puns, which, while unnatural to all Shakespeare’s other characters, is quite in harmony with the boastful, distorted, perverted character of the drunken Falstaff. That is the only reason why this figure really presents a definite character. Unfortunately the artistic effect of the character is spoilt by the fact that it is so repulsive in its gluttony, drunkenness, debauchery, rascality, mendacity, and cowardice, that it is difficult to share the feeling of merry humour Shakespeare adopts towards it. Such is the case with Falstaff.
But in none of Shakespeare’s figures is, I will not say his inability but his complete indifference, to giving his people characters so strikingly noticeable as in the case of _Hamlet_, and with no other of Shakespeare’s works is the blind worship of Shakespeare so strikingly noticeable--that unreasoning hypnotism which does not even admit the thought that any production of his can be other than a work of genius, or that any leading character in a drama of his can fail to be the expression of a new and profoundly conceived character.
Shakespeare takes the ancient story--not at all bad of its kind--relating: _avec quelle ruse Amlet qui depuis fût Roy de Dannemarch, vengea la mort de son père Horwendille, occis par Fengon, son frère, et autre occurrence de son histoire_, or a drama that was written on the same theme fifteen years before him; and he writes his play on this subject introducing inappropriately (as he constantly does) into the mouth of the chief character all such thoughts of his own as seem to him worthy of attention. Putting these thoughts into his hero’s mouth: about life (the grave-diggers); about death (“To be or not to be”); those he had expressed in his sixty-sixth sonnet about the theatre and about women--he did not at all concern himself as to the circumstances under which these speeches are delivered, and it naturally results that the person uttering these various thoughts becomes a mere phonograph of Shakespeare, deprived of any character of his own; and his actions and words do not agree.
In the legend Hamlet’s personality is quite intelligible: he is revolted by the conduct of his uncle and his mother, wishes to be revenged on them, but fears that his uncle may kill him as he had killed his father, and therefore pretends to be mad, wishing to wait and observe all that was going on at court. But his uncle and his mother, being afraid of him, wish to find out whether he is feigning, or is really mad, and send a girl he loves to him. He keeps up his rôle, and afterwards sees his mother alone, kills a courtier who was eavesdropping, and convicts his mother of her sin. Then he is sent to England. He intercepts letters, returns from England, and revenges himself on his enemies, burning them all.
This is all intelligible and flows from Hamlet’s character and position. But Shakespeare, by putting into Hamlet’s mouth speeches he wished to publish and making him perform actions he needed to secure effective scenes, destroys all that forms Hamlet’s character in the legend. Throughout the whole tragedy Hamlet does not do what he might wish to do, but what is needed for the author’s plans: now he is frightened by his father’s ghost, and now he begins to chaff it, calling it “old mole”; now he loves Ophelia, now he teases her, and so on. There is no possibility of finding any explanation of Hamlet’s actions and speeches, and therefore no possibility of attributing any character to him.
But as it is accepted that Shakespeare, the genius, could write nothing bad, learned men devote all the power of their minds to discovering extraordinary beauties in what is an obvious and glaring defect--particularly obvious in Hamlet--namely, that the chief person in the play has no character at all. And, lo and behold, profound critics announce that in this drama, in the person of Hamlet, is most powerfully presented a perfectly new and profound character, consisting in this, that the person has no character; and that in this absence of character lies an achievement of genius--the creation of a profound character! And having decided this, the learned critics write volumes upon volumes, until the laudations and explanations of the grandeur and importance of depicting the character of a man without a character fill whole libraries. It is true that some critics timidly express the thought that there is something strange about this person, and that Hamlet is an unsolved riddle; but no one ventures to say, as in Hans Andersen’s story, that the king is naked; that it is clear as day that Shakespeare was unable, and did not even wish, to give Hamlet any character and did not even understand that this was necessary! And learned critics continue to study and praise this enigmatical production, which reminds one of the famous inscribed stone found by Pickwick at a cottage doorstep,--which divided the scientific world into two hostile camps.
So that neither the character of Lear, nor of Othello, nor of Falstaff, and still less of Hamlet, at all confirms the existing opinion that Shakespeare’s strength lies in the delineation of character.
If in Shakespeare’s plays some figures are met with that have characteristic traits (mostly secondary figures as Polonius in _Hamlet_, and Portia in _The Merchant of Venice_) these few life-like figures--among the five hundred or more secondary figures, and with the complete absence of character in the principal figures--are far from proving that the excellence of Shakespeare’s dramas lies in the presentation of character.
That a great mastery in the presentation of character is attributed to Shakespeare arises from his really possessing a peculiarity which, when helped out by the play of good actors, may appear to superficial observers to be a capacity to manage scenes in which a movement of feeling is expressed. However arbitrary the positions in which he puts his characters, however unnatural to them the language he makes them speak, however lacking in individuality they may be, the movement of feeling itself, its increase and change and the combination of many contrary feelings, are often expressed correctly and powerfully in some of Shakespeare’s scenes. And this, when performed by good actors, evokes, if but for a while, sympathy for the persons represented.
Shakespeare, himself an actor and a clever man, knew not only by speeches but by exclamations, gestures, and the repetition of words, how to express the state of mind and changes of feeling occurring in the persons represented. So that in many places Shakespeare’s characters instead of speaking, merely exclaim, or weep, or in the midst of a monologue indicate the pain of their position by gesture (as when Lear asks to have a button undone), or at a moment of strong excitement they repeat a question several times and cause a word to be repeated which strikes them, as is done by Othello, Macduff, Cleopatra, and others. Similar clever methods of expressing a movement of feeling--giving good actors a chance to show their powers--have often been taken by many critics for the expression of character. But however strongly the play of feeling may be expressed in one scene, a single scene cannot give the character of a person, when, after the appropriate exclamations or gesture, that person begins to talk lengthily not in a natural manner proper to him, but according to the author’s whim--uttering things unnecessary and not in harmony with his character.