STUDY IV

SHAKESPEARE'S WAND AND SCEPTRE

A STUDY OF HIS IMAGINATION AND POINTS OF
SUPERIORITY

"THERE IS an upstart crow beautified with our feathers." So Shakespeare is described by Robert Greene in the year 1592.1 Beautified with our feathers!" This seems to imply that he is a plagiarist. That may not be the meaning; but it suggests the question of his originality.

'Many have supposed him original," says Grant White, "when he was only following the old play or the old story." Emerson remarks "Shakespeare regarded the mass of plays as waste stock, in which any experiment might be freely tried, and he used whatever he found. The investigation leaves hardly a single play as his absolute invention." "A great poet" (I am still quoting Emerson) "knows the sparkle of the true stone, and puts it in high place, wherever he finds it. Chaucer is a huge borrower; he uses poor old John Gower as if he were only a brick kiln or a stone quarry, out of which to build his house. He steals by this apology, that what he takes has no value where he finds it, and the greatest where he leaves it."

It is doubtful if Shakespeare originated wholly

a single play. When he builds the stately edifice, he usually finds the corner stone already laid, some if not all of the foundations in position, some of the principal apartments located. In what, then, does his originality consist? Partly in this: that, as Augustus 'found Rome brick and left it marble,' so Shakespeare finds a barn and leaves it a palace. He touches the rude fabric: wood becomes gold, foundations grow, walls recede, rooms multiply, ceilings lift; the roof expands, rounds into a dome, stretches far toward the infinite blue. Lo, columns, arches, battlements, towers!

"Cornice or frieze with bossy sculptures graven!

But the new structure, though it proves him a master builder, is the least part. He was not architect only, nor chiefly. So far as mere frameworks or plots are concerned, other dramatists and some novelists have been equally inventive, equally constructive; many of them more so.3 But what music sounds through Shakespeare's halls! What flowers of fancy and fragrance of sentiment there! What outlooks to earth and sky, toward heaven and hell, from those windows! What pictures adorn those walls, or move before our eyes!

Yet melody of verse, bloom of ideality, aroma of feeling, glimpses of great truths of the seen and the unseen, some of them from lofty soarings or deepsea soundings of the soul neither one nor many

of these combined are the principal charm. More than all else what living, speaking, energetic forms, interesting persons are here! The first thing we note on entering and the last on leaving is the multitude of striking characters, many of them the creation of the poet himself, a hundred of them seeming more real than the men and women of history!

It is not so much their number as their distinctness, representativeness, and mutual helpfulness. Here are thirty-seven plays presenting more than twelve hundred speakers, each of whom with hardly an exception talks and acts consistently with the author's conception of his part and so as to promote the purpose of the whole. For, speaking broadly, these productions, not only in their structure but also in the arrangement and interplay of characters, fulfil measurably the definition of an organism, that in which all portions are reciprocally means and ends.

There has been a good deal of loose exaggeration in describing his power, but most critics would probably agree in asserting this: That no other dramatist, perhaps no other man, ever stood at so many independent standpoints, looked through so many eyes, spoke from so many lips-in a word identified himself with so many individualities. His characters are rarely or never exact duplicates; they are seldom interchangeable or superfluous. Often each is typical of a distinct class. How

different from many great poets! Byron's Manfred, Mazeppa, Lara, Cain, Conrad, Hugo, Alp, Childe Harold, Don Juan, Sardanapalus and the rest all are different editions of Byron himself, Byrons in miniature: they all have the handsome Byronic scowl, or the beautiful Byronic disdain, or the bitter Byronic sneer, or the eloquent Byronic whine! Most of Milton's personages too, - Milton's Samson, Sabrina, Adam, Eve, Abdiel, Belial, Beelzebub, Gabriel, Michael, Uriel, Raphael, and especially Satan-yes, there's a great deal of Milton in the devil! his enemies always insisted there was a good deal of the devil in Milton!they are all stamped with Milton's likeness; all are phases of John Milton!

Not so with Shakespeare. His characters are not little Shakespeares. If he seems to duplicate, it is for dramatic effect, as in the case of the two Dromios of Syracuse and Ephesus in The Comedy of Errors. They are exactly alike externally, as are also their masters. You cannot tell them apart by their looks, "and there's the humor of it"; but they are differentiated; not alike internally.

In this Character-creation the dramatist apparently loses his identity, wears many masks, becomes successively each of a thousand persons. How is this transformation effected? Apparently either by intuition and reproduction, or by original creation: he either enters into the consciousness of some known personage, perhaps historical, and then

re-creates it, sometimes bettering it, Shakespearianizing it! or he assumes, or so to speak invents, a consciousness, clothes it with flesh and blood, all the attributes of personality; and thus really originates the character. In either case, the self-effacement is perfect; the writer himself disappears.

From the foremost man of all this world,' as he styles Julius Cæsar, and from old Lear 'every inch a king,' all the way down to young Gobbo, whose horizon rarely reaches beyond his dinner, and to Launce whose life mission was to train his mischievous cur Crab 'even as one would say,' "precisely thus would I teach a dog "; from the elder Hamlet, a goodly king,'

A combination and a form indeed
Where every god did seem to set his seal
To give the world assurance of a man;

and from Mark Antony, of whose Herculean physique Cleopatra exclaims,

His face was as the heavens; and therein stuck

A sun and moon, which kept their course and lighted

His legs bestrid the ocean; his reared arm

Crested the world; his voice was propertied
As all the tuned spheres!

from such, all the way down to Thersites of the sugar-loaf head, mastiff jaws, bandy legs, 'lame of the other foot'; yes, still lower to Caliban, tortoise shaped, 'fins like arms,' 'ancient and fish